Tuesday’s Cascade Shows Why AI Is Not Crypto’s Real Problem As DeFi Drains Pile Up

Three DeFi protocols across NEAR, Base, and Sui were drained on Tuesday. One of them, a $3.46 million Sweat Economy incident, later turned out to be a foundation rescue.

Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart used the cascade to needle Crypto Twitter’s AI-versus-crypto debate. He suggested the bigger threat to digital assets is the same one as always.

Tuesday’s Drain Cascade

Blockaid raised the alarm at around 1.36 p.m. UTC. Roughly 13.71 billion Sweat Economy (SWEAT) tokens, about 65% of total supply, moved through an attacker address.

On-chain analysts including former NEAR core contributor Zacodil traced the activity to an April 27 contract redeploy. The redeploy added refund_first and refund_second methods.

A single refund_second call returned 13.63 billion SWEAT, worth about $2.63 million, to 53 addresses.

Hours earlier, the Syndicate Commons bridge on Base lost 18.5 million SYND tokens worth $330,000 to $400,000. The proceeds were bridged to Ethereum.

On Sui, Aftermath Finance paused its perpetuals protocol after losing roughly $1.14 million USDC.

Seyffart Pushes Back on the AI vs Crypto Frame

Crypto Twitter has spent April arguing that AI will end crypto. AI agents and AI infrastructure are absorbing the venture capital that altcoins once drew.

Attention has rotated to AI projects, leaving alts without a narrative driver. And on-chain AI agents will eventually make human-led crypto projects redundant, the more aggressive version of the thesis goes.

People are asking — Is AI the end of crypto? quipped James Seyffart, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg.

The implied point is that crypto’s chronic problem is not external competition. The same protocol-level vulnerabilities that drained SYND, USDC, and SWEAT in one afternoon are arguably the bigger threat.

Sweat Economy operates the move-to-earn ecosystem behind Sweatcoin, competing with STEPN. The token price held steady through the episode.

Sweat Economy’s X account stayed silent all day, and the team has not yet explained what vulnerability prompted the redeploy.

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