Today, the US Dollar Index rose above the 98.70 level for the first time since the third week of January. Monday’s trading opened with a bullish gap, and upward momentum continues to build as news emerges of a major escalation in the Middle East:

→ Demand for safe-haven assets: Historically, the US dollar and US Treasury bonds have served as primary refuges for capital during periods of heightened uncertainty.

→ Military activity around the Strait of Hormuz is pushing oil prices higher (WTI jumped by approximately 10% yesterday) along with gas prices. This creates a direct pathway to another wave of global inflation.

Technical Analysis of the DXY Chart

Six days ago, when analysing the US Dollar Index (DXY) chart, we:

→ Reaffirmed the validity of the descending channel (marked in red), which originated in November 2025.
→ Once again highlighted the strength of demand, reflected in the confident upward trajectory (shown by the arrow) following the false break below the multi-month low of 96.50 at the end of January.
→ Suggested that bulls could regain momentum and break the prevailing downtrend.

Indeed, price action in early March confirms this view: the descending channel is losing relevance, being replaced by an upward trajectory marked in blue. In this context, developments in the Middle East are of critical importance:

→ If tensions begin to ease, the DXY may stabilise around the median line of the blue ascending channel.

→ A renewed escalation and the collapse of potential negotiations could trigger a further advance towards the upper boundary of the blue channel.

It is also worth noting that the area around the 98 level may now serve as support:

→ This zone previously saw rapid price appreciation, signalling strong buying pressure.
→ It was also the point of a bullish breakout from the red channel and above the 97.98 resistance level.

Trade global index CFDs with zero commission and tight spreads (additional fees may apply). Open your FXOpen account now or learn more about trading index CFDs with FXOpen.

This article represents the opinion of the Companies operating under the FXOpen brand only. It is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, or recommendation with respect to products and services provided by the Companies operating under the FXOpen brand, nor is it to be considered financial advice.

Blockchain security firm OpenZeppelin says it has found methodological flaws and data contamination in its audit of OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence benchmark for blockchain security, EVMbench.  

EVMbench was launched in partnership with crypto investment firm Paradigm in mid-February. It was built to evaluate how well different artificial intelligence models can identify, patch, and exploit smart contract vulnerabilities.

In an X post on Monday, OpenZeppelin said it welcomed the initiative but recently decided to put EVMbench “through the same scrutiny” it applies to all the protocols it helps secure, including the likes of decentralized finance heavyweights Aave, Lido and Uniswap.

In its audit, OpenZeppelin found two key issues: training data contamination and classification issues related to several high-severity vulnerabilities.

“We reviewed the dataset and identified methodological flaws and invalid vulnerability classifications, including at least four issues labeled high severity that are not exploitable in practice,” OpenZeppelin said.​

The release of the EVMbench saw an evaluation of how well AI agents could theoretically exploit smart contract vulnerabilities. Anthropic’s Claude Open 4.6 topped the list, followed by OpenAI’s OC-GPT-5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro.

EVMbench testing may need revising

Looking at the first issue in data contamination, OpenZeppelin said the most important capability in “AI security is finding novel vulnerabilities in code the model has never seen before.”

However, during the EVMbench’s testing of AI agents, OpenZeppelin said that all the AI agents that scored the highest had “likely been exposed to the benchmark’s vulnerability reports during pretraining.”

During EVMbench testing, internet access was cut off for the AI agents, meaning they couldn’t simply search for solutions to problems. However, the benchmark was based on curated vulnerabilities from 120 audits conducted between 2024 and mid-2025, with the knowledge training cutoffs for these agents generally set to mid-2025.

As such, it ran the risk that the AI agents already had the answers to all of the problems stored in their memory.

“While this does not necessarily enable the model to identify the issue immediately, it reduces the quality of the test. The dataset’s limited size further narrows the evaluation surface, making these contamination concerns more significant,” OpenZeppelin said.

​Related: Energym AI dystopia goes viral as crypto projects tout user-owned AI agents

​Finally, OpenZeppelin said that there had been some significant factual errors in the EVMbench’s dataset, arguing that several “high-severity vulnerabilities” were invalid.

OpenZeppelin said it had assessed at least four vulnerabilities that EVMbench classified as high risk, but that don’t actually work. However, EVMbench had been scoring AI agents correctly for finding these supposedly false vulnerabilities.

“These aren’t subjective severity disagreements; they are findings where the described exploit doesn’t work.”

Ultimately, OpenZeppelin reiterated that AI will have a significant impact on bolstering blockchain security, but stressed the importance of applying the tech and testing it properly to maximize its potential.

“The question isn’t whether AI will transform smart contract security — it will. The question is whether the data and benchmarks we use to build and evaluate these tools are held to the same standard as the contracts they’re meant to protect.”

​Magazine: AI won’t make you rich, but crypto games might, Axie founder steps down: Web3 Gamer