Stablecoin issuer Circle has minted an additional 5 billion USDC over the past week.

According to official announcements, on-chain structured products infrastructure City Protocol announced the completion of its seed and Pre-A funding rounds, raising a total of $11 million. Investors include Dragonfly, Jump Crypto, CMT Digital, Stratified Capital, Adaverse, Mirana, and others. City Protocol is dedicated to bringing structured products on-chain, providing an integrated infrastructure for the issuance, operation, and access of structured products through its tokenization layer, vault layer, and issuance & operation layer. Its flagship product is on-chain structured products platform Venzo, which currently has 4 strategy vaults live, with a total value locked (TVL) of $40 million, covering strategies previously targeted at institutional and professional investors, including quantitative hedging, cross-exchange arbitrage, and private credit. Venzo will also launch thematic vaults soon, divided into two categories: persona tracking and sector themes, with smart contracts executing the purchase and adjustment of a basket of assets directly in users' wallets per transparent public rules.

Crypto entrepreneur Huang Licheng, known as "Brother Ma Ji", responded in a post that recent media reports from Taiwan, China claimed his investment portfolio had surged 84 times in returns, but the news is "fake". Earlier reports said Brother Ma Ji seized last week’s one-sided rally in the crypto market, rolling over his long position from around $150,000 to roughly $11.15 million, recouping approximately $11 million in total. He had incurred a cumulative loss of about $35 million from long positions on ETH over the past 10 months; after this round of gains, his historical loss narrowed to roughly $24 million. On-chain data previously also showed his cumulative historical losses remained in the tens of millions of dollars.

Beating AI Express News reports that, per market sources, Deepseek's revenue reached $70 million as of July, marking a tenfold increase from 2025.

A source close to Sugon revealed that the company will launch a new token acceleration solution for large language model (LLM) inference, focusing on resolving duplicate computations and data scheduling issues during the inference process. Currently, Sugon’s ParaStor distributed storage has been deployed in China’s first fully domestic 100,000-card AI supercluster, Sugon 8000 (Dengfeng), providing data throughput and elastic scaling support for large-scale computing tasks. According to the latest report from CCID Consulting, Sugon ranks first in four sub-sectors: AI, education, embodied intelligence, and autonomous driving. (Jinshi)

BlackRock has drastically cut the minimum threshold for investors to directly exchange Bitcoin for shares of its spot Bitcoin ETF IBIT from $25 million to $1 million. The mechanism adopts the "in-kind creation" model, enabling investors to deliver BTC directly in exchange for ETF shares, skipping the need to first sell Bitcoin before purchasing ETFs, thus avoiding certain transaction steps and potential tax costs. Reports note Bitwise has also lowered its related conversion threshold from $100 million to $3 million. To date, IBIT has processed over $5 billion in cumulative in-kind conversions, up from $3 billion in October last year. As crypto asset theft, hacking and custody risks remain in the spotlight, a growing number of large Bitcoin holders are considering converting some of their self-custodied assets into regulated ETF products.

Beating AI News Flash: The Israel government-funded Hanover Institute for Public Policy has been exposed for mass-producing "research reports," with one key goal being to appear in search results of AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Since August 6, the institute’s website has published over 100 articles on Israel-Palestine issues, with no bylines, and many titles phrased exactly like questions users would ask AI platforms. Hanover also hosts an llms.txt file, organizing its entire site content into a machine-readable index. When Politico ran tests with neutral questions, ChatGPT and Perplexity had repeatedly cited Hanover. 404 Media and Responsible Statecraft each conducted AI detector checks on the articles, with most flagged as AI-generated. The behind-the-scenes PR firm Piro openly sells an "AI Story Optimization" service, which analyzes pages on Reddit, YouTube, forums, media outlets, and other platforms to identify those that most influence AI model answers, then creates content tailored to be easily cited by large language models (LLMs). Piro’s official website even uses Politico’s test results to promote its services. U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings show that Piro, via Havas Media, runs communications projects for the Israel Government Advertising Bureau LaPam. The two disclosed payments total $1 million.