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According to Cointelegraph, Iran has designated Bitcoin for paying the oil transit fees in the Strait of Hormuz, but insiders say that most of the funds are still settled through stablecoins.Hamid Hosseini, spokesperson for the Iranian Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters Union, stated that each tanker must report its cargo information to Iranian authorities via email, after which Iran will inform the amount of the fee to be paid, which must be paid in cryptocurrency. "Once the email arrives and Iran completes the assessment, the vessel will be given a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin, ensuring that it cannot be tracked or confiscated due to sanctions."

Three sources revealed that Anthropic is exploring the possibility of designing its own chips. This plan is still in the early stages, and Anthropic may ultimately decide to only procure AI chips instead of designing them in-house. Another source indicated that Anthropic has not yet determined a specific design plan and has not yet assembled a dedicated team for the project.

Binance founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) recalls in his new book that from the very beginning, the positioning of BNB was larger than the Binance exchange itself. He wrote in the white paper: BNB does not represent equity. As a utility token, holders can enjoy fee discounts when trading on Binance, and the application scenarios of BNB will not be limited to the exchange; in the future, it will also expand to the blockchain and DeFi ecosystem.

According to The Block, B2C2, a liquidity provider under SBI Holdings, has designated Solana as the primary network for large stablecoin settlements for its institutional clients. B2C2 provides market-making services for platforms such as Robinhood and collaborates with Standard Chartered, Anchorage Digital, Bitget, and others.The company will prioritize supporting stablecoins issued on Solana, including USDC, USDT, PYUSD, USDG, USD1, EURC, FDUSD, and other new varieties in the future. The report noted that Solana has seen an increase in activity for stablecoin settlements recently, with stablecoin trading volume reaching approximately $650 billion in February, but its stablecoin market capitalization still significantly lags behind Ethereum and Tron.

The first AI skill application store designed specifically for Chinese users—RenrenSkill officially announces its public beta. The platform is fully adapted to the Chinese environment, providing a complete experience for browsing, installing, learning, using, sharing, and creating.RenrenSkill uniquely creates three tiered sections: "Easy to Get Started, Advanced Players, Hardcore Geeks," precisely meeting the diverse needs from complete beginners to hardcore developers. In addition to a conversational installation experience that takes effect in seconds, RenrenSkill has also built a friendly community ecosystem where "everyone can create," supporting users to easily build their own exclusive Skills. In the future, it will also open up tipping and monetization mechanisms.Currently, users can visit the official website or follow the WeChat public account: RenrenSkill to learn about the latest developments on the platform. Start your low-threshold, high-efficiency AI skills journey.

Former Base design director Benji Taylor stated that he has joined the X platform and will lead the design team, "looking forward to working closely with Elon Musk, Nikita Bier, and other team members."

According to Reuters, Anthropic filed a lawsuit on Monday attempting to prevent the Pentagon from placing it on a national security blacklist, escalating the high-stakes confrontation between the AI lab and the U.S. military over restrictions on the use of its technology.The Pentagon officially designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk last Thursday, restricting a technology that, according to insiders, is being used for military operations in Iran. Anthropic claims in the lawsuit that this designation is illegal and infringes on its rights to free speech and due process. The documents submitted to the federal court in California request that the judge overturn the designation and prevent federal agencies from enforcing it.Anthropic stated, "These actions are unprecedented and illegal. The Constitution does not allow the government to wield its immense power to punish a company for its protected speech."Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listed Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk last week after the company refused to remove restrictions on its AI for use in autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance. This designation poses a significant threat to Anthropic's government business, and the outcome could affect how other AI companies negotiate restrictions on the military use of their technology.However, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clarified on Thursday that the designation has a "limited scope," and the company can still use its tools in projects unrelated to the Pentagon.

According to Jinshi News, Nasdaq has announced the launch of equity token design, aimed at providing investors with new investment options.

Ethereum founder Vitalik stated, "I think it's a good thing for the Ethereum community to have a bolder and more open mindset, especially regarding the application layer and how we view our place in the world. We should not compromise on core attributes: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security (CROPS). Especially at the application layer and in the interface between Ethereum and the outside world, we should be more willing to thoroughly rethink various concepts and step out of our comfort zone.Last year, we began to prioritize privacy and give it equal importance to other types of security. This means that the Ethereum application stack will undergo fundamental changes, as the entire stack has not been built around privacy so far. Great, let's build a completely different Ethereum application stack. An example this year is rethinking the role of L2 from scratch and determining which types of L2 can truly create the greatest synergy and benefits with Ethereum. This also includes cultural factors.For me and others, this is an important part of the "milady" concept. Write down your inherent notions of "decency," crumple them up, and burn them. This mental cleansing will lead to an intellectual cleansing, thereby sparking greater creativity and broadening perspectives. For a long time, our algorithm on Ethereum has been: we have an existing ecosystem, what should we do next to make it better? Now, our algorithm should be: we have a fantastic L1 layer, and it will become even better; we have more and more tools, including those developed inside and outside the ecosystem; based on what we currently know, what is the most valuable?If you were to write the section on applications from the 2014 Ethereum white paper, starting from first principles in areas like DeFi, decentralized social, and identity verification, what would you write? At the very least, please exclude all path dependency issues, assuming the Ethereum chain is currently unused, and you are the first to propose or build the first applications, and see what you would ultimately write. Even if you are currently building existing applications, please do this. This is the secret to revitalizing Ethereum."

Founder of Venice AI, Erik Voorhees, posted on the X platform that the OpenClaw documentation shows Venice has been set as the recommended model provider, with the default being venice/llama-3.3-70b and "best overall" being venice/claude-opus-45.Market data shows that Venice Token (VVV) has risen by 14.3% in the past 24 hours and 70.4% in the past 7 days.

The 60,000 Bitcoin money laundering case will have a "legal applicability issue" hearing in July, with the UK High Court confirming that Fieldfisher, which was involved in the case earlier, will serve as the lead law firm for the hearing. However, the proposal of the lead law firm has sparked controversy, with some law firms concerned that Fieldfisher may gain an information advantage, such as a list of large investment victims, and even take the opportunity to "poach clients" by improperly "inducing" victims to switch law firms.The judge believes that this arrangement does not designate Fieldfisher to represent all victims' asset recovery claims, but only to negotiate with the court on behalf of all victims regarding the "legal applicability issue." Other law firms will still handle their clients' claims individually, and the selection of a lead law firm is intended to improve litigation efficiency.

According to Cointelegraph, the XRP Ledger has launched a decentralized exchange (DEX) designed specifically for regulated institutions.

According to market news, Coinbase has announced the launch of "Agentic Wallets," a wallet infrastructure designed for autonomous AI agents, enabling AI agents to independently hold funds, send payments, trade tokens, earn yields, and conduct on-chain transactions.The tool is built on the x402 protocol developed in collaboration with other internet institutions, aiming to achieve "autonomous crypto payments without human intervention." Agentic Wallets are plug-and-play solutions that can configure wallets for any agent and execute transactions on behalf of users. Users can pre-set permissions, and agents will operate autonomously within secure boundaries, such as automatically adjusting positions when better yield opportunities are detected.The tool supports EVM-compatible chains and Solana, and enables gas-free transactions on the Coinbase-incubated Base Layer 2 network. The system includes built-in intelligent security protections, such as programmable spending limits, session caps, and transaction controls, with private keys always stored within Coinbase's secure infrastructure, not exposed to agents or large language models.The development team stated that agents are evolving from "advisors" to "executors," transitioning from "assistive tools" to "systems that operate autonomously within trust boundaries."

According to market disclosure data, Bitmine, the ETH treasury company, has an unrealized loss of up to $6.6 billion in its ETH holdings. The company's chairman, Tom Lee, responded on the X platform, stating that some market views misunderstand the operational logic of the Ethereum treasury. Bitmine's core goal is to track ETH prices and strive for outperformance over a complete market cycle. It is normal for ETH prices to decline in sync during a downturn in the crypto market.The "unrealized losses" in ETH holdings that Bitmine is experiencing at this stage are not a systemic flaw but rather a part of the product design. He also questioned whether similar criticism should be directed at index ETFs that incur losses during downturns.Tom Lee previously emphasized that Bitmine has no liabilities, and given the strengthening fundamentals of Ethereum, the recent market pullback is "very attractive." In the long term, Ethereum will still be an important infrastructure for the future financial system.

Vitalik Buterin proposed the main patterns for the future of on-chain mechanism design: mechanisms similar to prediction markets that maximize openness and accountability (anyone can buy and sell, good decisions make money, bad decisions lose money), suitable for being a "decentralized execution layer"; decentralized, diversified, non-tokenized preference settings (anonymous voting, preferably MACI to prevent collusion), maximizing intrinsic motivation space, avoiding token holders from monopolizing control. Prediction markets are the best primitive for achieving "decentralized governance."

According to market news, an unknown contract on the BSC chain was exploited, and the hacker executed two reverse transactions through a flaw in the "burn pair" mechanism, ultimately resulting in a loss of approximately $100,000.The attacker first drained PGNLZ, then triggered the destruction of PGNLP and manipulated the price, thereby siphoning off most of the USDT from the liquidity pool.

According to Bitsmedia, the Office of the Attorney General of Russia has listed the Ukrainian cryptocurrency exchange WhiteBit as an undesirable organization. The regulator believes that the exchange has been used to illegally transfer funds out of Russia, including to finance the Ukrainian armed forces. The Russian side has also included WhiteBit's parent company W Group and all its affiliates and subsidiaries on the list.The Attorney General's Office stated that since 2022, the management of WhiteBit has transferred approximately $11 million to the Ukrainian military, of which about $900,000 was used for the procurement of drones, and claimed that the platform cooperates with the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to provide technical support for the United24 crypto donation platform. Currently, there are no registered cryptocurrency exchanges under Russian law. The Central Bank of Russia hopes that legal amendments to regulate exchanges and cryptocurrency traders can be completed by July 1. The Central Bank of Russia plans to hold intermediary institutions in the crypto market accountable for illegal activities starting from July 1, 2027.

According to the official announcement, the fourth phase of the trading mining activity for Sun Wukong (SunX) will be held from January 22, 20:00 to January 29, 20:00 (UTC+8). During the event, users participating in BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT perpetual contract trading will receive a full refund of transaction fees, and an additional reward of $SUN tokens equivalent to 266,000 USDT will be distributed. The daily mining activity starts at T day 20:00 (UTC+8) and ends at T+1 day 20:00 (UTC+8). Rewards are settled hourly, with a Maker order reward ratio of 110% and a Taker order reward ratio of 107%.In addition, during the event, all transaction fee income generated by registered users will be used for the repurchase of $SUN tokens to support the stable growth of the $SUN token value. The repurchase of $SUN tokens will take place within Huobi HTX, and the repurchased $SUN tokens will be fully destroyed, with the destruction occurring at the end of each quarter.

BC.GAME today released a public letter to the community, stating that it will return to the "hardcore" product route and launch the "Zero Edge Plan." The letter mentioned that the platform "may have lost its soul" in the pursuit of scale and expressed its intention to return more initiative to the community.According to the introduction, the platform will allocate 1 billion platform tokens to the community; and in designated games, through the Tacoback mechanism, it will return 100% of the house edge to users, emphasizing a closer experience to "pure fairness." In addition, BC.GAME also previewed the advancement of the "Bet Anything" mapping/synthesis betting platform, low-threshold prediction markets, and "Trustless Trust" decentralized architecture, aimed at more open gameplay and community participation.

According to CoinPost, Japan's Minister of Finance, Shunichi Suzuki, stated during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Stock Exchange's first trading day of the New Year that 2026 is positioned as the "Digital Year."Suzuki mentioned that for the public to enjoy the benefits of digital assets and blockchain assets, commodity and securities exchanges need to play an important role, expressing hope for the popularization of cryptocurrencies and digital assets through exchange infrastructure. She pointed out that in the United States, crypto assets have become a means for the public to combat inflation through ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds), suggesting that Japan may take similar measures. Suzuki also stated that as the Minister of Finance, she will fully support the efforts of exchanges to build a trading environment utilizing cutting-edge financial technology and looks forward to the stock market reaching new highs this year.