Two prediction-market projects with very different strategies announced shutdowns on Aug. 10, highlighting how hard it has become for smaller teams to survive as volume and attention cluster around Kalshi and Polymarket. Trepa, a Solana-based app built around numerical accuracy rather than binary outcomes, said its final playable market will end on Aug. 12, 2026. The app will stay online until Sept. 30 so users can withdraw funds, then go offline. Fireplace, a professional trading terminal built on top of Polymarket, said trading will stop on Aug. 15 and the site will close at 23:59 UTC on Sept. 30. Trepa’s founders said they had bet that users would pay for precision, not just for picking the right direction. Its post-mortem pointed to several problems: higher cognitive load than binary markets, a concurrency model that required many users to participate in the same narrow time window, and an addressable audience far smaller than expected. Fireplace gave fewer details, but market feedback repeatedly focused on its roughly 1% trading fee, which some users said was too expensive compared with trading directly on Polymarket. Their exits come as the sector becomes more concentrated. According to the source article, Kalshi and Polymarket were far ahead of all other rivals in trading volume as of June 21, with Kalshi’s growth rate already outpacing Polymarket’s. The article argues that once giants control liquidity and order flow, new mechanisms and third-party interfaces face a much narrower path to becoming sustainable businesses.

A wide set of crypto and adjacent market developments landed over the past 24 hours, led by DeepSeek’s latest financing and a fresh policy push in South Korea. DeepSeek’s operating entity, DeepSeek SeekDeep, completed the first signing round of its new fundraising in Hangzhou on Aug. 10. The round is sized at 50 billion yuan with a pre-money valuation of about 500 billion yuan, up more than 40% from the roughly 350 billion yuan valuation attached to its first round completed in June. The first batch of capital is due as early as Aug. 30, and the company said the proceeds will go toward compute, model research, hiring, and possible domestic listing preparations. In South Korea, People Power Party lawmaker Jeong Seong-guk plans to submit a bill that would delay taxation on income from virtual assets by three years, moving the effective date from Jan. 1, 2027 to Jan. 1, 2030. Under the current framework, gains from virtual asset transfers or lending would be treated as “other income,” with profits above 2.5 million won taxed at 22%, including local income tax. The digest also highlighted the fallout from the Coldcard wallet vulnerability, which Forbes said has now led to about $130 million in stolen bitcoin tied to roughly 2,000 BTC and more than 5,200 addresses. That episode has revived the debate between self-custody and institutional custody, while U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs and spot ether ETFs posted weekly net inflows of $854 million and $245 million, respectively.

Prediction market Trepa announced that its last playable round will take place on Aug 12, 2026, with no new rounds after that. Users who have already earned referral and streak rewards will receive them in their Trepa wallets on Aug 13. The app will remain online through Sept 30 for withdrawals before becoming inaccessible, so users with balances are advised to withdraw to their own addresses via the in-app wallet beforehand. Founded at the Bybit x DMCC hackathon in November 2024, Trepa began as a TON-based Telegram mini app for forecasting opinion poll outcomes, then moved through multiple hackathons into macro events and short-term crypto price prediction.

Crypto markets on Aug. 10 were driven by a mix of trading data, policy signals, corporate developments and geopolitical headlines. On centralized exchanges, BMT and TUT posted the largest gains among the top 10 tokens by trading volume, while OKX’s 24-hour leaderboard was led by BOME and PEOPLE. On-chain, GMGN’s most watched meme tokens were TODA, REMUS, LOUIE, RISK and PUMPGUY. Away from the tape, Unitree Robotics officially opened subscriptions for its STAR Market IPO, with the market estimating an allotment rate of just 0.02% to 0.03%. In U.S. crypto legislation, Polymarket data showed the probability of the CLARITY Act becoming law by Dec. 31 had dropped to 21%, while Senate procedure points to a first cloture vote on Sept. 15. Industry updates included Bithumb restricting deposits and withdrawals tied to three entities sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, fresh data showing more than 100 crypto projects have shut down or filed for bankruptcy in 2026 so far, and DeFiLlama figures showing Pump.fun’s 30-day protocol revenue moved ahead of Hyperliquid. Separate updates covered Strategy’s lack of Bitcoin purchases since June, a $10.5 million seed round for Dow Protocol, and proposed South Korean tax and VASP rule changes.

South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb has restricted deposit and withdrawal services involving Shelbit, Aban Tether, and Crypto Home DMCC. The three companies were previously placed on the U.S. Treasury Department's OFAC sanctions list for supporting terrorist organizations, including Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or engaging in money laundering.

Meta AI’s FAIR team published a paper on July 29 saying reinforcement learning faces major obstacles in code speed optimization, including heavy timing-measurement noise and sparse rewards, which make standard algorithms unstable. The team introduced a benchmark called DMC-Optim to study the problem in a more controlled setting. The framework rebuilds the feedback system used in AI model training and combines correctness rewards with execution-speed rewards inside an offline simulator, creating a calibrated sandbox where timing noise can be adjusted. Results cited in the paper show the benchmark lifted model pass rates by as much as 64%, while performance gains under amplified noise conditions reached 100% to 200%. In the reported tests, Qwen 2.5 7B improved its pass rate from 18.0% to 31.3%, and CWM 32B rose from 30.7% to 50.4%. The paper also said CWM 32B outperformed traditional reinforcement learning methods 83% of the time on the LCB benchmark. The development was reported by CryptoBriefing.

Anthropic’s Claude Code CLI tool accidentally exposed about 513,000 lines of TypeScript source code on March 31 after a publishing configuration mistake, according to a Techub News report citing Cryptobriefing. The issue stemmed from an npm release that incorrectly included source map files that were not meant to be public, exposing nearly 2,000 internal files. The report said Anthropic’s follow-up DMCA takedown request also hit roughly 8,100 unrelated GitHub repositories by mistake. At the same time, malicious actors have started setting up fake repositories to distribute malware, attempting to lure developers into cloning infected code. Anthropic said the incident was caused by human error rather than a security flaw. The company also said no sensitive user data or credentials were exposed in the leak. The episode has turned attention to supply-chain risk for developers using public code hosting and package distribution channels, especially when attackers move quickly to exploit confusion around a widely discussed tooling incident.

Aurum Foundation has named Nick Patel as its RWA Relationships Advisor. On-chain RWA value hit $23.6B, up 66% year-to-date. Patel brings expertise in gold trading and tokenization, aiming to expand Aurum’s exposure to metals, emeralds, and other liquid assets.