Author: admin
In brief Blockstream said it will not “pay a ransom” for the return of about 598.5 BTC still held after the Liquid exploit. The hackers returned 3,400 BTC on Monday, about 85% of what was taken. The company said it will work with law enforcement, exchanges and forensic specialists to trace the rest should it not be returned. Blockstream has refused to pay for the return of the $47 million in Bitcoin still missing from the Liquid Network, abandoning days of negotiation with the people who took it.”Taking assets without authorization and withholding their return is a crime, not responsible…
Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show ‘FOMO HOUR’ covering all of the top stories and market action.GM!Today’s top news: Crypto majors fall another 1-3% ahead of CPI; BTC at $77k BTC ETFs see $280M in outflows and $440M on the week Binance’s Bitcoin reserves hit 2-year highs Stonkfun ecosystem soars as Stonk hits $0.30 and multiple pairs run 2-4x+ Robinhood Chain leaders rebound as volumes level off; Flycoin soars to $50M in its debut…
A former Missouri bank vice president and pastor is pleading guilty to federal fraud charges after running a cattle investment scheme that defrauded victims and his employer of millions. The 45-year-old Butler resident worked as a vice president and loan officer at Community First Bank while serving as a pastor, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri. From at least April 2024 until his termination in February 2026, he solicited funds for buying and quickly selling cattle but instead placed the money in an investment account. “Johnson did not use the funds to purchase cattle…
In brief Sam Bankman-Fried asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn the fraud conviction that put him in prison for 25 years. Bankman-Fried’s petition calls review “urgently necessary” and follows the Second Circuit’s decision upholding the conviction in June. He has separately applied to President Trump for a pardon, a move the Senate unanimously opposed. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the fraud conviction that put him in prison for 25 years, according to a petition reviewed by the New York Times.The odds are long. The court grants and hears argument in about 1%…
In brief Kun Chen used SpaceXAI’s shareable Grok Bot templates to build chatbot personas of Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg, trained on each executive’s public statements. The four bots spent multiple rounds fighting over AGI risk, compute, and open-weight models before signing a joint statement rejecting a future where one lab or government controls AI’s benefits. Grok Bot’s one-click template sharing shipped August 28, 2026, seventeen days after SpaceXAI launched the AI agent product itself. AI enthusiast Kun Chen cloned himself into a chatbot to stop his own AI agents from bugging him with every little…
In brief A BIS paper warns that AI is shortening the time banks have to repair software vulnerabilities. The authors say routine patching schedules are increasingly insufficient. Supervisors are urging faster fixes and better preparation to contain breaches and restore services. Advanced AI is leaving banks less time to fix software flaws before attackers exploit them, according to a new paper published by the Bank for International Settlements.The Financial Stability Institute paper, published on Wednesday, adds to recent warnings from AI developers and financial regulators that increasingly capable models are accelerating cyberattacks. The new report’s focus is on banks’ ability…
In brief Bitcoin fell 1.22% today to $77,323, unable to extend last week’s push above $80,000 as broader markets sold off on inflation fears. Bitcoin’s 50-day EMA is inches from crossing above its 200-day EMA—a golden cross projected to confirm around September 11. If it happen, it would be the first golden cross since the death cross of November 2025. It was a rough day to be an investor in risk assets. The S&P 500 dropped 0.59%, the Nasdaq fell nearly 1%, and Bitcoin gave back some of its recent gains as August’s Producer Price Index came in hotter than…
OpenAI’s latest mathematics breakthrough could bring automated theorem proving closer to smart-contract security workflows.On Sept. 8, the AI company said that roughly 10,000 concurrent AI agents produced a solution addressing the Navier-Stokes fluid-motion problem after about 88 hours. Formalization and verification in Lean, a software proof assistant, required another 17 hours using GPT-6 Astra.The system generated an analytical proof showing that an initially smooth fluid can develop a singularity in finite time while retaining finite energy, establishing cases C and D of the Millennium Prize formulation. OpenAI released both the proof and its Lean formalization for independent scrutiny. Related ReadingOpenAI…
In brief OpenDesign Arena scored DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 81.2 out of 100 on real-world design tasks, 98% of GPT-6 Astra’s 82.7, while charging $0.023 per finished design against Astra’s $1.61. Of the 13 models tested—including Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and Qwen 3.8-Max—11 scored lower than DeepSeek’s model and cost more to run. Only GPT-6 Astra scored higher. DeepSeek’s technical paper for V4.1 Flash shows the model activates just 8 billion of its 552 billion parameters to read a prompt, the design choice behind its low price. OpenDesign, the company behind the benchmark site OpenDesign Arena, ran 13 AI…
In brief Senate Republicans released an updated Clarity Act on Thursday. The draft would require non-decentralized trading protocols to register with the CFTC. A Senate procedural vote is scheduled for September 15. Senate Republicans released a revised Clarity Act on Thursday that targets “decentralized-in-name-only” crypto trading protocols.The new language would require non-decentralized protocols, that is those controlled by people or groups, to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.Myriad: Will Congress pass the Clarity Act? Click to make your prediction.Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) unveiled the 630-page updated legislation ahead of the September 15 procedural vote to pass the Clarity…
A business owner in Indiana lost more than $18,000 when scammers impersonating her bank tricked her into sharing login details. Vanessa Walker says she received a call claiming suspicious activity hit her Regions Bank business account, reports WRTV. “They were telling me if I didn’t do it, that my account was going to be locked for 90 days. As a business owner, that can’t be done. I was getting very frustrated.” Scammers directed her to a fake website displaying the bank’s logo where she entered her user ID and password. They then instructed her to dial codes that forwarded incoming…