Elon Musk’s TeraFab chip manufacturing plan has moved from a compute-supply story into a lithography debate after speculation that the project may be aligned with a free-electron laser, or FEL, approach to extreme ultraviolet light sources. The discussion gained momentum after Musk posted 「FEL FTW」 on social media, a remark that many read as support for the idea. The core issue is whether FEL can attack one of the most entrenched positions in the semiconductor equipment business: ASML’s dominance in EUV lithography. The article lays out why that question is drawing attention now. ASML’s laser-produced plasma, or LPP, light source enabled commercial EUV, but its limits are becoming more visible as the industry pushes toward 2 nm and below. Conversion efficiency remains low, tin debris contaminates costly mirrors, and power requirements keep rising. FEL backers argue their approach avoids plasma conversion, removes tin-droplet contamination, and could deliver much higher EUV output. xLight, which raised an oversubscribed $40 million Series B in July last year and later brought in former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger as executive chairman, says its system could sharply raise fab productivity. Even so, the broader field remains mixed. ASML is still expanding EUV and DUV output, advancing High-NA EUV, and posting rising sales and profit. At the same time, alternative paths including X-ray lithography, nanoimprint lithography, and electron-beam direct write are also developing, each with different trade-offs in cost, throughput, and manufacturability.

Marvell said on Aug. 4 that it has launched the Bravera SC6 SSD Controller, model MV-SF1410, aimed at the PCIe Gen6 NVMe SSD market for AI data centers, hyperscale cloud operators, and enterprise database deployments. The company said the chip is built for a shift in AI system design toward tiered memory architectures, where NVMe SSDs act as a high-capacity memory layer rather than serving only as conventional storage. According to Marvell, that setup can provide tens to hundreds of terabytes of capacity at a lower cost than GPU HBM and DRAM, helping keep GPUs utilized while reducing infrastructure costs. Bravera SC6 supports PCIe Gen6, remains backward compatible with PCIe Gen1 through Gen5, and complies with the NVMe 2.2 specification. It also features 16 NAND channels, transfer speeds of up to 3600 MT/s, support for ONFI and Toggle NAND, and compatibility with SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC flash. Marvell said samples are expected to become available in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party has moved to put the trading card market under closer scrutiny after a rare Pokémon card sold for about $16 million in February. On July 23, a cross-party parliamentary group, the Trading Card Promotion Parliamentary League, was formally launched in the Diet to examine risks tied to counterfeit cards, bulk hoarding for resale, and money laundering. According to the report, caucus head Seiji Kihara said trading cards are an industry that can compete globally, but the market is now facing visible structural problems. He listed three main concerns: circulation of counterfeit products, large-scale stockpiling for resale, and the use of cards in money laundering because individual cards generally lack unique identifiers, making ownership transfers hard to trace from printing to resale. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimates the domestic trading card market grew from ¥177.6 billion in fiscal 2021 to ¥338.4 billion in fiscal 2025, nearly doubling in four years. The report also pointed to a pricing imbalance: franchises such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! originated in Japan, but card values are heavily influenced by grades assigned by U.S. authenticator PSA. The caucus is expected to keep gathering views from manufacturers and grading firms before drafting policy proposals.

Japan's lower house passed a bill reclassifying crypto as financial instruments under securities law, paving the way for ETFs and reducing top tax from 55% to a flat 20%. The legislation awaits upper house approval, expected effective 2027.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's LDP secured a supermajority in February 2026, removing legislative hurdles for crypto tax reform, stablecoin rules, and ETF launch. Market expects flat 20% tax on crypto gains and loss carryforward.

BC.GAME releases an updated $BC whitepaper detailing BC Engine staking burn: 1% of any unstaked amount within 7 days gets burned. Fixed 10B supply, ATH $0.01196, and expanded utility across games, staking, and rewards.

Fears that quantum computers could soon crack Bitcoin keep resurfacing, but the source article argues the gap between theory and practical attack capability remains vast. In theory, the hardware required to break elliptic curve cryptography, or ECC, has fallen sharply, from about 317 million physical qubits in 2022 to fewer than 500,000 in a 2026 paper. That is a major change on paper. The problem is that current machines can only run real algorithms with about 105 usable qubits, leaving several orders of magnitude still missing. The article walks through what would actually be needed to run Shor’s algorithm against ECC, including logical qubits, error correction, decoding speed, and the production of magic states needed for non-Clifford gates such as Toffoli gates. It says the 2026 design would require around 1,200 logical qubits, about 90 million sequential Toffoli gates, roughly 500,000 physical qubits under current error-correction assumptions, and a runtime measured in minutes. It also separates abstract cryptographic risk from actual wallet exposure. For Bitcoin, addresses only become vulnerable once a public key is revealed on-chain, which is why the article highlights roughly 6.7 million BTC as already exposed. Ethereum faces a related issue because it uses the same secp256k1 curve and ECDSA signatures, while its persistent account model makes repeated address use more common.

A TechFlowPost article translated from Derrick Cui argues that practical quantum attacks on elliptic curve cryptography, or ECC, are still several orders of magnitude away even after major theoretical advances. The piece says recent research has cut the estimated hardware needed to break ECC from about 317 million physical qubits in 2022 to fewer than 500,000 in 2026, but today’s machines can run real algorithms on only about 105 qubits. It walks through what would actually be required to attack ECC with Shor’s algorithm, including logical qubits, error correction, decoding, Toffoli gates and magic-state distillation, then compares those requirements with current hardware. The article also discusses what a quantum break would mean for Bitcoin and Ethereum. In Bitcoin, the main risk is tied to addresses whose public keys have already been revealed on-chain, while Ethereum’s persistent account model would leave any wallet that has sent a transaction exposed if quantum attacks were available today. The piece concludes that the gap between theory and deployable machines remains enormous, and that no reliable timeline can be inferred from current progress alone.