Unchained · Oct 31, 2026 · 57m · 47m saved
With Robert Leshner, Co-Founder and CEO of Superstate · Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and former head of USDC at Coinbase · Tom Schmidt, Managing Partner at Dragonfly
Photo via superstate.com
Binance lost an estimated $5 billion to a hack about three hours before the panel taped, more than three times the largest crypto theft on record. Robert Leshner, co-founder and CEO of Superstate, used Unchained's The Chopping Block to press a harder question: whether DeFi is any better prepared for the next one.
Tether and Circle froze a large share of the stolen stablecoins within hours. Robert's point was that four and a half years after FTX, no team has shipped a genuinely different DeFi design, and almost no protocol is built for the day its own stablecoins are frozen.
"I don't think the DeFi protocols on the aggregate have solved for this issue yet... most protocols still don't necessarily know how to account for it. Has anyone ever frozen a protocol's USDC balance? Not really." — Robert Leshner
Robert co-founded Compound Labs before starting Superstate, which moves funds and stocks onto blockchains. Beside him were Nemil Dalal, who ran USDC at Coinbase before joining Y Combinator as a visiting partner, and Tom Schmidt, Managing Partner at Dragonfly. Rob Hadick, also a Managing Partner at Dragonfly, guest-hosted for a second week.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 57 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
An estimated $5 billion left Binance, more than triple the largest crypto hack before it
Circle rehearsed for a hack like this one, with responses running from pausing a whole stablecoin to blacklisting single addresses
Almost no DeFi protocol is built to handle a frozen stablecoin balance, Robert Leshner said
Every financial crisis has been about interconnection, and Nemil warns Binance is big enough to start one
Y Combinator's crypto wishlist puts tokenization, agent payments and AI capital raising at the top
"If you're a dev tools company today, in a year your buyer has changed from a human developer to an agent developer"
ICE's deal with trade.xyz reminds Tom of Larry Fink endorsing the Bitcoin ETF
Robert Leshner calls perps "a superior form factor" to dated futures, and Rob Hadick says they are still a retail product
1. A $5B Hack at Binance
The panel had agreed to skip security news this week. Then Binance was hit, roughly three hours before taping, and Tom opened with what was known.
Tom says the Binance hack is the largest in crypto by a wide margin
"Right now it looks like Binance has had some sort of compromise. People are estimating about 5 billion in assets has been swept off the platform... right now it is three times larger than the largest hack ever in crypto." — Tom Schmidt
The attack was tied to how Binance managed EIP-7702 account delegation, an Ethereum feature that lets one account act on behalf of another. That let the attacker generate signatures and withdraw funds by proxy. Roughly half the stolen assets were stablecoins, and Tether and Circle froze a large share of those within hours. The rest moved into Tornado Cash, a service that obscures where funds came from, or was swapped into other tokens.
