BNB Chain’s BSC mainnet will activate the Pasteur upgrade at 02:30 UTC on 25 August 2026. All mainnet nodes must be upgraded to v1.7.7 before that time. The upgrade tightens cross-chain verification and validator key-rotation rules. It also increases the number of transactions each block can carry while keeping the block time at 450ms.

Noncustodial Bitcoin bridge Boltz suspended its Bitcoin swap service on August 3 after suffering losses from AI-assisted attacks. The five-person, bootstrapped team said the risk was borne entirely by the project, while its design kept customer funds out of reach. Boltz had already disabled certain EVM swaps on August 1 to address a bug, but later said the issue had widened to the broader service. A group of veteran Bitcoiners is now preparing to take over the project.

Algorand’s development team has rolled out the v5.0.0 mainnet upgrade, replacing its prior flat-fee rule for all transactions with a fixed-point multiplier fee mechanism. Under the new model, fees are tied to actual computation and storage resource usage, aiming to improve the network’s economic design and add pricing flexibility for more complex on-chain operations. The upgrade also includes changes to inner transactions and consensus-layer improvements, marking Algorand’s move toward native quantum resistance.

Shares of several bitcoin mining companies have risen as they reposition existing power and site capacity to supply AI computing infrastructure. Riot Platforms surged 24% in after-hours trading after a 20-year, $9.1 billion agreement with Anthropic for 191 megawatts of computing capacity, Bloomberg reported. IREN climbed close to 10% this week after securing a $3.4 billion cloud contract with Nvidia. Other miners including Hut 8, Bitfarms and Core Scientific have also posted sizable gains this year as the AI shift becomes a key growth driver.

MARA Holdings said it has pledged 18,750 bitcoin as collateral to secure bitcoin-backed loans, with proceeds earmarked for its expansion plans in artificial intelligence and energy. The collateralized borrowing is intended to support MARA’s investment in AI computing and energy infrastructure. The move highlights bitcoin’s growing use as an institutional-grade collateral asset.

Ethereum improvement proposal EIP-8363 would dynamically burn consensus rewards as total staking rises, potentially taking net staking yield to zero as staked ETH approaches 50% of supply. As of Aug. 8, about 41.18 million ETH was staked out of a total supply of 120.68 million ETH, or roughly 34.13%. SharpLink has disclosed plans to stake $100 million in ETH and pair it with $25 million in outside capital for DeFi liquidity protocols and other onchain strategies, according to a May SEC filing.

Bitcoin faces the risk of a BIP-110 soft fork activation, a proposal designed to cap the amount of arbitrary data that can be included in transactions. Activation requires a 55% threshold, but as of Thursday only 2.56% of blocks signaled support. About 22.65% of nodes run the Knots client and are expected to start rejecting blocks without a specific signal beginning at block height 961,632, raising the possibility that enforcement by a minority could still trigger a network split. With Bitcoin’s market cap around $1.3 trillion, any fork would introduce significant uncertainty.

Latest data show that 10% to 23% of blocks on the Solana network per hour consume compute units (CU) above the previous 60 million limit. The shift indicates a marked rise in on-chain smart contract complexity, the intensity of parallel execution, and dApp activity. As Solana’s native token, SOL’s value thesis is closely tied to network throughput, resource utilization, and ecosystem activity. The data are framed as a positive technical signal, with no reference to tokenomics changes or regulatory events.