Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

On August 5th, Sam Blackshear posted on X stating that he would be leaving Mysten Labs to join Anthropic to conduct AI-related defensive security research.

This name may not be familiar to many, but you have likely heard of the things he has worked on. Move, the underlying programming language of the Sui blockchain, was created by him.

Before 2018, he was at Meta, where Zuckerberg sought to create the Libra stablecoin project, and Blackshear was a core member of the technical team, specifically designing a new programming language for this project, which was Move.

Libra was later renamed Diem, and subsequently, the entire stablecoin project was halted by regulators. However, the Move language survived.

In September 2021, Blackshear and four former Meta colleagues founded Mysten Labs, taking Move out of Meta's remnants and building a new public blockchain called Sui around it. Additionally, from the initial conception until now, he has invested over eight years in this language.

I think most readers may not have a clear sense of the personnel changes within the already bearish crypto market.

So how can one understand the weight of this personnel loss?

The safety of a chain and what it can or cannot do largely depends on the design of the underlying language. The relationship of Blackshear to Sui and Move can be roughly compared to that of Vitalik to Ethereum and Solidity.

Such individuals in a crypto project are not easily measured by their rankings.

They may be language designers, decision-makers for protocol evolution, or those who determine the flow of funds... In more common terms, they are a group of crypto project "gatekeepers," defining how high an ecosystem can grow.

Now, this type of person is visibly moving towards the AI industry. Blackshear is not an exception.

AI, A Brave New World

Before leaving, Blackshear actually had a moment.

During a roundtable discussion on project security this April, he mentioned something that also reflected the immense attraction AI has for technical leaders in the crypto industry:

He had written an analytical tool during his time at Facebook and later wanted to migrate it to Move to scan for potential vulnerabilities in Move code; this kind of migration previously relied solely on manual effort, and his own words were, "It would take a very long time."

Later, he handed this task to Claude.

Claude automatically completed this migration and flagged a number of potential vulnerabilities. Blackshear's reaction upon seeing the results was, "whoa, we have entered a new world.

I think this detail is very important.

Have you ever felt that when someone hears about the advantages of AI while scrolling through social media, it’s hard to be genuinely moved from within; only until you find that AI can solve problems in ways beyond your expectations when doing what you excel at?

Thus, the move of technical leaders from crypto projects to AI is both a career planning decision and a deep-seated feeling that there is significant potential.

Similar shifts are also happening to more within the crypto workforce.

In February of this year, Tomasz Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, announced his resignation less than a year after taking office. Stańczak previously founded Nethermind, one of the most important clients in the Ethereum ecosystem, and was a key participant in the evolution of the Ethereum protocol.

Upon leaving, he wrote in his blog, "I now realize that Agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world." This is also a "gatekeeper." However, he does not guard language security but rather the direction of Ethereum protocol upgrades.

As for those who left even earlier, many would be familiar with them.

OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah resigned as CTO in 2022 during the peak of NFTs and later created AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter, now valued at $500 million;

Leopold Aschenbrenner left FTX's Future Fund and wrote the 165-page "Situational Awareness," currently managing a multi-billion dollar AI investment fund, although it has suffered significant losses recently, it is still developing in another sphere;

His former colleague Avital Balwit also left the FTX system and is now the chief of staff for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

These individuals have left crypto at different times and for different roles, and the work they are currently engaging in is precisely what the AI industry is lacking.

Therefore, rather than saying they are "escaping" crypto, it resembles pulling blocks from a slowing growth system and inserting them into another system that is turning more rapidly.

The Retreat of Technology and Money

The aforementioned discusses specific people; now let's look at the data.

According to data from the Artemis analysis platform in March of this year, the weekly code submission volume for crypto projects on GitHub has decreased from about 850,000 times at the beginning of 2025 to about 210,000 times.

75% is gone.

During the same period, the number of weekly active developers dropped from about 8,700 to 4,600, more than halving. Ethereum developers decreased by 34% in three months, Solana decreased by 40%, and BNB Chain’s code submission volume fell by 85%.

This is not just a problem with a single chain; almost all ecosystems are bleeding.

Meanwhile, the GitHub platform as a whole is growing. In 2025, about 36 million new developers were added, and the total code submission volume on the platform has increased by 25% year-on-year. According to the GitHub Octoverse report, the increase is mainly flowing into AI projects, with over 4.3 million AI-related code repositories, and the import volume of large language model SDKs increased by 178% in a year.

Dragonfly's investor Omar believes that the reasons for this situation are that industry focus has shifted to AI, falling coin prices have reduced economic incentives for developers, and some teams have moved from open-source to closed-source development, meaning the code has not disappeared, it’s simply not visible on GitHub.

So a more accurate statement might be that the crypto industry is not "dying," but rather shrinking. The periphery has dispersed while the core teams are tightening up. But the problem is that the group of gatekeepers mentioned in the previous chapter is precisely not leaving the periphery, but the core.

This year, at least nine senior researchers and leadership from the Ethereum Foundation have left, with five of them concentrated in May, and the protocol research team has been nearly hollowed out, while Vitalik, in a sense, has become Ethereum's last "gatekeeper," still controlling the core direction of project development.

The reasons for these departures vary; some had disagreements concerning internal governance, some are related to salary issues, and others are dissatisfied with the L2 direction. But regardless of the reason, these positions remain vacant.

At the same time, the direction of money is also changing.

According to a Bloomberg report in July, Paradigm closed a new fund of $1.2 billion, expanding its investment scope into AI and robotics for the first time. Managing partner Palmedo stated, "So much is happening outside that it’s hard to pretend not to see it."

Image: In the second quarter of this year, the total amount of crypto financing was $12.8 billion.

Data source: cryptorank

In fact, it’s not just Paradigm; last month, Framework Ventures raised $400 million for AI and robotics, and Haun Ventures raised $1 billion in May, incorporating AI for the first time. According to Crunchbase data, in the first half of 2026, global VC investment reached $510 billion, with OpenAI and Anthropic together capturing more than 40%. During the same period, the entire crypto industry’s financing amount was less than 5% of this figure.

People who write code are leaving, and the money that pays their salaries is also changing direction.

The Black Swan After Guarding the Gate

The crypto industry has never been safe, but recent circumstances are especially intense.

On July 30, the hardware wallet Coldcard experienced a firmware vulnerability, leading to 1,196 wallets being emptied in 41 minutes, resulting in losses exceeding 1,082 BTC, approximately $70 million. This vulnerability had been hidden in the code for over five years without detection.

Afterward, a Reddit developer submitted Coldcard's open-source code to Claude Code with a request to "check for vulnerabilities." Eight minutes later, Claude had audited and found the issues.

Haseeb Qureshi, a managing partner at Dragonfly, stated on social media that approximately "$2 of AI computing power" could have prevented this attack.

Thus, when viewed together, the crypto industry seems to be entering an awkward situation:

Security threats are escalating, AI-driven attack methods are becoming increasingly complex, and the group that defines security boundaries and audits underlying code within the industry is being taken away one by one by the AI sector.

The remaining personnel may also need to rely on AI for code reviews and project development. This is actually a method that seems very efficient but is quite makeshift, and without someone who truly understands the system overseeing it, can what is produced purely by AI be considered safe?

Many are wondering when the bull market will return. But in an environment where gatekeepers are leaving in droves, the more pressing question might be what methods will be required to guard against the next black swan.