David Hoffman
Co-founder of Bankless, a media company covering Ethereum and crypto markets, and general partner of Bankless Ventures, an early-stage crypto investment fund he...
“There has never been the notion of bank heists in the trad bank world because they can just ledger entry update and undo the heist. … You can undo a transaction that's like 60 days old, a year old. You can go really far back with a court order. And so you're telling me that that narrative was violated by a trad bank getting heisted.”
Bankless · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026
Context
Hoffman sets up the story of a French bank that lost about $130 million to hackers who cashed out through crypto exchanges. The usual claim is that crypto is uniquely exposed because transactions are final; this case cuts against it.
Transcript
Arbitrum has been two for two on the last two big hacks, Bybit and then Binance on not losing customer money, not their customers. Well, it was their customer because it was Binance as their customer, but like Arbitrum is saved two for two times.
Yeah, exactly. Do you want me to tell you that story of how bank got robbed?
Let me just set up the premise of crypto has always felt very insecure because of the acceleration of AI exploiting technologies. So especially for bear assets, because once they are stolen, they are stolen because it's set on a blockchain. It's gone. Banks don't have that problem because if you send a bank transfer, you can just call your bank and say, hey, undo that. And there is no transaction finality in the bank context. You can undo a transaction that's like 60 days old, a year old. You can go really far back with a court order. And so there has never been the notion of bank heists in the trad bank world because they can just ledger entry update and undo the heist. And so you're telling me that that narrative was violated by a trad bank getting heisted. How did that happen?
Yeah. And this is a crazy story. And by the way, that's the reason I've always been skeptical of these takes of like, oh, you know, traditional banks are going to be hacked. It's just like, well, not in the way of crypto. They're not bare instruments. Everything is AMLKYC. You know, like it moves…
A physical. Like people with guns in the bank lobby.
Nope, digitally. Hackers. Digitally. So similar in some ways to the Binance attack and also very differently. This is a big bank, I should say. So about $200 billion balance sheet. So 5.5 million customers. It's a co-op and they have over 10,000 employees. It's a co-op. So it's not publicly traded…
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