Banks are one AI attack away from collapse. Here's the alternative.

On 7 April 2026, Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a frontier AI system that had autonomously identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating system software. A zero-day is a flaw hidden so deep inside code that even its authors never knew it existed — a stranger, quietly holding a key to a door in your home you never knew was there, able to enter, linger, and leave without trace, for as long as they pleased.

That same day, the US Treasury Secretary sat down with every major American bank chief executive. No formal statement was issued. None was needed.

"There will always be bugs in software, because humans are fallible — and so is the AI we build. There is no final patch. There never will be."

Those of us who have spent careers in cyber-defence have always known one uncomfortable truth: there will always be bugs in software, because humans are fallible — and so is the AI we build. There is no final patch. There never will be.

This is not pessimism. It is engineering reality.

It was this understanding that led me to initiate Multiven Group's legal action against Cisco in 2008, compelling software manufacturers to make bug fixes freely available as vulnerabilities are identified. A small but necessary victory.

It was this same understanding that led PhotonAI to acquire Multiven in June 2025, as it became clear that the age of human-led cyber warfare was ending.

And it is this knowledge — that every online transaction on earth flows through financial institutions that are simultaneously indispensable and brittle — that led me to found Boom.

We have entered the age of machine-to-machine warfare. Attack and counter-attack now play out at speeds no human security team can match. Mythos is both sword and shield, and it is, for now, in responsible hands.

But it is safe to assume that every major AI laboratory is building its own equivalent. The asymmetry that has always existed between attacker and defender — the attacker needs to find one door; the defender must guard all of them — has been industrialised.

Centralised systems have a throat. Sooner or later, someone will choke it.

"The question is not whether an alternative infrastructure is needed. It is whether we adopt it before or after the failure that proves the point."

Boom is not a bank. It is a better alternative to one. It is built on infrastructure that is decentralised — terrestrially today, and extra-terrestrially in the near term. Every unit of value is sovereign-backed, with zero leverage. Assets are self-custodied. Access is permission-less. There are no gatekeepers, and no exclusions.

For the banked world, Boom functions as a resilient backup payment and settlement layer — available when the primary system fails, or is made to fail. For the unbanked, it is the primary system.

The question is not whether an alternative infrastructure is needed. It is whether we adopt it before or after the failure that proves the point.

-Peter Alfred-Adekeye, Founder of Boom, inventor of Boomcoin