Move语言之父转投Anthropic，加密行业正在批量失去守门人

Original author: David, Odaily TechFlow

On August 5, Sam Blackshear posted on X that he was leaving Mysten Labs to join Anthropic, focusing on defensive security research related to AI.

Many people may not be familiar with this name, but you've likely heard of what he created. Move, the underlying programming language for the Sui blockchain, was built by him.

Around 2018, he was still at Meta. When Zuckerberg was launching the Libra stablecoin project, Blackshear was part of the core technical team, specifically tasked with designing a new programming language for the project—that language was Move.

Libra was later renamed Diem, and eventually the entire stablecoin project was shut down by regulators. But the Move language survived.

In September 2021, Blackshear and four former Meta colleagues co-founded Mysten Labs, bringing Move out of Meta's ruins and building a new public chain, Sui, around it. From initial conception to his departure, he invested over eight years in this language.

I imagine that most readers, in an already bearish crypto market, don't have a strong sense of these personnel changes.

So how can we understand the weight of this talent drain?

A chain's security, what it can and cannot do, largely depends on the design of its underlying language. Blackshear's role in Sui and Move can be roughly compared to Vitalik's role in Ethereum and Solidity.

The role of such people in a crypto project is hard to measure by job title.

They might be language designers, decision-makers on protocol evolution direction, or those who determine where funds flow... In simpler terms, these are the "gatekeepers" of crypto projects, defining how high an ecosystem can grow.

Now, these people are visibly moving toward the AI industry. Blackshear is not an isolated case.

AI, a Brave New World

Before Blackshear left, there was actually a moment.

At a roundtable discussion on project security in April this year, he shared something that also reflected AI's immense appeal to top technical talent in the crypto industry:

He had written an analysis tool during his Facebook days and later wanted to migrate it to Move, using it to scan Move code for potential vulnerabilities. This migration work used to be done purely manually—in his own words, it would take "a very, very long time."

Then, he handed the task to Claude.

Claude automatically completed the migration and flagged a batch of potential vulnerabilities. Blackshear's reaction to the results was, "whoa, we've entered a new world."

I think this detail is very important.

Have you ever had this feeling? When you hear people talking about how great AI is while scrolling through social media, it doesn't really move you deep down—until you use it for the work you're best at and do every day, and you find it solves problems beyond your expectations, even exceeding your own skill level.

So, top technical talent leaving crypto projects for AI is both a career move and a genuine belief that there's tremendous potential there.

Similar things are happening to more crypto professionals.

In February this year, Tomasz Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, announced his resignation less than a year into the role. Stańczak previously founded Nethermind, one of the most important clients in the Ethereum ecosystem, and he himself was a core participant in shaping the direction of Ethereum's protocol layer evolution.

When he left, he wrote in a blog post: "I now know that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world." He was another "gatekeeper"—except what he guarded wasn't language security, but the direction of Ethereum's protocol upgrades.

As for those who left even earlier, you're probably familiar with them too.

OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah resigned as CTO in 2022 at the height of the NFT craze, and later built the AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter, now valued at $500 million.

Leopold Aschenbrenner came out of FTX's Future Fund, wrote the 165-page "Situational Awareness," and now manages a multi-billion dollar AI investment fund. Although he's suffered heavy losses recently, he's still developing in another circle.

His former colleague Avital Balwit, also from the FTX ecosystem, is now chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

These people left crypto from different projects, positions, and time points, and the work they were each doing happens to be exactly what the AI industry needs most right now.

So rather than saying they "fled" crypto, it's more like building blocks being pulled out of a slowing system and plugged into another system spinning faster.

The Exit of Talent and Capital

The above covers specific people. Now let's look at the data.

According to data from analytics platform Artemis in March this year, weekly code commits by crypto projects on GitHub fell from approximately 850,000 at the start of 2025 to about 210,000.

That's a 75% drop.

In the same period, weekly active developers fell from roughly 8,700 to 4,600—cut by more than half. Ethereum's developers decreased by 34% within three months, Solana by 40%, and BNB Chain's code commits plunged 85%.

This isn't a problem with any single chain—almost every ecosystem is bleeding.

Meanwhile, GitHub as a whole platform is growing. In 2025, approximately 36 million new developers joined, and platform-wide code commits rose 25% year-over-year. According to the GitHub Octoverse report, the growth went primarily to AI projects. AI-related code repositories now exceed 4.3 million, and imports of large language model SDKs grew 178% in one year.

Omar, an investor at Dragonfly, believes the reasons are that industry attention has shifted to AI, falling token prices have reduced economic incentives for developers, and some teams have moved from open-source to closed-source development—the code hasn't disappeared, it's just no longer visible on GitHub.

So a more accurate way to put it might be that the crypto industry isn't "dying"—it's shrinking. The periphery has dispersed, and core teams are tightening up. But the problem is that the gatekeepers mentioned in the previous chapter aren't leaving from the periphery—they're leaving from the core.

This year, at least nine senior researchers and leaders have left the Ethereum Foundation, five of them concentrated in May alone, leaving the protocol research team nearly hollowed out. In a sense, Vitalik has become Ethereum's last "gatekeeper," still steering the core direction of the project's development.

The reasons for those who left vary—some had disagreements over internal governance, some had compensation issues, some were dissatisfied with the L2 roadmap. But regardless of the reason, these gaps are now empty.

At the same time, the direction of capital is also shifting.

According to a July Bloomberg report, Paradigm closed a $1.2 billion new fund, expanding its investment scope to AI and robotics for the first time. Managing partner Palmedo said, "There's so much happening out there, it's hard to pretend you don't see it."

Chart: In Q2 this year, total crypto fundraising was $12.8 billion. Source: cryptorank

It's not just Paradigm. Framework Ventures raised $400 million last month to invest in AI and robotics, and Haun Ventures raised $1 billion in May, including AI for the first time. According to Crunchbase data, global VC investment in the first half of 2026 reached $510 billion, with OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbing more than 40%. During the same period, total fundraising across the entire crypto industry was less than 5% of that figure.

The people writing code are leaving, and the money that pays them is changing direction too.

The Black Swan Behind the Gate

The crypto industry has never been safe, but recent events have been especially dense.

On July 30, hardware wallet Coldcard exposed a firmware vulnerability. 1,196 wallets were drained in 41 minutes, with losses exceeding 1,082 BTC—approximately $70 million. The vulnerability had been hidden in the code for over five years without being discovered.

Afterward, a Reddit developer fed Coldcard's open-source code to Claude Code with a single instruction: "Check for vulnerabilities." Eight minutes later, Claude had audited and identified the problem.

Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi said on social media that roughly "$2 worth of AI compute" could have prevented this attack.

So looking at all this together, the crypto industry is entering an awkward position:

Security threats are escalating, AI-driven attack methods are becoming more sophisticated, and the people who define security boundaries and review underlying code in the industry are being picked off one by one by the AI sector.

Those who remain may also have to rely on AI to review code and build projects in the future. This is a seemingly efficient but actually makeshift approach—but without people who truly understand the systems providing oversight at the top, is what's built purely by AI safe?

Many people are asking when the bull market will come. But in an environment where gatekeepers are leaving in droves, the more important question might be: what method will be needed to guard against the next black swan?