Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States bought up nearly six times as many Bitcoin as were produced by miners over the last week.

The US-based Bitcoin (BTC) funds bought a whopping 18,644 Bitcoin over the past week when only 3,150 BTC were mined for the period, reported asset allocator HODL15Capital on May 4.

This accumulation by institutions and ETF issuers represents almost six times the amount of the asset being produced since miners only generate 450 coins per day.  

The total inflow for the past five trading days was around $1.8 billion, with a net outflow on April 30, according to Farside Investors. There has only been one outflow day since April 16, as the inflows have mirrored market recovery. 

Last week’s accumulation followed an increase in BTC spot prices in early May when the asset gained 4% to reach a six-week high of $97,700 on May 2. However, the asset has since retreated to the $94,000 level, which is the same price it traded at this time seven days ago. 

Spot Bitcoin ETF flows. Source: Coinglass

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is the industry leader, having seen almost $2.5 billion in inflows over the past five trading days and a streak of 17 days without an outflow. 

Related: BlackRock Bitcoin ETF buys $970M in BTC as inflows surge, boost market

“Spot Bitcoin ETFs have surged into a nearly $110 billion category, despite facing significant distribution hurdles,” said ETF Store president Nate Geraci in a blog post on May 3. 

He added that many wealth management platforms still restrict or prohibit financial advisers and brokers from recommending or providing access to Bitcoin ETPs. 

“That’s why I’ve said spot bitcoin ETFs are operating with one hand tied behind their backs. Imagine what might happen as these restrictions are lifted.” 

Litecoin ETF decision due 

Meanwhile, the Canary Capital spot Litecoin (LTC) ETF filing is due for a second deadline decision from the US Securities and Exchange Commission by May 5. The issuer filed for a spot Litecoin ETF alongside a spot XRP ETF in October. 

“If any asset has a chance of early approval, it’s Litecoin IMO,” said Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart on May 5. “Personally think a delay is more likely,” he added. Fellow analyst Eric Balchunas echoed the sentiment earlier this year.

More than 70 US crypto ETFs are awaiting an SEC decision this year, Bloomberg reported in April. 

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OpenAI says it ignored the concerns of its expert testers when it rolled out an update to its flagship ChatGPT artificial intelligence model that made it excessively agreeable.

The company released an update to its GPT‑4o model on April 25 that made it “noticeably more sycophantic,” which it then rolled back three days later due to safety concerns, OpenAI said in a May 2 postmortem blog post.

The ChatGPT maker said its new models undergo safety and behavior checks, and its “internal experts spend significant time interacting with each new model before launch,” meant to catch issues missed by other tests.

During the latest model’s review process before it went public, OpenAI said that “some expert testers had indicated that the model’s behavior ‘felt’ slightly off” but decided to launch “due to the positive signals from the users who tried out the model.”

“Unfortunately, this was the wrong call,” the company admitted. “The qualitative assessments were hinting at something important, and we should’ve paid closer attention. They were picking up on a blind spot in our other evals and metrics.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on April 27 that it was working to roll back changes making ChatGPT too agreeable. Source: Sam Altman

Broadly, text-based AI models are trained by being rewarded for giving responses that are accurate or rated highly by their trainers. Some rewards are given a heavier weighting, impacting how the model responds.

OpenAI said introducing a user feedback reward signal weakened the model’s “primary reward signal, which had been holding sycophancy in check,” which tipped it toward being more obliging.

“User feedback in particular can sometimes favor more agreeable responses, likely amplifying the shift we saw,” it added.

OpenAI is now checking for suck up answers

After the updated AI model rolled out, ChatGPT users had complained online about its tendency to shower praise on any idea it was presented, no matter how bad, which led OpenAI to concede in an April 29 blog post that it “was overly flattering or agreeable.”

For example, one user told ChatGPT it wanted to start a business selling ice over the internet, which involved selling plain old water for customers to refreeze.

Source: Tim Leckemby

In its latest postmortem, it said such behavior from its AI could pose a risk, especially concerning issues such as mental health.

“People have started to use ChatGPT for deeply personal advice — something we didn’t see as much even a year ago,” OpenAI said. “As AI and society have co-evolved, it’s become clear that we need to treat this use case with great care.”

Related: Crypto users cool with AI dabbling with their portfolios: Survey 

The company said it had discussed sycophancy risks “for a while,” but it hadn’t been explicitly flagged for internal testing, and it didn’t have specific ways to track sycophancy.

Now, it will look to add “sycophancy evaluations” by adjusting its safety review process to “formally consider behavior issues” and will block launching a model if it presents issues.

OpenAI also admitted that it didn’t announce the latest model as it expected it “to be a fairly subtle update,” which it has vowed to change. 

“There’s no such thing as a ‘small’ launch,” the company wrote. “We’ll try to communicate even subtle changes that can meaningfully change how people interact with ChatGPT.”

AI Eye: Crypto AI tokens surge 34%, why ChatGPT is such a kiss-ass 

The Solana Foundation has confirmed that a zero-day vulnerability that allowed an attacker to potentially mint certain tokens and even withdraw those tokens from user accounts has been fixed. 

A May 3 post-mortem from the Solana Foundation said that the security vulnerability, first discovered on April 16, could have allowed an attacker to forge an invalid proof affecting Solana’s privacy-enabling “Token-22 confidential tokens.”

There is no known exploit of the vulnerability, and Solana validators have since adopted the patched version, the foundation said.

Solana zero-day security bug affected Token-22 confidential tokens

The Solana Foundation said the security vulnerability concerned two programs: Token-2022 and ZK ElGamal Proof.

Token-2022 handles the main application logic for token mints and accounts, while ZK ElGamal Proof verifies the correctness of zero-knowledge proofs to show accurate account balances.

The foundation said certain algebraic components were omitted from the hash in the Fiat-Shamir Transformation’s transcript generation, which specifies how provers create public randomness using a cryptographic hash function. 

The flaw could have enabled an attacker to exploit the unhashed components by crafting a forged proof that passes verification to mint and steal Token-22 confidential tokens.

Token-22 confidential tokens, or “Extension Tokens,” leverage zero-knowledge proofs for private transfers and aim to enable advanced token functionality. 

The vulnerability was first identified on April 16, and two patches were deployed to resolve the issues. A super majority of Solana validators adopted the patches around two days later.

Solana development firms Anza, Firedancer and Jito were the main parties behind the security patch, while Asymmetric Research, Neodyme and OtterSec also assisted.

The foundation confirmed that all funds remain safe.

Related: Bloomberg Intelligence boosts Solana ETF approval odds to 90%

Despite the fix, the Solana Foundation’s private handling of the issue with Solana validators raised centralization concerns from some in the crypto community. 

This included a Curve Finance contributor who raised concerns about the foundation’s close relationship with Solana validators.

“Why does someone have a list of all validators and their contact details? What else are they talking about in those comms channels,” they asked, fearing that they could collude to potentially censor transactions or roll back the chain.

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko didn’t directly deny the claims but said members of the Ethereum community could also coordinate to resolve a similar security bug.

Source: Clouted

More than 70% of Ethereum network validators are also controlled by crypto exchanges or staking operators such as Lido, Yakovenko said in arguing his point.

“It’s the same people to get to 70% on ethereum. All the lido validators (chorus one, p2p, etc..) binance, coinbase, and kraken. If geth needs to push a patch, I’ll be happy to coordinate for them.”

In August, the Solana Foundation and network validators resolved another critical vulnerability behind the scenes. At the time, the foundation’s executive director, Dan Albert, said the ability to coordinate a patch doesn’t mean that Solana is centralized.

Ethereum wouldn’t fall for the same issue, community member says

Ethereum community member Ryan Berckmans slammed claims that Ethereum is subject to the same centralization issues as Solana, pointing out that Ethereum has sufficient client diversity. 

The most popular Ethereum client, geth, has at most 41% market share on Ethereum, Berckmans said, while noting that Solana has just one production-ready client, Agave.

“This means zero day bugs in the single Sol client are de facto protocol bugs. Change the single client program, change the protocol itself. The client is the protocol.”

Meanwhile, Solana is looking to roll out a new client, Firedancer, in the next few months, which is expected to improve the network’s resilience and uptime. 

However, Berckmans said that Solana would need three clients to be sufficiently decentralized at the client level.

Source: Ryan Berckmans

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