Author: NBTC

In brief The Base accelerator plans to select 10 startups for its eight-week Batches 004 accelerator. Each selected team will receive a $100,000 investment from the Base Ecosystem Fund. The program is targeting startups building AI agents, trading, payments, and financing products. The team behind Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, is narrowing its startup accelerator to 10 teams for its latest cohort, with each selected company receiving a $100,000 investment upfront, Coinbase announced on Wednesday. Applications for Base Batches 004 are open through September 9, Coinbase said. The eight-week virtual program will conclude with a Demo Day in New York…

Credit unions now have a production-ready path to offer Bitcoin and other digital asset services without relying on outside platforms after DaLand CUSO and Circuit, an 80-member credit union collaborative, announced that Circuit’s Digital Asset Initiative has moved into implementation. The program grants participating institutions access to DaLand’s CODE Engine and Coin2Core technology, which integrates digital asset capabilities directly into core banking systems from Corelation KeyStone, Fiserv DNA, and Jack Henry Symitar. Under what DaLand calls a “Hybrid Custody” model, credit unions retain custody, member relationships, and data rather than routing customers to third-party crypto platforms. Three credit unions are…

The Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative has announced a grant allocation to the Freedom of the Press Foundation to support work on WEBCAT, an open-source project designed to help browsers verify website code against a signed manifest. According to the Foundation’s Aug. 5 announcement, the funding is intended to support a verification library that Ethereum wallets can integrate, along with Chromium-browser research, implementation support, an independent audit and proposed standardization work. Focus on front-end integrity The Foundation described a gap between encrypted website connections and verification that the code delivered by a site matches code approved by its developers.…

Barclays analyst Benjamin Budish estimates Coinbase processed roughly $152 billion of trading volume during the quarter, well below the Street’s expectation of about $178 billion. He expects adjusted EBITDA to come in roughly 3% below consensus, pointing to weaker blockchain rewards and institutional trading revenue. Clear Street’s Owen Lau also lowered estimates, projecting approximately $160 billion in trading volume and $301 million in adjusted EBITDA after weaker-than-expected retail activity. Benchmark’s Mark Palmer similarly reduced his EBITDA forecast to $377 million, while Compass Point expects revenue to slightly miss consensus but believes EBITDA will be roughly in line with expectations. Coinbase…

$CASHCAT has become one of the biggest memecoin stories of July 2026. After launching on Robinhood Chain shortly after the network went live, the token produced life-changing returns for some early buyers while helping push the chain into the spotlight. As traders search for the next project before public listings, attention is gradually shifting toward presales. Among them, MemeToro ($MT) is gaining interest by combining AI-powered token creation, prediction markets, and SocialFi on $BNB Chain rather than relying on a single viral meme. $CASHCAT Shows How Fast Memecoin Narratives Can Grow The success of $CASHCAT highlights how quickly attention can…

A Washington state court has ordered prediction market platform Kalshi to halt most of its event contracts in the state after finding that the company likely violated state gambling and consumer protection laws. The final order from King County Superior Court Judge John McHale bars Kalshi from offering, accepting or facilitating contracts tied to sports, elections, politics, entertainment, culture, technology, science and markets based on whether public figures mention specific words. Kalshi must implement geofencing based on users’ IP addresses and residency by Aug. 19, followed by a multi source geofencing system by Sept. 2. The company could face penalties…

Gnosis Chain is transitioning from a standalone Layer 1 to an Ethereum-settled rollup and retiring its independent validator set, according to an announcement from Gnosis Chain and a proposal published on GnosisDAO’s governance forum. For $GNO stakers, the approved direction would unlock roughly 350,000 $GNO when the validator set is sunset and end the treasury-funded staking subsidy. For users and developers, xDAI would remain the gas token, while addresses, balances and contract state would continue without migration to a new chain. The proposal’s main technical promise is atomic access from Gnosis to Ethereum contracts and liquidity. But that synchronous composability…

BIP-110 Faces Its Moment of Truth At block 961,289 on Thursday morning, Bitcoin sat roughly 343 blocks from BIP-110’s mandatory signaling phase. The bip110.org/monitor dashboard showed just 41 supporting blocks among 1,674 counted in the current period, leaving signaling at 2.45%. The mandatory window was projected to begin Aug. 8 at approximately 5:16 p.m. EDT. Image source: bip110.org/monitor at 8 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. The proposal called BIP-110, formally named the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, would clamp down on Bitcoin’s data rules for about one year. It limits the size of certain data elements inserted into transactions,…

Solana ($SOL) is entering a major infrastructure phase as Agave 4.2 begins activating three upgrades: 90% lower storage costs, 3.3x larger transactions and a staged reduction in slot times from 400ms toward 200ms. The changes could boost Solana’s position against other high-performance blockchains while creating new demand for the $SOL ecosystem. Faster Slots: 400ms to 200ms Anza CEO Brennan Watt says Solana is preparing to cut slot times from ~400ms to 350ms, as the first step toward a longer-term goal of 200ms. Faster slots mean lower latency and quicker transaction processing. LATEST: Solana is preparing to cut mainnet slot times…

South Korean chip giant SK Hynix’s stock price crashed nearly 10% on July 29 despite the chipmaker reporting its strongest quarterly operating profit ever. The company’s profit jumped more than 557% year over year, but missed high market expectations. SK hynix Profit Hits Record, But Misses Estimates According to SK hynix’s second quarter earnings report, the company posted 79.32 trillion won in revenue, up 256.8% from a year earlier. Operating profit jumped 557.3% to 60.54 trillion won, giving the company a record 76% operating margin. However, the strong results still missed market expectations. Analysts were expecting around 83.94 trillion won…