DeepSeek, an AI team spun out of Chinese quant hedge fund High-Flyer, has moved from a niche research outfit into one of the most closely watched names in the global model race. The company first drew broad attention in January 2025, when its reasoning model R1 was presented as a low-cost open model and the market reaction helped fuel what many called the “DeepSeek moment,” a day when Nvidia lost $589 billion in market value and DeepSeek climbed to No. 1 among free iOS apps in the U.S. By 2026, DeepSeek had rolled out the V4 family, including V4-Flash and V4-Pro, while also completing roughly $7 billion in first-round external financing. A planned second round was later put on hold after comments from founder Liang Wenfeng about China’s AI gap with the U.S. leaked from an investor meeting. The company’s appeal rests on a mix of open weights, relatively low API pricing and local deployment options. At the same time, its privacy policy, censorship concerns, restrictions by several governments on official use, and allegations related to model distillation and data sourcing continue to shape the debate around the company.

WuBlockchain’s July technology report mapped a broad set of protocol developments across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Zcash, NEAR, Cardano, Uniswap and Sui. On Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core v31.1 was released on July 8, 2026 with bug fixes tied to chainstate disk rewrites and an IP leak linked to the -privatebroadcast feature, while BIP-110 turned into a governance flashpoint as miner signaling stayed far below the 55% threshold. On Ethereum, the Glamsterdam upgrade moved into its final integration and performance-testing phase, Hegota remained in proposal-scope selection, and Vitalik Buterin published new pieces on Lean Ethereum, validator-state compression and privacy. The report also covered Ethereum proposals including Native UTXOs on Ethereum and EIP-8222, along with Starknet’s STRK20 privacy framework and Polygon’s Ithaca hard fork schedule. Elsewhere, Solana advanced Agave v4.2, launched Solana Governance Proposals and prepared SIMD-0286 to raise the single-block compute cap, while Zcash activated Ironwood NU6.3 on mainnet and introduced Zakura 1.0.0 as a new full-node client.

Anthropic said an unreleased version of its flagship model, Claude Mythos Preview, discovered two previously unknown attacks on cryptographic algorithms, including one targeting HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature system that had advanced to the third round of the U.S. NIST competition. According to the report, the attack cuts the cost of stealing HAWK’s smallest key from 2^64 operations to 2^38, or about 67 million times less work. Anthropic said fixing the issue would roughly double key sizes, weakening one of HAWK’s main selling points: compact keys and fast signing. The report also stressed that HAWK has never been deployed and that Bitcoin still uses ECDSA, so no live crypto system was broken by the finding. Even so, the development matters because a broad push toward quantum-resistant crypto infrastructure assumes that the replacement schemes are themselves secure. The newsletter also covered a range of market and policy developments, including gains in BTC and ETH ahead of the FOMC, public backing for the CLARITY Act from BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, and SoFi, fresh ETF flow data, Zcash’s Ironwood activation, and a burst of meme coin trading activity led by PIPEDOG on Robinhood chain.

ChainFeeds’ July 29 research roundup brought together five separate pieces spanning venture capital, Ethereum scaling, industry narrative shifts, RWA perpetuals, and Korean equity-linked market turbulence. One section highlighted comments from Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, who argued that parts of crypto venture investing may not remain attractive forever, especially if the industry becomes dominated by large incumbent platforms and network effects by 2030. He also questioned tokenization projects built around single assets unless they can scale around assets such as U.S. Treasuries or stocks and solve distribution. Another section focused on Ethereum’s 2030 roadmap, describing a five-part vision that includes 4-second block times, a Gigagas L1 targeting roughly 1 billion gas per second, expanded blob capacity for L2s, post-quantum cryptography, and native privacy through zero-knowledge proofs. The roundup also featured an essay arguing that the “crypto utopia” narrative has faded and that the industry is moving into a more business-like consolidation phase centered on stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, perpetuals, and AI agents. The final two pieces examined the growing role of trade.xyz within Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework and a sharp move in the SKHX perpetual contract tied to a thin Korean premarket print, which ChainFeeds said triggered cascading liquidations. Together, the report presented a snapshot of how crypto capital, infrastructure, and market structure are changing in mid-2026.

Anthropic said an unreleased version of its Claude Mythos model uncovered two previously unknown cryptographic attacks, including one against HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature scheme now in the third round of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s competition. According to the company, Claude identified a symmetry in HAWK’s structure that cuts the cost of recovering a secret key in the smallest configuration from 2^64 operations to 2^38, a roughly 67 million-fold reduction. Anthropic said fixing the issue would require roughly doubling HAWK’s key size, which would undercut the compactness and speed that make the scheme attractive for blockchains and other systems sensitive to signature size. The company also described a separate result on a 7-round research version of AES-128, where Claude was asked to avoid all five established families of AES cryptanalysis and invent a new approach. Anthropic said the model eventually produced a technique called “Möbius Bridge,” reducing one of the nine key bytes an attacker previously needed to guess. It also reported that Claude broke 13 rounds of LEA, though deployed LEA uses 24 rounds. Anthropic said it disclosed the findings to the algorithms’ authors and relevant U.S. government and industry partners before publication, and coordinated the HAWK finding with NIST.

Ethereum’s long-range research agenda is being consolidated into a single framework that stretches from the planned Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 through a series of hard forks expected to run into 2029. The draft document, known as “Strawmap,” follows Justin Drake’s Lean Ethereum vision and groups the network’s ambitions into five “North Star” goals. Those goals cover a faster Layer 1 with finality cut from roughly 15 minutes to seconds, a jump in Layer 1 throughput from about 5 million gas per second to 1 billion gas per second, a Layer 2 data path that could scale to 1 GB per second, a post-quantum cryptography transition, and native privacy features at the base layer. The proposal remains a draft and is still being revised. Glamsterdam has already slipped from the first half of 2026 to the second half. Even so, the document offers one of the clearest looks yet at how Ethereum researchers see the chain evolving by 2030: a settlement-focused base layer, a larger role for ZK proofs across consensus and execution, a wider field of independent development groups alongside a smaller Ethereum Foundation, and a network designed to be faster, more trust-minimized and more resilient to future cryptographic threats.

Quantum computing is often framed as a broad threat to any system that relies on modern cryptography, from banks to government networks. Yet several voices cited in a recent report argue that crypto may be the first place where the danger becomes visible. The reason, they say, is not simply Bitcoin’s use of elliptic-curve cryptography, but the slower governance process required to coordinate a network-wide response. Quantum Xchange CEO Eddy Zervigon told CoinDesk that crypto is the “canary in the coal mine,” warning that the first real signs of a cryptographically relevant quantum machine may appear in decentralized crypto networks. He pointed to an industry timeline that places such machines around 2029, a view he said aligns with public comments from IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and with newer research from Google Quantum AI. That research suggested the hardware needed to break elliptic-curve cryptography protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum could be below 500,000 physical qubits, far less than older estimates. Other cited work says even under ideal conditions, migrating vulnerable Bitcoin UTXOs to post-quantum-safe addresses would take at least 76 days, while major upgrades require 90% miner consensus. Taken together, the concern is clear: post-quantum tools may arrive in time, but Bitcoin’s governance may struggle to move fast enough.

DSA said it took part in a PayCLT webinar and a Cornell Tech conference, where speakers discussed stablecoins, tokenized deposits, settlement, liquidity, and payment infrastructure.