News linked to both this project and an event.
According to Bloomberg, former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI fund Situational Awareness invested $400 million this week to back a private company, semiconductor manufacturing startup Source Foundry. It is reported that VC giant Sequoia Capital also supports the startup. As of now, representatives of Situational Awareness and Source Foundry have not responded to requests for comment, while Sequoia Capital declined to confirm the hedge fund's investment details. According to reports, Source Foundry is dedicated to developing a semiconductor manufacturing process that is simpler, lower-cost, and faster than existing methods, aiming to bridge the widening gap between artificial intelligence computing demand and chip manufacturing capacity expansion capabilities. Analysts believe that Leopold Aschenbrenner's large-scale investment reflects the market's continued strong demand for new chip manufacturing technologies, as artificial intelligence developers' demand for computing power continues to grow. However, this investment also reveals that Situational Awareness had already established highly concentrated risk exposure before its public technology holdings encountered severe volatility and the fund came under significant financial pressure.
Odaily News: Bitcoin's BIP-110 will enter the enforcement phase after block 961,632, where nodes will reject blocks that do not signal support. Monitoring page data shows that among the 1,674 blocks counted in the current cycle, only 41 blocks support BIP-110, putting the miner signal support rate at 2.45%. BIP-110, officially named "Reduced Data Temporary Softfork," plans to tighten certain data rules in Bitcoin transactions within approximately one year, restricting the size of certain data elements used by Ordinals inscriptions and multiple token protocols. The proposal is primarily distributed through Bitcoin Knots, and Bitcoin Core has not adopted it. Major mining pools such as Foundry, Antpool, F2pool, and Viabtc have not issued support signals. If BIP-110 nodes execute as planned, the network could see two transaction histories, with the majority of miners and Bitcoin Core users expected to continue using the existing rules. Australian Bitcoin exchange Hardblock stated that BIP-110 activation is expected around August 7-8 and may temporarily suspend buying, selling, deposits, and withdrawals. Lightning Network tools and analytics provider Amboss has warned of a fork risk in early August, and Australian Bitcoin exchange Bitaroo plans to freeze deposits and withdrawals as the mandatory signaling deadline approaches.
Odaily News, March 24 – Antpool mined Bitcoin block 941,881 at UTC time 15:49:35. Foundry USA mined another version of the same height 12 seconds later, briefly creating two competing chains on the Bitcoin blockchain. Subsequently, ViaBTC extended block 941,882 on top of the Antpool version, while Foundry USA also continued to extend its own branch. Foundry USA then mined blocks 941,883 to 941,886 consecutively, giving its branch a cumulative workload lead. Nodes subsequently reorganized to the Foundry USA version, causing the blocks mined by Antpool and ViaBTC to become orphaned. The affected miners lost the corresponding block rewards and fees, and transactions not confirmed on the winning chain re-entered the mempool to be confirmed in subsequent blocks.
: Zcash mining company Fortitude has launched its 12 MW facility in Grand Island, Nebraska, completing its first greenfield data center construction and expanding its self-owned power portfolio to over 60 MW across seven sites. Fortitude stated that the facility has completed construction and electrical testing and is ready for commercial operations. This milestone comes ahead of Fortitude's planned public listing through a business combination with HeartSciences (Nasdaq: HSCS), a listed medical technology company. Fortitude expects that, with successful miner deployment and stable power, network, and market conditions, the facility will reduce the direct cash cost of mining Zcash from approximately $70 per coin to around $40 per coin. The company attributes the cost reduction to lower-cost self-owned power and more efficient next-generation mining hardware. The facility is expected to procure power at approximately $0.045 per kilowatt-hour. It is located between two solar power generation facilities and adjacent to a substation with spare capacity. Fortitude was spun off from the Foundry mining division of Digital Currency Group in January 2025, with operations including mining Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.
Odaily Odaily News: The Bitcoin BIP-110 forced signaling window will open at block height 961632, expected around August 9, 2026. As of 8:40 AM (EDT) on July 27, the chain height is 959842, approximately 1790 blocks away from this activation block. The current BIP-110 signaling support rate is around 2.64%. BIP-110, officially named "Reduced Data Temporary Softfork," proposes to limit the size of certain data fields within Bitcoin transactions, targeting Ordinals-like inscriptions, large OP_RETURN payloads, and similar high-data-volume use cases. If activated, the restrictions will take effect at block 965664 and automatically expire after 52,416 blocks (approximately one year). Current signaling support primarily comes from Ocean, independent miners, and small-scale operators. Major mining pools such as Foundry, Antpool, ViaBTC, and F2pool have not yet switched to supporting the proposal. Foundry has requested clients to vote based on their average hashrate; only when “support” votes exceed 51% of the participating weighted hashrate will the pool switch all its blocks to signaling support. If the current signaling level persists until block 961632, nodes enforcing BIP-110 will reject blocks that have not signaled version bit 4 and will instead follow the minority of blocks that do signal. Unupgraded nodes will continue to accept both signaling and non-signaling blocks, and will follow the chain with the most cumulative proof of work.
Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI will release the model weights of its high-performance model, Kimi K3. Developers can download the model, modify it for various purposes, and run it in their own data centers or cloud environments.Kimi K3 boasts 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1 million token context window, enabling it to process large-scale documents and codebases in a single pass. Moonshot AI plans to later publish a technical report detailing the model's architecture, training methodology, and performance evaluation results.Following the release of Kimi K3, Moonshot AI's daily revenue is reported to have increased by at least 6 times. The company is reportedly advancing a new round of fundraising at a $50 billion valuation and is considering a Hong Kong listing as early as this year.According to Bloomberg Intelligence, following the release of Kimi K3 and Z.AI's GLM-5.2, the share of Chinese open-weight models in overall token usage has risen to 68%. Services like AWS Bedrock, Microsoft Azure Foundry, and Google Vertex AI currently do not offer Chinese open-weight models such as Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2.
: Bitcoin News posted on platform X stating that Foundry USA, which accounts for 33% of global Bitcoin hashrate, has initiated a hashrate-weighted vote to ask its clients whether the mining pool should support BIP-110.
Bitcoin mining pool Foundry USA has released a BIP-110 resource guide. Foundry USA stated that this guide is aimed at miners, helping them make informed decisions before the voting deadline at block 961,632.According to reports, the guide includes the official BIP-110 specification, a proposal website, discussions on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, interactive explanations from Orange Surf, commentary by Jameson Lopp, as well as perspectives from Adam Back, Michael Saylor, Luke Dashjr, Alex Thorn, Softfork Mechanic, and others. (News.bitcoin)
Odaily, July 21 - Microsoft and French AI startup Mistral AI announced an expansion of their strategic partnership on July 21, signing a multi-billion dollar agreement centered on European AI infrastructure to enhance AI computing capabilities in the region. Under the agreement, Microsoft will leverage Mistral's expanded European GPU infrastructure to support its cloud computing and AI services. This infrastructure will be based on thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs.In terms of products, the Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models are now available on the Microsoft Foundry platform, and Mistral Medium 3.5 has also been integrated into Microsoft Copilot Studio for agent applications, document processing workflows, and industry-customized workflows. Additionally, the two parties will expand AI deployment options through Azure and Azure Local, supporting cloud, cloud-connected, and fully offline environments, targeting industries with high data compliance requirements such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.
According to Odaily, as of June 23, 2026, Foundry Digital, AntPool, ViaBTC, and F2Pool collectively control over 70% of the Bitcoin network's hashrate, with shares of approximately 31%, 18%, 13%, and 10% respectively. Foundry Digital is a US-based mining pool backed by Digital Currency Group, primarily serving large institutions and publicly listed mining companies. In the first half of 2026, D-Central reported a Nakamoto coefficient of 3, meaning that just three mining pools would be enough to produce more than half of the blocks. ViaBTC faced stricter regulatory scrutiny in 2026, prompting some miners to shift to alternative pools like EMCD.
Bitcoin News posted on X platform, stating that Foundry USA Pool has begun soliciting voting opinions from its mining clients regarding BIP-110 signaling. According to the email sent to mining pool account holders, voting weight is calculated based on each participant's 10-day average hashrate. Foundry stated that it will follow the majority result of hashrate votes during the signaling period; if more than 51% of the voting hashrate supports BIP-110, the mining pool will signal "Yes" with 100% of its blocks; if the majority opposes it, no support signal will be issued. Foundry is the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate.
According to Anthropic’s official announcement, Claude Opus 4.7 has been officially released and is now available across the entire Claude product suite, API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Its pricing remains unchanged from Opus 4.6: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
According to Fortune, Foundry, a leading Bitcoin mining pool, officially launched a new mining pool for the privacy coin Zcash on April 13. Mike Colyer, CEO of Foundry, stated that this move aims to address growing institutional demand for privacy coins. The pool has already attracted several institutional miners, and its output now accounts for nearly one-third of all newly minted Zcash globally. Zcash implements transaction privacy via zero-knowledge proof technology while supporting selective disclosure to meet regulatory compliance requirements—making it more appealing to institutions than its competitor Monero. Fueled by this news, Zcash’s price has surged over 75% in the past 30 days, with its current market capitalization standing at approximately $6.3 billion. Foundry currently controls about 31% of the global Bitcoin hash rate, making it the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool operator.