Crypto Is Going “Bunker Mode”

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Happy Thursday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is the ‘cryptopocalypse.’

Today’s Lineup

Union Square Ventures Partners Rebecca Kaden & Michael Mignano at 12:00 PM
Air Street Capital Founder & General Partner Nathan Benaich at 12:15 PM
Navan President Michael Sindicich & SVP Healey Cypher at 12:30 PM
Hone Co-Founder Moritz Stephan at 12:40 PM
Arena Co-Founder & CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos at 12:50 PM

Run of Show

Crypto Is Going “Bunker Mode”

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and many others in crypto are sounding the alarm that AI-driven math advances could threaten blockchain security.

Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins, put the situation in stark relief: “I think we might lose public key cryptography.”

At the moment, cryptography as a discipline has been exempted from the list of published papers related to AI-enabled math breakthroughs, but everyone suspects that this is purely by choice, and by no means a function of some key model limitation.

Much like the broader cybersecurity scare that happened back in March of this year, there is fortunately a gap between open-source models catch up on capability, but the 6 month delay estimate seems continually to be a useful guide. Anthropic announced Mythos Preview on April 7, 2026, and exactly 6 months later, CrowdStrike announced that a 26-year-old used a Chinese-developed AI agent to execute cyberattacks against South Korean banks.

So as the crypto community goes “bunker mode” I’m sure an incredible amount of progress will be made on “AI proofing systems” and the market seems to believe that it’s not all doom and gloom. Bitcoin is only down ~3% today and still up ~3% for the month. Still, lots to do if you work in crypto, or potentially even if you only hold crypto, so be careful out there.

Clip Spotlight: Hudson Institute’s Walter Russel Mead says nostalgia has softened our memory of how difficult life was from the late ’60s through the early ’80s:

"We hear Zoomers saying, 'Oh, this is terrible. We’re going to be the first generation that doesn’t live as well as our parents.'"

"That's just the way I was when I was a kid!"

"The boomers were going to be the first post-American generation. We had left behind all that stupid American ideology. The war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement."

"We saw through the American red, white, and blue, blah, blah. And also, we were the least religious generation anybody had ever seen."

"We came out of college into the stagflation of the 1970s. When we started wanting to buy houses in 1980, mortgage rates were 21%. We were so screwed. That’s how we felt."

“And then, of course, things kind of worked out. Not for everybody, but for a lot of us it ended up working out okay."

“I think that makes people like me resonate emotionally with the way people are feeling their situation, but we also don’t think the past was as utopian as some might say. And yet it did work out."