Breaking Down AI’s Threat to Cryptography /w Kostas Chalkias

Episode 35 of The Starting Block, hosted by The Block's Gareth Jenkinson, was broadcasted live with Mysten Labs Co-Founder Kostas Chalkias.

Mysten Labs co-founder Kostas Chalkias joined Gareth Jenkinson on The Starting Block for a wide-ranging conversation on cryptographic security in the age of AI. Chalkias argued that advancing artificial intelligence is becoming a growing threat to cryptographic systems, and made the case for continuous, automated auditing of blockchain code rather than one-off reviews. The conversation moved to hardware wallets and multi-signature setups, including Cold Card devices, as practical tools for securing keys against emerging risks. Chalkias also referenced Anthropic researcher Sam Blackshear in a segment touching on how leading AI labs are engaging with cryptography and security research. A significant portion of the episode focused on Walrus Memory, Mysten Labs' decentralized storage system, and how it could give AI models portable, persistent memory across different large language models rather than locking data into a single provider. The pair closed by debating whether decentralized AI infrastructure can scale to compete with centralized providers, weighing the trade-offs between decentralization and the compute demands of modern AI systems. The episode opened with a markets segment and The Block's daily briefing before moving into the interview itself.

OUTLINE
00:11 - Show Open & Markets
02:43 - The Block Briefing
08:00 - Hot Seat: AI vs. Cryptography
12:54 - Cold Card & Continuous Auditing
17:24 - Hardware Wallets & Multi-Sig
24:37 - Sam Blackshear & Anthropic
29:29 - Walrus Memory & LLM Portability
37:57 - Decentralized AI: Can It Scale?

Guest links:
Kostas Chalkias - https://x.com/kostascrypto
Mysten Labs - https://x.com/Mysten_Labs

Host links:
Gareth Jenkinson - https://x.com/gazza_jenks
The Block - https://x.com/TheBlockCo
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