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According to informed sources, SoftBank Group is considering acquiring Gravis Robotics AG, as SoftBank is targeting the artificial intelligence sector that supports robotics technology. SoftBank plans to make a significant investment in this European startup and incorporate it into its newly established company, Roze.SoftBank may complete the transaction in phases, achieving this through gradual acquisition of existing shares and injecting new funds. Informed sources say that this deal could ultimately value the Zurich-based Gravis company at over $500 million. They stated that no final decision has yet been made regarding the scale or structure of the transaction.

According to Bloomberg, Bank of New York Mellon is preparing to provide around-the-clock settlement for U.S. Treasury securities in response to the impact of the growth of the digital asset market on traditional financial infrastructure. In a letter to clients, the bank stated that it facilitated after-hours U.S. Treasury trading involving stablecoin issuers earlier this year, with plans to launch tokenized U.S. Treasuries and conduct pilot trading on its private blockchain by the end of 2026, aiming for 24/7 settlement of both traditional and tokenized U.S. Treasuries by 2027.Earlier this year, the bank facilitated after-hours Treasury trading involving stablecoin issuers—after the close of the Federal Reserve's Fedwire Securities Service, involving RLUSD stablecoin issuer Ripple and USDO stablecoin issuer OpenEden, both of which are backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries. BNY stated that the transaction "demonstrates that Treasury market activity related to the digital asset ecosystem can continue beyond traditional cutoff times."

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.

According to a report by Nikkei Asia citing multiple informed sources, TSMC (TSM.N) plans to raise the foundry prices for advanced and mature process chips by up to 10% in 2027, in response to rising costs of materials, manufacturing equipment, and the construction of new overseas plants. TSMC has begun discussions with customers regarding the price increase, which involves 7-nanometer and more advanced processes. This segment contributed approximately 77% of TSMC's revenue in the quarter from April to June this year.Informed sources indicated that the basic price increase will range from 5% to 10%, depending on the customer and product. For new orders of high-performance computing (HPC) chips that exceed the customer's original forecast, TSMC plans to impose an additional premium of 10% to 15% on top of the basic price increase. As a result, the overall price increase for some advanced process chip orders may exceed 10%. In terms of mature processes (including 12-nanometer, 16-nanometer, 28-nanometer processes, and other traditional technologies), TSMC plans to raise prices by up to 10%, but some products will see increases below this level. The mature process business accounted for about 23% of the company's revenue in the last quarter. Informed sources stated that relevant negotiations began around June and were finalized in July, with the new prices set to take effect in early 2027.

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 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.

The "whale" stated in a post on platform X, "Recently, several trades (in Bitcoin) have been short-term long positions, and no short positions have been taken, as the cost-effectiveness of shorting is too low at this time. Relatively speaking, we are already at a phase bottom, and I have a feeling that the trend for Bitcoin should soon emerge, starting a new round of increases. I am afraid of missing the signal for the start.This trade (referring to a long position of 69.4 BTC opened on the 18th) may be considered a medium to long-term position, depending on the situation, and short-term fluctuations cannot be ruled out. In the next six months, a large-scale correction in U.S. stocks related to artificial intelligence technology cannot be ruled out."

According to Bloomberg, producing the world's most popular advanced semiconductors requires a large amount of energy and relies on rare mineral resources. A UK AI startup, CuspAI, which was founded just two years ago, is betting that artificial intelligence can optimize this process and has raised nearly $500 million in funding for this purpose.CuspAI announced the establishment of the AI Materials Foundry alliance. This alliance brings together more than 48 tech giants, industrial companies, and research institutions, including Nvidia, Meta, and Hyundai Motor Group. The alliance aims to integrate the computing power resources and research capabilities of its members to jointly develop AI software, helping researchers develop new materials suitable for chip manufacturing and other industries at lower costs and faster speeds, thereby improving the efficiency of material research and accelerating innovation in advanced semiconductors and related industries.

According to the Korea Herald, the second phase of South Korea's central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot project "Han River Plan" is about to officially launch. The Bank of Korea and commercial banks are making final preparations for the real transaction testing of deposit tokens in the second phase. If the system development and participant recruitment preparations are completed as planned, actual transactions are expected to begin as early as September.In the first phase transaction testing from April to June last year, 81,000 people participated through electronic wallets and conducted 114,880 transactions using deposit tokens. The first phase examined the deposit token payment system, while the second phase focuses on exploring commercialization. Additionally, the Ministry of Economy and Finance of South Korea announced in its economic growth strategy for the second half of the year released on the 15th that next year it will implement a pilot project for the tokenization of government bonds linked to the central bank's institutional-level central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Well-known crypto trader Doctor Profit stated that he has closed all cryptocurrency short positions, including a Bitcoin short position established in the $115,000 to $125,000 range, another Bitcoin short position established in the $79,000 to $82,000 range, and over 100 altcoin short positions opened in the past few months, claiming that these positions have all achieved significant profits.He also mentioned that he has re-entered Bitcoin spot at $64,000, marking his first long allocation since September 2025. His plan is to invest 5% of the planned funds daily for spot purchases when Bitcoin is in the $54,000 to $64,000 range, continuing for a maximum of 20 days; if the price approaches $54,000, he will increase the buying intensity. Doctor Profit believes that there is a clear "herd behavior" in the current market: investors who were previously bullish at high levels up to $150,000 are now generally waiting for Bitcoin to drop to $40,000 to $50,000, viewing September or October as the bottom of the four-year cycle. When a large number of investors are waiting for the same price and time point, the market may not operate according to this expectation, which is why he chose to build positions in advance, judging that this round of bottom may appear earlier than the market generally expects.He also listed regulatory clarity, asset tokenization infrastructure, and institutional adoption progress as structural reasons for the shift to buying, and retracted his previous prediction that Bitcoin would drop to $40,000 to $50,000. However, he still retains all short positions in the S&P 500 index, believing that the crypto market has undergone significant repricing, while U.S. stock valuations remain relatively high.

According to The Block, Uniswap governance will conduct two key on-chain votes from July 19 to 26. The first proposal aims to enable protocol fees for the v4 version liquidity pools for the first time, covering seven chains: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, Optimism, and Robinhood Chain, targeting three types of pools: static fee pools, pools initiated through continuous liquidation auctions, and aggregator hooks pools; proposals for the remaining five chains will be submitted later.The second proposal, submitted by Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, aims to extend the fee mechanism of v2 and v3 to Robinhood Chain. The fees generated from both proposals will enter the UNIfication burn mechanism. Last month, the Uniswap protocol set a record by burning 186,000 UNI in a single day.

The Cardano development company Input Output will transfer control of key blockchain components such as Haskell nodes, the Plutus platform, and the Daedalus wallet to external professional teams starting in August, as part of a multi-year decentralization initiative. Independent companies like Se7en Labs and Teragone will be responsible for some core infrastructure.At least three implementations of Cardano will be maintained in Haskell, Rust, and Go languages, and will be subject to community oversight and formal specification management. Cardano is currently facing weak network activity and a significant drop in the price of the ADA token. Founder Charles Hoskinson has defined this restructuring and the related setbacks in the ecosystem as necessary "growing pains" on the path to complete decentralization.

According to Etoday, the South Korean Democratic Party stated that it will restart the special task force on digital assets after completing adjustments to its internal leadership and plans to propose the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" in September, aiming to complete legislation within the year. Democratic Party member Park Min-kyu mentioned that the content of the bill and the submission time will be coordinated by the National Assembly, the presidential office, and relevant departments, with discussions expected to start as early as early September.In addition to clarifying the issuers of stablecoins, it is also necessary to improve the supporting systems for market structure, security, and regulation, and to establish a localized digital asset system that aligns with South Korea's financial regulatory environment. Furthermore, Democratic Party member Min Byeong-deok suggested developing the Korean won stablecoin as a payment and settlement tool to support the overseas development of Korean culture, business, tourism, and manufacturing.

According to CNBC, AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI announced the completion of a $1.5 billion financing round, with the company's valuation reaching $17.5 billion. The company had previously received support from NVIDIA and primarily provides cloud-based services for open-source AI model deployment, helping businesses deploy artificial intelligence applications at a lower cost.This round of financing was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from institutions such as NVIDIA, Evantic, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Currently, Fireworks processes approximately 400 trillion AI tokens daily. The company's clients include businesses such as Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB. Previously, more than half of its revenue came from the AI programming tool Cursor, but the client base has now become more diversified.

SBI Group, DigiFT, and Startale Group have completed a joint proof of concept, demonstrating the full lifecycle of tokenized securities using the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYSC in an Ethereum testnet environment, including instant settlement for fund subscriptions and automatic on-chain dividend distribution.SBI Group and DigiFT are advancing the tokenization of the SBI Japan High Dividend Equity Fund, which is managed by SBI Asset Management with an asset management scale of approximately $1.3 billion, making it one of Japan's major public equity strategies. The three parties completed two tests, one demonstrating the near-instant settlement of fund subscriptions using JPYSC, and the other automatically calculating and distributing dividends to eligible token holders' wallets via smart contracts after the allocation registration is completed.The three companies plan to explore the integration of tokenized Japanese stocks with institutional DeFi platforms and consider testing use cases such as collateralized lending and on-chain asset management with ecosystem partners like Morpho and Gauntlet.

Cryptocurrency clearing startup Glacis Labs has completed a $6.8 million seed round financing. This round was led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, A.GAIN (formerly IDC Ventures), Protein Capital, and Techni Ventures, using an equity + token warrant structure.The financing will primarily be used to expand its core product, the ZeroDelta platform, and support the expansion of engineering, compliance, and market teams. ZeroDelta is a multi-chain clearing platform that enables matching, net settlement, and final settlement of cross-blockchain digital assets, currently focusing on stablecoins, and has processed over $1 billion in transaction volume to date.

According to Fortune magazine, stablecoin payment infrastructure startup Velocity announced the completion of a $38 million Series A funding round, led by crypto investment firm Dragonfly, with participation from institutions such as Coinbase, Capital One Ventures, and Wintermute. Velocity CEO Eric Queathem did not disclose the latest funding valuation.Founded in 2025, Velocity focuses on providing stablecoin payment solutions for businesses, payment service providers, fintech companies, and financial institutions, helping them optimize cross-border payments, fund settlement, and fund management processes using dollar-pegged tokens. Currently, Velocity has covered markets in the United States, parts of Europe, and Australia, with plans to use the new funds to apply for licenses to expand into Africa and Latin America, while also investing in building a more secure asset custody infrastructure and developing new features, including stablecoin yield products.