AI agents help rescue Ethereum's Glamsterdam fork; 'Steal My Bitcoin' challenge solved

Ethereum's Glamsterdam testnet is cancelled as AI agents hunt for bugs

The second and final testnet for Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork was cancelled this week. Security firm ChainSecurity found vulnerabilities in two gas scaling Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), which are proposed changes to the network's rules. The bugs could have affected at least 13 DeFi contracts.

The bugs are tied to EIP-8037/8038. They made contracts that rely on how gas currently behaves break when a call runs out of gas. The source says an attacker may have been able to exploit the resulting weaknesses.

The testnet dress rehearsal on Hoodi, Ethereum's test network, is not expected to be rescheduled until all second-order effects of the fork have been worked through.

Derek Chiang from Ethlabs said the issues were found very late in the process, which he called less than ideal, "causing everyone to scramble to deal with the fallout." He wrote that protocol designers should conduct much more thorough analysis of potential breakages earlier in the process.

Chiang said two researchers, one from Ethlabs and one from the Ethereum Foundation, independently set up groups of AI agents to scan contracts for vulnerabilities. When they realized they were using the same strategy, they set up a message board for their agents in the form of a GitHub repo to coordinate the work.

Chiang noted the similarity to the OpenAI and Hugging Face hack, where rogue agents had set up a message board to coordinate attacks. "Well, turns out the same pattern is useful for the good agents too," he said.

The exercise has been successful enough that a second board has been set up to examine the effects of EIP-8198, also known as "Quick Slots", which has been proposed for the later Hegota hard fork.

'Steal My Bitcoin' challenge solved in a day

A new website that was left unpatched for the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities offered a Bitcoin prize in a challenge tied to the year's biggest cybersecurity scare. The 'Steal My Bitcoin' site hid the key to a Bitcoin wallet worth around $2,000. The key was accessible to the PHP user account through a program called print-flag.

The site drew heavy interest and periodically went offline because of traffic and probing attempts.

It was solved by a person named KillerBoi, who successfully extracted the private key. In a twist, the key turned out not to be the one for the wallet address shown on the site. Organizer James Pavur acknowledged this was a mistake and said the funds would be transferred.

WordFence founder Mark Maunder said the key was extracted within a day, but that the challenge showed how hard PHP2Shell is to exploit. According to Maunder, the author had to trigger a precise memory corruption condition, leak internal memory addresses, bypass ASLR, reverse engineer PHP's internal memory structures, forge structures to hijack execution, and account for PHP build differences, worker behavior and timing.

PHP is a programming language widely used to power websites and web applications. As a precaution, government agencies and other organizations in the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Finland and elsewhere took critical websites offline on Wednesday while emergency patches were developed for two related critical vulnerabilities. The flaws could allow attackers to run code on affected servers without logging in.

Starknet votes to research becoming a post-quantum layer-1 blockchain

Starknet's community has voted to support research into becoming an independent, post-quantum layer-1 blockchain. A governance vote that ran for seven days drew about 3,200 votes, with 93.52% of voting power in favor.

The actual shift would require a separate, binding governance vote. For now, Starknet will keep operating as an Ethereum layer-2 network, which means it runs on top of Ethereum rather than as its own chain.

StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson told Cointelegraph that work on a whitepaper had begun even before the weekend, and the team hopes to release a draft for public scrutiny in November.

Starknet saw the biggest fall of the top 100 coins this week, erasing one quarter of its value.

Senator probes Tether over reported deal with ex-White House crypto adviser

Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate's investigations subcommittee, has requested information from Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. This came after the Wall Street Journal reported that the stablecoin firm had signed a $6.3 million deal with a marketing company co-founded by former White House crypto adviser Bo Hines.

In a Thursday letter to Ardoino, the Connecticut lawmaker said the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations demanded records and information related to contracts, payments, communications and lobbying about the deal. He believes it may contravene rules around ethics, corruption and lobbying.

Tether says an external investigation "found no evidence of wrongdoing."

JPMorgan projects Bitcoin will outperform stocks and gold over a decade

JPMorgan Asset Management projects Bitcoin will outperform stocks and gold over the next decade, while cautioning that its volatility makes it unsuitable for diversifying portfolios for now. This is a projection, not a confirmed outcome.

On Monday, JPMorgan published its 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions report. It projects a 10% annualized return for Bitcoin, compared with 7.5% for large-cap US stocks and 5.5% for gold.

The report said: "At the moment, we do not make a case for Bitcoin as a diversifier in portfolios due to its unstable market correlations." It added that JPMorgan sees Bitcoin as a speculative asset and a hedge against monetary easing.

New York seeks $1.37 billion from NovaTech founders over Ponzi scheme

New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked a court to order the founders of the defunct crypto and forex trading platform NovaTech, Cynthia and Eddy Petion, and related companies to pay $1.37 billion over a Ponzi scheme.

According to the attorney general's office, more than 11,000 New Yorkers lost tens of millions of dollars through NovaTech and an earlier crypto mining scheme called AWS Mining.

The complaint alleged that promoters targeted Haitian and other immigrant communities through prayer groups, social media and WhatsApp, promising high returns and recruitment bonuses.

Bitcoin Core changes its security policy because AI finds bugs faster

Bitcoin Core, the main software behind the Bitcoin network, is changing how it handles security vulnerabilities because large language models can uncover software flaws so quickly.

Bitcoin Core developer Antoine Poinsot said vulnerabilities were in the past generally kept under lengthy disclosure embargoes, giving users time to upgrade before details became public. However, he said these models have made some flaws so easy to rediscover that delaying fixes offers little protection.

"The embargo period achieves little but it delays the availability of a fixed release," Poinsot said. "We are therefore updating our policy disclosure to accommodate those."

Pentagon bars staff from betting with military information

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has barred all Pentagon staff from using undisclosed information to place wagers on upcoming military action in prediction markets.

Why this week's stories matter

The sources show AI agents playing two opposite roles in one week. The same coordination pattern used by rogue agents in the OpenAI and Hugging Face hack helped Ethereum researchers find bugs before a network upgrade went live. At the same time, AI finding flaws faster pushed Bitcoin Core to shorten its security disclosure process.

The Glamsterdam delay also shows that testnet rehearsals and external security review can catch serious problems before they reach the main network, even though the bugs were found late in the process.

Sources

• Cointelegraph

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