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As someone that has audited most of the major crypto custodians, who mostly ignored my advice and chose speed over security, I am honestly not even a little bit surprised.

Seriously, often many members of an engineering team have the ability to move billions of dollars in value solo.

Negligence is absolutely the default.

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Oh yeah, when I worked for a crypto place, I managed several of the development teams. It would have actually been trivial for me to move hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto to a personal account. Why didn’t I do it? Probably because I’m an idiot and a good employee. This is when tornado cash was in full swing and Monero was still exchangeable for USD. I would have gotten away pretty cleanly.

My worry is rarely about an employee being dishonest. It is about what a dishonest person will do to that employee to obtain their access.

Any organization putting billions of value in the control of any single individual or computer should be treated as though they were caught trying to donate to North Korea with plausible deniability.

Crypto is a house of cards in general, even economically. The systemic risk surrounding restaking in particular is jaw dropping.

Most things in crypto aren't ever tested because the big players know they'd all lose if the faults were exploited.

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