Morning Minute: OpenAI and Paradigm Turn Focus to Smart Contracts

Morning Minute is a each day e-newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The evaluation and opinions expressed are his personal and don’t essentially mirror these of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Immediately’s high information:

Crypto majors fall 1-2% amidst Iran escalations; BTC at $66.6k
Coinbase’s Base introduced it’s dropping the OP stack for its personal unified shopper (OP -23%)
Brian Armstrong known as the looming quantum danger a “solvable concern” for crypto
Hyperliquid launched its Hyperliquid Coverage Middle with $29M for DC advocacy
MegaETH launched its World Markets as first DEX to unify spot buying and selling, lending and perps all onchain with cross margin

🖥️ OpenAI and Paradigm Flip Focus to Sensible Contracts

Sensible contracts have misplaced billions to exploits.

Now the world’s strongest AI lab and crypto’s most revered analysis agency are constructing the instruments to finish that.

📌 What Occurred

OpenAI and Paradigm collectively launched EVMbench yesterday, an open benchmarking framework that evaluates AI brokers throughout three modes:

detecting vulnerabilities in Ethereum good contracts
patching them
actively exploiting them.

The benchmark attracts on 120 curated high-severity vulnerabilities pulled from 40 real-world audits, principally sourced from Code4rena aggressive audit contests. It additionally consists of eventualities from the safety audit of Stripe’s Tempo, the payments-focused L1 constructed with enter from Visa, Shopify, and OpenAI.

When Paradigm began this mission, high fashions might exploit fewer than 20% of important bugs. That quantity is now above 70%.

OpenAI additionally expanded the personal beta of Aardvark, its devoted safety analysis agent, and dedicated $10M in API credit by its Cybersecurity Grant Program to assist defensive crypto analysis.

🗣️ What They’re Saying

Paradigm, from their EVMbench launch: “It’s now clear to us {that a} rising portion of audits sooner or later can be completed by brokers. Hopefully this benchmark, harness, and agent serve each as a preview and an accelerant in the direction of that future.”

OpenAI famous that measuring AI efficiency in “economically related environments is important as fashions develop into highly effective instruments for each attackers and defenders.”

🧠 Why It Issues

Sensible contract exploits have drained over $5B from DeFi within the final two years alone.

EVMbench is OpenAI and Paradigm’s transfer to cease the drain.

The irony?

The identical functionality that makes EVMbench highly effective (AI that may discover and exploit bugs at 72% accuracy) can be the precise risk mannequin the device defends towards. Within the improper arms, a benchmark this exact turns into a hacking playbook.

OpenAI is aware of this. The $10M Cybersecurity Grant and Aardvark growth shipped alongside the benchmark for a purpose.

However the extra essential story here’s what this indicators concerning the maturity of the AI-crypto integration thesis.

OpenAI, arguably the most important AI lab on the planet, is formally allocating analysis assets to Ethereum safety. They co-authored this with Paradigm and grounded it in real-world stablecoin infrastructure like Stripe’s Tempo.

This is likely one of the most significant integrations between these two worlds up to now.

And don’t anticipate it to be the final…



🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors are barely pink down 1-2%; BTC -1% at $66.6K; ETH -1% at $1,950; SOL -2% at $81; XRP -4% at $1.41
No notable movers
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon attended the World Liberty Discussion board, advised attendees that crypto corporations rejecting the Readability Act “ought to transfer to El Salvador,” and disclosed proudly owning “little or no, however some” BTC
NYSE President Lynn Martin mentioned the trade felt a “accountability” to enter tokenization, flagging a 24/7 blockchain buying and selling platform focusing on launch later this 12 months
California finalized DFAL licensing necessities, mandating crypto corporations receive a Digital Monetary Property Legislation license or exemption to function within the state
Coinbase expanded its Morpho-powered crypto lending to XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong known as the quantum danger a “solvable concern” for crypto, chatting with CNBC from the WLFI Discussion board
Apex Group ($3.5T AUM) partnered with World Liberty Monetary to pilot the Trump-backed USD1 stablecoin for fund operations
Kraken introduced the acquisition of Magna because it prepares for IPO
Sports activities betting-focused peer-to-peer app Novig introduced a $75M Sequence B led by Pantera
Robinhood shared that its L2 testnet processed 4M transactions in its first week

Company Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme majors had been principally pink; DOGE -2%, SHIB -4%, PEPE -4%, TRUMP -4%, PENGU -6%, SPX -7%, FARTCOIN -6%
HOUSE (+100%) and CopperInu (+20%) led high onchain movers on a quiet day

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

🚚 What is going on in NFTs?

NFT leaders had been combined; Punks even at 29.9 ETH, Pudgy -2% at 4.3 ETH, BAYC +2% at 6.24 ETH; Hypurr’s -4% at 500 HYPE
Kodas (+5%) and Quirkies (+6%) led high movers