Crypto Industry Forced to Rethink Security Due to Mythos Protocol

Network News Mythos, an AI model from Anthropic, is driving a massive shift in how the crypto industry approaches security. For years, decentralized finance has focused on smart contract defenses, but Mythos is pushing attention towards the infrastructure that supports it. Paul Vijender, head of security at Gauntlet, stated that the bigger risks sit in infrastructure, including key management systems, signing services, and bridges. Mythos belongs to a new class of AI systems built to simulate adversaries, exploring how protocols interact and testing how small weaknesses can be combined into real-world exploits. This approach has drawn attention beyond crypto, with banks like JP Morgan treating AI-driven cyber risk as systemic and exploring tools like Mythos for stress testing. Aave, one of DeFi's largest lending protocols, is at the center of a broad recovery effort following losses tied to the Kelp DAO exploit. The effort, informally dubbed 'DeFi United,' had raised about $301 million in commitments as of Monday, with much of the capital still pending governance approval. Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of Alchemy, said that crypto was built for AI agents, not humans. Traditional finance assumes friction, but AI agents need to transact seamlessly across borders, at any time, often in tiny increments. Crypto offers a global, always-on financial layer where value moves as easily as data. Paul Sztorc proposed a Bitcoin fork, eCash, which would copy Bitcoin's history and give BTC holders an equivalent balance on the forked network. However, the plan to allocate 600,000 eCash to addresses linked to Satoshi Nakamoto and redirect the remaining 500,000 eCash to investors has sparked a backlash.