Tornado Cash recorded 968 deposits on July 23, marking its busiest day of 2026, according to L2Beat data. Onchain records show 29,573 ETH, worth about $57.2 million at that day’s prices, moved into the protocol’s Ethereum pools from 110 addresses. A single address labeled Drift Exploiter 4 accounted for 245 deposits totaling 23,095 ETH, or roughly $44.4 million, in less than two hours, representing 78% of the day’s inflows. Lookonchain and PeckShield both flagged the transfers, with PeckShield adding that the exploiter also sent 0.85 ETH to Bybit. The movement was the first involving funds tied to the April 1 exploit of Drift, the Solana perpetuals DEX that lost roughly $285 million in the largest DeFi hack of 2026. TRM Labs and Elliptic have attributed that attack with medium-to-high confidence to UNC4736, a North Korea-linked cluster also tied to the $1.5 billion Bybit hack. The jump in activity comes as Tornado Cash usage keeps recovering after the U.S. Treasury lifted sanctions in March 2025, while developer Roman Storm still faces a pending retrial fight.

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.

The AGA’s latest industry outlook showed strong executive sentiment, but 81% of respondents called prediction markets a major threat. DraftKings, FanDuel, Fanatics, and bet365 have all left the trade group in the past six months.

Chrome Web Store will enforce new developer rules on August 1, 2026, targeting prediction market extensions, AI tools that bypass safeguards, and opaque data collection practices. Non-compliant extensions could be removed.

Over a decade of player-scanned landmark images helped train Niantic Spatial's VPS system now guiding delivery robots, sparking debates on consent and gamification.

LazAI's research paper on QoS-aware token scheduling and private data valuation for multi-modal agentic networks has been accepted at IEEE ICME 2026, which had only a 28.89% acceptance rate out of 3,810 submissions.

R3CEV introduces Corda, a distributed ledger designed for regulated financial institutions, distinguishing itself from blockchain by data privacy, no native cryptocurrency, and tailored consensus. The project will be open-sourced in the future.

A long-running debate over surveillance and civil liberties resurfaced after the FBI sought broader exemptions for its NGI database under the Privacy Act, potentially limiting citizens’ ability to access, correct, or challenge personal records.