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According to TechCrunch, Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium has completed a $100 million seed round of financing, with new investors including Nvidia. Gradium was spun off from the Kyutai AI Lab and co-founded by researcher Neil Zeghidour, who has worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook, focusing on ultra-low latency voice AI models.The company emerged from stealth mode last December with $70 million in funding, with investors including FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, and French telecom magnate Xavier Niel. The company plans to use the new funds to open an office in the Bay Area to compete for AI talent and has signed clients including French automaker Renault.

According to the official announcement from NEAR Chain Status, the NEAR mainnet version 2.13.0 has been released, introducing post-quantum transaction signature schemes and dynamic sharding features.Voting will begin at 8:00 AM Beijing time on July 20. Former NEAR core developer Vadim introduced that this upgrade includes features that would typically require a ten-year roadmap for most blockchains: the post-quantum signature ML-DSA-65 becomes the third key type in the protocol after ed25519 and secp256k1, allowing accounts to hold keys that cannot be forged by quantum computers, with only a 32-byte hash recorded on-chain; dynamic sharding enables the chain to automatically monitor the status and size of each shard and to split and re-shard at epoch boundaries without the need for protocol upgrades or manual intervention; Gas Keys provide critical functionality for the proxy economy, allowing a single account to run a batch of proxies to send transactions simultaneously without nonce conflicts.

According to the official website of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Chinese storage giant Changxin Technology disclosed its IPO prospectus and "Issuance Arrangement and Preliminary Inquiry Announcement" for the Sci-Tech Innovation Board on July 9, officially starting the IPO issuance process for the Sci-Tech Innovation Board. The announcement revealed that the offline subscription date and online subscription date for the company's new shares are both July 16, 2026. The announcement also indicated that Changxin Technology's stock code/offline subscription code is "688825," and the online subscription code is "787825." The announcement shows that the proposed public offering will issue 668,808.8608 million shares (before the exercise of the over-allotment option), and the issuer grants China International Capital Corporation an over-allotment option not exceeding 15.00% of the initial number of shares issued. If the over-allotment option is fully exercised, the total number of shares issued will increase to 769,130.1608 million shares.

According to Cryptobriefing, AI chip startup Positron is negotiating a two-round financing of approximately $750 million. The first round is expected to be valued at $3.5 billion, while the second round is valued at around $5 billion.Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Reno, Nevada, the company has raised approximately $309 million in total funding, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion after completing a $230 million Series B financing in February 2026. Investors include the Qatar Investment Authority and Arm Holdings. Positron emphasizes energy efficiency advantages, and its Atlas inference system has already been shipped to customers, with Cloudflare being one of its buyers. The company claims that its hardware outperforms Nvidia products by more than 3.5 times in terms of performance per watt under certain AI inference loads. The next-generation chip, Asimov, is planned to finalize its design by the end of 2026 and enter mass production in early 2027.

According to Cointelegraph, StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson posted on the X platform, proposing to replace Bitcoin's hard cap of 21 million coins with a 4% annual issuance rate. He believes the current hard cap is "unreasonable" because private keys will be lost over time, stating, "As time approaches infinity, all private keys will be lost." Ledger estimates that approximately 4 million Bitcoins have already been permanently lost. Ben-Sasson indicated that a 4% annual issuance rate roughly matches the global population growth rate.The proposal has sparked strong opposition from the community. Opponents argue that the fixed cap is at the core of Bitcoin's value, and that Bitcoin can be divided into 21 trillion satoshis, which is sufficient to address the issue of decreasing available supply. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox suggested that Bitcoin developers refer to the "network sustainability mechanism" that Zcash is considering—maintaining the fixed cap but allowing users to destroy tokens, gradually reissuing them as block rewards over four years to alleviate the pressure on miner incentives without breaking the hard cap. Any such changes would require consensus among Bitcoin developers, miners, and node operators, which is extremely challenging under a decentralized governance model.

According to the Economic Times, the physical AI startup Mowito has completed a $3 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Version One Ventures, with participation from All In Capital, Unisol, and iSeed. AI researcher Soumith Chintala and founders from Foundry Robotics, Coformer.ai, Better Capital, and others participated as angel investors.Mowito was founded in 2024 by Puru Rastogi, Adityanag Nagesh, and Safar V. It builds AI foundational models for industrial robotic arms, addressing the bottleneck of software programming in manufacturing automation by allowing robots to learn tasks through human demonstration rather than explicit programming—engineers do not need to rewrite control code when product lines change. Mowito's software can run on standard, unmodified industrial robots, serving automotive and electronics manufacturing clients. This round of financing will be used for expansion into the U.S. market, expanding engineering and marketing teams, and deepening deployment in manufacturing sites.

BIT stated in the latest weekly market observation that Bitcoin has recovered most of its decline from June last week, re-establishing itself above the 200-week moving average and entering the key confirmation range of $63,000 to $66,000.Ethereum's weekly increase is even stronger, indicating that this round of rebound has broader market participation.

According to CoinDesk, Coinbase mistakenly sent a "breaking news" alert to users, stating that the Norwegian football team defeated Brazil 3-2 in the World Cup knockout stage, while the match had not yet started. The alert also mentioned that Haaland scored twice in the match; however, Coinbase's own market prediction page still indicated that the match was delayed due to weather.Reports indicate that a user posted a screenshot of the notification on X on Sunday. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong subsequently replied that he was investigating the matter with the team. According to another post, the alert was sent at 10:26 AM Eastern Time, while the match did not start until 4 PM.Max Branzburg, Coinbase's head of consumer and business products, later stated that the erroneous report had been corrected, and the company had made updates to prevent similar inaccurate information in the future. He also mentioned that AI-driven 24/7 trading insights have potential but still require adjustments for such issues. In the actual match, Norway ultimately defeated Brazil 2-1, with Haaland scoring two goals.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published the proposal "The Extremely Lean Chain," demonstrating how to radically compress the state requirements of the Ethereum consensus chain in the context of the "Lean" upgrade. This plan shifts responsibility to validators, who manage and periodically prove their state through ZK proofs, thereby eliminating the processing burden for each epoch and potentially supporting millions of validators.The core mechanisms include: removing the validator public keys from the on-chain state, storing only the deposit tree index; canceling real-time reward and penalty processing, with validators generating daily STARK proofs of their participation and updating balances; completely re-randomizing validator identities daily, achieving strong anonymity through ZK-STARK, with withdrawal addresses exposed only at the time of withdrawal and not publicly linked to deposits or on-chain activities. Vitalik stated that based on upgrades such as single-slot finality and quantum-resistant signature aggregation, the state requirement per validator could be compressed from approximately 180 bytes to 6 bytes. The daily proof cost for a single validator requires processing about 5400 Merkle branches, which can be completed within 1 hour on ordinary hardware, and the on-chain burden can be reduced through aggregated proofs. Additionally, this design can achieve a "virtually free" single secret leader election function, with 1 day as the conservative cycle length and 1 hour as the lower limit.

According to a report from Hongxing News, an investigation report leaked from a scam park in Myanmar shows that global telecom fraud is accelerating towards an "AI industrialization + cross-border encrypted payment" system. The scam network completes fund circulation through cryptocurrency and uses automated tools based on large models for multi-language script generation, identity disguise, and emotional manipulation.According to the investigation analysis, these systems extensively utilize OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini at the functional level to support "scaled social fraud." The funding side achieves rapid laundering and transfer through on-chain payments and cross-border channels, forming a dual structure of "AI customer acquisition + encrypted settlement," which gives the fraud industry a high degree of automation and transnational diffusion capability. In addition, Starlink, owned by Musk, has become the number one network service provider for the scam park in Myanmar, with American ISP providers carrying nearly one-fifth of the park's traffic.In response to the related accusations, OpenAI stated that the behavior of scammers using ChatGPT is highly similar to that of ordinary users, making identification difficult. However, they have banned about 100,000 suspicious accounts monthly through behavioral pattern recognition and risk control systems. Google stated that its AI models have safety barriers in place and emphasized its commitment to "responsible AI development" to limit the tools' use for fraud and other illegal purposes.

According to on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, a suspected insider address built a position when the market cap of the Meme coin CZ was only about $150,000 and has now started to sell.According to on-chain data monitoring, the address 0xf34...fddee spent only $756.8 yesterday to buy 5.108 million CZ, with a purchase cost of about $0.0001481. Ten minutes ago, this address sold 25% of its holdings at a price of $0.06853, making a profit of about $87,000.Currently, this address has accumulated a profit of about $374,000, including unrealized gains, with a return rate as high as 49,421.1%.

StarPhone is the first AI Agent phone, equipped with an AI native operating system, Echo local intelligence model, and Web3 infrastructure, which can convert users' natural language commands into executable tasks. Users only need to state their goals to complete transactions, asset management, information analysis, and other operations. With a native wallet, multi-chain support, hardware-level security, and AgentStore, StarPhone is driving smartphones from app-based operations to the "intention-driven, automated execution" era of agents.Currently, this AI Agent phone is available for pre-sale.

According to Crypto Briefing, Silicon Valley AI startup Higgsfield AI is in talks for a new round of financing, planning to raise between $300 million and $500 million, with a pre-money valuation target of $5 billion.If the financing is completed at the target valuation, it would increase the company's valuation from approximately $1.3 billion in January 2026 by more than four times. Higgsfield has raised a total of $138 million to date, with investors including firms like Accel and Menlo Ventures.It is reported that the scale of this latest financing round will exceed approximately three times the total amount raised previously.

AI chip startup Oxmiq announced the completion of a new round of financing of $35 million, led by Samsung Catalyst Fund and Fudomo, with participation from Taiwan's MediaTek and Pegatron Venture Capital. The company's total financing has reached $60 million.Oxmiq was founded by former Intel chief architect Raja Koduri and is headquartered in Campbell, California. The company plans to integrate the three major components of GPU, CPU, and tensor engine into a single IP module for licensing, and develop an integrated computing architecture that includes Chiplet and memory, while also entering the custom chip market to compete with Broadcom, Marvell, and MediaTek. Koduri stated that Oxmiq's goal is to become "the ARM of the next era." This round of funding will be used to complete the R&D of the first batch of IP and bring it to market, while also expanding the engineering team.

According to Cointelegraph, StarkWare has released the Starknet post-quantum roadmap, stating that the roadmap is divided into three phases to address the risks of future quantum computing attacks.The first phase of the roadmap includes replacing some existing security mathematical mechanisms, specifically the Pedersen hash, with post-quantum versions and adding post-quantum signatures; the second phase focuses on migration tools that upgrade existing smart contracts without requiring developers to manually rebuild applications; the third phase involves dependencies that Starknet cannot resolve on its own, primarily relying on Ethereum's quantum upgrade roadmap.

According to official news, OKX has officially launched OKX.AI, which supports AI Agents in task assignment, task acceptance, payment, evaluation, and arbitration, and is a decentralized platform aimed at the Agent economy. OKX founder and CEO Star stated in a post on X: "For the past twenty years, the world has been reconstructed around Apps; for the next ten years, the world will be reconstructed around Agents. Agents will serve people, hire Agents, pay Agents, and collaborate with Agents to complete complex tasks. Meanwhile, humans will focus more on imagination, judgment, goals, and truly unique value."Star emphasized that this is not a more efficient software era, but a new economic era. He stated: "In the future, it will not only belong to the companies with the most employees but also to those who have the best Agents. One person can be a world-class company. Welcome to the Agentic Economy, welcome to OKX.AI."

According to The Defiant, data shows that Pump.fun has repurchased over $400 million worth of PUMP tokens, covering approximately 145.5 billion PUMP. The repurchase plan started in July 2025 and has continued for a total of 346 days. Since April, Pump.fun has used 50% of its net income for repurchasing and burning tokens, with the remaining income allocated for operations, hiring, and acquisitions.Since the platform launched in January 2024, it has generated approximately $1.13 billion in expenses and $1.05 billion in revenue, but expenses have dropped to about $23.5 million in the last 30 days.