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.

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.

Hong Kong stocks closed with mixed benchmark performance, according to Odaily. The Hang Seng Index edged up 0.16%, while the Hang Seng Tech Index fell 0.96%. Among individual names, MINIMAX-W (00100.HK) posted a 17.13% decline at the close. Seres (09927.HK) also moved lower, ending the session down 13.56%. The update was reported in a brief market wrap by Odaily on July 13, 2026.

HTX Genesis, a hackathon hosted by HTX DAO and B.AI and co-organized by OpenCSG and TinTinLand, has selected its top 15 teams, according to an official social media update. Those teams will advance to the offline final scheduled for July 19 during the WAIC World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The organizers also said community voting will open soon, with users able to stake on the HTX DAO website and vote for their preferred teams. The event carries a total prize pool of 20,000 USDT and offers more than $100,000 in computing power support. Participating teams are building around several themes, including $HTX use cases, B.AI ecosystem applications and computing services, AI Agent finance, on-chain asset management, trading infrastructure, DAO tools, and intelligent financial operating systems.

Ghost Font, a browser-based experiment by developer Eric Lu, briefly looked like a fresh way to hide text from AI systems while keeping it readable to people. The tool turns typed text into a noisy video: pixels forming letters move upward while the background noise moves downward. Humans can spot the message through motion, but frame-by-frame analysis leaves only static snow. Initial tests appeared to support the idea. According to the article, Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra both failed to recover the real hidden message and instead reported decoy text embedded in the video. ChatGPT 5.5 Pro reportedly spent 19 minutes and still hallucinated a message that was not there. Gemini 3.1 Pro also returned a planted decoy. That edge did not last. Prompt engineer Riley Goodside gave GPT-5.6 Sol a single instruction explaining the motion directions of the letter pixels and the background. After 1 minute and 56 seconds, the model produced the correct message: “RILEY WAS HERE.” The episode turned Ghost Font from a showcase of human perceptual advantage into a test of how close current multimodal AI is to handling motion once the right cue is provided.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on July 13 that the United States has repeatedly violated agreements and that Tehran will not carry out its own commitments under a memorandum of understanding signed with واشنگton unless the U.S. first fulfills its obligations. The statement was attributed to a spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry in a report published by BlockBeats. The comment framed Iran’s position as conditional: no Iranian compliance with the memorandum so long as the U.S. does not meet its side of the commitments. No additional details about the memorandum or the alleged violations were provided in the source brief.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and three other government departments have issued guidance on improving the quality of internet basic resources, according to Jinshi. The document calls for stronger planning in internet science and technology innovation and for advancing related national key R&D programs and major national science and technology projects. It also stresses original technology innovation and names blockchain, artificial intelligence, and distributed identifiers as areas for joint research with internet basic resources. The guidance says efforts should target breakthroughs in network dynamic optimization, intelligent resource scheduling, and secure data interaction. It also lists several other priorities: innovation in the IPv6 technology system, fixes for protocol compatibility and high-performance transmission, breakthroughs in satellite internet mega-constellation networking, fast route switching and reliable anti-interference transmission, as well as key technologies for large-scale deployment and application of resource public key infrastructure.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, together with three other departments, has issued guidelines on the high-quality development of internet basic resources, according to a July 13 report cited by ChainCatcher from Jinshi Data. The document calls for stronger planning around internet technology innovation and says related national key R&D programs and major science and technology projects should be advanced. The guidelines specifically mention integrated innovation involving artificial intelligence, blockchain and distributed identifiers with internet basic resources. They also call for breakthroughs in dynamic network optimization, intelligent resource scheduling and secure data interaction. Beyond blockchain-related language, the document sets out several other technical priorities. These include innovation in the IPv6 technology system, with attention to protocol compatibility and high-performance transmission, as well as work on satellite internet mega-constellation networking, rapid routing switchover, reliable transmission and interference resistance. It also mentions key technologies for the large-scale deployment and application of resource public key infrastructure.