This week's Bankless Rollup covers the aftermath of the 2026 midterm elections with a Democratic 'blue wave,' a historic $6 billion Binance hack attributed to North Korea, and a $130 million heist from a French traditional bank using crypto as the getaway. It also discusses Ethereum's DevCon updates, including Justin Drake's accelerated post-quantum roadmap aiming for 2028, and market turmoil sparked by an AI sell-off.
Summarized by Podsumo
Markets experienced a sharp sell-off after the midterms, with the S&P 500 down 4% and Nasdaq down 6%, driven by an AI bubble pop and concerns over Democrat policy, particularly impacting AI infrastructure stocks like NVIDIA and Micron.
The $6.34 billion Binance hack by North Korea's Lazarus group was executed via a social engineering attack involving a fake job interview, with $2.85 billion frozen by stablecoin issuers and networks like Arbitrum and Polygon considering chain rollbacks.
A French bank, Credit Mutuel, was hacked for $130 million using a third-party vendor exploit, moving funds through mule accounts to crypto exchanges, demonstrating that traditional banks are vulnerable to similar heists as crypto platforms.
At Ethereum's DevCon in Mumbai, Justin Drake announced a plan to make Ethereum post-quantum by December 2028, accelerating the timeline due to quantum threats and AI breakthroughs, while Vitalik's keynote faced criticism for focusing on tangential topics like data privacy rather than Ethereum's core use cases.
Coinbase's stock hit a 970-day low after earnings, with CEO Brian Armstrong filing a plan to sell up to 24% of his shares, while MicroStrategy's stock briefly hit $100 but faces upcoming debt maturities.
"The AI infrastructure build-out companies are just getting absolutely walloped. A lot of the AI spenders, Amazon, Google, these aren't doing so bad, even though the whole market is down this week."
"The only way to go fully decentralized and not have the ability to do these types of things [freeze transactions]. But Thorchain is somewhat in the squishy middle."
"Banks have aren't used to just losing money. I mean, this is like the 1800s, right? It's like when banks used to get actually robbed by bandits and Billy the Kid. We're moving back to that era."