Solana Foundation: Core Goal Is to Attract Talent and Capital, Will Not Back a Single Team via 'Creating a God'

Coinbase announced the phased deployment of a new-generation high-performance matching engine on Deribit. Built on dedicated infrastructure, the engine can process over 100,000 orders per second with a matching latency of less than 1 millisecond, designed to enhance execution speed, scalability, and liquidity performance for institutional derivatives trading. This upgrade also integrates Deribit into the same core execution infrastructure as Coinbase International Exchange. Coinbase noted that the new engine adds a built-in "speed bump" mechanism to select trading products, which briefly delays active orders to give liquidity providers more response time in fast, volatile markets, and is expected to help market makers offer tighter bid-ask spreads and deeper order books. The company added that all its perpetual contracts will also migrate to this matching engine later this year. Once the migration is complete, options and perpetual contracts will share a more unified trading infrastructure, enabling a more consistent trading experience, broader product coverage, and deeper liquidity.

According to an official announcement, Bitget has launched two TradFi Quanto perpetual contracts: CSOPSK2LHKD (2x long SK Hynix) and CSOPSS2LHKD (2x long Samsung Electronics), supporting up to 20x leverage and 24/7 trading. These TradFi Quanto perpetual contracts enable users to directly trade non-US dollar-denominated overseas stocks, such as Hong Kong-listed equities, using USDT, with no foreign currency conversion required throughout the process. The contracts are quoted in local currencies including Hong Kong dollars and Japanese yen, while margin deposits and profit/loss settlements are all completed in USDT, simplifying the trading workflow and effectively avoiding additional risks from exchange rate fluctuations.

Bitcoin has fallen roughly 27% year-to-date, with its price retreating below $64,000. In addition to over $4.4 billion in net outflows from U.S. spot crypto ETFs, sales by long-dormant holders and digital asset treasury firms, listed Bitcoin miners have emerged as a less-discussed supply source in the market. According to Blockware Intelligence data, listed miners held a combined ~127,000 BTC at the start of the year, a figure that has since dropped to 99,000 BTC. This translates to roughly 28,000 BTC sold year-to-date, worth around $1.78 billion at current prices. Blockware Solutions’ research team noted: “The sales by listed miners since the start of the year are an underdiscussed factor weighing on Bitcoin’s weak price performance in 2026.” Miners’ profitability is also under pressure, with the average cost to mine one BTC standing at roughly $74,300. A growing number of miners are shifting to AI operations, leveraging the high-voltage power resources they have secured to support this transition. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has dropped roughly 18% from its November peak, with the decline in hash rate marking one of the longest such stretches on record. Blockware stated that competition has eased following the exit of large miners, and active operators are now earning roughly 18% more BTC than they were 10 months ago, leading to improved mining economics.

According to disclosures from Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX), H&H International Investment, LLC—managed by Chinese investor Duan Yongping—increased its stake in Pop Mart H-shares from 5.55% to 7.70% on August 6. Earlier reports noted that on August 5, HKEX disclosed that H&H International Investment, also managed by Duan Yongping, had cut its long position in Pop Mart International Group Co., Ltd. from 7.65% to 5.55% on July 30, 2026. Duan Yongping responded to the recent position reduction on Xueqiu, a Chinese social media platform, saying: "It’s just that the put options expired, and some shares were called away." (Clarification: The put options expired, and some shares were called by call options.)

Crypto travel infrastructure firm Entravel Group has closed a $7.5 million funding round, co-led by Ethereal Ventures (led by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin) and Finality Capital, with participation from GSR, Varrock, G1 Ventures, Seier Capital, and other investors. Entravel provides travel booking systems for crypto and fintech platforms including Kraken and MetaMask, currently serving over 40 brands with a combined total of roughly 300 million users. The company plans to deploy the funds to expand supplier credit lines, boost booking volumes, enter the traditional travel market, and build a stablecoin-based financial system for settlements, fund management, and working capital.

Market research firm Counterpoint Research’s report reveals that in Q2 2026, as AI workloads transition from training to inference, enterprise-grade SSD (eSSD) accounted for 48% of global NAND shipments, nearly double the 26% recorded in the year-ago period. Server-side demand has tightened consumer-grade NAND supply, lifting industry revenue to a record high—up roughly five times from Q2 2025. On the vendor front, Samsung retained the top spot with a 25% shipment share, though down from 32% in Q2 2024, driven by its priority allocation of high-margin DRAM production capacity. SK Hynix ranked second with a 22% share; its subsidiary Solidigm saw NAND bit shipments rise 40% quarter-over-quarter. Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) lifted its shipment share to 14%, surpassing Kioxia to enter the global top three for the first time. Its shipments grew 22% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter. Counterpoint pointed out that while YMTC ranked third by shipment volume, it placed fifth by revenue, trailing Micron and Kioxia, mainly due to its product mix remaining focused on consumer applications with a lower share of high-value data center eSSDs. The company plans to further expand its eSSD product portfolio in the second half of the year. The report forecasts that by the end of 2026, server eSSDs will account for more than half of global NAND bit shipments. As servers emerge as the primary driver of NAND demand, future vendor competition will hinge more on high-value product portfolios rather than just overall shipment scale.