Digital Currencies

5 articles
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.

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Digital Currencies

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.

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Digital Currencies

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.

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Digital Currencies

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?

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Digital Currencies

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.

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The practitioner behind the practice.

Viren Mantri

Viren Mantri

Founder · Grey Orbits

Viren Mantri is the Founder of Grey Orbits. A Singapore citizen with more than three decades across technology, cybersecurity, and risk, he has held senior roles at Standard Chartered Bank, McAfee, UBS, and KPMG, with earlier development work at Citibank in India and the UAE.

As Chief Information Security Officer at SC Ventures, the venture-building platform of Standard Chartered Bank, he led cybersecurity across twenty fintech ventures in digital banking, supply chains, cryptocurrency, and tokenisation.

Prior to SC Ventures, his long tenure at Standard Chartered covered cyber architecture, design, operations, governance, risk and compliance. Earlier, he led Strategic Security Services at McAfee across Asia, ran global security monitoring at UBS, and supervised risk consulting at KPMG across banking, telecommunications, healthcare, and government. His work has remained anchored in regulated financial services, with regulatory engagement across jurisdictions and a record of authoring board papers and executive briefings.

Viren founded Grey Orbits years earlier, and has delivered international engagements across Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Singapore.

At Singapore Management University Executive Development, he designs and delivers programmes for senior executives on Blockchain, Digital Currencies and Tokenisation, AI Governance, Cybersecurity, and Quantum Readiness.

He is the author of three proprietary frameworks: the PETALS™ Framework for AI Governance, whose name is registered as a trademark with IPOS; the Cybersecurity Model for Startups; and the Framework for Cyber Insurance. He writes on the convergence of AI, digital assets, and quantum disruption.

Viren holds a Master of Technology in Artificial Intelligence Systems (formerly Knowledge Engineering) from NUS, an MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology (US), and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Mumbai (India). He is a certified AI Governance Professional and has completed Full Stack Development with AI at NUS and the SANS Blockchain and Smart Contract Security programme.

AIGP · IAPP Full Stack AI SANS SEC554 M.Tech AI · NUS SMU Faculty

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