Binance said its 2026 Binance Blockchain Week will take place on Nov. 28-29, 2026, at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center in central Bangkok, bringing the exchange’s flagship event back to Asia after editions in Singapore, Istanbul, Paris and Dubai. The company said the two-day gathering will bring together thousands of developers, institutional investors, fintech leaders and policymakers to discuss the next stage of digital asset development as traditional finance and crypto draw closer. The event will carry the theme “EVOLVE,” which Binance said reflects a maturing industry in 2026. Topics listed by the company include bitcoin’s continued expansion in institutional markets, stablecoins as payment infrastructure, the institutional evolution of DeFi, tokenization of real-world assets, tokenized stocks, cross-border payments, AI integration and regulatory frameworks that can support responsible scaling. Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng and Co-Founder and Co-CEO Yi He are expected to speak, alongside Eowyn Chen, SB Seker, Catherine Chen and Thomas Gregory. Binance also said early-bird tickets are now on sale for $19. The material was provided by Binance and was first published by Blockcast.

The Bitcoin and Virtual Asset Development Association will host a forum on May 7, 2026, unveiling a comprehensive blockchain industry map covering over 100 local firms. Panels will tackle stablecoins, Bitcoin ETFs, and regulatory compliance.

Pakistan has created a dedicated cryptocurrency investigation unit within the Federal Investigation Agency’s National Command and Control Center, according to local media cited by BlockBeats on July 22. The new team will focus on crimes involving digital assets, with authorities specifically naming money laundering and terror financing as priority areas. Muhammad Athar Waheed, head of the FIA’s anti-terrorism department, said the unit will work alongside the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or PVARA, in enforcement actions. He also called for the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency and the Anti-Narcotics Force to form their own specialist teams to address cybercrime and drug trafficking linked to crypto. The move comes as Pakistan continues to formalize its digital asset framework. In March, parliament passed the Virtual Assets Act, establishing PVARA as a permanent federal regulator for licensing exchanges, custodians, and token issuers. PVARA has already issued operating licenses to several major platforms, including Binance and HTX. PVARA Chairman Bilal bin Saqib has also said Pakistan plans to launch a sovereign stablecoin, build a national Bitcoin reserve, and allocate 2,000 megawatts of power for Bitcoin mining and AI data centers.

France’s Senate has passed a bill that would bar children under 15 from using social media, putting the country on track to become another major jurisdiction after Australia to adopt a hard age threshold. Under the reported plan, the law would take effect on Sept. 1, ban new accounts for users under 15, give platforms four additional months to shut existing accounts, and require age-verification systems approved by France’s privacy regulator. Taiwan is not pursuing the same outright ban, but it has begun moving on a different front. On April 21, 2026, the Ministry of Health and Welfare published draft amendments to Article 59 of the Protection of Children and Youths Welfare and Rights Act. The proposal would introduce age-identification mechanisms and allow access-restriction measures for harmful content, with detailed standards to be set by the NCC and the Ministry of Digital Affairs. The draft has already drawn criticism from civil society groups. The Judicial Reform Foundation warned of privacy risks, overly broad legal authorization, and weak due-process protections around network blocking. Amnesty International Taiwan also raised concerns about possible harm to privacy, anonymity and free expression. The debate in Taiwan is no longer only about whether minors should face tighter controls online, but about what kind of enforcement infrastructure is being built and how far it could later be extended.

Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency has created a virtual currency investigation unit within the newly launched National Cyber Crime and Control Center (NC3), according to Dawn. The unit will focus on cases involving money laundering and terror financing through virtual assets. An official from the counterterrorism wing said it will work with the newly formed Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or PVARA, to investigate crimes tied to crypto assets. The official also urged the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency and the Anti-Narcotics Force to establish similar units to address the use of crypto assets in cybercrime and drug trafficking. At the same time, the FIA has integrated anti-money laundering operations, border entry and exit monitoring, and investigations into human trafficking and migrant smuggling within NC3, while pushing new rules and staff expansion to speed up case handling and improve coordination across enforcement functions.

Taiwan will stage its first-ever drill simulating restricted mobile internet access during wartime or a major disaster, with exercises set for Aug. 10 and Aug. 13 across 14 cities and counties in central and northern Taiwan. Under plans outlined by the National Communications Commission, the scenario will involve both disaster roaming and tiered traffic throttling, with limited bandwidth redirected to voice calls, text messages and government alert systems. For roughly 30 minutes during each drill, residents are expected to notice slower mobile data speeds, while social media, video streaming and other high-bandwidth services may become difficult or impossible to use. Phone calls, SMS and official alerts are expected to continue operating normally. Authorities have also advised the public to look up nearby shelters in advance through designated police and disaster-prevention platforms, then save screenshots locally on their phones for offline access if the network becomes congested. The report said this is the first time the urban resilience exercise has formally incorporated offline backup planning for digital public services.

IOSG argues that demand for private AI is rising across both enterprises and consumers as concerns over intellectual property leakage, data retention, and legal discovery become harder to ignore. The report maps the current privacy stack, from contract-based zero data retention and anonymous proxies to trusted execution environments, end-to-end encryption, fully homomorphic encryption, and local inference. Its main point is that the tradeoff is no longer as simple as privacy versus performance. A central example comes from Bridgewater’s AIA Labs and Thinking Machines. In a June 30 case study, an expert-tuned open model, Qwen3-235B, outperformed frontier models on financial judgment tasks while also delivering much lower inference cost. The model scored 84.7% on an independent test set, above an 80% threshold set by investment professionals. Frontier models averaged about 50% with simple prompts and reached 78.2% with expert prompting. By the report’s framing, the fine-tuned Qwen made 29.8% fewer mistakes than the best frontier baseline and ran at 13.8x lower inference cost. IOSG also says infrastructure for private inference and post-training is starting to mature. Enclave-based services from companies such as Phala, Tinfoil, and NEAR AI are pushing privacy costs down, in some cases to parity with or below plain-text routes. Still, major gaps remain in tool calling, agent workflows, and encrypted search, where privacy guarantees often break once requests leave the model layer.

Taiwan’s legislature has taken a first step toward loosening restrictions that have blocked Starlink from launching commercial service in the market. A telecom law amendment cleared initial review on July 13, removing the requirement that the chair of a satellite telecom operator’s local telecom business be a Republic of China national and relaxing foreign ownership rules to a 60% cap regardless of direct or indirect holdings. The move is widely seen as opening a path for SpaceX’s Starlink, which reportedly failed to reach a deal with regulators in 2021 after insisting on a wholly owned operating structure that conflicted with existing rules. Taiwan’s three major carriers — Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan Mobile, and Far EasTone — backed the direction of the amendment, but all called for safeguards tied to national security, cybersecurity, communications resilience, oversight, and industrial policy. The debate is now shifting to whether those requirements will be written directly into law or left to future rules set by regulators.