The father of the Move language leaves Sui to join Anthropic, and crypto talent is flowing in bulk to AI

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

On August 5, Sam Blackshear posted on X that he would be leaving Mysten Labs to join Anthropic, focusing on AI-related defensive security research.

This name may not be familiar to many, but you have likely heard of the things he has worked on. Move, the underlying programming language of the Sui blockchain, was created by him.

Around 2018, he was still at Meta, when Zuckerberg was working on the Libra stablecoin project. Blackshear was a member of the core technical team, specifically designing a new programming language for this project, which is Move.

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

In September 2021, Blackshear, along with four former Meta colleagues, founded Mysten Labs, bringing Move out of Meta's remnants and building a new public chain, Sui, around it. Moreover, from the initial conception to now leaving, he has invested over eight years in this language.

I think most readers in the already bearish crypto market do not have a clear sense of the personnel changes.

So how can we understand the significance of this personnel loss?

The security and capabilities of a blockchain largely depend on the design of its underlying language. Blackshear's role in Sui and Move can be roughly compared to Vitalik's role in Ethereum and Solidity.

Such individuals in a crypto project are not easily measured by their job titles.

They may be language designers, decision-makers for protocol evolution, or those who determine the flow of funds… In simpler terms, they are a group of "gatekeepers" for crypto projects, defining how high an ecosystem can grow.

Now, these individuals are visibly moving towards the AI industry. Blackshear is not an isolated case.

AI, A Brave New World

Before Blackshear left, there was actually a moment.

During a roundtable discussion on project security in April this year, he mentioned something that reflected the immense attraction of AI to technical leaders in the crypto industry:

He had written an analysis tool during his time at Facebook and later wanted to migrate it to Move to scan for potential vulnerabilities in Move code; this migration work used to rely solely on manual effort, and his own words were, "It would take a very long time."

Later, he handed this task over to Claude.

Claude completed this migration automatically and flagged a number of potential vulnerabilities. Blackshear's reaction upon seeing the results was, "Whoa, we have entered a new world."

I think this detail is very important.

Have you ever felt that when someone talks about how good AI is while scrolling through social media, you can't be moved from the heart? Until you find that AI can solve problems in ways you didn't expect, even surpassing your own capabilities while doing the part of your work that you are best at.

Therefore, the departure of technical leaders from crypto projects to AI is not only a career planning move but also a heartfelt belief that there is great potential.

Similar situations are 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 office. Stańczak previously founded Nethermind, one of the most important clients in the Ethereum ecosystem, and he was also a core participant in the evolution of the Ethereum protocol layer.

When he left, he wrote in his blog, "I now know that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world." He is also a "gatekeeper." However, he is not guarding language security but rather the direction of Ethereum protocol upgrades.

As for those who left even earlier, they are certainly not unfamiliar to everyone.

OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah resigned as CTO in 2022 during the peak of the NFT craze and later created the AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter, which is now valued at $500 million;

Leopold Aschenbrenner left FTX's Future Fund, wrote the 165-page "Situational Awareness," and now manages a multi-billion dollar AI investment fund, which has faced significant losses recently but is still developing in another circle;

His former colleague Avital Balwit also left the FTX system and is now the chief of staff for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

These individuals have left crypto at different projects, positions, and times, and the work they are doing happens to be what the AI industry currently lacks the most.

So rather than saying they are "fleeing" crypto, it is more like they are pulling blocks out of a slowing growth system and inserting them into another system that is growing faster.

The Exit of Technology and Money

What has been discussed so far are specific individuals; now let's look at the data.

According to data from the Artemis analysis platform in March this year, the weekly code submission volume for crypto projects on GitHub dropped from about 850,000 at the beginning of 2025 to about 210,000.

75% is gone.

During the same period, the number of weekly active developers fell from about 8,700 to 4,600, a reduction of more than half. Ethereum's developers decreased by 34% in three months, Solana by 40%, and BNB Chain's code submission volume dropped by 85%.

This is not just an issue for one blockchain; almost all ecosystems are bleeding.

Meanwhile, the GitHub platform as a whole is growing. In 2025, approximately 36 million new developers joined, and the total code submission volume across the platform increased by 25% year-on-year. According to the GitHub Octoverse report, the incremental growth is mainly flowing into AI projects, with AI-related code repositories exceeding 4.3 million, and the import volume of large language model SDKs increased by 178% in a year.

Omar, an investor at Dragonfly, believes that the reason for this situation is that industry attention has shifted to AI, falling cryptocurrency prices have reduced developers' economic incentives, and some teams have shifted from open-source to closed-source development, meaning the code hasn't disappeared; it's just not visible on GitHub.

So a more accurate statement might be that the crypto industry is not "dying" but rather shrinking. The periphery has dispersed, while the core teams are tightening. But the problem is that the gatekeepers mentioned in the previous chapter are not leaving the periphery; they are leaving the core.

This year, at least nine senior researchers and leaders from the Ethereum Foundation have left, with five of them concentrated in May, and the protocol research team has been almost emptied. In a sense, Vitalik has become the last "gatekeeper" of Ethereum, still controlling the core direction of project development.

The reasons for the departures vary; some have disagreements over internal governance, some have salary issues, and some are dissatisfied with the L2 roadmap. But regardless of the reasons, these positions are now vacant.

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

According to a July report from Bloomberg, Paradigm closed a new $1.2 billion fund, expanding its investment scope to include AI and robotics for the first time. Managing partner Palmedo stated, "There is so much happening outside that it's hard to pretend not to see it."

Image: In the second quarter of this year, the total amount of crypto financing was $12.8 billion

In fact, it's not just Paradigm; Framework Ventures raised $400 million last month to invest in AI and robotics, and Haun Ventures raised $1 billion in May, marking its first inclusion of AI. According to Crunchbase data, global VC investment in the first half of 2026 reached $510 billion, with OpenAI and Anthropic consuming over 40%. During the same period, the total financing amount for the entire crypto industry was less than 5% of this figure.

The people writing code are leaving, and the money that pays their salaries is also changing direction.

The Black Swan After Guarding the Gate

The crypto industry has never been safe, but the recent situation is particularly intense.

On July 30, the hardware wallet Coldcard experienced a firmware vulnerability, leading to 1,196 wallets being emptied in 41 minutes, resulting in losses exceeding 1,082 BTC, approximately $70 million. This vulnerability had been hidden in the code for over five years without anyone noticing.

After the incident, a Reddit developer handed Coldcard's open-source code to Claude Code, inputting a command to "check for vulnerabilities." Eight minutes later, Claude audited and identified the problem.

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, stated on social media that about "$2 worth of AI computing power" could have prevented this attack.

So when viewed together, the crypto industry is entering an awkward situation:

Security threats are escalating, AI-driven attack methods are becoming increasingly complex, while the group of people defining security boundaries and auditing the underlying code in the industry are being taken one by one by the AI industry.

Those who remain may also have to rely on AI for code auditing and project development in the future. This is actually a seemingly efficient but practically makeshift approach; without truly understanding the system, is what AI produces safe?

Many people are asking when the bull market will come. But in an environment where gatekeepers are leaving in droves, the more pertinent question might be: what methods will be used to guard against the next black swan?