Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon used a recent interview to press for a more durable US crypto regulatory framework, arguing that the industry has outgrown its early experimental phase and now needs federal rules that support legitimate business activity without repeating failures such as FTX. Andreessen revisited his 2014 essay, "Why Bitcoin Matters," and said crypto has evolved from an emerging technology into a mature industry. He warned that expanding liability for developers whose open-source software is misused would chill innovation, drawing a parallel to the period after HTTPS restrictions were lifted, when the US went on to lead e-commerce development. Dixon said crypto has shifted from subculture to financial infrastructure, pointing to stablecoins as a tool for near-free, instant global transfers with volumes that can rival Visa. He added that the GENIUS Act has brought more clarity to stablecoins and helped drive adoption, but said the broader market still lacks a federal framework. Both argued that the CLARITY Act would define the roles of the SEC and CFTC, set different rules for centralized and decentralized tokens, and give builders longer-term certainty.

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.

Ethereum’s 11th year is shaping up as a transition point on two fronts: protocol design and institutional structure. Over the past year, the network activated Fusaka on mainnet, adding PeerDAS and later raising blob targets and gas limits to prepare Ethereum for more Layer 2 data throughput. At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation completed a broad reorganization, cut staff by 54 people, and narrowed its internal scope while related work moved into independent groups including Ethlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and EthSystems. A longer-range technical debate is also taking shape. Justin Drake’s Lean Ethereum vision and the EF Architecture-maintained Strawmap have pushed discussion toward finality, execution design, cryptography, state models, privacy, and post-quantum resilience. Vitalik Buterin has described this phase as a possible “third major iteration” after early Ethereum and The Merge, while stressing that the ideas remain under discussion rather than fixed commitments. Current network data helps explain why this phase matters. Ethereum mainnet still carries roughly half of global stablecoin supply by the cited datasets, leads tokenized real-world assets on RWA.xyz, and remains the top single network by DeFi TVL, even as a large share of execution has shifted to L2s. The next upgrades, Glamsterdam and later Hegotá, are expected to continue that redesign.

ZAMA climbed from $0.035 to above $0.065 in less than two days, setting a new all-time high and rising nearly 100%, according to Foresight News. The token’s market capitalization reached $188 million and its fully diluted valuation rose to $700 million. The rally has brought renewed attention to Zama’s core pitch: adding practical confidentiality to public blockchains through fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, without requiring users to move assets to a new chain. A major catalyst was the July 23 launch of the test version of Confidential RFQ, an on-chain sealed-bid request-for-quote protocol designed for larger trades. Zama said 100% of trading fees generated by Confidential RFQ will be used to buy back and burn ZAMA, with no front-end fees. The protocol currently supports cUSDT/cUSDC, cZAMA/cUSDC and pairs tied to confidential yield positions, while a public release is scheduled for September. The project has also highlighted operating milestones across the network, including confidential stablecoin transfers, a confidential USDC vault built with Morpho and Steakhouse, compliance wallet screening with Elliptic, and a confidential transfer benchmark of about 1,000 TPS on commodity GPUs. Foresight’s report also pointed to staking growth, shielded TVL in the $40 million to $50 million range, and token unlocks that keep larger allocations locked until Feb. 2, 2027.

Anthropic said an unreleased version of its Claude Mythos model uncovered two previously unknown cryptographic attacks, including one against HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature scheme now in the third round of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s competition. According to the company, Claude identified a symmetry in HAWK’s structure that cuts the cost of recovering a secret key in the smallest configuration from 2^64 operations to 2^38, a roughly 67 million-fold reduction. Anthropic said fixing the issue would require roughly doubling HAWK’s key size, which would undercut the compactness and speed that make the scheme attractive for blockchains and other systems sensitive to signature size. The company also described a separate result on a 7-round research version of AES-128, where Claude was asked to avoid all five established families of AES cryptanalysis and invent a new approach. Anthropic said the model eventually produced a technique called “Möbius Bridge,” reducing one of the nine key bytes an attacker previously needed to guess. It also reported that Claude broke 13 rounds of LEA, though deployed LEA uses 24 rounds. Anthropic said it disclosed the findings to the algorithms’ authors and relevant U.S. government and industry partners before publication, and coordinated the HAWK finding with NIST.

Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison said blockchains may need to handle 1 billion transactions per second if AI agents take over most online commerce, far beyond the capacity of today’s leading networks.

Bitcoin stands at $66,312 as Strategy loads 45,000 BTC in 30 days; SOL trades at $82 with Firedancer surpassing 1 million TPS. Meme coin Pepeto raises over $8 million in presale, claiming its co-founder built the original Pepe coin to $11 billion market cap.

CoinUp released its 2025 annual report, revealing over 10 million users, $5 billion peak daily trading volume, and a Form D filing with the SEC. Second-tier exchanges are closing the gap with top platforms through security, compliance, and sustainable strategies.