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Gate Research Institute released the August 2026 cryptocurrency and TradFi quantitative report. BTC and ETH rose approximately 25.1% and 32.6% respectively during the month. Gate contract data shows that the open interest amount for BTC increased from about $4.02 billion to $4.38 billion, while ETH rose from about $2.46 billion to $2.75 billion, with increases of approximately 9% and 12.1% respectively.The funding rates for both remained moderately positive most of the time, with long positions dominating the number of accounts, but the active trading long-short ratio was below 1. The TradFi market also rose in sync, with NAS100 increasing about 4.2% during the month, outperforming US500 and US30, while large tech stocks showed a divergence in trends.The report compared four models: moving average trends, trend momentum, Donchian breakout, and RSI mean reversion. Backtesting results showed that the 100-day moving average and 20-day price momentum strategies achieved positive cumulative returns on BTC, ETH, US500, and NAS100, with a median Sharpe ratio of 0.64 and a median maximum drawdown of 8.71%. The report includes Gate TradFi's US500 and NAS100 in cross-asset observations and evaluates market heat by combining Gate contract long-short ratios, funding rates, and open interest data. The execution over the next one to three months will focus on trend confirmation, volatility rebalancing, leverage limits, and cooling off abnormal liquidations.

Base Labs has announced its establishment as an independent research organization focused on advancing open-source AI. It believes in a healthy and open frontier model ecosystem and will conduct scientific research in an open manner.Base Labs will carry out blue-sky research on continuous learning, reinforcement learning science, and model lifecycle learning mechanisms, and will publicly share all experiments and recipes; it will build the BaseHub Data Foundry to provide an open reinforcement learning environment, training data, and real-world benchmarks; it will enhance the capabilities, safety, and alignment of open-source models through continuous post-training and deploy cutting-edge safety stacks; at the same time, it will conduct model performance research to reduce costs and improve performance.The organization emphasizes that this is mission-driven research work rather than a commercial product and is currently recruiting engineers, researchers, and research scholars.

Alea Research published that Sky, BlackRock, and Circle together account for half of the yield-bearing stablecoin market. There are a total of 26 products in the market, with a total scale of $21.43 billion.The top three are sUSDS (23.8%), BUIDL (16.7%), and USYC (12.7%), which together account for 53.1%, while the remaining 23 products share the rest of the market.

ARK Invest researcher Lorenzo Valente compares Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid to McDonald's, Chipotle, and In-N-Out, respectively, believing that the three are not different versions of the same L1 business model, but rather have completely different value capture structures.Valente believes that Ethereum is similar to a franchise system, expanding through L2 but charging too little on the settlement layer, even claiming it has established the most successful franchise system in crypto, yet forgot to send the bill; Solana resembles a direct sales model, retaining more value within its own system through transaction fees, priority fees, and MEV; Hyperliquid relies on highly vertical integration, no VC, and fee buybacks of HYPE, possessing the shortest value capture chain, but facing risks of a more concentrated product, team, and revenue sources.

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki stated that he hopes to avoid a race towards "unmonitorability" of models due to misleading reports. He mentioned that current cutting-edge models, including Astra, have a computational graph depth that differs from GPT-4 by no more than a factor of two. Since the launch of the first inference models, OpenAI has been committed to preserving and utilizing chain-of-thought monitoring, believing that this technology helps observe how the model's alignment capabilities generalize from the training distribution.Pachocki also pointed out that chain-of-thought monitoring is relatively fragile, and the trend is not optimistic, but it can still be strengthened through research and has become a core objective of OpenAI's current research agenda. Previously, The Information reported that Astra uses recurrent depth, allowing the same set of Transformer layers to compute repeatedly. As a result, some inferences can occur internally within the model, without needing to be entirely expressed as a chain of thought, raising concerns about whether the model will become increasingly difficult to monitor.

Fidelity Global Macro Research Director Jurrien Timmer stated that Bitcoin has maintained its power law curve bottom and has adjusted long enough to meet the time factor of the four-year cycle.

According to monitoring by Galaxy's research director, Coldcard hackers are still active, and one hacker stole a key generated by increasing entropy through 5 dice rolls.

The privacy and regulatory compliance tool supported by the Ethereum Foundation, 0xbow.io, awarded a $5,000 bounty to researcher ross.wei for disclosing a vulnerability in the Privacy Pools v1 SDK.The vulnerability reduced the entropy of the user account master key generation and was fixed in March. The team has provided a migration process, and there have been no reported losses of user funds.

Melius Research raised the target price for Nvidia (NVDA.O) from $400 to $420.

Matthew Sigel, the Head of Digital Asset Research at the asset management company VanEck, stated on CNBC that Bitcoin does not need a Republican president to perform well, and former President Biden is not anti-Bitcoin. Sigel pointed out that despite Republicans repeatedly criticizing Democrats for being anti-cryptocurrency, and the regulatory agencies under the Biden administration suing digital asset companies, Bitcoin can still develop healthily under Democratic governance.Sigel also discussed the delay in the legislation of the Clarity Act, which aims to establish a classification framework for digital assets and clarify the regulatory jurisdiction over securities, commodities, or payment stablecoins. Some Republican senators accused Democrats of delaying the legislation, while Coinbase's Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad believes that the opposition mainly comes from older Democrats, and the younger generation better understands technological changes, making cryptocurrency potentially the most bipartisan issue in Washington.Recently, Bitcoin has shown strong price performance, rising nearly 24% in the past seven days, reaching as high as $81,160, and currently retreating to about $78,438. Previously, the Trump administration promoted the establishment of a Bitcoin strategic reserve and issued several executive orders supporting cryptocurrency.

Galaxy Research tracked and found that 6 Bitcoin wallets that have been inactive since 2011, 2012, and 2014 transferred a total of 553.59 Bitcoins between August 16 and 26, valued at 40.15 million dollars based on the price at the time of transfer. Two of the wallets are tagged with "Salomon Client Dusted," related to the Noah Doe lawsuit in New York.One of the transfers involved 40 Bitcoins, with the wallet having been dormant since May 28, 2012. The funds were transferred to the German cryptocurrency custody bank Boerse Stuttgart Digital on August 26. Based on a cost of about 5 dollars, this fund has increased by approximately 1,535,911%. The remaining transfers included 212, 150, and 132.31 Bitcoins, respectively from long-inactive wallets from 2012, 2014, and 2011. The Noah Doe lawsuit involves a request to declare 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses in New York as lost property, and some long-term holding addresses transferred funds after the Coldcard hardware wallet vulnerability incident in July.

According to The Block, Solana digital asset reserve company DeFi Development Corp. has launched a public real-time data and research platform called State of Solana, aimed at tracking metrics such as market, staking, validators, yields, and ecosystem of the Solana network.The company currently holds approximately 2.3 million SOL, valued at about $208 million. Meanwhile, its Nasdaq-listed stock has fallen by about 16% year-to-date.

ARK Invest's Director of Digital Asset Research, Lorenzo, stated that the latest improvement proposals from Solana and Ethereum are surprising. The market has indicated that Hyperliquid and others are posing strong competition, but the relevant communities are still taking time to adjust inflation arrangements and CU restrictions, which may further decrease the competitiveness of applications. He believes that L1 should prioritize how proposals can enhance network competitiveness, promote growth, and attract more consumer-grade applications and users.Lorenzo pointed out that for Solana, this is certainly not the time to be entangled in the value accumulation of token holders versus cash flow, or to increase the costs for application developers. It is essential to first prove that the pie can be expanded 100 times before discussing how to allocate it. Although in the future, it will be necessary to price high resource-consuming transactions more finely and address token value accumulation, if market share is seized by HYPE, there will be no value to accumulate. The current priority should be to expand the pie 100 times.

According to Bloomberg, former Google researchers Rishub Jain and Joshua Jacob founded the nonprofit organization Sampura Research, aiming to ensure continuous human involvement in AI safety oversight, creating a human-machine hybrid system called "Referee" to help companies identify vulnerabilities and prevent models from going out of control. The organization has raised $6.5 million in funding and secured an additional $4.2 million in committed investments.Jain believes that involving humans from the early stages of research and development helps prevent models from learning to circumvent safety measures. Previous incidents where OpenAI and Anthropic's models accessed other companies' systems without permission have heightened the urgency for safety oversight. This project contrasts with automated solutions that use AI to monitor AI—though faster, Sampura believes that humans should always be involved in oversight. Meanwhile, over 1,100 top laboratory researchers have signed a petition calling on the U.S. government to help slow down the pace of AI development.

Research institution Digitimes stated that with the surge in AI-driven infrastructure spending, major cloud service providers are expected to place greater emphasis on operational efficiency and financial discipline in the second half of 2026. Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft reported a combined cloud business revenue of $106.3 billion in the second quarter, with an annual growth rate accelerating to 43%. These companies are expected to increase their total capital expenditures to $74.5 billion.

According to Bloomberg, the Taiwanese research institution TeamT5 stated that the scale of cyberattacks linked to China has significantly increased after incorporating DeepSeek and other open-source AI models into their operations. Since they began delegating daily tasks to AI and using it to develop more advanced malware, the number of attacks carried out by the relevant organizations has more than doubled.Researchers noted that it is not always possible to accurately identify the specific AI models used by attackers, but products related to DeepSeek are popular among hacker groups in the country due to their high performance and ease of customization. The report indicates that experienced attackers are leveraging relatively limited AI tools to scale up their operations and achieve breakthroughs, highlighting the attackers' ability to use basic AI tools to target overseas objectives.

Bitget Research Institute Chief Analyst Ryan Lee stated that driven by multiple favorable factors such as the continuous net inflow of the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF for five days, large-scale short liquidations, the U.S. Treasury's expansion of long-term bond repurchases leading to a drop in yields and a weakening dollar, as well as signals from the Trump administration indicating a pro-crypto regulatory stance, Bitcoin has broken through the $80,000 mark, reaching a new high in recent months, with market sentiment rapidly shifting from "fear" to "greed."He pointed out that BTC is expected to stabilize above $78,000 in the short term and oscillate around that area, with key support levels in the $74,000--$76,000 range and primary resistance at $83,000. If it breaks through effectively, it may further challenge the $85,000--$90,000 levels.Regarding Ethereum, benefiting from the market's increased risk appetite driven by BTC, simultaneous ETF fund inflows, and a rebound in DeFi activity, Ryan noted that ETH's short-term average price could reach $2,600--$2,800. If it breaks through the $2,650--$2,700 resistance level, it may further push towards the $3,000 mark.At the same time, Ryan also reminded investors that although ETF fund inflows are strong and short-term momentum is sufficient, there are still profit-taking pressures in the market, as well as macro policy uncertainties such as the Jackson Hole meeting and the September interest rate meeting. Traders should be prepared for fluctuations of 10--20% and closely monitor daily ETF flow data and key support levels.

Galaxy Research tweeted that its running Bitcoin Core v29 node observed an orphan block at block height 963,853. Relevant monitoring screenshots have been released.An orphan block typically refers to a valid block that was not adopted by the longest chain due to reasons such as network propagation delays or miners producing blocks almost simultaneously. This event was captured in real-time by the node of Galaxy Research and disclosed to the public.