Autor Cointelegraph By Felix Ng

A Bitcoin security researcher says he has been forced to go back to using open-source Chinese AI models after finding himself restricted from analyzing further codebases by OpenAI, highlighting a growing concern that the most capable AI tools aren’t being made available to defenders. In an X post on Tuesday, AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton said he had begun integrating OpenAI’s Trust & Cyber capabilities into his Bitcoin Red Team work on Saturday, only to find his access restricted the following morning. “It absolutely guts me as a patriotic American to have to do this, but I will be going back to using Chinese open source models to conduct my research to protect Bitcoin infrastructure,” he added. Bitcoin Red Team, a group of volunteers, has been using AI tools and human review to scan hundreds of open-source Bitcoin-related repositories for vulnerabilities, with efforts accelerating days after the Coldcard hardware wallet hack, which has seen over $100 million in Bitcoin stolen. Last month, crypto executives told Cointelegraph that many of crypto’s biggest players are still waiting to gain access to powerful new AI models to strengthen their code from attacks, with only a select few having been able to get it.  “I am now prevented from being able to continue the investigation in a further effort to make sure their code changes are sufficient, as well as understand if there are other issues that have yet to be discovered,” said Hamilton. “Black hats will not hit these issues. The white hats will. We’ve hit a local minima in policy,” said Hamilton. “Intelligence is unrestricted for those who don’t follow rules, and those who engage in harm reduction are left on the sidelines.” Related: Crypto firms still seeking frontier AI access; only select few have itCointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Australia’s anti-money laundering watchdog has suspended the operation of Cryptolink’s Bitcoin ATMs for three months, citing “ongoing concerns” about its compliance with anti-money laundering obligations. Australia has the highest number of crypto ATMs of all countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Australian authorities have been cracking down on the criminal use of crypto ATMs since at least late 2024. AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas said Monday the company’s Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registration has been suspended for three months starting Sunday, meaning its crypto ATMs will not be allowed to operate during that time. AUSTRAC said Cryptolink failed to meet basic reporting requirements, particularly threshold transaction reports, and did not respond to AUSTRAC’s request for information. “As part of our continued focus on digital currency as a money laundering risk, AUSTRAC has ongoing concerns about the company’s ability to manage high-risk transactions through its CATMs,” said Thomas. The action follows an enforceable undertaking that Cryptolink entered into with AUSTRAC in October 2025, after its Cryptocurrency Taskforce identified alleged breaches including late transaction reporting and shortcomings in Cryptolink’s risk assessments. AUSTRAC also issued a $56,340 infringement notice, which Cryptolink paid. Cryptolink has 96 ATMs in Australia, allowing customers to exchange cash for Bitcoin. Most of its ATMs are located in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Cointelegraph reached out to Cryptolink for comment. Related: Bitcoin Depot stock crashes 71% premarket after Chapter 11 filingCointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

The first sign that quantum computing has broken modern cryptography probably won’t be a splashy theft of Satoshi Nakamoto’s dormant Bitcoin. It could just be a wave of unrelated crypto wallet breaches with no trace of how an attacker did it, according to the founder of blockchain startup Quantus. “When someone cracks your key, you don’t get a memo saying how they did it,” Christopher Smith, CEO and co-founder of Quantus Network, told Cointelegraph. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from public keys exposed onchain, allowing an attacker to move funds without compromising a wallet, device or exchange’s internal systems. This makes the arrival of “Q-day” — a hypothetical future moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard public-key cryptography — unusually difficult to detect. In a theft involving a highly secure organization, “the only forensic evidence would be that there was no breach,” Smith said.Smith’s warning comes as advances in quantum algorithms have reduced estimates of computing resources needed to attack the elliptic-curve cryptography used by major blockchains. First target may not be Satoshi’s Bitcoin Much of the fear around Q-day in crypto is what will happen if a quantum computer cracks the keys securing Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated Bitcoin holdings, worth $63 billion at the time of writing, which could be suddenly dumped on the market. However, Smith said the first targets may be military systems and state secrets, while crypto attackers could go for even more valuable keys. “If I’m focusing on blockchain, what’s the single most valuable key? It’s probably Tether’s minting key,” Smith said. A quantum attacker could mint tokens out of thin air from an administrative wallet and dump them on the market before the issuer could respond, he added.USDT is a multi-chain stablecoin, and some of the networks on which it is deployed are already actively working on post-quantum migration. Related: Jim Cramer plans to sell his Bitcoin over quantum fears as BTC rises 1.6%Another theory is that attackers make a quieter opening move.Sean Cheetham, a security researcher at Blockchain Capital, said an attacker would more likely target hot wallets at exchanges “that aren’t going to ring alarm bells rather than stealing Satoshi’s coins.”Smith said an attacker may disguise a quantum theft as an ordinary compromise.“There’s an alternative scenario where they… have these plausible, deniable [explanations]: ‘Oh, somebody just lost their keys somehow,’” he said.Q-day timeline hard to pin downIn March, Google accelerated its post-quantum migration timeline to 2029 as an AI-assisted breakthrough showed elliptic curve cryptography can be cracked with far fewer physical qubits than previously forecasted.NGRAVE CEO Roy Blackstone said earlier quantum forecasts failed to account for the parallel development of AI. “Most threat models assumed we had well into the next decade before quantum technology could realistically crack the cryptography securing public keys, but it did not account for how fast AI would develop alongside it.”Despite growing urgency, there is little agreement on when a quantum computer capable of breaking modern cryptography will be ready.Smith, whose company is developing a blockchain network aiming to be quantum-resistant from launch, said there was a “50-50” chance it could happen by 2028, arguing that continued AI-assisted improvements in quantum algorithms and hardware research are making forecasts less reliable. Cheetham said the early 2030s “definitely is almost a certainty” and that an earlier arrival was “more of a trailing probability.” Michael Coates, the Solana Foundation’s chief information security officer, declined to give an estimate during an earlier interview, saying “there’s no way to know.” “If you talk to people in the industry, it is always five years away, and it’s been that way for 10 years or more now. Perhaps today people say it’s four years away,” he said. But the uncertainty is not a reason to delay, he added.“Thankfully, blockchains aren’t waiting and have started migrating to post-quantum signatures,” said Blackstone. “The damage would be catastrophic if they didn’t.”Magazine: How AI just dramatically sped up the quantum risk for Bitcoin

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A bipartisan ethics proposal pitched to US President Donald Trump to secure passage of the crypto market structure bill in Congress could create a significant tax benefit for the president, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The ethics addendum, which has not been made public, includes a provision requiring the president to divest from crypto-related businesses, according to people familiar with the matter. The proposal would reportedly allow Trump to defer capital gains taxes on any required divestitures, potentially leading to tax savings in the millions. Democratic concerns over Trump’s crypto conflicts have been a central obstacle to passing the market-structure bill. Senators have been working on an ethics addendum meant to break that impasse, though the reported tax-deferral benefit could become another point of contention for Democrats to question whether the president’s financial interests are genuinely curbed. Cointelegraph reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive an immediate response. Related: US Senate pushes CLARITY Act vote to September: ReportTrump’s annual financial disclosure report for 2025, released at the end of June, revealed the US president saw $1.4 billion in income from crypto-related ventures last year.According to the 927-page disclosure, the licensing and sale of memecoins such as Official Trump (TRUMP) generated the most income for Trump, with about $635 million coming from “royalties” in a “license agreement with Celebration Coins.”Meanwhile, the Trump family’s DeFi platform, World Liberty Financial, was the second-biggest earner, generating about $588 million from “proceeds from token sales.” The disclosure also revealed that Trump earned $197 from the sale of an equity interest in a stablecoin venture. Meanwhile, disclosures on World Liberty’s website show that DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity affiliated with Trump and certain family members, owns “approximately 38% of the equity interests” in World Liberty’s parent company.Magazine: CLARITY hopes fade, BitMEX shuts as lawsuit looms: Hodler’s Digest, July 26 Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.