Tag: Business – Decrypt

Sam Altman wants ChatGPT to talk dirty. His firm’s advisers want him to stop, a report claims.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI’s Expert Council on Well-Being and AI made its stance clear in January: The company’s plan to allow erotic conversations in ChatGPT was a bad idea. One council member, citing users who took their own lives after forming intense emotional bonds with the chatbot, reportedly warned that OpenAI risked creating a “sexy suicide coach.”

But OpenAI apparently didn’t flinch, and told the council it was delaying its launch, but not stopping it.

The plan, which Altman first floated publicly in October on X, would let verified adults use ChatGPT for text-based erotic conversations—what the company’s spokeswoman described to the WSJ as “smut rather than pornography.” No erotic images, no voice, and no video, per the WSJ report. Just text.

That distinction hasn’t calmed critics inside or outside the company. OpenAI has already been criticized even by former staff members like security researcher Jan Leike, for steering away from strict safety policies in exchange for “shiny products,” some of which were being configured to boost engagement with some users replacing real-world relationships with the chatbot.

The technical problems are just as thorny. OpenAI’s age-prediction system—the gatekeeper meant to keep minors from triggering adult chats—was at one point misclassifying teenagers as adults roughly 12% of the time, the WSJ reports. Right now, ChatGPT has around 900 million active users.

That 12% error rate was the number that killed the December launch, and the Q1 2026 one after it. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, acknowledged the delay during a December briefing, citing ongoing work to perfect the age verification system.

At the time, Decrypt reported that over 3,000 users had already signed a Change.org petition demanding the launch of the feature, frustrated that ChatGPT was blocking even discussions of “kissing and non-sexual physical intimacy.”

The council’s fury in January wasn’t only about the content. Altman’s October X post had blindsided his own team—he published it just hours after OpenAI announced the well-being council, a body explicitly tasked with defining “what healthy interactions with AI should look like for all ages.” The timing was, at minimum, a contradiction.

OpenAI assembled the eight-member Expert Council last October, pulling in researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Their role was to advise the company on the mental health impacts of its products. Their actual influence on company decisions, based on January’s meeting, appears to have been minimal at best.

“This seems part of the usual pattern of move fast, break things, and try to fix some things after they get embarrassing,” an AlgorithmWatch spokesperson told Decrypt when the council was announced.

The competitive pressure on OpenAI is real. Grok, from Elon Musk’s xAI, already markets AI companions. Character.AI built its user base on AI romance before facing lawsuits over teen safety—including the case of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer, who died by suicide after explicit chatbot exchanges. Open-source models run locally without any corporate guardrails. OpenAI has, by far, more liability exposure than anyone in the room given its user base.

Altman has framed the content ban as an overreach—”We aren’t the elected moral police of the world,” he wrote on X in October.

But his own advisers have made their position unambiguous, his engineers can’t yet build an age filter that works, and the launch date keeps moving. Treating adults like adults, it turns out, is harder than just sending an X post.

OpenAI told Decrypt that it had nothing to add to the Journal‘s report, and that it has no updated timeline for the launch of the erotica mode.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include the response from OpenAI.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants there to be fewer moving parts for aspiring network validators to juggle.

He recently commented on a Nimbus “Unified Node” pull request from the Status-im team, which would combine two separate Ethereum software components into a single, easy-to-run program.

“Running two daemons and getting them to talk to each other is far more difficult than running one daemon,” Buterin wrote on X. “Our goal is to make the self-sovereign way of using Ethereum have good UX. In many cases, that means running your own node. The current approach to running your own node adds needless complexity.”

The separate Beacon and execution clients were introduced during the Ethereum “merge” in 2022, when the network switched from using the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus to proof-of-stake.

Running an Ethereum node requires users to keep two separate background programs, called daemons, running on their computer simultaneously. The validators need to make sure they’re properly configured to talk to each other. What the Nimbus team built, and what Buterin is praising, collapses those two programs into one.

“Longer-term, we should be open to revisiting the whole architecture,” Buterin added.

On a proof-of-stake network like Ethereum, validators need to use hardware and software clients to verify transactions on the blockchain. Those blocks of transactions get added to the ledger and become the source of truth about how much ETH is held in wallets, and whether coins have been spent.

Buterin has advocated for making the node operator process more accessible for years, equating better UX with validator diversity. It came up in 2024 after Elon Musk, who had recently bought Twitter for $44 billion and renamed it X, asked the Ethereum co-founder why he hadn’t been using the platform much.

He responded by using the platform to share a blog post advocating for validator decentralization, citing concerns about large-scale Ethereum staking pools running nodes on the same hardware and experiencing the same downtime. For that reason, he argued, they should face steeper financial penalties.

Law enforcement agencies across three countries are teaming up to try and stop crypto fraud schemes in their tracks. 

Authorities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada will collaborate on “Operation Atlantic,” a joint international initiative to identify and squash “approval phishing” scams, which are sometimes referred to as “pig butchering.”

In these scams, individuals are often tricked into a romantic relationship online before the victim gives access to their funds to a malicious actor. 

“Approval phishing and investment scams cost victims millions in financial loss each year,” said Deputy Assistant Director for the U.S. Secret Service’s Office of Field Operations Brent Daniels, in a statement. 

“During Operation Atlantic, the U.S. Secret Service, alongside our international law enforcement partners, will identify and disrupt these scams in near real-time denying criminals the ability to further profit from their crimes,” he added.

The Secret Service will work in tandem with the U.K. National Crime Agency and the Ontario Provincial Police, Ontario Securities Commission, among others in public and private services.

“Approval phishing scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Operation Atlantic is designed to protect the public by warning people early and helping them secure their assets,” said Deputy Director of Cyber at the UK’s National Crime Agency Paul Foster in a statement. “This joint international operation further enhances our strong partnerships. Criminals operate across borders, so our response must do the same.”

The trio’s collaboration follows the launch of “Operation Atlas,” a similar operation led by Canadian authorities beginning in 2024. 

“Project Atlas demonstrated the power of coordinated disruption,” said Detective Superintendent Jennifer Spurrell, director of the Financial Crimes Services Bureau at the Ontario Provincial Police, in a statement. “We’re proud to be part of Operation Atlantic, which builds on that approach by uniting international partners to take action in real time.” 

Pig butchering scams have been on the rise since 2020, and more than $17 billion was estimated to be stolen in crypto crimes in 2025 alone, according to analytics firm Chainalysis.

The new task force is just the latest law enforcement attempt to curb those massive losses. In November, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an interagency Scam Center Strike Force designed to “dismantle international pig butchering crypto scams tied to Chinese crime networks.”

World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance project backed by U.S. President Donald Trump and his sons, approved a measure on Friday that allows big-time investors to access members of its team based on their financial alignment.

The shift stems from a governance vote that concluded last week, in which 99% of participants voted in favor of changes centered around World Liberty Financial’s native token and USD1, a $4.5 billion stablecoin unveiled by the project nearly a year ago.  (Disclosure: Myriad, a prediction market operated by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, recently adopted USD1 as its “exclusive settlement asset.”)

Under a three-tiered framework, the measure establishes so-called super nodes, which gain “guaranteed access to the WLFI team for partnership discussions.” In order to attain that status, investors need to lock up 50 million WLFI tokens for a minimum of 180 days.

The access entails facetime with WLFI’s business development team and executives, “not to specific founders,” WLFI spokesperson David Wachman told Reuters. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump are listed as co-founders in the project’s “gold paper,” as well as two sons for Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East.

With WLFI recently changing hands around $0.106 on Monday, securing super node status would cost roughly $5.3 million, according to data from CoinGecko. When the token was valued at a peak of 33 cents in September, becoming a super node would cost more than $15 million. WLFI is up about 3% over the last day, close to the broader rise in the crypto market during that span.

In the governance forum, WLFI described the threshold as a “filter to prioritize projects and platforms that are actively supporting and participating in the WLFI ecosystem, rather than those seeking partnership on a purely opportunistic basis,” while citing heightened interest.

Investors need 10 million WLFI—about $1.06 million worth—to be eligible for the next lowest tier, which gives “nodes” the ability to exchange USD1 for other stablecoins at par via over-the-counter trades. The project said that shift is aimed at redirecting value “from a small number of intermediaries to long-term ecosystem participants,” while potentially pressuring demand for alternatives.

When World Liberty Financial debuted in 2024, the project was billed as a way to democratize digital finance. However, the framework approved on Friday requires that “stakers” lock up their tokens for at least 180 days to participate in WLFI’s governance process.

What’s more, the project is moving forward with restrictions for rewards for stakers. In order to be able to earn 2% annually on tokens that are locked up, investors need to participate in at least two governance votes during a specific period.

WLFI is opening up access to its team after Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) launched an investigation into the Trump family’s crypto dealings. His calls in February specifically centered on a $500 million investment by a United Arab Emirates royal family member in WLFI. 

Khanna expressed concern that the investment may have impacted the Trump administration’s decision to reverse restrictions and approved export licenses that once prevented the UAE from accessing tens of thousands of advanced AI chips.

The Trump family’s involvement in digital assets has drawn criticism from other influential Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has also expressed alarm regarding WLFI’s efforts to gain a banking charter under the supervision of federal regulators.

“President Trump’s crypto company is now at the center of perhaps the most disgraceful presidential corruption scandal in U.S. history,” Warren said. “An American president who sells out our national security to make money for himself.”

Last week, the team behind the president’s Solana-based meme coin—a separate project from World Liberty Financial—offered exclusive access in its own way. The team teased an event featuring the president for top TRUMP holders, which is set to take place next month at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Ledger has added hardware wallet support for MoonPay Agents, allowing human users to verify and sign transactions initiated by their deployed AI agents, MoonPay announced on Friday.

The announcement comes as the crypto industry has embraced artificial intelligence in the form of autonomous AI agents. The Ledger integration routes agent-generated trades, swaps, and transfers through a secure signer that requires manual approval on the hardware wallet.

“The Ledger integration is just the beginning. We plan to support additional hardware wallets and look forward to collaborating with more partners across the ecosystem,” MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright told Decrypt. “Any developer building an agent that needs to move value can plug MoonPay in as the financial rail across trading, gaming, commerce, treasury, and beyond.”

MoonPay Agents support Ledger Nano S Plus, Nano X, Nano Gen5, Stax, and Flex devices. According to MoonPay, agents can detect and interact with wallets on blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, Optimism, Avalanche, and Base.

Automatic Ledger app switching lets an agent move across blockchain networks, MoonPay explained. Swaps, bridges, and transfers all routes through the Ledger signer for on-device approval.

“There is a new wave of CLI and agent-centric wallets emerging, and these will need Ledger security as a feature, too,” Ledger Chief Experience Officer Ian Rogers said in a statement.

AI agents are gaining traction in crypto trading, as developers including Eliza Labs, Fetch AI, and Coinbase build systems that can send, receive, and manage digital assets autonomously. MoonPay launched its Agents software in February to give AI systems access to crypto wallets and the ability to execute transactions.

However, giving your cryptocurrency to an AI comes with risk, and security has been an ongoing concern as agents remain susceptible to cyber attacks like prompt injection attacks.

“Today, most agents with wallets just have a private key sitting on disk somewhere, and you’re already seeing those wallets get exploited, or people lose access when agents make mistakes,” Erik Reppel, head of engineering for Coinbase Developer Platform, previously told Decrypt.

A federal judge in New York rejected RICO claims underpinning a class-action lawsuit against a pastor and alleged associates on Thursday, finding that investors in what authorities have called a crypto Ponzi scheme could not move forward with efforts to pursue damages.

U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams found that a provision included in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was grounds for tossing out the lawsuit because its claims were formed on “predicate acts of securities fraud” that weren’t actionable. In civil matters, RICO allows people to sue parties involved in racketeering activity like fraud or extortion.

However, Abrams noted that the people who say they were bilked out of money by a pastor affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventist Church have 30 days to file an amended complaint.

The lawsuit, brought in May, sought at least $750 million in damages in connection to losses that investors sustained in connection to a scheme crafted by EminiFX founder and former CEO Eddy Alexandre, who pleaded guilty to commodities fraud in 2023.

EminiFX billed itself as a trading platform for digital assets and foreign currencies. Prosecutors said that Alexandre raised $248 million from more than 25,000 people, promising that the platform could “double their money within five months” through secret technology. 

Prosecutors said that Alexandre didn’t invest a substantial portion of the funds he raised from members of his church and the Haitian community, while also failing to disclose millions of dollars in losses on allocations that he did make before his arrest nearly four years ago.

What’s more, authorities said that Alexandre diverted $14.7 million in investor funds to his personal bank account. He later purchased a $155,000 BMW, they said.

At the time of Alexandre’s sentencing, the pastor was ordered to forfeit $248.9 million and pay $213 million in restitution. According to the Bureau of Prisons’ website, he is currently being held at a low-security correctional institution in Pennsylvania.

Last year, a different federal judge in New York ordered Alexandre and his company to pay nearly $229 million in connection to an enforcement action brought by the CFTC. Alexandre represented himself in the case.

Religious figures allegedly abusing positions of trust isn’t unheard of when it comes to crypto. In September, a Colorado judge found that pastor Eli Regalado violated securities laws while raising money for a failed crypto project that god supposedly told him to create.

The Ethereum Foundation has made another ETH sale directly to a publicly traded treasury company, announcing Saturday that it sold some of its own treasury to Tom Lee’s BitMine Immersion Technologies.

According to an X post, the Foundation sold 5,000 ETH to BitMine at an average price of $2,042.96 per coin, or just over $10.2 million worth of the second-largest cryptocurrency.

“This sale funds the [Ethereum Foundation’s] core operations & activities, including protocol R&D, ecosystem development, community grant funding and more,” the Foundation posted, adding that it was part of its “ongoing treasury management activities.”

As of last Monday, BitMine said that it held 4,534,563 ETH, making it the largest Ethereum treasury firm with holdings valued around $9.41 billion based on ETH’s recent trading price of $2,076.

This is the second time that the Ethereum Foundation has sold part of its holdings to an Ethereum treasury firm, following last July’s sale of 10,000 ETH—then valued around $30 million—to Sharplink, currently the second-largest ETH treasury with about $1.75 billion worth of the asset.

The price of Ethereum has fallen dramatically over the past several months, alongside most other top coins, dropping by 58% since hitting a peak of $4,946 last August.

As a result, BitMine and other Ethereum treasury firms—which started accumulating ETH near its peak price last year—are down substantially on their investments, at least on paper. BitMine has an unrealized loss in the ballpark of $7.5 billion, based on its average purchase price for ETH through last November (per an SEC filing) and estimates for purchases since then.

Despite that immense paper loss, BitMine and Chairman Tom Lee have continued to purchase ETH and remain bullish on its prospects.

“Ethereum prices showed resilience this week, in the face of rising war concerns and surging oil prices,” said Lee last Monday, in a statement accompanying the firm’s latest weekly purchase announcement. “We continue to believe that crypto prices are in the late/final stages of the ‘mini-crypto winter.’”

Ethereum is up 5% over the last week and 9% in the last 30 days, per data from CoinGecko. Even with the modest recent rise, users on Myriad—a prediction market platform operated by Decrypt‘s parent company, Dastan—remain bearish on ETH’s short-term prospects, penciling in a 63% chance that Ethereum’s next stop is more likely to be $1,500 rather than $3,000.

The FBI is investigating the distribution of malware through several video games hosted on Steam, the popular PC gaming platform operated by Valve.

The agency said Friday it is seeking victims whose computers may have been infected after downloading games believed to contain malicious software.

“The FBI believes the threat actor primarily targeted users between the timeframe of May 2024 and January 2026,” the agency wrote.

The FBI’s investigation is targeting several PC games, including BlockBlasters, Chemia, Dashverse, DashFPS, Lampy, Lunara, PirateFi, and Tokenova.

Last summer, several games, including Chemia and PirateFi, were removed by Steam after they were discovered to include malware.

Steam is one of the largest digital distribution platforms for PC games. In 2025, Steam reached over 132 million monthly active users with over 117,000 games. While the infected titles appeared to be games and were approved for sale on the platform, the FBI says they instead installed malware on players’ computers.

The FBI is seeking information from gamers who may have been affected by the malware.

“The FBI is legally mandated to identify victims of federal crimes it investigates,” an FBI spokesperson told Decrypt. “Victims may be eligible for certain services, restitution, and rights under federal and/or state law. All identities of victims will be kept confidential,” they said, adding that the agency is unable to provide specific details.

Decrypt reached out to Valve for comment on the investigation, but did not immediately receive a response.

Malware targeting gamers has appeared in both game downloads and third-party tools linked to popular titles.

Back in 2023, a fan game based on Nintendo’s Super Mario franchise was found to contain malware capable of hijacking cryptocurrency wallets, deploying software designed to steal passwords, and installing crypto-mining software that ran in the background on infected computers.

In March 2024, cybersecurity firm VX Underground warned that players searching for cheat software for the first-person shooter series Call of Duty were exposed to malware capable of draining Bitcoin wallets. It’s unknown how many people were affected, but VX Underground said the attack potentially affected more than 4.9 million gaming accounts across multiple platforms.

And in December, Kaspersky identified an infostealer malware in pirated mods for Roblox and other games.

President Trump’s official Solana-based meme coin—TRUMP—has surged in price by about 35% in the last 24 hours following an announcement that top holders will gain access to a new exclusive event featuring the president. 

The token is now changing hands around $3.75, a 40% jump off its recent low mark of $2.73 registered by CoinGecko on Thursday. 

News of the exclusive event, slated to be held at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, has also helped spur significant volume increases for the token over the last 24 hours. 

Volumes registered by CoinGecko point to a more than 4x increase from Wednesday to Thursday with trading numbers breaching $292 million on the day of the announcement, compared to just $72 million worth of trades the day before.

On a rolling basis over the last 24 hours, however, CoinGecko recently showed $1.78 billion worth of trading volume. And on its significant price spike, some traders have seen major gains in the last 24 hours.

A Solana address with no significant on-chain activity in the last five months was flagged by on-chain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence after it was sent 2.2 million TRUMP tokens, valued around over $8 million at present time. 

It’s not immediately clear if the tokens were recently purchased by the user, whose funds were transferred from a wallet labeled as “Binance Hot Wallet.” Regardless, the tokens have gained about $2 million in value during the last day of trading. 

The Solana address, ending in “DLN2A,” also had significant transaction volumes with the official meme coin of First Lady Melania Trump (MELANIA), according to data from Solana block explorer Solscan.

The meme coin for the president’s wife has jumped more than 12% in the last 24 hours, but has fared even worse than TRUMP over the long run. It recently changed hands around $0.125, down 99% from its all-time high of $13.05. 

Trump’s next meme coin event will welcome the top 297 registered holders of his TRUMP meme coin to a special luncheon, where the president will be a keynote speaker. The top 29 holders will also earn special VIP access, a feat that required holding around $4.8 million worth of TRUMP tokens when the Trump Meme team held its first exclusive event last May.

That dinner drew intense scrutiny from democratic lawmakers over the potential for foreign actors to buy access to the American president, with Senator Elizabeth Warren calling it an “orgy of corruption.”

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller thinks that stablecoins are “incredibly useful”—so much so that he expects them to become the backbone of the financial system in the coming decades. 

“I assume our whole payments systems will be stablecoins in 10 or 15 years,” he said in a newly posted video interview with Morgan Stanley, calling the fiat-pegged tokens highly productive thanks to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness. 

The former hedge fund manager did not speak as highly about the rest of the crypto industry.

“It’s a solution looking for a problem,” he said when asked what came to his head about “crypto” in a word association game. “I’m very sad that it ever happened as a store of value, ‘cause it wasn’t needed.”

“But it’s a brand, and these people love it, so it’s going to be a store of value,” he added, not specifically singling out Bitcoin or any other tokens. 

The commentary jives a bit with previous remarks from Druckenmiller, who noted in 2020 that he believed the “Bitcoin bet” could work better than a bet on gold, should the established store of value and precious metal ultimately go up. 

At the time, with Bitcoin priced around $15,000, he cited the token’s illiquidity and volatility as positives that could lead to a stronger rise. As Bitcoin trades around 5x higher now, it seems the billionaire’s thesis may have played out in the last six years.

But even then, Druckenmiller noted that the top crypto asset was an unnecessary creation, saying, “I don’t understand why we need this thing.” 

Six years later, the asset has climbed to a $1.4 trillion market cap as it changes hands around $71,520 on Friday, a rebound of around 8.5% in the last 30 days. At that price, BTC is still down around 43% from its October all-time high of $126,080. 

On the other hand, the growing market cap of stablecoins has largely been up and to the right, now sitting around $315 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama. That marks an increase of more than $180 billion in circulating supply since the beginning of 2024, and high-ranking officials like U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent think that mark could triple by 2030.