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Pine Analytics released the Zcash Q3 2026 report. Ironwood was activated on July 28 at block 3,428,143, and within five weeks, holders migrated 87% of their Orchard balance, with the new pool holding 3.84M ZEC as of August 31. The shielded supply increased by 9.9% to 4.86M ZEC, with the shielded ratio rebounding from 26.3% to 28.7%, recovering 440K from the 745K unshielded ZEC in June.The price of ZEC rose from $407 on June 30 to $836 on August 31, an increase of 106%. Grayscale ZCSH converted to a spot ETF, with assets growing from $155 million to $346 million. Mining difficulty rose by 35%, reaching an all-time high, with two corporate miners committing approximately $65 million in hash power. NU7 has no mainnet height yet, and holders will vote until September 14 to decide whether to launch before September 30 with a 25-second block time and smooth issuance; there are still 470K ZEC remaining in Orchard.

Leifeng Network · Whale Rhino has learned that OpenAI is secretly developing a screenless AI hardware product in Shenzhen. Industry insiders say that the project's confidentiality level is extremely high.Engineers came to Shenzhen for a business trip without even bringing their phones. The product is planned to be launched in 2027.

According to CoinDesk, the U.S. Department of Commerce has allocated up to $100 million each to three quantum computing companies: Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantinuum, totaling up to $300 million, to expand hardware, manufacturing, and error correction systems, while simultaneously acquiring minority stakes in the three companies.Meanwhile, Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are accelerating the advancement of post-quantum cryptography upgrade plans. The Ethereum Foundation has set December 2029 as the deadline for the base layer quantum resistance upgrade, covering the execution layer, consensus layer, and data layer; although there is no unified timeline for Bitcoin, proposals BIP-360 (post-quantum output types) and BIP-361 (phasing out ECDSA and Schnorr signatures) have been accelerated, with researchers also viewing 2029 as a critical window for completing a trustworthy migration path.

The Ethereum Foundation stated on the X platform that the Trezor hardware wallet now supports the "Clear Signing" feature through the ERC-7730 standard, making transactions more readable and understandable on the hardware device.This progress is the result of the Clear Signing working group promoted under the foundation's "Trillion Dollar Security Initiative," aimed at reducing the risk of users suffering asset losses due to "blind signing" of unclear transactions and encouraging more wallets and decentralized applications to participate.

WOO X has issued a statement regarding user withdrawal anomalies, indicating that it has noted reports concerning withdrawal processing times and is reviewing relevant cases and system status. Some requests may still be under review or in the on-chain processing stage, and the team is working hard to resolve the issues as soon as possible.Users experiencing withdrawal delays can submit their UID, withdrawal order number, application time, asset and network information, as well as status screenshots through official customer service channels. The platform reminds users not to trust unsolicited private messages and not to share passwords, mnemonic phrases, private keys, or verification codes.WOO X also stated that it reserves the right to take legal action against behaviors that fabricate, distort, or maliciously spread false information that harms the reputation of users or the platform, and reminds users to rely only on information from official announcements and customer service channels.

Core DAO is coordinating an emergency hard fork due to some validators receiving CORE rewards that exceeded the protocol's expected issuance. Core stated in an update that the situation has been brought under control, and "malicious validators" can no longer claim excess rewards. This fork is a forward upgrade and will not roll back the network or revoke any confirmed transactions.Previously, Core indicated in a status update on Monday that the rewards accumulated by a small number of validators were significantly higher than the protocol's expected issuance. The incident was limited to the reward distribution phase, user assets remain secure, and they promised to release a technical review report. Following the incident, several exchanges restricted CORE transfers: Coinbase suspended deposits and withdrawals on the Core network, Bithumb and Coinone suspended deposits and withdrawals, Bitget suspended deposits and withdrawals citing wallet maintenance, and LBank suspended deposits at the request of the project party.Core has not disclosed the amount of excess issued CORE, the duration of the activity, or whether additional tokens have entered circulation, nor have they provided details on the vulnerability that allowed validators to receive rewards. Cointelegraph reached out to Core for further information but had not received a response by the time of publication.

The SEMICON Taiwan 2026 Memory Summit took place on the 1st, where Nikhil Cherian, Senior Director of Supply Chain Infrastructure at Google Cloud under Alphabet, pointed out that with the popularity of multimodal and mixed expert architectures, AI computation has shifted from being power-limited to memory-limited, with high-performance memory accounting for over 75% of the cost of AI server hardware bill of materials. In the face of capacity, bandwidth, and power consumption bottlenecks, Google is breaking through the AI memory bottleneck through a dual-track strategy of hardware offloading for inference and training, and lossless quantization software algorithms.Google adopts an offloading strategy in hardware architecture, launching TPU 8i for low-latency inference and TPU 8t specialized for large-scale training. The TPU 8i is equipped with 288 GB of high-bandwidth memory, with SRAM capacity on the chip increased threefold to 384 MiB, placing dynamic conversation states and key-value caches on the chip itself to achieve zero chip-off latency. The TPU 8t forms a super-large computing cluster with 9600 chips, achieving a shared pool of HBM at a scale of 2 PB, eliminating chip-off data transfer bottlenecks, along with TPU Direct Storage technology.Google has developed the training-free TurboQuant lossless quantization algorithm, compressing the key-value cache of large models from 32 bits to 3 bits, reducing memory usage by six times without loss of accuracy, resulting in an eightfold acceleration in attention computation, and integrating old-generation DRAM technology to extend the lifecycle of components.

Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo responded to investor Gary Cardone's doubts, stating that the current market value of gold is approximately $32 trillion. If it continues to play the role of a global currency anchor, its reasonable value should be around $103 trillion. He claims that the traditional view of gold as a "financial asset" is an "illusion" shaped by the U.S. government and Wall Street, and that gold has essentially existed as currency for thousands of years.Woo believes that Bitcoin is striving to become a global hard currency similar to gold. According to this logic, the price of Bitcoin corresponds to about $5 million per coin. He also pointed out that the global fiat currency system has only been in operation for about 55 years, which, compared to the thousands of years of hard currency history, resembles an "experiment."

According to TechCrunch, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has expanded the size of its fifth growth fund from $6.75 billion established in January this year to $8.5 billion, adding $1.75 billion in new funds. The fund primarily invests in growth-stage startups that are expanding products, exploring new markets, and scaling businesses.This fundraising comes just days after a16z announced the completion of its $1.1 billion Machine Era Fund. This fund mainly focuses on the AI hardware sector, with investment areas including infrastructure startups in chips, storage, networking, and data storage. David George, head of a16z's growth investment team, stated that the relevant growth fund has invested in over 100 companies in the past seven years. As AI companies enter the growth stage more rapidly, their financing needs and valuations are also rising. a16z is currently focusing on areas such as enterprise and consumer AI, defense technology, robotics, software and hardware infrastructure, and medical technology.

The privacy public chain Zano activated its sixth hard fork (HF6) at block height 3,833,000. The upgrade has been launched on the mainnet, completing the largest upgrade in the network's seven-year history. HF6 introduces Gateway Addresses, providing a directly traceable single balance and instant synchronization for centralized exchanges, DEX, and cross-chain bridges, while retaining existing addresses and their privacy models.Native ZANO can now be cross-chain transferred to Ethereum, Solana, and TON without custody, publicly on external networks, and privacy protection is restored after crossing back to Zano. The upgrade also tightens consensus validation rules and strengthens wallet encryption, mining pool fault tolerance, payment IDs, anti-DoS restrictions, SOCKS5 proxies, and RPC interfaces. HF6 is a prerequisite for the development of the EVM-compatible chain Zano Execution Layer, which currently has no fixed launch date; the next-generation consensus protocol Zenith has been included in the 2027 roadmap.

Polygon Labs disclosed that it has fixed a batch of security vulnerabilities in its proof-of-stake network through two hard forks, with the related fixes privately deployed before public disclosure. According to a forum post released on Wednesday, the team packaged the fixes into the Austin hard fork of the Bor client and the Kyoto hard fork of the Heimdall client, both of which followed the standard process for fixing issues that affect consensus: first validated on the Amoy testnet, and then publicly disclosed once the mainnet was activated and the network was secure.The Austin fork fixed two denial-of-service paths in block processing, including a vulnerability where malicious block producers could crash peer nodes by filling them with oversized field data. The Kyoto fork addressed a broader range of consensus hardening issues, with the most severe vulnerability allowing an attacker to force the entire validator set to perform costly and coordinated work with just one crafted transaction—the cost of constructing the transaction is low, but the network processing cost is high. Polygon emphasized that none of the vulnerabilities were observed to be exploited on the mainnet and have been proactively addressed. The two upgrades are now mandatory for node operators and have taken effect without the need for state migration or resynchronization.This disclosure comes at a critical transformation period for Polygon, which has completed the migration of the traditional MATIC token to POL as part of a comprehensive overhaul of its network architecture. The news did not boost the price of POL; according to CoinGecko data, POL traded at approximately $0.09983 on Sunday, down 2.3% in 24 hours, down about 6.8% over the past week, and down about 60.8% over the past year, with a market capitalization of approximately $1.07 billion.

Polygon disclosed multiple previously undisclosed security vulnerabilities that were recently fixed through two hard forks, which could affect its proof-of-stake network. The vulnerabilities involve Polygon's Bor and Heimdall clients, including denial of service risks, validator resource exhaustion, and defects affecting checkpoint and milestone processing.Polygon stated that these vulnerabilities were fixed through the Austin and Kyoto hard forks, and the fixes were privately tested before being deployed to the mainnet and publicly disclosed. The most serious issue involved Heimdall, where a carefully crafted transaction could force validators to perform excessive processing work, thereby disrupting the network. The Austin hard fork also fixed two denial of service risks in Bor that could slow down block processing or cause node crashes.Polygon indicated that these vulnerabilities were not exploited on the mainnet, and the fixes were proactively deployed before the details were made public. Nodes running outdated client versions have fallen out of consensus after the hard fork activation height and must upgrade to rejoin the standard network. All Polygon PoS nodes are required to upgrade to Bor v2.1.0, and validators and full nodes must upgrade to Heimdall v0.11.0, both upgrades are now effective on the mainnet.

According to CryptoSlate, Polygon Labs issued an urgent notice that Polygon PoS nodes remaining on the old versions of Bor or Heimdall have lost consensus after the activation of the Austin and Kyoto hard forks and need to upgrade to catch up with the network progress. Austin was activated at mainnet block 91,949,700, requiring Bor v2.1.0 or above; Kyoto was activated at height 51,533,000, requiring Heimdall v0.11.0 or above.Austin fixed two types of Bor resource exhaustion risks: L1 to L2 bridging state synchronization events not counted towards the gas limit could slow down block processing; the TxDependency field having no size limit could lead to peer node crashes. Kyoto addressed vulnerabilities such as deep nested message attacks, fee coin scanning, and checkpoint signature recovery. Both hard forks are pure binary upgrades, requiring no state migration, and non-forked nodes do not need to resynchronize. Operators of old clients should upgrade and restore synchronization under Polygon's guidance if necessary.

The blockchain network BNB Chain has enabled the Pasteur hard fork on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) mainnet. The upgrade involves cross-chain bridge validation, validator authorization, staking, and governance security, while enhancing block capacity without changing the 450 milliseconds block time.This upgrade includes BEP-682, BEP-695, and BEP-675, which respectively involve duplicate validator entries, validator key rotation and penalty governance, and block submission processes. In the internal testing environment QANet, the new process increased throughput from 1,237 transactions per second to 2,324 transactions per second, but the related data comes from controlled tests and not mainnet measurement results.

Regarding Besant's increased investment in U.S. Treasury buybacks, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan stated, "When the government artificially suppresses long-term interest rates, it erodes the value of savings. Investors need to purchase hard assets to escape this predicament. Bitcoin is the fastest horse in this race."

"BTC OG insider whale" agent Garrett Jin analyzed that Bitcoin's recent breakthrough of $70,000 was driven by multiple positive factors, including the expansion of the U.S. Treasury's bond buyback, the SEC's proposed regulatory framework for crypto assets, and the White House crypto summit. The current price has entered a dense area of trapped positions between the latter half of $60,000 and the lower range of $80,000, with the first resistance level showing signs of loosening.Garrett Jin pointed out that over the past two months, a large amount of new holding costs has accumulated in the area just above $60,000, providing bottom support for this breakthrough. Although the short squeeze triggered by short liquidations may push Bitcoin above $80,000 in the short term, the $80,000 to $82,500 range is a key resistance area to watch, and the short squeeze momentum is difficult to sustain in the long term. If effective absorption of chips can occur below $80,000 before the breakthrough, it would be more beneficial for the healthy development of subsequent trends.On the same day, SK Hynix announced the largest stock buyback and cancellation plan in South Korea's history, committing to return at least 50% of the expected free cash flow before 2027 to shareholders. The stock price surged more than 10% at one point, triggering the buyer's circuit breaker mechanism for the KOSPI index. Analysts believe this move can alleviate market concerns about the declining risk appetite for South Korean semiconductor stocks, but it cannot change the cyclical trend of the memory industry itself.

According to "DuJia," DingTalk is advancing a brand new AI office application QwenNote (Qianwen Listening Note). This application is positioned as an AI personal assistant, integrating real-time voice transcription, summarization, and translation through a combination of software and hardware, and deeply integrating with AI Agent, embedding Agent capabilities into voice input, promoting a shift from simple recording to automated execution. The application supports real-time transcription and bilingual recognition in Chinese and English, as well as language switching, and can generate structured meeting minutes, outlines, and to-do lists, with built-in AI Q&A and quick commands based on listening materials.QwenNote offers a voice memo function, requiring a QR code scan to connect to the recording device. By long-pressing the button on the back of the device, users can record inspirations, and once the recording is complete, it will automatically archive, generate a title and brief summary, and timestamp it. The product also features a stealth protection mode, which, when activated, will physically delete the original audio and only retain the transcribed text to accommodate confidential scenarios. The associated hardware QwenNote A2 has already been showcased, which is part of the Qianwen Listening Note hardware ecosystem, which also includes DingTalk A1, DingTalk A1 Pro, Cleer H1, etc., and users can complete the binding by scanning a QR code.Reports indicate that DingTalk hopes to complement the offline voice collection entry through the integration of software and hardware, forming a closed loop of on-site audio collection, real-time bilingual transcription, AI meeting minutes Q&A, and DingTalk organizational collaboration. Listening materials can be synchronized to DingTalk AI Listening Note and support personal private isolation. On the software side, it continues to embed large models into documents, meetings, and IM scenarios, while on the hardware side, it expands the Qianwen Listening Note product line. Relevant hardware has not yet been widely publicly searched for more formal release information.

Ethereum developer Toni Wahrstätter posted on the X platform that Ethereum core developers are planning the next annual upgrade "Hegotá," with 66 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) currently on the candidate list. Future core developer meetings will screen these proposals to finalize the upgrade content that can be implemented, tested on the development network, deployed on the test network, and has the potential to go live in 2027. Proposals that do not make it into Hegotá will be postponed until the next hard fork, making the current screening process significantly impactful for Ethereum's future development direction.Currently, FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) has been identified as one of the important upgrade contents for Hegotá. Developers believe that combining framework transactions (EIP-8141), keying Nonce (EIP-8250), and root references (EIP-8272) will help build native privacy capabilities, allowing privacy applications to operate without relying on third-party intermediaries. Additionally, enhancing scalability is also a crucial direction for Hegotá. Developers propose that it is necessary to prepare for a future increase in the Gas limit to 600 million by repricing data resources (EIP-8131, EIP-8279) and state growth costs (EIP-8368). Although these improvements are not as intuitive as privacy features, they are considered key work to promote Ethereum's scalability in the short term.Other candidate upgrades include shorter block times (EIP-8198), adjustments to the issuance mechanism (EIP-8363), anti-correlation penalty mechanisms (EIP-7716), EVM optimization and simplification, as well as discussions on the first EIPs related to zkEVM and quantum-resistant cryptography. It is reported that Hegotá cannot incorporate all the features the community expects, and the core team needs to make trade-offs between "future vision" and "near-term deliverable upgrades," with most candidate EIPs likely not making it into this upgrade. Currently, it has been 256 days since the launch of the current Glamsterdam upgrade, with the goal of completing deployment by the end of this year. Hegotá is planned to go live in 2027, and in the coming months, core developers and the community will discuss the priorities of various EIPs. Community opinions will still play a role in the screening process, and participants who support or oppose a certain EIP entering Hegotá can present their views to the core development team through public discussions.