Personal Keys Are the Worst Design in Crypto — And It’s Costing Billions

For greater than a decade, crypto safety has been constructed on a fragile assumption:
{that a} single secret — a non-public key — may be safely generated, saved, backed up, and by no means uncovered.

Actuality has confirmed in any other case.

A Design That Retains Failing

Since 2011, crypto hacks and scams have resulted in an estimated $22.7 billion in losses throughout tons of of reported incidents.
Yr after yr, investigations level again to the identical root trigger: personal key compromise.

In 2024, complete crypto-related losses reached roughly $2.2 billion, with personal key-related incidents contributing the most important share.

By the primary half of 2025, the state of affairs worsened. Trade experiences estimate losses between $2.1–$2.47 billion, of which 69–80% had been attributed to pockets, personal key, or signing infrastructure compromise.

All figures are based mostly on incomplete and underreported public knowledge.

The business retains patching the signs.
However the illness stays untouched.

Thousands and thousands of Customers, One Structural Weak point

This isn’t an issue restricted to whales or exchanges.

Phishing, malware, leaked restoration phrases, browser exploits, and compromised password managers have impacted thousands and thousands of customers worldwide. Most retail losses go unreported, fragmented into transactions too small to make headlines — however devastating in combination.

The uncomfortable fact is that this:
Crypto wallets demand excellent key administration from imperfect people.
And when failure occurs, customers are blamed — not the system.

The Largest Theft Proved the Level

In February 2025, the business suffered its largest single theft thus far:  roughly $1.5 billion misplaced in a Bybit-related incident.

The assault didn’t break cryptography.
It broke the signing course of.

By compromising the transaction approval interface, attackers successfully seized pockets management. Personal keys didn’t stop the theft — they enabled it.

This incident surpassed all earlier data and demonstrated a harsh actuality:
so long as signing authority may be captured, belongings are by no means really secure.

The Query the Trade Prevented

For years, pockets safety has centered on one objective:
shield the personal key higher

Encrypt it.
Break up it.
Conceal it in {hardware}.
Ask customers to protect it extra rigorously.

However irrespective of how superior these defenses grow to be, all of them share the identical flaw:
A non-public key should exist — someplace, at a while.
That existence defines the assault floor.

So the true query is now not shield personal keys.
The query comes,  why do they should exist in any respect.

Alph.AI and the Shift Past Personal Keys

At Alph.AI, we began from a special premise:

If personal keys are the issue, eradicating them totally must be the answer.

As a substitute of managing keys, Alph.AI’s pockets structure eliminates the idea of a whole personal key altogether.

• Signing authority is distributed throughout a number of impartial parts.
• No single system, system, or individual can authorize a transaction alone.
• At no level does a full personal key exist — not encrypted, not reconstructed, not recoverable.

That is achieved via a next-generation MPC-based signing system mixed with remoted execution environments and zero-trust operational design.

In sensible phrases:

• There may be nothing for hackers to steal.
• There isn’t a single path to assault.
• There isn’t a inner “god mode.”