David Schwed

Today OpenReserve announced the @USOCC (OCC) granted conditional approval of our full-service U.S. national bank charter application.

Over the past several months, I’ve helped organize OpenReserve Bank, N.A. (in organization) purpose-built for digital assets, and I'll be serving as its CTO.

I remain COO of @svrn_ai through the end of this year. This is a transition @sal_ternullo and I have been planning together, with the full support of our board.

Working alongside Sal to build the only publicly traded NEAR treasury company, we operationalized the business from a standing start.

We stood up MPC infrastructure to help secure the NEAR network, and we've worked to drive enterprise adoption, like with our recent Oracle partnership. And there are a number of new initiatives rolling out in coming months that Sal and the team will share.

At year-end, I'll move into a technology and security advisory role at SVRN, staying hands-on and supporting the team in any way I can.

With 29+ years at institutions like BNY, Galaxy, and Robinhood, the chance to build a blockchain‑native digital bank was one I couldn't pass up.

More on OpenReserve, and why I joined, in the coming weeks.

My thoughts on the Binance hack:

This is what I’d call a sophisticated unsophisticated attack. This has been attributed to Lazarus, a nation-state adversary. That doesn’t make them unstoppable. Nothing about what appears to have happened here is new. It’s the same playbook we’ve seen many times, and many of these attacks could have been stopped with simple controls. Companies have the ability to stop this. Enough is enough.

Companies over-index on protecting the keys and don’t invest nearly enough in the signing infrastructure and flows around them. We saw it with Bybit, where signers were tricked into approving a different transaction than the one they thought they were signing. That was 100% preventable, with controls that are relatively easy to implement.

By Binance’s own account, a DevOps engineer’s laptop was compromised, and that gave the attacker access to a service container that could submit withdrawal transactions. My read is that the container was trusted internally, so anything coming from it was considered safe to sign. That’s where additional controls belong. Verify that what’s being signed is what you meant to sign.

Did we intend to sign a 7702 delegation?
No?
Then don’t sign it, and open an incident, because you’ve been compromised.

That’s one control that should have been in place. We don’t know yet how a compromised laptop reached that container, but I’d expect other controls were missing there too.

Also the messaging of ‘Your funds are safe’ creates a false sense of security. There may come a day when an exchange can’t say that. If digital assets are the future of financial markets, the industry needs to get its house in order.”

@Sibos felt different this year.

For the past few years, every financial services conference talked about payment rails, stablecoins and tokenization.

It always felt like a solution in search of a problem .... surface-level initiatives hedging against "what may be."

This past week in Miami, the conversations started with the problem.

Then came the solution .... new settlement capabilities, real use cases for stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

We've left the era of building for the press release.

We're entering the era of financial markets transformation.

The banks get it now.

“security is becoming a measurable input into market resilience and liquidity quality.”

Agreed 🙏