Advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader: Conflict May Escalate If Conditions Are Not Met

U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Michael S. Selig has released the agenda for the inaugural meeting of the Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC). The meeting is scheduled to be held in Washington on Thursday, August 20, and will focus on topics including crypto asset regulation, artificial intelligence, and prediction markets. Selig said: "The United States has long been a global hub for financial innovation. I look forward to meeting with entrepreneurs, thinkers, and builders of the CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee to explore how emerging technologies and financial products can shape our markets in the new financial frontier." The public may submit relevant comments by August 27, and all received submissions will be published publicly. The meeting agenda may be adjusted based on other priorities of the IAC; the full agenda is available on the CFTC’s official website. The CFTC also emphasized that the views and opinions expressed by the advisory committee represent only the committee itself and do not reflect the positions of the CFTC, its staff, or the U.S. government.

AI data platform Databricks announced it has closed a $5 billion strategic funding round at a $190 billion post-money valuation. The term sheet published on July 16 had set a $188 billion valuation, with the final figure rising due to an expanded funding size and additional share issuance. The round was led by existing shareholder Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, and T. Rowe Price, while Sixth Street Growth joined as a new investor. The company’s annualized revenue run rate has exceeded $7 billion, growing over 80% year-over-year. Co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi stated that, per the industry definition used before 2022, AGI has arrived—with the real bottleneck now shifting to enterprise context, AI token costs, and agent infrastructure. The new capital will be allocated to three core areas: Unity AI Gateway (for cross-model routing and spend control), Lakebase (a serverless Postgres database whose revenue run rate has already topped $100 million), and Genie (which provides AI with access to enterprise context). Ghodsi also revealed that the company’s likelihood of going public before Anthropic or OpenAI is "very low". He had repeatedly denied summer funding rumors earlier, and the final decision to raise capital was based on factors including the cost of expanding its AI business and increasing investment in hiring and mergers and acquisitions.

According to GMGN data, Binance Wallet’s stock-themed meme token UTILITY rallied sharply today, surging past $10 million in market cap with a 24-hour trading volume of $17.48 million, before pulling back to $7.5 million at press time. As early as January 30, CZ (Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao) posted that GameStop (GME) should issue a utility token on the blockchain, preferably on BSC (Binance Smart Chain). Today, bStocks’ official account reposted CZ’s old tweet and announced that GMEB, the tokenized GameStop stock on bStocks, is now tradable on the platform. BlockBeats notes that UTILITY’s trading pair is UTILITY/GMEB, not the typical BNB or USDT liquidity pair. This falls under the current popular “stock meme” trend on BSC, using bStocks’ US stock token (GMEB) as the liquidity pool, centered on the classic narrative of GameStop’s retail investors vs. Wall Street and meme stocks. BlockBeats reminds users that most meme coins lack real use cases, are highly volatile, and investors should exercise caution.

Ethereum Foundation core researcher Justin Drake announced in a post that Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) will abandon Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function that has been dominant since 2019, in favor of traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s. This reversal stems from a breakthrough in SNARK design, centered on "hash-friendly SNARKs" rather than the prior approach of "SNARK-friendly hashes". By natively aligning Boolean operations in traditional hashes with binary fields, proof performance for traditional hash calls in SNARKs has reached 1 million per second, with overhead of just around 100x—a stark contrast to the previously extremely expensive operations in large prime fields. Drake dubbed this "science-fiction-level cryptography" and named contributors to key research breakthroughs including Binius and Flock. The shift will push Ethereum’s hash-based cryptography to the peak of minimal assumptions, while drastically accelerating deployment: there is no need to wait for years of cryptanalysis maturity for Poseidon. The Ethereum Foundation’s (EF) post-quantum team is advancing rapidly, with a roadmap targeting a production-grade leanVM in 2027, and deployment of the consensus, execution, and data layers in 2028. Drake also noted that AI’s enhanced cryptanalysis capabilities have recently dealt successive setbacks to lattice-based schemes (HAWK) and isogeny-based schemes (SQIsign), while hash-based schemes are emerging as the leading candidates for post-quantum signatures in blockchains. The trend of open-source automated research is also accelerating; SNARK.fast has achieved 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. is preparing to deploy the aircraft carrier USS Washington to the Middle East to replace the USS Lincoln under a previously scheduled rotation plan. The USS Lincoln has been on a lengthy deployment with very few port calls, sparking concerns among U.S. lawmakers about living conditions aboard the vessel. The USS Lincoln began its scheduled deployment last November and was redeployed to the Middle East in January this year ahead of the launch of military operations against Iran. The carrier and its embarked aircraft played a key role in the U.S. military's Operation Epic Wrath airstrikes, and later took part in the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports. U.S. lawmakers stated that the intense operational tempo and stress from the prolonged deployment have overwhelmed the crew, and they are pressing the Pentagon to provide more information about living conditions and mental health issues aboard the ship. U.S. media outlet MS Now reported earlier this month that the USS Lincoln's crew has been facing harsh conditions including food shortages and depleted supplies of items like toothpaste and soap. Lawmakers expressed concern over reports that the crew is exhausted and suffering from deteriorating mental health due to the lack of port calls for rest and recuperation.

A senior executive of SanDisk (SNDK.O) stated that Meta Platforms (META.O) will join the relevant group to co-develop the open standard for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF).