Crypto Industry's 'Gatekeepers' Flee for AI Research

Sam Blackshear, the creator of the Move programming language used in Sui and former Meta employee, has joined Anthropic. He was part of the team that designed Move for the Libra stablecoin project before it was shut down by regulators.

Move is an essential component of Sui's underlying architecture, similar to Solidity being crucial for Ethereum. Blackshear's departure from Mysten Labs and his co-founders marks a significant loss for the crypto industry.

This is not an isolated incident; several key figures have left the crypto space for AI research in recent months. These include Tomasz Stańczak, the former co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, who announced his resignation after less than a year in the role.

Stańczak stated that he 'now understand[s] that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world.' This sentiment is echoed by others who have left crypto for AI. Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, stepped down as CTO in 2022 to build an AI model aggregation platform valued at $500 million.

The departure of key personnel from the crypto industry is coupled with a significant decline in code commits and active developers on GitHub. According to data from Artemis analytics, weekly code commits by crypto projects fell from around 850,000 to roughly 210,000 between January and March this year, a drop of over 75%.

The shift towards AI research is not just evident in the departure of key figures but also in the direction of funding. Paradigm has closed a $1.2 billion new fund that includes investments in AI and robotics, while Framework Ventures raised $400 million for AI and robotics last month.