Digital Currencies
Post-Mortem of 2026’s Biggest Crypto Exploit: Attributed, Not Recovered
The attacker has been attributed. The money may never come back. LayerZero says North Korea's Lazarus Group, the same actors behind the $285M Drift exploit three weeks earlier. KelpDAO and LayerZero now blame each other for the configuration. The bigger truth: you can't sanction a smart contract or extradite a wallet.
2026’s biggest crypto exploit. $13B wiped out.
One transaction. Forty-six minutes. $292M gone. The ensuing panic wiped $13B in the next 48 hours. DeFi has yet to demonstrate the control maturity of a regulated institution. The solution is not complicated. What is missing is the will to prioritise cybersecurity and governance over speed to market.
From Cryptos to Quantum: The Great Financial Convergence
Seventeen years after the first Bitcoin block, the conversation is no longer centralised versus decentralised. It is how they converge. DeFi, stablecoins, tokenised real-world assets, CBDCs, instant payment rails, AI, and quantum are not separate stories. They are one architecture taking shape. A practitioner's view on how this evolved since 2009, and what it means for leaders today.
NFT risks related to marketplaces with centralised storage and lack of institutional custody
The blockchain immortalises the hash and metadata. But the actual NFT lives on a centralised marketplace's servers. If the marketplace disappears, what remains is an orphan: a record on the chain pointing to an asset that no longer exists in the real world. After Axie, Terra Luna, Polygon, and Three Arrows, the possibility of marketplace failure is not far-fetched. So why is decentralised storage still not the norm?
51 percent attack on cryptocurrency
The privacy coin Verge has just been hit by a 51% attack for the second time in a month, with $1.75M and $1.1M stolen on consecutive occasions. Look closely and it is not a 51% attack in the traditional sense. It is a time-warp exploit, made possible by the same recurring failure: coding shortcuts that traded resilience for speed.