Tech

Bitcoin’s Core Lightning implementation has been placed into a secret 14-day emergency lockdown after AI-assisted auditing tools found a large number of vulnerabilities in its code. The development team halted activity to fix the issues and reduce the risk of potential attacks. The lockdown has directly affected Lightning Network node operations and has renewed scrutiny of security in open-source infrastructure code.

Ripple’s XRPL AI Starter Kit, launched on June 9, has driven a surge in on-chain agent-based payments within 77 days. Data from the live XRPL AI Hub show more than 2.43 million agentic transactions, settling 5,407.50 XRP and 2,349.26 RLUSD. The hub also lists 144 merchant addresses and 1,669 live x402 services, with AI payments surpassing 1 million in under a month. Separately, Mastercard has added Ripple to its machine-agent payments ecosystem, expanding potential use cases.

Ethereum Foundation protocol architecture team member Toni Wahrstätter said the Ethereum Hegotá upgrade is taking shape. The recommended core plan would make FOCIL the main upgrade to improve censorship resistance. It would also add Frame Transactions as an execution-layer upgrade to enhance transaction expressiveness and user experience.

HIVE reported $79.1M in revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2027, up 74% year over year. Bitcoin mining generated $72.1M of that total. HPC/AI contributed $7.1M in revenue, up 52% quarter over quarter. The company will provide full results on its Q1 FY2027 earnings call at 8:00 AM ET on Monday, 8/17.

In August 2026, U.S.-listed Hyperscale Data (GPUS) sold 685 bitcoin for about $43 million. The company said about $30 million will go toward paying down debt, with the remainder earmarked for expanding a high-performance computing and AI-focused data center in Michigan. After the sale, its bitcoin holdings fell from more than 1,100 BTC to about 275 BTC.

BNB Chain’s BSC mainnet will activate the Pasteur upgrade at 02:30 UTC on 25 August 2026. All mainnet nodes must be upgraded to v1.7.7 before that time. The upgrade tightens cross-chain verification and validator key-rotation rules. It also increases the number of transactions each block can carry while keeping the block time at 450ms.

Noncustodial Bitcoin bridge Boltz suspended its Bitcoin swap service on August 3 after suffering losses from AI-assisted attacks. The five-person, bootstrapped team said the risk was borne entirely by the project, while its design kept customer funds out of reach. Boltz had already disabled certain EVM swaps on August 1 to address a bug, but later said the issue had widened to the broader service. A group of veteran Bitcoiners is now preparing to take over the project.

Algorand’s development team has rolled out the v5.0.0 mainnet upgrade, replacing its prior flat-fee rule for all transactions with a fixed-point multiplier fee mechanism. Under the new model, fees are tied to actual computation and storage resource usage, aiming to improve the network’s economic design and add pricing flexibility for more complex on-chain operations. The upgrade also includes changes to inner transactions and consensus-layer improvements, marking Algorand’s move toward native quantum resistance.

Shares of several bitcoin mining companies have risen as they reposition existing power and site capacity to supply AI computing infrastructure. Riot Platforms surged 24% in after-hours trading after a 20-year, $9.1 billion agreement with Anthropic for 191 megawatts of computing capacity, Bloomberg reported. IREN climbed close to 10% this week after securing a $3.4 billion cloud contract with Nvidia. Other miners including Hut 8, Bitfarms and Core Scientific have also posted sizable gains this year as the AI shift becomes a key growth driver.

MARA Holdings said it has pledged 18,750 bitcoin as collateral to secure bitcoin-backed loans, with proceeds earmarked for its expansion plans in artificial intelligence and energy. The collateralized borrowing is intended to support MARA’s investment in AI computing and energy infrastructure. The move highlights bitcoin’s growing use as an institutional-grade collateral asset.