Responsible Fintech Institute, or RFI, and crypto custody infrastructure provider Safeheron have launched a pilot focused on post-quantum digital asset wallets and onchain transfers. Participants are drawn from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The pilot runs on a post-quantum NEAR testnet and uses a multi-party computation protocol that supports the ML-DSA-65 standard. Regulatory participants include Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office, and Malta’s Financial Services Authority. Bison Bank and DK Bank are taking part as financial institutions. In the first phase, banks will test wallet creation and transfers in a shared application environment, while regulators will observe before joining governance workflows at a later stage. The organizers also plan to publish a white paper covering the research, protocol design, and testing results, and to gradually open-source the underlying technology. The update comes as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority aims to have Hong Kong’s banking sector fully prepared for quantum security risks by 2030, while a 2025 report from the Bank for International Settlements recommends that financial institutions migrate to post-quantum systems in phases.

Banks and financial regulators from Europe, the Middle East and Asia have joined a pilot program testing quantum-resistant infrastructure for digital asset wallets and onchain transfers. The initiative was announced Monday by the Responsible Fintech Institute and crypto custody infrastructure provider Safeheron. It uses a multiparty computation protocol that supports ML-DSA-65, a post-quantum digital signature standard published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, and runs on a quantum-resistant NEAR testnet. Participating regulators include Abu Dhabi Global Market, Bhutan’s Gelephu Financial Services Office and the Malta Financial Services Authority. Bison Bank and DK Bank are taking part as financial institutions and will test wallet generation and transfers in a shared application environment. Regulators will observe the first phase before contributing to a governance workstream later, with each institution taking part at a different level. Organizers also plan to publish a white paper on the research, protocol design and test findings, and later open-source the underlying technology. The pilot arrives as financial authorities step up preparations for the security risks that quantum computing may pose to public-key cryptography.

ChainFeeds Research’s PRO #155 rounds up updates across Bitcoin protocol work, Ethereum governance topics, new research, and fresh papers. The issue centers on the supply side of Ethereum block building, a proposed way to handle gas accounting under EIP-7999, and Native Ethereum Delegation (NED), a protocol-level design for staking delegation. It also includes Bitcoin quantum-recovery ideas, a Lightning Network congestion proposal, Bitcoin Core release changes, and several MEV and proof-system research notes. On the builder side, Christoph Rosenmayr and Jascha Samadi argue that the scarce asset is not block count but valuable orderflow. Their Dune-based data shows validators have earned about $1.36 billion in execution-layer rewards via MEV-Boost since early 2024, while builders kept about $404 million in builder surplus. Titan, they say, now builds around half of blocks yet captures roughly 80%–85% of surplus. The Bitcoin section includes Shinobi’s view that users who still control private keys should be able to recover BTC locked to hash-addresses without protocol-level confiscation of long-dormant coins. It also covers Bitcoin Optech’s CMTC proposal, Bitcoin Core’s new static Linux binaries, and a change that moves transaction relay throttling from per-peer queues to a global limit. On Ethereum, Anders Elowsson lays out four accounting paths for EIP-7999, while Jeff’s NED research proposes protocol-routed delegation with a worst-case concentration bound. The issue also highlights ragged multi-instance GKR for Poseidon2b, MEV articles and conference videos, and a censorship paper from Derivation Technology, Aarhus University, and Nanyang Technological University.

Ethereum is moving away from Poseidon at Layer 1, ending years of work around a hash function long favored in SNARK-based systems. On Aug. 13, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said on X that the Ethereum Foundation had decided to abandon Poseidon in favor of traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2. The change comes after eight years of research, tens of millions of dollars in spending, and a broader reset of Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap. The key technical driver is progress in binary-field SNARK design, which allows traditional hash functions to perform inside proving systems at speeds that were previously associated with SNARK-optimized designs. Drake said a laptop can now verify about 1 million conventional hash calls per second in a SNARK setting, while recent benchmarks from projects including Flock and SNARK.fast point to sharply improved throughput. The roadmap itself remains in place. Ethereum still expects a production-grade leanVM in 2027, followed by deployments across the consensus, execution, and data layers in 2028. The Foundation has also expanded its post-quantum work through pq.ethereum.org, weekly interoperability devnets involving more than 10 client teams, and two $1 million research prizes. The shift also comes as Solana and Starknet advance their own post-quantum plans using Falcon and BLAKE2-based transitions.

ChainFeeds published its Aug. 14 research roundup, pulling together five feature pieces selected from its Aug. 13 Web3 briefing. The package spans Bitcoin market structure, crypto venture and trading narratives, wallet design for AI agents, Ethereum’s long-term cryptography roadmap, and startup advice from Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. The Bitcoin section, citing Glassnode, says BTC remains stuck between two key on-chain cost bases: the Median Realized Price near $63,000 and the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis near $68,700. Spot activity has fallen to one of the lowest levels in years, ETF demand has yet to show a convincing return, and leveraged longs in derivatives have built up ahead of a broader recovery. The report says a downside break would put focus on the June low around $58,500. Other pieces in the roundup argue that stablecoins and perpetuals remain crypto’s clearest native product-market fits, examine how products such as x402 and MetaMask Agent Wallet try to give AI agents controlled spending and execution power, and frame recursive STARK aggregation as a key tool for Ethereum’s post-quantum, privacy, and scaling agenda. The final feature highlights Garry Tan’s warning that chasing hot sectors can pull founders away from areas where they have genuine edge, while AI-driven coding is changing what counts as a durable moat.

A busy news cycle from Aug. 6 to Aug. 7 brought a mix of crypto regulation, market structure, corporate disclosures, and AI-linked developments. Dow Protocol said claims that OKX Ventures had invested in the project were false and said a list of investors would be released this week without OKX Ventures on it. The U.S. Senate, meanwhile, decided to delay a vote on the Clarity Act until September, extending uncertainty around a major federal crypto bill. Outside Washington, Thailand confirmed a five-year capital gains tax exemption on crypto trades executed through Thai SEC-licensed venues from Jan. 1, 2025 through Dec. 31, 2029. MetaMask introduced a self-custodial AI wallet that lets agents execute on-chain transactions within user-defined limits, and Wintermute registered a broker-dealer subsidiary with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. The update set also included Binance Alpha’s AGT and AIA blind box airdrop, Cipher Digital’s sale of 1,619 BTC at a realized loss, a Chainalysis report on more than $30 million in violent robbery losses targeting crypto holders in the first half of 2026, Bernstein’s renewed $140 target on Circle, and several funding, hardware, and security stories tied to the broader AI sector.

Sui announced plans to bring quantum-safe vaults to its mainnet within this year, introducing two NIST-approved post-quantum signature schemes. ML-DSA-65 will serve as the native protocol signature for regular accounts, while the hash-based SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s is designated for high-value vaults within Move smart contracts. The move responds to the potential threat quantum computing poses to existing elliptic curve cryptography. According to Sui, because Sui keys are deterministically derived from seeds, users can upgrade to quantum-safe keys using their existing recovery mnemonic. An already live address-alias feature lets current accounts update authorization keys without moving assets. The quantum-safe vaults are slated for mainnet deployment this year, with native ML-DSA-65 accounts expected on testnet by year-end. Account authentication is targeted for mainnet in Q1 2027. Sui said the upgrade is incremental and optional, leaving existing accounts and contracts unaffected.

A public challenge from BitGo CEO Mike Belshe has become a flashpoint in the debate over whether artificial intelligence can actually break the cryptographic foundations behind Bitcoin. On Aug. 1, Belshe transferred 100 BTC, worth about $6.5 million at early-August prices, into a BitGo wallet address and openly challenged Anthropic to take it, after a wave of discussion around Claude’s security research and the Coldcard weak-randomness incident. When GoPlusZH checked the chain while writing, the funds were still sitting untouched. The article argues that AI is changing cybersecurity fast, but mostly by improving vulnerability discovery, exploit development, and analysis of weaker or insufficiently reviewed designs. It points to Anthropic’s incident report on Claude’s cybersecurity evaluations, as well as research showing progress against the post-quantum candidate HAWK and reduced-round AES. At the same time, it draws a sharp distinction between those results and the mature cryptographic stack used by Bitcoin, including SHA-256 and secp256k1. GoPlusZH’s main point is that real-world crypto losses rarely come from “breaking encryption” in the abstract. They usually come from implementation flaws, poor key management, phishing, social engineering, or supply-chain compromise. In that framing, AI looks less like a force that overturns mathematics and more like a powerful amplifier of existing operational and security weaknesses.