In 2014 I went nearly a week without sleep. I was running PayPal and attackers were inside our corporate network. They'd compromised an eBay employee's laptop, got onto the VPN, taken over a domain controller and made themselves domain admins. eBay and PayPal were one company then, on one Windows network. They stole 145M eBay user records, then came for the segregated vault holding PayPal's card credentials. We fought them off. They never got in, but they got close. Too close.
Yesterday Binance lost ~$6.3B in what looks like the same way. A DevOps engineer's laptop, then a service inside the withdrawal stack, then withdrawals the signer approved because they came from a trusted source. Hot wallets emptied in under four hours. No key was stolen.
Nobody broke cryptography or a ledger. They found someone with access and used the trust that came with it. Banks get hit exactly the same way.
2016: attackers inside Bangladesh Bank used its own SWIFT access to send $951M of payment orders to the NY Fed. $81M was lost. The rest was held because an unrelated sanctions filter tripped on the word "Jupiter". That was luck, and it only worked because wires took days to settle.
June 2025: an IT employee at C&M Software, which connects Brazilian banks to Pix, sold his credentials for about $2,700. Attackers used them to send fake Pix transfers out of six institutions' reserve accounts at the central bank. ~$140M in under three hours.
August 2025: stolen vendor credentials at Sinqia, another Pix connector. ~R$710M out of HSBC and one other institution in a single afternoon. The central bank froze most of it, after it had already moved.
Same attack every time. Speed is what changed. When settlement took days, a filter, a correspondent bank or someone in ops could catch a bad payment. Pix, FedNow, SEPA Instant and blockchains settle in seconds. Payment security was mostly built for the slow world.
PayPal's card and user data survived 2014 because domain admin on the corp network couldn't unlock it quickly enough, and our alerting caught the unusual activity on the network. That's the model. Approval policy no laptop or vendor login can reach. Velocity and anomaly limits enforced outside the system that sends. Dynamic caps on what any one wallet, account or service can move per hour. All of it in real time.
About $3B of what left Binance has been frozen, almost all of it stablecoins. The $1.4B in bitcoin is sitting in 19 wallets and nobody can touch it. I don't think that's the problem. For decades the ability to reverse a wire or a card charge let a lot of weak security slide. You either stop the transfer before it's signed or you eat the loss.
Nothing about the technology failed here. The chains processed exactly the transactions they were handed. Binance's own systems handed them the wrong ones because an engineer's laptop was compromised. That's operational security. eBay in 2014, Bangladesh Bank and two Pix connectors all failed at it on their own rails.
In 2014 the attackers never reached the vault. If they had, the fraud losses would have been the small part. PayPal existed so people could pay without handing their card details to every merchant on the internet. We held those details so they didn't have to. Losing them would have broken the one thing the company was built on, and I'm not sure we would have recovered.
I expect blockchains and digital assets to become the standard way money moves. Every custodian of digital assets, or of fiat on a real-time rail, is in that position now. The controls have to adapt to settlement in seconds, crypto or not.
Yesterday Binance lost ~$6.3B in what looks like the same way. A DevOps engineer's laptop, then a service inside the withdrawal stack, then withdrawals the signer approved because they came from a trusted source. Hot wallets emptied in under four hours. No key was stolen.
Nobody broke cryptography or a ledger. They found someone with access and used the trust that came with it. Banks get hit exactly the same way.
2016: attackers inside Bangladesh Bank used its own SWIFT access to send $951M of payment orders to the NY Fed. $81M was lost. The rest was held because an unrelated sanctions filter tripped on the word "Jupiter". That was luck, and it only worked because wires took days to settle.
June 2025: an IT employee at C&M Software, which connects Brazilian banks to Pix, sold his credentials for about $2,700. Attackers used them to send fake Pix transfers out of six institutions' reserve accounts at the central bank. ~$140M in under three hours.
August 2025: stolen vendor credentials at Sinqia, another Pix connector. ~R$710M out of HSBC and one other institution in a single afternoon. The central bank froze most of it, after it had already moved.
Same attack every time. Speed is what changed. When settlement took days, a filter, a correspondent bank or someone in ops could catch a bad payment. Pix, FedNow, SEPA Instant and blockchains settle in seconds. Payment security was mostly built for the slow world.
PayPal's card and user data survived 2014 because domain admin on the corp network couldn't unlock it quickly enough, and our alerting caught the unusual activity on the network. That's the model. Approval policy no laptop or vendor login can reach. Velocity and anomaly limits enforced outside the system that sends. Dynamic caps on what any one wallet, account or service can move per hour. All of it in real time.
About $3B of what left Binance has been frozen, almost all of it stablecoins. The $1.4B in bitcoin is sitting in 19 wallets and nobody can touch it. I don't think that's the problem. For decades the ability to reverse a wire or a card charge let a lot of weak security slide. You either stop the transfer before it's signed or you eat the loss.
Nothing about the technology failed here. The chains processed exactly the transactions they were handed. Binance's own systems handed them the wrong ones because an engineer's laptop was compromised. That's operational security. eBay in 2014, Bangladesh Bank and two Pix connectors all failed at it on their own rails.
In 2014 the attackers never reached the vault. If they had, the fraud losses would have been the small part. PayPal existed so people could pay without handing their card details to every merchant on the internet. We held those details so they didn't have to. Losing them would have broken the one thing the company was built on, and I'm not sure we would have recovered.
I expect blockchains and digital assets to become the standard way money moves. Every custodian of digital assets, or of fiat on a real-time rail, is in that position now. The controls have to adapt to settlement in seconds, crypto or not.
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You know it’s a contested and tight midterm election cycle when you annoyingly receive 50 texts a day. Can’t wait for it to be done.
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The most difficult part of “enterprise” partnerships when you’ve spent a long time in consumer is how frustratingly slow things can be at times. But when you find scaled partners that totally jive with you at the perfect time, it feels magical.
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Enabling people to get paid instantly no matter where they live and work is one of the most fulfilling use cases of the money infra we built at @lightspark. Thrilled to support @LootRushInc in this mission. A truly remarkable team.
Work went global years ago. Money stayed local.
@LootRushInc built a global account for a generation of freelancers, creators, and entrepreneurs to get paid from anywhere and pay anyone in their local currency.
We're proud to power their growth 🤝
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Had to stop by to see the @Tesla Roadster in person. The front is totally insane. Spaceship.
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Terminator companies of this era will combine max AI with uniquely human strengths (relationships, taste, creativity) + real moats (licensing, manufacturing, pharma…). Frontier AI companies will enter those moaty areas. Inevitable. Fortunate to already run one with @lightspark!
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I'm a @kevinweil fan, and this is one to watch closely! Excited for what's to come!
💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.
We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.
I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
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Buy Bitcoin.
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building Francisco to achieve record power density.
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Huge! Congrats @whop team! Excited to continue building for entrepreneurs and builders across the world together with @lightspark!
Whop has raised $200M in Series D funding at a $5.1B valuation, backed by @sequoia and @Shopify.
It really feels like we are barely touching the tip of the iceberg in a market larger than anyone can imagine.
We first launched Whop as a better way for us to sell sneaker bots, ypes of desktop software out there.
Total TAM? Probably $20,000 per day.
Who cares, tiny market.
But, what people discounted is the idea that there were actually 70,000 other markets exactly like that one.
Beyond the investment itself, I am especially excited to welcome legendary silicon valley investor @dougleone to our board of directors. Doug and the sequoia team are nothing but a brilliant, resourceful, and principled group of people.
My co-founder Cameron and I started building on Shopify when we were 13 years old. Shopify is one of the most impactful all-in-one cloud ecosystems ever created; @tobi has pioneered modern entrepreneurship the way we know it and we are thrilled to have him in our corner.
We have a tenet at Whop to be the dumbest in the room and I am very grateful that this has recently become a lot easier.
We are focused on markets, scale economies, and progressive media. If that is up your alley, please message me directly.
The $200M raised will support our expansion as we build economic infrastructure for the next century, continuing on our mission of delivering everyone an income.
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It’s @MKBHD appreciation day. I can’t think of any reviewer putting more craft and care in product reviews, and it really shows on this particular one.
NEW VIDEO - iPhone Duo Review: It's Real First Generation Fun! youtu.be/ESABTN4VtrA
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David Marcus retweeted
Every day, 10 to 15 people make their first $20K on @whop. Today, Lightspark powers a new way for them to cash out instantly to their bank accounts.
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I’ve been a big fan of @whop as it’s empowering tens of millions of entrepreneurs and businesses worldwide to prosper. Today I’m thrilled to announce that @lightspark now gets to help move money faster for all of them! 🤝 @cultured
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One underappreciated @Muse capability is how great it is at taking mid-turn directions. Many other models and products need a “steer” which often waits for turns to complete. Muse takes these as a normal person would in a chat. Very elegant product work behind the scenes here.
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Europe: Break Glass Emergency Protocol
Europe is spiraling. It’s been on a downward trajectory for a while, but now is time for a last resort common-sense plan while we still can:
1) Bring back a value system anchored in meritocracy. Reward ability, effort and results. Find role models from each community and walk of life, make them national heroes. Find ones on the other end of the spectrum and make punitive examples out of them.
2) Restore law and order. Break it and face real, swift consequences. Indictment also means you lose every social benefit and state subvention. 2x law enforcement budgets. Change the rules so forces on the ground stop fearing retribution for doing their jobs.
3) If you reject and disrespect the country and its values, you’re no longer welcome. Pending status + crime = immediate deportation. Raise the bar for naturalizations.
4) 12-months Europe-wide regulations purge. Aggressively delete the non-sensical regulations killing Europe’s competitiveness. Default: remove.
5) Elect people who will execute this, or accept the consequences. Keep voting for more welfare and suicidal empathy and there’s no turning back and no soft landing.
Watching what’s happening in Europe should also be a telltale for America. Here, we should also ensure we defend and protect this framework with all we’ve got, or end up in the same tragic state as our European friends.
Europe is spiraling. It’s been on a downward trajectory for a while, but now is time for a last resort common-sense plan while we still can:
1) Bring back a value system anchored in meritocracy. Reward ability, effort and results. Find role models from each community and walk of life, make them national heroes. Find ones on the other end of the spectrum and make punitive examples out of them.
2) Restore law and order. Break it and face real, swift consequences. Indictment also means you lose every social benefit and state subvention. 2x law enforcement budgets. Change the rules so forces on the ground stop fearing retribution for doing their jobs.
3) If you reject and disrespect the country and its values, you’re no longer welcome. Pending status + crime = immediate deportation. Raise the bar for naturalizations.
4) 12-months Europe-wide regulations purge. Aggressively delete the non-sensical regulations killing Europe’s competitiveness. Default: remove.
5) Elect people who will execute this, or accept the consequences. Keep voting for more welfare and suicidal empathy and there’s no turning back and no soft landing.
Watching what’s happening in Europe should also be a telltale for America. Here, we should also ensure we defend and protect this framework with all we’ve got, or end up in the same tragic state as our European friends.
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Watching the aftermath of yesterday’s chaos across France, and today’s renewed violence and my heart breaks for the thousands of shops and restaurants owners who lost everything. These are good, hard-working people. They’ve been completely abandoned by their own government.
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I was born in Paris. And it pains me to see how decades of delusional policies and tragically upside-down incentive systems rewarding losers instead of good people are now resulting in what can only be seen as the fall of the Republic.
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The thing I’m most grateful to Elon for is bringing back an age of wonder and excitement to humanity. That was jaw-dropping awesome! Screams and mouths wide open in the audience. Nuts.
Roadster x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
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