A widely shared post translated by TechFlowPost lays out a six-step blueprint for how the US could catch up with Shenzhen’s manufacturing system. Written by industrial entrepreneur Zane Hengsperger, the piece argues that Shenzhen did not win because of cheap labor, but because of density, speed, and a culture that gives high status to making physical products. He says all three can be reproduced. The roadmap starts with culture, arguing that factory work in the US has lost prestige even as skilled labor shortages deepen. It then moves to factory density, with a call for far more steel mills, foundries, machine shops, sheet metal facilities, and assembly plants clustered in existing industrial regions such as Detroit, Houston, Phoenix, and the Carolinas. The article also frames electricity as a strategic industrial input. With US data center power demand projected to rise from 31 GW in 2025 to 66 GW in 2027, Hengsperger argues heavy industry must build around self-generation, flexible load, and shared interconnection with data centers. He also calls for a domestic supply chain that can deliver everything from alloys to coatings without crossing the Pacific, and for AI-native factories that use software to accelerate quoting, scheduling, maintenance, and robotics. The final step is government action focused narrowly on permitting speed, demand guarantees, and capital access.

eToro has taken a strategic stake in Extended, an onchain perpetual futures exchange built on Starknet, according to a post from Extended. The company said the round also marks the start of a partnership between Extended and Zengo, the self-custody wallet provider eToro acquired earlier this year. Neither eToro nor Extended disclosed the size of the investment in their own statements, and neither had issued a dedicated press release on the deal at the time of publication. CoinDesk reported that the round totaled $12.5 million. Extended says its platform supports more than 100 markets across crypto, equities, foreign exchange, and commodities. The deal adds to eToro’s stated push to link traditional finance with onchain infrastructure. It also follows eToro’s April announcement that it would acquire Zengo, a transaction Bloomberg and other outlets reported at roughly $70 million. The move comes as retail brokerages expand beyond simple crypto spot trading and build broader onchain product stacks, with Robinhood this week launching the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, its Arbitrum-based Layer 2 for financial services and real-world assets.

NEAR’s on-chain governance body, House of Stake, has approved proposal HSP-027 to remove the protocol’s developer gas rebate, changing how transaction fees are handled on the network. Under the current setup, 30% of gas fees generated by a smart-contract call go to the contract owner, while 70% are burned. Once the change is implemented, the rebate will fall to 0% and all gas fees will be burned. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin confirmed the result on Monday and described the move as a way to keep the protocol simpler and cleaner. A delegate who voted on the proposal said implementation is expected around August 2026 with the nearcore v2.14 release. The final tally was 46 votes representing 4.66 million veNEAR in favor, against two votes representing 1,819 veNEAR. NEAR accounts had flagged the change earlier this month, telling builders not to include the gas bonus in dApp budgets and describing the measure as a way to reduce protocol complexity and misaligned builder incentives. Polosukhin said the original rebate no longer matches how most NEAR apps make money and also pointed to accounting difficulties in separating rebates from ordinary user deposits.

Richard Heathcote, Tether Holdings SA’s former chief investment officer, is planning to sell a small portion of his equity stake in the stablecoin issuer, according to a Monday Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg said Heathcote is working with investment bank PJT Partners to market part of his 1.26% holding in Tether, with discussions already underway with potential buyers. No buyer has been identified publicly, and no final price has been disclosed. The planned sale follows an executive transition announced by Tether in March. At that time, the company said Heathcote would step down from the CIO role and move into a non-executive advisory position, while his deputy, Zachary Lyons, would take over. During his tenure, Heathcote oversaw the reserves backing USDT, which remains the largest stablecoin by circulating supply, and led a broad investment push that included stakes in soccer clubs and humanoid robotics ventures. Bloomberg noted that Tether has historically revealed little about its capitalization table or executive ownership. As a result, the sale process could offer one of the clearest public glimpses yet into the company’s ownership structure below the founder level. Tether did not comment in Bloomberg’s report, and Heathcote was not immediately reachable through company channels.

BitMine Immersion Technologies said it bought 42,197 ETH over the past week, a position valued at roughly $73 million, taking its total Ethereum holdings to 5,742,237 ETH. Based on the company’s update, that equals about 4.8% of Ethereum’s circulating supply. The firm also reported $11.1 billion in combined crypto and other holdings, including its ETH position marked at $1,800 per coin, 206 BTC, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries, a $71 million stake in Eightco Holdings, and $527 million in cash and marketable securities. Separately, BitMine’s staked ETH remained unchanged at 4,879,157, even as its overall ETH balance increased. The weekly purchase keeps the company moving toward its stated goal of controlling 5% of ETH’s total supply, a threshold it has tied to its treasury strategy.

Tom Blomfield, a partner at Y Combinator and former Monzo co-founder, said he is taking a temporary leave from YC to join Anthropic, the large language model company. He said he will work with Tom Brown on the company’s compute team. Blomfield framed the move around a technical bottleneck rather than a broader role change. In his remarks, he said AI is entering an early stage of “recursive self-improvement,” and that compute supply is becoming one of the key constraints. His focus at Anthropic will be on challenges tied to access to AI computing resources. The announcement was reported by PANews on July 13.

South Korea’s stock selloff deepened on July 13, with KOSPI 200 futures falling more than 5% and triggering the market’s 18th sidecar halt of the year. At the time of the halt, the KOSPI stood at 7,162.21, down 4.20% from the previous session, while major chip names including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix posted sharp losses. The index has now retreated more than 20% from its intraday peak of 9,385 on June 19. As equities dropped, trading in crypto picked up. CoinGecko data showed that Upbit’s 24-hour volume surged to $4.12 billion, up 436% in a day. The top five assets by trading volume on the exchange were BTC, XRP, ETH, T and BLAST. The report said this kind of rotation by South Korean retail traders has appeared before during KOSPI selloffs. The article also pointed to a prior five-week slowdown in domestic crypto trading before the rebound. From July 3 to July 10, combined volume across Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax fell 25.75% week over week to 9.9676 trillion won, the first time since September 2023 that the total dropped below 10 trillion won.

U.S. storage chip stocks have sold off sharply since late June, with SanDisk, Micron Technology, Seagate Technology and Western Digital all down more than 20% in recent weeks, according to a report cited by Yicai. The immediate trigger was a Bloomberg report saying Meta plans to build a cloud infrastructure business and sell excess AI compute capacity to outside customers. That headline hit a sensitive part of the market: worries that AI compute may be moving into oversupply and that the capital spending cycle could be nearing a peak. Still, the picture in the underlying market looks less uniform. Reporting cited in the article says rental pricing for training-focused compute such as Nvidia B200 has eased recently, while inference compute pricing for government, enterprise and traditional industry use cases has remained stable. The report also argues that memory is not just facing a sentiment-driven selloff. Its business model is changing. Large cloud providers and AI data center operators are increasingly signing multi-year supply agreements with memory makers, often including price bands, minimum purchase commitments and prepayments. That shift may soften the classic boom-bust cycle in memory, but it also raises the financing burden for buyers and could concentrate supply access among larger players. At the same time, investors across the AI chain are moving from valuing “belief-driven” growth to demanding clearer earnings proof.