Bifu is trying to push its identity beyond that of a conventional crypto exchange. In an interview with Foresight News, the company’s CEO said the platform is built around “financial inclusion,” a concept he described as giving ordinary users access to quality assets, strategies, and trading infrastructure that have often been concentrated among institutions and high-net-worth investors. The executive said Bifu is expanding through a two-engine structure. One side connects to external liquidity and brokered markets for products with established pricing, including contracts for difference and prediction markets. The other side focuses on Bifu’s own liquidity, pricing, and matching capabilities for unpriced primary assets as well as standardized products such as spot and derivatives. These components feed into BiNet, the firm’s broader trading network, which is designed to place crypto, foreign exchange, commodities, stock CFDs, real-world assets, and prediction markets under one account and one pool of funds after a single identity verification. The interview also covered the company’s rebrand from “exchange” to “trading network,” its plans for trader incubation, live content, instant messaging, and AI agents, and its view on trust and compliance. In the near term, Bifu said it relies on group-level operating history, asset segregation, custody, and compliance planning. Longer term, the CEO said the company wants to move from being merely trustable to becoming trustless through a protocol-based exchange structure in which rules and asset flows are enforced by mechanisms rather than brand promises.

Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck and manager of the VanEck Onchain Economy ETF (NODE), said the current AI infrastructure trade should not be viewed as a replay of the 19th-century railroad bubble. In his view, the key difference is funding: this cycle is backed by private-sector contracts, multi-year backlog, customer prepayments, and in some cases customer-supplied GPUs, rather than government-led land grants and speculative bond issuance. Sigel said the four largest cloud providers now hold more than $2 trillion in signed backlog, with Microsoft and Oracle accounting for roughly half. Sigel also argued that crypto’s weak tone is not mainly a macro story. He said institutions have grown disappointed with major Layer 1 networks after many tokens doubled following the election without a breakout application or a clear wave of new capital formation. VanEck has reduced exposure to Solana, ETH, and other mainstream L1s since the election, while paying closer attention to enterprise-chain efforts tied to Circle, Stripe, Robinhood, and even Wells Fargo. He said regulated institutions do not want to place significant value directly on open networks and often need to support several chains at once, which weakens the winner-take-all case for any single L1. On portfolio positioning, Sigel said NODE has outperformed Bitcoin by nearly 100 percentage points over the past 15 months, largely by identifying the undervalued power and land controlled by Bitcoin miners shifting toward AI data center use.

A WuBlockchain-republished feature argues that the latest wave of layoffs across Web3 has been framed as an AI story on the surface, while the deeper driver is financial pressure and a weakening business model across much of the industry. The report says crypto exchanges and related firms have spent more than half a year cutting teams, reorganizing departments, and tightening internal controls, with employees often losing access to Slack, email, and internal systems before they even receive formal notice. Several named interview subjects in the article, identified by pseudonyms including Kevin, Richard, Xiaoyu, and John, describe abrupt dismissals, disputed severance, and a workplace culture where performance reviews, surveillance software, and difficult KPI structures can be used to turn layoffs into “performance-based” exits. The piece also ties the employment shock to broader structural changes in crypto. It says exchange revenues that once depended heavily on trading fees and listing fees are under pressure as retail participation weakens, token quality deteriorates, liquidity dries up, and onchain derivatives platforms such as Hyperliquid pull activity away from centralized venues. Coinbase’s May announcement of about 700 global job cuts, described by the company as an “AI-native reorganization,” is cited alongside claims from former employees and people familiar with the matter that the impact in India was much larger. The article ultimately argues that AI has become a convenient label, while the harder issue is that parts of Web3 no longer generate durable revenue in the way they once did.

Binance-affiliated entities have opened legal action against RedotPay’s co-founders in Hong Kong, with a parallel case also moving ahead in Singapore, according to a Bloomberg-cited report carried by WuBlockchain. The dispute centers on RedotPay’s card top-up flow tied to Binance Pay and whether the funds involved were properly segregated. The claim totals $472.8 million. The figure was reportedly calculated by assigning a $925 lifetime value, or LTV, to each of roughly 470,000 users that Binance says were diverted into the RedotPay system. The report says this kind of user-value model is common in internet litigation, though far less typical in crypto disputes. The case lands at a sensitive moment for RedotPay. The company is described in the article as a crypto payments unicorn targeting a valuation above $4 billion in a planned U.S. IPO. The same report lists more than 6 million users, about $10 billion in annualized payment volume, and annualized revenue above $150 million. RedotPay has said it will actively defend against all allegations and that day-to-day operations remain unaffected. Still, the lawsuit now hangs over its listing plans.

A busy news cycle from Aug. 6 to Aug. 7 brought a mix of crypto regulation, market structure, corporate disclosures, and AI-linked developments. Dow Protocol said claims that OKX Ventures had invested in the project were false and said a list of investors would be released this week without OKX Ventures on it. The U.S. Senate, meanwhile, decided to delay a vote on the Clarity Act until September, extending uncertainty around a major federal crypto bill. Outside Washington, Thailand confirmed a five-year capital gains tax exemption on crypto trades executed through Thai SEC-licensed venues from Jan. 1, 2025 through Dec. 31, 2029. MetaMask introduced a self-custodial AI wallet that lets agents execute on-chain transactions within user-defined limits, and Wintermute registered a broker-dealer subsidiary with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. The update set also included Binance Alpha’s AGT and AIA blind box airdrop, Cipher Digital’s sale of 1,619 BTC at a realized loss, a Chainalysis report on more than $30 million in violent robbery losses targeting crypto holders in the first half of 2026, Bernstein’s renewed $140 target on Circle, and several funding, hardware, and security stories tied to the broader AI sector.

Step App, a Move-to-Earn app, has announced it will shut down after four years of operation. The platform surpassed 1 million downloads, tracked tens of billions of steps, and helped bring Web2 and Web3 fitness together. All services will stop before Aug. 21, 2026, and users are urged to unstake locked tokens and manage exchange positions by then.

Step App has announced its official closure after four years of operation. All services will stop on Aug. 21, according to PANews. Users are asked to unstake all locked tokens and sort out their exchange positions before the shutdown date. Step App says the platform accumulated more than 1 million downloads and tracked billions of steps, contributing to the Move-to-Earn (M2E) sector and acting as a bridge between Web2 and Web3.

Grvt is building a different kind of onchain exchange on ZKsync. Rather than chasing trading volume alone, the platform is combining perpetual futures with yield-bearing collateral, tokenized stocks, credit products, and treasury-linked instruments in an effort to give retail users a single venue for trading and wealth storage. The article, written by Joel John and Vaidik Mandloi and translated by TechFlow, places Grvt in a broader shift in market structure: exchange commissions have been driven toward zero over time, pushing platforms to look beyond fees and toward interest income, float economics, and product distribution. Against that backdrop, Grvt is presented as an experiment in rebuilding broker and bank functions with tokenized assets. The piece says Grvt processes a little over $1 billion in daily trading volume, has about $46 million in TVL, and roughly $348 million in open interest. It also notes that the company had nearly 90,000 users at the time of writing and had raised about $33.3 million across all rounds, including a $19 million Series A led by ZKsync in September 2025. More broadly, the article argues that crypto’s next battleground may shift from raw infrastructure to distribution, retention, and products that let users earn yield, keep liquidity, and trade without giving up self-custody.