It's fascinating to watch the entire software world rediscover problems crypto developers have been dealing with for years.
While everyone is trying to distance themselves from "crypto," the rest of the industry is waking up to the same security nightmares we've been living through for almost a decade.
If you've ever built a decentralized protocol, you know attackers are watching you 24/7.
- One vulnerability, and millions can be drained by sophisticated attackers, sometimes even state-sponsored groups.
- One compromised social account, and someone can launch a fake token, scam your users, and destroy years of trust.
- One overlooked edge case, and your entire protocol can be exploited.
Crypto developers learned these lessons the expensive way. So we built guardrails:
1/ We routinely paid 2–3 independent audit firms, often spending $100K+, to have security experts tear our code apart.
2/ We formally verified critical parts of our systems to mathematically prove they behaved according to their specifications.
3/ We built real-time monitoring and detection systems so on-call engineers could respond when something went wrong.
And even with all of that, exploits still happened across the industry.
The software zeitgest over the past year year has been:
VIBE CODE YOUR WAY INTO EXISTENCE, SHIP AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, AND GET USERS
A lot of people out there just didn't know about software security, maintenance, and correctness, and just pushed that to be a later time.
It's pretty clear that later time is HERE.
As AI makes writing software nearly free, we're about to discover that generating code was never the hardest part.
The hard part has always been making sure it works, stays secure, and doesn't break when someone is actively trying to exploit it.
A whole generation of vibe coders is about to learn what crypto developers learned through billions in losses.
And until we figure out how to systematically verify all this AI-generated software, it's going to be a bloodbath.
Stay safe out there! 🤲
I keep thinking about the PHP/railway hack.
Once you get hacked or your data gets leaked, it’s such a bad feeling.
You can’t take it back. It feels like a stranger was walking around your house while you were asleep.
Some of the most valuable companies on earth will be security companies.