Side-Eye Signals

AI x Crypto

AI Agents Get Wallets, Crypto Gets Hacked Again

4 min read

Blockworks pipes crypto data into ChatGPT and Claude, Worldcoin brings ID to AI agents, and NEAR Intents eats a $3.8M exploit two days after playing hero.

  • AI x Crypto
  • Security
  • Infrastructure
  • Roundup
AI Agents Get Wallets, Crypto Gets Hacked Again

The Agents Are Getting Wallets (and Data Feeds)

The most interesting thing happening in AI x crypto right now isn't a token. It's plumbing.

  • Blockworks launched an MCP server that pipes its crypto data — 40,000+ assets, 300+ exchanges, financials for 400+ DeFi protocols — directly into ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor. Co-founder Jason Yanowitz: "Agents are going to be the biggest users of financial data." Answers come with sources attached. Access requires a Blockworks API subscription.
  • Worldcoin linked up with PeaqOS to bring World ID to AI agents, per Cryptonews — because apparently the hard problem with autonomous agents is proving they're not, you know, other agents.
  • Brian Armstrong rejected the "pivot to AI" framing back in July, arguing crypto rails will power AI agents rather than the other way around. Still the cleanest summary of the bull case.

Every one of these announcements is a company selling picks and shovels to a workforce that doesn't legally exist yet. The MCP server is real and useful. The agent economy is still a slide deck.

NEAR Intents: Hero on Monday, $3.8M Hole on Thursday

Two days after blocking a $50 million swap tied to the Bitget hacker — and freezing $500K+ in related funds — NEAR Intents got drained itself.

  • The protocol halted Thursday after a bug in its Omni deposit/withdrawal infrastructure interacting with the NEAR Intents smart contract let an attacker take roughly $3.8 million.
  • ZachXBT traced the funds to KuCoin, then bridged to Bitcoin. Unchained's review found the receiving BNB Chain address pulled about 3.87M USDT from the HOT Bridge treasury contract in seven transfers, each self-triggered.
  • The team says the contract-side flaw is patched, full compensation is promised, and law enforcement plus analytics partners are on it. Deposits and withdrawals stayed down on 11 networks, including BNB Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, and Avalanche.
  • NEAR fell 6.7% to $4.96. The Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR), launched two days earlier, is down 6.4% — giving back its entire debut and then some.

The Bitget saga is still unresolved: the exchange lost roughly $387.5M, its CEO and Elliptic pointed at North Korea, and nobody has confirmed anything. Now the protocol that played bouncer is the one with a hole in it. No confirmed link between the two incidents — but the timing is doing a lot of narrative work for free.

It's a brutal year for crypto security: Bitget at ~$350M+, Liquid Network ~$320M, Drift ~$295M, Kelp ~$293M, per DefiLlama.

Miners Are Quietly Becoming AI Landlords

  • Frank Holmes of HIVE Digital calls Bitcoin mining a "tier one" data center — power, land, substations, and GPUs that once mined Ethereum now pointed at AI. He expects the next wave of AI factories built on mining infrastructure from Paraguay to Canada.
  • ETF Database frames the same trade bluntly: miners are trading rigs for AI as power becomes the prize.

The pitch is coherent. The risk is that "AI compute pivot" becomes the new "we're a metaverse company" — a rebrand that buys one more cycle before the power bills arrive.

Research Desk: Guardrails for Agents That Touch Real Systems

  • ContractWarden (arXiv) proposes kernel-enforced damage boundaries for LLM agents: a human-authorized allow/deny/no_egress contract, enforced via eBPF LSM. All 570 runs across 19 security tests passed, with median overhead of 11.96–12.89% on a Linux VM.
  • HARDE (arXiv) optimizes agent "harnesses" for runtime risk detection, beating manual designs on three attack benchmarks while preserving utility.
  • PipelineRL (Hugging Face / ServiceNow) open-sources RL training with inflight weight updates, targeting the throughput-vs-on-policy tradeoff for large-scale LLM training.

The fact that the most credible work in "AI agents + crypto" this week is about containing agents is the actual signal. Everyone else is building the wallet. These people are building the leash.

Odds and Ends

  • The SEC sued a crypto AI platform over $12.5M, alleging fake signals and frozen accounts (InvestmentNews).
  • Jordi Visser argued AI agents could bridge institutions to Bitcoin (tokenpost).
  • Tom Lee's AI-crypto bull case put BitMine (BMNR) in focus (Benzinga).
  • Senator Cynthia Lummis talked crypto tax and AI (Punchbowl).
  • Senator Steve Daines released the ADAPT Act text, extending wash-sale and constructive-sale rules to digital assets and carving out small gas fees (Bitcoin Magazine).
  • 50,000+ Europeans pushed the EU to loosen stablecoin reward restrictions in the MiCA review (Cointelegraph).
  • Dogecoin got a DeFi testnet via DogeOS, which wants miners to eventually verify app proofs through a proposed OP_CHECKZKP upgrade — currently a draft with a placeholder checker (CoinDesk).
  • Trezor's CEO explained layoffs and, notably, did not blame AI (Around Prague).

Closing Take

The AI x crypto story this week isn't a token pump — it's infrastructure quietly wiring agents into data, identity, and compute. That's genuinely interesting and mostly unmonetized. Meanwhile the security story is the same as it's been all year: protocols get drained, teams promise full compensation, and the token chart does the rest of the talking. Build the leash before you hand out the wallet.

Not financial advice. Not even close.