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Recovery hopes fade as Kelp DAO hacker launders nearly all $220M in stolen funds

I find the whole thing massively overhyped, specifically defi apps.
Take Arcium as a case study. Arcium is a privacy protocol on Solana that basically enables computation on encrypted data, encrypted by different people. An obvious use case is a sealed auction where you cannot see the participating bids.
Privacy is probably one of the biggest narratives currently on-chain, but to be honest it is not exactly a groundbreaking infrastructural upgrade that will transform the world, or even defi. That would be fine if it wasn't for the ridiculous overhyping on twitter and discord of these projects.
I remember in my own case I was trying to bring privacy to my dapp in early 2025 and thought there would be some niche group of devs fleshing out the token2022 extension or whatever which had long been disregarded. I partly took interest in it because the tech is pretty hard to vibecode and you need a good understanding of their specific rust compiler and stack, so it seemed like it might be something genuinely skill-based I could get an edge in - but what I found was something completely different.
I joined the Arcium discord and it has literally 200k members of mainly nigerian and south asian users, who spam things like "gmpc" constantly, (portmanteau of gm and multi-party-computation, mpc) . THOUSANDS of people are lining up to spam messages every day to boost their points on this stupid discord leaderboard and professing their belief in this tech like a literal CULT. a HUGE swath of people are trying to become "crypto influencers" specifically "arcium influencers" where they make bizarre short form content about how groundbreaking this extraordinarily niche tech is. It’s honestly just cringe.
What even has been built with this? [Crafts.dev](http://Crafts.dev), glorified DAO framework, no-one even knows what it does. [Bench.markets](http://Bench.markets), generic prediction market. Then there are about 10 copies of Umbra like "Stealf finance" which are all pretty much the same. [Zinc.cash](http://Zinc.cash), which literally just looks like a scam its a POW app on a POS chain, - certainly not anything important to society like the Arcium founder endlessly professes about. Anonmesh, wow you can send crypto from Mount Everest thats so useful! Let’s make 10000 videos about it on twitter in hopes they will pay me 10 dollars to be their official community manager!
Even my own project I got so many DMs on telegram of people claiming they were experts in security audits or were community managers - and they literally would write 2000 word essays about my shit in hopes I'd pay them to promote it 💀 (all of it was AI of course). Idk maybe thats a dumb complaint but there is something so remarkably toxic about it all. There's no good ideas here it’s all just a game of hype.
Thats not to say there aren’t some genuinely innovative projects built here. Umbra is basically the only one and its a genuinely good idea made by some genuinely smart people, but its still not super useful until dApps and trading venues will adopt this mpc tech, which will likely not happen for years because the MPC is painfully slow - you cannot make a simple matching engine on it at all, and this kind of latency is not acceptable as we have seen from the success of hyperliquid. It’s ironic given this was meant to solve the slowness of FHE, which is why FHE never took off. If this stuff was really that awesome then Sols price would be in a league of its own, but ofc its tied to btc and eth and so on bc ultimately its just yet another crypto chain.
Then take the RTGs and the Colosseum hackathon. Arcium was a sponsor. Basically just consists of thousands of vibecoded apps that are all entirely useless or YET ANOTHER prediction market of some kind. Pretty much every app that won the wave 1 RTG has since died, and then they decided to make almost NO ONE "eligible" for the wave 2 rtg - aka they just arent giving out their tokens other than to insiders or people who spammed messages in their discord. The col hackathon and the RTGs are just a massive scheme to get people to mess around with code and make their ecosystem look active to boost their TGE, which is always "just a few weeks away!".
All these high-production quality ads and conferences and so on where toly and mert can hype up NFTs for 5 seconds to keep people on the edge of their seat, and now they are hyping up privacy. Its all garbage. NFTs have no applications realistically.
Blockchain technology is genuinely quite interesting but I dont think anyone is really making it big from a genuinely novel dapp or whatever, esp now Claude code has poisoned everything. Its just a game of what is the most popular and what has the most attention. Sol will not change the world and it wont change finance either.

Recovery hopes fade as Kelp DAO hacker launders nearly all $220M in stolen funds