An on-chain address tracked by analyst Ai Yi has posted a steep paper loss after buying Base meme token BRIAN. According to Odaily, address 0x378…1c476 bought $179,000 worth of BRIAN yesterday at $0.01311. The token later fell after Coinbase CEO changed his X profile picture, pushing BRIAN’s market capitalization down to $1.43 million. Based on the latest tracked position, the address is now sitting on an unrealized loss of $159,000, with total assets tied to the position down 88.7%. The update was cited by Odaily from Ai Yi’s on-chain monitoring.

U.S.-based visual reasoning AI startup Elorian has raised $55 million in a seed round, reaching a $300 million post-money valuation, according to BlockBeats. The valuation stands out because the company has not yet released a product. The round was co-led by Striker Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Altimeter Capital, with participation from Nvidia and Google senior vice president Jeff Dean. Elorian formally emerged from stealth in April 2026. The company is led by two co-founders with major AI backgrounds: Andrew Dai, who spent 14 years at Google DeepMind and worked on early large language model research that later informed ChatGPT development, and Yinfei Yang, who previously led work on multimodal AI systems at Apple. The startup has also assembled a core team drawn from leading AI labs around the world, covering pretraining, data and multimodal AI. BlockBeats said Elorian’s $300 million post-money valuation is roughly 20 to 60 times the traditional pre-seed valuation range of $5 million to $15 million, highlighting the premium institutional capital is placing on founders with advanced AI research pedigrees.

Kaspersky security researchers said they have identified a new malware strain called OkoBot that is designed to steal cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases and credentials through roughly 20 separate modules. According to the researchers, the operators use the ClickFix social engineering technique to trick victims into running malicious commands, then distribute the malware through GitHub repositories disguised as legitimate tools such as SQL Server Management Studio. The report also outlines several named components inside the malware family. One module, SeedHunter, injects into hardware wallets including Trezor and Ledger and presents a fake interface during seed phrase recovery. Another, MC Keylogger, captures keyboard input and clipboard activity. A third module, OkoSpyware, tracks wallet passwords and records window video. The findings point to a multi-module malware operation focused on collecting highly sensitive wallet access data.

Coinglass data points to two key liquidation levels for Ethereum on major centralized exchanges. If ETH falls below $1,754, cumulative long liquidations could reach $582 million. On the upside, if ETH breaks above $1,927, cumulative short liquidations could hit $459 million. The figures highlight the size of leveraged positions clustered around those price levels and show where market pressure may build if ETH moves sharply in either direction. The data cited in the update was reported by ChainCatcher.

Iran said it launched strikes on multiple U.S. military targets in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan, according to a July 18 report by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency cited by Odaily. The statement was issued by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which said the operation was carried out in response to U.S. strikes on July 17. According to the statement, drones and missiles were used to hit a fuel supply dock serving a U.S. fleet at Ahmadi Port in Kuwait and an aircraft assembly site in Sheikh Isa, Bahrain. It also said a data and information center in Bahrain was destroyed. In a separate statement the same day, the IRGC said Iranian naval aircraft destroyed a signal communications center in Kuwait. The group also said it launched missile and drone attacks on aircraft shelters and a large apron at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, Jordan, claiming at least two fighter jets and three other aircraft were destroyed and several more were seriously damaged.

Debate over Bitcoin proposal BIP-110 is heating up again as its August enforcement window approaches, even though support from miners remains below 1% and only 15,035 of 102,674 nodes are willing to run it. Introduced by Dathon Ohm in December 2025 and backed by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, the proposal seeks to limit arbitrary or non-monetary data in Bitcoin transactions for one year, targeting Ordinals, Bitcoin NFTs, and other large data payloads. Supporters argue the change would reduce spam and preserve Bitcoin’s monetary use, while critics say it would introduce subjective transaction filtering, restrict future innovation, and risk splitting the chain. Opponents including Adam Back, Jameson Lopp, and Michael Saylor also argue that BIP-110 does not solve the underlying fee-market issue and could create new coordination and security problems. The proposal’s activation design has become the center of the dispute because nodes running BIP-110 would reject non-compliant blocks during the enforcement window even without broad consensus, raising the prospect of a minority chain fork in August.

The FBI has arrested a Florida student accused of helping distribute malware through fake games on Steam, in a case that prosecutors say led to intrusions into about 80 cryptocurrency wallets and theft of at least $220,000. The latest development, cited by TechCrunch, is the first time prosecutors have explicitly confirmed the number of wallets allegedly compromised and the amount stolen. According to prosecutors, the suspect and accomplices spent roughly the past two years uploading malicious games to Steam and promoting them on social media. Once victims installed the software, their computers were infected and crypto assets were stolen. Authorities said the campaign affected about 8,000 victims. The FBI said investigators identified the suspect by tracing cryptocurrency payment records tied to gift card purchases. Law enforcement has also seized the suspect’s electronic devices. The case is still moving through the courts.

Cross-chain aggregated DeFi platform Infinex said it has launched a new feature called Confidential, built on NEAR’s Confidential Intents. According to the company’s post on X, the feature lets users deposit any asset, from any chain, in any amount, and withdraw confidentially on any chain at any time. Infinex also said users can carry out private swaps inside the Confidential wallet. The company stated that all confidential operations run on NEAR’s private shards rather than on public infrastructure, with no public RPC endpoint or block explorer, while remaining connected to public networks through cross-chain links. Infinex added that each deposit generates a one-time deposit address, and withdrawals can either be sent back to a user’s main wallet or privately sent to an external address.