Coinbase Ventures emerged as the most active crypto venture capital firm in the first half of 2026, with DeFi, AI, and payment sectors being its most favored investment areas.

According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, BlackRock (BLK.N) disclosed that as of June 30, it held 51 million Class A common shares of SpaceX (SPCX.O).

According to ABC News, after suffering a setback at the Supreme Court, Donald Trump is still pushing forward with his attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

Bybit has filed a civil lawsuit against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), its General Reconnaissance Bureau (RGB) intelligence agency, and the Lazarus Group, a hacking group linked to North Korea that stole $1.5 billion from Bybit last year. In addition to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Bybit said it has obtained a preliminary injunction freezing certain stolen assets held by a group of unidentified individuals and entities, who are listed as "John Doe" defendants in the case. The crypto exchange stated in a Friday press release that the preliminary injunction means a federal judge has ordered the defendants not to transfer or sell their assets while the case is pending. The platform will seek further relief from the court. "This civil lawsuit is separate from the ongoing criminal investigation by U.S. law enforcement," it said. (CoinDesk)

OpenAI published a new blog post noting that internal tests have shown its upcoming Astra model has made significant advances in agent coding and cybersecurity. Evaluated against its Preparedness Framework, OpenAI stated it cannot rule out that the model has reached the "critical" cybersecurity capability threshold. Additionally, the company clarified in the post that the Astra model was not involved in the recent Hugging Face security incident, and is continuing benchmark tests under the Preparedness Framework to manage frontier cybersecurity capabilities. As a result, OpenAI has suspended internal activities related to Astra that do not yet meet these enhanced security control requirements. The "critical" capability is defined as: a model can, without human intervention, discover and exploit all severe functional zero-day vulnerabilities across a large number of real, hardened critical systems; or independently design and execute end-to-end novel cyberattack strategies against hardened targets based solely on high-level objectives. Prior models, such as GPT-5.6-Sol, were only rated at the "high" level.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), U.S.-listed optical module stocks extended their strong rally, with intraday gains widening. COHR jumped more than 16%, AAOI climbed 12.12%, and LITE advanced 6.47%. The optical module stock ETF (LYTE) operated by prominent investment management firm Roundhill rose 4.66%.

OpenAI has delayed the launch of its new flagship model Astra due to cybersecurity concerns. Astra, OpenAI’s next-generation primary model, features robust capabilities including long-duration autonomous operation, multi-agent collaboration, and solving long-unresolved mathematical problems, and has recently been validated in internal builds. (Axios)