A daily brief · crypto + AI

TrustCore Media

Thursday, July 16, 2026

Edition · 200 items · 9:41 AM ET

Calm signal from the crypto and AI firehoses — hand-picked from 14 sources, every morning. No commentary, just what moved.

Crypto · lede

Gambling on random Pokémon cards: Onchain gagcha hits record high as crypto sinks

Users spent a record $324 million on onchain gacha in June, even as Bitcoin hit a 21-month low. The thrill of scoring a top Pokemon card from a random pack is becoming big business

CoinTelegraph · 11 minutes ago

AI · lede

Quoting Linus Torvalds

Simon Willison · 15 minutes ago

Trending

CryptoMillionTetherBitcoinRecordWantsDefiInvests

The full file

Every headline, in order

CryptoGambling on random Pokémon cards: Onchain gagcha hits record high as crypto sinksAIQuoting Linus TorvaldsCryptoPrediction markets defy crypto downturn with record Q2 volume: CoinGeckoCryptoLedger wants AI agents to manage crypto without holding your keysCryptoMoonPay buys Glide to bolster crypto deposits infrastructureCryptoLedger unveils hardware-backed Agent Stack to prevent rogue AI transactionsCryptoMoonPay acquires Y Combinator-backed crypto deposits startup Glide in all-equity dealCryptoThis Bitcoin-backed company is betting retiring founders will swap private stock for their life’s workCryptoDune research finds 85% of concentrated DeFi liquidity is underutilized, with $150M in annual fees foregoneAII just got my first GPU that can actually run an LLM (Laptop 5090 24 GB) what do I play with first?CryptoTether invests $20 million in Ualá as the fintech firm reaches $3.2 billion valuationCryptoTokenized stocks market cap gains to record $2.3BCryptoBitcoin’s old coins have gone quiet and $69,000 could reveal whether the new holders crackCryptoFATF urges faster crypto AML enforcement as stablecoin crime increasesCryptoMorning Minute: Base Hands Its App Over to CobieCryptoGalaxy targets institutional stablecoin yield with new DeFi vaultsAINewer Models, Same AdvantageAINVIDIA H200 Disassembly & Liquid-Cooling Installation with EK-Pro H200 NVL Water BlockCryptoARK pushes back against a16z’s ‘TradFi wants blockchain, not DeFi’ claimAIFilings: Dario Amodei gave $1M in May to Public First, a super PAC advocating for AI safety regulations, seemingly his first seven-figure political donationCryptoThe most popular bitcoin call option has slipped by $10,000CryptoJeff Booth, Lyn Alden-backed ORANGE JUICE raises $40 million to launch permanent capital firm with bitcoin treasury strategyCryptoRebooting the internet: inside the open-source project to let AI programs pay each otherCryptoIs using an old iPhone safer than a crypto hardware wallet? ZachXBT thinks soCryptoFeds Arrest Florida Man Over Video Game Malware That Stole $220K in CryptoCryptoBitcoin pulls back to $64,000 after hitting monthly high as bears take controlCryptoAutonomous AI agent economy faces infrastructure gaps: Visa, ArtemisCryptoTether invests $20 million in Argentine neobank Ualá as it expands Latin America pushCryptoU.S. adds four Iran central bank crypto wallets to sanctions, Tether freezes $131 million of contentsAIQwen 3.6 35B A3B Q8_0 "Create an SVG of a Darth Vader." at various expert counts.CryptoVolvo Group tests proprietary cryptocurrency for supplier transactions in blockchain pushCryptoBlackRock earned $82M while its crypto funds erased $30B – now it wants inside your walletCryptoUS Senate unanimously adopts resolution opposing clemency for SBFCryptoLummis, Gallego secure unanimous Senate approval opposing Sam Bankman-Fried clemencyCryptoUS Senate Unanimously Opposes Sam Bankman-Fried PardonCryptoEthereum is flashing a $478 million buy signal but top traders still expect it to failCryptoVisa says stablecoins will power micro-commerce in AI agentic economyCryptoTether invests $20M into Argentine neobank UaláCryptoBitcoin $107K buyers providing ‘early signals’ of 2026 bear-market bottom: GlassnodeAILooks like Hugging face is downCryptoRobinhood Chain memecoin launchpad Vlad.fun halts after ‘internal integrity’ issueCryptoBitcoin whale moves $383 million in BTC after 8 years of dormancy: onchain dataCryptoHyperion DeFi to deploy 500K HYPE for Hyperliquid HIP-3 marketsCryptoLive updates: Bitcoin slips back to $64,000 after Korea rate hike, ahead of U.S. dataCryptoU.S. Senate unanimously opposes clemency for FTX founder Sam Bankman-FriedCryptoHere’s what happened in crypto todayCryptoA bitcoin wallet dormant since the 2017 peak just moved $383 millionCryptoEther outruns bitcoin as ETF money returns, almost all of from BlackRock's fundCryptoTrump to meet with senators over CLARITY Act on Thursday: PoliticoCryptoTwo groups of crypto investors are selling bitcoin to cap its latest price recoveryAIQwen3.5 122B-A10B · ROCmFP4 iMatrixAIPSA: Nvidia's CMP 170HX Full Compute and Memory(80GB) may be unlockable via exploitCryptoCalifornia pair charged with laundering crypto proceeds from darknet fentanyl salesCryptoBase’s social bet left it trailing in prediction markets and perps: PollakAIMermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)AISecurity incident disclosure — July 2026AIxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAIHy3 1Bit 89-93 GBCryptoFrom Perpetual Swaps to Perpetual CFDs: The Regulated EvolutionCryptoStripe-PayPal deal could accelerate shift to blockchain-based money, Polygon exec saysCryptoWhy Analysts Aren’t Worried About Coinbase’s 30% DropCryptoPublic Hyperliquid treasury firm Hyperion enters into new 500k HYPE bond agreement with SkewCryptoStrategy CEO says company isn’t going anywhere as bitcoin buyer, sees debt concerns only below $10,000 BTCCryptoBitcoin to $40,000? If History’s Anything to Go By, It’s Possible, Says ReportAIGrok Build open sourced under Apache 2.0 licenseCryptoOpenAI Uses AI Red Team to Strengthen GPT-5.6 Against Prompt Injection AttacksAIInkling by Thinking Machines is the #1 US open weight model nowCryptoCoinbase's Jesse Pollak steps back from Base app leadership after admitting his crypto social strategy failedCrypto‘Hugely positive’ meeting on Thursday with Trump to discuss ethics raises hopes for passage of sweeping crypto legislationCryptoMeet Bonsai: The First 27B AI Model That Fits on Your PhoneCryptoUS government sends $288M to Coinbase putting Bitcoin reserve rules into questionCryptoWhat Is BIP-110 and Why Is It Dividing the Bitcoin Community?AIGoogle is updating Gemma 4's chat templates, bringing major fixes to tool calling and reducing "laziness", and enabling Flash Attention 4 on Hopper GPUs, plus an interactive guide on how to work with and improve its vision!CryptoHow Morgan Stanley plans to bring crypto custody, staking and lending support in-houseCryptoBase Creator Jesse Pollak Steps Back From App Leadership After Admitting Social Bet 'Was Wrong'AIThinking Machines releases first open-weight model “Inkling”CryptoBlackRock, Goldman, and JP Morgan Will Give Tokenized Stocks a TryCryptoBitcoin miner AI pivot hits roadblock with New York 50 MW permit freezeCryptoPresident Trump To Meet Senators On Clarity Act’s Ethics Fight: ReportCryptoTraders Took $8.2 Million From Polymarket’s Five-Minute Bitcoin Bets, Study FoundAIWhat building Shippy taught us about building agentsAIModel Routing Is Simple. Until It Isn’t.CryptoDTCC moves tokenized securities into live trading, marking a milestone for Wall Street's blockchain pushCryptoAnother DeFi Exploit: Perp DEX Ostium Loses $18 Million in Oracle AttackAILinus Torvalds tells people to stop attacking others for using AICryptoBitcoin miner CleanSpark signed a $6.6B AI lease before securing the $2.1B required to build itCryptoUS Treasury Freezes $131 Million in Iran-Linked Crypto WalletsCryptoCantor and Securitize collaborate on blockchain-based IPOsCryptoBitcoin Price Jumps Over $65,500 on Soft Inflation Data CryptoBitcoin Breaks Heavy Resistance—But Death Cross Looms: AnalysisAIThe best model is the one you can actually runCryptoBitcoin Giant Strategy Isn't Panicking—Unless BTC Crashes to $10K: CEOCryptoBitMine made $46 million staking Ethereum then lost twice that betting on itCryptoVerifiedX and BitGo Sign MOU to Deliver Qualified Custody for vBTC, Expanding Institutional Access to Native Bitcoin Utility, and with Immediate Support for Non-Synthetic Canonical on BaseAIHow I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secretsCryptoJapan’s Landmark Vote Reclassifies Bitcoin And Crypto As Financial AssetsCryptoKeel Infrastructure to Consolidate Three Bitcoin Sites Into One AI CampusCryptoMorning Minute: Crypto Rips on Cool CPICryptoUK Fraud Review Calls for Judge Training on Crypto Laundering, AI ScamsAIWelcome Inkling by Thinking MachinesAIIntroducing Real World VoiceEQ: Measuring the human quality of voice AIAIQuoting GitHub ChangelogAIsimonw/pedalicanCryptoChina’s Prosecutors Move to Treat Crypto Mixers as Evidence of Money LaunderingAIlobste.rs is now running on SQLiteAIQuoting Armin RonacherCryptoThe Bitcoin Softfork That Tried to Police “Junk Data” — And Why It’s Already FailingAIdatasette 1.0a37CryptoCleanSpark Signs $6.6 Billion Data Center Lease as Bitcoin Miner Pivots to ComputeAIUsing uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly wayAIDOOMQLAIdatasette code-frequency chart on GitHubAIDirectly Responsible Individuals (DRI)AIshot-scraper 1.11AIFable gets another bumpAI6 months to live for open modelsAIProfiling in PyTorch (Part 3): Attention is all you profileAIData for AgentsAINative-speed vLLM transformers modeling backendAIFrom Hugging Face to Amazon SageMaker Studio in one clickAIHugging Face Models on Foundry Managed ComputeAIRun AI workloads on any cloud, store on Hugging Face: zero-egress storage with SkyPilotAILeRobot v0.6.0: Imagine, Evaluate, ImproveAIPRX Part 4: Our Data StrategyAIImport AI 464: Fable writes GPU kernels; AI automation; and analog computationAI🤗 Kernels: Major UpdatesAIBest Local VLMs - July 2026AIImport AI 463: Self-improving robots; a 10k Chinese GPU cluster; and an elegiac essay for the human eraAILatest open artifacts (#22): Zyphra, Cohere, and Poolside are expanding the breadth of the ecosystemAIUsing Local Coding AgentsAIGLM-5.2 is the step change for open agentsAIImport AI 462: Superpersuasion; self-sustaining AI; paths to ASIAIBanning Open Source AI Would Be A MistakeAIState of the blog, mid-2026AIFrontier post-training recipe review with Finbarr TimbersAIImport AI 461: "Alignment is not on track"; FrontierCode; and synthetic research internsAIWelcome to the AGI era of AI governanceAIClaude Fable 5 and new AI safety fablesAIImport AI 460: Reward hacking society, RSI data from Anthropic; and RL-based quadcopter racingAILLM Research Papers: The 2026 List (January to May)AIFarewell Ai2AIImport AI 459: AI oversight is difficult; scaling laws for protein folding models; and pricing the extinction risk of AI systemsAIOpen and closed models are on different exponentialsAISome ideas for what comes next, May 2026AIImport AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity storyAIImport AI 457: AI stuxnet; cursed Muon optimizer; and positive alignment AILatest open artifacts (#21): Open model bonanza! Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, MiMo 2.5, GLM-5.1 & others. On CAISI's V4 assessment.AIRecent Developments in LLM Architectures: KV Sharing, mHC, and Compressed AttentionAIHow open model ecosystems compoundAIImport AI 456: RSI and economic growth; radical optionality for AI regulation; and a neural computer AINotes from inside China's AI labsAIThe distillation panicAIImport AI 455: AI systems are about to start building themselves.AIImport AI 454: Automating alignment research; safety study of a Chinese model; HiFloat4 AIMy Workflow for Understanding LLM ArchitecturesAIImport AI 453: Breaking AI agents; MirrorCode; and ten views on gradual disempowermentAIImport AI 452: Scaling laws for cyberwar; rising tides of AI automation; and a puzzle over gDP forecasting AIComponents of A Coding AgentAIImport AI 451: Political superintelligence; Google's society of minds, and a robot drummer AIImport AI 450: China's electronic warfare model; traumatized LLMs; and a scaling law for cyberattacks AIA Visual Guide to Attention Variants in Modern LLMsAIA Dream of Spring for Open-Weight LLMs: 10 Architectures from Jan-Feb 2026AIAfter Orthogonality: Virtue-Ethical Agency and AI AlignmentAICategories of Inference-Time Scaling for Improved LLM ReasoningCryptoVenezuela’s sanctions are stablecoins’ proof of conceptCryptoThe Strategy playbook looks different in 2026CryptoRanger’s ICO starts today, and MetaDAO eyes a resetCryptoETH derivatives reset and the next retail tradeCryptoFriday charts: Finding good news, in spite of bad headlinesCryptoDePIN and crypto gaming led a surprising end-of-year reboundCryptoCanton’s $6T RWA rails and Lighter’s Hyperliquid multipleCryptoThe long wait for crypto’s “coffee pot” momentCryptoFailure is an option in crypto financeCryptoYield Basis is making native BTC yield a realityCryptoUsers are the best investors to haveCryptoA sleeper in the perps categoryCryptoThe old story of investing in new technologyCrypto2025 ReflectionsAIThe State Of LLMs 2025: Progress, Problems, and PredictionsAILLM Research Papers: The 2025 List (July to December)CryptoThe perps wars are heating upAIFrom DeepSeek V3 to V3.2: Architecture, Sparse Attention, and RL UpdatesAIBeyond Standard LLMsAIUnderstanding the 4 Main Approaches to LLM Evaluation (From Scratch)AIUnderstanding and Implementing Qwen3 From ScratchAIFrom GPT-2 to gpt-oss: Analyzing the Architectural AdvancesAIAGI Is Not MultimodalAIShape, Symmetries, and Structure: The Changing Role of Mathematics in Machine Learning ResearchAIWhat's Missing From LLM Chatbots: A Sense of PurposeAIWe Need Positive Visions for AI Grounded in WellbeingAIFinancial Market Applications of LLMsAIA Brief Overview of Gender Bias in AIAIMamba ExplainedAICar-GPT: Could LLMs finally make self-driving cars happen?AIDo text embeddings perfectly encode text?AIWhy Doesn’t My Model Work?AIDeep learning for single-cell sequencing: a microscope to see the diversity of cellsAISalmon in the LoopAINeural algorithmic reasoningAIThe Artificiality of Alignment