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Vitalik Reviews a Big Leap in Hiding Program Code
Vitalik Buterin broke down Diamond iO, a new way to scramble a program so nobody can read its secret logic, while it still runs and returns the right answers.
The idea, called obfuscation, is often described as a holy grail of cryptography. It could power truly private apps, like secret onchain voting or programs that safely hold private keys, with no middleman to trust.
The catch has always been speed. Older designs were so slow they were basically theoretical. Diamond iO, built by the Machina iO team, combines two encryption techniques into a simpler design and cuts the runtime from what Vitalik calls "galactic" to "planetary" scale. It is still too slow for real use today, but he says it may be only a few optimizations away.
Hungary Eases Crypto Rules, Licenses CoinCash
Hungary's parliament has voted to repeal the strict national crypto rules it added in 2025, including a transaction-validation regime and criminal penalties that had pushed most exchanges out of the country. Officials called the framework excessive and incompatible with EU law, and the EU had opened an investigation into it.
Just days earlier, the National Bank of Hungary granted CoinCash the country's first MiCA license, covering custody, exchange, transfers, advice and portfolio management.
CoinCash, founded in Budapest in 2017, is Hungary's largest crypto broker and runs its biggest Bitcoin ATM network. It suspended service last December under the old rules and is now restarting. Neither CoinCash nor Hungary has a token, so this is purely a regulatory reset.
Musk Says Grok 4.6 Arrives Around August 7
Elon Musk says xAI will release Grok 4.6, a 1.5-trillion-parameter model with significantly improved supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, around August 7.
A larger 2.1-trillion-parameter Grok 4.7 is set to follow a few weeks later. Musk says it will be better than 4.6 in every way and more token-efficient, though slightly slower to serve.
Both are steps up from xAI's current flagship, Grok 4.5, released in early July. As with any Musk timeline, the dates and specs are stated targets and could still slip. Note that xAI has no crypto token, and any "$GROK" or "xAI" presale is a scam.
Tokenized Stocks on CEXs: The Cost You Don't See
CryptoRank tested Bitget, Binance and Gate on the same names. Top-of-book spreads were close. But on a $50K order the cost split wide open: Bitget's rTokens averaged 11.8 bps of slippage versus 23 to 31 for the others, up to 58% lower.
Bitget also lists the most (568 tokenized stocks and ETFs vs 45 and 65), names its custodian (Alpaca, FINRA and SIPC), and is the only one publishing daily independent proof of reserves.
Plume Brings Institutional RWA Vaults to LI FI Earn
Plume Network has integrated its institutional RWA vaults with LI FI Earn, allowing wallets, exchanges, neobanks, and other applications to offer tokenized real-world asset yield through a single integration.
The integration enables one-click, cross-chain deposits into institutional RWA strategies across government debt, private credit, commodities, diversified funds, and tokenized private markets, with built-in KYC and compliance checks powered by LI FI Composer.
Multiple Bitcoin's Historical Bottom Indicators Align Once Again
• High-timeframe indicators suggest BTC is at or near a cycle low. With Bitcoin trading around 50% below its all-time high and the current bear market lasting 40+ weeks, multiple long-term metrics are aligning with previous cycle bottoms
• BTC is the most oversold ever versus the Nasdaq. Relative strength indicators show Bitcoin has reached its lowest reading on record against the Nasdaq, while it also recorded extreme oversold conditions versus gold earlier this year. Historically, similar signals preceded strong 1–3 year outperformance
• Realized Price sits at ~$53K. Bitcoin is currently trading only 18% above its realized price (the average on-chain cost basis of all BTC). Historically:
1. Every bear market bottom traded at or below realized price
2. BTC has spent only 12% of its history below this level
3. Buying near realized price has historically generated attractive long-term returns
• Cycle timing points to a potential bottom by late 2026. Previous BTC bear markets reached their lows around 60 weeks after the all-time high. The current cycle is at week 40, implying a historical window for a bottom around November–December 2026
• Returns are compressing each cycle. The report argues Bitcoin is maturing, meaning future bull markets may deliver smaller percentage gains than previous cycles. Passive "buy and hold" may become less effective than selectively increasing exposure during deep market corrections
• Capital allocation should be opportunistic. Rather than remaining permanently overweight BTC, the report suggests accumulating during rare periods when multiple long-term indicators simultaneously reach extreme oversold levels.
• Historical outlook remains constructive. If previous cycles repeat (with lower returns), Bitcoin could transition into a multi-year recovery through 2027–2028, with the current period representing a favorable long-term accumulation zone.
ℹ️ Risks & Limitations
• The analysis is based on very small historical samples (3–4 market cycles)
• Current market structure differs from previous cycles due to spot ETFs, corporate treasury adoption, and a more mature derivatives market
• These indicators are not guarantees and do not predict short-term price action. BTC could still experience additional downside before establishing a definitive bottom
Elfa AI Launches the Iris Intelligence Stack
Elfa AI has launched Iris, a real-time intelligence stack that turns live news, markets and social signals into structured, actionable context for AI agents and traders.
Beyond the data layer, Iris is also a runtime for autonomous finance agents, handling sandboxing, persistent memory, triggers, guardrails and hosting, so teams can go from an API key to a production agent quickly. It pairs with the Elfa app's "Ask Elfa" chat and in-app trading.
Elfa says Iris covers 300K+ sources and 100K+ markets at sub-two-minute latency. Access is metered per request in USDC via the x402 standard on Base, Arbitrum, Polygon or Avalanche, and Elfa AI has no token.
1inch Launches Aqua, a Shared Liquidity Protocol
1inch has launched Aqua, which it calls the first "shared liquidity protocol" — a design that effectively turns a user's own wallet into a self-custodial AMM.
Instead of locking funds into pool contracts, a single wallet balance can back many DeFi strategies at once. Liquidity is pulled atomically only at the moment a trade executes, so the same capital can be reused across strategies simultaneously.
"Aqua solves liquidity fragmentation for market makers by multiplying effective capital. From now on, the only limit to your capital efficiency is your strategy," said 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov. Built on the SwapVM protocol, Aqua aims to do for makers what 1inch's 2019 aggregator did for takers.
Securitize Registers as an SEC Investment Adviser
Securitize's asset-management subsidiary, Securitize Capital, has registered with the SEC as an investment adviser, stepping up from an exempt reporting adviser to full regulatory oversight — public disclosure, compliance and periodic exams.
The status lets it work directly with asset managers and institutions on tokenized investment strategies. It becomes a fourth regulated pillar alongside Securitize's broker-dealer/ATS, transfer-agent and fund-administration arms.
"Asset managers and institutional investors want to work with partners that understand both the opportunity of tokenization and the obligations that come with operating in regulated markets," said Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo.
Axis Robotics has Closed a $12M Seed Funding Round
Axis Robotics has raised $12M in a seed round led by Hack VC, with Nomad Capital, Pi Network Ventures and 10K Ventures also taking part.
The startup is building a compounding "data engine" for physical AI — a closed-loop pipeline of simulation, real-world capture and human-in-the-loop training meant to solve the data-scarcity problem holding robotics back. It says 100,000+ contributors already feed the system.
Axis runs its contributor network on Base, recording wallet-linked proof-of-work on-chain, and ties into the BitRobot Network. There is no live token yet — supply and allocation remain undecided — so contributor rewards are currently points-based.
Wall Street is Racing to Trade Like Crypto: 24/7
The market that never sleeps is coming for the one that does. America already moved, the UK just followed, and the map is splitting in real time.
Korea targets 24h by 2027, Canada called it disruptive then started building it anyway. Germany warns against it, China still trades four hours a day. Everyone is heading the same way. Some just refuse to say it out loud.
World Foundation Raises $52.5M in Strategic WLD Token Sale
World Foundation, the nonprofit behind the World protocol, has raised $52.5 million through a strategic sale of WLD tokens, with all purchased tokens subject to a one-year lockup.
The funding round was led by Pantera Capital and included Bain Capital Crypto, Eightco Holdings, Selini Capital, Susquehanna Crypto, and other investors.
SparkKitty Malware Found on App Store & Google Play
A new cross-platform malware dubbed SparkKitty has been discovered on both Apple's App Store and Google Play, targeting cryptocurrency users by scanning photos for wallet recovery phrases.
Instead of monitoring your clipboard or keystrokes, SparkKitty uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to search your photo gallery for seed phrase screenshots, passwords, QR codes, and other sensitive data before sending them to attacker-controlled servers.
Thai SEC Accuses Bitkub of Hiding a $47M Hack
Thailand's SEC has filed a criminal complaint against Bitkub — the country's largest crypto exchange — and two former directors, alleging they concealed a 2021 hack from the regulator.
About $47M (1.7 billion baht) across 16 assets was drained from a Bitkub wallet in May 2021. From May to October that year, the exchange's daily filings to the SEC allegedly showed no change in holdings, masking the loss.
Bitkub says it deliberately withheld the breach to avoid triggering a bank run, not to defraud anyone. Its co-founders personally bought replacement assets in the same amounts, so it says neither the exchange nor customers lost funds — and the SEC reportedly confirmed its holdings were intact as of September 2025.
Telegram Adds Rich Text Editor & Communities
Communities link several groups, channels and bots into one unit — members see its other chats and join them instantly, with the whole set collapsed into a single chat list item. Admins mark each chat visible or hidden and can limit who adds more.
Premium gets a rich text editor: headings, tables, lists, quotes and code blocks, photos and video mid-message, and up to 32,768 characters in a single message.
Bots can now answer one person inside a group, keeping greetings, menus, errors and confirmations out of everyone else's feed. GIF search spans 350 million GIFs across 36 languages, indexed offline with open-source models and no third party involved.
Uniswap flipped the fee switch. After years of governance-only debate, LP fees now route to buy and burn UNI
The headline number: a 100M UNI retroactive burn, about 16% of circulating supply (~$320M), as if the switch had run since day one. Fee run-rate is $2 to 5M a day, among the highest in crypto outside stablecoins.
But the honest part: fees are live on only some pools so far, so today's recurring burn is thin, roughly 0.4% of supply a year. The whole thesis rides on volume. If throughput scales the way Robinhood Chain could push it, the burn runs $280 to 700M a year.
Base Launches Onchain Anti-Sybil Identity
Base, Coinbase's Ethereum L2, has launched Base Verify Onchain: a way for smart contracts to enforce one-person-one-claim and shut out bot farming and duplicate airdrop claims.
Instead of judging a wallet's history, contracts check a per-app "identity hash" drawn from a user's verified credentials, such as a linked X account or a Coinbase One membership. The same human gets the same hash across wallets, so they cannot claim twice.
It is built on Coinbase-backed onchain attestations, not zero-knowledge proofs, and is live on testnet for developers, with early users like the Bracket mini app gating its airdrop. Base itself still has no live token, though a network token is under exploration.
Morgan Stanley Launches Staked ETH and SOL ETFs
Morgan Stanley Investment Management has debuted spot Ethereum (MSSE) and Solana (MSOL) exchange-traded funds on NYSE Arca, each charging a market-low 0.14% expense ratio.
That undercuts rivals such as Grayscale's Mini Ether Trust at 0.15% and Franklin Templeton's Solana fund at 0.19%, making them the cheapest ETH and SOL funds on the market.
Both funds also stake a portion of their holdings and pass all of the staking rewards through to investors, with Morgan Stanley keeping none of the yield. The launch follows the bank's Bitcoin trust (MSBT), which gathered about $381M in roughly four months.
Emirates Launches Crypto com Pay for UAE Flight Bookings
Emirates has officially integrated Crypto com Pay, allowing eligible UAE customers to book flights using cryptocurrency through the airline's website and mobile app.
Users can now select Crypto com Pay at checkout, approve the transaction via the Crypto com app or by scanning a QR code, with payments securely settled in UAE Dirhams (AED) in compliance with local regulations.
Kolo Adds ATM Withdrawals, BTC Cashback & Transaction Notes
Kolo, a licensed European fintech platform combining a crypto wallet, exchange, personal IBAN, and virtual payment card, has introduced several new features to improve everyday payments and account management.
Users can now withdraw cash from ATMs using their Kolo card, with a maximum of $500 per withdrawal and up to three withdrawals every 24 hours. ATM withdrawals are subject to a $1.00 + 0.65% fee, while standard currency conversion applies for non-USD withdrawals.
Crypto VC Participation Falls to Lowest Level Since November 2020
Crypto venture capital participation has dropped to its lowest level in nearly six years, with only 150 unique VC firms joining funding rounds in July 2026 (as of July 28).
The figure marks a sharp decline from the May 2022 peak of 1,177 active investors, highlighting a market where capital is becoming increasingly concentrated among a smaller group of highly selective funds.
Dow Protocol Raises $9M for E-Commerce Financing
The startup is pulling real-world e-commerce financing onchain. Rather than trading yield, it packages the repayment cash flows of online merchants — think Amazon sellers waiting on payouts — into tokenized, yield-bearing vaults, with credit underwriting handled by cross-border e-commerce lender Dowsure.
That financing is already live through partner vaults on BNB Chain (via Lista DAO) and Sui (via Volo), where the yield comes from real merchant repayments rather than token emissions.
CXMT's $8.6B Public Debut: China's DRAM Leader
A chipmaker just became China's most valuable public company overnight. CXMT raised $8.6B, popped 466% on debut, and now trades above Intel by market cap.
It is China's answer to Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, and it is coming for the memory market fast. Everything you need to know.
Moonshot Releases Kimi K3, a 2.8T Open-Weight Model
Chinese AI lab Moonshot has published the model weights and technical report for Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, under a permissive open-weight license.
K3 activates about 104B parameters per token and adds native vision, a 1M-token context window and roughly 2.5x better compute efficiency than its predecessor Kimi K2, driven by a new attention design.
Moonshot also released supporting infrastructure, including its attention kernels and inference recipes. K3 is billed as the largest open-weight model to date and rivals top frontier US systems, though early coverage notes it still trails the strongest closed models. The weights are open, but training data and code are not.
GRVT Caps Perp Funding, Upgrades Earn Product
Most leveraged positions are closed because of the funding, charged every few hours with no ceiling, quietly eroding the trade. Stable Funding Perps publish the annual rate up front, a target of ~4% to high single digits, and charge it once a day.
Mark the date: GRVT lists on July 30, with both products built so that capital never has to choose between earning yield and standing ready to trade.
Treasuries & ETFs Board. Crypto Accumulation and Capital Flows
ETF demand showed continued recovery with positive but mixed flows. Public companies maintained selective treasury expansion, mainly in Ethereum.
Corporate Treasuries
- BitMine acquired ~9,946 ETH ($19.4M) in its latest weekly purchase, lifting holdings to 5.787M ETH.
- Strive added 79 BTC ($5.20M), reaching ~20,000 BTC.
- Strategy raised its USD Reserve to $3.75B, started STRC buybacks, and kept its Bitcoin holdings at 843,775 BTC.
ETF Flows
Bitcoin ETFs recorded modest net inflows early in the week that later decelerated.
Ethereum ETFs posted ~$104M net inflows for the third straight positive week and led broader crypto ETF flows.
AI's Next Trillion-Dollar Opportunity Isn't Software — It's Services
A new article from Sequoia Capital's Julien Bek argues that the next $1T AI company won't sell software, it will sell completed work, with AI operating behind the scenes.
The industry is shifting from AI copilots, which help professionals perform tasks, to AI autopilots, which deliver the end result directly. Instead of helping accountants close the books, AI companies will simply close them.
Today, software engineering accounts for nearly 50% of all AI agent usage, demonstrating that AI has already reached the point where it can handle most intelligence-heavy work autonomously. As models continue to improve, the same transition is expected across legal, finance, healthcare, insurance, IT, and procurement.
Dango Is Winding Down, L1 Shuts Off on Aug 13
Dango, a perpetuals DEX running on its own Layer-1, is shutting down after concluding there is no viable path to lasting commercial success. The team cited a short cash runway, legal and compliance delays, team departures and tough market conditions.
Trading halts on July 29 (12:00 UTC), and the Dango L1 blockchain shuts down permanently on August 13. Open positions settle at oracle prices and all balances convert to USDC.
"Despite our best effort, various reasons have led us to conclude there is no viable path to a lasting commercial success," the team said. Users should close positions and withdraw before July 29; any assets left behind will auto-return to their original Ethereum deposit addresses as USDC.
Strategy Grows Its USD Reserve to $3.75 Billion
Strategy said it added $525M to its USD reserve this week, lifting the cash pile to $3.75B — enough to cover roughly 2.1 years of its preferred-stock dividends and debt interest.
The reserve is designed to service those obligations without touching Strategy's 843,775 BTC (about $63B), a position it has held unchanged for weeks as it raised cash through share sales rather than new coin buys.
Separately, a filing shows Strategy repurchased $25M of its STRC "Stretch" variable-rate preferred — the first buyback executed under a $1B Digital Credit Securities repurchase program authorized on June 29, aimed at supporting STRC's price near its $100 par after it slid to record lows.
WEMIX's Contract Hijacked, $6.25M Illicitly Minted
An attacker seized owner privileges over the smart contract that issues WEMIX's dollar-pegged stablecoin on July 26, abnormally minting around $6.25M worth of tokens.
The freshly minted stablecoin was swapped into WEMIX and USDC, and roughly $724K was bridged off WEMIX 3.0 to Ethereum and BNB Chain before it could be stopped. No user wallets were compromised.
In response, WEMIX suspended all WEMIX 3.0 bridges (including Chainlink CCIP and the PLAY Bridge), paused affected liquidity pools and the stablecoin module, flagged the attacker's addresses and asked exchanges to freeze the funds. Blockchain security firms are tracing the flows.