The crypto industry is on the cusp of a revolution where AI agents manage various tasks, from flight bookings to trades and payments. However, a new study suggests that the underlying infrastructure may be insecure.
According to McKinsey, AI agents could facilitate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030. Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong predicts that AI agents will soon outnumber humans in making transactions on the internet, with Binance founder Changpeng Zhao forecasting that agents will make millions of times more payments than people, all in crypto. A group of security academics and crypto researchers have released a paper highlighting that a largely overlooked piece of AI infrastructure is being exploited to steal credentials and drain crypto wallets. The researchers, affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of California, San Diego, blockchain firm Fuzzland, and World Liberty Financial, found that LLM routers, which sit between users and AI models, can be a powerful attack point for malicious actors.
These routers have full access to everything passing through them, including sensitive data. The researchers noted that LLM agents have moved beyond conversational assistants into systems that book flights, execute code, and manage infrastructure on behalf of users. The LLM routers leave users vulnerable as they assume they are interacting directly with a reputable AI model when, in reality, many requests pass through intermediary services that can see and modify that data.
According to researcher Chaofan Shou, the problem is no longer theoretical, with 26 LLM routers secretly injecting malicious tool calls and stealing credentials, including one that drained a client's $500,000 wallet. The researchers stated that a malicious router can replace a benign command with an attacker-controlled one or silently exfiltrate every credential that passes through it.
The implications for crypto users are severe, as private keys, API credentials, and wallet access tokens often pass through these systems in plain text. The researchers found multiple cases where routers simply collected those secrets. In one instance, a test Ethereum wallet was drained after its private key was exposed.
The team also demonstrated how easy it is to expand the attack by poisoning parts of the router ecosystem, allowing them to observe and potentially control hundreds of downstream systems within hours. A single malicious router in the chain is enough to compromise the entire system, highlighting a weakest-link problem. This creates a potential mismatch as industry leaders predict AI agents will handle a growing share of crypto activity, while the underlying infrastructure lacks guarantees that outputs haven’t been tampered with.