Unchained
Unchained
Laura Shin
Uneasy Money: Who Owns Stolen Crypto? The $71M Fight Testing DeFi Limits
1 hour 14 minutes Posted May 6, 2026 at 6:45 pm.
Introduction
The $71M legal battle over Arbitrum-frozen KelpDAO hack funds
But legally, are those funds DPRK’s? Would that claim hold up in court?
Why stealing funds doesn’t transfer ownership
The vigilante security layer in DeFi: who acts and who hides behind 'decentralization'
Questions the judge asked the first day of the Gerstein case
When Kain was also sued by Gerstein … and Luca was also served
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BankrBot prompt-injected via Morse code: the LLM-to-LLM attack surface
Can DeFi survive the agents? AI security risks and what 'blast radius' means
Coinbase's 14% layoff and what it really says about AI and org structure
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Show notes
A legal battle over frozen KelpDAO hack funds is forcing DeFi to answer questions it has long avoided.
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When the Arbitrum Security Council froze $71 million in funds tied to the KelpDAO  hack, it was hailed as vigilante justice. Now lawyers representing families of North Korea's victims are claiming that same money in a New York federal courtroom, as if theft transfers title. 
Meanwhile, an AI agent running on Base got robbed via a prompt injection hidden in Morse code, and Coinbase cited artificial intelligence when announcing 14% layoffs. 
Kain Warwick, Taylor Monahan, Luca Netz, and Kelsie Nabben, author of Decentralised Digital Security, work through what DeFi's security layer actually is, who gets to decide when to act, and whether any of it survives the arrival of autonomous agents.
Hosts:
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins
Guest:
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kelsie Nabben, Research Fellow at RMIT University — Author of 'Decentralized Digital Security: Code, Community, Crisis' (2025)
Timestamps
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