This week’s project updates spanned layoffs, product launches, protocol restructuring, security findings, and corporate actions across the crypto sector. Pump.fun was reported to have cut staff in early April, about two months before its first PUMP token unlock, with at least one former employee allegedly missing out on token allocations worth more than $1 million at current prices. Uniswap rolled out a beta token launch aggregation feature called Launches on Robinhood Chain and, separately, introduced Earn in partnership with Morpho, allowing users to deposit USDC, USDT, and ETH into Gauntlet-managed vaults from the Uniswap app and wallet. Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the protocol has brought in Zapper’s entire engineering team and is preparing to launch Aave Pro. At the same time, Aave plans to retire 50 low-adoption reserves, wind down deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, and delist 21 expired Pendle PT positions. Other developments included 1inch opening its self-custodial liquidity layer Aqua to all users, Storj Labs filing for Chapter 11 reorganization in the United States, Metronome’s msUSD briefly trading about 11% below its peg, Ondo Finance reviewing a potential $250 million to $500 million acquisition, and Nansen’s CEO saying AI trading agents could outnumber human traders within about two years.

July 31 brought a dense mix of crypto, equity-market, and policy headlines. On the corporate side, Coinbase reported $1.22 billion in second-quarter revenue, down 14% from the prior quarter and below the $1.29 billion expected by the market, while Strategy posted an $8.2 billion quarterly loss tied mainly to unrealized losses on its Bitcoin holdings and said it held 843,775 BTC at the latest disclosure. In one of the day’s most closely watched cross-market stories, people familiar with the matter said Citadel had acquired most of the equity portfolio of Situational Awareness, the $24 billion hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, after losses tied to AI-related trades. Elsewhere, Aave said it would retire 50 low-adoption reserves and wind down deployments on six chains, Uniswap launched a beta product for token launches, and ENS DAO proposed creating a full-time operating foundation. On the policy front, U.S. senators submitted a new compromise proposal tied to ethics provisions in the Clarity Act, while South Korea said it had completed a draft digital asset framework bill and is also considering rules that could cover AI agent payments and suspicious-account payment freezes.

Aave is removing a broad set of underused markets after what founder Stani Kulechov described as a full review. In a post on X on July 30, Kulechov said the protocol will retire 50 low-adoption asset reserves across multiple deployments. At the same time, Aave is winding down its deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium and Aptos, affecting another 25 asset reserves. The cleanup also covers 21 expired Pendle PT tokens, which Aave said will be removed to make room for new expiry products. In total, the changes touch $98.1 million in supplied assets and $15.6 million in debt. Kulechov said the move is part of Aave’s new risk framework and its technical asset listing framework, with the goal of reducing the protocol’s economic and technical risk exposure. He added that Aave will keep conducting ongoing risk reviews for all assets across all of its deployments.

Amazon is overhauling its artificial intelligence strategy, scaling back most of its in-house flagship Nova models and redirecting engineering talent and computing resources toward a new "Frontier Model Research" initiative, according to a Business Insider report citing people familiar with the matter. The shift affects Premier and Omni, two high-end Nova models, along with Reel for video generation and Canvas for image generation. Some employees said those products have been moved into KTLO, or "Keep The Lights On," meaning Amazon will continue basic support for existing customers but no longer treat them as core development priorities. The report said Amazon is not abandoning the Nova brand entirely. Nova 2 Sonic, Nova 2 Lite, Nova Forge, and the AI agent technology Nova Act are expected to remain in operation. Resources freed up by the change are being redirected to the Frontier Model Research, or FMR, project, led by Pieter Abbeel, who joined Amazon through its acquisition of robotics AI startup Covariant. Business Insider said the team is building a new flagship foundation model that Amazon plans to unveil at its re:Invent conference this fall. The strategic reset comes after layoffs and management changes inside Amazon’s AGI organization. The company said AI models remain one of its most important areas of work and that it will keep adjusting its model lineup based on customer demand.

Sonic Labs said Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson have resigned from the board, with Matt Visser named CEO. Cronje said his work was focused on architecture and development, not token migration, airdrop planning or tokenomics decisions.

Kraken listed GENIUS with USD and EUR pairs on May 15, 2026, but the token fell 9.77% in 24 hours to $0.456. Traders are now watching support near $0.45 while attention builds around Genius Terminal’s second airdrop season.

Sonic Labs shifts from a gas-fee-only model to vertical integration, building or acquiring apps to route all ecosystem revenue to the S token. The FeeM mechanism burns leftover fees to boost scarcity, aiming for sustainable token growth.

Capital rotation marked the final week of July as Pump.fun, Ethena, and Story Protocol surged while Conflux, Sonic, and Curve DAO declined. Bitcoin stayed range-bound between $118K and $120K with total market cap resilient at $3.89T.