Unstoppable Domains has withdrawn 14 planned top-level domain applications tied to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, including .crypto, .bitcoin and .brave. The company said it scrapped nine direct applications and five partner-linked extensions. CEO Matthew Gould said the 2021 crypto and NFT boom inflated expectations around Web3 demand and described the market as small and niche. The move also reflects the economics of the process: ICANN charges $227,000 per new gTLD application, which would have pushed the base cost for nine filings above $2 million. The company also said ICANN integration would require more than 4 million existing Web3 names to be re-registered in the traditional DNS system and would require registrant information to be disclosed. Unstoppable is offering refunds for certain affected domain purchases, with applications due by Sept. 25, 2026 and processing expected within 28 days. Even so, the company is keeping five applications alive: .agi, .robot, .gram, .hub and .xmr.

Kalshi is pushing deeper into U.S. professional sports through new brand partnerships with five Major League Baseball teams: the Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, Atlanta Braves, San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants. The company said the deals will place Kalshi across stadium signage, social media, digital channels, radio and in-person fan activations, rather than limiting promotion to online ads. At Dodger Stadium, the arrangement includes LED advertising, naming rights for an in-stadium bar, and fan events and special offers at Centerfield Plaza. Kalshi said baseball-related trading volume on its platform has risen sharply. According to the company, baseball trading volume grew 36-fold over the past year, and baseball-related contract volume in 2026 has approached 13 billion contracts so far, up from about 355 million during the same period last year. Kalshi describes itself as a federally regulated event contracts exchange, though the article notes that contracts tied to game outcomes can look increasingly similar to sports betting from a fan’s perspective. That overlap makes the MLB tie-ups more sensitive in light of the case involving Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, who admitted to bank fraud and filing a false tax return after using illegal bookmakers and stealing nearly $17 million from Ohtani’s account.

Mozilla is testing a new “Smart Window” in Firefox, a separate optional space where users can chat with an AI assistant of their choice while browsing. The feature is being offered through a waitlist and stays off by default. Mozilla says users can decide when, how, or whether to use AI at all, and can turn it off if they do not want it. The company frames the project as user-controlled and says it is building in the open, with feedback from early testers. The Smart Window sits alongside Firefox’s Classic and Private modes, and Mozilla says it is meant to avoid the lock-in it associates with browsers made by AI companies. The feature also extends existing AI tools in Firefox, including the desktop sidebar chatbot and Shake to Summarize on iOS. Mozilla says AI should be “open, accessible, and driven by choice.”

Cross-chain routing protocol Squid took an unusual path to token issuance. The project had already been running on mainnet for three and a half years, routing more than $6 billion in volume, before introducing its native token, QUID, in 2026. On May 22, Squid announced a $6 million strategic funding round led by North Island Ventures with participation from Ripple, bringing total funding to $13.5 million. Three days later, on May 25, a third-party Gnosis Safe module tied to the Squid name was exploited, with losses reported at roughly $3 million in the article’s headline framing and about $3.2 million to $4 million in the detailed account. The core routing contracts, according to Squid, were not affected. QUID’s public sale opened from June 30 to July 3 on Legion and Kraken at $0.045 per token, with a $2.25 million hard cap. The sale drew about $26.66 million in subscriptions, or around 11.9 times oversubscribed, from 3,542 participants across 78 countries. On Aug. 4 at 13:00 UTC, QUID held its token generation event and debuted first on Binance Alpha, followed by Kraken, Bitget, Upbit, Bithumb, MEXC, and later LBank, BingX, and XT. The token rose from its public sale price to a peak of $0.14 and was trading around $0.09 to $0.11 as of Aug. 7.

Japanese officials have repeatedly told the U.S. government to stop using anime and video game material from franchises such as Mario, Pokémon and Naruto in official social media content, according to local reports cited by Decrypt. Tokyo’s foreign ministry has raised the issue since March, objecting to the unauthorized use of copyrighted Japanese works by accounts tied to the Trump administration. Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said during a parliamentary session in April that it is inappropriate for public institutions to reproduce copyrighted material without rightsholder consent, pointing to a pro-war video that used Nintendo’s Wii Sports. In June, Cabinet Minister Kimi Onoda said the same message had been conveyed to Washington through diplomatic channels multiple times. The dispute covers posts from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, including a September 2025 video that mixed Pokémon’s Ash Ketchum with ICE raid footage and March posts that used Wii Sports, Halo, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball and other titles. The issue resurfaced in June after President Trump shared an AI-generated Naruto-themed video on Truth Social. Japanese officials see the unauthorized use not as tribute, but as a risk to the image of the works involved.

Marvell said on Aug. 4 that it has launched the Bravera SC6 SSD Controller, model MV-SF1410, aimed at the PCIe Gen6 NVMe SSD market for AI data centers, hyperscale cloud operators, and enterprise database deployments. The company said the chip is built for a shift in AI system design toward tiered memory architectures, where NVMe SSDs act as a high-capacity memory layer rather than serving only as conventional storage. According to Marvell, that setup can provide tens to hundreds of terabytes of capacity at a lower cost than GPU HBM and DRAM, helping keep GPUs utilized while reducing infrastructure costs. Bravera SC6 supports PCIe Gen6, remains backward compatible with PCIe Gen1 through Gen5, and complies with the NVMe 2.2 specification. It also features 16 NAND channels, transfer speeds of up to 3600 MT/s, support for ONFI and Toggle NAND, and compatibility with SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC flash. Marvell said samples are expected to become available in the fourth quarter of 2026.

A heavy 24-hour news cycle in crypto and adjacent tech markets was led by SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company, which showed $7.8 billion in second-quarter revenue, 18,712 BTC on its balance sheet, and roughly $540 million in unrealized losses after Bitcoin fell 33% in the quarter. Coldcard’s wallet security incident kept escalating as the company urged users to migrate funds, while Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn said at least 15 attackers have now been identified through victim reports and on-chain tracing. In South Korea, Upbit and Bithumb both moved to list QUID, while on-chain flows highlighted a new wallet buying CASHCAT, a 40x leveraged BTC short on Hyperliquid, HYPE unstaking, and another Strategy-linked BTC transfer. Elsewhere, U.S. crypto policy centered on the CLARITY Act and fresh political friction around Trump’s TRUMP meme coin, while institutions expanded tokenized finance, staking, and custody services through Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon, Circle, Dinari, and Cloudflare. Markets also tracked BIP-110 activation risk, lower Bitcoin implied volatility, Ethereum staking policy debate, major AI infrastructure deals, and a long list of company, macro, and semiconductor updates.

Marvell Technology has introduced a new portfolio of memory solutions for AI infrastructure, targeting bottlenecks in memory capacity and bandwidth during Agentic AI inference. According to the company, the lineup spans server-class AI storage, rack-scale CXL memory expansion and pooling, and multi-cabinet shared memory built on optical interconnects. Marvell said growing model sizes, longer context windows, and rising KV Cache demand are making traditional tightly coupled compute-memory architectures less efficient for inference workloads. The company argues that memory disaggregation allows memory resources to scale more independently from compute, which can improve GPU utilization and reduce data movement latency. The launch includes the Bravera SC6 PCIe 6.0 SSD controller for AI inference storage, the Structera X memory expansion platform based on CXL, and the Photonic Fabric optical memory solution. Marvell said the Bravera SC6 is designed to help cloud providers move more KV Cache to high-performance SSDs and is expected to begin sampling in the fourth quarter of 2026. The company also said Photonic Fabric can support up to 32TB of warm KV Cache offload and deliver as much as 2x to 3x higher token throughput within existing data center space and power limits.