PANews reported on April 30th that OpenAI disclosed in previous filings that in mid-January 2018, Elon Musk congratulated them on their successful fundraising, agreed to their Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise $10 billion—which would involve a for-profit subsidiary—and told them they had resolved their long-term funding issues. However, by the end of January, he told them he was no longer supporting ICOs (at which point they had also lost faith in ICOs) and believed OpenAI was "doomed to fail relative to Google." Then, in February 2018, Elon Musk concluded that OpenAI would not be able to raise sufficient funds. That same month, he resigned, focusing instead on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) at Tesla.

It is reported that in mid-January 2018, the cryptocurrency market rapidly reversed course from its bull market peak, with Bitcoin falling sharply from nearly $20,000 (December 2017) and the overall market entering the early stages of a bear market. During the same period, the ICO bubble began to burst, and concerns about project quality and regulatory risks led to a decline in market confidence. The US SEC and other agencies strengthened their scrutiny, mainstream platforms restricted cryptocurrency advertising, and the industry shifted from a fundraising frenzy to a contraction phase.