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The cryptocurrency lobbying organization TDC has filed a lawsuit seeking to block the enforcement of the Illinois Digital Asset Tax Act.This tax applies to any company headquartered in Illinois or operating in the state that provides digital asset services in the state.

Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-8222 aims to separate staking deposits from withdrawals through a STARK-based cryptographic mechanism and to re-anonymize validators to reduce the traceability of validator activities. Currently, about one-third of ETH is staked.Thibault Dubuis, Head of Staking and Decentralized Finance Products at Sygnum Bank, stated that the current deposit addresses, validators, and withdrawal credentials create visible links, making institutional holdings, entry times, and staking strategies nearly public. This proposal is still in the discussion phase and has not yet scheduled a deployment time. Its design may involve arrangements such as fixed deposit denominations and asset withdrawal waiting periods, and institutional users may need to bear higher execution costs, process delays, and compliance work.

Augustus is a startup that is building a federally chartered clearing bank. The company stated that it has raised $180 million, aiming to expand its dollar payment infrastructure, while stablecoins are reshaping the global financial system. This round of financing values Augustus at $1 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from investors such as Hummingbird Ventures, QED Investors, as well as founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel.This financing comes at a time when banks, fintech companies, and crypto firms are competing to upgrade cross-border payment infrastructure. While the market's focus is mostly on stablecoin issuers, Augustus is targeting a less noticed but crucial part of the financial system—the correspondent banking system. Augustus CEO Ferdinand Dabitz stated in an interview, "We believe that the distribution of financial services is bottlenecked at the clearing bank level." He pointed out that traditional clearing systems are "slow, not available around the clock, take two days to settle, and are closed on weekends."

According to Bloomberg, Venezuela's largest fintech company Cashea recently completed two rounds of financing totaling $100 million, including a $60 million Series B round led by FinSight Ventures in June this year, and a $40 million Series A round completed in March led by Spice Expeditions, which included $20 million in debt provided by Architect Capital. Several U.S. donor funds and Latin American investment institutions participated.Founded in 2022, Cashea provides "buy now, pay later" services for Venezuelan consumers who have long been credit-constrained. Users can make a down payment via the app or by scanning a code offline and then pay in interest-free installments. The company claims to have processed over 110 million transactions, serving more than 10 million accounts, with partnerships reaching 40,000 merchants. The new funds will be used to expand credit products and support post-disaster reconstruction.

According to PConline Pacific Technology reports, the official version of DeepSeek-V4 has begun a small-scale gray testing, including two versions: DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Insiders say that the official version is expected to be released at the end of this month, which is somewhat delayed compared to previous plans. The new version will focus on optimizing inference efficiency, response speed, and agent capabilities.Developers participating in the testing claim that V4's comprehensive capabilities are on par with Anthropic Opus 4.8, with code generation close to OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, and improvements in scenarios such as 3D modeling, SVG image generation, and mini-game development. DeepSeek-V4 has completed the adaptation for de-CUDA, and on the first day of launch, it will be compatible with multiple domestic AI chips, and will adopt peak and off-peak API billing, with peak prices being double that of off-peak.

According to a report by businesswire, the stablecoin and digital asset financial infrastructure service provider Cordant announced the completion of an $8 million seed round financing, led by Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT, with participation from Bankless VC, FJ Labs, SignalFire, Quona, Next Stage, Selah Ventures, Flatironx, Nascent Ventures, Silvercircle Ventures, and Generative Ventures. The new funds will support its introduction of new payment networks and AI automation tools.Cordant is collaborating with financial institutions on product co-development, covering banking, payments, embedded finance, cross-border transactions, stablecoins, and digital assets. Among them, the Latin American digital asset and payment platform Bitso and the blockchain infrastructure company Paxos are both participating as investors and design partners.

According to Jinshi, the weekly change in ADP employment in the United States for the week ending July 4 was a decrease of 16,500, compared to the previous value of 19,750.

According to Forbes, humanoid robot startup Humanoid announced the completion of a $152 million Series A funding round, with a post-investment valuation of $1.35 billion, becoming the first unicorn company in Europe focused on the humanoid robotics field.This round of financing was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from German industrial giants Schaeffler and Bosch, Taiwan's Fubon Financial Holdings venture capital, and LVMH Arnault family's investment firm Aglaé Ventures. After this financing, Humanoid's total funding amount has reached $270 million.

Ant International announced the completion of its Series A financing. Ant Group and several existing shareholders, including Alibaba, as well as multiple internationally renowned investment institutions participated in this round of financing. It is reported that the financing amount is approximately $1.2 billion, which will be used to expand global operations, accelerate investment in cutting-edge technologies such as AI, broaden inclusive fintech services like cross-border payments and global accounts, and help global merchants achieve growth.On March 19, 2024, Jing Xiandong announced that Ant International, OceanBase, and Ant Digital, all under Ant Group, have established their respective boards of directors and are independently facing the market. Currently, the chairman of Ant International is Jing Xiandong. Ant International's business covers major markets in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, connecting over 150 million global merchants and more than 2 billion consumer accounts, with innovation, settlement, and operation centers located in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. Currently, Ant International has four major business segments: Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst, and Bettr, which focus on enhancing global payment connectivity, developing technology-driven merchant payment, treasury management, and fintech solutions, and building a broad cooperation network with domestic and foreign financial institutions, technology companies, and merchants.

Gate Europe CEO Dr. Giovanni Cunti was invited to participate in a live interview on Cointelegraph X Space, where he shared insights on the regulatory trends of digital assets in Europe, the MiCA compliance framework, and Gate Europe's development strategy in Europe. Dr. Giovanni Cunti stated that the implementation of MiCA is an important step towards the unification of the European market, "Unified regulation brings broader market access, and market access will further drive institutional adoption." He believes that after the adjustments made under the MiCA framework, market participants will be able to operate in a clearer and more transparent regulatory environment, providing institutional investors with a higher degree of security and trust.During the live broadcast, Dr. Giovanni Cunti also introduced the latest strategic progress of Gate Europe in the European region. He emphasized that Gate Europe proactively began compliance alignment as early as the initial phase of the MiCA framework in 2021. Leveraging the dual licensing advantages of MiCA and Payment Institutions (PI), Gate Europe is steadily strengthening compliance, risk control, and operational governance while continuously expanding digital asset trading, wealth management, and localized services, committed to providing European users with safer, more transparent, and efficient digital asset services.As the global regulatory framework for digital assets continues to improve, compliance is becoming an important foundation for the long-term development of the industry. Currently, Gate has completed regulatory registrations, license applications, or obtained authorizations and approvals in multiple jurisdictions including Europe, the United States, Japan, Dubai, Australia, and the Bahamas, continuously advancing its global compliance strategy. In the future, Gate will adhere to the parallel development of compliance and innovation, continuously enhance its global service capabilities, promote the steady development of the digital asset industry, and provide global users with safer, more efficient, and trustworthy products and services.

Fluidstack, a cloud computing startup focused on AI computing power leasing Neocloud, announced that it completed an $830 million Series A funding round in January, with a valuation of $7.5 billion. The round was led by the Situational Awareness fund of former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, with participation from multiple investors.According to reports, Fluidstack builds infrastructure for AI laboratories, aiming to become the company that can deploy hundreds of gigawatts of computing power the fastest in the world.

AI inference infrastructure startup Infinity announced the completion of a $15 million financing round, with the company's valuation reaching $100 million. Investors in this round include Touring Capital, Principal VC, and researchers from organizations such as OpenAI and Anthropic.The company is developing a general reasoning library that enables different AI chips to automatically reproduce cutting-edge AI research results and enhance hardware performance through software optimization.

According to CoinDesk, the Cardano mainnet completed the "Van Rossem" hard fork on July 18, upgrading the protocol version to 11, primarily reducing the cost of smart contract execution and paving the way for subsequent scaling solutions.This upgrade was the first to be fully proposed, discussed, and voted on by the community through the on-chain governance process, rather than being directly led by the founding development company Input Output. On-chain data shows that the voting support rate was approximately 78.97%, all 7 members of the Constitutional Committee confirmed that the proposal complied with the "Cardano Constitution," about 53.02% of node operators voted in favor, and over approximately 93% of block production pledges have run the new version of the node.This upgrade prepares technically and procedurally for the scaling solution Ouroboros Leios, which is planned to go live in 2026.

According to GlobeNewswire, AI security startup Neo announced the completion of a $100 million financing round, led by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures.It is reported that the company positions itself as an "Agentic Software Control" company, dedicated to building a real-time control layer for enterprises, helping security operations teams (SecOps) manage and protect the rapidly proliferating AI agents, AI applications, browsers, identity systems, and intelligent capabilities in traditional software. The new funds will be used to expand the engineering and marketing teams and accelerate the expansion of enterprise customers.

According to the official announcement from Gate, Gate has completed the cash dividend distribution for 84 U.S. stock targets including Alibaba (BABA), Intuit (INTU), Thermo Fisher Scientific (TMO), and American Tower (AMT), and has proportionally distributed the equivalent amount in USDT to eligible users' spot accounts, with no action required from users.This dividend distribution covers multiple categories including technology and semiconductors, financial services, energy, consumer goods, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, real estate REITs, utilities, materials manufacturing, and strategic ETFs. Users can check the dividend details in the APP under [TradFi] - [Stocks] - [Trading] - [History] - [Funds Flow] or on the Web under [Stocks] - [Funds Flow]. The final amount and timing of the funds received will be based on the actual receipt situation.

According to the latest report released by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), FATF conducted the seventh special assessment of the implementation of Recommendation 15 (R.15) across global jurisdictions. The report indicates that since the last update in 2025, countries have continued to advance in the regulation of virtual assets (VA) and virtual asset service providers (VASP), including conducting risk assessments, improving licensing and registration frameworks, implementing travel rules, and strengthening law enforcement actions.However, the report also points out that significant gaps still exist, mainly reflected in: the difficulty in effectively translating risk assessment results into mitigation measures, insufficient implementation of licensing and registration frameworks, challenges in identifying VASP activity subjects, and inadequate effectiveness of risk-based supervision and law enforcement. In terms of emerging risks, the report focuses on the following areas: the exacerbation of the "industrialization" trend of organized crime groups using virtual assets to commit fraud, the rising risk of stablecoin abuse, risks associated with non-custodial wallet peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions, offshore VASPs operating outside of regulation, and ongoing challenges in the DeFi sector. FATF calls for the public and private sectors to jointly strengthen the implementation of R.15, enhance risk mitigation capabilities, and deepen domestic, international, and public-private cooperation mechanisms.