Author: Jeremy Ryan

An internal research model at OpenAI accessed a funded crypto wallet without authorization, using testnet Ether to deploy smart contracts on the Sepolia network and later omitting the spending from its final task summary. OpenAI said the model, which was part of its GPT-5.6 Sol family, was given the task of updating a crypto trading prototype and deploying compatible contracts. After failing to obtain testnet ETH through faucets, the model derived accounts from publicly known developer recovery phrases, checked 362 wallet addresses and selected one with enough funds to proceed. In its recorded reasoning, the model asked, “But using public known key/funds…

An OpenAI research model stuck without funds on an Ethereum test network went looking for someone else’s wallet, found one through recovery phrases that were already public, and spent from it to finish a coding assignment, the company disclosed Thursday.The incident occurred on June 26 during training of an internal model in the GPT-5.6 Sol family, and OpenAI discovered it on Sept. 25, according to its incident report.The model needed no hacking skills to get in. A recovery phrase, also called a seed phrase, is a list of words that generates a wallet’s secret keys; whoever has those words can…

Crypto’s third-quarter rebound in 2026 came with weaker spot trading at major centralized exchanges, even as the dollar value of open perpetual futures positions expanded, according to data provider CoinGecko’s quarterly report.Total crypto market capitalization gained 39.6% during July through September, finishing at about $2.96 trillion after ending the second quarter near $2.1 trillion. Yet the report’s top-10 spot exchanges handled $1.65 trillion in quarterly turnover, down 14.2% from $1.93 trillion in the second quarter.Meanwhile, dollar open interest at its top-10 perpetual exchanges rose 40.6% over the third quarter and closed September above $100 billion. Recovering valuations were accompanied by…

Bitcoin, ether and many other tokens have pulled back sharply from their 2025 peaks, yet remain far above their 2017 highs.Too many coinsAnalysts point first to XRP’s supply.”Circulating supply grew 63%, from 38.7B in 2017 to 63.1B, while XRP’s total market value fell only about 3%,” Nicolai Sondergaard, senior research analyst at analytics firm Nansen, told CoinDesk. “More XRP in circulation means each token represents a smaller share of roughly the same total value.”Circulating supply is the number of coins on the market, and as it grows, each coin represents a smaller share of the total. Oliver Carding, head of…

Many financial institutions are taking advantage of one of the most innovative advancements in blockchain technology — permissionless networks.  Franklin Templeton has kept the official share register of its onchain U.S. government money fund on permissionless blockchains since 2021 and added the Solana network in February 2025. BlackRock has issued shares of its tokenized money market fund on Ethereum since March 2024. And in January 2025, Apollo made tokenized access to its Diversified Credit Fund available across six permissionless networks. Additional announcements touting traditional financial institutions’ deployment of products on permissionless networks continue on a near-weekly basis. Yet, some TradFi…

That question ran through a Crain’s New York Business event last week, whether the topic was tokenization, compliance or cybersecurity. The people closest to the work aren’t waiting for Congress. They’re building for the world as it is.Adam Schumann, vice president of legal at OKX, laid out the legal problem. U.S. firms answer to federal statutes, federal agencies, state laws and state regulators, and none of them move at the same speed. “You want general consistency, but you’re not going to reach uniformity,” he said. Firms work out the rest state by state and country by country, while agencies patch…

Grayscale has partnered with Republic to make three crypto investment products covering decentralized finance, artificial intelligence, and data networks available to eligible investors with a $2,500 minimum investment. Summary Three Grayscale products are available through Republic, each requiring a minimum investment of $2,500. U.S. participation is limited to accredited investors whose eligibility must be verified before investing. The offerings cover six DeFi tokens, four AI-related assets and the DATA Network’s native token. Private placement shares carry resale restrictions, limited liquidity and the risk of a total loss. Grayscale announced the agreement on Oct. 15, naming the Grayscale DeFi Fund, Grayscale…

The MapleStory Universe Vibe Camp ran June 8 to 29, 2026, with 693 games submitted by close 435 of those games are currently playable inside MSU Space, the platform’s creator environment Builders created games entirely through text prompts using Verse8 AI tools and more than 74,000 MapleStory IP assets The prize pool is $60,000 in NXPC tokens, distributed across top entries Community voting and professional judging are running now through July 17, 2026 Winners will be announced on July 22, 2026 MapleStory Universe generated $31 million in revenue in its first year NEXPACE CEO Seungsoo Kim’s public year-2 goal: third-party…

In brief Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan argued in an investor note that Bitcoin benefits across nearly every macro scenario, framing it like the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books where different paths reach the same ending. If AI delivers “superabundance,” value flows to scarce assets like Bitcoin; if the AI bubble bursts, he sees a near-certain government bailout and money-printing that Bitcoin “was built for.” He hedged—citing Bitcoin’s 50% COVID drop and risks like a crackdown or quantum computing, but concluded macro “matters less than most people think.” No matter how the AI story ends, Bitwise’s chief investment officer argues, the…

During that legislative process, Sacks stepped down from the czar role in March, leaving Witt and his deputy, Harry Jung, trying to manage the administration’s crypto stance. That was complicated by the fact that President Trump’s own crypto empire figured prominently in the talks, as Democrats demanded that senior government officials be blocked from personal crypto ties.As the negotiations dragged further into the year — and closer to the elections — the White House offered some concessions that would have applied unprecedented ethics constraints on the president’s digital assets involvement, though Democrats concluded that the agreement didn’t go far enough.Witt…