Morning Minute: OpenAI and Paradigm Turn Focus to Smart Contracts

2026년 2월 19일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance

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. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s top news:

Crypto majors fall 1-2% amidst Iran escalations; BTC at $66.6k Coinbase’s Base announced it’s dropping the OP stack for its own unified client (OP -23%) Brian Armstrong called the looming quantum risk a “solvable issue” for crypto Hyperliquid launched its Hyperliquid Policy Center with $29M for DC advocacy MegaETH introduced its World Markets as first DEX to unify spot trading, lending and perps all onchain with cross margin

🖥️ OpenAI and Paradigm Turn Focus to Smart Contracts

Smart contracts have lost billions to exploits.

Now the world’s most powerful AI lab and crypto’s most respected research firm are building the tools to end that.

📌 What Happened

OpenAI and Paradigm jointly released EVMbench yesterday, an open benchmarking framework that evaluates AI agents across three modes:

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

The benchmark draws on 120 curated high-severity vulnerabilities pulled from 40 real-world audits, mostly sourced from Code4rena competitive audit contests. It also includes scenarios from the security audit of Stripe’s Tempo, the payments-focused L1 built with input from Visa, Shopify, and OpenAI.

When Paradigm started this project, top models could exploit fewer than 20% of critical bugs. That number is now above 70%.

OpenAI also expanded the private beta of Aardvark, its dedicated security research agent, and committed $10M in API credits through its Cybersecurity Grant Program to support defensive crypto research.

Can AI Agents Boost Ethereum Security? OpenAI and Paradigm Created a Testing Ground

🗣️ What They’re Saying

Paradigm, from their EVMbench release: “It’s now clear to us that a growing portion of audits in the future will be done by agents. Hopefully this benchmark, harness, and agent serve both as a preview and an accelerant towards that future.”

OpenAI noted that measuring AI performance in “economically relevant environments is critical as models become powerful tools for both attackers and defenders.”

🧠 Why It Matters

Smart contract exploits have drained over $5B from DeFi in the last two years alone.

EVMbench is OpenAI and Paradigm’s move to stop the drain.

The irony?

The same capability that makes EVMbench powerful (AI that can find and exploit bugs at 72% accuracy) is also the exact threat model the tool defends against. In the wrong hands, a benchmark this precise becomes a hacking playbook.

Story Continues

OpenAI knows this. The $10M Cybersecurity Grant and Aardvark expansion shipped alongside the benchmark for a reason.

But the more important story here is what this signals about the maturity of the AI-crypto integration thesis.

OpenAI, arguably the biggest AI lab on the planet, is formally allocating research resources to Ethereum security. They co-authored this with Paradigm and grounded it in real-world stablecoin infrastructure like Stripe’s Tempo.

This is one of the most meaningful integrations between these two worlds to date.

And don’t expect it to be the last…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors are slightly red down 1-2%; BTC -1% at $66.6K; ETH -1% at $1,950; SOL -2% at $81; XRP -4% at $1.41 No notablemovers Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomonattended the World Liberty Forum, told attendees that crypto firms rejecting the Clarity Act “should move to El Salvador,” and disclosed owning “very little, but some” BTC NYSE President Lynn Martin said the exchange felt a “responsibility” to enter tokenization, flagging a 24/7 blockchain trading platform targeting launch later this year Californiafinalized DFAL licensing requirements, mandating crypto firms obtain a Digital Financial Assets Law license or exemption to operate in the state Coinbaseexpanded its Morpho-powered crypto lending to XRP, DOGE, ADA, and LTC Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrongcalled the quantum risk a “solvable issue” for crypto, speaking to CNBC from the WLFI Forum Apex Group ($3.5T AUM) partnered with World Liberty Financial to pilot the Trump-backed USD1 stablecoin for fund operations Kraken announced the acquisition of Magna as it prepares for IPO Sports betting-focused peer-to-peer app Novig announced a $75M Series B led by Pantera Robinhoodshared that its L2 testnet processed 4M transactions in its first week

California Begins Enforcing State-Level Crypto Licensing With DFAL

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Canary Capital and Grayscalelaunched the first US spot Sui ETFs with staking Brevan Howard’s crypto funddropped 30% in 2025 per FT

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme majors were mostly red; DOGE -2%, SHIB -4%, PEPE -4%, TRUMP -4%, PENGU -6%, SPX -7%, FARTCOIN -6% HOUSE (+100%) and CopperInu (+20%) led top onchain movers on a quiet day

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Hyperliquidlaunched the Hyperliquid Policy Center, a $29M DC advocacy org led by Jake Chervinsky, to fight for DeFi and derivatives regulation in Congress Baseannounced it’s dropping the OP Stack for its own unified client (base/base) built on Reth, doubling hard-forks to 6 per year (OP down 23%) MegaETHwelcomed World Markets as the first exchange to unify spot trading, lending and perps all onchain and under one risk engine Milocrossed $100M in Bitcoin and crypto mortgages since launching its crypto-backed lending product Polymarketintroduced the ability to sponsor markets by adding rewards for liquidity providers, in an effort to make more markets more liquid

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

NFT leaders were mixed; 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 top movers

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