Risks in Crypto
Attacks follow the concentration, not the chain.
A hack is a targeted attack that exploits a technical or a human weakness in order to take assets. It lands where capital or access piles up — smart contracts, exchanges, wallets, bridges — and settlement leaves almost no time to react.
The problem
Where the capital sits.
Four places where capital or access piles up. Press each one for what made it worth attacking and what a holder on the outside actually experiences. Then try to get it back.
Four stores, same question
NOTHING PRESSED YETFour stores, none of them pressed. Start with any one.
Not one of those four is a blockchain. A hack exploits a technical weakness or a human one — a fault in code, or a person led into an action — and it lands wherever the payoff is concentrated. Once it has executed, speed does the rest: assets are moved on within minutes, and an executed crypto transaction usually has no central party who can pull it back. That is why security here is a baseline requirement, not an add-on.
Most so-called crypto hacks hit applications, exchanges and bridges — not the blockchain itself. Theft almost always happens on the layer above: a fault in a smart contract, a breached connection point between networks, a break-in at a platform, a single user led into an approval. The base protocols are rarely the victim. People read the headline, conclude that the chain failed, and take away the wrong lesson — the thing that broke was something built on top of it.
The definition
Three things the four stores were telling you.
Tap each card for the mechanism underneath it.
Hands on
Four situations. Which part was hit?
Pick a situation, read what it says, and call the part. The wording is deliberately about where the loss landed, not about how anyone got there.
Choose a situation above, then call the part.
Four different places, one shared property: each of them holds more than any single holder does. That is the whole selection rule — capital, or the access that moves it, gathered in one spot.
The bridge
Weakness, speed, finality — and what is left.
The four things that turn a fault into a loss you cannot undo.
Everything in this lesson assumes somebody had to break in from the outside. The next lesson removes that assumption: a rug pull needs no vulnerability and no exploit, because the people who built the thing already hold the permissions.
Check yourself
Five questions.
Answers come straight from this lesson. Submitting completes it.