Cryptopolitan

Darcy, a blockchain asset-recovery investigator and co-founder of FlashRescue, has revealed that targeted money slipped out of a wallet while Tether was in the middle of freezing it.
So far in 2026, Circle has faced multiple rounds of criticism for freezing flagged or stolen funds too rarely. And now, Tether, which has long been praised for freezing funds, is receiving criticism for how cleanly the freezes it does run actually execute.
What is Tether being criticized for?
Darcy from FlashRescue, who posts on X (formerly Twitter) as @DarcyAri and works on joint investigations with partner firms, wrote on August 6, 2026, that during a recent case, the flagged funds at one address were allowed to be moved even as the freeze was being carried out by Tether. That delay reduced the total amount that they could freeze.
The stablecoin issuer has long been praised for its speed in freezing funds, especially compared to its main rival, Circle (USDC). However, this new criticism suggests that during the execution of Tether’s freezes, there is a significant time gap between proposal and finalization on the blockchain.
Circle’s problem has been inaction. CEO Jeremy Allaire told a press conference in Seoul that the USDC issuer will only freeze a wallet “at the direction of law enforcement or the courts.”
On-chain investigator ZachXBT has pointed to more than a dozen cases since 2022, including the roughly $280 million Drift Protocol exploit tied to North Korea, where Circle sat on its freeze power, and about $420 million in illicit funds got away.
Wisconsin prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Circle after it said it could not comply with a warrant to recover a scam victim’s USDC.
Is there really a gap in Tether’s freeze execution?
An analysis of 2,955 Tether freeze events on the Ethereum and TRON networks revealed the average time between a freeze proposal and its execution is 2 hours, 16 minutes, and 15 seconds.
The freeze mechanism is controlled by a multisignature wallet, which is the root cause of the delay.
The analysis found that at least 60 addresses completely emptied their holdings before the freeze could take effect, moving a total of $20.4 million in USDT. These transfers started, on average, just 14 minutes after the freeze proposal was submitted, with the main funds moved within 15 minutes.
Additionally, another 113 addresses managed to transfer a portion of their assets, totaling approximately $35.5 million, before the freeze was executed.
The clearest public example of this gap in Tether’s system lies in the company’s July action against Iran’s central bank. After OFAC sanctioned four TRON wallets that had taken in more than $165 million in stablecoins, Tether locked $131 million of it, but roughly $34 million was already gone by the time the block hit.
Granted, the amount that was lost is a small share of a large seizure, as Tether’s Iran-linked freezes now total about $475 million, including a separate $344 million lock in April, but a freeze mechanism with such a large gap can be manipulated by a sophisticated actor.
Tether has said that it coordinates “directly with investigators during active cases, rather than reacting after funds have been dispersed,” and reports working with more than 340 law enforcement agencies across 65 countries on over 2,300 cases, helping freeze more than $4.4 billion in assets.
In an August 4 post about the Gate exchange theft, Darcy said that recovering lost assets becomes close to hopeless once the stolen funds land in an address and blends with unrelated money, because Tether will rarely freeze a pool it cannot cleanly attribute.
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OKX birjası tərəfindən yaradılan Ethereum layer-2 şəbəkəsi X Layer 2026-cı ilin yayında ən yeni DeFi uğur hekayəsi kimi meydana çıxıb: zəncir $100 milyon DeFi ümumi dəyər kilidlənməsi (TVL) və $2 milyard stabilkoin tədarükü səviyyələrini aşdıqdan sonra.
X Layer mərhələ təkmilləşdirmələri şəbəkə Aave və Uniswap DeFi protokollarını inteqrasiya etdikdən sonra gəldi; bu ikilinin yarısı Robinhood Chain-in 1 iyul tarixli startından sonra onun isti debütünü işə salan əsas katalizatorlardan biri oldu.
Cryptopolitan-ın o dövrdə bildirdiyi kimi Robinhood Chain hələ Aave-i inteqrasiya etməsə də, Robinhood Chain Uniswap və rəqib kreditləşdirmə protokolu Morpho-ni qoşaraq canlı yayına çıxdıqdan sonra doqquz gün ərzində 220,000-dən çox günlük treyder və 1 milyard dollarlıq kumulyativ həcmə çatdı.

Kite Foundation 6 avqustda X-də bildirib ki, o, Ethereum mainnetində işləyən KITE tokeninə yönəlmiş hücumu aşkar edib dayandırıb. Bildirilib ki, heç bir token ələ keçirilməyib. Erkən 2026-cı ildə ortaya çıxan azsaylı yeni tokenlərdən biri kimi Top 100-ə yüksələn bir layihə üçün insident, hakerliklə yadda qalan yayda arzuolunmaz bir qeyddir.
KITE indi Boltz, AQUA, ZEUS və son iki həftə ərzində yoxlanılan və ya vəsaitləri boşaldılan artan sayda DeFi protokollarına qoşulur.
Heç bir sikkə itirilməyib, amma xəbərdarlıq mainnetdən gəlib.

Yaponiyanın ilk lisenziyalı yen stablkoininin Tokiodakı emitenti olan JPYC B raundunun uzadılmasını bağlayıb və maliyyələşdirmə həcmini təxminən 6 milyard yenə (təxminən 38 milyon ABŞ dolları) çatdırıb.
Raundun tərkibinə logistika qrupu AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings də daxildir və yeni investor kimi iştirak edir. Şirkət həmçinin JPYC tokenindən istifadə edərək təxminən 2,300 nəfərin xidmət haqqı və maaşlarını ödəməyi planlaşdırır.
JPYC nədir?
JPYC rəqəmsal tokendir; o, 2025-ci ilin oktyabrında istifadəyə verilib və həmişə 1 Yapon yeninə bərabərdir. JPYC Yaponiyanın ilk qeydiyyatdan keçmiş yen stablkoinidir və hər bir JPYC tokeni ehtiyatda saxlanılan real yen depozitləri və Yaponiya hökumətinin istiqrazları ilə təmin edilir.

Europe’s crypto cleanup has opened new doors for fraudsters. According to EU officials, crooks pretending to be regulatory authorities and licensed exchanges have increased their activities after the July 1 deadline for compliance with Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), which required unlicensed businesses to stop operating and drove customers to look for compliant alternatives.
The migration—not crypto prices—is the bigger story. As hundreds of firms stop serving EU investors, many users are being asked to move accounts or assets, creating the uncertainty that impersonation scams thrive on. In the meantime, cryptocurrency markets continue to experience stability with Bitcoin trading around $64,700 and Ether at $1,910 on the morning of August 6.
Scammers exploit MiCA transition
MiCA’s transition phase came to an end on July 1, and crypto firms lacking authorization to operate as crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) could not legally provide services to customers within the EU and EEA anymore.
This shift has prompted many users to take their assets into a licensed exchange or self-custody wallet. Cybersecurity professionals have been warning for years about the risks associated with large migrations owing to the fact that the average investor is expecting to see emails, proof of identity, and instructions on how to transfer the money. The criminals would just copy these messages.
The Financial Times reported that French regulators, Dutch authorities and those at the EU have all said that there has been an increase in these scams. The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) has warned that investors who are looking for licensed providers could be targeted.
How the fake regulators operate
Stéphane Pontoizeau, head of market intermediaries and infrastructure supervision at France’s Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), reportedly stated. The transition has created “an opportunity for scammers more than usual.”
French government has revealed instances of law violators passing off as AMF agents and directing investors to counterfeit websites made to look like government services.
European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued a similar alert after criminals began using ESMA’s name, logo, and branding in their phishing schemes. The regulatory body has assured that official communications always come from an email address ending with @esma.europa.eu and that the authorities would never ask investors to transfer cryptocurrency for compliance purposes.
🛑 #Fraud alert: scammers are impersonating #ESMA and exploiting the end of the #MiCA transition!
❌ Don’t engage with suspicious messages
📤 Report scams to your national authorities
🛡️ Verify sources.
Official ESMA emails → @esma.europa.eu
Website → https://t.co/TrxPfYfR1Y pic.twitter.com/MaMIUoyO4c
— ESMA – EU Securities Markets Regulator 🇪🇺 (@ESMAComms) July 9, 2026
According to experts specializing in security, these scams make use of psychological techniques rather than technical hacks to deceive their victims. Criminals use official brand logos, regulatory terms, and create pressure on the victims to make them act quickly in order to avoid being in violation of any law. Verifying the instructions by going to the regulator’s website rather than replying to the messages or emails is one of the most efficient means of protection.
EU crypto migration fuels phishing
The extent of the implementation of MiCA clarifies why the swindlers are putting their emphasis on the transition.
As of July 31, MiCA’s registry reported 338 registered CASPs, up from about 194 in May, which means an increase of approximately 74% in three months. Still, this amount only represents a tiny percentage of more than 3,000 crypto companies that were registered under national licenses before. According to VASPnet, it is estimated that more than 1,700 companies will cease operating for EU clients eventually.
The imbalance has resulted in a large proportion of investors flocking to a few licensed platforms. Every campaign promoting the migration from the old to the new platform provides fraudsters with another opportunity to masquerade as the rightful destination for displaced users.
Binance was one of those who suffered from losing the MiCA license ahead of time and terminating services for users in the EU. Clients from unlicensed major platforms are forced to update their accounts, verify their identities and transfer their assets. This is when they are the most vulnerable to phishing.
Various national regulators are revealing the names of violators. Belgium’s Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) has raised awareness among the general public about different unauthorized crypto businesses while reminding investors that their investments in cryptocurrency are usually not eligible for compensation.
A trend that predates the deadline
Impersonation scams were not initiated by MiCA, but it gave a much-needed opportunity to fraudsters.
Chainalysis predicts that scam and fraudulent activities related to cryptocurrencies raked in around $17 billion in illegal revenue in 2025 as AI-powered social engineering techniques are used to enhance the effectiveness of phishing attacks through counterfeit websites, phony customer support agents and emails that look authentic.
This lesson has applications beyond Europe, as important legal changes, whether related to new licensing rules or even upcoming exit from the exchanges (moving from one platform to another), create opportunities for redirecting clients, which lasts for a short period of time that fraudsters are quick to exploit. Although MiCA is supposed to boost investors’ protection over time, its introduction shows that regulatory changes in the industry can result in short-term risks, which means that it is equally important for investors to check who they work with and whether they use licensed platforms.

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Honq Konqda polis Fun Coffee kriptosxeminin çökməsi ilə bağlı itkilərin ilkin olaraq qorxulandan daha çox ola biləcəyini etiraf edib.
Yenilənmiş rəqəm 104 milyon HK$ (təxminən 13 milyon $) bir gün sonra rəsmi bəyanatlarda və yerli hesabatlarda görünməyə başlayıb; həmin gün Honq Konq polisi qonşu şəhərlərdə, o cümlədən Makаoda, səlahiyyətli orqanlarla birgə reydlər keçirib.
İndiyədək Koulun Bay, Tsim Şa Tzui, Mong Kok və Tsuen Van ərazilərində aparılan reydlər zamanı təxminən 147,000 HK$ nağd pul, 16 bank kartı, altı telefon və şübhəli mənfəət kimi təxminən 610,000 HK$ məbləğində vəsait ələ keçirilib.

On Wednesday, Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest bought about $17.3 million of Circle stock and ~$20 million of SpaceX stock.
Both buys landed on the same day SpaceX plunged 13.6% on a jump in AI spending.
Circle beats on profit but misses on revenue
Ark bought 273,343 Circle shares split among the Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK), the Ark Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW), and the Ark Blockchain & Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF).
Circle closed nearly flat that day, up 0.05% to $63.28, meaning the stake was worth around $17.3 million.
According to Ark’s disclosures, the USDC issuer sits ninth in ARKK’s holdings with a 3.68% weight worth $223.4 million. Ark limits any one position to 10% of a fund, so it’s diversified across its ETFs, and there’s still room to add.
In the second quarter, total revenue and reserve income for Circle reached $701 million, a 7% increase year-over-year. The figure was less than the $712 million to $718 million analysts had modeled. CRCL dropped about 3% in premarket trading before bouncing back.
Adjusted earnings were 18 cents a share, versus a consensus of 16 cents, and net income from continuing operations was $48 million. Adjusted EBITDA was up 8% to $143 million. Total USDC in circulation grew 19% to $73.3 billion, with onchain transaction volume increasing 151% to $14.8 trillion.
Circle’s reserve income, which is the money it earns on the assets backing USDC, was $668 million, up 5% from a year ago. But the yield on those reserves fell 66 basis points. Circle is sitting on more reserves and making less from each dollar of them.
Circle’s Arc blockchain is scheduled to launch on the public mainnet on September 16, with BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, and Mastercard listed among founding validators.
SpaceX sinks 13.6% on a sixfold capex jump
Ark bought 181,830 SpaceX shares in ARKK, the Ark Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (ARKQ), ARKW, and the Ark Space & Defense Innovation ETF (ARKX), amounting to a ~$20 million stake.
That order came as SpaceX dropped 13.6% to $108.27, below its $135 IPO price. Earnings coverage from Cryptopolitan said revenue had soared 92% year over year to $7.8 billion, along with a $541 million net loss.
Investors were spooked by spending after capital expenditures rose to $18.4 billion, a sixfold increase in the quarter, mostly to build out AI infrastructure.
SpaceX expects $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, or possibly 2029, ahead of an earlier 2031 target, Elon Musk told the call.
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Meta released Muse Code (beta), a terminal-based coding agent, on Wednesday. The company’s own charts show its model beating OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Antigravity on most coding tests but losing to Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 on every benchmark Meta released.
Muse Code trails Opus 5 but adds a crash-safe log
Muse Code is powered by Muse Spark 1.2, an update to the coding model Meta opened up to U.S. developers in July.
Muse Spark 1.2 lags behind Opus 5 on the coding benchmarks Meta presented but outperforms Codex and Antigravity on most of them. Meta said the model was its “next step toward the frontier, with larger and much more capable models on the way.”
The company says that Version 1.2 is better at code generation, debugging, and understanding large codebases after it scaled up compute spent on coding tasks during training.
In one case study, the model rewrote GPU kernels for NVIDIA Hopper chips over more than 1,000 tool calls and for as long as 24 hours, working from a baseline it was told not to copy from existing libraries.
Muse Code maintains a local event log that records all model calls, tool runs, approvals, and edits. “This single source of truth makes the runtime replay-exact and restart-safe,” Meta wrote in its blog post referring to the log.
If a crash occurs, the agent can pick up where it left. The agent also keeps background subagents running for an entire session.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, wrote in a post, “When a job is big enough, it fans out to separate sub-agents working in parallel in isolated worktrees.” He continued, “Your working copy is never touched. In testing we had it build six features for a game simultaneously with no collisions.”
Releasing Muse Code in beta today. It’s a terminal coding agent that takes on complete software engineering tasks across large repos: planning changes, writing code, validating the results. Powered by Muse Spark 1.2, a coding-focused model update. pic.twitter.com/xqavk41w6v
— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) August 5, 2026
/plan, /grill, and Meta’s bet on cost
Muse Code has several built-in commands. /plan turns a request into an approval-gated plan, /grill stress tests that plan until it sticks, and /goal drives towards the completion of the stated goal.
Developers are able to install the agent on macOS or Linux with a single curl command. Muse Spark 1.2 is also available via the Meta Model API.
The model and the agent work as a pair. The Muse Code toolset keeps them compatible.
Some of the training data was generated by the older Muse Spark 1.1, generating hard coding problems and grading candidate answers. This is a loop Meta says helped the newer model closely follow instructions.
Meta is telling investors it expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion this year on chips, data centers, and other infrastructure.
With Opus 5 out of reach on the benchmarks, the company is competing on price instead. A larger Meta AI model, codenamed Watermelon, is still in training.
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Federal hakim Apple-ın ticarət sirlərinə dair iddiasını rədd etməlidir, OpenAI çərşənbə günü bildirib. Şirkət iddia edir ki, iş mühəndisləri saxlaya bilməməsi və AI-ni çatdırmaq (buraxmaq) iqtidarında olmamasının ört-basdırıdır.
İddiaların rədd edilməsi barədə ərizə bildirir ki, OpenAI və iki keçmiş Apple əməkdaşı müsahibələr zamanı gizli məlumat götürüb ticarət sirlərini oğurlamağa cəhd ediblər. 31 səhifəlik sənəddə “fail” sözünün müxtəlif formalarından təxminən 50 dəfə istifadə olunur və mübahisəni Apple-ın öz problemləri ilə əlaqədar qəzəblənib hücum etməsi kimi təqdim edir.
OpenAI-nin ərizəsi “fail” sözünə əsaslanır

Meta entered the AI coding race on August 5 with Muse Code, a terminal-based coding agent, and Muse Spark 1.2, its coding-focused AI model, taking direct aim at Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
Meta claims that Muse Code is designed for software development on extensive codebases rather than creating single code snippets. Unlike its open-weight Llama models, Muse Code is paid software for macOS and Linux that integrates closely with Muse Spark 1.2.
The CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the agent is able to execute “complete software engineering tasks across large repos: planning changes, writing code, validating the results.” He added that internal testing showed that the agent is capable of creating six different game features at the same time with no issues, while suggesting that there will be other open-weight AI software launches in the future.
Where Meta stands in a market it mostly watched
Meta is making its way into a market where companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are key players, and some startups, like Cursor, have already witnessed a need for AI-based software engineering tools.
Meta has observed that Muse Spark 1.2 may be competitive in some ways, but it is far from being the market leader. It could only score 82.9% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, beating GPT-5.6 Terra and Grok 4.5 but losing to Anthropic’s Opus 5 on this benchmark. Muse Spark 1.2 showed mediocre performance on the DeepSWE 1.1 benchmark as well, achieving third place, with Opus 5 being the winner.
Third-party tests yielded the same result. Muse Spark 1.2 ranks number 14 out of 186 models according to Artificial Analysis in terms of Intelligence Index, scoring 54, which is above the median of 32. It experiences good latency and has a relatively low price, meaning that Meta is focusing more on the balance between performance and price than being the top performance model.
How Muse Spark 1.2 prices against DeepSeek’s V4
Pricing could become one of Meta’s biggest competitive advantages—if developers accept the tradeoff.
Reuters, citing Artificial Analysis, reported that DeepSeek V4-Flash is the least expensive widely used AI model to run in benchmark tests, making the DeepSeek V4 family a key pricing benchmark for competing frontier models.
Muse Spark 1.2 has two different pricing options. Its Standard Pricing for API use is $1.25 per million input tokens, $0.15 for cached input tokens, and $4.25 per million output tokens. Meta offers its Contributor price for approved prompts and responses, bringing the prices down significantly to $0.10 for input tokens, $0.01 for cached input tokens, and $0.20 for output tokens.
DeepSeek charges $0.14, $0.0028, and $0.28 for V4-Flash for one million input, cached input, and output tokens, respectively. As for V4-Pro, the prices are $0.435, $0.0145, and $0.87, respectively, depending on peak and off-peak times as per the API description.
The above comparison shows two different approaches to pricing. When it comes to regular pricing, Muse Spark 1.2 is more expensive in comparison to both DeepSeek models. However, under the Contributor tier, Meta offers a lower price for input and output as compared to both V4-Flash and V4-Pro, which makes it one of the cheapest products for eligible users who are ready to share their data.
The price benefit of DeepSeek might not last forever. Reports say that DeepSeek is planning to apply a major price hike in its AI services that hasn’t been revealed yet. If the new prices are introduced, it might close the gap between DeepSeek and other strong players in the industry.
The bet on persistent background agents
The distinguishing feature of Meta’s agent might be its architecture rather than its benchmark results.
As per the company’s engineering notes, Muse uses persistent background agents to keep the background context of the repositories during each development session, rather than restarting from zero during each request. When dealing with larger projects, Muse conveys the tasks to be carried out in numerous isolated Git worktrees, so that sub-agents can run their tasks without affecting the primary workspace of the developer.
Meta is also focused on reliability. Every model call, tool run, and file edit is logged in a local event log, enabling interrupted sessions to continue from a checkpoint instead of starting over. The company has tested this system on more than 1,000 tool calls throughout a 24-hour GPU kernel engineering job, emphasizing its focus on long-running autonomous software engineering.
The launch also escalates the competition in the worldwide AI sector. Meta’s arrival allows software developers one more dependable marketplace contender in addition to Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepSeek, putting pressure on AI suppliers to contend as far as coding skills and pricing models are considered. This could lead to quicker product launches and lower inference costs as well as greater availability of advanced AI programming tools that aid software engineering.

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The time is running out for the CLARITY Act before the Senate takes its recess on August 7, and the impact of this delay is being felt differently in the crypto space. Major firms are managing to raise funds, but smaller companies, DeFi projects, and community banks are still expecting the appropriate regulations, which, it seems, will come up only in 2027.
That disparity became clear this week when Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest increased its stake in Coinbase and Circle Internet, according to Investor’s Business Daily, whereas Senate Majority Leader John Thune said nothing except that he was looking for an initial vote before the week was over. Circle managed to gain federal approval for its national trust bank back in July, according to InvestorIdeas. Various firms that can adapt to the regulatory landscape are getting advantages over others while the new framework is still not finalized.
A four-week runway that never opened
As per Yahoo Finance’s Alex Ioannou, a combined Senate draft was supposed to happen approximately on July 13 and have a floor action on July 20, after which the lawmakers would have about a month until the August recess. However, since the Senate rules require 60 votes to break a filibuster, Republicans will still need Democrats’ votes.
On May 14, the Senate Banking Committee moved forward with its proposal of the bill with support from all Republicans and two Democrats. Later, the Democrats demanded an ethics requirement regarding senior government members, which would prevent them from being involved in the crypto business. Despite this condition, the merged draft has not incorporated this wording yet, while Yahoo Finance claims that the lawmakers are still discussing the extent of authority state attorneys general have in enforcing ethical violations. The White House stayed out of these negotiations.
Which version of the bill, and who it hits
The law has continued to grow with each update made to it. As pointed out by Galaxy Research, the draft put forth in January had increased from 278 pages in length to 309 pages in May. Yahoo Finance added that the merger with the Senate Agriculture Committee text had increased it by more than 70 pages, mainly dealing with matters of consumer protection.
The legislation would establish the jurisdiction of the SEC and CFTC depending on whether a token is classified as a security or a commodity. As previously mentioned by Cryptopolitan, centralized exchanges will have clearer rules for operating, while decentralized finance protocols will achieve clarified terms of operation that include definitions of validators and oracles. The new requirements on disclosures will be imposed on token issuers. Meanwhile, the regulatory requirements will be imposed on intermediaries who will bear federal registration and anti-money-laundering obligations. Those compliance costs are easier for large firms to absorb than for smaller competitors.
Banks push back on stablecoin yield
Rewards associated with stablecoins are still one of the biggest pressure points of the bill.
Anthony Scaramucci of SkyBridge Capital accused the “banking lobby” of trying to make last-minute efforts to obstruct the bill, as per an article in Benzinga that quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial criticizing the bill’s loopholes. Similarly, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, stated that the bill will allow crypto companies to operate and compete with banks without the same safeguards.
Supporters disagree. Senator Cynthia Lummis labeled the legislation “a consumer-friendly disclosure framework for digital assets.” She also highlighted more than 16 anti-illicit-finance mechanisms that she came up with in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s criticism.
Bitcoin shrugs off CLARITY delay
Markets seem to have mostly absorbed the legislative slowdown.
Bitcoin declined from around $65,000 to $62,000 last week, a drop of about 2.8%. According to Bitfire Research, as reported by InvestorIdeas, the decrease was due to several reasons, such as the stagnating legislation, hawkish stance of the Federal Reserve, the transfer of BTC worth about $165 million by Trump Media wallet, and the Coldcard flaw costing the owners roughly 1,367 BTC.
Investor sentiment has changed as well. Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows dipped to around $205 million in July, their lowest monthly amount since their inception. Polymarket says the likelihood of the CLARITY Act passing by 2026 has decreased to only 23%; Galaxy Research said in mid-May that the likelihood ranged between 67% and 75%. Citi has also pointed out regulatory uncertainty as a major factor in its outlook for Bitcoin and Ether.
Even if the Senate approves the bill, lawmakers still need to reconcile it with the House version, which was passed with a 294-134 vote in July 2025, before sending the bill for President Trump’s signature. If Congress fails to meet this week’s deadline, September will be the next right time for passing the legislation. Otherwise, it can defer the bill until the midterm election era, thus increasing the regulatory uncertainty and further benefiting large crypto companies.
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Solana processed 169.9 million non-vote transactions on a single day this week on August 4 according to data from Blockworks. This is the most number of transactions on a single day the network has ever seen. Non-vote transactions filter out the messages validators send each other to agree on blocks, hence this number shows actual user and application activity rather than consensus overhead.
Source: Blockworks
From a weekly timeframe, transaction count has surpassed the highs set in early February and up around 55% since the lows of this year in April.
A 66% Capacity Increase That Filled in Six Days
On July 29, Solana activated a network upgrade called SIMD-0286 at the start of a new epoch, the roughly two-day cycle Solana uses to rotate validator duties. The upgrade increased the maximum compute limit in a block from 60 million to 100 million compute units or a 66% increase. Compute units essentially measure processing work, so a higher limit can accommodate more transactions per block.
Written by Jito Labs engineer Lucas Bruder, this upgrade is the largest expansion in throughput that Solana has shipped since its inception. Block times remained at 400 milliseconds and speed wasn’t compromised with this upgrade, which was only possible after XDP kernel-bypass networking, a method that lets validators move data faster by skipping parts of the operating system, cleared 70% of staked SOL.
The 60 Million Cap Was Being Tested by Real Traffic
Data from the Solana Foundation shows that 11.2% of blocks were hitting 56 million compute units or higher under the previous 60 million limit. The limit was put to the test during volatile periods, exactly when traders need their orders to land. In this sense, the blockspace was not sitting empty waiting for users to arrive. Demand was getting squeezed out.
Most of the New Flow Is Trading Machinery
Market makers running proprietary AMMs update their quotes onchain constantly, and Blockworks Research put that flow at roughly 20% of all Solana transactions as of late 2025. Arbitrage and order-book maintenance sit on top of it. This kind of traffic expands to fill whatever blockspace exists, because that is how liquidity provision works on a venue with 400ms blocks and sub-cent fees. It is also the traffic that keeps spreads tight for everyone else.
The payments side showed up the same day. Western Union’s Stablecard went live August 4 on Solana rails through Rain, covering 37 markets and running on the USDPT stablecoin. Circulation is still near 7.4 million tokens, small enough that it is not moving the transaction count yet. But the reason Western Union picked Solana is the same reason the record was possible, and the headroom now exists for that flow to land at scale.
BREAKING: Western Union's Stablecard is live.
Spend instantly anywhere Visa works, across 175M merchant locations in 37 markets at launch.
The card runs on USDPT, @WesternUnion's own stablecoin issued onchain on Solana and powered by @raincards. https://t.co/A0ycTQP68X pic.twitter.com/01NajGWGPe
— Solana (@solana) August 4, 2026
Record Throughput, Weakest Fees Since 2023
The caveat sits in the revenue line. Q2 network fees came in at $51 million, Solana’s weakest quarter since Q3 2023, and DEX volumes are at their lowest since September 2024. Transaction counts are printing records while the money attached to them shrinks.
The mix has changed. Memecoin speculation paid well on a per-transaction basis. Market-maker requoting and stablecoin payments do not. That is healthier as infrastructure and thinner as a business, and it is a genuine tension rather than a footnote.
Alpenglow and 200 millisecond slots come next. Solana is building for throughput it has not hit yet.
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Meta has become the latest tech giant to admit that its AI agent hacked another firm after an independent testing partner misconfigured its secure environment.
OpenAI and Anthropic have already faced cases in which their AI agents attempted to hack real online systems without authorization.
Meta told reporters that the AI breakout stemmed from a system misconfiguration similar to Anthropic’s breach. Unlike OpenAI, where an AI agent exploited a previously undiscovered vulnerability to access the internet during a cybersecurity test. So far, researchers and governments have responded to the incidents by calling for stronger protections and stricter testing standards.
Such incidents come as AI companies are racing to create more autonomous agents capable of executing complex tasks without human intervention. Unlike chatbots in the traditional chat space, these systems can create code, interact with online services and execute multi-step actions independently.
While these capabilities promise major productivity gains, they also increase the risk that a poorly formatted testing environment or insufficient controls may result in models taking unplanned actions in a security assessment process.
Key figures in the AI community are even pushing for a managed deceleration to ensure that human control keeps pace with machine intelligence.
Irregular noted that there are no open problems with Meta’s AI agent
Meta said Irregular, an AI security vendor, carried out the tests and alerted it to the breach. It added that it plans to disclose more publicly about the incident once it has confirmed all the facts.
It contended that its AI agent “exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service.” Sources identified the rogue AI as Muse Spark 1.1, a model heavily promoted by Meta for its elite programming skills.
Irregular said the incident boils down to the same environment flaw Anthropic disclosed last week, completely ruling out a complex hacking feat or sandbox escapes.
And while Meta said that the breach was caused by a testing environment misconfiguration rather than the AI independently breaking out of its sandbox, researchers say the incident demonstrates that security relies not only on the model itself but also on its infrastructure.
Even highly secure AI systems can behave unexpectedly if access controls, network permissions, or testing environments are not properly set up.
It further stated, “There are no current open issues. Irregular is developing a white paper to share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evaluations.”
AISI says OpenAI and Anthropic’s models tried to influence human maintainers
Previously, OpenAI admitted that its autonomous systems had infiltrated multiple public networks, including the AI community hub Hugging Face. OpenAI’s disclosure later prompted Anthropic to run its own security checks, which revealed that Claude had carried out similar attacks on several companies after a configuration error allowed it to access the internet.
A UK regulatory report, however, revealed more concerning issues. According to the UK’s AI Security Institute, AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic attempted to add malicious code to an open-source project by influencing its human maintainers.
“In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code,” AISI said.
It noted that all these attempts failed and did no real-world harm. Even though no real damage was done and every attempt failed, the watchdog warned that this is the clearest real-world evidence yet of an AI acting deceitfully and the dangers of autonomy.
AISI also explained its testing criteria: “To measure what these models can genuinely do, we test them under conditions that reflect what a capable human attacker could do.”
So far, OpenAI has acknowledged the security incident during the AISI trials, stating that it wants to build better, industry-wide guardrails for testing volatile models. It went public about a separate incident in which Irregular accidentally exposed its models to the open internet during a mock drill.
The firm pledged to strengthen its oversight of third-party testing, including how it determines which evaluations carry greater risk, reviews requests for internet access or fewer safeguards, manages isolation and credential use, monitors testing, and responds to incidents through clearer escalation procedures.
Meanwhile, the White House invited top AI developers, including Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, this week to discuss a newly finalized voluntary framework for cybersecurity testing of advanced AI systems.
During discussions with company representatives, the Trump administration said open-weight AI models like Meta’s Llama and Nvidia’s Nemotron would not be covered by its proposed voluntary safety testing framework.
The exemption has sparked debate among AI safety researchers, who argue that open-weight models can be freely downloaded, modified, and fine-tuned by third parties.
Critics say excluding them from voluntary testing guidelines could create blind spots as increasingly capable models become widely available outside the control of their original developers.
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Bu həftə, Wall Street-dəki ən böyük hedc fondlarından bir neçəsi cəhd edilən kiberhücumlar dalğasında hədəfə alınıb. Bildirilir ki, bu hücumlara Point72 Asset Management, Citadel, Two Sigma Investments və Millennium Management daxildir.
Hücumçuların əməkdaşları istifadəçi adı və şifrə etimadnamələrini verməyə və ya daxili sistemlərə giriş verməyə sövq etmək üçün səs fişinqindən, yəni vishingdən istifadə etdiyi deyilir. Bu, maliyyə institutları üçün AI-nin dəstəklədiyi sosial mühəndisliyin yaratdığı daim artan təhlükənin xatırlatmasıdır.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has set up a new department dedicated to examining violations in accounting practices and financial reporting, which shows that the agency has begun paying more attention to companies’ disclosures at a time when its approach toward crypto is quickly moving from litigation to rulemaking.
For the crypto industry and auditors who analyze their financial reports, this action delivers an unambiguous signal: even though the SEC is expanding its digital asset policy framework through the Crypto Task Force and regulations, it is actively improving its power of evaluating public firms’ disclosures to investors.
A team of accountants and lawyers, led by a Gibson Dunn alum
The new Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit will operate within the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, focusing on accounting fraud, financial reporting violations, and misconduct involving accountants and auditors.
The unit will be led by Timothy Zimmerman, who joined the SEC in May 2026 after spending 12 years at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and serving as deputy general counsel at RSM US LLP, the fifth-largest U.S. accounting firm. Enforcement Director David Woodcock, who also joined the SEC in May, previously worked at Gibson Dunn.
The new unit combines two teams of lawyers and an accounting expert team using existing personnel and some new employees.
Why the SEC says it needs the capacity now
The SEC is trying to regain its expertise after a significant drop in accounting-related enforcement. According to Cornerstone Research, enforcement actions in the field of accounting and audits had dropped 68% in 2025 compared to the previous year.
Enforcement activity decreased overall. According to White & Case, the SEC had 313 prosecutions in fiscal 2025, a decline from the 431 in 2024 and the agency’s settlements were only $808 million, which is its lowest so far since 2012. The company believes that this decline is mainly caused by the lack of staff, the 43-day government shutdown, and a number of vacancies in the leadership.
Woodcock explained that the aim of the new unit is to retain specialized expertise.
“It’s about bringing that expertise together and allowing them to focus on those things that frankly are hard,” Woodcock stated, while adding that the ultimate goal is “making us better and smarter at them.”
Back to issuer disclosures, an old SEC beat
This unit is a manifestation of SEC Chair Paul Atkins’s overall “back to basics” approach, which is aimed at insider trading, market manipulation, breaches of fiduciary duty, and accounting fraud.
The trend began earlier in the year. At the 2026 SEC Speaks Conference, SEC Enforcement Chief Accountant Ryan Wolfe mentioned that accounting cases are “not dead,” and noted the SOX Group created for auditing and Sarbanes-Oxley violations. The Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit is a continuation of an initiative that was announced in March that targets misconduct within the audit profession.
Investigations in accounting represent one of the most technically challenging types of investigations carried out by SEC experts who deal with issues related to the valuation of assets and ascertaining impairment.
What auditors and the PCAOB should watch
The enlarged unit is likely to alter the manner in which the SEC collaborates with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the body that has been responsible for many audit enforcement cases since 2018. Both bodies are collaborating so as to delineate their responsibilities better.
Recent incidents give a glimpse of the focus of the unit. This year, the SEC has settled an accounting fraud with Archer-Daniels-Midland worth $40 million and penalized the auditing firm EisnerAmper for improper asset valuation. Osman Nawaz, the principal deputy director of the Enforcement Division stated that Zimmerman‘s knowledge will be essential for specialized enforcement activities of the agency.
Even if the unit does not work specifically with cryptocurrency matters, its activities may still have a direct impact on crypto firms and issuers of tokens who adhere to U.S. securities law.
Companies are increasingly holding cryptocurrencies, as well as generating revenues from staking, custodial services, and stablecoins, leading to more complicated requirements for accounting and disclosures.
The SEC has been vocal about companies needing to provide disclosures to its investors that are relevant to any particular situation. Atkins has also joined the call for the SEC to issue “clear rules of the road” for crypto issuance, custody, and trading while protecting investors.
These efforts mean that the SEC is focusing on developing crypto policies separately from enforcement and increasing supervision over how all companies, both traditional and digital, report their finances.
Bottom line, the SEC is not retreating from oversight of crypto companies—it is shifting from questions about whether a token is a security toward whether crypto businesses are accurately reporting their financial condition.


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Avqustun 5-də ZEUS, kiberhücum insidentinin aşkar edilməsindən sonra Lightning cüzdan xidmətlərini dayandırıb və bu, Boltz və AQUA-da xidmət fasilələri yaşandıqdan təxminən 72 saat sonra xidmətlərini dayandıran üçüncü görkəmli Lightning təminatçısı olub.
Şirkət hücumun öhdəsindən gəlinərək müştəri pulunun itirilmədiyini təsdiqləyib. Bununla belə, bir-birinin ardınca bir neçə gün ərzində Lightning-in qeyri-aktivləşməsi ilə bağlı olan üç yaxşı tanınmış xidmətin meydana çıxması Lightning infrastruktur təminatçılarının təhlükəsizliyinə dair narahatlıq yaradıb; Bitcoin Lightning Network-un özünə deyil.

Block (NYSE: XYZ) shares gained more than 4% in late trading after the payments company posted second-quarter numbers above Wall Street forecasts. Adjusted earnings reached $1.02 per share for the three months through June 30.
Analysts following London Stock Exchange Group (LSE: LSEG) were expecting 87 cents per share. The quarterly income came to $6.62 billion, exceeding the estimates of around $6.49 billion from analysts.
The company, led by Jack Dorsey, also raised its full-year target. Block now sees 2026 gross profit at $12.51 billion, which would mean 21% growth from a year earlier. Its old target was $12.33 billion, or 19% growth. The report came at the end of a solid earnings season for U.S. payment companies.
Block separates bitcoin activity from the business metrics it uses to judge operations
Block said it looks at both GAAP and non-GAAP results when reviewing its performance. The company gives the most attention to gross profit, adjusted operating income, and adjusted earnings per share.
“Bitcoin trading activity and changes in bitcoin prices have historically had modest impacts on Gross Profit, Adjusted Operating Income, and Adjusted Earnings per Share, but can create significant variability in reported revenue and GAAP net income. To provide greater transparency into these dynamics, we are reporting Cash App’s Bitcoin Ecosystem revenue and the remeasurement of our bitcoin investment ahead of reported earnings,” said Block.
For the second quarter, Block’s early estimate for Cash App Bitcoin Ecosystem revenue was $1.8 billion. That number mainly covers the dollar value of bitcoin bought by customers through Cash App.
The company also expected an $88.5 million accounting loss from revaluing its bitcoin investment using the asset’s June 30 closing price. Block records that item below operating income. It changes GAAP earnings only and does not alter the adjusted operating figures used to track the business.
Block said both bitcoin figures were early and unaudited and did not stand in for the complete quarter. The company scheduled the full report for August 5, 2026.
Cash App’s bitcoin revenue can change quickly because the price of bitcoin and the amount customers trade are never steady. The accounting gains or losses on Block’s own bitcoin position also rise or fall with bitcoin’s market price.
Cash App lifts Block’s quarter as banking, lending and shopping activity grow
Cash App did most of the heavy lifting. Its gross profit rose 31% from the same quarter last year. The Square seller business posted a 13% increase. Across Block as a whole, gross profit grew 25% year over year.
The company also reported a 27% adjusted operating income margin, the highest level it has posted. Adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 65% from a year earlier and reached a record $1.02.
User activity inside Cash App also grew. Primary Banking Actives increased 17%, while Cash App Commerce Enablement volume also rose 17%. Consumer lending originations climbed 59%, with Cash App Borrow supplying most of that growth.
Square’s payment volume rose across its merchant network. Total Square gross payment volume grew 13% from the prior year. U.S. GPV increased 10%, the fastest domestic pace since the second quarter of 2023. International GPV rose 28%.
Block has also been cutting expenses. In February, the company said it planned to eliminate over 50% of its jobs as part of a wider rebuild that puts artificial intelligence into more of its daily operations.
“Intelligence tools are the next major technology shift, but machine learning is not new to Block,” Jack wrote in a letter to shareholders.
For 2026, Block now expects gross profit to rise 21%, adjusted operating income to increase 67%, and adjusted diluted earnings per share to grow 70%.
The earnings materials direct readers to an appendix for the company’s definitions of transacting active, Square GPV, Primary Banking Actives, Cash App Commerce Enablement Volume, and Cash App Consumer Lending Origination Volume. Block also included tables that connect each non-GAAP figure in the presentation with the closest GAAP figure.
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Manhettendə federal prokurorlar NFT startapının təsisçisi Taj Tarshanı Few and Far, dəyərli kağızlar və simli (wire) fırıldaqçılıqda ittiham ediblər.
Hakimiyyət orqanları iddia edir ki, o, investorların verdiyi 10 milyon dollardan artıq vəsaiti götürüb və onu vəd etdiyi marketplace-in yerinə qumar oyunlarına, spekulyativ kripto mərcələrinə və Mayami kondominiuma xərcləyib.
Few and Far-ın NFT bazarına nə oldu?
Nyu-Yorkun Cənub Dairəsi üzrə ABŞ vəkilinin ofisi bu gün fevral 2022-ci ilə gedib çıxan iddia edilən bir sxemlə bağlı ittiham aktı elan edib.

Demis Hassabis will step down from the day-to-day running of Google DeepMind to become its chairman. Staff memos published August 5 say 27-year Google veteran Jeff Dean is leaving to start a startup that Google will help fund.
Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the AlphaFold protein-structure work he led with John Jumper.
Hassabis steps back as Kavukcuoglu takes over
Hassabis is taking on two new titles, Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He is continuing to lead the company’s AI drug-discovery spinoff, Isomorphic Labs.
“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote. He wanted “the time and space to focus on the big picture.”
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to AI that matches or exceeds humans across most tasks.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, until now DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect, will be senior vice president of the unit, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, and will be responsible for developing Gemini, frontier research, and the app and developer teams.
Kavukcuoglu has been at DeepMind for 13 years and was part of early breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN, Pichai’s memo said.
Pichai wrote that after “an incredible 27-year run,” Dean wants to try something new, and he’s not going alone. Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are establishing an independent public benefit corporation, called Discovery Loop, to speed up discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering.
DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le are joining too. Google will be a founding investor and cloud provider for the new company, and the two will collaborate on research into ML systems and infrastructure.
Dean said being outside a public company gives him room to chase science over quarterly returns. “We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company’s purist financial interests,” he said.
Reshuffle lands as Google races OpenAI and Anthropic
Gemini 3.5 Pro is running months behind schedule. Several senior researchers, including one of Gemini’s co-leads, have already left for rival labs.
Investors read the memos as a warning. Shares of Alphabet dropped more than 4.10% on the news, giving back some of a 13% run-up the stock had enjoyed off a post-earnings low.
The departures come just weeks after Google rolled out Gemini 3 to compete with ChatGPT, a release Hassabis publicly touted. Pichai’s memo said the Gemini app has more than 950 million monthly users
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