MCPwned: How the Model Context Protocol Is Becoming DeFi's Newest Attack Surface

MCPwned: How the Model Context Protocol Is Becoming DeFi's Newest Attack Surface The Model Context Protocol (MCP) promised to be the universal bridge between AI agents and blockchain infrastructure. Instead, it's becoming one of the most dangerous attack surfaces in crypto — and most developers don't even know they're exposed. What Is MCP and Why Should You Care? MCP, originally launched by Anthropic as an open standard for connecting AI models to external systems, has rapidly been adopted across the crypto ecosystem. Projects like Base-MCP let AI assistants create wallets, check balances, send transactions, and interact with smart contracts on EVM chains. The problem? MCP servers are implicitly trusted by AI agents , and that trust is being weaponized. In the past 12 months, we've seen: Tool poisoning attacks redirecting crypto transactions to attacker wallets Seed phrase exposure through unencrypted MCP config files CVE-2025-6514 — a CVSS 9.6 RCE in mcp-remote affecting 437,000+ inst