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According to Bloomberg, UBS analysts expect that China's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities may struggle to make sufficient progress in the next decade to develop solutions that can truly replace ASML's advanced EUV lithography technology. UBS analysts wrote in their report, "The stage they are currently at seems comparable to ASML's in 2004." Based on patent application activities, especially in the fields of light sources and laser subsystems, China's current technological maturity is roughly equivalent to ASML's level 15 years before it began mass production of EUV equipment.UBS also expects that China is likely to achieve large-scale production capabilities for immersion DUV lithography machines within the next two to five years. While immersion DUV is not as advanced as EUV, it remains an indispensable tool for chip manufacturing. ASML's immersion DUV machines are priced at nearly $90 million, while EUV equipment costs over $200 million each. China is one of ASML's largest markets, but due to export restrictions, ASML is prohibited from selling EUV equipment to China. UBS pointed out that considering the yield and capacity gaps, as well as regulatory restrictions, Chinese lithography equipment is unlikely to be applied overseas. An ASML spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. This report is based on UBS analysts' predictive views, and actual progress will depend on industry dynamics.

The Zcash full node client team, Zakura, has released Zakura Common, a set of cryptographic and protocol libraries for the Zcash ecosystem. Official benchmarks show that the proof generation speed on mobile has increased by over 14 times (over 5 times on desktop), Sinsemilla hash speed has increased by over 21 times, decryption trial speed has increased by over 1.5 times, and zk-SNARK verification speed has increased by 4 to 8 times; in many cases, the waiting time for wallet transaction creation can be reduced from over 3 seconds to under 200 milliseconds.This upgrade does not require a network upgrade and has been open-sourced under the MIT/Apache 2.0 dual license. Zakura 1.3.0 will switch to this technology stack.

Arthur Hayes posted on the X platform that the FLOP tokenomics infographic for his AI/crypto project Flop Labs will be released this week. Hayes stated that there will be an AMA on X Spaces and YouTube next week to answer questions about the tokenomics and gather feedback to improve the design.

Cryptocurrency infrastructure provider Zerohash has resubmitted its national trust bank charter application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), marking its second attempt following the rejection of its application in July. Previously, on July 17, the OCC returned Zerohash's application, citing "insufficient materials."Zerohash stated that the return was part of an administrative process, allowing it to reapply this month, a practice coordinated with the OCC and not a judgment on the substantive content of the application, nor does it affect the company's existing operations. The company noted that the initial application covered "a wide range of digital assets and fiduciary services," and thus decided to adopt a "phased" approach, focusing on "national trust business that aligns more closely with the established launch timeline."Zerohash is a Chicago-based cryptocurrency infrastructure platform that provides backend operational support for cryptocurrency businesses to institutions such as E*Trade under Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Stripe, Interactive Brokers, and DraftKings, and it already holds a state trust bank charter.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article titled "Obfuscation (Part 3): Local Mixing," which delves into a cryptographic obfuscation technique being explored—"Local Mixing." He claims it may become a new foundational cryptographic tool following elliptic curves, RSA, and lattice-based cryptography.Vitalik states that current mainstream obfuscation techniques mainly rely on complex mathematical assumptions, often resulting in extremely high computational overhead. In contrast, Local Mixing adopts a completely different approach, not relying on elliptic curves, large integer factorization, or lattice cryptography. Instead, it draws on experiences from symmetric cryptography and hash function design, continuously shuffling, reconstructing, and hiding circuit structures to eliminate information leakage while maintaining functionality.The Local Mixing technique primarily includes steps such as reversibility, hardening, mixing, splitting, crossing walk, and "gadgetization." By introducing random structures into the circuit, rearranging logic gates, and employing nonlinear hiding mechanisms, it makes it difficult for attackers to recover the original computational logic.Vitalik points out that this technology is still in its early stages, with security not yet validated over the long term and facing challenges such as random attacks and linear analysis. However, he believes that Local Mixing represents a completely new path for cryptographic exploration, aiming to construct more efficient indistinguishable obfuscation (iO) schemes.If breakthroughs in Local Mixing technology are achieved, it could lead to new quantum-resistant public key encryption schemes and promote the development of general obfuscation techniques. The field still requires years of cryptanalysis and optimization validation, but AI-assisted research may significantly accelerate this maturation process. Vitalik states that obfuscation technology is seen as the "final frontier" of cryptography because, theoretically, other cryptographic primitives can be constructed based on obfuscation and one-way functions. Local Mixing may not only reduce the costs of traditional obfuscation schemes but could also become an important direction for future cryptographic infrastructure.

According to Cryptopolitan, cybersecurity company Adversa AI disclosed that xAI's AI assistant Grok has a security vulnerability known as "cryptographic context injection." Attackers can hide cryptographic commands within ordinary web pages, and when users request Grok to summarize the page, Grok automatically decrypts and executes the hidden commands, sending the user's name, geographical location, subscription level, and complete chat history to the attacker's server.The vulnerability was reported to xAI through the HackerOne platform on June 3, 2026. Researcher Rony Utevsky followed up on August 4 and 10, but as of August 19, the vulnerability had still not been fixed on Grok.com, and xAI had not provided a patch timeline.

South Korean enterprise-level AI data infrastructure company GraphAI announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing round, led by K2 Investment Partners, with participation from A-Ventures and Jiyu Investment, as well as previous participants in the Pre-A round, Quad Ventures, Kiwoom Investment, and We Ventures. To date, the company has raised a total of $14.7 million.GraphAI was founded in 2022 by Professor Min-Soo Kim from the KAIST School of Computing, with the goal of providing next-generation data infrastructure for enterprise AI applications by integrating the capabilities of graph databases, vector databases, and relational databases. Its Akasic platform offers an integrated solution covering enterprise data connectivity, collection, transformation, AI inference, and intelligent agent execution environments.

Justin Drake posted on the X platform that Ethereum L1 will no longer use the SNARK-friendly hash function Poseidon, which has dominated since 2019, and will instead turn to traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s.This adjustment is based on advancements in the field of SNARK design, shifting the focus from "SNARK-friendly hashing" to "hash-friendly SNARK." By aligning Boolean operations in traditional hashing with binary field native, the proof performance of traditional hashing in SNARK has reached 1 million per second, with an overhead of about 100 times.Research from Binius and Flock has driven relevant progress. The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is advancing this route, with a roadmap that includes deploying production-level leanVM in 2027, and deploying in the consensus layer, execution layer, and data processing layer in 2028.Justin Drake also stated that the enhanced capabilities of AI in cryptanalysis have recently led to setbacks for the lattice-based scheme HAWK and the homomorphic scheme SQIsign, with hash-based schemes being used for post-quantum signatures on the blockchain. The trend of open-source automated research is also accelerating, with SNARK.fast achieving 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.

The Graph QoS oracle has been down for over a month, and the official Subgraph has stopped parsing new data.

According to official news, OpenAI has released research results stating that its next-generation AI model Astra has made progress in the fields of mathematics and theoretical computer science, involving areas such as high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, group theory, quantum complexity, post-quantum cryptography, and extremal combinatorial mathematics. The 10 published results include: the high-dimensional sphere packing problem, binary and spherical coding problems, non-sofic group problems, Connes rigidity conjecture, arithmetic circuit complexity problems, quantum parallel repetition problems, nearest vector problems, Ehrhart volume conjecture, multi-color Ramsey number problems, and extremal graph theory conjectures.It is reported that these results were derived using an internal version of the Astra model, with the computational cost of finding solutions amounting to approximately $2000 (calculated based on Sol API prices).Subsequently, human researchers used the same model to assist in compiling the results into a paper and generated verifiable proof certificates through the Lean formal proof system.

According to Jinshi reports, as the demand for AI computing power surges, the global storage chip market is facing a severe supply shortage. In Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, affected by Nvidia's new round of price increase notifications, graphics card manufacturers have completely stopped bulk shipments, and the supply of spot goods has rapidly tightened.Statistics show that the prices of mainstream storage products and graphics cards continue to rise, with the price of a 1TB solid-state drive increasing from 410 yuan last September to 950 yuan, a rise of 132%; the price of 16G DDR5 memory has increased by 311%; the price of the RTX 5060 graphics card has risen by about 30%, and the price of the RTX 5080 has risen by about 50%.

According to a report by The Information citing informed sources, a Shanghai state-owned company whose name has not been disclosed has begun producing domestically-made immersion DUV lithography machines, planning to manufacture about 5 units this year and increase to about 20 units by 2027. The first batch of equipment will be delivered to major foundries such as SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor, and ChangXin Technology, but the equipment still needs to undergo verification for accuracy, stability, and production line compatibility, a process that may take several months or even longer.Currently, most components of the equipment come from domestic sources, but some key parts still rely on Japan, and the performance and manufacturing quality lag behind ASML. In comparison, ASML is set to deliver about 131 immersion DUV lithography machines as early as 2025. Although domestic equipment has made the leap from prototype testing to small-scale production, there is still a significant gap before it can replace ASML on a large scale. Previously, Reuters reported that the U.S. is considering tightening restrictions on the export of lithography equipment to China and on maintenance services in China, and the delivery of domestic equipment coincides with this backdrop.

Gate Europe CEO Dr. Giovanni Cunti was invited to participate in a live interview on Cointelegraph X Space, where he shared insights on the regulatory trends of digital assets in Europe, the MiCA compliance framework, and Gate Europe's development strategy in Europe. Dr. Giovanni Cunti stated that the implementation of MiCA is an important step towards the unification of the European market, "Unified regulation brings broader market access, and market access will further drive institutional adoption." He believes that after the adjustments made under the MiCA framework, market participants will be able to operate in a clearer and more transparent regulatory environment, providing institutional investors with a higher degree of security and trust.During the live broadcast, Dr. Giovanni Cunti also introduced the latest strategic progress of Gate Europe in the European region. He emphasized that Gate Europe proactively began compliance alignment as early as the initial phase of the MiCA framework in 2021. Leveraging the dual licensing advantages of MiCA and Payment Institutions (PI), Gate Europe is steadily strengthening compliance, risk control, and operational governance while continuously expanding digital asset trading, wealth management, and localized services, committed to providing European users with safer, more transparent, and efficient digital asset services.As the global regulatory framework for digital assets continues to improve, compliance is becoming an important foundation for the long-term development of the industry. Currently, Gate has completed regulatory registrations, license applications, or obtained authorizations and approvals in multiple jurisdictions including Europe, the United States, Japan, Dubai, Australia, and the Bahamas, continuously advancing its global compliance strategy. In the future, Gate will adhere to the parallel development of compliance and innovation, continuously enhance its global service capabilities, promote the steady development of the digital asset industry, and provide global users with safer, more efficient, and trustworthy products and services.

According to PR Newswire, QIZ Security announced the completion of a $17 million seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, Qino Cyber Capital, and others.The company positions itself as a management platform for crypto assets and post-quantum cryptography (PQC), providing continuous crypto asset discovery, risk modeling, and governance, helping large clients in finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure achieve "crypto agility" to address the risk of "Q-Day," when quantum computing capable of breaking existing encryption systems may emerge as early as 2029, and collaborates with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, IBM, and others to promote enterprise quantum security migration planning.

According to Xinhua Daily, the police in Ya'an, Sichuan have cracked a cross-border online pornography crime case. The involved pornographic comic website "Shameful Color Comics" profited by inducing teenagers to frequently make small payments, with the website receiving over 100 million visits and a financial flow exceeding 12 million yuan (approximately 1.66 million USD). The police found that individuals within the country received the illicit funds through multiple companies and personal accounts, and that Li Mouwu and others transferred the money abroad using virtual currency.Recently, the People's Court of Ming Mountain District in Ya'an City sentenced five defendants for the crimes of profiting from the distribution of obscene materials and assisting in information network crime activities. Judicial authorities are still investigating the foreign financial backers behind the website.

The court in Qujiang District, Quzhou City, Zhejiang Province, China recently ruled on a hacker case that used government and enterprise websites as a platform for pornography. The defendant, Zhou, illegally controlled over 150 servers (involving 157 government and enterprise units and well-known apps) through website vulnerabilities, batch-injecting malicious files, forcing redirection to overseas pornographic websites, and selling control permissions for profit. To evade tracking, Zhou rented a house and opened accounts using the identities of friends and relatives, arranged for accomplices to operate

On May 14, BNB Chain released the "BSC Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Report," stating that it has completed the migration testing for quantum-resistant cryptography for transaction signatures and the consensus layer, using the NIST standardized post-quantum signature algorithm ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium) and the pqSTARK aggregation scheme.The report shows that BSC has replaced transaction signatures from ECDSA to ML-DSA-44 and switched consensus voting aggregation from BLS12-381 to pqSTARK to address the potential threats posed by future quantum computing to the existing elliptic curve cryptography system. However, post-quantum signatures also significantly increase the on-chain data volume: the size of a single transaction has increased from about 110 bytes to approximately 2.5KB; the block size in a 2000 TPS scenario has increased from about 130KB to around 2MB; and the TPS in the testing environment has decreased by about 40%-50%.BSC stated that the current network bottleneck mainly comes from the larger transaction data propagation, rather than the consensus protocol itself. Meanwhile, the consensus layer aggregation still maintains high efficiency, with pqSTARK achieving a signature compression ratio of about 43:1, and the additional burden on validators remains within a controllable range. The report concludes that existing technology can achieve "quantum-resistant" deployment for blockchain, but future issues related to network bandwidth and data scalability still need to be addressed.