Language Creator Moves to Anthropic as Crypto Loses Key Talent to AI

Author: David, Shenchao TechFlow

On August 5, Sam Blackshear posted on X that he is leaving Mysten Labs to join Anthropic, where he will work on defensive security research related to AI.

His name may not be familiar to many, but you’ve likely heard of what he created. He developed Move, the underlying programming language for the Sui blockchain.

Around 2018, while he was at Meta, when Zuckerberg was developing the Libra stablecoin project, Blackshear was a core member of the team and designed a new programming language specifically for this project, called Move.

Libra was later renamed Diem, and subsequently, the entire stablecoin project was halted by regulators. However, the Move language survived.

In September 2021, Blackshear left Meta along with four former colleagues to found Mysten Labs, rescuing Move from Meta’s remnants and building a new public blockchain, Sui, around it. He had devoted over eight years to this language, from its initial conception until his departure.

I think most readers in the already bearish crypto market haven't felt the impact of personnel changes.

How can one understand the significance of this personnel turnover?

The security of a blockchain and what it can or cannot do depend largely on the design of its underlying language. Blackshear’s relationship to Sui and Move can be roughly compared to Vitalik’s relationship to Ethereum and Solidity.

People in this category are difficult to evaluate by traditional job titles within a cryptocurrency project.

They could be the designers of the language, the decision-makers on protocol evolution, or those controlling the flow of funds... In simpler terms, these are the “gatekeepers” of crypto projects, determining how high an ecosystem can grow.

Currently, this group of people is visibly moving toward the AI industry. Blackshear is not an exception.

Before Blackshear left, there was actually a moment.

At a roundtable discussion on project security in April this year, he shared something that highlights the exceptional appeal of AI to technical leaders in the crypto industry:

During his Facebook days, he built an analysis tool and later wanted to migrate it to Move, using it to scan for potential vulnerabilities in Move code; this kind of migration used to be done entirely manually, and in his own words, it “took a very, very long time.”

Later, he assigned this task to Claude.

Claude automatically completed the migration and flagged a batch of potential vulnerabilities. Blackshear’s reaction upon seeing the results was, “Whoa, we’ve entered a new world.”

I think this detail is very important.

Have you ever felt that when scrolling through social media and hearing how great AI is, you can’t truly be moved by it—until, while doing the part of your work you’re most skilled at and do daily, you discover that AI can solve problems in unexpected ways, even surpassing your own abilities?

So, tech experts leaving crypto projects for AI is both a strategic career move and a genuine belief in its immense potential.

Similar things are also happening to more crypto professionals.

In February this year, Tomasz Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, announced his resignation after less than a year in the role. Previously, Stańczak founded Nethermind, one of the most important clients in the Ethereum ecosystem, and has been a key contributor to the evolution of the Ethereum protocol.

When he left, he wrote in his blog: “I now understand that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world.” He is also a “gatekeeper,” except instead of guarding language safety, he guides the direction of Ethereum protocol upgrades.

As for those who left earlier, everyone is certainly no stranger to them.

OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah stepped down as CTO in 2022 during the peak of the NFT boom and later founded OpenRouter, an AI model aggregation platform, now valued at $500 million;

Leopold Aschenbrenner, who came from FTX’s Future Fund, authored the 165-page paper "Situational Awareness" and now manages a multi-billion-dollar AI investment fund; despite recent significant losses, he continues to operate within another circle.

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

These individuals left the crypto industry at different times, across various projects and roles, and the skills they possessed are precisely what the AI industry is currently lacking.

So, rather than “fleeing” crypto, it’s more like individual blocks being pulled out of a slowing system and inserted into another that’s spinning faster.

So far, we've discussed specific individuals; now let's look at the data.

According to data from the Artemis analytics platform in March this year, weekly code commits on GitHub for crypto projects dropped from approximately 850,000 at the beginning of 2025 to around 210,000.

75% is gone.

During the same period, weekly active developers dropped from approximately 8,700 to 4,600, a reduction of more than half. Ethereum’s developer base decreased by 34% over three months, Solana by 40%, and BNB Chain’s code commits fell by 85%.

This is not an issue with just one chain; nearly all ecosystems are experiencing outflows.

Meanwhile, the entire GitHub platform is growing. In 2025, approximately 36 million new developers joined, and total code commits across the platform increased by 25% year-over-year. According to the GitHub Octoverse report, the growth was primarily driven by AI projects, with over 4.3 million AI-related repositories and a 178% year-over-year increase in imports of large language model SDKs.

Omar, an investor at Dragonfly, believes the reason for this situation is that industry attention has shifted toward AI, falling crypto prices have reduced economic incentives for developers, and some teams have moved from open-source to closed-source development—meaning the code hasn’t disappeared, it’s just no longer visible on GitHub.

So a more accurate statement might be that the crypto industry isn’t “dying”—it’s contracting. The periphery has dispersed, and core teams are tightening up. But the problem is, the gatekeepers mentioned in the previous chapter weren’t the ones leaving the periphery—they were from the core.

This year, at least nine senior researchers and leaders left the Ethereum Foundation, with five departing in May alone, leaving the protocol research team nearly hollowed out, while Vitalik has, in a sense, become Ethereum’s last “gatekeeper,” still guiding the project’s core direction.

The people who left did so for various reasons—some disagreed with internal governance, others had salary concerns, and some were dissatisfied with the L2 roadmap. But regardless of the reason, these positions are now vacant.

At the same time, the direction of money is also changing.

According to Bloomberg in July, Paradigm closed a $1.2 billion new fund, expanding its investment scope for the first time into AI and robotics. Managing partner Palmedo said, “There’s too much happening outside to pretend it’s not there.”

Chart: The total amount of crypto funding in Q2 this year was $12.8 billion.

Data source: CryptoRank

It’s not just Paradigm—Framework Ventures raised $4 billion last month for AI and robotics, and Haun Ventures raised $1 billion in May, marking its first fund to include AI. According to Crunchbase data, global venture capital investment in the first half of 2026 reached $510 billion, with OpenAI and Anthropic alone accounting for over 40%. During the same period, the entire cryptocurrency industry raised less than 5% of that amount.

The people writing code are leaving, and the money used to pay them is also changing direction.

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

On July 30, a firmware vulnerability in the hardware wallet Coldcard was exploited, emptying 1,196 wallets within 41 minutes and resulting in losses of over 1,082 BTC, approximately $70 million. The vulnerability had been hidden in the code for over five years without being detected.

Afterward, a Reddit developer pasted Coldcard’s open-source code into Claude Code and typed, “Check for vulnerabilities.” Eight minutes later, Claude had identified the issue.

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

So, taken together, the crypto industry is entering an awkward position:

Security threats are escalating, AI-driven attack methods are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the people in the industry who define security boundaries and audit底层代码 are being gradually recruited by the AI sector.

Those who stay may also rely on AI for code reviews and project development. This approach seems efficient but is actually quite sloppy. Without someone who truly understands the system to oversee it, can things created purely by AI be secure?

Many are asking when the bull market will arrive. But in an environment where gatekeepers are leaving en masse, a more pertinent question might be: How can the next black swan be contained?