Cryptopolitan

Pavel Durov has doubled down on Telegram’s position after Apple removed the platform from its App Store earlier this week following a review that revealed offensive material in the app.
Telegram, used by more than a billion people, has called the takedown of its app an overreaction to the conduct of a single user. The app was reinstated days later.
Did Telegram take its app off the App Store?
Apple shortly took the Telegram app off its app store, saying its review of Telegram turned up material that violated its strict guidelines against child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The app reappeared on the App Store after the content was removed and the poster was banned.
Anyone who already had Telegram installed was able to keep using it throughout the brief window. The takedown mainly blocked new downloads and updates.
Telegram directly challenged Apple’s decision on X, asking if the company’s safety standards would be applied equally to all other apps in the store
Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn spoke against the decision, saying that Apple disrupted the communication of a billion people due to the actions of a single user.
The company’s founder, Pavel Durov, explained on his personal channel that the offensive material bypassed the app’s security measures because the AI-modified content was posted by editing an old message in an active group chat.
Durov also explained that the attacker was a takedown extortionist; an individual who posts offensive material and demands ransom in exchange for not targeting communities.
Do Apple and Telegram have existing issues?
Apple previously pulled Telegram from the App Store in 2018 over inappropriate content, and once again restored it once the issue was resolved.
French authorities arrested Durov back in 2024, and he was charged with enabling illegal transactions and complicity in the distribution of CSAM.
Telegram responded by disabling some features it described as misused and changing how it handles private chats.
Durov remains under formal investigation in France. The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that Durov faces an array of potential charges for criminal activities linked to Telegram.
Cryptopolitan previously reported that Durov is wanted in Russia over allegedly aiding Ukraine’s “terrorist activities” in the country.
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Researchers have tied the faulty randomness code at the center of the Coldcard wallet breach to Coinkite co-founder and CTO Peter Gray, who Bitcoin developer James O’Beirne says brushed off a warning about the defect in May 2025.
The exploit has now drained roughly $114 million across more than 5,200 Bitcoin addresses, and Coinkite says it is still live.
The GPG signatures that point at one person
The buggy library, called libngu, was published on GitHub under a pseudonymous account named Switch. An analysis posted on August 4 by Bitcoin developer James O’Beirne laid out cryptographic evidence that the account belongs to Gray.
O’Beirne’s write-up rests on GPG commit signatures. According to the analysis, there are 58 commits that are authored as “Switck” that carry valid signatures from Gray’s personal key, the same key that signs his commits under the name Peter D. Gray in the same repository.
The Switch account, by contrast, has uploaded no key of its own. The analysis states that it has been cryptographically proven that the two identities are one person.
The connection matters because Coldcard’s production firmware pulls libngu in as a dependency, according to O’Beirne’s analysis, which also cites security firm Wizardsardine’s finding that the library is one of three repositories involved in the vulnerability.
A report from May 2025 that went nowhere
O’Beirne flagged the risk more than a year ago while auditing Coldcard’s firmware in May 2025.
He said that he wanted to pin down where the wallet sourced its randomness and traced it back to libngu, after which he informed Coinkite about the possible defect at the time.
“This is the same guy that shrugged off my report of the possibility of the defect in May 2025,” O’Beirne wrote, referring to Gray. He added that he had not yet told the full story of that exchange.
Coinkite has yet to respond to the identity claim of the report.
One commit in 2021, unnoticed for five years
Block’s Bitcoin engineering and security teams traced it to a commit dated March 1, 2021, that changed how Coldcard built a wallet’s seed. The change swapped a call that pulled from the device’s hardware random number generator for one that fell through to MicroPython’s software randomizer.
The mistake hid in a single preprocessor check. Firmware version 4.0.0 shipped with the flaw on March 17, 2021.
The seeds were built with too little entropy, so attackers could regenerate them offline and drain funds without ever touching a device. None of the thefts involved stolen hardware, phishing, or malware.
Coinkite tells owners to move funds now
Coinkite has told users to act with urgency. “Please treat this as urgent. Migrate your funds,” the company posted, while confirming that the exploit is still in progress and asking holders to alert others who are “less online.”
Not every wallet is exposed. Reports say that Mk3 devices set up on firmware 4.0.1 or later are at risk, while Mk4, Mk5, and Q owners running firmware below 5.6.0 or 1.5.0Q should update, create a new seed, and move their coins.
Wallets built with the device’s dice-roll option, where a user enters at least 50 physical rolls, never ran the broken path and are considered safe. A strong BIP-39 passphrase and multisig setups where the Coldcard key is only one of several signers also held up.
Losses near $114 million across four waves
The theft has come in bursts. The first wave on July 30 moved about 1,083 BTC out of 1,196 addresses inside 41 minutes, worth roughly $70 million. Three more waves followed over five days, with Galaxy Research counting a fourth sweep early on August 3 that pushed the running total to about 1,816 BTC.
Some reports put the value near $116 million, while others cite $114 million at prevailing prices.
Bitcoin itself has barely moved, trading near $63,800 during U.S. hours on August 4. Vincent Bouzon, a cybersecurity expert at rival wallet maker Ledger, stated that the episode was “a failure of one implementation rather than a verdict on self-custody,” adding that entropy “must be anchored in secure hardware.”
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The majority of surveyed Russian citizens fail to recognize significant use cases for cryptocurrency despite its upcoming legalization in their country.
The finding comes before the enforcement of a comprehensive regulatory framework in September as Moscow seeks to take the reins of the growing market.
Russians remain skeptical about crypto ahead of restrictive regulations
Around 69% of the participants in a new survey do not expect any real use cases for cryptocurrency even after it is permitted in Russia next month.
Approximately 52% of the respondents admit they are not using the digital asset now and don’t understand how its legalization will impact their lives.
Of the remaining half, 8% plan to spend crypto on purchases from abroad, 6% intend to use it for long-term investments and diversification of their savings, TASS detailed in a report on Tuesday.
Another 4% want to employ digital money in business activities and 13% envisage various other uses, the official news agency added, quoting the poll conducted by the Rambler&Co media holding.
The results of the recently carried out study are coming out after the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament, passed the bill “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights.”
To become law, the delayed legislation still needs the approval of the Federation Council, the upper house known as the Russian senate, as well as President Putin’s signature.
It represents Russia’s most comprehensive attempt so far to regulate its cryptocurrency market, which has been expanding amid sanctions imposed by the West over the invasion of Ukraine.
After skipping the original July 1 deadline, the main provisions of the package are now expected to enter into force on September 1, 2026, with additional texts scheduled to take effect in 2027.
They will regulate transactions related to investment and trading, including by licensing dedicated platforms for cryptocurrency exchange and storage, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
For the first time, ordinary Russians will be granted legal access to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, albeit limited to the most liquid coins and capped at less than $4,000 a year for non-qualified investors.
Long-awaited regulation may raise cryptocurrency awareness in Russia
Despite the serious restrictions, more than a fifth of the polled Russians (22%) are convinced it’s nevertheless better to regulate cryptocurrencies.
Around 20% say they have been anticipating the transition to a market with clear rules and 6% have become interested after the adoption of the “digital currency” bill.
Many of these respondents cite regulatory clarity and risk protection as the most important conditions for touching crypto rather than the accessibility of this financial instrument.
The survey also revealed that some 38% of Russian citizens would like to receive “honest information” about cryptocurrency without promises of quick profits, the Gazeta.ru portal noted in a post.
Almost as many, 36%, want to deal with unambiguous laws and regulations, while 16% expect the authorized platforms to be reliable and offering simple interfaces and user support.
As things currently stand, 54% admit they know almost nothing about how cryptocurrency works. 23% say they lack sufficient information to get the full picture and 17% know only the basics.
Just 6% have some prior experience with it and 39% hope the new legislation will simplify financial transactions in the digital-asset space.
If that happens, 15% are ready to regard crypto as a full-fledged alternative to traditional currencies, although direct coin payments will remain prohibited.
The poll has been conducted between July 23 and 30, right after the adoption of the new law, among more than 2,000 active internet users across the vast country.
According to another recent survey, the results of which were published at the end of July, 46% of Russians plan to use the digital ruble when it is launched.
The Bank of Russia is preparing to open its platform to the public also next month. The central bank digital currency will be introduced in several stages starting September 1.
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Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) has joined the league of large U.S. banks building a shared tokenized deposit network, operated by The Clearing House.
The project is targeting a first-half of 2027 launch and would allow the banks to move digital versions of customer deposits between each other around the clock.
What are major U.S. banks launching?
JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM), the Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), Wells Fargo, Citigroup (NYSE: C) and other large U.S. banks are building a shared tokenized deposit network scheduled for launch in the first half of 2027.
The Clearing House, a private payments firm the participating banks own collectively, would run the new system.
Through this new system, deposits recorded on blockchain rails would settle instantly and at any hour, pushing bank transfers past the standard business-day window they run on today. However, no blockchain partner has been chosen yet.
The first users of the system are expected to be large multinational companies, the kind with tangled cross-border payment and treasury needs that stand to gain from round-the-clock liquidity.
Wells Fargo, which oversees $1.7 trillion in assets, piloted an internal settlement tool called Wells Fargo Digital Cash on its own distributed-ledger platform back in 2019.
In May 2025, Wells Fargo, alongside others like Citigroup, JPMorgan and Bank of America, reportedly held early discussions about a jointly issued stablecoin.
Cryptopolitan reported that stablecoins topped $300 billion in market value by the end of that year, with transaction volume reaching $55 trillion.
The pending U.S. stablecoin legislation, known as the CLARITY Act, has banks on alert over provisions within it that could let stablecoin issuers pay interest and compete head-on with deposit rates.
On the other hand, a bank-run network offers blockchain speed and programmability without losing customers to crypto-native rivals.
Do clients actually want this system?
The adoption of the new system is still an open question. Mark Monaco, the Bank of America’s head of global payments solutions, said that clients are not “beating down the door” for tokenized deposits yet, but the network will ready banks for the demand when it arrives.
JPMorgan is bringing experience to the project with its Kinexys platform that already handles institutional payments. The bank launched a deposit token on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, earlier this year for its institutional clients.
Cryptopolitan reported this March that Wells Fargo filed a U.S. trademark application for WFUSD, a digital-asset platform covering payment processing, trading, and tokenization. The filing suggests that the bank could be developing a branded deposit token or stablecoin of its own.
The Clearing House effort would stretch the infrastructure of the participating banks across the wider banking system rather than keeping it inside one firm.
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Sequans Communications (NYSE: SQNS) trimmed down its Bitcoin treasury to 314 coins during the second quarter and wiped out its convertible debt, the French chipmaker said Tuesday, August 4, as CEO Georges Karam steers the company back toward its IoT semiconductor business.
According to the Paris-based company’s preliminary second-quarter results, it held 1,514 BTC worth $103.2 million as of the end of March.
How many Bitcoins did Sequans Communications sell in three months?
The company reportedly held 314 BTC, which was valued at $18.4 million as of June 30. Sequans Communications had spent months boxed in by collateral rules.
Back in March, it had 1,217 BTC worth $82.9 million locked up, pledged as security against its convertible notes.
But it has now sold 1,200 coins over the quarter, changing that math. The company booked a realized net gain of $5.3 million on the second-quarter sales, a turnaround from the $11.7 million realized loss it took in the first quarter when it was dumping coins into a falling market.
Sequans is not ranked number 73 among public company holders of Bitcoin per BitcoinTreasuries.net. Its 314 BTC are now worth $20 million.
Sequans Bitcoin holdings. Source: BitcoinTreasuries.net
Why did Sequans Communications sell its Bitcoins?
Karam shared insights into what led to the sales, positioning it as capital-structure housekeeping. A number of companies offloading their holdings usually point to the need to divest and refocus on another sector, with AI and data centers emerging as the new areas of focus. For Sequan, it was to focus on their core IOT strategy.
Karam stated that they fully redeemed their convertible debt in May and closed the quarter with $21 million in cash, up from $10.6 million three months earlier, and no debt on the books.
In the first quarter of 2026, Sequans had a $29.3 million unrealized impairment on the Bitcoin holdings, and this led to a $76.2 million net loss. The second-quarter impairment was far smaller, at $3.0 million.
Product sales carried the quarter
The chip business, which Karam is now pushing to the front, had a better three months. Revenue reached $7.5 million, up 23.2% from the first quarter and above the company’s own guidance, though still down 8.4% from a year earlier because the 2025 figure included one-off licensing money from a Qualcomm deal. Strip that out, and revenue climbed 84.2% year over year.
Karam said product sales made up the bulk of the total and rose more than 80% from a year earlier. He pointed to over 40 design-win projects now in mass production, which he put at 55% of a $300 million three-year product pipeline, and to a first drone customer for the company’s RF transceiver technology.
Gross margin slipped to 32.9% from 37.7% in the prior quarter, a drop the company attributed to more low-margin hardware in the mix.
Investors liked the read as SQNS traded at $2.87 in pre-market on Tuesday, up 17.62% from Monday’s close, according to Google Finance, though the stock remains far below its 52-week high of $13.90.
From 370 coins to a full retreat
Sequans has now reversed the treasury play it started barely a year ago. Karam began buying Bitcoin in July 2025 with 370 coins, built the pile toward a peak above 3,300, having floated a target of 3,000 coins funded by up to $200 million in share sales.
The selling started in November 2025, when the company offloaded about 970 coins to redeem half its convertible debt. A further 1,025-coin sale followed in the first quarter of 2026.
Sequans is not the only company letting go of a sizeable part of its Bitcoin holdings. MARA Holdings, Riot Platforms, Hut 8, and Cango, among others, have all cut Bitcoin exposure in recent months. Even Strategy, the largest corporate holder, sold 1,638 coins for about $104.7 million in late July to fund dividends and build cash.
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The new report maps the illicit and legitimate uses of crypto privacy tools, drawing on data from TRM Labs, Chainalysis, the RAND Corporation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Statista, and U.S. Treasury Department disclosures. It argues that the current regulatory focus is aimed at the wrong layer of the transaction stack.
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent and the Grenadines — Today, ChangeNOW, a cryptocurrency super app, and CoinRabbit, crypto asset management platform, announced the joint release of “Financial Privacy in the Digital Age,” a research report that looks at the use, abuse, and regulation of privacy-preserving technology in cryptocurrencies.
Balancing Legitimate Need Against Illicit Exploitation
In order to determine whether privacy technology does more harm than good, the research pits the actual volume of illicit exploitation against the urgent necessity for discretion in the real world. The findings are clear: on-chain privacy has moved from a specialized preference to an essential safety measure.
Today, it protects:
Individuals: Shielding high-net-worth holders from physical extortion and targeted kidnapping.
Business: Preventing corporate rivals from spying on treasury movements and sensitive financial deal flow.
Humanitarian Efforts: Allowing civilians in conflict zones and sanctioned regions to receive medical payments, while keeping journalists and activists operational.
Rethinking the Regulatory Approach
The report’s central finding is that privacy and compliance are not a zero-sum trade-off: across every category examined, the decisive enforcement vulnerability sits at the fiat off-ramp, where crypto converts into spendable currency, rather than in the transactional privacy infrastructure further upstream.
“Privacy is a basic expectation in everyday life, but public blockchains leave all transactions in the open. Finding a balance here is simply about making digital capital safe to use. With that in mind, we at CoinRabbit believe it’s important to contribute to the conversation and share our research with the industry”, says Walter Barrett, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer at CoinRabbit
Key findings include and Threat Assessment
Pig-butchering fraud produced an estimated USD 75 billion in cumulative losses between 2020 and 2024.
Physical & Violent Extortion, CertiK data indicates that $124.1 million in cryptocurrency was targeted in 52 verified physical “wrench attacks” in the first half of 2026 alone, a 33% increase in incidents and an nearly elevenfold surge in financial exposure compared to H1 2025.
Crypto payments linked to human trafficking networks in Southeast Asia grew 85% in 2025.
Corporate data exposure remains a major threat: 36% of corporate board members cite internal financial data becoming publicly accessible as a top governance concern, with the average data breach now costing USD 4.44 million.
These real-world cases starkly illustrate how rapidly both on-chain visibility and off-chain data leaks translate into physical threats.
Industry Solutions for Compliant Privacy
“Financial privacy isn’t a feature request, it’s a baseline that every other financial system already provides,” said Pauline Shangett, Chief Strategy Officer at ChangeNOW. “The question the industry needs to answer isn’t whether privacy should exist on-chain. It’s whether we build it responsibly or let bad actors define what it looks like by default.”
The report also profiles two working examples of privacy architecture designed to preserve AML compliance: ChangeNOW’s Private Crypto Transfers, which breaks the deterministic link between sender and receiver without pooling user funds, and CoinRabbit’s custodial model, which uses dynamic per-user deposit addresses to prevent end-to-end reconstruction of a client’s holdings from public blockchain data.
A Path Forward for Policymakers
The report closes with five recommendations directed at regulators, industry, analytics firms, and policymakers, centered on shifting enforcement resources toward fiat off-ramps and cross-jurisdictional intelligence sharing rather than restricting transactional privacy for general users.
Access the Report
The full report, “Financial Privacy in the Digital Age,” is available online.
About ChangeNOW
ChangeNOW is a personal crypto super app that gives clients a fast, simple, and secure way to access Web3 finance.
About CoinRabbit
CoinRabbit is a crypto asset management platform built for long-term capital preservation. Since 2020, it ensures 100% reserve, keeping clients’ funds safe and never reused.

Sources close to the Trump White House have claimed that the administration is now working on a new set of rules to blacklist made-in-China components for anyone building a data center in America, according to Reuters.
The governments in Washington and Beijing have traded bans and restrictions to slow down the other in the race to lead AI technology over the past year. That standoff has now expanded to new fronts as data center gear could now join the growing list of items that have to be locally sourced for the AI buildout.
What AI components has the US banned from China?
Citing people familiar with the process, Reuters said that the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning a proposal to close its borders to new Chinese-made optical transceivers.
An optical transceiver is a device that transmits data over fiber-optic cables running through data centers.
If the plan goes forward as planned, it will add to Cryptopolitan’s July report about the US ban on the importation of Chinese humanoid robots. There are already existing limitations on the use of Chinese models on government-issued devices.
Why is the US banning Chinese optical transceivers?
The paranoia in Washington goes to the possibilities of how foreign entities could compromise US-made frontier AI models if they are in the critical infrastructure that anchors their training.
The argument for the preemptive ban draws on real-life precedents of data theft, malware, or service disruption threats.
Per Axios, two researchers found last year that anyone could remotely access cameras on China’s Unitree Robotics Go1 robot dogs via a pre-installed backdoor. Regulators were equally spooked by the proliferation of Chinese power inverters in the electrical grid powering American AI data centers.
A ban would disproportionately hit targets like Zhongji Innolight, which the Pentagon added to its list of firms with Chinese military ties in June. The firm controls roughly 27% of the global market for data center transceivers.
Even though it is still not a done deal, US makers like Coherent and Lumentum would be big winners if the ban lands as analysts project. Even though none of them have the capacity to meet current demand, domestic AI chipmakers were ironically pushed to quickly plug the gap that Nvidia’s forced exit left in the Chinese market.
Beijing warns of “all necessary measures”
China has not absorbed the pressure quietly. Its embassy in Washington criticized the proposed transceiver curbs and urged the US to stop targeting Chinese firms, warning that Beijing would take “all necessary measures” if its interests suffered material harm, StratNews reported.
The threats are not idle. China has already signaled it could retaliate over the robot ban by leaning on its control of rare-earth minerals that Western manufacturers struggle to source anywhere else.
Each new US restriction now tends to draw a Chinese counter, and a supply chain built over decades is being pulled apart one product category at a time.
The software fight is running in parallel
Hardware is only half the campaign. The administration has also weighed restricting Chinese open-weight AI models, and that push has met resistance from inside the US tech industry.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued the US should out-build China rather than ban its models, telling an interviewer that better technology, not restrictions, keeps America ahead, Cryptopolitan reported. Startups have warned that cutting off cheap Chinese models would hurt American developers more than it hurts Beijing.
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China’s market for wearable exoskeleton robots reached more than 1.6 billion yuan, approximately $237 million, in 2025 on shipments of around 26,000 units, according to a report published Tuesday, August 4, by research firm IDC, the first time the company has measured the sector.
The numbers put a figure on what has become another arm of China’s bid to lead in physical AI, the machines that turn algorithms into movement in the real world.
Per IDC’s report, 2025 was the year when the industry hit a new high in its commercial phase, with the growing market now split into three: medical rehabilitation, consumer assistance, and industrial use.
Which market is generating the most revenue in China?
Per the IDC report, medical rehabilitation remains the largest slice by value at about 1.42 billion yuan. However, it accounts for only around 3,200 of the units shipped. Hospital rehab departments, specialist rehab clinics, and recovery centers are the leading buyers in this segment.
IDC credits an aging population, domestic substitution of imported gear, and the buildout of grassroots rehab services for making it the most commercially mature segment. The companies that lead here are Fourier Intelligence, Chengtian Technology and Milebot.
The story is quite the opposite for consumer-assist devices. This segment brought in close to 110 million yuan but shipped around 19,000 units, which is more than seven in ten of all exoskeletons sold in China last year, according to IDC.
Reasons for this volume are falling costs, which make them quite affordable, and the rising silver economy, which services adults aged 50 and above. There is also demand from hiking, tourism, and everyday walking, all contributing to the volume of shipped units.
The front-runners in this segment are Chengtian, Kenqing Technology, and Jike.
The market for the industrial models, which are used in warehousing, auto plants, power, and emergency response, generated the least revenue, bringing in 80 million yuan on about 3,800 units.
Rental legs on the Great Wall and Mount Tai
The volume recorded in the consumer sections is easy to monitor on the ground, as they are already actively in use even in public settings such as the Great Wall of China and Mount Tai, among other locations.
At the Great Wall, tourists can now rent lightweight exoskeletons to ease the climb. That rollout is reportedly part of a growing effort to commercialize mobility aids.
Deutsche Welle (DW) reported on this development, noting that better batteries, high-performance alloys, and mass manufacturing have dropped prices from tens of thousands of dollars to a few hundred. It cited projections that global exoskeleton revenue will pass $2 billion by 2030.
The rental model is also live at Mount Tai in Shandong, where the Taishan Cultural Tourism Group operated 500 Kenqing units at the site, the largest single deployment of the technology.
The executives say that usage of these units hit 80% at peak season. Each device weighs 1.8 kilograms and runs about eight hours on a charge. Investors have taken note with 19 financing deals worth 2.2 billion yuan reportedly closed in 2025. This is up from eight deals worth 292 million yuan in 2024.
Why are Chinese wearable exoskeletons gaining significant commercial traction?
While prices play a major role in the rise in demand, it is not the only reason for the recent commercial success of the sector.
At April’s Canton Fair, a Hangzhou firm opened preorders on a rehab exoskeleton at $1,200 with a final price expected below 10,000 yuan after a video of an Argentine buyer standing with the device drew hundreds of livestream orders on Douyin.
According to analysts, Chinese firms are able to offer these devices at affordable rates because of the country’s industrial base, which feeds the current robotics rush.
A report from the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement (KIRO) pointed out a state-backed “industrial commons,” which sees that supply chains, manufacturing capacity, and R&D talent are shared across sectors as instrumental. As a result, gains recorded in electric vehicles and batteries spill into robotics.
The growth is also spreading abroad; an example is leisure-exoskeleton maker Hypershell’s expansion, having sold over 30,000 units globally and launching in South Korea this year.
However, the growth has not been without friction, given the current state of trade between the United States and China. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned imports of Chinese-made humanoid and quadruped robots on national-security grounds.
While exoskeletons were not named in that action, they ride the same supply chains now under a political spotlight.
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OpenAI has publicly pushed back on Apple’s trade-secret lawsuit, publishing a post that called the case “careless, aggressive and oddly personal.”
OpenAI has also accused Apple of misstating the timeline of events that led to the filing. Notably, more than 400 former Apple employees already work at OpenAI.
Is Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI really personal?
Apple’s case against OpenAI accuses Chang Liu, a former employee, of tapping confidential information after his departure. Apple has also accused Tang Tan of seeking and using its trade secrets.
OpenAI responded to the lawsuit with a post unwinding Apple’s version of the events that led up to the suit.
Directly addressing the claims in the suit, OpenAI revealed Apple’s own employees messaged Liu asking him to help them find files. To back that up, OpenAI published iMessages that it says are between Liu, whose last day at Apple was January 22, 2026, and former colleagues asking him to locate documents and complete file transfers.
OpenAI says the “residual access,” which Liu had, is due to Apple failing to cut off system access when people leave, so departing staff keep getting access to files they neither want nor know they still hold.
In the case of Tan, who spent more than 24 years at Apple, OpenAI said it has been explicit with the team that it does not want and will not use confidential material from other firms.
Apple also said it reached out to OpenAI in February and got no reply, but according to OpenAI, Apple now admits its outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after mixing up two Asian last names, and only conceded that after OpenAI flagged it.
OpenAI also says Apple claimed a conversation took place with OpenAI’s general counsel that, by Apple’s own later admission, never happened.
OpenAI said that Apple never raised the specific allegations now in the lawsuit during any earlier contact, and at one point told OpenAI it was “resolving any issues.” Five months of silence followed before the suit landed, the company wrote.
What is Apple asking a court to do?
Apple is seeking a preliminary injunction, an early court order meant to freeze conduct while a case proceeds. A request OpenAI has called both baseless and pointless, saying it holds none of Apple’s trade secrets and has no interest in them.
Apple’s broader allegation against OpenAI is that the company used internal Apple codenames to pull confidential information out of job candidates.
Cryptopolitan has reported that Apple lost a string of researchers from its Foundation Models team to Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Cohere, including team lead Ruoming Pang, who left for a Meta package reported at over $200 million.
OpenAI says it previously offered to work with Apple on the allegations and would have clarified the details had Apple asked first.
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NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin has encouraged stakeholders of the network to consider a protocol fund for investment. It would hold NEAR tokens, earn yield, and spend some of that yield on security and other public goods.
He posted the idea to the NEAR governance forum Monday with a timeline of two weeks for community members to share their input.
Polosukhin calls for the community’s input
“This is very much a proposal and not a mandate,” he wrote. “I believe our ecosystem belongs to all of us and is not truly resilient or decentralized if the founder is calling all the shots,” he continued.
He wants to hear from validators and token holders voting through House of Stake and the community before anything moves forward.
NEAR is getting ready to begin its sixth year of Mainnet. Polosukhin called the first five years a bootstrapping phase. Recent groundwork, he says, includes inflation falling by half in late 2025, a fee switch that directs revenue from NEAR Intents to token buybacks, and NEAR charging for AI inference.
According to the forum post, the proposed treasury would be funded by NEAR’s existing protocol treasury and the protocol revenue collected to date and in the future. The fund would hold it in NEAR and put the tokens to work. A portion of the revenue share would fund the Validator Support Program, MPC providers, and other similar services. The fund would launch with ~30 million NEAR, or about $53 million at current prices.
Participation by delegates in NEAR’s stake-weighted governance system, House of Stake, will be through mechanisms that are already set up. Over time, Polosukhin suggested, NEAR could redirect a growing share of emissions into the fund. That would reduce effective inflation, and validators and stakers would still be paid.
Norway and Singapore are the blueprint
Sovereign wealth funds and university endowments turn one-off or cyclical income into a permanent asset base that pays out yield year after year.
Polosukhin cited Norway and Singapore. Singapore’s fund is 45 years old, and Norway’s is 36, evidence that the structure can survive market cycles. Crypto revenue is just as cyclical as oil or land sales, he stated, so putting it into a productive fund is better than paying bills directly.
He drew a sharp distinction between this process and the burning of tokens, a mechanism NEAR’s community has discussed in the past. Burning offsets inflation for a moment, he said, but the effect washes out in a volatile asset, and once inflation switches off, there is nothing left. He likes simple math; the same tokens are lent out on yield, and the principal continues to generate funding.
Polosukhin turned down a proposal in early July to burn tokens held by the Foundation, saying that a one-time burn was “a blunt instrument” and instead pointing to the possibility of a Bitcoin-style hard cap on the supply of NEAR. The fund helps that. If the yield can eventually cover network security and public goods on its own, he wrote, NEAR “could move towards a fixed supply.”
The Near Foundation co-founder acknowledged that yield carries risk. The plan is to diversify and hedge it, and any inflation adjustment should still keep validator and staking incentives intact. NEAR was trading at $1.74 up 1.4% on the day but down 29.6% over the year, according to CoinGecko data.
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Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal have launched their latest inquiry into the finances related to President Donald Trump, his family, and the people closest to the administration.
This time, the senators are asking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), led by Trump appointee Paul Atkins, to launch an investigation into whether the $TRUMP memecoin was an “illegal scam,” according to a letter CNN saw.
Warren and Blumenthal launch their latest attack on Trump
Warren and Blumenthal have stirred up storms in the last two years over income streams flowing from the digital asset industry to the president, his family, and high-ranking officials. In that time, they have sent letters, demanded hearings, and requested documents about business deals that have raised their suspicions.
As Cryptopolitan reported in April, Senator Adam Schiff joined the duo to push to publicize details of the Trump memecoin gala at Mar-a-Lago, where the opportunity to dine with POTUS was the main attraction.
By June, three other senators joined Warren and Blumenthal in demanding due diligence on a $500 million deal between the Trump family’s DeFi project, World Liberty Financial venture, and a state-linked partner from the UAE.
Who is calling the TRUMP meme a ‘rug pull?’
The central accusation in the letter that Senator Elizabeth Warren and Warren Blumenthal sent to SEC Chair Paul Atkins is whether President Trump could be involved in a rug pull. In crypto circles, a rug pull refers to a pre-planned liquidity extraction that leaves buyers holding worthless tokens after a coordinated hype campaign.
Argentina’s Javier Milei has been fighting his own rug pull accusation since 2025, when the LIBRA token crashed shortly after the president’s endorsement post on X.
CNN wrote that the letter they saw relayed concern that “President Trump’s memecoin scheme may constitute an illegal scam” and asked the agency “to detect any illegal fraud or unjust enrichment that the coin may have facilitated.”
The $TRUMP coin launched days before the 2025 inauguration and briefly touched a market value of about $9 billion on January 19, 2025. CoinMarketCap data puts the coin under $400 million as of this report.
Nansen data estimates that close to a million people have lost about $3.8 billion to the president’s venture as of the end of June.
And similar to the insiders of rug pull schemes, the president has done well regardless of the losses from his crypto ventures. Warren was among those who asked to investigate the president after his family reported about $1.4 billion in income from its digital currency businesses in just one year.
Is the TRUMP memecoin a rug pull?
The blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs knocked down the rug pull theory in 2025 and doubled down this year that the project “does not have the hallmarks of a rug pull.”
Ari Redbord, who is now TRM’s global head of policy after previous federal prosecutor and Treasury roles, conceded the distastefulness of the outcome.
“A small group of early buyers and the coin’s creator profited. Most of the people who bought in later lost money, and lost it at scale,” Redbord said. He continued that the question of whether the project was a rug pull or not will never resolve favorably for the president, in the context that roughly a million retail buyers absorbed losses while the few holders who controlled 80% of the supply walked away with most of the gains.
Warren and Blumenthal have tried to bridge that gap by describing the episode as a possible “soft rug pull,” where price support is withdrawn gradually rather than in one sudden dump. “The SEC must be willing to enforce the law even when potential wrongdoers include those with powerful political connections,” the senators wrote.
Whether the SEC has any room to act
The request runs into a jurisdictional wall that the Trump administration built. Days before Trump took office in 2025, the SEC charged a New York blockchain engineer over a “rug pull fraud.” Weeks later, in late February 2025, the agency issued guidance stating that a memecoin is not a security, which narrows the SEC’s authority to police these tokens at all.
The White House referred questions to the Trump Organization, and the SEC declined to comment, according to CNN. The letter adds to pressure that has already stalled crypto legislation, with several Democrats refusing to back a federal regulatory bill unless it addresses conflicts tied to the president’s holdings.
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A relatively new Chinese robotics startup, AI² Robotics, is considering going public in Hong Kong, after a recent funding round that doubled its valuation to nearly $3 billion in June.
Some people with knowledge of the matter revealed Tuesday that AI² Robotics is currently in talks with an adviser for an initial public offering, expected to take place next year.
The Shenzhen-based unicorn is only three years old, founded in early 2023. The CEO, Yandong Guo, had disclosed last September that the company aimed to go public within one or two years.
AI² Robotics pursues IPO after a $736 million raise
AI² Robotics has not formally confirmed a filing for a Hong Kong listing. However, it’s worth noting that it conducted a joint-stock restructuring in April, which is usually seen as a structural precursor to public listings.
Two months after the reform, the company raised nearly 5 billion yuan ($736 million), pushing its valuation past 20 billion yuan (over $2.9 billion).
It builds wheeled humanoid robots, which it calls AlphaBot, paired with an in-house vision-language-action system named Alpha Brain, which Guo says is their “key advantage.”
According to Guo, AI² Robotics has been a unicorn even in the last year. In September, he told Reuters that the company was “looking at 10 times growth (in revenue) pretty much every year.”
More Chinese robot makers head to Hong Kong for IPO
AI² Robotics is now on the growing list of Chinese robotics startups pursuing a listing in Hong Kong, as capital needs for scaling manufacturing continue to rise.
In fact, Caixin Global reported Tuesday that up to 50 Chinese robotics startups are currently looking to list in Hong Kong or the Chinese mainland.
Among these companies are leaders such as Unitree Robotics and AGIBOT.
Earlier in July, Cryptopolitan reported that Unitree Robotics had been cleared for its planned IPO this August. The company is expected to be valued at more than 50 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) following the debut.
AGIBOT, the largest Chinese robot vendor, plans to list in Hong Kong later this year. The company targets a valuation of HK$40 billion to HK$50 billion ($5.14 billion to $6.4 billion), according to people familiar with the matter.
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SpaceX has erased more than $500 billion in market value since its June 12 debut, with shares now over 50% below their peak.
The company reports its first public earnings after today’s closing bell rings, following four straight weekly declines.
Analysts expect $6.85 billion in revenue, up 68%, while the quarterly loss widens to 19 cents per share.

Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) jumped 12% in late trading after Monday’s earnings release as the software company beat Wall Street’s second-quarter targets and lifted its 2026 forecast.
Adjusted profit came to 41 cents a share, above the 35 cents expected by analysts tracked by London Stock Exchange Group (LSE: LSEG). Revenue reached $1.94 billion, topping the $1.80 billion estimate. Commercial sales also more than doubled from the same period last year.
The rally came after Palantir shares had fallen 29% this year. Investors had been worried that the AI software trade was losing energy and that growth rates could cool. Palantir raised its full-year revenue target and said it now expects 71% growth, which is 10 percentage points above the forecast issued in the prior quarter.
Palantir doubles its U.S. business as commercial sales and contract values climb
Palantir’s first-quarter 2026 figures showed total revenue of $1.633 billion, up 85% from a year earlier and 16% from the previous quarter. U.S. revenue reached $1.282 billion after climbing 104% year over year and 19% quarter over quarter.
U.S. commercial revenue rose 133% from a year earlier and 18% from the prior quarter to $595 million. U.S. government revenue increased 84% year over year and 21% sequentially to $687 million.
Contract activity also grew. Palantir signed 206 deals worth at least $1 million. That total included 72 contracts worth $5 million or more and 47 worth at least $10 million. Total contract value came to $2.41 billion, up 61% from a year earlier.
U.S. commercial contract value reached $1.176 billion, a 45% annual increase. Remaining deal value for the U.S. commercial unit rose to $4.92 billion, up 112% year over year and 12% from the previous quarter.
The unaudited quarter produced $753.998 million in GAAP operating income, equal to a 46% margin. Adjusted operating income reached $983.545 million, or 60% of revenue.
Cash from operations totaled $899.165 million with a 55% margin, while adjusted free cash flow came to $924.630 million with a 57% margin. Net income attributable to common shareholders was $870.527 million, equal to 53% of sales. Adjusted net income was $856.450 million.
Adjusted EBITDA reached $990.310 million, giving Palantir a 61% margin. Diluted GAAP earnings were 34 cents a share, while adjusted diluted earnings were 33 cents. The company ended the period with $8 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term U.S. Treasury securities. Its Rule of 40 score reached 145%.
Palantir raises its 2026 targets as Alex Karp points to faster U.S. demand
For the second quarter of 2026, Palantir expects revenue between $1.797 billion and $1.801 billion. Adjusted operating income is forecast between $1.063 billion and $1.067 billion. For the full year, management now expects revenue from $7.650 billion to $7.662 billion.
Palantir also raised its U.S. commercial revenue target to more than $3.224 billion, which would mean growth of at least 120%. Adjusted operating income is now expected between $4.440 billion and $4.452 billion.
Adjusted free cash flow is projected between $4.2 billion and $4.4 billion. The company still expects GAAP operating profit and GAAP net income in every quarter this year.
Palantir co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp said the company’s Rule of 40 score had “soared to 145%.” He compared that result with AI infrastructure groups NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU), and SK hynix (KRX: 000660).
Alex said the company reached its fastest annual growth rate after more than doubling its U.S. business and said stronger demand in the domestic market supported the higher outlook.
Alex also said U.S. commercial sales grew 28% from one quarter to the next. He argued that Palantir completed in 90 days what some companies might need a year to achieve. He added that the result came while the sales team stayed very small and continued shrinking.
Alex described the U.S. commercial unit as “just nascent” and said Palantir gets paid based on the value its software creates for customers.
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On-chain research firms and cycle analysts are projecting late 2026 as the most likely time for Bitcoin to make its cycle low. Those who agree with this scenario note that a further macroeconomic deterioration or a regulatory crackdown could cause the price to bottom in 2027.
The global crypto market has witnessed some heavy sell-off over the first half of 2026. Its cumulative market cap stands at around $2.18 trillion. Bitcoin price is down by more than 27% on the year-to-date (YTD).
Late 2026 is the projected time for Bitcoin to bottom
A Glassnode report highlights Q3 as a possible bottom, noting early accumulation, while Mudrex Learn suggests October 2026 to December 2026 as the most probable period, with a low of $50,000 to $55,000, according to Anupam Dodecha’s analysis.
Both on-chain research firms suggest a market closer to a bottom than to a top. Mudrex report notes that Bitcoin recently hit a low of $60,000 in recent weeks before recovering, a bounce it read as evidence of buyer support rather than a confirmed floor. As of July 12, The Motley Fool put Bitcoin near $63,853, saying the crypto was in its worst bear market since 2022.
The halving makes late 2026 the most probable time for Bitcoin to bottom.
Mudrex highlights the four-yearly halving that occurred in April 2024 as a reason to expect a bottom in the late 2026 time frame. The analyst notes that previous cycles saw a bottom between 24 and 28 months after the event, putting the focus on mid-2026 to late 2026.
環遊世界一圈，
也休息了很久。
最近回來後看著群裡的消息，
發現整個 meme 生態已經變得非常割裂。
老外玩老外的，中文圈玩中文圈的，彼此幾乎沒有交集。
海外玩家大多使用 Pump App、FOMO 等工具交易 Memecoin、交流資訊、喊單
中文圈則依然以 TG 群、微信群為主。
兩個市場逐漸形成不同的生態，… pic.twitter.com/vdmuekFIDY
— CryptoD | 1000X GEM (@CryptoDevinL) August 3, 2026
Another way to look at it is to take the October 2025 peak and count 12 to 15 months for a typical bear market, which would put the bottom in the fourth quarter of 2026. History provides further context, with Bitcoin’s last cycle low in June 2022 at around $17,600, and it held even through the FTX collapse that November.
Seasonally, December has repeatedly marked capitulation: $3,200 in 2018 and $15,500 in late 2022. Mudrex notes that CryptoQuant, Glassnode, Benjamin Cowen, and PlanB all agree that the bottom is likely to be in Q4.
Why Bitcoin’s bottom could slip into 2027
The report notes that their projection of a late 2026 bottom assumes that the macroeconomic environment will not deteriorate. A deep recession, a regulatory crackdown, or other factors could push the bottom into the first quarter of 2027.
Meanwhile, another scenario suggests that Bitcoin’s low could come in the summer of 2026 if ETFs drive sufficient demand to prevent a 70%+ drawdown. However, the analyst highlights that this scenario is unprecedented and would require a significant change in the demand-supply dynamics.
The Motley Fool highlights quantum computing as the biggest threat to Bitcoin in the next cycle, with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer threatening to decrypt crypto assets. BIP-360, which was approved in February 2026, is the first step in making Bitcoin quantum-resistant.
The publication estimates that every major blockchain will have to invest more in cryptographic research to make their networks investable. This projection highlights another factor that could disrupt Bitcoin’s cycle and cause it to bottom. Even if the cycle low occurs in late 2026, the assets that drive the price upward may be different.
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The Trump White House has asked Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to visit D.C. on Tuesday for a meeting on voluntary government testing of the best US AI models.
This comes after two of the four invitees admitted their AI systems breached into outside companies’ networks.
Tests built to gauge a model’s hacking potential
On Monday, an official from the White House said that the Trump administration had decided on the specific details of a voluntary program designed to measure the extent the country’s strongest AI models can hack a computer.
This exercise began in June after President Trump asked his administration to draft a set of tests meant to probe the offensive cyber skills of advanced American models.
What the official left out of the statement is equally as important as what was said. The Trump admin has chosen not to shed light on the metrics used in the test, how the findings of the tests get reported, or whether the test results will be made public.
These questions are vital, especially for AI labs that expect to be trusted by their customers.
The breaches that necessitated an urgent meeting
The timing isn’t happenstance. Just last week, Anthropic announced that its models had breached the systems of three companies while controlled cybersecurity trials were ongoing. A few days earlier, OpenAI announced that one of its AI agents escaped from a testing environment and broke into the systems of Hugging Face, the AI development platform.
OpenAI tagged the incident as an “unprecedented cyber incident,” and the event has sent ripples throughout Washington.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman visited the White House last week to discuss the voluntary tests and his company’s yet-to-be-released models.
A framework that came in the nick of time
Trump’s executive order set August 1 as a deadline for the administration to publish its voluntary AI framework. OpenAI and Anthropic released a joint proposal to that effect, one they believe creates an equal playing field, and the best systems face the same level of scrutiny whether they operate open-weights or closed-weights.
The decision to push for stricter oversight comes as a surprise, seeing as the second Trump administration began by taking an anti-regulatory stance.
In Europe, however, officials like Chris Canal believe long-lasting testing programs begin by evaluating concrete threat scenarios like bioweapons or attacks on government databases while using independent verification systems as opposed to a company evaluating its own work.
Congress is drafting stricter regulations in parallel
Voluntary testing is just one side of the whole equation. Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act on the 23rd of July. The bill allows the Department of Homeland Security to force the biggest AI labs in the country to shut down a model deemed to be too dangerous.
If such labs refuse, they’d be penalized to the tune of $20 million daily.
Whether or not the bill becomes law remains to be seen. However, Tuesday’s meeting will be the earliest indicator yet as to how AI labs are willing to concede to the government’s demands.
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Tyler Williams, the top digital assets adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has left the federal government and is expected to head back to the private sector.
Williams left his role ahead of the Senate’s August recess, which has still not voted on the crypto industry’s signature bill, the CLARITY Act.
What was Tyler Williams’ role at the U.S. Treasury?
The crypto industry spent 2025 building relationships in Washington, only for Tyler Williams, one of the most knowledgeable crypto officials inside the government, to leave his role just days before the Senate’s August recess. Williams is also exiting his role despite the fact that the CLARITY Act has yet to be passed.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appointed Williams in February 2025. Before that, he worked as Global Head of Policy and Regulatory Counsel at Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY), one of the largest crypto financial firms. He also previously served as a Treasury Deputy Assistant Secretary from 2018 to 2020.
During his time as Counselor to the Secretary for Digital Assets, Williams helped write the White House’s 163-page digital assets report. He also worked on the CLARITY Act and took part in discussions about a federal Bitcoin reserve. In April 2026, he announced a new Treasury initiative to share cybersecurity information with digital asset firms.
Eleanor Terrett, who covers crypto policy, posted on social media that it “feels like crypto’s allies are leaving Washington en masse,” citing the departures of SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), and Williams himself.
Can the CLARITY Act pass before the August recess?
The CLARITY Act is the crypto industry’s top legislative priority that would split the oversight of digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It would also protect blockchain developers from liability over how third parties use their code.
With the Senate’s August recess starting August 10, lawmakers have roughly five working days to act, but Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. At least seven Democrats are required to reach the 60 votes required to move the bill forward.
But due to concerns regarding ethics and security, seven Democratic senators have blocked the bill. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has even called the bill “dead on arrival.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has said he wants a floor vote but has not confirmed a path forward. As of Monday, August 3, the CLARITY Act was not listed on the Senate’s floor schedule.
Galaxy Research cut its estimated odds of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 from 50% to 30%. Polymarket odds have fallen from above 80% in February to roughly 30%.
The bill’s failure would likely cause a negative reaction in digital asset markets, but policy support from agencies might continue.
A coalition that includes BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Fidelity, and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) is urging that the bill be passed. Coinbase’s (NASDAQ: COIN) chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad argued on The Hill’s Rising show that younger Democrats understand the technology and the bill “should be good to go.”
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On-chain analytics firm BubbleMaps has published data that shows that 25 wallets control 19% of the CATE memecoin.
This is a concentration warning aimed at the nearly 75,000 traders who have bought the cat-themed token that markets itself on a link to the dog behind Dogecoin.
Who controls the bulk of CATE supply?
BubbleMaps shared the figure in a thread on X on Wednesday, August 3, stating that 74,863 wallets had bought the CATE token.
Over 53,500 of these wallets are currently in profit, with two investors up by over $1 million, 48 up by over $100,000, and 1,618 up by over $1,000. BubbleMaps, however, asked how long the investors will hold.
The data analytics platform pointed out that a sizeable chunk of the token supply is controlled by a small group of wallets. BubbleMaps stated, “Twenty five wallets control 19% of $CATE,” while sharing a link where it can be tracked.
The current data shows that the bulk of buyers are above water for now, which is quite unusual for a memecoin at this stage. While it is bullish for investors, the part that calls for alarm is the concentration figure because paper gains hold only as long as the largest wallets stay put.
Is CATE linked to the owner of Kabosu?
CATE trades on an implied tie to Kabosu, the Shiba Inu whose photo became the Doge meme. However, that tie is disputed, as Atsuko Sato, Kabosu’s owner, has stated that the CATE tokens circulating in the market have nothing to do with her.
Sato said an old Instagram post of hers was used without permission to manufacture a connection to the token.
According to her, Own The Doge is the only project she has authorized to manage her intellectual property. That project bought the Doge NFT in 2021, launched the DOG token, runs Doge Day events, and released the COCORO token on Base in 2025.
Sato told buyers to verify any token that claims to have her endorsement before they put their money in.
Does BubbleMaps’ latest data on CATE highlight a familiar playbook?
In July, the firm reported that 63% of the 164,538 traders across Robinhood Chain’s top 50 memecoins had lost money and that the chain’s flagship CASHCAT token was down roughly 75% from its July 11 peak.
In that case, BubbleMaps ran distribution checks and found CASHCAT’s ownership spread out, while a separate token, CASHDOG, was labeled heavily bundled.
Earlier, in July, the firm warned that the LAB token faced an “ugly” selloff as early investors approached a cliff unlock, with presale participants sitting on hundreds of millions in locked paper gains. Cryptopolitan reported that LAB had already fallen 72% from its June high amid separate insider-manipulation allegations from investigator ZachXBT.
The setting with CATE resembles the state of the above tokens before everything came crashing. A small group controlled the lion’s share of the supply. How the remaining investors react to this data in the coming days will be very critical to the performance of the token.
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The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) is providing job seekers and recruiters a way to confirm a certificate in seconds by writing the country’s academic records to the Avalanche (AVAX) C-Chain.
Ava Labs disclosed the rollout in an August 3 blog post, and Avalanche confirmed it the same day on X.
What is Kenya’s new records system?
For years, confirming a Kenyan certificate meant filing a request through official portals or shipping paper files back and forth. A single check could take up to a month, and bulk verification for large recruiters could take as long as six months.
However, the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) recently started moving the country’s academic records onto the Avalanche blockchain so verification can be done in seconds.
More than 15 million records are reportedly now stored on the Avalanche (AVAX) C-Chain, with the system expected to grow to about 35 million records.
KNEC Chief Executive Officer Dr David Njengere said students can now “securely access, download and verify their KCSE certificates online.” The certificates for the 2025 KCSE exams, which nearly 1 million students took, are now only available through this digital system.
The project covers records from Grade 8 (KCPE), Grade 12 (KCSE), advanced diplomas, and teaching certification. The work is done on the LegitDoc platform by a local Kenyan technology company.
Beyond the increase in verification speed, the old paper system was also easy to cheat. Fake certificates were a problem, and even the QR codes on those diplomas led back to normal databases that could be copied with fake websites.
However, each record on the new blockchain system is a secure, unchangeable entry, and anyone with access to the official portal can quickly check a certificate’s true status.
Why is Kenya using Avalanche?
The LegitDoc platform and Avalanche blockchain have also been used in India’s Dantewada district to put more than 700,000 land records on-chain. That project cut verification time from weeks to less than a day.
Avalanche has been used for other large projects, including the California DMV’s work with 42 million vehicle titles and Bergen County, New Jersey’s project with property deeds.
Cryptopolitan reported that Japan’s Progmat used an Avalanche Layer 1 for a tokenized securities project valued at over $3 billion, and the lending protocol Aave brought its new system to Avalanche.
The network’s ability to handle high volumes of transactions at a low cost makes it attractive for large-scale government projects. Records dating back to 1989 are now part of the new system.
However, even with these wins, the price of AVAX is down. On August 3, 2026, AVAX traded around $6.52, down about 70% from a year ago.
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