Crypto security leaders are grappling with a growing mismatch: attackers increasingly benefit from cutting-edge, AI-assisted capabilities, while many major crypto firms still lack direct access to the most powerful “frontier” cyber models used for security testing and code hardening.

In June, Coinbase said it had secured access to Anthropic’s restricted Mythos model, and Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic used Mythos to help audit the Zcash protocol at the request of Shielded Labs. Yet other large players, including Binance, have publicly indicated they have not been able to obtain similar access—highlighting an emerging “security divide” across the industry.

Key takeaways

• Major crypto firms have uneven access to restricted frontier cyber models like Anthropic’s Mythos, leaving some with fewer defensive tools than others.
• Executives argue gating advanced models is initially necessary because attackers may adopt new capabilities faster than defenders.
• As publicly available models close the capability gap, industry pressure is likely to increase for wider defender access to restricted tools.
• Recent incidents involving AI-assisted exploitation and wallet/bridge security show why faster defensive iteration is becoming critical.

Why access to “frontier” cyber models is uneven

Anthropic’s Mythos is positioned as a restricted version of a model also related to a more public offering—its developers say the underlying base is similar, but that Mythos removes certain safeguards that limit sensitive cybersecurity work. OpenAI has described a comparable approach, offering different tiers of capability depending on the type of user and intended use, including “Trusted Access for Cyber” for verified defenders.

Binance chief security officer Jimmy Su told Cointelegraph that the gap remains meaningful. According to Su, Binance has been trying to make progress on obtaining such tools, including conversations with other crypto exchanges and investors, but it has not obtained the most advanced model like Mythos.

This uneven rollout matters because the cyber threat landscape is moving faster than traditional security review cycles. In an ecosystem where vulnerabilities can be exploited rapidly—often with automated or semi-automated assistance—having fewer defensive options can translate into slower discovery and patching.

Executives back initial gating—then question the long-term rationale

Crypto security executives interviewed by Cointelegraph said there is likely a legitimate need to restrict initial access to frontier cyber models. The reasoning is straightforward: if a new model enhances attackers more quickly than defenders, it can increase the ecosystem’s exposure before the security community catches up.

Su suggested that controlled rollout can reduce the “blast radius,” especially early on. However, he also argued that the justification changes as competing models become more powerful and more widely available. In that scenario, the pressure shifts to model developers to broaden access—and the key question becomes whether defenders can use the tools effectively at the same pace attackers do.

Michael Coates, chief information security officer at the Solana Foundation, echoed the tension. Coates supported safeguards but said verification and acceptance pathways can slow down legitimate defensive usage. In his view, defenders need a more streamlined process to get advanced models into the hands of teams that can evaluate code and identify issues before they are exploited.

Blockchain Capital’s Sean Cheetham also leaned toward eventual opening. He argued that while malicious actors are skilled, the broader pool of security researchers tends to be larger. If “good people” can scale their defensive work, broader access could ultimately strengthen the ecosystem more than it helps attackers.

Large exchanges and builders still waiting, while some crypto-adjacent firms got in

Binance’s access situation is notable given its scale: DefiLlama data cited by Cointelegraph places Binance’s total assets at $137.8 billion. Despite that footprint, Su indicated the exchange had not reached the highest tier of frontier cyber-model access.

Cointelegraph also reported additional signals of staggered access within the sector. Fireblocks, a major crypto custodian, said in April it had sought access to Mythos. At that time, it relied on Anthropic’s publicly available model for penetration testing rather than restricted access. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams similarly criticized safeguards tied to cybersecurity prompts in relation to Fable 5.

Separately, the Ethereum Foundation said in July that it has been running “coordinated AI agents” to find bugs across its systems but did not specify which models were being used. Cointelegraph reached out to the Ethereum Foundation, Fireblocks, and Uniswap to confirm whether they had received access to restricted frontier models since those earlier statements.

While many crypto players appear to be waiting, some crypto-adjacent organizations have moved ahead. FIS, which provides technology to banks and partnered with Circle last year for USDC payments, said it joined Anthropic’s Project Glasswing program last month. Project Glasswing is designed as a gated channel for vetted cyber defenders and critical software infrastructure organizations to obtain early access to restricted Mythos models.

HackerOne—known for bug bounty and security testing—also said it joined Project Glasswing. Cointelegraph notes that, in this case, testing is limited to HackerOne’s own infrastructure rather than being extended to customer programs.

Cointelegraph reached out to OpenAI and Anthropic for details on how many crypto companies have been granted access to restricted models, but those responses are not included in the article text provided.

Why the stakes are rising: AI-assisted exploitation and faster attacker iteration

The access debate is playing out against a backdrop of security incidents that organizations link to faster exploitation cycles. On Monday, Bitcoin swap service Boltz said it paused its non-custodial bridge after it observed a steady rise in AI-assisted hacking attempts over the past few months. Boltz’s statement, as reported by Cointelegraph, argued that the pattern is that attackers can iterate faster than a smaller security team can find and patch issues.

Hardware wallet maker Coinkite reported last week that some of its Coldcard devices were exploited due to a flaw in wallet seed generation. Coinkite indicated the randomness of the seed generation was less than expected and speculated that the attacker may have used AI to examine previous firmware versions to identify and exploit the weakness—even though the company said it had used “one of the best available AI models” to review its code only weeks earlier.

These examples underscore a key practical problem: even when defenders use advanced tools, the cadence mismatch—how quickly attackers can adapt and how quickly defenders can verify fixes—can still drive outcomes. Access to restricted models may be only part of the answer; process, testing rigor, and deployment speed remain central to reducing real-world risk.

Next, readers should watch whether frontier-model providers expand defender access beyond the current limited pipelines and whether security teams can demonstrate that broader availability improves outcomes rather than accelerating exploitation. The gap between who can test with the most capable tools—and how quickly they can patch—may become one of the defining operational fault lines in crypto security.

The crypto industry’s most important regulatory bill is stuck because of the president’s own memecoin. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal just asked the SEC to investigate while the Clarity Act’s ethics provision remains the last unresolved section blocking a vote. The irony is precise: the bill that would bring regulatory clarity to crypto cannot advance because the most powerful person in the country launched a token that embodies exactly the regulatory ambiguity the bill was designed to resolve.

The letter arrived on the same day that crypto lobbyists in Washington were counting votes for the Clarity Act, the legislation that would for the first time define which digital assets fall under SEC jurisdiction and which belong to the CFTC. The bill has bipartisan support in principle. It passed committee with votes from both parties. The industry has spent millions pushing it toward a floor vote. And it is stuck, not on a technical question about token classification or a policy disagreement about decentralized exchange regulation, but on the question of whether the president of the United States should be allowed to profit from a memecoin while his appointees regulate the industry.

What the Clarity Act would actually do

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is designed to solve the jurisdictional ambiguity that has defined US crypto regulation since the industry’s inception. Currently, there is no clear statutory framework determining whether a given token is a security (regulated by the SEC), a commodity (regulated by the CFTC), or something else entirely.

The bill creates a functional test for determining a token’s regulatory classification. Tokens that are sufficiently decentralized, meaning no single entity controls them, would be classified as digital commodities and regulated by the CFTC. Tokens that function as investment contracts, where buyers depend on the efforts of a centralized team for returns, would remain securities under SEC jurisdiction.

The legislation also creates registration pathways for crypto exchanges, sets disclosure requirements for token issuers, and provides a framework for stablecoin oversight that complements the separate GENIUS Act focused specifically on stablecoins.

For the crypto industry, the Clarity Act represents the difference between operating in regulatory limbo and having a defined set of rules. Projects that have delayed US launches because of enforcement risk would have a path forward. Exchanges that have restricted token listings because of securities law uncertainty would have clearer criteria. Investors would have standardized disclosures that currently do not exist for most crypto assets.

The bill’s journey through Congress has been broadly supported by both parties. The political dynamic that historically divided crypto along partisan lines, with Republicans favoring lighter regulation and Democrats favoring stricter oversight, had begun to shift as both parties recognized the electoral weight of crypto-interested voters. The White House said in April that a deal was “very close.”

Then the ethics provision became the obstacle.

The ethics fight that froze everything

The core dispute is narrow but politically explosive: should the Clarity Act include provisions that restrict senior government officials, including the president, from directly profiting from crypto projects while in office?

Democrats argue that any comprehensive crypto regulation bill must address the conflict of interest created when the president launches a token, profits from it, and simultaneously appoints the regulators who oversee the industry. Without an ethics provision, they contend, the bill effectively legalizes a regulatory framework while leaving the most prominent conflict of interest in the industry unaddressed.

Republicans counter that the ethics provision is scope creep, that the bill’s purpose is market structure regulation, not ethics reform, and that adding restrictions targeted at a specific individual risks turning a bipartisan bill into a partisan weapon. The president agreed to accept limited restrictions, but the proposed language was so narrow that Democrats described it as meaningless in practice.

The negotiation is now in the hands of Senators Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, and Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, who are drafting compromise language. The White House has been involved in the discussions but has not publicly committed to signing a bill with meaningful ethics restrictions. Every day the bill remains stalled, the industry operates without the regulatory clarity it was designed to provide.

The $TRUMP token: $636 million in, $3.8 billion out

The numbers around $TRUMP are what give the ethics debate its weight. The token launched on January 17, 2025, three days before the presidential inauguration. It peaked at approximately $46 within days and has since declined to roughly $1.47, a 97 percent drop from its all-time high.

According to blockchain data analyzed by The New York Times and confirmed by the president’s 2025 financial disclosure, Trump-linked entities earned approximately $636 million from the token through a combination of initial allocation sales and ongoing transaction fees collected by the protocol.

On the other side of the ledger, nearly one million buyers collectively lost an estimated $3.8 billion. The asymmetry is stark: for every dollar the president’s side earned, buyers lost approximately six dollars. This ratio is not unusual for memecoins, but the involvement of a sitting president in the profit-taking entity is unprecedented.

The token saw brief price spikes around two Mar-a-Lago gala events where top token holders were invited to dine with the president. These events temporarily reversed the price decline but did not sustain any recovery. The galas themselves highlighted the conflict: the president was simultaneously the most powerful figure in crypto regulation and the host of an event that rewarded the largest holders of his personal memecoin.

What Warren’s letter asks and why it probably will not work

The Warren-Blumenthal letter to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins requests a formal investigation into whether $TRUMP involves “potentially fraudulent enrichment schemes with implications for market integrity and stability.” The letter cites the $3.8 billion in estimated buyer losses and the $636 million in presidential profits as evidence of an asymmetry that warrants regulatory scrutiny.

The request faces several obstacles. First, the SEC under Chairman Atkins has taken a materially different approach to crypto enforcement than the Gensler-era commission. The current SEC has paused or dropped numerous crypto enforcement actions and adopted a policy of regulation through rulemaking rather than enforcement.

Second, the SEC issued a staff statement in February 2025 explicitly declaring that memecoins are “generally outside its sphere of influence.” The statement said memecoins have “limited or no use or functionality” and do not qualify as securities under the Howey test because buyers are not investing based on the expectation of profits from the efforts of others. By the SEC’s own published position, $TRUMP is not a security and therefore falls outside the agency’s enforcement jurisdiction.

Third, Atkins was appointed by President Trump. Asking a presidential appointee to investigate the president’s personal financial interests is a political act more than a regulatory one. Warren and Blumenthal know this. The letter’s primary function is political: it creates a public record of the conflict of interest and forces a response (or conspicuous non-response) from the SEC that can be cited in the Clarity Act debate.

The letter is a negotiating tool dressed as a regulatory request. Its real audience is not the SEC. It is the handful of senators whose votes will determine whether the Clarity Act passes with or without meaningful ethics restrictions.

The SEC’s memecoin blind spot

The SEC’s February 2025 memecoin statement created a regulatory gap that the $TRUMP situation has exposed. By declaring memecoins outside its jurisdiction, the SEC effectively created a category of financial product that no federal regulator oversees.

The CFTC regulates commodities and derivatives but has not asserted jurisdiction over memecoins. The FTC regulates consumer fraud but has not acted on memecoin losses. State securities regulators have limited resources and jurisdictional reach for tokens that trade globally.

This gap means that a sitting president can launch a token, collect hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, watch nearly a million buyers lose billions, and no federal agency has clear authority to investigate or act. The Clarity Act was supposed to fill gaps like this by creating a comprehensive framework for token classification. Instead, the most prominent example of the gap’s consequences is the reason the bill cannot pass.

The irony compounds. If the Clarity Act passes without an ethics provision, it would create a legal framework that implicitly permits government officials to profit from token launches. If it passes with a strong ethics provision, it would retroactively create restrictions that apply to the president’s existing token. If it does not pass at all, the entire industry continues operating without the regulatory clarity that would attract institutional capital, encourage responsible innovation, and protect retail investors from exactly the kind of losses that $TRUMP buyers experienced.

The crypto industry’s impossible position

The crypto industry’s Washington lobby has spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars building bipartisan support for regulatory legislation. The Clarity Act is the culmination of that effort. And it is being held hostage by a conflict of interest that the industry cannot publicly criticize without alienating the president whose administration has been broadly favorable to crypto.

Major industry trade groups have carefully avoided commenting on $TRUMP specifically. Their public statements focus on the importance of passing the Clarity Act and avoid any reference to the ethics provision. Privately, industry leaders acknowledge that the president’s memecoin has complicated their legislative strategy. The token’s existence makes it harder for Democrats to vote for the bill without ethics restrictions, and harder for the industry to argue that ethics restrictions are unnecessary without appearing to endorse a presidential conflict of interest.

Some industry participants have taken a different approach, arguing that the $TRUMP situation is precisely why clear rules are needed. Under a comprehensive regulatory framework, the argument goes, a presidential memecoin would either be subject to disclosure requirements and trading restrictions or it would be clearly categorized as outside the regulated perimeter. Either outcome would be better than the current ambiguity, where no one knows which rules apply and no agency claims jurisdiction.

The problem with this argument is timing. The industry wants the bill passed now, and the ethics provision is the obstacle to passing it now. Any delay risks losing the political window entirely. If the bill carries over into a new Congress, it must restart the committee process, and the bipartisan coalition that brought it this far may not reassemble.

What happens if the bill dies

If the Clarity Act fails to pass this session, the consequences extend beyond the crypto industry’s policy wishlist.

The SEC would continue operating under the enforcement-first approach of previous years or the current hands-off approach, depending on which administration is in power. Neither approach provides the predictable, statute-based framework that institutional capital requires. Major financial institutions that have waited for regulatory clarity before offering crypto products would continue waiting or would structure their offerings under existing securities law, which adds compliance costs that make many crypto products uneconomical.

Token projects would continue launching in offshore jurisdictions and restricting US access, as they have for years. The US share of global crypto innovation and trading volume would continue declining relative to jurisdictions like the EU, which implemented its MiCA framework in 2024 and is already attracting projects that want regulatory certainty.

Retail investors would remain in the current environment where memecoins exist in a regulatory vacuum, where disclosure requirements are absent, and where losses like the $3.8 billion from $TRUMP buyers have no regulatory pathway for investigation or remedy. The Clarity Act does not specifically address memecoins, but its classification framework would at minimum force a determination about whether specific tokens fall under SEC or CFTC jurisdiction, ending the current situation where no agency claims responsibility.

The deepest irony is that the $TRUMP token is the strongest argument for why the Clarity Act is necessary, and simultaneously the reason the Clarity Act cannot pass.

What to watch

The Tillis-Gallego compromise language. The bipartisan pair negotiating the ethics provision will determine whether the bill lives or dies in this Congress. Watch for a draft that restricts government officials from launching new tokens while grandfathering existing ones, a structure that addresses Democratic concerns without requiring the president to divest from $TRUMP.

The SEC’s response to Warren’s letter. A formal investigation is unlikely, but the SEC must respond in some form. The nature of the response, whether a brief dismissal or a detailed explanation of jurisdictional limitations, will signal how the current commission views its role in the memecoin space.

The September legislative calendar. Congress returns from recess with a narrow window before the midterm election cycle consumes legislative bandwidth. If the Clarity Act does not advance in September and October, its chances of passing this session diminish sharply.

$TRUMP token price action. Any significant price movement in $TRUMP, up or down, will reignite media attention on the ethics question. A rally would raise questions about insider trading. A further decline would increase the estimated buyer losses and strengthen the case for an investigation.

Other government official tokens. If $TRUMP’s existence normalizes the practice, other elected officials may launch their own tokens. Each new launch would add pressure to the ethics provision debate and make the Clarity Act’s passage without restrictions increasingly untenable.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risks. Always conduct your own research before making any financial decisions. The information in this article is current as of August 4, 2026.

Every once in a while, my good friend Thelma Golden will meet someone who is shocked to learn this tiny, energetic, and dynamic woman is a paradigm-­shifting curator. Some would find this disheartening. But not Thelma. She sees it as her chance to show the world exactly what she can do. 

As one of the most influential people in art, Thelma knows the power of flipping an assumption on its head. Her exhibits at the Studio Museum in Harlem and, previously, the Whitney not only stop you in your tracks, they also show you so much more about the depth of the Black experience. Her steadfast dedication has given voice to a new generation of artists and curators who are ready to stir our souls too—folks who may have otherwise gone unnoticed had it not been for Thelma’s eye for talent and potential. She has broadened the world of art to better reflect the sum of us, rather than just a few. That’s power. And that’s why, while some folks might go on underestimating her, I’ll never be one of them.