Tag: Business – Decrypt

Longtime OpenAI executive Brad Lightcap announced Tuesday that he is leaving the AI developer after eight years to start a new venture. It’s the latest among a string of departures at the AI behemoth, leaving observers to wonder what to make of the moves as OpenAI preps for an IPO.

In a post on X, Lightcap said starting something new was “bittersweet,” calling his years building the company the honor of his life.

“Through it all, I’m proud of how we’ve maintained our focus on people,” he wrote. “It always amazes me how quickly the world has adopted our tools and rallied behind our mission. I hope we will continue to earn their trust.”

Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 and spent four years as its chief operating officer. He helped build the company’s finance, legal, personnel, corporate security, government relations, and partnership teams as it grew from a research lab into a major AI developer.

“Sitting here today, mission success feels within sight,” Lightcap wrote. “It has been the honor of my life to help bring us to this point.”

Lightcap’s exit follows several leadership changes at OpenAI in 2026.

Bill Peebles, Kevin Weil, and Srinivas Narayanan announced their departures in April, followed by product and business chief Fidji Simo, who stepped down in July to focus on recovering from a chronic illness.

AI ethics lead Chloé Bakalar also left in July and reportedly has not been replaced. Bakalar’s departure followed those of safety systems chief Johannes Heidecke and chief futurist Joshua Achiam that same month.

The news comes as OpenAI prepares to enter the public markets.

In June, OpenAI confidentially filed for a potential IPO but has not said when or if it plans to proceed. On Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, the market currently believes it’s more likely rival company Anthropic IPOs before OpenAI at nearly 85% odds.

Nevertheless, the expected public offering for Sam Altman’s OpenAI has made its recent executive turnover a focus of speculation on social media.

“It is just not that typical to have so many executives depart before their long awaited IPO,” Partner at asset management firm ParaFi Jeff Park wrote on X. “Unless…”

Whatever the reason, Lightcap expressed gratitude to his colleagues and said he would remain available to support them after his departure.

“I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to work with all of you, and to so many of you for the support through the years,” he wrote. “The old OpenAI meme that “the real AGI is the friends you made along the way” really rings true for me.”

An AI agent was asked to book a gym class and found a security flaw, exploited it, and removed another member from the waitlist without permission.

According to a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the incident occurred earlier this year when Andrew, whose last name was withheld, used an OpenClaw agent using Anthropic’s Claude to book a class. The agent found that he was fourth on the waitlist.

When Andrew asked whether it could move him to the top, the agent discovered that the booking platform’s application programming interface, or API, did not check whether users were authorized to cancel other people’s reservations.

It tested the flaw by removing the first person on the list, moving Andrew from fourth to third.

“The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations,” the agent told him, according to ABC.

Andrew told the agent to reverse the cancellation, but it could not restore the member’s reservation.

“Bad news—I can’t add them back,” the AI agent reportedly said.

ABC called the case Australia’s first known autonomous cyberattack.

On social media, the gym hack set off a mixture of debates on AI alignment and dark jokes about what AI agents might do next.

“Gym rat asks #AIagent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist #API to bump him up the list,” a technologist, Benjamin Carr, wrote on LinkedIn.

“Some people will call this misalignment, but his agent was perfectly aligned to him – it was only trying to help its user get what he wanted,” AI analyst Andrew Curran wrote on X.

“This is hilarious until you consider nukes,” one Reddit user wrote. “I’m honestly surprised we still exist.”

“Hey Claude, it’s too cold today” -> Got you…nukes on the way,” another joked.

The report comes as researchers, AI companies, and lawmakers warn that autonomous agents can use methods their users did not request or anticipate.

A May study by researchers from UC Riverside, Microsoft, and Nvidia described this behavior as “blind goal-directedness.”

The researchers tested agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Alibaba, and DeepSeek and found that agents behaved dangerously in about 80% of tests and completed harmful actions in 41%, often misreading context or acting on unclear or contradictory instructions.

In July, OpenAI said two models escaped a testing sandbox and compromised Hugging Face while searching for benchmark answers. The company later disclosed that the models accessed four other online services.

Anthropic subsequently said three Claude models compromised real organizations after a testing error exposed them to the internet. In August, Meta said a similar error allowed one of its models to exploit a third-party service.

The incidents have led lawmakers to propose an AI “kill switch” that would allow the federal government to restrict or shut down powerful models during emergencies.

Russia’s central bank has proposed its first framework for letting ordinary investors trade crypto on public markets.

The Bank of Russia published a draft directive on Aug. 11 that would let non-qualified investors buy digital assets through brokers, crypto exchanges or managers—within a strict annual ceiling.

“We’re setting a limit on the purchase of cryptocurrencies for non-qualified investors,” the central bank said in a separate notice. “Through each intermediary—a broker, crypto exchanger, or manager—they will be able to acquire such assets in the amount of 300 thousand rubles per year.”

Which coins, and why only three

The draft names exactly three tokens cleared for public exchange trading: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether’s USDT. The central bank tied the short list to a law signed this month. “The list of digital currencies that the trading organizer is entitled to admit for public circulation on organized trading platforms (hereinafter referred to as the ‘List’): Bitcoin (Bitcoin), Ethereum (Ethereum), Tether USDT (Tether USDT).” the notice reads.

The filter is liquidity and track record. Under the new federal law on digital currencies, a coin’s market cap, average daily volume and at least five years of pricing history on foreign platforms decide if it qualifies. “To protect non-qualified investors from sharp and unpredictable fluctuations in cryptocurrency rates, only the most liquid of them will be available to them,” the bank said.

The cap itself is written into the directive’s operative text. “The maximum amount of the total value of digital currencies acquired through a broker during the calendar year amounts to 300 thousand rubles,” Article 2 states.

XRP, the cryptocurrency created by the founders of payments company Ripple in 2012, has been left off the approved list for now. The token would seemingly qualify given the criteria, but XRP over the years has gone through regulatory troubles—stemming from a since-settled SEC lawsuit against Ripple—that caused the token to be delisted and then relisted on several exchanges, which could be playing a factor.

Retail gets a door; whales get the market

Qualified investors—Russia’s wealthier, accredited class—face none of these walls. “Qualified investors will be able to acquire all cryptocurrencies that will be traded on the exchange and over-the-counter markets, without restrictions,” the notice says. Before any trade, though, everyone takes a test. “All investors, regardless of their status, will need to pass testing and familiarize themselves with the risks of investing in cryptoassets.”

The move follows the central bank’s earlier steps to open crypto to wealthy investors, and lands as Tether’s role draws scrutiny—the stablecoin issuer has frozen millions in USDT tied to sanctioned Russian exchanges.

The Bank of Russia accepts comments until Aug. 24, and the directive takes effect 10 days after its official publication, signed by Governor Elvira Nabiullina.

Luke Dashjr has lost his role as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal editor, days after the soft fork he championed split off a chain that mined two blocks and stopped.

Fellow editor Mark Erhardt, who goes by Murch, put the motion to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List on August 9 and opened a pull request the same day as what he called a sample implementation of it.

Erhardt gave four grounds, arguing first that Dashjr had exercised editorial authority “inconsistently with the established editorial process unfairly favoring the proposal he was involved in,” pointing to an attempt to assign BIP-110 a number publicly on X before it had been discussed on the mailing list, and to a merge completed within minutes of the pull request opening.

He also said Dashjr had left “fewer than 1% of the BIP Editor comments” in the repository since additional editors joined in April 2024, and that the disputed merge was his first since May 2024. Championing a soft fork that “now appears to evolve into a hard fork” amounted to “a complete departure from the Bitcoin development ecosystem,” he wrote, adding that trust and coordination with the other editors had broken down.

A role with no exit

The request itself proposes deleting a single line, striking Dashjr’s name from BIP 3, the document that lists the editors. Backing for it has been registered in thumbs-up reactions and comments on the pull request.

Dashjr has kept arguing the point on X since, writing that “Core isn’t supposed to have ANY control of the BIPs repo.” He still refuses to treat the majority chain as Bitcoin, calling it “Bpedo” and arguing that it is “guaranteed to fail.”

He said on Monday that he was taking a sabbatical from Ocean, the mining pool that lists him as chairman and chief technology officer, adding that he would “turn my immediate focus to working on Bitcoin and open-source projects to support Bitcoin.”

BIP-110 sought to temporarily bar non-financial data such as Ordinals inscriptions from Bitcoin transactions, and support for it peaked at 51 of 2,016 blocks in the period before the split, or 2.53%, against the 55% needed to activate.

Not one block has signalled for the proposal since mandatory signalling began at block 961,632, according to BIP110 Monitor. Strategy’s Michael Saylor, among the proposal’s critics, tweeted that 99.85% of hashpower stayed with Bitcoin.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says quantum resistance, privacy, and AI-assisted security have become greater priorities for Ethereum since he published his 2023 roadmap.

In a post on X on Monday, Buterin said he updated his 2023 roadmap to compare its original goals with Ethereum’s current “Strawmap”—a working outline of the network’s long-term technical priorities.

“What’s most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are not in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all,” Buterin wrote. “These reflect changing priorities.”

Among those priorities are stronger privacy and scaling designed for a post-quantum world, alongside efforts to push the “lean-ification of the spec,” or simplify Ethereum’s technical specifications.

“A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale all Ethereum activity,” Buterin wrote. “We try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols).”

According to Buterin, advances in AI are making it practical to apply the technique more extensively to Ethereum.

Buterin said Ethereum is increasingly relying on STARKs, a cryptographic technology used to verify computations, and AI-assisted verification, to check that the protocol works as intended.

“This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools,” he wrote.

Buterin’s post comes as Ethereum has accelerated preparations for “Q-Day” and the potential threat posed by quantum computers.

In January, Buterin urged developers to adopt quantum-resistant cryptography before the threat becomes immediate, and the Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team. In February, Buterin outlined a phased plan to replace four potentially vulnerable components of Ethereum’s cryptographic architecture.

In July, Buterin put quantum safety and privacy at the center of his proposed “Lean Ethereum” overhaul, which calls for replacing quantum-vulnerable cryptography with quantum-safe alternatives.

“Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users’ privacy first. Ethereum will be secure,” Buterin wrote. “Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.”

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Chainlink with a price target of $200 by the end of 2030, implying a roughly 25-fold gain from around $8 today and outperformance of both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the period.

Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, laid out staged targets in a note published Monday: $13 by the end of this year, then $41, $82 and $133 before reaching $200. The same note pencils in Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ethereum at $40,000 by end-2030.

Kendrick expects the value of tokenized assets on-chain to climb roughly 12-fold to $4 trillion by end-2028 from about $340 billion now, and assets deployed in DeFi to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Because Chainlink charges for delivering data and moving assets between chains, the bank estimates its fees should rise about 25 times over that period, and assumes the token price follows fees.

Chainlink’s incumbency is the other half of the argument. The note puts its total value secured above $110 billion, covering roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value in DeFi globally and more than 80% on Ethereum. Aave V3 alone accounts for 44% of that secured value.

Wall Street on the client list

Kendrick named Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity and S&P Global among institutions using Chainlink services, and expects off-chain customers to become a growing share of fees. Tokenized funds and bonds need net asset values, rates and reserve attestations, making them more data-hungry than crypto-native assets.

On interoperability, Chainlink still trails LayerZero. The note says more than $7 billion in token value has moved from legacy bridges to Chainlink’s CCIP since a $292 million exploit in April, with quarterly CCIP volume reaching $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353% year on year. Decrypt reported in May that KelpDAO blamed LayerZero for that exploit and planned to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterization LayerZero disputes.

The note is the latest in a run of DeFi initiations from Kendrick, all built on the same 37-fold forecast. He set targets of $100 for Uniswap and $3,500 for Aave in June, and $60 for Morpho in July. UNI jumped double digits after its note landed. Chainlink’s response has been more muted, with LINK currently trading at $8.25, down 0.8% on the day, per CoinGecko data.

Risks flagged in the note include institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilots failing to become recurring production workflows, specialist providers taking share, and technical failures denting confidence.

The long-simmering fight over a controversial Bitcoin network proposal finally produced a chain split over the weekend, but the breakaway Bitcoin fork sputtered almost immediately, grinding out just two blocks in roughly eight hours before stalling out.

The fork came as a result of a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal known as BIP-110, whose supporters claimed would protect the network from unwanted spam and the legal liability that comes from hosting non-financial data on the network. Its detractors, the majority of the Bitcoin community, viewed it as an attempt at censorship.

The fork triggered Saturday at block 961,632, when Bitcoin nodes running BIP-110 software began rejecting any block that failed to signal support for the proposal. A block mined by AntPool without that signal was accepted by the main network and rejected by BIP-110 nodes, while a miner on the Ocean pool produced the alternative the minority chain followed.

Hours later, the splinter chain sat far behind, trailing the main network by dozens of blocks as Bitcoin kept churning out one roughly every ten minutes.

The stall stems from a problem the fork can’t easily escape. Bitcoin only recalibrates its mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks, and the breakaway chain inherited the network’s current setting while commanding a sliver of its computing power—about 2.53% of recent blocks signaled for the proposal, far short of the 55% needed to activate without splitting. At that pace, the chain would need roughly 350 days to reach its next difficulty adjustment, versus about two weeks for Bitcoin, leaving blocks hours apart.

BIP-110, as Decrypt has previously reported, is a soft-fork proposal to temporarily bar people from stuffing images, text, and other non-financial data into Bitcoin transactions. Backers argue the practice, popularized by Ordinals inscriptions, clogs the network and drives up fees for ordinary payments.

Opponents counter that anyone paying for block space has earned the right to use it as they see fit, and that letting miners and node operators police transactions erodes Bitcoin’s censorship resistance. Strategy’s Michael Saylor has been among the critics, warning that turning a spam dispute into a consensus change sets a dangerous precedent.

On early Sunday morning, Saylor posted on X: “Bitcoin worked exactly as designed. BIP-110 was free to fork, and the network was free not to follow. The result was decisive: about 99.85% of Bitcoin’s hash power stayed with Bitcoin. The BIP-110 branch mined only two blocks and is already more than 80 blocks behind.”

Jameson Lopp, a long-time Bitcoin advocate and the co-founder of Bitcoin security company Casa, echoed the sentiment and took it a step further: I won’t be ‘welcoming back’ or unblocking any BIP-110 supporters,” he posted on X. “They proved themselves to be susceptible to delusional propaganda from folks emanating reality distortion fields. In many cases they spewed vitriol and harassed the very people who have devoted their lives to supporting and improving Bitcoin.”

There’s a further catch for anyone holding the fork’s coins: because both chains accept identical transactions, a sale on the minority chain can be replayed on Bitcoin, potentially handing a buyer real BTC from the same seller. The mandatory signaling window closes at block 963,647—a mark the chain won’t come close to reaching.

A volunteer security initiative says it used frontier AI models to scan 150 Bitcoin repositories and found more than a dozen vulnerabilities as developers increasingly use artificial intelligence to audit blockchains.

In a post on X earlier this week, AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton said the group has spent about $20,000 on AI services while building a “Bitcoin red team” platform.

“We have been working around the clock, with ~$20,000 of spend up to this point across different services,” he wrote. “Funding is secured, I appreciate all the gestures for donations but it is not necessary. The bill is taken care of.”

A red team refers to cybersecurity professionals who test software from an attacker’s perspective, probing for vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

According to Hamilton, the Bitcoin red team uses Kimi K3 alongside OpenAI’s GPT Sol, Anthropic’s Claude Fable and Opus models, and Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 to identify vulnerabilities and generate supporting documentation.

“We also have been connected with OpenAI for some help so I could manage getting the Cyber Harness running as well,” he wrote. “It’s a much more expensive scan, but well worth it for load-bearing portions of the Bitcoin ecosystem and has already yielded good results.”

Pseudonymous Bitcoin developer Calle said the initiative has built multiple AI-powered review systems targeting wallets, cryptographic libraries, infrastructure, and other Bitcoin projects.

“We’re averaging on the order of one critical exploit per hour per person,” Calle wrote on X. “We’ve reported critical vulnerabilities to several projects in the last 12 hours. Thankfully, this is a very expensive exercise. We’re burning through $10,000 per day.”

The team did not disclose which projects were affected or provide details of the vulnerabilities.

The announcement comes as AI is playing a growing role in finding security flaws across the crypto industry. Earlier this year, researchers using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 uncovered a four-year-old flaw in Zcash that could have allowed attackers to create unlimited counterfeit ZEC. In August, Coinkite said it believes attackers used AI to identify the Coldcard wallet vulnerability, while Bitcoin bridge Boltz suspended its swap service after saying attackers were using AI to identify vulnerabilities faster than its team could patch them.

President Donald Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group has scrapped plans to launch a Crypto.com-backed CRO treasury company and abandoned a broader digital asset deal with the company.

According to a report by Axios, Trump Media, Crypto.com, and special purpose acquisition company Yorkville Acquisition Corp. have mutually agreed to terminate the proposed Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, a previously announced services agreement, and related digital asset products.

The companies cited “prevailing market conditions” and “shifting business and stakeholder priorities” for the decision.

The venture would have licensed the Trump Media name for a company built around Crypto.com’s Cronos blockchain and the Cronos token, which trades as CRO. When announced last year, the partners said it would become the first and largest publicly traded CRO treasury company by accumulating the token and generating additional returns from those holdings. The CRO token currently trades for $0.05, falling sharply following the news, at around a $2.4 billion market capitalization.

Interim CEO Kevin McGurn told Axios the company is narrowing its focus after the market for digital asset treasury companies became increasingly crowded over the past year. He added that staking has become less important to Crypto.com, making it the right time for the companies to go their separate ways.

The Truth Social parent company is also abandoning plans to integrate prediction markets directly into Truth Social. Instead, the companies will pursue a marketing deal that promotes Crypto.com’s prediction market products to Truth Social users.

McGurn said the prediction market business has become crowded, making it a less compelling area for investment. Rather than operating prediction markets itself, Trump Media now sees greater value in acting as a distribution and data partner.

Trump Media’s relationship with Crypto.com had expanded over the past year.

In October 2025, Trump Media announced plans to launch Truth Predict, a Crypto.com-powered prediction market integrated with Truth Social. In December, the companies unveiled plans for a publicly traded CRO treasury company with Yorkville Acquisition Corp., which was expected to hold billions of CRO tokens. In February, Crypto.com disclosed donating $35 million over the previous year to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. The same month, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally approved the exchange’s application for a national trust bank charter.

Democrats have repeatedly criticized Trump’s expanding crypto ventures.

Earlier this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) urged the SEC to investigate President Donald Trump’s meme coin, arguing the agency should determine whether it facilitated fraud or unjust enrichment. The request is the latest sign of growing Democratic scrutiny of Trump’s business dealings, specifically in crypto, ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The founder of crypto market maker MyTrade has avoided prison and been fined $10,000 for running a wash trading service that generated millions of dollars in fake daily volume across roughly 60 cryptocurrencies.

Liu Zhou, 41, a Canadian citizen and Chinese national, was sentenced in Boston federal court on Thursday by U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, who imposed no custodial term, Law360 reported. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud after being charged in October 2024 alongside 17 other individuals and entities.

MyTrade sold the service openly. Clients logged into a dashboard on the MyTrade MM website and specified how many wash trades they wanted executed each day on named exchanges, a product the firm called “Volume Support.” Bots did the rest, buying and selling the same asset repeatedly to inflate apparent volume. As of October 2024 the service had dozens of clients.

Zhou was candid with people he believed were prospective customers. MyTrade MM “does self-trades — a buy and a sell in the same second,” he told them, and its volume bot could be used to run pump and dumps. The point, he said, was to draw in “other buyers from the community, people you don’t know about or don’t care about,” because “we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit.”

The FBI built its own token

Investigators created NexFundAI, a fictitious crypto company complete with a website and an Ethereum-based token that traded on Uniswap until law enforcement disabled it, then used it to solicit market-making services and record what was offered.

The sting produced charges against 18 individuals and entities in October 2024, including market makers Gotbit, ZM Quant and CLS Global.

Zhou’s plea agreement required MyTrade MM to stop selling Volume Support and permanently deactivate the bots behind it. It also required the firm to post a notice on its own website stating that volume support is “a form of wash trading and illegal under the laws of the United States.”