El Salvador's Bitcoin payment experiment is nearly grinding to a halt, with a core developer witnessing firsthand the drying up of payments at 'Bitcoin Beach'

According to GMGN monitoring, Robinhood Chain ecosystem token PONS has crossed $115 million in market capitalization, hitting an all-time high, with a 30.2% gain in the past 24 hours and approximately $19.2 million in trading volume over the same period. PONS is the native platform token of Pons, a token launch platform built on Robinhood Chain. The platform supports the creation and issuance of fixed-supply tokens, allocates collected WETH fees to repurchase PONS, and directly burns the PONS fees it collects. Some community members have dubbed it the "Pump.fun of Robinhood Chain". BlockBeats reminds users that token prices are highly volatile, so investment caution is required.

Beating AI News (from Dongcha) – Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Cloud and Smart Industries Group, published a lengthy article directly addressing the claim that "Tencent is slow in AI development." He acknowledged internal anxiety at Tencent, noting that rival firms have gained more momentum in recent years. More directly, Tencent’s overall computing power is "severely insufficient," which has slowed the training of its Hunyuan model and product development, "having a relatively large impact." However, Tang believes this is likely only the first kilometer of the AI marathon, "sticking it out for longer is more important than starting early." He previewed that the next-generation Hunyuan Hy4 will bring more breakthroughs, while arguing Tencent cannot compete solely on foundational models: algorithms set the upper limit, engineering determines implementation speed, and real-world scenarios such as WeChat’s office, documents, meetings, and enterprise services are Tencent’s biggest asset. Tang also rarely reviewed several mistakes: over the past year, Tencent’s AI assistant Yuanbao invested heavily in promotion for user growth, but "neither the model nor the product was ready" at the time, leading to unsatisfactory results. CodeBuddy and WorkBuddy were not pre-planned successful paths; early-stage DevTools operated at a loss for a long time and was almost cut. WorkBuddy later capitalized on the agent wave, rolling out over 40 versions in three months after launch. Tang said the team now uses AI extensively for coding, with humans mainly responsible for judgment, debugging, and oversight. He predicts the boundaries between product, development, and testing will become increasingly blurred in the future, and small teams will be able to accomplish tasks that only large teams could do before with AI’s help.

The Ethereum Foundation team has released an impact assessment of gas repricing for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade. The upgrade includes two EIPs: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The former increases and standardizes the cost of creating new states, including new accounts, new storage slots, and deployed bytecode. The latter raises the cost of state access operations (such as SSTORE, SLOAD, and cold account access), making gas prices more accurately reflect actual resource consumption. State operation gas pricing has not been adjusted since the Berlin fork in 2021, while Ethereum’s state size has grown significantly, and recent increases in the gas limit have further accelerated this growth. The new pricing is based on a performance target supporting approximately a 3x increase in base throughput, and serves as a necessary prerequisite for future further hikes in the gas limit. The team evaluated the actual impact by replaying historical mainnet transactions, categorizing all transactions into four groups: most transactions are completely unaffected; some transactions still succeed but have changes in details like gas usage; some contracts run out of gas under their original limit but can complete when the limit is raised; a tiny number of contracts may still fail even with a significantly increased gas limit. This last category typically relies on hardcoded gas assumptions. Developers can check if their contracts are affected and verify fixes on the Plat?berget testnet. End users do not need to take any action, as updated wallets and infrastructure will handle the changes automatically.

Crypto trading app Fomo has for the first time surpassed 100,000 daily active traders, making it the second application to reach this milestone. Previously, in January 2025, when Trump launched the TRUMP meme token, Moonshot set a record of over 180,000 wallet addresses.

Bitdeer subsidiary Dory Creek will deploy its Sealminer A2 Pro Air mining rigs at Soluna’s Project Kati 1, a wind-powered data center in Willacy County, Texas, U.S., starting September 2026. The deployment is expected to connect to 28MW of power and deliver approximately 1.93 EH/s of Bitcoin mining hashrate. The partnership uses a revenue-sharing model: Soluna is responsible for the site, power supply, and daily operations, while Bitdeer supplies and owns the mining rigs, with both parties splitting the Bitcoin revenue generated by this portion of the equipment. Project Kati 1 has a total capacity of 83MW, and Galaxy Digital is currently utilizing 48MW of its capacity for Bitcoin mining.

Beating AI Express: Stability AI, the developer of AI image generation model Stable Diffusion, has closed a $76 million Series B funding round, bringing its total financing to $232 million. Investors include Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Electronic Arts (EA), AMD Ventures, Pacific Alliance Ventures, and others. Founded in 2019, Stability has signed multiple deals with entertainment companies over the past year, integrating generative AI into their creative workflows. It partnered with Universal Music and EA in October last year, and collaborated with Warner Music Group in November, with all partnerships adopting a co-development model.