upgrade

Elon Musk stated that the image and video understanding capabilities of Grok 4.6 have undergone significant upgrades.

Conflux Network announced that the v3.1.0 network hard fork upgrade will introduce multiple network improvements, including EVM compatibility updates, bug fixes, RPC changes, and security enhancements. CIP-173 is expected to be activated on August 26.

B.AI platform announces the official launch of Grok 4.6 on the B.AI API. Compared to Grok 4.5, the new version achieves a comprehensive leap in complex task handling, deep reasoning, and overall intelligence level, demonstrating significant leading performance in the GPDVal-AA V2 evaluation, further expanding the application boundaries in large-scale reasoning and high-difficulty task scenarios. This launch simultaneously opens up dual-channel access for "official" and "self-selected service providers," and introduces an exclusive 40% discount for both official and self-selected service providers, enabling developers to easily access Grok 4.6 with more flexible choices and lower costs, enjoying cutting-edge AI computing power. Starting today, users can experience the upgraded capabilities through the B.AI API.

The Bitcoin wallet Electrum has released version 4.8.1, with the official statement claiming that this update includes "important security fixes" and urging users to upgrade as soon as possible.Developers involved in reproducible builds have provided independent signatures for the binary packages on the download page to verify the consistency between the release package and the source code.

The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) of South Korea has launched a three-month project to rebuild the fraud refund system with a budget of approximately 119 million won. This upgrade aims to align with the revised Telecommunications Fraud Damage Compensation Act, which will officially take effect on October 1, and formally includes virtual assets in the categories of "damaged property" and "refundable property."The new system will support the calculation of compensation amounts based on token types and quantities, using the value of the won at the time the funds were frozen as a reference benchmark, and will also have the capability to dismantle mixed fraud funds across multiple accounts. Major exchanges such as Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and GOPAX will be required to undertake anti-fraud and victim relief obligations equivalent to those of banks, including verifying transaction purposes, monitoring suspicious funds, and freezing suspected accounts.

According to SBS, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) of South Korea has begun a comprehensive reform of its system to address compensation issues related to financial fraud, including voice phishing involving virtual assets. The FSS launched the "Financial Fraud Loss Compensation System Improvement Project" on August 6. This project aims to reform the existing compensation calculation system centered on the Korean won, in preparation for including virtual asset losses in the compensation scope starting in October this year.The current system primarily calculates compensation amounts based on losses valued in Korean won, but after the reform, a compensation ratio will be adopted, taking into account the type and quantity of virtual assets involved. Additionally, during payment suspensions, the Korean won exchange value of virtual assets will also be included in the calculations.

According to Decrypt, the Bitcoin payment processing project BTCPay Server has warned users of a serious vulnerability in its servers that is currently under active attack. Attackers may exploit this vulnerability to gain unauthorized access and cause financial loss. Administrators are required to upgrade to version 2.4.2 immediately and confirm that the server footer shows the update is complete.If an upgrade cannot be performed in a timely manner, the official recommendation is for users to temporarily shut down BTCPay Server to prevent further attacks. Additionally, BTCPay Server advises users to change any potentially exposed macaroons credentials, recreate the macaroons.db file, and refresh the authentication strings for other Lightning Network backends.

VeChain Foundation announced the entry into the next phase of the Renaissance roadmap, Interstellar. Previously, Galactica completed the EVM foundational upgrade, and Hayabusa completed the transformation of consensus and token economics. Interstellar aims to deepen the EVM compatibility of VeChainThor with the Ethereum ecosystem and expand developer capabilities.The first upgrade proposal, VIP-255, will introduce execution layer improvements compatible with Ethereum versions such as Cancun, Prague, and Osaka, including transient storage, MCOPY instruction, and cryptographic support for BLS12-381 and secp256r1. Voting will take place from August 10, 2026, 00:00 UTC to August 17, 2026, 00:00 UTC via the VeVote platform, allowing validators and eligible StarGate NFT holders to participate. This upgrade does not affect the VET and VTHO token economics, and regular holders do not need to take any action.

Starknet announced that it has completed the quantum-resistant signature transfer test, where a wallet account using a quantum-resistant signature mechanism completed a real transfer on the Starknet mainnet, with a transaction fee of about 6 cents, and can be queried through the block explorer. This account is currently an experimental, unaudited version, mainly used for research testing. StarkWare stated that this transfer benefits from the design of the Starknet account model.Unlike most blockchains that fix the signature algorithm at the protocol layer, each account on Starknet is a smart contract that can autonomously define the accepted signature schemes, allowing users to upgrade their wallets from traditional elliptic curve signatures to quantum-resistant signatures without hard forks, asset migrations, or changing addresses. StarkWare pointed out that most blockchains face quantum computing risks because wallet signatures and underlying verification systems rely on elliptic curve cryptography. Once large-scale quantum computers appear, running Shor's algorithm could potentially break the related encryption systems. Currently, the Starknet ecosystem supports a quantum-resistant signature scheme based on Falcon-512, which is part of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process, with relevant implementations promoted by ecosystem teams and organizations such as OpenZeppelin.

According to the official announcement, Bitget has upgraded the stock spot (rToken) fee structure. While maintaining a base fee rate of 0.05%, high-level VIP and PRO users can enjoy lower tier exclusive rates; using BGB to offset fees also provides a 20% discount.Among them, after applying the BGB offset, the VIP user Maker rate is as low as 0%, and the Taker rate is as low as 0.024%; the PRO user Maker rate is as low as 0.008%, and the Taker rate is as low as 0.01752%. During regular trading hours for U.S. stocks, orders will be routed to the underlying market via StockRoute and charged uniformly at the Taker rate; during weekends and holidays, internal matching periods will differentiate between Maker and Taker rates.

Bitget's licensed RWA issuance platform Reality announced a deepened cooperation with the American auditing firm The Network Firm. After the upgrade, The Network Firm will provide daily Proof of Reserve (PoR) audit reports for the rToken, a U.S. stock token issued by Reality, based on the attestation standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The aim is to verify that each issued rToken corresponds to the stocks or ETF assets held in the custody account. The underlying stocks and ETFs continue to be held by the FINRA-registered and SIPC-protected U.S. brokerage firm Alpaca Securities LLC, forming an independent and transparent structure for issuance, verification, and custody.The rToken issued by Reality currently supports 634 tokenized stocks and ETFs and is deeply integrated with the Bitget ecosystem, allowing for core scenarios such as unified account margin and collateralized lending. Previous data showed that the assets under management (AUM) of Bitget's stock token rToken exceeded $100 million one month after its launch.

Morgan Stanley has upgraded the rating of the South Korean stock market to "Overweight," with a target price of 9,000 points, implying a 36% upside from the current level.Morgan Stanley believes that the previous severe deleveraging is nearing its end, and the KOSPI valuation has fallen to historically low levels, providing investors with a more attractive entry point. Their data shows that hedge funds have completed about 75% of their deleveraging, leveraged ETFs have evaporated 70% from their peak, and the chip structure has significantly improved.Shawn Kim, head of Morgan Stanley's Asia Technology team, pointed out three recent catalysts for South Korean chip stocks in the report.First, capital expenditure. The capital management trends of Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are seen as the most important recent catalysts. The market is waiting for specific announcements from both companies regarding their "value enhancement" plans and capital returns, with the timing still unclear, but the expectations themselves have already formed a potential catalyst.Second, HBM4 pricing. Samsung Electronics recently stated that HBM4 will account for about 60% of its total HBM sales by the end of next year. If HBM4 prices reach the market expectation of over $3 per Gb, it will positively catalyze overall DRAM pricing from 2026 to 2027.Third, the iPhone 18 release cycle. The mobile segment still accounts for 30% to 40% of global DRAM demand and 25% to 30% of NAND demand. According to feedback from members of the Korean Apple supply chain (such as LG Innotek), Apple has a positive outlook on the iPhone 18 cycle, expecting a year-on-year shipment increase of 5% to 10%. The iPhone 18 will be released in September, with the first models being the Pro series (including Pro, Pro Max, and foldable), and if sales perform well, it will positively drive Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.

Bitget announced a comprehensive upgrade to its BGBTC, adding daily coin-based earnings, large-scale rapid redemption, and institutional-level risk management. This upgrade also introduces an independent Curator mechanism, with the DeFi risk management agency Gauntlet responsible for supervising the underlying earnings strategy and risk management, adding independent strategy reviews beyond asset custody to strengthen portfolio monitoring, risk control, and long-term earnings sustainability. Currently, BGBTC supports the deployment of earnings strategies on the Morph chain, further expanding multi-chain earnings channels and application scenarios.At the infrastructure level, Bitget uses Chainlink CCIP as the official cross-chain solution for BGBTC and continues the Chainlink Proof of Reserve program, providing real-time transparency and verifiable reserve guarantees for its 1:1 pegged Bitcoin. The upgraded BGBTC can still be used for contract margins, loan collateral, and participation in Launchpool and PoolX while obtaining earnings, further enhancing capital efficiency while retaining asset liquidity.

According to Jinshi reports, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that for users who wish to heavily utilize the new AI products, Apple will provide an "upgrade option."

According to official news, the prediction market Polymarket announced a significant adjustment to its settlement mechanism for cryptocurrency price fluctuation markets starting from August 7, to protect market integrity. From midnight UTC on that day, the affected markets will no longer settle based on a single price snapshot at a specific time but will instead use a time-weighted average price.Markets of different durations correspond to different TWAP windows: all cryptocurrency 5-minute markets will use a 30-second TWAP, 15-minute markets will use a 60-second TWAP, and 4-hour markets will also use a 60-second TWAP. The previous single snapshot settlement method was prone to price manipulation during periods of low liquidity, and this change is a proactive reinforcement of the market integrity system by Polymarket after facing regulatory scrutiny.To support this transition, Polymarket will inject $1 million in liquidity rewards into all affected markets throughout August. On the technical side, Chainlink TWAP testnet data streams are now available, and mainnet data streams along with Polymarket real-time data stream services will go live on August 4, at which point developers can access TWAP prices directly through Chainlink Data Streams or Polymarket's public WebSocket.

According to official news, Websea has completed a major upgrade of the contract insurance airdrop rules on July 30, 2026. After the upgrade, the insurance α pool will airdrop a fixed amount of 1 USDT for new nodes each period, and the insurance β pool will airdrop a fixed amount of 0.7 USDT for new nodes each period, with a maximum of 100 airdrops for both pools, and the total amount is fixed and transparent.Websea's contract insurance aims to provide an additional risk buffer for every opening position, helping users reduce risk concerns amid fluctuations in the derivatives market. This upgrade focuses on simplifying the rules and enhancing transparency, allowing users to calculate the amount for each period, the number of airdrops, and the total cumulative amount in advance, without facing fluctuating variables.

According to Jinshi reports, SpaceXAI announced that on August 5, it will upgrade Grok-Voice-Latest from version 1 to version 2.

According to VentureBeat, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has received its largest update since its launch in November 2024, managed by the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation. This update completes the transition to a fully stateless architecture, allowing MCP servers to be deployed behind standard load balancers without relying on "sticky routing" or shared session state, thereby simplifying large-scale cloud-native and Kubernetes deployments.In terms of security, the new version of MCP enforces validation of the issuer (iss) parameter for OAuth and OpenID Connect to prevent mix-up attacks and introduces enterprise-hosted authorization extensions to support unified identity governance for enterprises. The protocol also establishes a formal deprecation policy, ensuring that features are announced for deprecation at least 12 months before their earliest removal. MCP Apps and MCP Tasks have also been upgraded to official extensions, supporting servers in providing interactive interfaces to AI clients and executing interruptible, resumable long-running asynchronous tasks through persistent task handles. According to MCP co-creator David Soria Parra, the related SDK's weekly download volume has reached approximately 250 million, doubling in the past six months.

Binance announced that it will support the BNB Smart Chain (BEP20) network upgrade and hard fork.To accommodate this arrangement, the platform will suspend deposits and withdrawals for this network starting from July 30, 2026, at 05:55 (UTC), and wallet maintenance will begin at 06:00 (UTC), expected to last for about 1 hour.