Sei has completed the v6.6 mainnet upgrade and described it as the biggest version release in the roughly two years since EVM support was added in May 2024. Two of the three major upgrades under the Giga plan are now officially live. The Ares upgrade is running, with the v2 executor being gradually retired. The Eidos upgrade is also active, separating two years of on-chain state by moving EVM historical data into an independent database, so it no longer shares Cosmos state. The upgrade fixes more than 30 issues and optimizes node synchronization efficiency, consensus timeout parameters, error-prone configuration items, and data pruning. Developer-facing improvements include better receipt generation, JSON-RPC error handling, and historical call tracing.

Peking University and the YuanKong AI Agent Joint Lab have open-sourced OpenAI4S, a research agent project released on GitHub on July 6, 2026 under the MIT license. The team says the system is not just a surface-level imitation of Anthropic’s Claude Science, but an independent open implementation of a research-agent stack built around Code-as-Action, including the engine, a persistent kernel, a host-RPC protocol, and a security layer. OpenAI4S ships with a full web app, more than 30 built-in scientific skills, support for connecting a lab’s own compute resources, and versioned research artifacts. Instead of stopping at text answers, the project is designed to move a task from question to completion by letting the agent generate and run Python or R code inside a persistent environment, preserve intermediate results, and hand off notebooks for human review or editing. The project also adopts a strict no-fabrication policy. According to the release notes, it does not substitute fake data or simulated outputs when services or compute are unavailable. The team says users can route GPU-heavy workloads such as protein structure prediction and mutation scoring to their own servers, while keeping data, models, and compute inside their own environments. The repository is published at github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/OpenAI4S.

Data from SoSoValue showed that XRP spot exchange-traded funds recorded total net inflows of $1.1467 million on Aug. 3, U.S. Eastern Time. Canary XRP ETF (XRPC) was the only product to post positive flows that day, with net inflows matching the total at $1.1467 million. Its cumulative historical net inflows have now reached $468 million. As of press time, the total net asset value of XRP spot ETFs stood at $1.007 billion, while the XRP net asset ratio was 1.49%. Historical cumulative net inflows across XRP spot ETFs had reached $1.51 billion.

WuBlockchain’s July technology report mapped a broad set of protocol developments across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Zcash, NEAR, Cardano, Uniswap and Sui. On Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core v31.1 was released on July 8, 2026 with bug fixes tied to chainstate disk rewrites and an IP leak linked to the -privatebroadcast feature, while BIP-110 turned into a governance flashpoint as miner signaling stayed far below the 55% threshold. On Ethereum, the Glamsterdam upgrade moved into its final integration and performance-testing phase, Hegota remained in proposal-scope selection, and Vitalik Buterin published new pieces on Lean Ethereum, validator-state compression and privacy. The report also covered Ethereum proposals including Native UTXOs on Ethereum and EIP-8222, along with Starknet’s STRK20 privacy framework and Polygon’s Ithaca hard fork schedule. Elsewhere, Solana advanced Agave v4.2, launched Solana Governance Proposals and prepared SIMD-0286 to raise the single-block compute cap, while Zcash activated Ironwood NU6.3 on mainnet and introduced Zakura 1.0.0 as a new full-node client.

ChainFeeds’ Aug. 1 research briefing pulled together several notable threads across crypto markets, protocol history, treasury strategy, and wallet design. One featured note, citing Glassnode, said Bitcoin has moved into a "waiting mode" as risk appetite cools, with spot price sitting in the densest part of its on-chain cost basis distribution between $62,000 and $68,000. The report identified $69,000, the short-term holder cost basis, as a key line for any renewed upside. It also argued that by historical bear-market measures, the current downturn still looks relatively shallow. Another item revisited Ethereum 11 years after its genesis block on July 30, 2015, tracing where its eight co-founders are now. Vitalik Buterin remains closely tied to Ethereum, while Joseph Lubin continues building through ConsenSys. Others took different paths, including Charles Hoskinson with Cardano and Gavin Wood with Polkadot, while some founders stepped back from public crypto roles. The briefing also highlighted Strategy’s first quarterly report since STRC sharply broke from its $100 target par value. The company posted $122 million in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, but an $8.22 billion net loss tied largely to unrealized digital asset fair value changes. Management said restoring STRC toward par is now the immediate priority, while keeping its 12% annualized payout rate unchanged and building a larger cash cushion.

ChainFeeds’ July 29 research roundup brought together five separate pieces spanning venture capital, Ethereum scaling, industry narrative shifts, RWA perpetuals, and Korean equity-linked market turbulence. One section highlighted comments from Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, who argued that parts of crypto venture investing may not remain attractive forever, especially if the industry becomes dominated by large incumbent platforms and network effects by 2030. He also questioned tokenization projects built around single assets unless they can scale around assets such as U.S. Treasuries or stocks and solve distribution. Another section focused on Ethereum’s 2030 roadmap, describing a five-part vision that includes 4-second block times, a Gigagas L1 targeting roughly 1 billion gas per second, expanded blob capacity for L2s, post-quantum cryptography, and native privacy through zero-knowledge proofs. The roundup also featured an essay arguing that the “crypto utopia” narrative has faded and that the industry is moving into a more business-like consolidation phase centered on stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, perpetuals, and AI agents. The final two pieces examined the growing role of trade.xyz within Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework and a sharp move in the SKHX perpetual contract tied to a thin Korean premarket print, which ChainFeeds said triggered cascading liquidations. Together, the report presented a snapshot of how crypto capital, infrastructure, and market structure are changing in mid-2026.

Ethereum’s long-range research agenda is being consolidated into a single framework that stretches from the planned Glamsterdam upgrade in the second half of 2026 through a series of hard forks expected to run into 2029. The draft document, known as “Strawmap,” follows Justin Drake’s Lean Ethereum vision and groups the network’s ambitions into five “North Star” goals. Those goals cover a faster Layer 1 with finality cut from roughly 15 minutes to seconds, a jump in Layer 1 throughput from about 5 million gas per second to 1 billion gas per second, a Layer 2 data path that could scale to 1 GB per second, a post-quantum cryptography transition, and native privacy features at the base layer. The proposal remains a draft and is still being revised. Glamsterdam has already slipped from the first half of 2026 to the second half. Even so, the document offers one of the clearest looks yet at how Ethereum researchers see the chain evolving by 2030: a settlement-focused base layer, a larger role for ZK proofs across consensus and execution, a wider field of independent development groups alongside a smaller Ethereum Foundation, and a network designed to be faster, more trust-minimized and more resilient to future cryptographic threats.

GnosisDAO has formally introduced GIP-153, a governance proposal that asks the community for directional consensus on moving Gnosis Chain away from its current position as an independent Layer 1 and into an Ethereum Economic Zone, or EEZ, rollup. The proposal, written by Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst together with Philippe Schommers and Ben Carvill, is notable for saying plainly that Gnosis Chain’s standalone L1 positioning has failed. It argues that the chain’s promise of credible neutrality overlaps too heavily with Ethereum, while Gnosis lacks the scale and liquidity to justify carrying a full security stack on its own. The document lays out the economic pressure behind that conclusion. According to the proposal, Gnosis Chain’s fee revenue does not cover network security costs, forcing GnosisDAO’s treasury to subsidize the gap and causing about 2.3% annual dilution for non-stakers. It also points to a TVL of roughly $91 million and a GNO market capitalization of around $280 million, figures it presents as marginal in the current L1 race. Rather than becoming a standard L2, Gnosis wants to adopt the EEZ framework, whose main pitch is synchronous composability with Ethereum. If implemented, the shift would also unlock about 350,000 staked GNO, remove the existing validator set, and hand sequencing to Gnosis Ltd. Community voting is expected in August to September 2026.