Rhinofi is discontinuing its retail offering at the end of July 2026, cutting off bridge access and transaction history for individual users. Anyone with funds, liquidity positions, or balances on the platform should withdraw before the deadline.

B2B clients remain unaffected and can keep using Rhinofi's Stablecoin Activation Stack by contacting the team directly.

The shutdown marks a notable exit for a bridge widely used during past airdrop farming seasons, reflecting a broader pullback among airdrop-linked infrastructure amid the current bear market.

Augustus has secured $180 million in a Series B round, reaching a $1 billion valuation, to expand its mission of providing financial institutions worldwide with programmable access to U.S. dollar accounts and payment rails.

The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from QED Investors, Hummingbird VC, Brevan Howard Digital, existing backers, and founders of Ramp, Deel, Nubank, and Circle.

The funding follows Augustus' recent conditional OCC approval for a U.S. national bank charter, supporting its vision of building a Global Dollar Bank powered by its AI-native banking platform, Marble.

COTI has launched the testnet for COTI Nightfall, an Ethereum Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Roll-up joining the COTI ecosystem as an enterprise-grade privacy layer.

Nightfall was originally built by Ernst & Young in 2019 and released to the public domain, later upgrading to a full ZK Roll-up architecture in 2025 for near-instant finality.

The latest iteration, Nightfall 4, supports private transfers across ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155, and ERC-3525 token standards, with decentralized permissioning and KYC-gating built in for regulated environments.

Rather than replacing COTI's existing Garbled Circuits (GC) mainnet, Nightfall adds a second privacy layer, creating a dual-mainnet stack:

1️⃣ GC Mainnet — fast, low-cost, scalable; built for DeFi, payments, identity, and AI applications

2️⃣ Nightfall ZK — enterprise-grade, compliance-ready privacy for institutional workflows, tokenized RWAs, and regulated payments

The COTI token will be native to both chains, bridged 1:1, with a fixed max supply and no new token minting, unifying fees, staking, governance, and privacy services across both networks.

Jack Mallers has stepped down as CEO of Twenty One Capital (NYSE: XXI), effective immediately, to focus full-time on Strike, the Bitcoin payments company he founded. Board member Raphael Zagury, CEO of Elektron Energy, has been named as his successor.

The leadership change comes alongside the collapse of a proposed three-way merger between Twenty One Capital, Strike, and Elektron Energy, first floated by Tether in April. Strike will remain an independent company, while a potential two-way combination between Twenty One and Elektron remains under preliminary evaluation.

Twenty One holds roughly 43,514 BTC (~$2.8B), making it the second-largest public Bitcoin treasury, and is backed by Tether, Bitfinex, Cantor Fitzgerald, and SoftBank.

The transition marks a strategic pivot for Twenty One, which now says it will prioritize cash-flow generation and disciplined capital allocation, building out an institutional-grade operating company around its Bitcoin balance sheet rather than being judged on holdings alone.

Anthropic has opened the first thematic call of its AI for Science program, giving researchers up to $50,000 in Claude credits over six months to work on rare genetic diseases.

The call runs two tracks: one for scientists doing basic research — with the Monarch Initiative as an early partner — and one for early-stage biotechs racing to compress drug-development timelines. Some 400M people live with one of 7,000+ rare diseases, yet each is studied in isolation. Applications are open through August 2, 2026, with credits usable on Claude Opus and other models approved for biology work.

Falcon Finance has launched Falcon Card, allowing users to spend USDf directly for everyday purchases. Users can mint USDf using eligible collateral, including stablecoins, major cryptocurrencies, tokenized gold, and supported tokenized stocks.

The card is available to verified users in 90+ jurisdictions, with no annual subscription fee (FX charges may apply). Supported collateral includes XAUt, Ondo tokenized stocks, and xStocks, while eligible card activity also earns rewards through Falcon Miles Season 2.

Falcon Card extends the utility of USDf beyond DeFi into everyday payments, adding a spending layer to the protocol's collateral infrastructure.

20 of 22 digital-asset treasuries are sitting on unrealized losses, about $30B combined at today's prices. Strategy (−$9.8B) and Bitmine (−$8.9B) carry 61% of the pain alone.

The only two names in profit? Both hold HYPE, not BTC or ETH.

Fluidstack has closed an $830M Series A at a $7.5B valuation, led by Situational Awareness — the AGI-focused fund from ex-OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. The company builds compute infrastructure for the world’s leading AI labs, aiming to be the fastest on the planet at deploying hundreds of gigawatts of compute.

Fluidstack said the raise came “with participation from world-leading investors” but named only the lead. Bloomberg earlier reported the round’s backers include Stripe’s Collison brothers, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and AI investor Daniel Gross, with Google also weighing a stake; Goldman Sachs advised on the deal.

Samsung Electronics has set up a dedicated robotics division reporting straight to its CEO, aiming to make humanoid robots and AI a core growth engine.

The new RX (“Robotics eXperience”) unit will run Samsung’s mid- to long-term robotics strategy. It is led by EVP Lee Dongkun, who previously headed robotics strategy at Hyundai Motor Group, including its direction of Boston Dynamics. Samsung will deploy humanoids first in its factories, then move into home and retail, with agentic AI reshaping its plants by 2030. Its new “Shallow-π” tech cuts robot-control compute to a third.

Bybit has acquired a majority stake in Indonesian crypto exchange NOBI, rebranding it as Bybit Indonesia and launching a locally regulated platform under OJK supervision.

The world’s #2 exchange by volume enters a market of 21M+ registered crypto users, rolling out in phases from 500+ trading pairs. It is led by ex-NOBI executives Lawrence Samantha (CEO) and Dionisius Evan (COO). The deal fits Bybit’s regulatory-first playbook of entering new markets through licensed local entities — Indonesia saw roughly $26.85B in crypto transactions in 2025.