Report: Rug Pull Incidents in the Crypto Space Have Decreased, but Their Impact Has Grown

EthLabs founder Barnabé Monnot (barnabé.eth) has published his "Week 2" update, recapping the team’s latest progress in the launch and funding phases, as well as key ecosystem discussion priorities. On interoperability, the team said it is growing more confident in "zero-knowledge (zk)-based asynchronous interoperability", which it believes will help build more secure cross-chain bridges and improve the native distribution of assets across Ethereum’s multi-layered networks. Current cross-chain paths still face latency issues, particularly for L2→L1 transfers; against this backdrop, the intents mechanism can act as a transitional solution, while L1’s ample liquidity supports matching with cross-chain solvers. Additionally, L1→L2 paths are expected to drastically cut confirmation latency via the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR), with clients already beginning to integrate the mechanism. In ecosystem discussions, PropAMMs (proposal-based automated market makers) have emerged as a recent focus for multiple teams and researchers, centered on their potential to optimize the balance between L1 execution efficiency and block building. Meanwhile, ENS is highlighted as "critical Ethereum infrastructure", with the team continuing to engage relevant stakeholders to advance its development. For team expansion, EthLabs has received over 300 applications to date, having processed roughly 20% of them. The team aims to grow to around 10 members in the short term, and roughly 20 in the medium term, prioritizing talent with engineering capabilities and domain expertise. On the funding front, EthLabs noted its current financing round is nearing completion, having secured early backing from investors including BitMNR, Sharplink, and Ethereum Joseph. It plans to add 1–2 core investors before moving to the next phase.

According to monitoring by OnchainLens, a newly created wallet withdrew approximately 323.72 Bitcoin from Binance in the past hour, valued at around $20.59 million.

The CLARITY Act’s original target of being signed into law by July 4 has been missed, and the window for its passage ahead of the midterm elections is rapidly narrowing. While most Senate work can advance behind the scenes during the summer recess, House of Representatives procedures are currently at a standstill. Negotiators remain optimistic about passing the bill by 2026, but key coordination must be completed before the Senate recess on August 7. If the bill fails to pass before the midterms, should the Democrats take control of Congress after the election, they will likely demand major revisions to the legislation.

According to OnchainLens monitoring, one of the most profitable wallets on the Hyperliquid platform (linked to Abraxas Capital, with a historical cumulative profit and loss of approximately $173.75 million) deposited $2 million into Hyperliquid one hour ago. Currently, the account’s total position size stands at around $35.92 million, with roughly 98.5% of that in short positions. Key holdings breakdown: HYPE short (5x leverage): ~$20.51 million, unrealized loss of ~$3.95 million; SOL short (10x leverage): ~$6.76 million, unrealized loss of ~$72,000; GOLD short (4x leverage): ~$5.44 million, unrealized profit of ~$184,000; FARTCOIN short (5x leverage): ~$2.04 million, unrealized profit of ~$1.06 million. Overall, the account’s current unrealized loss is approximately $2.55 million, though it has earned around $9.87 million in cumulative funding fees.

SemiAnalysis published a report stating that NVIDIA’s latest rack-scale interconnect architecture, Kyber NVL144, has undergone major adjustments just three months after its announcement: its launch has been delayed by over 12 months to 2028, primarily due to persistent challenges in the manufacturing feasibility of its PCB layout. Meanwhile, the NVL72x2 back-to-back rack architecture has been scrapped. Originally designed to boost pure copper NVLink scaling by deploying two Oberon racks back-to-back, the plan faced strong market skepticism due to its complex structure and heavy operational burden on hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs), ultimately leading to its abandonment. As co-packaged optics (CPO) technology remains immature, NVIDIA’s larger-scale scaling plans based on CPO NVSwitch (such as NVL576) may also face further delays or be limited to small-batch trial production. This means NVIDIA will lack a stable large-scale scale-up solution until CPO matures. Additionally, the product roadmap for Rubin Ultra has changed: the originally planned version with four compute chips has been canceled, leaving only the version with two compute chips, with the overall system-level performance scale expected to drop by roughly half compared to the original plan. This series of adjustments means NVIDIA’s scale-up expansion capabilities for the Rubin Ultra generation are limited. Against the backdrop that CPO NVSwitch cannot be implemented before the Feynman architecture, competitors such as AMD’s MI500X and Google’s TPU v8i may gain a relative window of opportunity in the scaling capabilities of large-scale training clusters. At the same time, NVIDIA is expected to meet market demand during the product transition period by shipping large volumes of Oberon Rubin racks and their "Ultra" versions, while maintaining the overall supply chain rhythm.

According to the Financial Times, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has said a regulatory "race" on artificial intelligence is unfolding in the financial sector, and it is calling for new regulatory powers to step up oversight of large language models including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.