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According to CoinDesk, the crypto startup raised $11.2 billion in funding in the first half of 2026, with all disclosed funds directed towards regulated and licensed enterprises. The most funding was received by payment and stablecoin companies, prediction markets, exchanges, and trading platforms.Major investors include Wall Street and large global financial institutions, focusing their investments on licensed and compliant companies. Investors and founders increasingly view regulatory licenses as scarce and defensive assets, while retail investors still primarily trade on unlicensed or other alternative platforms.

According to the announcement from the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Yushu Technology has released the announcement of the results of its initial public offering and listing on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, as well as the prospectus for the initial public offering and listing on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board. It disclosed that the online and offline subscription payment work has been completed, and after the adjustment mechanism was activated, the final number of shares issued offline was 22,650,148 shares, accounting for approximately 70% of the number of shares issued after deducting the final strategic placement. The final number of shares issued online was 9,707,000 shares, accounting for approximately 30% of the number of shares issued after deducting the final strategic placement.In addition, before this issuance, the actual controller of Yushu Technology, Wang Xingxing, directly held 86,714,964 shares of the company, controlling a total of 34.763% of the shares. Through the arrangement of special voting rights, the proportion of voting rights controlled by Wang Xingxing in the company was 68.7816%. After this issuance, the proportion of voting rights controlled by Wang Xingxing will decrease to no more than 65.309%.

According to Techtimes, AI model evaluation company Vals AI completed a $40 million Series A funding round with a valuation of $400 million, led by a16z, with participation from 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg Beta, as well as new investors HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures.Vals AI uses an independent system to evaluate cutting-edge models launched by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, rather than using traditional public benchmark tests. The new funding will be used to expand evaluation infrastructure and launch testing tools for creating programming benchmarks based on enterprise GitHub code repositories.

According to CoinDesk, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has granted a preliminary conditional federal banking charter to World Liberty Trust Company, allowing it to operate as a national trust bank and to succeed BitGo as the exclusive issuer and custodian of the USD1 stablecoin under World Liberty Financial, primarily serving institutional clients. Final approval still requires meeting additional pre-opening conditions.Due to World Liberty's partial ownership being linked to the Trump family, this move has faced strong opposition from Democratic lawmakers. Senator Elizabeth Warren and others have announced plans to introduce the "Terminate President's Bank Corruption Act," which, if passed, would prohibit senior government officials from owning or controlling banks. Notably, World Liberty Trust does not intend to become a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and is not seeking access to a Federal Reserve master account.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, in an interview with The Block, responded to ongoing criticisms raised after KPMG U.S. completed its first full financial audit. He stated that some critics are unable to admit that their past judgments about Tether were wrong, and said, "Honestly, I don't care." Ardoino mentioned that Tether has repeatedly proven its resilience.He noted that in 2022, Tether processed $7 billion in redemptions within 48 hours, which was about 10% of its reserves at the time, and there was no pause in redemptions during that period. He believes that many traditional financial institutions would struggle to handle withdrawals of a similar scale in such a short time. He also stated that criticism itself is not a bad thing, as it makes Tether better and stronger. Even if some critics view it as a "villain," as long as Tether can continue to serve its claimed 650 million users who rely on USDT, especially in emerging markets, he does not mind.According to informed sources, Tether, as a private company, will not publicly share audited financial statements. The company plans to conduct a full audit once a year in the future while continuing to release quarterly attestation reports. Overall, the KPMG audit is an important step for Tether to enhance transparency, but controversies surrounding its reserves, disclosure levels, and systemic impact have not completely dissipated.

South Korean enterprise-level AI data infrastructure company GraphAI announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing round, led by K2 Investment Partners, with participation from A-Ventures and Jiyu Investment, as well as previous participants in the Pre-A round, Quad Ventures, Kiwoom Investment, and We Ventures. To date, the company has raised a total of $14.7 million.GraphAI was founded in 2022 by Professor Min-Soo Kim from the KAIST School of Computing, with the goal of providing next-generation data infrastructure for enterprise AI applications by integrating the capabilities of graph databases, vector databases, and relational databases. Its Akasic platform offers an integrated solution covering enterprise data connectivity, collection, transformation, AI inference, and intelligent agent execution environments.

According to Fortune, an analysis of executive compensation by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) shows that Elon Musk's total compensation from Tesla in 2025, calculated based on the fair value on the date of restricted stock grants, is approximately $158.3 billion, which is about 2.52 million times the median annual salary of Tesla employees at $57,243. Based on this calculation, Musk earns compensation equivalent to a Tesla employee's annual salary approximately every 4.23 seconds.The AFL-CIO stated that Musk's 2025 compensation package is at a "historic level" that has been "unprecedented" since it began tracking CEO compensation in 1997. His compensation is about 14 times the total compensation of all other S&P 500 company CEOs, while the average CEO compensation in the S&P 500 is approximately 312 times that of employees.It is important to note that the $158.3 billion is not the actual cash Musk will receive that year, but rather the fair value calculated based on the restricted stock granted by Tesla in 2025 on the grant date. This batch of stock could ultimately be worth up to $1 trillion, provided that Tesla meets the corresponding performance requirements.

According to Fintechnews, Malaysian stablecoin company BLOX announced the completion of a $1 million seed round financing, led by the technology investment division of Singapore's venture capital fund Kivo Technology. The new funds will be used to expand the development of its Malaysia Ringgit (MYR) backed stablecoin MYRC.It is reported that BLOX has participated in a domestic blockchain payment proof-of-concept project in Malaysia, exploring blockchain-based local payment scenarios through MYRC.

According to Pulse2, the AI agent platform Moss announced its entry into the "unicorn club" after completing a €30 million Series C funding round, led by Portage and Cherry Ventures.The new funding will support its expansion into a broader Finance AI product system, creating AI agent workflows aimed at corporate finance departments. Users can configure AI agents based on different financial functions, retaining visibility and control over the agent's operational steps and decision-making processes while automating tasks.

According to the official announcement, Bitget CFD will adjust the leverage and margin tier rules for XAUUSD (gold against the US dollar) and USDCNH (US dollar/offshore RMB) starting from August 15.Among them, when the nominal value of the XAUUSD contract is below $100,000, a maximum leverage of 800 times can be supported; when the nominal value of the USDCNH contract is below $1,000,000, a maximum leverage of 100 times can be supported. For positions exceeding the corresponding range, the platform will adopt a tiered margin calculation method, and the margin rate will be adjusted as the nominal value of the position increases. Users can reasonably allocate their positions according to their asset needs.

Venture capital fund Team8 announced the completion of a new fundraise of $365 million. This round of fundraising includes $265 million for Team8 Capital's third fund, as well as over $100 million for follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies.The new fund will focus on investing in seed and Series A stage AI-native companies, covering areas such as cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, and fintech, with a particular emphasis on infrastructure projects that help businesses deploy AI while ensuring security, governance, and control capabilities. Team8 currently manages assets close to $2 billion.Previously, Team8 has co-invested in several cryptocurrency and AI companies, including cryptocurrency institutional wallet developer Curv, AI compliance platform IVIX, and AI data leak prevention company Jazz.

According to Reuters, Apple has trained a large language model for the Chinese market in collaboration with Alibaba. This move is different from Apple's previous strategy of relying on third-party models.Insiders revealed that Apple's AI toolkit, Apple Intelligence, is expected to launch in China in the coming months after an iOS update.

Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich stated that the company has launched a new bond issuance program called BitBonds and has completed its first issuance.This issuance, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Metaplanet Securities, involves the issuance of Series 21 to 24 unsecured ordinary bonds under Japan's small-scale private placement system, raising a total of approximately 200 million yen. The scale is pilot in nature, aimed at establishing a framework for subsequent bond issuance, distribution, and management.

Digital asset company Tether announced that it has completed a full independent audit conducted by KPMG U.S. on the financial statements of Tether International, S.A. de C.V. as of December 31, 2025. KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified audit opinion.The audit covered transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations, counterparties, and financial statement evidence, and reviewed the balance sheet, income statement, statement of changes in equity, and cash flow statement. KPMG U.S. also physically counted and inspected each gold bar held by Tether. Tether's Chief Financial Officer Simon McWilliams stated that the audited financial statements for 2025 show that its reserve assets exceed liabilities by $6.814 billion. Tether stated that this audit is an important step in fulfilling its long-term commitment to financial transparency.

According to Forbes, AI data infrastructure company Databricks announced the completion of a $5 billion strategic financing round, led by Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, and T. Rowe Price. Sixth Street Growth joined as a new investor, bringing the post-financing valuation of the company to $190 billion, higher than the previously disclosed valuation plan of $188 billion. The funds will be used to advance AI infrastructure layout, product development, and potential acquisitions.Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi stated that the company's current annual revenue run rate has exceeded $7 billion, with a year-on-year growth of over 80%. In terms of AI Agent infrastructure, Databricks believes that the scale of AI-generated software will significantly increase in the future, and each AI application will require database support.

According to official news from Robinhood, Robinhood Ventures Fund II (RVII) announced the pricing of its initial public offering, issuing 8 million shares of common stock at a price of $25 per share. The total size of the fund is $225.5 million (before deducting sales expenses and issuance costs), and if the underwriters fully exercise the option to purchase an additional 1.2 million shares, the size could reach up to $255.5 million.Shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on August 13, with the stock ticker RVII, and the issuance is expected to be completed on August 14. Goldman Sachs is serving as the lead bookrunner for this offering, with Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, UBS Investment Bank, and Wells Fargo Securities as co-bookrunners.

According to Finsmes, AI architecture development company Pathway announced the completion of a $30 million seed round financing, with participation from Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures, Red Bridge Ventures, Kadmos Capital, and WS Investment, an investment institution under Wilson Sonsini. Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle also joined as an angel investor.Pathway is developing the "Post-Transformer" architecture called BDH (Biologically-inspired Dynamic Hierarchy), aiming to address the limitations of current Transformer models that continuously rely on more data, GPUs, energy, and capital expansion. Unlike traditional large models that require periodic retraining, BDH can continuously learn with less data and achieve ongoing adaptation.It is reported that the company has appointed former Google DeepMind Gemini product head Adam Kurzrok as Chief Product Officer, responsible for the product direction based on the BDH model, including model packaging, evaluation systems, and commercial deployment.

Bitcoin News posted on the X platform that after two weeks of using cutting-edge AI to scan almost the entire Bitcoin open-source ecosystem for vulnerabilities, Bitcoin Red Team member @callebtc stated, "The easily discoverable vulnerabilities have been addressed," and maintainers are verifying "a large number" of serious and high-risk vulnerabilities.@callebtc indicated that the main findings include: decades of accumulated open-source technical debt are being exposed alongside AI capabilities that can discover vulnerabilities at speeds and scales unattainable by human researchers; Lightning seems particularly vulnerable, with its complexity meaning its security status is "worse than average"; unmaintained Bitcoin projects should be considered vulnerable until their security is confirmed.Projects that began building AI security and auditing processes months ago are now in a completely different position compared to those that have been waiting until now. The Bitcoin Red Team has now completed a foundational scan of almost the entire Bitcoin open-source ecosystem. Easily discoverable vulnerabilities have mostly been addressed, but as AI capabilities improve, external red team testing may need to continue indefinitely. Despite discovering and reporting "a large number" of real serious and high-risk vulnerabilities, @callebtc believes this process will ultimately make Bitcoin stronger. The same AI security review will soon expand to areas far beyond Bitcoin.

AI security startup Mindgard announced the completion of a $30 million Series A funding round, led by Album VC, with participation from Karma Ventures, .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital, and Lakestar.Mindgard was founded by Dr. Peter Garraghan in 2022 and incubated at Lancaster University in the UK, with headquarters in Boston and London. The company's platform offers Shadow AI discovery, AI red team testing, and runtime AI protection capabilities, having helped disclose over 150 high-impact AI security vulnerabilities, including issues such as the Cursor IDE zero-day code execution vulnerability, Google Antigravity trusted workspace defects, and ChatGPT image generation protection failures.