Daily Briefing

Nvidia launched the Open Agent Safety Platform on Monday, pairing OpenShell, an open-source runtime that sandboxes AI agents, with Sentry, a hardware watchdog running on Nvidia's BlueField-4 DPU that Nvidia says can quarantine a misbehaving agent within milliseconds. More than 100 organizations signed on as launch partners, including Anthropic, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Palantir, Cisco, CrowdStrike and SpaceX AI.

Nvidia's pitch is that safety should be enforced outside the model, through controls the agent cannot get past, rather than left to the agent's own judgment. Anthropic chief commercial officer Paul Smith framed the platform as an addition rather than a replacement for existing safeguards, saying it "adds another layer of governance and control across hardware and software."

Sentry sits on the BlueField-4 data processing unit, separate from the software running the agent, so Nvidia says it can cut an agent off without asking its permission, since the agent has no way to reach or override it. OpenShell turns an operator's instructions into enforceable rules governing which files, networks and tools an agent may touch.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, a new Sonnet-class model that the company says brings substantially improved cyber capabilities over Sonnet 5. Because of those gains, Anthropic is deploying it with Opus-class safeguards, under which higher-risk cybersecurity tasks visibly fall back to Sonnet 5 rather than being served by the new model.

The release extends Anthropic's practice of shipping a newer model with stricter, transparently falling-back safeguards, meaning users of Sonnet 5.5 can hit a different model mid-task depending on the request. Community analysis of the system card also suggests safeguard fallback rates can materially shift benchmark comparisons between models.

According to community reading of Section 8.5 of the Sonnet 5.5 system card, about 10% of Opus 5.5's Terminal-Bench trials were answered by a fallback model due to safeguards, versus roughly 1.5% for Sonnet 5.5 — which commenters argue likely explains Sonnet 5.5's higher Terminal-Bench score (70.6) over Opus 5.5 (66.4). Commenters also reported that at "max" thinking effort, Sonnet 5.5 consumed 128,000 thinking tokens over about 15 minutes and ran out before producing a final SVG output, matching a reported issue with Opus 5.5.

Citi and Coinbase are expanding their partnership to give businesses infrastructure that connects traditional fiat payments with stablecoins, extending round-the-clock fiat access to a combined user base of more than 150 million. Reports describe the corporate stablecoin payments effort as a planned collaboration.

Broadening bank-to-exchange payment rails gives users round-the-clock on-ramp and off-ramp access, linking regulated banking settlement directly to crypto trading venues.

Reports characterize the initiative as a planned corporate stablecoin payments collaboration, framed around a combined user base of more than 150 million.

Attackers drained more than 12.4 million XRP (roughly $18 million) from over 7,000 D'CENT wallets, and the losses spread beyond the XRP Ledger to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and Stellar using a single compromised recovery phrase. IoTrust, the maker of D'CENT, confirmed at least 110 abnormal transfer reports, including non-XRP assets, according to ZDNet Korea.

D'CENT now warns that wallets created through its app are vulnerable, urging users to generate a fresh recovery phrase and immediately migrate everything, including tokens, NFTs, and staked assets. The cross-chain sweep shows that one leaked recovery phrase can drain the holdings of a multi-chain wallet across several networks.

At least six waves of theft occurred between September 15 and 20, emptying 6,678 wallets of 11.7 million XRP, with the thief starting manually on large wallets and later writing scripts to hit progressively smaller ones. A further 640,370 XRP was taken after September 21, and by Friday 6.3 million of the stolen XRP had crossed to Ethereum via the swap service THORChain, with researchers saying "Most of it is no longer XRP."

Goldman Sachs is offering its roughly $100 billion Treasury fund, FTIXX, to institutional digital-asset firms through Lynq, a settlement network used by crypto companies, with trades handled by SEC-registered broker-dealer tZERO Securities. It is the first outside fund offered on Lynq, and unlike BlackRock's BUIDL or Franklin Templeton's BENJI, the fund is not being tokenized — Lynq serves as a new distribution channel for the existing fund.

The arrangement gives institutional crypto firms a yield-bearing place to hold trading cash between trades without requiring Goldman Sachs to build a tokenized blockchain product, reflecting what Lynq CEO Jerald David described as a convergence between traditional and digital-asset market participants.

Getting FTIXX onto the network required Lynq to modify its technology, restrict access to U.S. clients and integrate with Mosaic, and customers also need a relationship with tZERO Securities plus onboarding and eligibility checks. Lynq runs on a private, permissioned Avalanche (AVAX) Layer 1 and says more than 30 institutional digital-asset firms are onboarded with more than $89 million in assets.

Chainlink launched CCIP 2.0 on Monday, introducing a Cross-Chain Verifier (CCV) feature that lets institutions run their own verifier for cross-chain transfers or hire one from firms such as Infosys or Nethermind, instead of relying solely on Chainlink's default network. Chainlink's documentation also confirms that "the Risk Management Network's automated offchain role is no longer active in current CCIP deployments," though it is expected to be offered as an optional validation layer in future releases.

The upgrade gives institutions a configurable way to add their own verification of cross-chain transfers, arriving five months after the $292 million Kelp DAO hack pushed several firms to Chainlink. At the same time, an institution that adds no extra verifier now relies on a single verification network, where CCIP previously had two.

Chainlink's default check is unchanged: a committee of 16 independent node operators that must reach consensus on every transfer, and starter kits for custom verifiers are available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The Risk Management Network's on-chain contract remains only as an emergency backstop, and Chainlink says equivalent independent checks can come from the optional CCVs instead.

Coinbase-issued tokenized stocks are now accepted as collateral on Aave V4 on the Base network, extending DeFi lending to tokenized equity collateral tied to a major exchange. TokenPost described the change as Aave V4 adding Coinbase-tokenized U.S. stocks as USDC collateral.

The integration adds a new collateral type to one of DeFi's largest lending protocols and connects an exchange-issued tokenized equity product to on-chain credit markets. According to Aave's own blog post, the tokens are offered under Regulation S and only to eligible non-U.S. persons in permitted jurisdictions, which limits who can actually use them.

The tokenized stocks operate on Base and are backed 1:1 by real shares held in regulated custody, per Bitrue's explainer on Coinbase tokenized stocks. Aave's blog states these are securities issued by Coinbase and offered under Regulation S only to eligible non-U.S. persons in permitted jurisdictions.

Multi-chain decentralized exchange DYORSWAP integrated a spoofed version of the upcoming GIWA blockchain over the weekend after the fake chain reused GIWA's genuine chain ID, 9134. More than 1,000 users bridged a total of 767 ETH (roughly $2 million) into the fraudulent bridge contract, which the scammers drained and then routed through Tornado Cash.

DYORSWAP said it will offer a 40% refund to users who bridged less than 5 ETH, with larger amounts handled case by case, and claims to have distributed over 200 ETH in compensation. The incident shows that a fake OP Stack chain reusing a legitimate chain ID can pass an integrator's initial verification.

DYORSWAP said the spoofed bridge was deployed shortly after 6 PM UTC on Saturday and was emptied just over 12 hours later, and it tallied 1,335 addresses that had bridged a total of 767.65 ETH, almost all of which was later drained. The exchange also identified addresses it believes were behind the scam "based on timing and behavior," funded from Binance and Gate, and mentioned "specific suspicious messages" that may have planted false information in its community.

Kraken disclosed that stolen client data was used in an extortion attempt against the exchange, and publicly stated that it refused to pay the attackers' demand. The disclosure concerns client data rather than a loss of customer funds or exchange reserves.

The incident is a security and trust event for Kraken's users, whose data is at the center of the extortion attempt, and the exchange's public refusal puts its position on record rather than resolving the matter privately.

Franklin Templeton and Bybit announced a program allowing eligible institutional clients to pledge tokenized shares of Franklin Templeton money market funds, issued through its Benji platform, as collateral for USDT- or USDC-denominated trading credit lines on Bybit. The fund shares stay in off-exchange custody and continue to earn yield while being used to finance trading on the exchange.

The arrangement extends tokenized money market fund shares beyond buy-and-hold holdings into a collateral role for exchange trading, letting institutions finance crypto positions without selling the yield-bearing assets or moving them onto the exchange.

Franklin Templeton and Bybit said they also plan a tokenized investment product for wallet users on Bybit and the Mantle network, but have not disclosed details. Franklin Templeton ran a similar structure with Binance in February 2026.

Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's permanent subcommittee published a report Monday alleging that Tether's USDT has become a key tool for the Iranian government to bypass sanctions and that the stablecoin is a "significant financial lifeline" within Iran's shadow banking network. The report said the Iranian government made an estimated $2 billion in transactions last year, while Tether said in a blog post the same day that it had "supported nearly $550 million in Iran-linked" freezes.

The report intensifies congressional scrutiny of the largest stablecoin's role in sanctions evasion. Tether said in response that it remains "in regular and direct coordination with authorities in the United States and around the world" so that illicit funds can be identified and frozen.

The report alleged that Tether "repeatedly failed" to block Iran-connected wallets, that freezes sometimes took weeks when they did occur, and that the company sometimes responded to requests without actually blacklisting wallets; it added that before 2024 Tether did not comprehensively and consistently freeze wallets designated by counter-terrorism agencies. The report did not provide an overall total for alleged Iranian government USDT transactions, citing only the estimated $2 billion in transactions last year. Tether listed recent freeze actions it said it took at the behest of U.S. authorities, and CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company remains in direct coordination with authorities.