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Project Overview
Coinversation Protocol is a DeFi protocol platform of the Polkadot ecology. It has been expanded from a synthetic asset protocol to a derivative ecosystem, including parachains, DEX, synthetic assets, and stablecoin protocols.
AI Agent infrastructure layer Orthogonal completes $4.3 million seed round led by Pantera Capital
Odaily reports: AI Agent infrastructure layer project Orthogonal has announced the completion of a $4.3 million seed funding round, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast Club, Outbound Capital, Rice Capital, Surreal by Premise, Batch Ventures (CTO Fund), and others.The project primarily builds infrastructure for AI Agents, enabling instant capability discovery, orchestration, and payments, allowing agents to dynamically obtain necessary tools and complete on-chain transactions without human intervention.
InfoHawk Secures $2.25 Million Pre-Seed Funding Led by Moonshots Capital
Odaily AI-driven anti-fraud infrastructure provider InfoHawk has announced the completion of a $2.25 million Pre-Seed funding round, led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from former U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, AppNexus founder Brian O'Kelley, former Meta advertising executive Rob Goldman, GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov, and others. The new funds will be used to support the company's application of AI content recognition and deep infrastructure analysis technology to help enterprises detect, analyze, and combat large-scale online fraud, phishing sites, brand impersonation, and Deepfake attacks. (PRNewswire)
a16z Leads Special’s Funding Round; Former DOGE Team Bets on AI-Driven M&A Cost Reduction
According to Tech in Asia, Special, an AI-powered M&A firm co-founded by Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox—both former staff members of the U.S. government’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—has announced a funding round of undisclosed amount, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Investors include Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners; Anthony Armstrong, former CFO of xAI; Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase Global; and Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir Technologies. Special plans to acquire service-based businesses by automating workflows with AI to reduce costs, and has already reached an agreement to acquire a Texas-based healthcare company, which will be integrated into Figure Health—the company’s business line focused on aging populations.
a16z Crypto Closes $2.2 Billion for Its Fifth Fund; CTO Eddy Lazzarin Promoted to General Partner
According to The Block, a16z crypto—the cryptocurrency division of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—has completed fundraising for its fifth fund at $2.2 billion. This fund is smaller than its record-breaking fourth fund, which raised $4.5 billion in 2022. Paul Cafiero, Communications Partner at a16z crypto, stated that the firm intentionally returned to a smaller fund size because “a shorter fundraising cycle enables us to keep pace with the rapidly evolving crypto landscape.” Prior a16z crypto funds included: the $2.2 billion third fund in 2021, the $515 million second fund in 2020, and the $350 million first fund in 2018.
Printr Founder Announces Full Refund of Community Fundraising
Printr founder announced stepping down as CEO, with COO and GTM head Lennon immediately succeeding as CEO, while co-founder Lea continues as CTO. The founder will transition to an advisory role.Meanwhile, Printr announced it will fully refund its community fundraising, with the relevant refund process expected to be disclosed within 7 days. The team stated that this move aims to rebuild community trust, while the platform's products, team, and development roadmap will remain unchanged.
Sooth Labs Secures $50 Million in Funding, Felicis Ventures Participates
Sooth Labs, an AI prediction laboratory founded by former Meta executives and a CMU professor team, is completing a $50 million funding round at a $335 million valuation, led by Felicis Ventures. Yann LeCun and Jeff Dean are participating as individual investors, and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth serves as an advisor. The company specializes in multimodal AI event probability prediction, serving institutions in finance, defense, insurance, and other sectors, and has already provided probability predictions for events such as the WHO pandemic and Anthropic's IPO.
Ledger: Coldcard Vulnerability Losses Reach Approximately $130 Million, Hardware Wallet Security Needs to Adapt to AI
Odaily News: Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has stated that the recent Coldcard vulnerability indicates the hardware Bitcoin wallet industry needs to reassess its security model. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet stated that Ledger devices were not affected, as their recovery phrases are generated by a hardware random number generator built into a certified secure element. Coldcard manufacturer Coinkite disclosed last week that its air-gapped Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallet contains a vulnerability traceable to firmware versions from March 2021. The vulnerability uses a software fallback mechanism to generate wallet recovery seeds, allowing certain private keys to be guessed, with related losses reaching approximately $130 million. Coinkite released a fixed firmware on Sunday and urged affected users to transfer funds to newly generated wallets. Charles Guillemet stated that open source is different from being audited — the flaw had existed in public code for over five years, and AI is enabling attackers to scan code and identify vulnerabilities at machine speed. Charles Guillemet also said that over the past two years, Ledger has combined AI with security engineers and cryptography experts to review code and identify vulnerabilities. He believes that when evaluating hardware wallets, users should understand how randomness is generated and whether that process has received independent certification.
2026 Q2 Web3 Security Incidents: $764 Million Stolen, 88.3% from Compromised Keys and Infrastructure
According to the quarterly Security and Compliance Report by Hacken, 67 security incidents in the Web3 space resulted in losses of $763.9 million in Q2 2026, making it the most severe quarter since Q2 2025. Compromised keys and infrastructure accounted for 88.3% of the stolen funds, approximately $674.5 million. Smart contract vulnerabilities remained the most common type of attack, linked to 44 out of the 67 incidents, but corresponding losses represented only about 11% of the total. Approximately 75.5% of the losses stemmed from two incidents attributed to North Korean threat actors, and 14 audited protocols were breached during the quarter. Leo Fan, founder of Cysic, stated that an audit is a point-in-time assessment of a specific codebase and does not automatically cover signature devices, cloud infrastructure, operational permissions, subsequent upgrades, third-party dependencies, or old contracts that remain callable. Samuel Videau, CTO of Genius, pointed out that nearly 90% of losses came from compromised keys, signers, and infrastructure. Multiple security leaders noted that Web3 security requires layered defenses including real-time monitoring, key management, multi-party authorization, and bug bounty programs. Leo Fan expects that operational access control attacks will continue to dominate losses in the second half of 2026, including social engineering, credential theft, compromised signers, cloud or CI/CD intrusions, and attacks on off-chain validator infrastructure.
Malaysia's Johor State Revokes Business License of Network School Founded by Balaji Srinivasan
According to Reuters, the Johor state government of Malaysia has revoked the business license of the digital nomad community Network School, founded by American investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and required it to cease all operations in Forest City starting from July 22. The project was previously investigated after being accused on social media of assisting Israeli citizens in entering Malaysia, but the immigration department stated after inspection that the relevant members held valid travel documents. The Johor state government stated that the decision to revoke the license was made based on inspection reports, law enforcement results, and the company's statements.
"Huawei Genius Youth" Li Bojie Responds to ABCDE Capital Investment Dispute: Investment Funds Not Fully Received, Resigned Due to Family Reasons
In response to public accusations by Du Jun, Co-founder of Huobi and ChainUP and Founder of Vernal Capital, Metagent Co-founder and former CTO Li Bojie (@bojie_li) issued a response. Li Bojie stated that ABCDE Capital committed to investing $1.5 million in the investment agreement, but actually only $500,000 was received, with the remaining $1 million never arriving, yet the company's cap table continued to record their equity based on the $1.5 million share. Affected by this, he and the co-founders voluntarily reduced their salaries, and the company's recruitment and R&D also fell into difficulties. In October 2024, Li Bojie officially resigned with board approval, citing personal family reasons preventing him from leaving mainland China and compliance risks existing in Web3 projects. He stated that during his tenure, he always fulfilled the responsibility of disclosing the cap table and business status on schedule, and after resignation, he also complied with non-compete clauses, voluntarily avoiding startup projects in fields such as Web3, AI infra, and image generation. Previously, Du Jun publicly posted stating that Li Bojie is the "founder with the least contractual spirit" he has ever cooperated with, accusing him of refusing to fulfill basic obligations agreed in the investment agreement, including refusing to synchronize business progress and financial status with investors, and subsequently losing contact.
Ledger: Coldcard Vulnerability Losses Reach Approximately $130 Million, Hardware Wallet Security Needs to Adapt to AI
Odaily News: Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has stated that the recent Coldcard vulnerability indicates the hardware Bitcoin wallet industry needs to reassess its security model. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet stated that Ledger devices were not affected, as their recovery phrases are generated by a hardware random number generator built into a certified secure element. Coldcard manufacturer Coinkite disclosed last week that its air-gapped Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallet contains a vulnerability traceable to firmware versions from March 2021. The vulnerability uses a software fallback mechanism to generate wallet recovery seeds, allowing certain private keys to be guessed, with related losses reaching approximately $130 million. Coinkite released a fixed firmware on Sunday and urged affected users to transfer funds to newly generated wallets. Charles Guillemet stated that open source is different from being audited — the flaw had existed in public code for over five years, and AI is enabling attackers to scan code and identify vulnerabilities at machine speed. Charles Guillemet also said that over the past two years, Ledger has combined AI with security engineers and cryptography experts to review code and identify vulnerabilities. He believes that when evaluating hardware wallets, users should understand how randomness is generated and whether that process has received independent certification.
Over 1,800 BTC Stolen, Coinkite CTO Allegedly Ignored RNG Code Warnings a Year in Advance
Odaily Planet Daily reported that Bitcoin News posted on X platform, stating that new evidence suggests the anonymous account "switck," who wrote the LibNgU code, may actually be Peter Gray, Co-founder and CTO of Coinkite. This code is at the center of the COLDCARD entropy failure incident. Researchers claim that Gray's GPG key signed dozens of commits by switck, and other identifiers appear to link the two identities together. Bitcoin developer James O'Beirne stated that he had warned Coinkite in May 2025 that the RNG implementation of LibNgU looked suspicious and recommended removing it, but he said the other party responded that if there were issues, they would have already been discovered. Screenshots also show that as early as April 2021, users had already raised questions about the LibNgU rewrite. If these findings are accurate, it means that the engineer who introduced the code was later linked to the theft of over 1,800 BTC, and had received direct warnings about the RNG implementation more than a year before the vulnerability was publicly disclosed.
2026 Q2 Web3 Security Incidents: $764 Million Stolen, 88.3% from Compromised Keys and Infrastructure
According to the quarterly Security and Compliance Report by Hacken, 67 security incidents in the Web3 space resulted in losses of $763.9 million in Q2 2026, making it the most severe quarter since Q2 2025. Compromised keys and infrastructure accounted for 88.3% of the stolen funds, approximately $674.5 million. Smart contract vulnerabilities remained the most common type of attack, linked to 44 out of the 67 incidents, but corresponding losses represented only about 11% of the total. Approximately 75.5% of the losses stemmed from two incidents attributed to North Korean threat actors, and 14 audited protocols were breached during the quarter. Leo Fan, founder of Cysic, stated that an audit is a point-in-time assessment of a specific codebase and does not automatically cover signature devices, cloud infrastructure, operational permissions, subsequent upgrades, third-party dependencies, or old contracts that remain callable. Samuel Videau, CTO of Genius, pointed out that nearly 90% of losses came from compromised keys, signers, and infrastructure. Multiple security leaders noted that Web3 security requires layered defenses including real-time monitoring, key management, multi-party authorization, and bug bounty programs. Leo Fan expects that operational access control attacks will continue to dominate losses in the second half of 2026, including social engineering, credential theft, compromised signers, cloud or CI/CD intrusions, and attacks on off-chain validator infrastructure.
InfoHawk Secures $2.25 Million Pre-Seed Funding Led by Moonshots Capital
Odaily AI-driven anti-fraud infrastructure provider InfoHawk has announced the completion of a $2.25 million Pre-Seed funding round, led by Moonshots Capital, with participation from former U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, AppNexus founder Brian O'Kelley, former Meta advertising executive Rob Goldman, GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov, and others. The new funds will be used to support the company's application of AI content recognition and deep infrastructure analysis technology to help enterprises detect, analyze, and combat large-scale online fraud, phishing sites, brand impersonation, and Deepfake attacks. (PRNewswire)
Ledger CTO Analyzes Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration, Blockchain Favors Hash-Based Signature Schemes
Ledger Chief Technology Officer Charles Guillemet pointed out that the development of post-quantum cryptography has entered a critical stage. Although the timeline for a practical quantum computer remains unclear, a full-scale migration of the encryption systems across the industry is an inevitable trend. Led by NIST, the traditional sector plans to phase out high-risk algorithms by 2030 and completely ban them by 2035, with government and enterprise institutions expected to complete their migration layouts by 2029. Encryption and key exchange will adopt ML-KEM to defend against quantum decryption attacks on harvested data, with digital signatures becoming the core of blockchain transformation. The traditional industry prefers ML-DSA hybrid schemes, while the blockchain sector favors the more secure and robust SLH-DSA hash-based signature. Both schemes have their respective advantages and disadvantages. The compatibility challenges of post-quantum algorithms with MPC and threshold signatures remain a key risk that the industry urgently needs to address.
AI-Driven Vulnerability Bounty Reports Surge, Leaving Crypto Protocol Teams Overwhelmed by “AI Spam”
According to Cointelegraph, the widespread adoption of AI is driving up the number of submissions to cryptocurrency industry bug bounty programs—but a flood of low-quality “AI spam” reports has also emerged, placing a heavy burden on protocol teams for triaging. Barry Plunkett, Co-CEO of Cosmos Labs, stated that submission volume to its platform surged 900% year-on-year, with 20–50 reports received daily; Kadan Stadelmann, CTO of Komodo Platform, likewise noted a marked rise in low-quality and false-positive reports, attributing the root cause primarily to AI’s drastic reduction in the cost of generating reports. Daniel Stenberg, creator of the open-source tool curl, has already shut down his bug bounty program outright due to being overwhelmed. In response, industry insiders recommend that teams deploy defensive AI systems to automatically triage reports and adopt stricter submission criteria—reducing the volume of invalid reports and ensuring genuine vulnerabilities receive timely attention.
Pons Surpasses Nearly $2.5 Billion in Monthly Trading Volume Within First Month, Burns Over $9 Million Worth of PONS
Odaily News Pons announced on the X platform that since its launch one month ago, the platform's cumulative trading volume has approached $2.5 billion, with over 290,000 tokens issued and more than $15 million in rewards distributed to token creators. Additionally, Pons allocates 80% of protocol revenue to buy back PONS, and has so far burned over $9 million worth of PONS, accounting for nearly 30% of the total token supply.Furthermore, Pons expressed optimism about NFTs and their applications in combination with tokens, and is currently developing related products with two partners. In addition, Pons plans to open migration features for communities looking to conduct a CTO on Pons v1 tokens, as well as for projects hoping to migrate from Solana to Robinhood via Pons. Pons also stated that its iOS App has entered the testing phase.
Luke Dashjr Steps Down Temporarily as Ocean Chairman and CTO, Shifts Focus to BIP-110 Fork Development
Odaily News – Luke Dashjr, co-founder, chairman, and CTO of Jack Dorsey-backed Bitcoin mining pool Ocean, has announced he is temporarily stepping away from these roles to focus on Bitcoin and open-source project development. Ocean's communications lead, Bitcoin Mechanic, has also announced a temporary departure. Both have stated this is a temporary leave of absence rather than a permanent resignation.The BIP-110 minority chain has mined only two blocks since splitting at block height 961,632, and has since stalled due to inheriting Bitcoin's 127,480,000 difficulty and a relatively low share of SHA-256d hashrate. Bitcoin Knots developers are preparing a hard fork that plans to reset the proof-of-work, adjust the block header, and add replay protection.Developers plan to select the new PoW algorithm from BLAKE2b-256, SHA3x, BLAKE2s, Scrypt, BLAKE3x2, and Eaglesong, using a commit-reveal mechanism, with the algorithm to be determined by the next block produced after 14:00 UTC the following day. Dashjr, Kyle, and Chris Guida are respectively responsible for the block header and PoW, replay protection, and RDTS adaptation. BIP-110 shares transaction history with Bitcoin, and developers believe changes such as transaction signatures are needed to prevent Bitcoin transactions from becoming valid on the minority chain. The Bitcoin community has criticized the fork for producing only two blocks so far, arguing that nodes can execute custom rules but cannot compel users, miners, exchanges, and businesses to switch to the chain. (Bitcoin News)
Cardano Foundation CTO will step down on August 31
According to an official announcement, Cardano Foundation Chief Technology Officer Giorgio Zinetti will depart from the foundation on August 31. The foundation expressed its gratitude for his support and significant contributions to the development of the foundation and Cardano since he assumed the role of Chief Technology Officer in 2024.
Ledger: Coldcard Vulnerability Losses Reach Approximately $130 Million, Hardware Wallet Security Needs to Adapt to AI
Odaily News: Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has stated that the recent Coldcard vulnerability indicates the hardware Bitcoin wallet industry needs to reassess its security model. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet stated that Ledger devices were not affected, as their recovery phrases are generated by a hardware random number generator built into a certified secure element. Coldcard manufacturer Coinkite disclosed last week that its air-gapped Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallet contains a vulnerability traceable to firmware versions from March 2021. The vulnerability uses a software fallback mechanism to generate wallet recovery seeds, allowing certain private keys to be guessed, with related losses reaching approximately $130 million. Coinkite released a fixed firmware on Sunday and urged affected users to transfer funds to newly generated wallets. Charles Guillemet stated that open source is different from being audited — the flaw had existed in public code for over five years, and AI is enabling attackers to scan code and identify vulnerabilities at machine speed. Charles Guillemet also said that over the past two years, Ledger has combined AI with security engineers and cryptography experts to review code and identify vulnerabilities. He believes that when evaluating hardware wallets, users should understand how randomness is generated and whether that process has received independent certification.
2026 Q2 Web3 Security Incidents: $764 Million Stolen, 88.3% from Compromised Keys and Infrastructure
According to the quarterly Security and Compliance Report by Hacken, 67 security incidents in the Web3 space resulted in losses of $763.9 million in Q2 2026, making it the most severe quarter since Q2 2025. Compromised keys and infrastructure accounted for 88.3% of the stolen funds, approximately $674.5 million. Smart contract vulnerabilities remained the most common type of attack, linked to 44 out of the 67 incidents, but corresponding losses represented only about 11% of the total. Approximately 75.5% of the losses stemmed from two incidents attributed to North Korean threat actors, and 14 audited protocols were breached during the quarter. Leo Fan, founder of Cysic, stated that an audit is a point-in-time assessment of a specific codebase and does not automatically cover signature devices, cloud infrastructure, operational permissions, subsequent upgrades, third-party dependencies, or old contracts that remain callable. Samuel Videau, CTO of Genius, pointed out that nearly 90% of losses came from compromised keys, signers, and infrastructure. Multiple security leaders noted that Web3 security requires layered defenses including real-time monitoring, key management, multi-party authorization, and bug bounty programs. Leo Fan expects that operational access control attacks will continue to dominate losses in the second half of 2026, including social engineering, credential theft, compromised signers, cloud or CI/CD intrusions, and attacks on off-chain validator infrastructure.
Pons will release v2 version, introducing RWA trading pairs and Uniswap V4 fee mechanism
According to Odaily, Pons, a token launch platform on Robinhood Chain, will release its v2 version, planning to introduce multiple feature updates.It is reported that Pons v2 will introduce a Bonding Curve mechanism denominated in ETH, remove trading restrictions for non-developer wallets, and support custom trading pairs, including RWA assets such as USDG, NVDA, AAPL, and HOOD.Additionally, Pons will adopt Uniswap V4 pools and Hooks to redesign the fee structure, with creators receiving fees in ETH by default. When the token value reaches 4.2 ETH, it will automatically graduate to a permanently locked Uniswap V4 full-range position.Other updates include a new CTO function with a 3-day timelock, support for charging fees in stablecoins or other tokens, and an optional tax mechanism for each buy and sell transaction.
Related news
Pons Surpasses Nearly $2.5 Billion in Monthly Trading Volume Within First Month, Burns Over $9 Million Worth of PONS
Odaily News Pons announced on the X platform that since its launch one month ago, the platform's cumulative trading volume has approached $2.5 billion, with over 290,000 tokens issued and more than $15 million in rewards distributed to token creators. Additionally, Pons allocates 80% of protocol revenue to buy back PONS, and has so far burned over $9 million worth of PONS, accounting for nearly 30% of the total token supply.Furthermore, Pons expressed optimism about NFTs and their applications in combination with tokens, and is currently developing related products with two partners. In addition, Pons plans to open migration features for communities looking to conduct a CTO on Pons v1 tokens, as well as for projects hoping to migrate from Solana to Robinhood via Pons. Pons also stated that its iOS App has entered the testing phase.
Google appoints Koray Kavukcuoglu as new head of DeepMind
According to CNBC, Google announced the appointment of Koray Kavukcuoglu as Senior Vice President of DeepMind, reporting directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and fully responsible for Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini applications and developer team. DeepMind co-founder and former CEO Demis Hassabis will transition to Chairman of the Board. Kavukcuoglu joined DeepMind in 2012, previously serving as CTO and Google's Chief AI Architect. Analysts interpret this promotion as a significant signal that Google is shifting its strategic focus from academic research to product deployment and enhancing the competitiveness of frontier models.
Luke Dashjr Steps Down Temporarily as Ocean Chairman and CTO, Shifts Focus to BIP-110 Fork Development
Odaily News – Luke Dashjr, co-founder, chairman, and CTO of Jack Dorsey-backed Bitcoin mining pool Ocean, has announced he is temporarily stepping away from these roles to focus on Bitcoin and open-source project development. Ocean's communications lead, Bitcoin Mechanic, has also announced a temporary departure. Both have stated this is a temporary leave of absence rather than a permanent resignation.The BIP-110 minority chain has mined only two blocks since splitting at block height 961,632, and has since stalled due to inheriting Bitcoin's 127,480,000 difficulty and a relatively low share of SHA-256d hashrate. Bitcoin Knots developers are preparing a hard fork that plans to reset the proof-of-work, adjust the block header, and add replay protection.Developers plan to select the new PoW algorithm from BLAKE2b-256, SHA3x, BLAKE2s, Scrypt, BLAKE3x2, and Eaglesong, using a commit-reveal mechanism, with the algorithm to be determined by the next block produced after 14:00 UTC the following day. Dashjr, Kyle, and Chris Guida are respectively responsible for the block header and PoW, replay protection, and RDTS adaptation. BIP-110 shares transaction history with Bitcoin, and developers believe changes such as transaction signatures are needed to prevent Bitcoin transactions from becoming valid on the minority chain. The Bitcoin community has criticized the fork for producing only two blocks so far, arguing that nodes can execute custom rules but cannot compel users, miners, exchanges, and businesses to switch to the chain. (Bitcoin News)
Cardano Foundation CTO will step down on August 31
According to an official announcement, Cardano Foundation Chief Technology Officer Giorgio Zinetti will depart from the foundation on August 31. The foundation expressed its gratitude for his support and significant contributions to the development of the foundation and Cardano since he assumed the role of Chief Technology Officer in 2024.
F2Pool Co-founder Wang Chun: Luke Dashjr's Push for BIP-110 Failed, Both Finances and Personal Credibility Bankrupt
F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun stated in a post that Luke Dashjr, co-founder and CTO of OCEAN Mining Pool, is not only financially bankrupt but his personal credibility is also bankrupt; he also sarcastically suggested that Luke might as well try changing the PoW algorithm next, but the outcome would similarly be unfavorable.
SanDisk Executives Sell Shares, Cashing Out Tens of Millions of Dollars in Total
Odaily News: Marcos Milla disclosed on X platform that there has been a recent increase in insider share selling activity at SanDisk. Among them, CEO David Goeckeler sold shares worth approximately $5.7 million; CTO Alper Ilkbahar sold shares worth approximately $9.8 million; Director Thomas Caulfield sold shares worth approximately $13.4 million; CFO Luis Felipe Visoso sold shares worth approximately $2.5 million, and other executives also recorded share sales worth millions of dollars.