A security paper presented at the USENIX Security Symposium found that 63% of the sampled Ethereum EIP-7702 wallet authorization transactions were linked to malicious contracts controlled by attackers, according to a Techub News report citing NewsBTC. The study said those malicious authorization activities have already resulted in more than $2.3 million in confirmed asset theft. The report said the main issue is not an inherent flaw in Ethereum itself. Instead, it centers on malicious authorizations and a broader wallet attack surface created around the way users approve permissions. EIP-7702, as part of account abstraction, lets externally owned accounts gain more flexible functionality through authorized code execution, but that same flexibility can leave users exposed if they sign harmful authorizations. Researchers said wallet interface design has become a critical layer of defense. They suggested wallets may need clearer warnings, stronger authorization displays, and better simulation tools so users can better understand the risks before signing.

Aligned, a zero-knowledge infrastructure project spun out of LambdaClass, said its native token ALIGN will begin spot trading on Coinbase, Bitget and KuCoin, with the airdrop set to open when the token officially goes live. Coinbase has already enabled deposit address generation, though it had not announced a trading start time as of publication. The listing arrives after a controversial strategic shift: less than a month before TGE, Aligned retired its Proof Verification Layer, the project’s most mature product, despite it having verified more than 136,000 proofs and reached more than 50 operators at its peak. The move has pushed investors and users to re-examine the project’s business case. Aligned said it made the change because ZK technology has matured, Ethereum is moving toward native ZK support, and demand has tilted toward Ethereum-level security over ultra-low latency. Since the shutdown, operator count has fallen to about 26 and restaked capital stands at roughly $119 million. The project is now centered on its Proof Aggregation Service, which it says can cut costs by more than 90%, while several other pieces of its broader stack remain in development. ALIGN has a fixed supply of 10 billion tokens, with about 16% expected to circulate at TGE. Updated token allocations from April 2026 set aside 23.50% for the team, 19.71% for investors, 18.00% for the ecosystem, 16.61% for future reserves, 11.40% for the foundation, 8.74% for airdrops and 2.04% for community sales.

A dense 24-hour news cycle brought fresh filings, earnings, market calls and regulatory signals across crypto and adjacent tech markets. Fidelity filed an amended registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Aug. 11 to add ETH staking to its spot Ethereum ETF, the Fidelity Ethereum Fund (FETH). Under normal conditions, the fund said it could stake as much as 100% of the ETH it holds, with no minimum staking threshold, and its investment objective would change to include staking rewards if approved. Elsewhere, some existing Anthropic investors said the AI company could be valued at more than $2 trillion if it goes public as early as October, with one investor putting the upside case at $3 trillion based on a roughly 30x revenue multiple. The estimates remain investor forecasts, and several investors said Anthropic management has not set an IPO valuation target. The session also featured quarterly updates from Bullish, BitGo and Securitize, new SEC steps around tokenized fund operations and tokenized equities, ETF flow data for Bitcoin and Ethereum products, and a series of policy, infrastructure and security developments spanning Europe, the U.K., Brazil and the U.S.

Ethereum’s 11th year is shaping up as a transition point on two fronts: protocol design and institutional structure. Over the past year, the network activated Fusaka on mainnet, adding PeerDAS and later raising blob targets and gas limits to prepare Ethereum for more Layer 2 data throughput. At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation completed a broad reorganization, cut staff by 54 people, and narrowed its internal scope while related work moved into independent groups including Ethlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and EthSystems. A longer-range technical debate is also taking shape. Justin Drake’s Lean Ethereum vision and the EF Architecture-maintained Strawmap have pushed discussion toward finality, execution design, cryptography, state models, privacy, and post-quantum resilience. Vitalik Buterin has described this phase as a possible “third major iteration” after early Ethereum and The Merge, while stressing that the ideas remain under discussion rather than fixed commitments. Current network data helps explain why this phase matters. Ethereum mainnet still carries roughly half of global stablecoin supply by the cited datasets, leads tokenized real-world assets on RWA.xyz, and remains the top single network by DeFi TVL, even as a large share of execution has shifted to L2s. The next upgrades, Glamsterdam and later Hegotá, are expected to continue that redesign.

PANews’ weekly roundup collected a wide range of crypto and AI stories that shaped market discussion over the past week, spanning trading venues, regulation, infrastructure, prediction markets, and artificial intelligence. Among the most watched developments, a macro analysis argued that South Korea’s stock market became more volatile than Bitcoin at one point as the AI trade pushed names such as Samsung and SK Hynix into the spotlight and leveraged ETFs amplified moves. In Washington, debate around the CLARITY Act stayed in focus, with a16z calling for the bill’s passage while the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce warned the Senate that it could accelerate deposit outflows. On the exchange front, BitMEX said it would shut down and halt new user registration immediately, a move that was followed by a 95% plunge in BMEX, with Bubblemaps saying 75% of the token allocation had never circulated on-chain. The roundup also tracked Robinhood Chain’s launchpad battle, Solana’s second-quarter tokenized asset growth, Circle’s 76% stock slide, Movement Labs’ bankruptcy filing, and a slate of shorter market and policy headlines tied to AMD, SEC, MoonPay, Etched, Bithumb, and others.

IPOR said a malicious transaction drained $336,000 USDC from a legacy USDC Fusion Optimizer Vault on Arbitrum. The protocol said the loss was under 1% of Fusion funds, other vaults were unaffected, and the DAO treasury will fully reimburse impacted depositors.

The Ethereum Foundation has mapped out its 2026 protocol priorities, with Glamsterdam and Hegotá leading the next phase of scaling, security, and UX work, while ETH charts point to bearish pressure.

A long-inactive PancakeSwap liquidity provider lost about $2.96 million after signing a malicious EIP-7702 approval, according to monitoring by Specter. The attacker removed roughly $1.48 million in BSC-USD liquidity and another $1.48 million in BUSD liquidity that had been supplied by the victim. Specter said the attacker then swapped the BUSD portion into ETH. Of the stolen funds, about $1.46 million has already been deposited into Tornado Cash, while around $1.48 million in USDT remains in the attacker-controlled address. The incident centers on a malicious authorization and involved assets previously deployed on PancakeSwap as liquidity.