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The U.S. Treasury Department announced that the budget deficit for July was $432 billion, exceeding market expectations of $346 billion, compared to a budget deficit of $291 billion in the same period last year.

Tencent Holdings released its Q2 2026 financial report, with revenue of 204.79 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 11%, slightly exceeding market expectations; Non-IFRS net profit was 68.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%; profit attributable to equity holders of the company was 56.022 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 0.7%. Capital expenditure was 52.78 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 176%, far exceeding the market expectation of 32.14 billion yuan, mainly used for AI infrastructure investment. The free cash flow for the quarter was negative 13.8 billion yuan; excluding prepayments for AI computing power purchases, free cash flow was 37.6 billion yuan.In terms of business, value-added services revenue was 98.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8%, with domestic game revenue at 47.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17%, significantly contributed by "Delta Action," "Valorant," and "Lock Kingdom: World"; international market game revenue was 18.6 billion yuan, down 0.8% year-on-year due to exchange rate effects, but up 4% year-on-year when calculated at constant exchange rates. Marketing services revenue was 43.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22%, making it the fastest-growing segment; financial technology and enterprise services revenue was 60.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%.Regarding AI products, the report specifically mentioned that WorkBuddy achieved rapid user growth and a healthy user retention rate, with strong user willingness to pay. Its market-leading position is attributed to its strong harness engineering capabilities, a rich selection of models, and an industry-leading skill library. The official version of Hy3 saw a more than 68-fold increase in usage in the week following its launch compared to the previous generation, consistently ranking among the top three globally in terms of OpenRouter token consumption, with plans for a larger parameter scale Hy4 to be released soon. The AI agent Xiaowei within WeChat has initiated a small-scale gray testing. Excluding the contribution from new AI products, Non-IFRS operating profit increased by 19% year-on-year to 86.1 billion yuan. By the end of the quarter, the company's net cash decreased from 146.9 billion yuan at the end of March to 58.2 billion yuan.

On August 11, TSMC held a board meeting and approved a capital budget of approximately $29.443 billion to expand advanced process and advanced packaging capacity to meet the strong demand brought by AI and high-performance computing. In May of this year, the board had already approved $31.283 billion, bringing the total approved capital budget for the year to $60.726 billion (approximately NT$1.96 trillion). TSMC Chairman C.C. Wei stated at the July earnings call that in the coming years, 13 advanced wafer fabs and advanced packaging plants will continue to be built in Taiwan, covering Kaohsiung, Hsinchu Baoshan, and Tainan, with the total investment scale in Arizona, USA also increasing to $26.5 billion.The board also approved the establishment of a joint venture with Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation, with TSMC's investment cap set at 282 billion yen. The joint venture will be located in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, aiming to mass-produce next-generation image sensors for smartphones by 2029. In addition, the board approved a cash dividend of NT$7 per share for the second quarter, with the ex-dividend date set for December 10. TSMC will provide eligible foreign shareholders with the option to receive cash dividends in US dollars.

According to Jinshi, senior officials at the U.S. Pentagon pitched the "Reconciliation 4" plan to Senate Republicans in a closed-door meeting, emphasizing the need for a significant increase in military funding to replenish weapon stockpiles depleted by the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine.Defense Secretary Hegseth and several deputy secretaries provided a detailed closed-door briefing to Republican members of key Senate committees, analyzing global threats and discussing the issue of U.S. military ammunition stockpiles.

According to a report by Z Finance, Tencent's AI-native desktop intelligent agent platform WorkBuddy entered public beta on March 9, achieving a monthly active user count of 20 million across all platforms within 3 months, with daily active users surpassing 13 million, including over 2 million daily active users on the PC side, and a DAU/MAU ratio stabilizing between 65%-75%. The product is led by Liu Yi, Vice President of Tencent Cloud, with a core team of about one hundred people, classified internally as one of the highest priority AI projects. The team claims they are currently only "temporarily ahead by half a position."WorkBuddy is derived from Tencent's previously launched AI programming assistant CodeBuddy, which has already covered about 12,000 engineers within Tencent. The product completed prototype development on January 17, and after the public beta in March, it has undergone a total of 43 iterations, gradually integrating capabilities related to QClaw developed by the Tencent PC Manager team based on an open-source framework. The product adopts a multi-model access strategy, with the underlying self-developed Harness engine for unified scheduling.In terms of commercialization, at the end of April, Tencent Cloud adjusted its pricing: the SaaS enterprise version was raised from 78 yuan/person/month to 198 yuan, and the private cloud enterprise version was raised from 158 yuan to 316 yuan. Market information indicates that it has acquired thousands of enterprise clients and over one hundred thousand paid seats, with an estimated annual revenue of about 300 million yuan. Third-party evaluations show that the product scored an average of 2.31/4 points on 70 questions (Word category 2.85 points, Design category 1.45 points), indicating that it is still some distance from producing stable results without manual modifications.

According to a report by Reuters on July 13, the South Korean government announced plans to draft a budget expenditure for the fiscal year 2027, which will reach a historic high of over 800 trillion won (approximately 530.97 billion USD). The expansion of this budget scale is mainly attributed to strong tax revenue growth brought about by the prosperity of the AI chip industry.The South Korean government stated that the funding for the budget will rely on increased tax revenue and the restructuring of existing expenditure items amounting to about 50 trillion won. In terms of fund allocation, the three major "giant projects"—chips, AI data centers, and physical AI—will receive the highest financial priority.In addition, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung emphasized that this is a critical period for determining global AI dominance. To this end, South Korea plans to establish a "Future Response Fund" as a strategic investment platform, which will specifically invest excess tax revenue in four key areas: youth, growth engines, regional development, and talent cultivation, to ensure that corporate investments proceed as planned.

According to reports from Jiemian News, Kingsoft Cloud will accelerate the construction of GPU computing clusters in the second half of the year to meet the explosive growth in computing power demand from major clients. Among them, Xiaomi's demand for Kingsoft Cloud's GPU computing power has upgraded from a ten-thousand-card cluster, with the related budget significantly increasing from nearly 4 billion yuan to over 10 billion yuan. In addition, Alibaba's large model team has signed a 5-year computing power leasing contract with Kingsoft Cloud, involving more than 3,000 eight-card GPU servers. Based on the contracted price, the annualized revenue after full delivery will exceed 4 billion yuan.To meet the surging customer demand, Kingsoft Cloud's capital expenditure plan for 2026 has been raised to 15 billion yuan, with an annual revenue target of 12.5 billion to 13.5 billion yuan. It is reported that due to tight upstream supply, Kingsoft Cloud is currently only accepting long-term contracts from clients for 3 to 5 years, and some orders are facing delivery delays. Due to concerns about the risk of impairment of high-level card assets, Kingsoft Cloud is currently pausing aggressive hardware expansion, anticipating that the prices of computing hardware may reach a turning point for decline in the third quarter of this year.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, stated that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a budget cut of approximately 40% this year as part of its financial transformation plan.According to the funding management policy released last year, EF is gradually transitioning from an "expenditure-based organization" to an "endowment-based model," aiming to reduce the annual expenditure ratio from about 15% to approximately 5% after 2030. In this process, the foundation emphasizes that it will accept inevitable personnel and resource adjustments and acknowledges the loss of some capabilities and experience.In this round of restructuring, EF has reduced approximately 54 employees, accounting for about 20% of the overall team. Vitalik stated that many of these departing members may continue to participate in the Ethereum ecosystem in external forms in the future. Meanwhile, the foundation will shift its strategic focus to a more "lightweight" protocol governance and development path, including advancing the "Strawmap" long-term roadmap, covering core protocol upgrades such as consensus mechanisms, privacy technologies, account models, and state structures, and promoting Ethereum's evolution into its third phase.In terms of specific structural adjustments, EF will weaken the "multi-client redundancy priority" model and shift towards a development approach based more on specialized division of labor and AI-assisted formal verification; the privacy and scalability research team PSE will be restructured, transitioning from exploratory R&D to more focused engineering implementation; the scale of ecosystem activities such as Devcon will also gradually be reduced.In addition, EF will reduce investments in large cross-domain projects in the future, placing greater emphasis on protocol security and high-value improvements, while encouraging more innovative work to be completed externally. Although the path is more streamlined, Ethereum will continue to strengthen its core positioning as a highly censorship-resistant and long-term stable protocol.

According to a report by Politico, a document submitted by the European Commission to member states and the European Parliament shows that the EU is assessing the possibility of incorporating the cryptocurrency industry into a unified tax system to find new sources of fiscal revenue for the 2028-2034 budget cycle.The document estimates that if a tax rate of 0.1% is applied to cryptocurrency transaction volumes, it could bring in about 3 billion to 4 billion euros in revenue for the EU each year; if capital gains from cryptocurrencies are taxed, it is expected to increase fiscal revenue by about 1 billion to 2.4 billion euros annually.However, the European Commission also pointed out that due to the still inadequate data related to the cryptocurrency industry, there is significant uncertainty in the current revenue forecasts, and the actual results may differ from the estimates.The relevant proposal is still in the evaluation stage, and to be formally implemented, it requires unanimous approval from all 27 EU member states. If progress goes smoothly, this will become one of the most important discussions on unified tax policy for the cryptocurrency industry in the EU.

The Bitcoin TAP protocol ecological project BIT (@dmt_bit_) has released a new roadmap, announcing a focus on the narrative of "Bitcoin Security Budget Layer," with tokens being directly issued to Bitcoin miners every block as a new source of miner subsidies.The BIT team disclosed that currently only the $NAT token enjoys the miner subsidy mechanism under the TAP protocol, and this mechanism is hardcoded in the protocol's source code (effective only for the dmt-nat token), making it unavailable for other DMT projects. The TAP protocol has also not publicly disclosed any third-party security audits to date.BIT has submitted a code upgrade proposal to TAP, hoping to open this mechanism for use by all DMT tokens, but it was rejected by the TAP officials.According to the roadmap, BIT will next develop a new protocol based on a TAP fork—any DMT token deployment party can customize the token issuance rules and miner distribution methods (including distribution by mining pool weight, independent miner prize accumulation, mixed distribution, etc.) through a single inscription, eliminating any hardcoded privileges for projects. A third-party security audit will be completed before the mainnet launch of the new protocol. $BIT will serve as the native token of the new protocol, and the ecological development of the protocol will continue to empower $BIT.

According to Jinshi reports, Trump's budget proposal is expected to result in a real GDP growth of 3.1% in the fiscal year 2027.

According to BBX data, global listed companies made key progress in "health optimization" of their treasury structures yesterday:$50 million addition: Boyaa Interactive (0434.HK) announced yesterday that the board has approved an additional budget of $50 million for increasing its holdings in Bitcoin and Ethereum. So far, the group has invested over $250 million, aiming to establish itself as the largest digital asset treasury entity in Asia.Officially entering "debt-free holding": TeraWulf (NASDAQ: $WULF) announced yesterday that it has used cash flow generated from its high-performance computing business to pay off the last of its high-interest debt. As one of the most energy-efficient mining companies globally, the company reiterated that it has entered the "100% output retention" phase as of yesterday.Computing power as net reserves: HIVE Digital (TSX-V: $HIVE) disclosed yesterday that the profits from its AI data center in Sweden have fully covered global operating expenses for two consecutive months. This means that all Bitcoin produced yesterday is recorded as "net reserves," with no need for any market sell-off.$10 million procurement settled: Acurx Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: $ACXP) confirmed yesterday that its first $10 million strategic procurement of Bitcoin has been fully completed. As a biopharmaceutical company, ACXP plans to use this asset as a "value anchor" for its clinical research and development funding over the next five years.Automated treasury upgrade: Public.com launched an "automated treasury balancing" suite for small and medium-sized enterprises globally yesterday, supporting the automatic proportional conversion of idle corporate funds into BTC, with the first-day subscription scale exceeding $80 million.

Tencent officially launched the WorkBuddy tool, which can be used without complex deployment. This tool is referred to as "Little Lobster" and aims to enhance user office efficiency. WorkBuddy integrates various practical features, supporting document management, collaborative communication, and task tracking, helping users easily cope with diverse work scenarios.Tencent stated that the launch of WorkBuddy is to meet the modern office's demand for convenience and efficiency, assisting enterprises in improving overall work effectiveness. Users only need to download the application to immediately experience its convenient features.

According to Jinshi, U.S. President Trump stated that he may increase the military budget to $1.5 trillion.

Aave Labs announced the security framework for Aave V4, proposing a "security-first" development model that embeds security verification during the architectural design phase, rather than only conducting a final audit before launch.This security plan has been ongoing for about a year, with approximately 345 days of security reviews completed, funded by a $1.5 million security budget approved by the Aave DAO. It is reported that the V4 security process combines multiple auditing methods, including formal verification, manual audits, invariant testing, fuzzing, and public security competitions. Future protocol development will continue to adopt five long-term security measures, including introducing formal verification early in development, implementing multi-layer security auditing methods, continuous validation mechanisms, a long-term bug bounty program, and utilizing AI-assisted smart contract security scanning.

Fluid is currently discussing a governance proposal submitted by Instadapp's Chief Operating Officer DMH on February 23. The proposal suggests transferring all intellectual property of the protocol (including smart contract code, front-end interface, domain names, and trademarks) to a non-profit foundation in the Cayman Islands, and applying for a monthly DAO allocation of $250,000 (approximately $3 million per year) to support engineering, security, and business operations.The foundation will have no actual owners and will be operated by custodians and directors, with FLUID token holders retaining ultimate control through governance voting, including the ability to vote to dissolve the foundation in extreme cases. Fluid currently has a TVL of over $1.2 billion, with approximately $1.1 million in protocol revenue in January. If the proposal is approved, the monthly allocation would represent about 16% of its highest historical monthly revenue. The legal work for the transfer of intellectual property is expected to be completed by mid-2026.

According to CoinDesk, India's federal budget for the fiscal year 2026-27 maintains the existing 30% cryptocurrency capital gains tax and 1% withholding tax, disappointing industry groups that had sought tax reductions. The government did not adjust the tax rates but proposed new penalties for entities that fail to properly report cryptocurrency transactions under Section 509 of the Income Tax Act starting from April 1, 2026.Failure to submit the required reports will incur a daily fine of 200 rupees (approximately $2.2) until the non-compliance ends. If the submitted information is incorrect, or if errors are not corrected after being discovered, a fixed penalty of 50,000 rupees (approximately $545) will be imposed. Officials stated that this move aims to strengthen compliance, but market participants warn that it will continue to create friction for traders.

According to Jinshi Data, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum to department heads, instructing agencies whose funding will expire at midnight to begin preparations for a government shutdown. These agencies include the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Las Water stated, "Given that Congress clearly cannot complete its work before the funding deadline, the affected agencies should now implement an orderly shutdown plan. Employees should report to work on time, fulfill their next regular job responsibilities, and carry out orderly shutdown activities. The government will continue to work with Congress to address the recently raised issues and complete the appropriations for fiscal year 2026. We hope this shutdown will not last long."