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Whoever Holds the Keys Is the "Hacker"

Aslan Hasanli · Founder, AYA Network · 30 September 2026 · 5 min read

You've been told you were robbed. How do you check it wasn't them? You can't.

Who does the work

Picture crypto as a vast building site.

Miners buy the hardware, pay electricity bills the size of a small steelworks, and live with the hum of fans around the clock. Validators keep servers running, patch software at three in the morning and make sure the network doesn't fall over. Holders believe, wait and stay put.

And they do get paid. In the very coin they keep running. Price goes up: party. Price goes down: party cancelled. The electricity bill, curiously, is not.

Their whole salary is hope. The whole risk is theirs too.

Who makes the money

Next to the building site stands a rather nice office. It doesn't smell of solder. It smells of flat whites and marketing budget.

These are the exchanges, the platforms, the "revolutionary" services. They take a fee on every trade, in dollars, whatever the weather. Market rising: people buy, the fees trickle in. Market falling: people sell, and the fees trickle in faster.

Their logos are on stadiums. Their founders are on magazine covers. Their billboards read: "The future of money is here." And it is. The only question is whose pocket it's in.

Two ways to make a graceful exit

This story usually has one of two endings.

Ending one: "We've left the building."

FTX: roughly $8 billion of customer money evaporated. The founder, a genius in shorts with hair to match, got 25 years. He now has plenty of time to reflect on decentralisation.

Turkish exchange Thodex simply didn't open one morning. By then its founder was already in Albania. The court gave him 11,196 years. Just to be on the safe side.

Celsius promised high returns that were "safer than a bank." The bank, as it turned out, was safer. The founder got 12 years.

Ending two: "We've been hacked."

This is the more elegant option. Nobody runs anywhere. One day a press release simply appears: "Malicious actors gained access to our wallets. We deeply regret…"

In February 2025, $1.5 billion walked out of Bybit. Over the whole of 2025, $3.4 billion was stolen. And in late September 2026, $351 million left Bitget's "hot" wallets.

Thefts have become so routine they could go in the weather forecast. "Tomorrow in Dubai: 38 degrees, clear skies, with a moderate chance of one exchange being hacked."

The awkward question

Now imagine you're told you've been robbed. How do you check it wasn't them?

You can't.

The textbook case is Canada's QuadrigaCX. In 2018 its founder died unexpectedly, and according to the company, the keys to the cold wallets "went with him." A tragedy. Then the investigators opened the wallets. They had been empty for months. It turned out the founder had been spending customers' money himself for years. The "hacker" and the CEO were the same man. Terribly efficient: no outsiders involved at all.

One more detail. According to researchers, North Korean hackers often get jobs inside crypto companies. So the "external hacker" is sometimes sitting in the next office and turning up to the Christmas party.

The rule is simple: whoever holds the keys can move the money. Whoever they are: a hacker, an employee, or a founder having a bad day.

And in AYA?

We don't hold the keys to your wallet.

Not "we keep your keys somewhere safe." Not "your keys are under double protection." We simply don't have them. Your key lives with you.

So we can't move your AYA. Not even if we really wanted to. Not even on a bad day. Not even if a remarkably talented "intern" from Pyongyang joins the team.

Which means you won't get a press release from us saying "we've been hacked and your money is gone." There's nobody to write it: we physically have nothing to steal.

Sounds boring? Perhaps. But in crypto, boring is the new luxury.

AYA CORE is a post-quantum Layer-1 blockchain built from scratch in Rust. Read the documentation at portal.ayacoin.online/docs, verify what the network records through the public AYA CORE Explorer, and hold the keys yourself: the wallet runs at ayacoin.online and is available on the App Store and Google Play.

Sources

Also on: Medium

Aslan Hasanli is the founder of AYA Network, a post-quantum Layer-1 blockchain built from scratch in Rust by Bruno Kapital & Investment LLC.

This article is educational and does not constitute financial or investment advice.