The week ahead includes a dense run of crypto policy, exchange and project events. DeepSeek’s revised API pricing takes effect on Aug. 17 with peak and off-peak rates, while Coinbase is scheduled to carry out system maintenance, launch US500 perpetual-style index futures for U.S. users through Coinbase Derivatives, and end support for USDC deposits and withdrawals on Noble. Hashdex is also set to close and liquidate its Bitcoin ETF, and Binance will delist six tokens on the same day. Attention then shifts to regulation. South Korea will implement tighter rules for single-stock leveraged ETF and ETN products on Aug. 19, including stricter deviation-rate controls and an added simulated-trading requirement for first-time retail investors. Politico, citing three people familiar with the matter, reported that the White House may meet crypto and prediction-market executives on Aug. 19. On Aug. 20, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee will hold its first meeting, with crypto assets, artificial intelligence and prediction-market oversight on the agenda. The week also features several token unlocks, including LayerZero, KAITO, MBG and SOON, plus project updates from Solana, DGrid AI, SNS, Doodles, Step App and Manus. Binance will make additional network and compliance-related changes later in the week, including restrictions involving EXMO and other platforms.

The week of Aug. 17-23 is packed with events that could draw close attention from crypto traders, policymakers, and market infrastructure operators. On Aug. 19, President Donald Trump is expected to attend a White House gathering of crypto and prediction-market executives, with CEOs from Coinbase, Ripple, Gemini, Robinhood, Polymarket, and Kalshi also set to join, according to CoinDesk. The event is expected to warm up the first formal meeting of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s newly formed Innovation Advisory Committee. A day later, the Federal Reserve will release minutes from its July policy meeting, where the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9-3 to keep the federal funds rate at 3.5% to 3.75%. Markets will be looking for clues on how many officials saw a case for a rate hike and what evidence could shift the broader committee. Elsewhere, South Korea will roll out tighter rules for single-stock leveraged products and expand review standards for crypto operator registration. The same week also includes a series of exchange and network updates, including Binance delistings and precision changes, Coinbase product launches and support changes, Upbit service suspensions, a planned bitcoin eCash hard fork, and Manus data migration steps tied to its return as an independent company.

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.

Ankr, a Web3 infrastructure provider, has launched vRPC, a verifiable RPC service designed to prevent compromised nodes from feeding forged data to systems. The team warned that hacked RPC nodes can return responses that are indistinguishable from genuine data, while the code itself cannot detect the difference. vRPC signs every response inside an Intel TDX trusted execution environment (enclave), supporting local verification and rejecting any tampered data. Ankr stressed that users should verify RPC node responses rather than trust them blindly.

On Aug. 9 local time, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said during remarks on recent regional conflicts that Iran had been targeted by military strikes from the United States and Israel and had suffered casualties. He said Iran would not forget the dead from the recent conflicts. "We will neither forget, nor forgive," Araghchi said. He then said that, in the face of external pressure, Iran would continue to maintain its resistance stance and protect the country's national independence and dignity. The remarks were originally reported by China Central Television and distributed as a news flash by Odaily, with the flash timestamped Aug. 9, 2026 at 06:53 UTC. No additional details were given about the number of casualties or the scope of the military action. The foreign minister's comments did not outline any specific policy steps, but they make clear that Iran intends to hold to its position under external pressure. The flash item itself was brief, focusing entirely on Araghchi's statement without additional analysis.

Coinbase is using an internal AI coding platform called Forge to explore a different model for software development, one built around multiple AI agents working in parallel rather than a traditional step-by-step workflow. The system has evolved from an early internal tool into a broader ecosystem of AI development capabilities and is now described as an important part of the open-source AI coding framework OpenSWE. According to the information disclosed, Forge was previously known as Cloudbot, and an even earlier version was called Claudebot. OpenSWE is designed to provide infrastructure resembling an “AI software engineer,” with agent orchestration, cloud sandboxes, tool use, integrations with Slack, Linear, and GitHub, support for sub-agents, and automatic Pull Request creation. One of Forge’s most watched features is Mux, which has about 600 internal users at Coinbase and lets engineers run multiple AI agents at the same time. Coinbase engineering lead Chintan Turakhia also ran an internal experiment in which nearly 1,000 engineers were asked to stop using traditional IDE tools for two weeks to see what parts of development an AI-driven workflow could automate. He said Coinbase’s AI spending has fallen as use of coding tools has increased, while token usage has continued to rise.

Monad co-founder Keone Hon has released a broad ecosystem update spanning user onboarding, on-chain activity, and protocol research, laying out what the network has built over the past eight months. On the startup side, the first Nitro cohort held its Demo Day in New York with more than 100 investors in attendance, as seven teams presented products ranging from prediction markets and stablecoin on-ramps to open credit markets and AI-assisted trading tools. On the product and adoption front, Category Labs introduced Mera, an open-source Passkey onboarding library that lets apps create crypto accounts for users through familiar biometric flows such as Face ID and Touch ID, without relying on smart accounts or backend logic. The latest Monad Economy figures show TVL at $800 million, more than 30 fiat on-ramps, live institutional lending and RWA markets, and cumulative DEX volume above $15 billion. App Hub now lists more than 130 applications, while Aave’s Monad market has reached $500 million in deposits. The update also highlights developer shipping, academic research, and infrastructure work. Category Labs accounted for 6 of 34 talks at the Science of Blockchain Conference, the testnet has deployed v0.15.2 in preparation for MIP-8 and Deterministic Raptorcast, and the Monad Foundation has launched MOST to subsidize independent open-source developers with AI tokens. BuildAnything, meanwhile, said its first hackathon drew more than 600 project submissions.

Dan Koe’s essay on remembering what you read makes a blunt case against a habit many knowledge workers have turned into doctrine: trying to retain every article, highlight and note. His argument is that memory is not the real bottleneck. The larger problem is that people confuse collecting information with learning, and organization with actual use. In his framework, the material that matters most is not the material you force yourself to memorize, but the material that becomes embedded through repeated application, discussion and output. The piece reframes learning through a cybernetics lens built on four parts — goal, sense, compare and act — and says most people get stuck because they keep feeding themselves information without a clear target. Koe then pushes a project-first approach: start building, create pressure through real work, and learn only what the task requires. He extends that logic to digital note systems, arguing that many “second brain” setups fail because they are designed for storage, not retrieval or creation. The article also reviews practical workflows, including a self-managed Obsidian + Claude setup and tools such as Eden and MyMind, and draws a line around AI’s role. AI, in Koe’s view, can reduce friction in research, sorting and drafting, but it should not replace a person’s own judgment, values or voice.