You Can't Code Your Way Out of Risk | Amor Sexton | Blockdaemon [EP. 314]

About this episode

Amor Sexton discusses the recent operational failures in the blockchain industry and the importance of governance in risk management.

You Can't Code Your Way Out | Amor Sexton, Blockdaemon In the last few weeks, Drift and Kelp lost $577 million between them. Neither one was a code exploit. Both were operational and governance failures. Amor Sexton, Chief Operating Officer at Blockdaemon, was last on MoneyNeverSleeps in October 2022 (EP 193) talking about how institutional client expectations of resilient processes would drive blockchain adoption. Three and a half years later, the industry just got an extremely expensive lesson in exactly that thesis. In this episode, Pete and Amor get into: - Why "this isn't a hack, it's a governance failure" is the conversation the industry isn't having - How compliance is a subset of risk — and why DeFi keeps confusing the two - The Web2/human layer compromise that exploits a legitimate Web3 feature - Pluto on Castle Island: "Everything that TradFi has built in terms of circuit breakers, we're just speed running relearning those things in crypto" - The Kelp configuration was a known vulnerability — and 47% of operators chose it anyway - The two or three governance questions every DeFi protocol and LP should be asking right now - Why it always comes back to people, not code…

People in this episode

Host: Pete Townsend

Guest: Amor Sexton

Topics covered

• governance failures
• blockchain adoption
• risk management
• operational failures
• DeFi compliance
• Web3 features
• TradFi lessons

Keywords

• blockchain
• governance
• risk
• DeFi
• operational failures
• compliance
• Web3
• TradFi
• Kelp
• Drift

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Blockdaemon, Drift, Kelp, Pluto on Castle Island, TradFi, DeFi

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