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The European Central Bank (ECB) has signed agreements with European Card Payment Cooperation, Nexo Standards, and Berlin Group to reuse existing open payment standards for digital euro transactions, aiming to reduce the system access costs for banks, merchants, and payment service providers.The relevant standards cover contactless payments, connections between merchants and payment service providers, as well as alias payments based on mobile phone numbers. The European Central Bank stated that this move helps to reduce market adoption costs and promotes a unified digital euro user experience in the euro area. Previously, the European Central Bank analyzed that the digital euro could bring about 4 billion to 6 billion euros in costs to EU banks within 4 years.

Microsoft had evaluated the possibility of acquiring the AI programming tool company Cursor, but ultimately did not proceed with the deal. Subsequently, SpaceX quickly reached an agreement to obtain an option to acquire Cursor at a valuation of $60 billion, with a $10 billion penalty for cancellation if the acquisition is not completed.Cursor is currently an important player in the AI programming sector, benefiting from the strong demand for automated programming tools from developers. Competition in this field has become increasingly fierce, with OpenAI and Anthropic being major players. On the other hand, Microsoft is facing multiple pressures, with its stock price down 10% this year, underperforming its peers in the hyperscale data center sector.

Non-custodial staking infrastructure provider Everstake has partnered with Web3 asset data platform RootData to comprehensively empower its business processes using RootData's data. Through the RootData API, Everstake will integrate comprehensive project information into its products, significantly enhancing user experience; leveraging RootData's rich industry data to provide more diverse and in-depth research reports; and obtaining more customer expansion leads based on information such as financing and teams.It is reported that Everstake is an institutional-grade staking infrastructure provider that supports secure and scalable participation in staking across more than 130 proof-of-stake (PoS) networks. Everstake provides support for asset management companies, custodians, non-custodial wallets, protocols, exchanges, and platforms, helping them achieve convenient staking access.

The State Duma of Russia (the lower house of parliament) has passed the "Digital Currency and Digital Rights Bill" in the first reading, marking a key step towards the legalization of cryptocurrency assets in the country.According to the bill, the Bank of Russia will become the core regulatory body for the cryptocurrency market, responsible for issuing licenses, approving or prohibiting related transactions, and defining the legality of transactions. The bill proposes to classify cryptocurrencies as "property," but explicitly prohibits their use as a means of payment domestically, with the ruble remaining the only legal tender. However, in the context of Western sanctions, cryptocurrency assets can be used for cross-border trade settlements, including service payments, intellectual property transfers, and other scenarios.In addition, the bill allows Russian residents to legally invest in cryptocurrency assets through licensed institutions, but will implement a tiered investor system, setting testing and annual investment limits for ordinary investors (with a suggested cap of 300,000 rubles). Initially, only high-market-cap mainstream assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum will be allowed for trading, with a whitelist established by the central bank. The bill is expected to be formally passed and come into effect by July 2026 at the latest. However, some lawmakers and banking industry figures have criticized the overly strict regulations, which may affect market activity and even lead to funds remaining in the gray market. At the same time, accompanying legislation is also proposed to introduce criminal penalties, with a maximum sentence of 7 years in prison for illegal cryptocurrency trading.

At the Bitget "Obsidian Night" offline event, the platform's Chinese language head, Xie Jiayin, elaborated on the IPO Prime product strategy. He stated that relying on the UEX panoramic exchange architecture, IPO Prime aims to break the barriers of traditional primary markets that have long been monopolized by leading institutions, building a standardized asset subscription channel that allows ordinary users to fairly participate in the early value growth of global unicorns like SpaceX.Xie Jiayin emphasized that "coming means being a VIP" has never just been a slogan, but a substantial right delivered to users based on UEX capabilities. IPO Prime is not only an upgrade and iteration of the product system but also a deep practice of the concept of financial equality in the cryptocurrency trading field. By continuously lowering participation thresholds and improving asset circulation efficiency, the rights to allocate high-quality global assets are truly made accessible to every user.

The 0G Foundation announced a partnership with Alibaba Cloud to launch on-chain access to the Qianwen large model for AI agents.This move shifts artificial intelligence infrastructure from centralized, API-based systems to programmable, tokenized access specifically designed for autonomous agents. Through this collaboration, 0G allows developers to directly embed access to Qianwen into their infrastructure via a token-based mechanism. This eliminates the need for traditional account management and enables on-demand programmable access to AI computation. Agents running on 0G can query the Qianwen large model to generate responses, process information, or execute tasks in real-time.Michael Heinrich, CEO and co-founder of 0G Labs, stated, "From a macro perspective, inference runs on Qianwen, and verification runs on 0G—this builds a more complete computational and trust foundation for autonomous AI systems. The integration of 0G with Alibaba Cloud's Qianwen marks a milestone, achieving the fusion of top-tier intelligence and trusted infrastructure."

ChainCatcher reports live that Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, delivered a keynote speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. She pointed out from a macroeconomic perspective that global production, users, and resources are distributed globally, but capital formation is not; only 20 stock exchanges in 14 countries account for 94% of the global market value of approximately $145 trillion, with two-thirds concentrated in the United States. This means that about 180 countries have almost no access to capital markets, and their economies can only rely on debt rather than equity financing, failing to provide ownership pathways for their citizens.She proposed the vision of an "Internet Capital Market," where any asset from anywhere can raise capital from anyone globally, priced in dollars and settled on an open track. Stablecoins are the key infrastructure for this vision, enabling any country to participate in the global financial system, while Solana provides the underlying settlement and execution layers. She also contrasted "Universal Basic Ownership" (UBO) with the widely discussed "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) in the AI era, arguing that blockchain allows anyone with a mobile phone to hold a part of their country's economy, representing basic property rights in the digital age without resorting to placing everyone in a welfare system.

Vercel announced a security incident analysis, stating that some of its internal systems were accessed without authorization. This was caused by a third-party AI tool, Context.ai, used by an employee being compromised, allowing the attacker to take over their Google Workspace account and access some environment configuration data.The initial impact is that a small number of environment variables not marked as "sensitive" (such as API Keys, Tokens, etc.) may have been leaked. Relevant users have been notified and advised to rotate their credentials immediately. There is currently no evidence that data marked as "sensitive" or the supply chain (such as npm packages) has been tampered with.Vercel stated that the attacker possesses a high level of technical skill and has partnered with Mandiant and several security agencies to investigate, and has reported the incident to law enforcement. They also emphasized that platform services are still operating normally. Additionally, users are advised to enable multi-factor authentication, comprehensively rotate potentially leaked environment variables, and check account activity logs and deployment records to prevent further risks.

Lido stated on platform X that its EarnETH treasury was affected by the theft of 116,500 rsETH (approximately $29.2 million) from the Kelp DAO cross-chain bridge on April 18.EarnETH holds approximately $21.6 million in rsETH risk exposure through leveraged positions in rsETH/ETH on Aave, accounting for about 9% of the total assets in the treasury. The EarnETH team is currently actively deleveraging to reduce risk, and the outcome depends on the final decisions made by Kelp, LayerZero, and Aave regarding loss sharing and bad debt handling.Lido further stated that EarnETH has a $3 million "first loss protection mechanism" funded by the Lido DAO treasury, which will be used to cover losses if necessary. The treasury has currently suspended redemption processing to assess the losses. This incident does not affect stETH and wstETH, and the core staking protocol of Lido is not involved.

On-chain detective ZachXBT questioned Kraken's due diligence process for the listing of $M (Memecore) spot trading on July 3, 2025, stating that approximately 7.9 million $M had been withdrawn from Kraken to 18 newly created addresses, of which a total of about 11.7 million $M is currently held, valued at approximately $39.8 million at the current price.He also mentioned that a suspected Memecore team address received 200 million $M during the token generation event (TGE) and transferred 5.3 million $M to the Kraken deposit address on July 3, 2025.

WORLD3 officially released the AI Strategic White Paper today, fully disclosing the latest progress of its decentralized AI infrastructure platform RouterLink and the managed AI agent platform TapClaw, and announced that it has reached official cooperation with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.According to the white paper, WORLD3 has currently processed over 100 billion LLM Tokens, supporting 52 models from 20 providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek, attracting over 10,000 active developers using its API, with the network consuming over 150 million $WAI in total. Additionally, since its launch in March 2026, its TapClaw platform has deployed over 1,200 AI agents.In terms of future planning, WORLD3 stated that it will promote the construction of the RouterLink mainnet and GPU computing power market, plan to expand TapClaw to the global multilingual market, and launch an Agent skill market and enterprise-level computing power guarantee services.

According to SlowMist founder Yu Xian (@evilcos), the core of the KelpDAO theft incident, which involved approximately $290 million, was a targeted poisoning attack on the downstream RPC infrastructure of LayerZero DVN (Decentralized Validator Network).The specific attack steps were: first, obtaining the list of RPC nodes used by LayerZero DVN, then breaching two independent clusters and replacing the op-geth binary file; using selective deception techniques to return forged malicious payloads only to DVN while returning real data to other IPs; simultaneously launching DDoS attacks on the unbreached RPC nodes, forcing DVN to failover to the poisoned nodes, completing the forged message verification, and then the malicious binary self-destructing and clearing logs. This ultimately led to LayerZero DVN issuing validations for "transactions that never occurred."

According to official news, the cloud hosting platform Vercel has confirmed that a security incident has occurred, involving unauthorized access to some internal systems.Currently, only a small number of customers have been confirmed to be affected, and Vercel is communicating directly with the relevant customers. Vercel stated that its services are still operating normally, and it has initiated an investigation and hired incident response experts to assist in handling the situation, while also notifying law enforcement.Vercel recommends that all customers review their environment variables and use the sensitive environment variable feature to enhance security protection.

Binance Co-CEO He Yi responded to community questions at the BNB Chain event in Hong Kong, stating that when trading memecoins on BSC, one should not "nitpick" (picking apart He Yi or Big Brother's Twitter content) and deceive oneself.He Yi mentioned that she is not a narcissistic person and does not tweet every day to create hype. Some coins discussed at the Binance Alpha event are popular not because she tweeted about them, but because they have inherent popularity, which creates a false cycle.She emphasized that BNB Chain is a public chain, and just as one does not question the Ethereum Foundation about the quality of projects on Ethereum, everyone trading memecoins on BSC should have the correct understanding. Binance's mission is to protect users, but that does not mean that every investment on the BNB Chain will necessarily be profitable."99.9% of memecoins will go to zero," He Yi stated, noting that most projects will fail, and investors must be clear about what they are doing and not be misled by others. One cannot assume that any memecoin "picked out" by He Yi will definitely be listed on Binance; otherwise, it would contradict the reputation of "protecting users," and this understanding is misguided.

etherFi posted on platform X that its Liquid treasury is temporarily not directly exposed to the Kelp rsETH event risk, but as a precautionary measure, it has suspended the LayerZero cross-chain bridging functionality for weETH and eETH until the root cause of the Kelp rs ETH event is clarified. Meanwhile, for Liquid (ETH, BTC, USD), sETHFI, and eBTC products, the relevant Teller contracts have been suspended to block the LayerZero OFT bridging path, and the deposit and withdrawal functions for the related assets have also been suspended. They are currently working closely with security partners and will provide timely updates once more details are confirmed.

According to Vitalik Buterin (@Vitalik Buterin), the DNS registrar of eth.limo was attacked, and users are advised not to visit vitalik.eth.limo or other eth.limo related pages temporarily, until the official confirmation of normal recovery.

According to Edaily, Kim Sang-hoon, the chairman of the Digital Assets Special Committee of the People Power Party of Korea, expressed concerns about the restrictions on equity in cryptocurrency exchanges at an academic conference. He called for the prioritization of advancing the basic law on digital assets related to stablecoins (Phase Two legislation) to avoid getting caught in equity regulatory disputes and missing the golden legislative opportunity.He pointed out that the reality of the issuance and circulation of the Korean won stablecoin KRWQ has emerged overseas, posing a severe challenge to monetary sovereignty. Kim Sang-hoon emphasized that the law should provide market predictability, offer clear guidance for operators, and establish effective safety mechanisms for users.

According to official news, the NFT public chain Mint Blockchain announced that the blockchain network officially ceased operations on April 17, 2026. To ensure the safety of user assets, the project team reminds all users to transfer their on-chain assets to the Ethereum mainnet as soon as possible, including assets such as ETH, WBTC, USDC, and USDT.The announcement states that users need to complete the asset migration through the extraction channel provided by the official team, with a deadline of October 20, 2026. Before this deadline, users can still perform asset extraction operations normally to ensure the safe transfer of funds to external networks. If users do not complete the extraction before the deadline, the related assets will no longer be processed or recoverable.