Our analysis
The $6.3 billion laptop
Binance's first findings trace crypto's largest theft to one laptop. The same week, AI agents broke into Chainalysis. What happened, and what to check.
MATT Research · 12 min readThree side doors in ten days: Coinbase, Warp, OpenCode
OpenCode's console, a Warp vendor and Coinbase's analytics provider: three leaks in ten days, two blamed on AI agents. What leaked, and what to ask vendors.
MATT Research · 10 min readPatterns to test if your system moves money
- AP-0104Identity & access
Object ownership missing on a generated endpoint
On an exchange or a wallet, the object behind the identifier is a balance, an order or a withdrawal address.
- AP-0112Identity & access
A revoked session that keeps working
A token that outlives a password reset can still trade and withdraw after the owner has taken the account back.
- AP-0403Automation & fraud
A reset flow that reveals which accounts exist
A recovery form that confirms who holds an account turns a leaked contact list into a list of customers to call while posing as support.
- AP-0605AI-written & agentic code
Content an agent reads becoming a command it runs
An agent with access to code, deployment or payment tools acts on what it reads, so a ticket or document an outsider wrote must stay data.
Questions
Where have the largest crypto losses come from?
The largest came through the systems around the contracts. On 29 October 2026 about $6.3 billion left Binance’s hot wallets, the largest theft in crypto’s history; Binance’s first findings point to a compromised engineer’s laptop, with no evidence that private keys leaked. In February 2025 Bybit lost about $1.5 billion after attackers compromised a developer’s machine at Safe, its multisig wallet provider, and altered the signing interface its signers used. In May 2025 Coinbase estimated $180 million to $400 million in costs after bribed support contractors leaked customer records.
Do smart contract audits still matter?
Yes. Contract audits, formal verification and bug bounties cover the code on chain, and any team that holds or moves funds needs them. The losses above came through the laptops, signing systems and support tools around that code, which need rules and tests of their own.
What should a team that moves money test first?
The rules that protect accounts and funds: no account can read or move another account’s balance, orders or withdrawal addresses; a revoked session stops working everywhere within a minute; recovery and signup flows reveal nothing about who holds an account; and content an AI agent reads never becomes an instruction it acts on. Each is a plain-English rule, re-proven on every release and reported as holding or broken.
How does work with MATT start?
With a 15-minute ExploitOps discovery call with a MATT co-founder, a fit check on whether there is a real need. If there is, the next step is a paid ExploitOps Review, scoped on that call and run by MATT’s security researchers with your team. The work starts read-only: nothing is installed and no customer data leaves your environment.