News linked to both this project and an event.
: Privacy blockchain Zano has announced that Zenith has entered the implementation phase, with a network transition planned for 2027, subject to testing, analysis, and review results. Zano has not yet announced an activation date, and the proposed operational parameters still require verification at the network level. Zenith will transition Zano from a hybrid PoW and PoS mechanism to a privacy-preserving pure PoS protocol. The proposed block time will be reduced from approximately 1 minute to about 15 seconds, the recommended number of confirmations will be lowered from 10 blocks to 4 to 6 blocks, and the typical confirmation time will be around 60 to 90 seconds. Andrey Sabelnikov, co-founder and core developer of Zano, stated that Zenith is based on over 12 years of privacy research, aiming to provide the network with the advantages of modern PoS while retaining the privacy protections that Zano users expect. PoW miners currently receive approximately 720 newly issued ZANO per day, equivalent to around 21,600 per month and 262,800 per year. After Zenith is activated and PoW mining ends, this issuance will be discontinued. Zano has also launched the official Zano Forum for technical discussions and community support.
security firm Project Eleven has introduced a post-quantum proof technology designed to help users prove ownership of their Bitcoin wallets after quantum computers become capable of deriving private keys and generating valid signatures. Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden stated that the technology utilizes the wallet's key derivation path, enabling users to prove control without disclosing the parent key, thus distinguishing legitimate owners from attackers. The solution was developed in collaboration with Jim Posen, a primary maintainer of the open-source Binius zero-knowledge proof system, and is based on the "signature lifting" technique proposed by Alon Sattath and Robert Wyborski. Project Eleven noted that the prototype has not yet been audited and requires blockchain protocol support before it can be deployed. It is primarily aimed at users who miss the window to migrate to quantum-resistant addresses in the future.
global payment giant Visa is accelerating its stablecoin infrastructure efforts by launching the Visa Stablecoin Platform, which helps banks and fintech companies integrate stablecoin payment capabilities into their existing payment and treasury management systems. It is reported that the platform aims to provide stablecoin service support to approximately 15,000 financial institutions and over 200 million merchants within Visa's network, enabling enterprises to use USD stablecoins for settlement, capital flow, and financial management within the traditional payment network.Visa currently processes approximately $15 trillion in payment transactions annually and has already processed tens of billions of dollars in stablecoin settlement volume. The company hopes to further expand the application scope of stablecoins through this new platform. Initially, the Visa Stablecoin Platform will support the new stablecoin OUSD, launched by the Open Standard alliance, while continuing to be compatible with stablecoins already supported by Visa, including USDC issued by Circle and USDG issued by Paxos. Visa believes that stablecoins are becoming an important part of the future financial infrastructure, with advantages including:Instant Settlement: Transactions no longer rely on traditional banking clearing cycles;Low-Cost Transfers: Reducing payment costs based on blockchain networks;Transparency and Traceability: On-chain transaction records provide higher verifiability.Visa has been consistently building its footprint in the stablecoin space. In 2020, Visa became the first global payment network to support USDC settlement; in 2025, the company launched a stablecoin settlement plan to further promote the entry of stablecoins into the mainstream payment system.Meanwhile, Visa's competitors are also accelerating their entry into the stablecoin market. Mastercard recently launched a stablecoin settlement solution and partnered with companies such as MoonPay and Paxos; American Express has also participated in the ecosystem development related to Open Standard.As traditional payment giants increasingly adopt stablecoins, they are transitioning from a payment tool within the crypto industry into a vital component of the global financial infrastructure. (Fortune)
AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI has announced the completion of a $1.5 billion financing round, valuing the company at $17.5 billion. The company, previously backed by NVIDIA, primarily provides developers with cloud-based services for running open-source AI models, helping enterprises deploy AI applications at lower costs. This funding round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from NVIDIA, Evantic, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. Currently, Fireworks processes approximately 40 trillion AI tokens daily. Its clients include companies such as Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB. Previously, over half of its revenue came from the AI coding tool Cursor, but its client base has since become more diversified. (CNBC)
hardware wallet company Ledger has launched the open-source toolkit Ledger Agent Stack, enabling AI agents to interact with crypto wallets by reading balances, preparing transactions, and suggesting actions, with all transactions requiring user approval on a Ledger hardware device. Ledger stated that this release is the first step in its AI roadmap, aiming to introduce hardware-based security mechanisms into AI-driven crypto applications and prevent autonomous agents from transferring funds or accessing sensitive credentials without human approval.
Binance will list multiple perpetual contracts sequentially starting from 11:00 on July 17, 2026, including MiniMax Perpetual Contract MINIMAXUSDT (11:00), Zhipu AI Perpetual Contract ZHIPUUSDT (11:05), Tencent Quantitative Perpetual Contract HK0700USDT (11:10), Xiaomi Quantitative Perpetual Contract HK1810USDT (11:15), and Tencent Perpetual Contract TENCENTUSDT (13:00). Among them, HK0700USDT and HK1810USDT are quantitative perpetual contracts, based on Hong Kong stock prices, settled directly in USDT, without involving foreign exchange conversion.
According to Visa's official website, Visa and Artemis jointly released a report that deeply analyzes the current status and trends of AI agent payments based on real-time on-chain data. The report indicates that AI agent payments are divided into two categories: one is "macro commerce" where agents replace users to complete tasks like booking tickets and subscriptions, similar to traditional e-commerce payments; the other is "micro commerce" such as high-frequency, low-value API calls between software, where single transaction amounts are typically less than 1 cent. On-chain data shows that the open protocol x402, incubated by Coinbase and Cloudflare and now hosted by the Linux Foundation, has processed approximately 109 million transactions since launching in May 2025, with an adjusted transaction volume of about $15 million, mainly active on the Base, Solana, and Polygon chains; the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), jointly built by Stripe and Tempo with Visa's contribution, launched in mid-March 2026 and completed approximately 115,000 transactions within weeks, with a settlement amount of about $25,000. The report notes that blockchain settlement costs have dropped to extremely low levels, making small payments in the 1-cent to 1-dollar range economically feasible for the first time, but agent payments still face significant challenges at the legal and regulatory level regarding trust, liability attribution, and dispute resolution. Visa stated that its goal is to build a unified foundation that simultaneously supports card-native trust authorization and machine-native settlement
: The inaugural Web4.0 and Agent Innovation Summit, along with the launch ceremony of OPC Hub, was held at Hong Kong Cyberport. Cobo was officially announced as a partner of OPC Hub, listed alongside Alibaba Cloud, AWS, NVIDIA, Dell, Lenovo, and BytePlus. Cobo will provide blockchain infrastructure support for entrepreneurs within the ecosystem. Its product capabilities cover Agentic Wallet and stablecoin payments (Cobo Payments), enabling developers to build agent-based applications with on-chain payment capabilities.
According to official Bitget data, the platform-level yield product Cash Plus has exceeded $50 million in Assets Under Management (AUM) within 5 days of launch. Cash Plus provides users with a brand-new stablecoin demand yield service, balancing yield, liquidity, and capital efficiency, allowing users to enjoy daily compound interest during the holding period. The initial phase supports USDT / USDC, enabling 1:1 redemption at any time, real-time fund arrival, and 0 fees with no slippage. The reference annualized yield during the initial launch period is 4% APR, and the actual yield will be dynamically adjusted based on market conditions.
According to the official announcement, HTX recently officially launched the first "Quant Master Trading Competition", aiming to build a stage for real competition and strategy verification for professional quantitative teams and API strategy traders. From now until September 14, 00:00 (UTC+8), API quantitative trading users who register for the competition and meet the specified asset and trading volume requirements will be ranked in three major leaderboards and share the prize pool based on the trading volume, profit amount, and profit rate generated by their spot and contract API trading. The total prize pool will be unlocked tier by tier according to the cumulative trading volume of all participants, up to a maximum of 1,000,000 USDT. In addition, the Quant Master Trading Competition also features bi-weekly phase rewards, and the Top 3 strategies on each leaderboard can win $HTX reward funds. New users who register for the competition can also enjoy 4 exclusive benefits, including Prime 11 exclusive low fees, early bird rewards, broker activation rewards, and interest-free loans up to 50,000 USDT.
According to The Block, Nasdaq-listed Hyperliquid treasury company Hyperion DeFi (HYPD) announced a HYPE Asset Usage Service Agreement (HAUS) with Skew Technologies and will deploy 500,000 staked HYPE (approximately $33.59 million) to Skew to support Skew's launch of a new suite of institutional-grade perpetual futures products on the Hyperliquid HIP-3 permissionless market. In return, Hyperion will receive equity in Skew and a revenue share from market listing services. Previously, Hyperion had terminated similar staking agreements with Felix and Native Markets because both built HIP-3 markets based on Hyperliquid's deprecated native stablecoin USDH. Currently, Hyperliquid has shifted to using Circle's USDC as the primary quote asset, with Coinbase serving as the stablecoin vault provider.
According to Odaily, the persistent memory supply shortage driven by AI demand continues to exert upward pricing pressure on smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics, Apple, and Xiaomi in the second half of the year. Industry sources indicate that Samsung Electronics' upcoming Galaxy Z8 series, set to be released this month, has an increased likelihood of price increases based on storage capacity. The price of the 256GB base model is expected to remain at a similar level to its predecessor, approximately 3.05 million won, while the 512GB and 1TB models may see price increases of around 120,000 won each. This pricing strategy aims to minimize the price increase for the base model while prioritizing adjustments to higher-capacity models, which are more affected by memory cost pressures.
Securitize partners with Cantor Fitzgerald to develop a blockchain-based IPO framework, enabling tokenized securities issuance within the existing U.S. securities regulatory framework.
: The UK and US governments, through the Future Markets Cross-Atlantic Working Group, have issued a joint position on stablecoins, supporting coordinated rules on reserves, redemption, market access, and cross-border use. The two governments stated that if stablecoins are properly regulated, they can improve payments, settlement, and financial market infrastructure, while supporting the development of private digital currencies under public sector oversight. The UK and US indicated that stablecoins used as currency should be fully backed by high-quality liquid assets at a minimum ratio of 1:1. Reserve assets should be segregated from the issuer’s own funds, with disclosure standards for custody, redemption, and legal rights provided to holders. The two countries also stated they will explore pathways for stablecoins issued in one country to enter the other’s market, and support fair, risk-based access to financial services and markets for legitimate, regulated stablecoin and digital asset providers.
DTCC has completed live trade processing involving tokenized stocks, ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries, marking its largest production-grade tokenization initiative to date. The pilot demonstrates that tokenized securities can support collateral, repo, and equity trading while retaining the same legal ownership as traditional assets. DTCC plans to launch its tokenization services in October, as Wall Street firms continue to explore blockchain-based market infrastructure.
Starknet announced the opening of its privacy development stack to developers, launching a privacy SDK and privacy wallet API, enabling apps, wallets, and protocols to integrate private balances, private transfers, and related DeFi interaction features based on STRK20.
According to the official announcement, HTX listed INTW/USDT and XBI/USDT perpetual contracts on July 15, with a maximum leverage of 10x for both. Additionally, HTX launched the INTW and XBI contract trading competition from 15:00 on July 15 to 15:00 on July 22 (UTC+8), with a total prize pool of up to 20,000 USD. During the event, users who complete registration and participate in INTW/USDT and XBI/USDT contract trading with a cumulative valid trading volume ≥ 1,000 USDT can share the prize pool based on trading volume ranking; new contract users who complete contract trading of event coins will also receive exclusive benefits.
According to official announcements, OKX will open the first batch of tokenized US stock spot trading on July 16. Users can hold and trade the price exposure of underlying stocks or ETFs in units of "shares". Assets are named by adding an "X" before the stock ticker (e.g., XNVDA, XTSLA). Deposits and withdrawals are supported via the Solana and X Layer networks, with 24/7 trading available, and trading pairs are quoted in USDT.It is reported that this product enables trading year-round, with prices during non-trading hours calculated based on the latest closing price plus market estimates. Positions in this product, spot, and stock perpetual swaps are unified under the same account, allowing direct trading with USDT without requiring a brokerage account. It supports automated trading via strategy robots such as recurring buys and grids. Dividends will be reinvested at the issuer level and returned in the form of increased share quantities.
Ripple announced on July 14, 2026, that it has joined the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation as a Premier Member, participating in the technical and governance development of the protocol. The x402 Foundation, initiated by 40 member organizations, aims to develop an open payment standard based on HTTP for AI agents, APIs, and applications. Coinbase has contributed x402 to the Linux Foundation, supporting AI agents, APIs, and applications in sending and receiving payments directly during network interactions. Ripple stated that the XRP Ledger already supports agent payments via x402, including transactions using XRP and the Ripple USD stablecoin RLUSD. (Bitcoin.com News).
TxFlow L1 has announced the launch of its second Channel, Probly, the first prediction market application developed based on the TxFlow Improvement Protocol 3 (TIP3). Upon launch, Probly offers 172 live markets covering over 7,000 events, including continuous rolling markets with a minimum duration of 5 minutes, and supports on-chain settlement and TxFlow L1's shared financial infrastructure. Probly covers 15 categories including politics, sports, crypto, finance, and geopolitics, and provides prediction markets related to BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP price movements for 5-minute, 15-minute, 1-hour, and 4-hour intervals. Users can access Probly via an email-based embedded wallet without needing to manage seed phrases, or by connecting compatible wallets such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Phantom, and Uniswap Wallet. Eligible settlement amounts will be automatically credited in USDC after the event is resolved, with no separate claim required. (Decrypt).