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Covey
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Change Architects. We Invest, Create, Advise, Accelerate.
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Binance published how the $6.3 billion hack got started, and part of it was a LinkedIn message.
Someone posing as a recruiter contacted one of its engineers and set up two interviews. In the second one, he was told to download a coding assignment onto his work laptop. The assignment had malicious code in it, and the company's endpoint security didn't catch it.
Binance says it stopped 57 North Korea linked attempts this year before this one got through. The FBI is pointing at a North Korean group called TraderTraitor.
The weak point was a developer doing something developers do all the time, running a take home test.
Covey's take: our engineers work inside client repos, so this one is close to home. Anyone on your team, in house or embedded, should run outside code on a separate machine with no access to production. That's cheap to set up.
Someone posing as a recruiter contacted one of its engineers and set up two interviews. In the second one, he was told to download a coding assignment onto his work laptop. The assignment had malicious code in it, and the company's endpoint security didn't catch it.
Binance says it stopped 57 North Korea linked attempts this year before this one got through. The FBI is pointing at a North Korean group called TraderTraitor.
The weak point was a developer doing something developers do all the time, running a take home test.
Covey's take: our engineers work inside client repos, so this one is close to home. Anyone on your team, in house or embedded, should run outside code on a separate machine with no access to production. That's cheap to set up.
Traditional finance is beginning to operate on blockchain infrastructure, not just experiment with it.
Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority has expanded its EnsembleTX initiative to support 24/7 interbank settlement of tokenised deposits using tokenised central bank money.
The initiative now involves 12 banks and 20 industry participants.
The significance goes beyond faster transactions. It points to a financial system where liquidity management, asset settlement and institutional transfers can operate beyond conventional banking hours.
The next challenge is making these systems interoperable, scalable and commercially viable.
That’s where the real infrastructure opportunity lies.
Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority has expanded its EnsembleTX initiative to support 24/7 interbank settlement of tokenised deposits using tokenised central bank money.
The initiative now involves 12 banks and 20 industry participants.
The significance goes beyond faster transactions. It points to a financial system where liquidity management, asset settlement and institutional transfers can operate beyond conventional banking hours.
The next challenge is making these systems interoperable, scalable and commercially viable.
That’s where the real infrastructure opportunity lies.
Schroders, a global asset manager overseeing $1.1 trillion in assets, is bringing its emerging-market bond strategy on-chain through Solana and Centrifuge.
This is a significant development for real-world asset tokenization.
The market is moving beyond tokenized Treasuries and money market funds into more sophisticated investment products.
The opportunity is no longer simply putting assets on-chain. It is building the infrastructure for issuance, distribution, settlement and access at institutional scale.
The next phase of tokenization will be defined by what traditional finance can actually do on-chain.
This is a significant development for real-world asset tokenization.
The market is moving beyond tokenized Treasuries and money market funds into more sophisticated investment products.
The opportunity is no longer simply putting assets on-chain. It is building the infrastructure for issuance, distribution, settlement and access at institutional scale.
The next phase of tokenization will be defined by what traditional finance can actually do on-chain.
Here's how one Ethereum feature played a part in Binance's $6.3 billion loss.
EIP 7702 shipped with the Pectra upgrade in May 2025. It lets an ordinary wallet sign an authorization pointing at a smart contract, then run that contract's code as its own. It was built for things like batched payments and sponsored fees.
On Thursday the attacker submitted one transaction carrying 50 authorizations, all signed by a Binance wallet, each for a different transaction counter. That wallet was processing withdrawals so fast that its counter kept moving, so the attacker covered the range. The network accepted one. Less than four minutes later, about $2.5 billion in ETH and tokens had moved out, and the permission stayed live for nearly four hours, so later deposits got swept too.
The feature did what it was built to do. The open question is how the attacker got valid signatures from a wallet holding billions, and Binance hasn't said yet.
Covey's take: upgrades like this widen what a single signature can authorize, so the signing path needs the same design attention as the contracts. Before anything touches production, we'd want to know who or what can produce that signature and what checks sit between it and a withdrawal.
EIP 7702 shipped with the Pectra upgrade in May 2025. It lets an ordinary wallet sign an authorization pointing at a smart contract, then run that contract's code as its own. It was built for things like batched payments and sponsored fees.
On Thursday the attacker submitted one transaction carrying 50 authorizations, all signed by a Binance wallet, each for a different transaction counter. That wallet was processing withdrawals so fast that its counter kept moving, so the attacker covered the range. The network accepted one. Less than four minutes later, about $2.5 billion in ETH and tokens had moved out, and the permission stayed live for nearly four hours, so later deposits got swept too.
The feature did what it was built to do. The open question is how the attacker got valid signatures from a wallet holding billions, and Binance hasn't said yet.
Covey's take: upgrades like this widen what a single signature can authorize, so the signing path needs the same design attention as the contracts. Before anything touches production, we'd want to know who or what can produce that signature and what checks sit between it and a withdrawal.
