Aligned published the terms for its ALIGN airdrop on Tuesday, 20 months after registration for the drop closed, but the company still did not set a launch date for the token. The Genesis Drop covers 8.74% of a fixed 10 billion ALIGN supply, with 44.36% unlocking at TGE. Aligned also outlined allocations for the main community pool, ZK Arcade, Protocol Guild, L2BEAT, ZachXBT and Zero Knowledge Podcast, while noting that the public sale site now says the sale has been canceled. The token sits with 26 holders on Ethereum and no transfers, and preview pages on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap show no price. The article also details Aligned’s two failed public sale attempts, the deprecated Proof Verification Layer, the new Proof Aggregation Service, LambdaVM progress, and the disputed Coinbase listing claims circulating on X.

Web3 recorded 182 publicly disclosed security incidents in the first half of 2026, with total losses reaching about $956 million, according to reports released by OKX Web3’s security team, SlowMist and OtterSec. The headline loss figure was down nearly 60% from a year earlier, but the decline mostly reflected the absence of a repeat of Bybit’s roughly $1.5 billion 2025 outlier. Incident count actually rose to 182 from 121, up about 50% year over year. The reports point to a structural shift in how attacks are carried out. The largest losses increasingly came from outside audited smart contracts and instead hit signing flows, cloud keys, validation paths, developer devices and users themselves. Examples cited in the reports include the roughly $285 million Drift Protocol attack, a months-long social engineering campaign centered on pre-signed transactions, and a Singapore case in which AI-generated officials appeared in a fake video conference, leading to losses of about S$4.9 million. Recovery remains rare. SlowMist said only 18 incidents in H1 resulted in stolen funds being recovered or frozen, totaling about $118 million, or 12.3% of overall losses. The rest, nearly 90%, was effectively gone. The reports also describe supply-chain poisoning, AI-assisted phishing, malicious browser extensions, recruiter scams and increasingly industrialized laundering routes involving privacy tools, cross-chain channels and OTC off-ramps.

PANews’ July 25 daily roundup collected a broad set of crypto regulatory, market, project, funding, and data developments, led by two market signals: analysts said stablecoin inflows to exchanges have fallen to their lowest level of 2025, while U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a combined net outflow of $240 million on July 24, with BlackRock’s IBIT accounting for $212 million of that figure. The report also covered a Hong Kong court sentencing Xiao Rui, son of former Wuhan supervisory official Xiao Jun, to six years and nine months in prison in a money-laundering case involving more than HK$64 million; Thailand’s SEC filing criminal complaints against Bitkub Online and two former directors over disclosures tied to a 2021 theft; and India’s move to ask GitHub to remove repositories for Bitchat, an offline messaging app backed by Jack Dorsey. On the project and corporate side, PANews highlighted Robinhood’s talks with Crypto.com on prediction markets, Across Protocol’s post-mortem on a relayer incident, LayerZero’s plan to wind down support for 20 low-activity chains, Phantom’s scheduled end of support for Monad, BlackRock’s transfer of about 3,126 BTC to Coinbase Prime, Circle’s mint of 250 million USDC, and World Foundation’s $52.5 million strategic WLD sale led by Pantera Capital. The roundup also included updates on Anduril, LMAX, B2C2, Capital Group, ARK, Kinetic Group, Bitcoin volatility, and Hyperliquid buybacks.

LayerZero said it will phase out offchain support for 20 low-activity blockchains, with the first shutdown taking effect on July 30. The move covers LayerZero Labs-operated DVN and Executor services, while Stargate v2 will also drop support for five of those chains: Botanix, EDU Chain, Aurora, Taiko, and LightLink. The company warned that users who do not bridge or redeem affected assets before each chain’s cutoff date could lose access to their funds. The timeline is split across four dates: July 30, July 31, August 28, and September 30. LayerZero also provided chain-specific instructions for Stargate users holding assets such as USDC.e, wETH, USDT, S*USDC, and S*ETH. In several cases, users are asked to bridge assets back to Stargate Pools or withdraw liquidity before support ends. LayerZero said the shutdown applies to its managed offchain services rather than onchain Endpoint contracts, which remain deployed and immutable. Even so, without official verification and execution services, cross-chain messaging on those networks will effectively lose LayerZero’s operational support. The announcement points users toward deeper-liquidity destinations including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and BSC.

Polymarket confirmed a third-party vendor compromise led to malicious code injection into its frontend, draining about $2.94M from at least 11 wallets. The platform removed the dependency, contained the incident, and promised full refunds. The breach is the 89th Q2 crypto security incident, a quarterly record.

A widely discussed commentary argues Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap failed to deliver, exposing internal conflict, weak incentives, and developer departures, while even long-time backers such as Paradigm are now linked to Layer 1 efforts.

zk-rollups move execution off-chain and post validity proofs on Ethereum, raising throughput while lowering fees. The article explains how they work, where they fall short, which projects use them, and how they compare with optimistic rollups and zkEVM efforts.

Taiko has stopped all proposers from producing new blocks after confirming a breach in its chain state verification mechanism. Security firms said the attacker moved 1.99 million TAIKO to MEXC.