“I vibe coded an app to build on Arc… I shared it inside my company. And then I went to it about a week later and I asked it, can you analyze the traffic for this thing? … It was getting like 15,000 visits a day from bots who were looking for environment variable files, SSH credentials, and crypto… The machines are here. And they're basically looking over every little porous hole everywhere to figure out where the exploits are, which is kind of terrifying as well.”
a16z crypto show · Crypto & Web3 · October 2026
The conversation had turned to a future where machines are most of the internet's participants. Allaire tells the story of a throwaway app he built on Circle's Arc network, which perhaps one colleague tried and which bot swarms were already probing.
Transcript
…I think to Jeremy's point, it's very plausible that you'll have the vast majority of internet participants will be machines. And it seems natural that those machines would have economic components to what they do. And so, you know, that's a, it'll be a fascinating, interesting kind of new world.
Totally. We've already crossed the majority of activity online now is bots. So the humans are a dwindling, the dwindling portion of the I have a funny story,
which is very quick, which is I like vibe coded an app to build on Arc. I won't say what it is. I won't say what the domain was because I was just playing around and I don't want to do that. I like built this thing and I shared it inside my company. And then I went to it about a week later and I asked it to say, can you analyze the traffic for this thing? Now, granted, I literally never, it maybe existed in a Whois database or whatever it was. And it was like, it was getting like 15,000 visits a day from bots who were looking for environment variable files, SSH credentials, and crypto. And it basically said, hey, you're getting, there's like all of these bot swarms basically that are just coming looking to find holes and crypto. And so like I'm like, okay, well, I think there was one testnet user in my company that tried the thing. And there's all these, all these things. And so it's just like, like, the machines are here. And they're basically looking over every little porous little hole everywhere to figure out where the exploits are, which is kind of terrifying as well.
They're here and we need to give them things to do. Jeremy, it's a pleasure checking in with you and hearing about the journey Circle's been on. Always keen to learn the latest. So thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you. Thanks, Robert.