News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily News: Software company Strategy holds nearly 850,000 Bitcoin, valued at just over $50 billion, with some recent purchases funded through debt and stock issuance. Since Michael Saylor shifted the company toward Bitcoin accumulation in 2020, his wealth has fluctuated with Bitcoin's price. Michael Saylor stated that last year, with the aid of an AI chatbot, he earned $15 billion through the company's Bitcoin-backed preferred stock. Strategy's STRC offers an annual dividend yield of 12%, with its price recently recovering to near $100 after dipping to around $75 in late June. Over the past year, Strategy's common stock value has fallen by approximately 80% alongside Bitcoin's price decline. The company recently sold some of its Bitcoin holdings to manage debt and dividend commitments, and has built a $4 billion cash reserve, providing roughly two years of funding support before subsequent financing. Michael Saylor also mentioned that in May of last year, he used ChatGPT's deep research mode to design the company's convertible preferred stock product.
Odaily News: "AI stock guru" Leopold Aschenbrenner has shared wedding photos on X after a nearly one-year silence.Previously reported, Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund gained 439% cumulatively before June 2026, but suffered heavy losses during the July AI sector sell-off. Prior to his wedding, he sold most of the fund's equity portfolio to Citadel, the investment firm owned by Ken Griffin.
Odaily News: Tether's Q2 net operating profit was $1.5 billion, primarily derived from interest generated by its U.S. Treasury holdings and repurchase agreements. As of June 30, Tether's reserve buffer stood at $4.11 billion, with assets exceeding liabilities by the same amount. USDT's circulating supply increased by $446 million to $184.6 billion, accounting for over 60% of the global stablecoin market. DeFiLlama data shows the global stablecoin market size is approximately $307 billion, with Tether remaining one of the major holders of U.S. Treasury securities. Asset management firm BlackRock has launched two tokenized money market products aimed at stablecoin issuers to help meet reserve requirements under the U.S. GENIUS Act. One of the funds tokenizes shares of its existing Treasury liquidity strategy on Ethereum, while the other is an institutional-grade money market instrument designed to support multiple chains and automatically reinvest returns.
Odaily News: Bitcoin mining company and mining service provider BitFuFu has released its unaudited Bitcoin production and operational data update for July 2026. The company stated that during July, it strategically acquired additional future hash rate resources by selling a portion of its Bitcoin holdings, with this hash rate expected to come online in August. Combined with the hash rate resources acquired in June, BitFuFu anticipates its managed hash rate will recover to approximately 20 EH/s by mid-August.Additionally, BitFuFu's Bitcoin production in July totaled 112 BTC (40 from cloud mining and 72 from self-operated mining), with an average daily production of 3.6 BTC, both down month-over-month. Its Bitcoin holdings decreased from 1,671 BTC in June to 1,314 BTC. (WSJ)
Odaily Odaily News: AI personal assistant startup Pally has announced the completion of a $5.2 million funding round, led by Cyber Fund and Y Combinator, with participation from Pioneer Fund, Founders Inc, 468 Capital, and angel investors. The company is valued at $30 million and primarily provides AI personal assistant services through an SMS interface. Pally was launched in 2025, with its latest version released in June, and can sync with platforms such as Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Granola, and Notion. After user authorization, Pally can book flights, manage inboxes, reply to messages, and reserve restaurant tables. Pally uses Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, as well as open-source models such as Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2. Co-founder Haz Hubble stated that the company will not sell user data or use related data to train models. (Business Insider)
Odaily News: AI research startup Mirendil has entered into a multi-year partnership agreement with Google Cloud to secure large-scale computing resources in support of its "Self-Improving AI" research and development. Under the agreement, Mirendil will gain access to TPU and NVIDIA GPU computing resources provided by Google Cloud, as well as managed AI training clusters, to develop AI systems capable of continuously optimizing their own capabilities. It is reported that Mirendil is focused on advancing "Recursive Self-Improvement" AI, in which AI systems enhance their own performance through iterative refinement, self-learning, and optimization. This direction is also a research area of interest among some of the top AI laboratories today.Benham Neyshabur, co-founder and CEO of Mirendil, revealed that the total value of the agreement exceeds $100 million, roughly equivalent to half of the $1 billion valuation seed funding round the company completed at the end of June. (TechCrunch)
According to the official page, Robinhood-owned CEX Bitstamp has just listed CASHCAT, a meme coin on the Robinhood chain. As of press time, CASHCAT is trading at $0.1123 on Bitstamp, while GMGN data shows CASHCAT is currently at $0.132 on-chain, up 48% in the past 24 hours. An official detailed announcement post from Bitstamp has not yet been seen, but the page indicates that trading functionality is already live. In early June, Robinhood announced the completion of its $200 million cash acquisition of Luxembourg-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp.
Odaily News: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren has asked the U.S. Department of Commerce to explain its policy toward the UAE, following the U.S. granting the UAE greater access to AI chip exports after UAE-linked entities invested in Trump-family-backed crypto project World Liberty Financial. In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, it was mentioned that an Abu Dhabi entity invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial in January; another UAE-affiliated company used World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin to complete a $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance. The U.S. Department of Commerce previously reclassified the UAE as Country Group A:5, granting it greater access to license-free exports, including advanced chips. The department also stated it would "actively review" license applications involving exports of chips and servers to MGX, the UAE entity that completed the $2 billion Binance investment. Warren stated that the Commerce Department's actions raise significant questions about whether the president's crypto business interests could influence agency operations and national security. In June, several senators, including Warren, had already requested a hearing regarding the $500 million World Liberty Financial deal.
Western Union has partnered with stablecoin infrastructure provider Rain to launch Stablecard, a digital wallet and Visa-branded card that enables users to hold and spend US dollar-pegged stablecoins. The product is now available in 37 markets, with Western Union planning to expand to more than 60 markets by the end of this year. Stablecard supports USDPT, a US dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank and running on the Solana blockchain. Users can directly receive Western Union remittances and transfer funds to compatible crypto wallets and exchanges. Users can also spend their balances at all Visa-accepting merchants, as well as through Apple Pay and Google Pay. Western Union also unveiled USDPT in May and expanded its ecosystem through exchange partnerships in June.
Galaxy Digital released its financial report for the second quarter of 2026, with a net loss of $85.31 million, significantly narrowed from $216.3 million in the first quarter; adjusted EBITDA loss was $77.26 million. As of June 30, the company's total equity was $2.72 billion, and cash and stablecoin holdings were $2.459 billion.
Odaily News: Apple has limited the number of vulnerability reports a single researcher can submit at one time because its security team has received a large number of submissions generated by AI, many of which do not actually contain real flaws. Apple stated that researchers can request a higher limit at any time, and the company is also using AI internally to triage submissions.Bynario, a Milan-based cybersecurity startup, said it used OpenAI's ChatGPT to discover more than 50 vulnerabilities in the latest version of macOS within three weeks, including a privilege escalation chain that could give attackers full control of a Mac device.Bynario stated that it was unable to report this vulnerability because Apple had already rejected further submissions. Bynario CEO Alfredo Pesoli estimated the vulnerability's value on the criminal market at $100,000 to $200,000. Apple said it has reached out to the company and reviewed its work. In June, Apple added a submission cap and a 30-day cooldown period to its security portal. In a recent security update, Apple listed vulnerabilities discovered with the assistance of Anthropic and OpenAI software, with the number of fixes approximately five times that of a normal cycle. (Decrypt)
: Evan Cheng, co-founder of Mysten Labs, the development entity behind Sui, stated that within the next four years, the scale of digital payments carried by Sui will be comparable to the combined scale of traditional internet bank card networks and bank payment rails. Mysten Labs was founded in 2021 by engineers who previously worked on Meta's discontinued Diem blockchain and the Move programming language. Cheng positions Sui as settlement infrastructure for stablecoins, remittances, and agent-to-agent commerce between AI systems. Since June 10, when Mysten Labs removed gas fees for stablecoin transfers at the protocol level, Sui has processed over $65 billion in stablecoin transfers. Since the beginning of 2024, Sui's cumulative stablecoin transaction volume has reached $2.27 trillion. Sui's Hashi testnet went live on July 22, allowing Bitcoin to be used as collateral for decentralized finance loans on Sui without being wrapped as a synthetic token. The bridge was built by Mysten Labs and the Sui Foundation in collaboration with more than 20 participating institutions.
Odaily News: Tether Gold (XAU₮) investor holdings grew 9.5% in Q2. As of 23:59 UTC on June 30, 2026, 612,823.66 XAU₮ tokens had been sold, an increase of 53,225.02 tokens from the end of Q1, corresponding to an additional 1.66 tonnes of ownership in the physical gold reserves already held. As of the end of Q2, XAU₮ physical gold reserves stood at 707,747.139 troy ounces, approximately 22.01 tonnes, with a total market value of approximately $2.837 billion. Each XAU₮ is backed 1:1 by at least one troy ounce of physical gold. The reserves include 1,759 London Good Delivery gold bars and smaller bars, all stored in Switzerland. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that while gold experienced its largest quarterly pullback in 13 years during Q2, investors continued to increase their XAU₮ holdings. Tether International SA de CV purchased approximately 27.1 tonnes of gold in the first half of the year through June 2026, averaging 4.5 tonnes per month.
According to TechCrunch, AI startup June has officially announced its emergence from stealth mode, completing a $20 million pre-seed financing round led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, with participation from tech industry notables including Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. June was co-founded by former Salesforce executive Efrat Rapoport and three co-founders; the team previously founded speech-to-text company Bonobo AI, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. June's core product automatically scans existing enterprise systems, identifies business process bottlenecks, and generates a complete roadmap for the step-by-step deployment of AI Agents, helping enterprises achieve AI implementation in complex legacy system environments such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday, without relying on high-cost Frontline Deployment Engineers (FDE).
According to Bitcoin.com, a recent survey report released by Bearingpoint shows that 23% of Swiss adults use cryptocurrency at least occasionally, far higher than 11% in Germany and 18% in Austria. The survey was conducted by YouGov in June 2026 among over 4,000 adults in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The report points out that Switzerland's leading advantage stems from its Distributed Ledger Technology Act (DLT Act) officially effective in 2021, which provides a clear legal framework for crypto assets, attracting a large number of enterprises to establish operations, and driving the expansion of the "Crypto Valley" ecosystem to 1,749 blockchain companies. Additionally, 37% of Swiss respondents consider cryptocurrency an asset worth investing in, and 45% support it becoming an international reserve currency, both leading Germany and Austria. In contrast, regarding Germany, although retail adoption rates lag behind, the "meinkrypto" platform under DZ Bank and Dekabank's crypto services for the savings bank network are expected to cover approximately 80 million customers, potentially gradually narrowing the gap with Switzerland.
Hong Kong-licensed cryptocurrency exchange HashKey Exchange has received approval from JPMorgan to open client fund accounts. HashKey Holdings stated that the account will support client fund segregation and settlement through JPMorgan's banking infrastructure. HashKey Exchange activated a client fund account with Singapore's DBS Bank on June 30, supporting fiat currency deposits, withdrawals, and settlement services. HashKey Holdings merged the previously independent HashKey Exchange and HashKey Global applications into a single entry point one week ago. HashKey Holdings was listed in Hong Kong in December last year, having raised $206 million through an oversubscribed initial public offering.
According to IT Home, Snap announced it will hold a dedicated event in Los Angeles, USA on September 16 to fully showcase its consumer-grade AR glasses Specs for the first time. CEO Evan Spiegel will personally introduce the device's functions and application scenarios. Specs opened for pre-order in June this year at a price of $2,195 (approximately 14,858 RMB), featuring dual Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, self-developed LCoS display technology, a 51-degree field of view, and AI real-time contextual assistance. It can operate independently without an external computing unit, with a mixed usage battery life of about 4 hours, extendable to 20 hours with the charging case.
According to Yonhap News Agency, data released by the National Investigation Headquarters of the Korean National Police Agency shows that during the concentrated crackdown campaign in the first half of this year (March to June), a total of 5,203 drug suspects were caught and 1,039 were detained, representing a year-on-year increase of 1.8% and 7.8% respectively. Among them, suspects involved in online drug transactions reached 2,178, accounting for 41.9% of the total number of suspects caught, an increase of 300 people compared to the same period last year; there were 848 foreign nationals involved in drug-related activities, an increase of 114 people year-on-year, with supply-related crimes accounting for up to 47.2%. During this period, the police also successfully extradited Philippine drug lord Park Wang-yeol and recovered criminal proceeds of 3.84 billion Korean won. In the second half of the year (August to December), the police will focus on strengthening crackdowns on drug sales channels on social platforms such as Telegram, and establish a 41-member special tracking team for virtual assets, while jointly strengthening efforts to crack down on drug crimes involving foreign personnel with international law enforcement agencies.
: Tether International, S.A. de C.V. has released its Q2 2026 assurance report, prepared by global independent accounting firm BDO, confirming Tether's financial data and reserve report, and outlining the assets backing USD₮ as of June 30, 2026. As of the end of Q2, USD₮ issuance stood at approximately $184.6 billion, an increase of about $446 million from the end of Q1, with its stablecoin market share exceeding 60%. Tether reported a net operating profit of approximately $1.5 billion in Q2, primarily derived from U.S. Treasuries and repurchase operations. As of quarter-end, Tether's total assets were $187.751 billion, with total liabilities of $183.642 billion, of which $183.622 billion was related to issued digital tokens. Its assets exceeded liabilities by approximately $4.11 billion, and secured loan exposure decreased by approximately $2.38 billion, a reduction of 15%. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that USD₮ remains fully backed by reserves, with 14 tons of physical gold added during the quarter and a global user base expansion of over 30 million new users. Tether also continued to advance the audit process with Big Four accounting firms during Q2.
Japanese listed company Quantum Solutions has sold another 1,000 Ethereum, cashing out approximately $1.9 million to support its AI data center expansion. Following this sale, the company has reduced its ETH holdings by nearly 30% since mid-June.According to company documents, Quantum Solutions' subsidiary, GPT Pals Studio, sold this batch of ETH on Thursday at an average price of $1,903. The company expects to record a loss of approximately $100,000 from this transaction. After the sale, Quantum Solutions' remaining ETH holdings amount to approximately 4,765, which is lower than the 4,976 ETH held by Def consulting, thereby losing its position as the largest corporate ETH holder among Japanese listed companies.Quantum Solutions has sold a total of 1,904 ETH in less than two months, accounting for approximately 28.6% of its pre-sale holdings of 6,668.8 ETH. Previously, GPT Pals had sold 904 ETH on June 16, cashing out about $1.6 million.The company acquired the majority of its ETH during the crypto market highs of the fourth quarter of 2025, when ETH prices were in the range of approximately $4,000 to $4,500.