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ChianCatcher news, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan stated during an interview on a blog program under Cypherpunk that cryptocurrency is not only a business matter but also an ideological one. The banking and political systems have failed and need to withdraw to self-sovereignty, and the missing part is privacy.He pointed out that the two major innovations of Bitcoin are programmability represented by Ethereum and privacy represented by Zcash. From 2009 to 2017, Bitcoin's viability was proven; from 2017 to 2025, programmability's viability will be proven; and now, from around 2025 to 2030, is the privacy phase. Privacy means using ZK encryption for everything, including ZKYC, ZK DEX, and ZK smart contracts, to achieve the minimum necessary information. This may require modifications to the base layer, new L1, or entirely new companies, and ZK can technically attract high-IQ talent like AI.

According to Tech Funding News, the crypto travel platform Entravel has completed a $7.5 million financing round, led by Ethereal Ventures and Finality Capital, with participation from GSR, Varrock, G1 Ventures, Seier Capital, Veris Ventures, Funfair Ventures, and WTG Ventures.Entravel provides travel booking systems for over 40 brands, including Kraken and MetaMask, covering 300 million users, with an average booking conversion rate exceeding 10%. Founded in 2026, Entravel operates three interconnected businesses: MocatravelX directly collaborates with hotels to obtain inventory and pricing; RateStellar integrates supply from other channels, using AI to match hotels and room types from different suppliers, covering over 2.2 million hotels; on this basis, Entravel offers a white-label booking layer for partners, allowing them to provide hotel booking services to users without needing to build their own supplier network.

According to South Korean media Edaily, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of South Korea announced that the amendment to the enforcement decree of the Specific Financial Information Act, aimed at strengthening regulation of the cryptocurrency industry, has been approved by the State Council.The main changes of the new regulations include: regulatory agencies will conduct stricter reviews of the qualifications of major shareholders of exchanges, while requiring that the debt ratio of exchanges must not exceed 200%. In addition, the previous Travel Rule only applied to transactions over 1 million won, but will now cover all transfers without a monetary threshold. Transactions involving overseas exchanges and personal wallets will be subject to differentiated control based on risk levels. The new regulations also require exchanges to be equipped with professional personnel and necessary equipment, and to establish internal control systems, with existing exchanges granted a one-year grace period. Some provisions will take effect on August 20, while those related to the Travel Rule will be officially implemented six months later.

Bitcoin.com published an article stating that the model of Web3 startups conducting corporate pilots by paying traditional financial institutions "is a dead end," with 95% of pilot projects failing to reach production environments. Web2 companies only want the idle venture capital and revenue sharing from startups, rather than their open-source innovations. The article argues that true defensiveness comes from a "structural moat"—compliance licenses, deep network liquidity, or distribution lock-ins that Web2 engineering teams cannot replicate.The article cites recent cases: Stripe was acquired for $1.1 billion after proving an annual cross-border transaction volume of $5 billion with Bridge, and Robinhood acquired Bitstamp for $200 million to gain 50 global regulatory licenses and institutional liquidity, rather than maintaining long-term vendor relationships. The article predicts that the next round of B2C expansion will present an 80/20 pattern: 80% of retail liquidity will be controlled by 3 to 5 Web2/fintech giants such as Visa, Stripe, Robinhood, PayPal, and BlackRock, providing compliance and fiat entry; 20% will be an unlicensed DeFi sandbox for validating initial product-market fit. The growth path for startups should be to first validate PMF in the DeFi sandbox, then integrate or sell to the few Web2 gateways controlling the 80% distribution layer. The article believes that the current protocol cancellations and wave of startup closures are part of a "necessary market cleanup."

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.

On July 17, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot submitted Bill No. 921 to the Senate, proposing to incorporate the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) into French law and to automatically exchange encrypted data with 48 countries that have signed related agreements.The exchanged information includes specific transactions, user names, addresses, tax identification numbers, places of residence, and the cumulative transaction value during the reporting period. EU member states have prepared to conduct relevant data exchanges based on the DAC-8 directive, which will take effect on September 30, 2027. After the bill is approved, the French government will accelerate the collection of encrypted data. A Chainalysis report indicates that by 2026, France had recorded 30 publicly known violent robberies of crypto assets; the report states that a tax official in the Paris region is suspected of selling data on high-net-worth crypto holders.

According to a16z crypto, the monthly spending on crypto payment cards has grown from a niche scale to $759 million. These cards allow users to pay with cryptocurrency in all scenarios that support traditional card organizations, with stablecoins converted to local currency at the point of sale, making it no different for merchants than regular card transactions.As of July 31, looking at the spending composition from various card programs, RedotPay has long held the majority share, while EtherFi, KAST, Karta, and others have gradually increased their share since the end of 2025. a16z crypto states that crypto cardholders do not need traditional bank accounts and can deposit stablecoins with the issuer or hold them directly through self-custody. These cards have expanded global users' access to dollar accounts and provided a convenient spending method for stablecoin holders.

According to The Kobeissi Letter analysis, cryptocurrency trading activity continues to decline. Data from 44 spot exchanges tracked by Kaiko shows that last week, the average daily trading volume for cryptocurrency spot trading dropped to about $15 billion, the lowest level of the year, down approximately 70% from the peak in January. In comparison, there were two trading days in February where the trading volume exceeded $100 billion.It states that since December 2025, the trend of average daily trading volume has decreased by about 50% to $20 billion, also the lowest level of the year. Meanwhile, trading volume remains highly concentrated, with the largest 6 exchanges accounting for over 60% of total trading activity, and liquidity in the cryptocurrency market is drying up.

According to CoinDesk, cryptocurrency trading platforms are expanding into traditional finance by offering perpetual futures linked to stocks, indices, and commodities, with related trading volume reaching $1.32 trillion in the first five months of 2026.Stock-linked perpetual futures allow traders to gain around-the-clock price exposure to assets like the S&P 500 without holding the underlying stocks and without shareholder protections. This product is aimed at institutions seeking low-friction trading and retail investors looking for access channels.Major platforms like Coinbase and Binance are building an "everything exchange" model, integrating crypto assets, stocks, and derivatives into a single account, including using tokenized stock positions as collateral. Large funds remain cautious about decentralized trading venues.

According to Coin Bureau, the consumption amount of cryptocurrency payment cards reached $705.5 million in July, an increase of 12.2% compared to June, setting a new historical high and achieving growth for the fifth consecutive month.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) company Zama CEO Rand Hindi stated on X on Monday that the company has achieved benchmark results of 1,000 confidential transactions per second on GPUs, an increase of about 5,000 times compared to the 0.2 transactions per second demonstrated at ETHcc in 2022. Hindi mentioned that the cost of running an FHE node is approximately $0.000004 per ERC7984 transaction, significantly lower than zero-knowledge proofs, but this comparison has not been independently verified. The benchmark has not yet been activated on any mainnet, is self-reported data from the company, and the testing methods have not been published, with plans to go live by the end of the year.Hindi also set long-term goals: 10,000 tps by 2028 and 100,000 tps by 2030. Zama has been active recently: on July 24, a confidential RFQ exchange product was launched, which within weeks shielded over $121 million USDT on Ethereum, collaborated with Elliptic to enhance compliance screening for confidential transactions, and co-founded the Confidential Token Association with OpenZeppelin and Inco to standardize encrypted ERC-20 tokens. Zama previously completed a $57 million Series B funding round.

Anthropic announced that the Claude Mythos Preview model has made breakthroughs in cryptographic research, discovering improved attack methods against the post-quantum digital signature candidate HAWK. HAWK is a post-quantum signature candidate solicited by NIST to combat quantum computer attacks, which has already passed two rounds of expert review. However, Claude reduced the effective key strength of HAWK-256 from 2^64 to 2^38 in just 60 hours, significantly lowering the theoretical cost of cracking. HAWK has not yet been deployed in practice, and this attack currently does not affect any production systems.Claude also discovered an improved attack against 7-round AES, achieving a speed increase of 200 to 800 times. During the research process, Claude independently completed literature reviews, mathematical reasoning, and experimental validation with limited guidance from cryptographers. The HAWK attack took about 60 hours and had an API cost of approximately $100,000; the AES attack was completed independently by Claude, which generated about 1 billion tokens before proposing core innovative ideas. Anthropic researchers then spent hundreds of hours validating the results. Anthropic stated that AI models can now help identify significant flaws in cryptographic algorithms, and the cryptography community may face bottlenecks similar to those in the software vulnerability field—AI-generated research results far exceed human verification capabilities. Anthropic has collaborated with academic institutions to launch the CryptanalysisBench benchmark and coordinated disclosures with NIST authors and government partners. The research team has achieved preliminary results on algorithms such as LEA and Serpent-128. Anthropic warns that as AI capabilities improve, actual attacks against deployed systems may be discovered in the future, necessitating the establishment of response mechanisms in advance.

HSBC released the "Affluent Investor Snapshot 2026" report, which shows that a survey of nearly 10,000 high-net-worth investors worldwide indicates that the average allocation to crypto assets in 2026 is 6%, a decrease of 1 percentage point year-on-year; however, 45% of respondents still plan to increase their allocation in the next 12 months, while 40% plan to maintain it.The allocation to crypto assets for investors in Singapore and Malaysia is 5% and 6%, respectively, both unchanged from the previous year; during the same period, global cash allocation has dropped to 19%, with funds continuing to shift towards stocks, gold, and alternative investments.

According to TechCrunch, Apple has been sued over App Store security issues. Three plaintiffs claim they were induced to download a fraudulent cryptocurrency wallet app, Sparrow Wallet, which is not officially available for iOS. The plaintiffs have incurred losses totaling over $1.8 million—James Ramirez lost approximately $875,000, Christopher Ellis lost about $840,000, and Jalen Delgado lost around $120,000.The lawsuit accuses Apple of knowingly allowing fraudulent apps to remain in the App Store while using its security promises as a marketing tool to resist third-party app stores and sideloading. The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial, damages, and public disclosure of App Store risks. Apple has not commented on the lawsuit but stated that counterfeit apps violate its guidelines and will be swiftly removed. Currently, there are no counterfeit versions of Sparrow Wallet in the App Store, and over 371,000 submissions of plagiarized or misleading apps have been rejected in 2025.

According to former Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett, one of the largest police unions in the United States, the National Fraternal Order of Police, has shifted its support to the latest version of the Clarity Act, stating that the revised provisions of the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) address its previous concerns and preserve law enforcement's ability to investigate cryptocurrency crimes.The report notes that the text of the latest version of the BRCA, released on Wednesday, has not changed, and it is currently unclear what specific revisions the union is referring to.

According to tracking data from the Web3 asset data platform RootData, in the past 7 days, the crypto media platform BSC News has been the project that X (Twitter) top figures have unfollowed the most. The new influential figures on X who have unfollowed this project include well-known cryptocurrency trader Ansem (@blknoiz06) and cryptocurrency trader Ash Crypto (@AshCrypto). In addition, the project that X top figures have unfollowed the most also includes Ostium.

According to CoinDesk, hardware wallet company Ledger has launched an open-source toolkit called Ledger Agent Stack, which supports AI agents to interact with crypto wallets by reading balances, preparing transactions, and suggesting actions, with all transactions requiring user approval on Ledger hardware devices.Ledger stated that this release is the first step in its AI roadmap, aiming to integrate hardware-based security mechanisms into AI-driven crypto applications and to prevent autonomous agents from transferring funds or accessing sensitive credentials without human approval.

According to Etoday, the Financial Services Commission of South Korea has announced a draft amendment to the "Special Law on Preventing Telecom Financial Fraud and Returning Victim Funds," planning to include funds from phone scams that are transferred to crypto assets within the scope of victim compensation, and to clarify the standards for the return and valuation of crypto assets. The relevant regulations are expected to officially take effect on October 1.According to the new regulations, if the frozen assets are cryptocurrencies, victims will generally be compensated based on the type and quantity of assets; if the defrauded assets differ in form from the frozen assets, compensation will be made in the form of assets that existed at the time the account was frozen. In cases where cash and crypto assets are mixed, the regulatory authorities will value the crypto assets based on the market price at the time of freezing to determine the final compensation amount.The Financial Services Commission of South Korea stated that clarifying the form of returned assets and the timing of valuation will help achieve faster and fairer compensation in complex cases involving mixed funds from multiple victims. It is reported that the public consultation for the draft amendment will continue until August 24.

According to a report from Hongxing News, an investigation report leaked from a scam park in Myanmar shows that global telecom fraud is accelerating towards an "AI industrialization + cross-border encrypted payment" system. The scam network completes fund circulation through cryptocurrency and uses automated tools based on large models for multi-language script generation, identity disguise, and emotional manipulation.According to the investigation analysis, these systems extensively utilize OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini at the functional level to support "scaled social fraud." The funding side achieves rapid laundering and transfer through on-chain payments and cross-border channels, forming a dual structure of "AI customer acquisition + encrypted settlement," which gives the fraud industry a high degree of automation and transnational diffusion capability. In addition, Starlink, owned by Musk, has become the number one network service provider for the scam park in Myanmar, with American ISP providers carrying nearly one-fifth of the park's traffic.In response to the related accusations, OpenAI stated that the behavior of scammers using ChatGPT is highly similar to that of ordinary users, making identification difficult. However, they have banned about 100,000 suspicious accounts monthly through behavioral pattern recognition and risk control systems. Google stated that its AI models have safety barriers in place and emphasized its commitment to "responsible AI development" to limit the tools' use for fraud and other illegal purposes.