Alliance co-founder Imran Khan argues that Chris Dixon’s core thesis on crypto remains largely intact: blockchains add an economic and ownership layer that the internet never fully built into its base architecture. In Khan’s view, early attempts to embed payments into the web, from Netscape’s work with Visa to the long-unused HTTP 402 status code, showed the idea was old even if the tooling was not ready. Crypto later introduced concepts such as user-owned assets, permissionless markets, decentralized identity, open social graphs, portable reputation, decentralized storage, and programmable finance, but most people never prioritized decentralization over convenience. That is where Khan sees AI changing the picture. He says AI agents are becoming a new class of internet participant and may be the real demand-side users for open protocols. As machine-to-machine activity grows, agents may need permissionless access to services, datasets, markets, identity systems, programmable money, storage, reputation, and discoverability across open networks. Khan’s broader conclusion is that the next internet will not be defined by crypto alone. He describes it as a stack shaped by crypto, AI, robotics, compute, energy, and eventually biotech, with crypto serving as the ownership layer and AI handling intelligence and interaction.

Shipyard, a development team in the IPFS ecosystem, said it will stop IPFS-related engineering, maintenance, and infrastructure operations on Sept. 30 after Protocol Labs decided not to renew its funding. The change leaves several core projects maintained by Shipyard — including Kubo, Helia, and IPFS Desktop — without dedicated maintainers, based on the team’s announcement. Shipyard also said the future of public infrastructure such as ipfs.io and dweb.link, along with IPFS bootstrap nodes, will be decided by Protocol Labs. The team added that it will help with the transition through the end of September. The announcement outlines a shift in responsibility across parts of the IPFS stack and public services currently tied to Shipyard’s work.

WuBlockchain’s daily crypto roundup covered five separate developments across macro data, security incidents, exchange operations and US market access. First, US initial jobless claims for the week ended Aug. 15 came in at 206,000, below the 210,000 consensus estimate, while the prior reading was revised from 209,000 to 212,000. Second, a user reportedly lost 1,010 ETH after visiting a phishing site tied to Tornado Cash’s expired former domain, tornado. cash, which community disclosures said had been re-registered by an attacker after the original team could not renew it following OFAC sanctions. Third, HTX denied any role in reported “address poisoning” transfers and said some affected users may have had funds frozen on Kraken, with one known case involving about $4.2 million. Fourth, OKX said it had restricted Hong Kong staff, as well as employees traveling through China, from using Anthropic’s Claude after a brief suspension of its enterprise account in early August, citing Anthropic’s regional access rules. Fifth, President Donald Trump said CFTC Chair Mike Selig is pushing Hyperliquid’s compliant entry into the US market, with HYPE briefly rising from about $62 to $72.3, a gain of roughly 16%.

Coinbase Markets said on Aug. 17, 2026 that it had added Cluster Protocol, whose token trades under CP, to its asset listing roadmap and published the project’s Base contract address. The move put fresh attention on a project that says it is building an orchestration layer for autonomous AI workflows on Base, combining model inference, tokenized data, GPU compute and x402-based micro-payments under one settlement stack. According to the source article, Cluster routes requests to more than 500 open-source models through an OpenAI-compatible API, stores datasets on IPFS, represents ownership with ERC-721 NFTs on Base, and uses smart contracts to split revenue, with creators receiving 85%. Its browser-native product, CodeXero, is designed to let users describe an idea in natural language and deploy a dApp while consuming Cluster’s underlying services. The same article also notes a gap between the project’s narrative and disclosed activity. Cluster said it recorded 130,000 inference payment requests and $79,000 in settlements over the past 30 days, while CodeXero has connected more than 300,000 wallets and deployed more than 25,000 onchain dApps. Those figures were self-reported by the project, with no independent dashboard verification cited. Cluster has raised $7.75 million in total, including a $5 million round led by DAO5 on April 23, 2026.

Foresight published an overview of five infrastructure technologies it sees as central to Web3’s shift from a single-chain niche to multi-chain adoption at scale. The piece focuses on Layer2 scaling, zero-knowledge proofs, modular blockchains, cross-chain interoperability and decentralized storage. According to the article, Layer2 has become the main answer to congestion and high fees on Ethereum and other major chains, with Optimistic Rollup and ZK-Rollup representing the two dominant paths. It also highlights data availability as a core security consideration for Layer2 systems. On zero-knowledge technology, Foresight describes ZK as a base cryptographic tool for privacy and efficient verification, with use cases spanning ZK-Rollup, ZK-EVM, privacy payments, on-chain identity and secure cross-chain interaction. The article also argues that modular blockchains are changing public-chain design by separating consensus, execution, settlement and data layers into independent modules. In parallel, cross-chain messaging protocols and unified asset standards are being used to address fragmentation across multiple chains, while IPFS, Filecoin and Arweave are presented as key pieces of decentralized storage infrastructure for NFT metadata, AI datasets and on-chain archives. Foresight’s conclusion is that these five technologies together support Web3’s path toward large-scale commercial deployment.

Foresight laid out a broad primer on decentralized storage, arguing that the Web3 stack needs alternatives to centralized cloud providers because of four persistent weaknesses: user ownership does not fully rest with the uploader, single points of failure can disrupt access, stored content can be altered without cryptographic proof, and long-term storage costs keep compounding. The article frames IPFS, Filecoin and Arweave as the three core building blocks of this shift, each serving a different role. IPFS is presented as a content-addressed, peer-to-peer file layer that generates a CID hash for each file but lacks built-in token incentives, which limits its ability to guarantee long-term retention on its own. Filecoin adds the market and incentive layer on top, using Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime to verify storage and sustain a commercial marketplace for large-scale data. Arweave, by contrast, focuses on permanent storage through its Blockweave structure and SPoRA consensus, paired with a one-time payment model backed by a long-term endowment fund. The piece also maps out practical use cases, including long-term archives, NFT metadata, AI training datasets and storage mining, before outlining industry trends such as hybrid storage architectures, growing use in modular blockchain systems and lower adoption barriers for creators and smaller businesses.

IOSG’s latest deep dive argues that Robinhood is no longer renting blockspace from someone else’s network. By launching its own Layer 2, the company now controls the rails for trading, settlement, collateral, yield and asset circulation, a move the report frames as a direct answer to Coinbase’s Base. Robinhood Chain was built for tokenized equities and broader real-world asset activity, yet its first wave of traction came from meme coins and AI agents rather than stocks. As of July 20, 2026, IOSG said RWA assets still accounted for only about 4% of total value locked. The report lays out a layered structure around the chain, including USDG as the main settlement dollar, USDe as a yield-bearing collateral asset, Wallet as the user entry point, and separate perpetual venues such as Lighter and Arcus. It also spends considerable time on the legal structure of Robinhood’s stock tokens, describing them as tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited rather than direct ownership of underlying shares. IOSG’s conclusion is that the infrastructure economics already make sense for Robinhood, but the unresolved question is whether meme-driven traffic can be converted into durable RWA activity and whether the company will eventually publish reserve proof for its stock token model.

eth.limo said in its Q2 update that the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, is being used for more than domain names and is seeing application in decentralized websites. The project said Turkey’s communications authority has published content through ENS and IPFS, offering a concrete example of that shift. The update also said gateway latency has been reduced and access to both IPFS and Arweave has been improved. According to eth.limo, the move by Turkey’s communications authority suggests that government agencies are starting to test ENS as a tool for public communications. The item was cited by Techub News, which referenced Bitcoinist.