Solana mainnet has activated a 200-millisecond slot target, halving the previous 400-millisecond timing and raising block-production opportunities to five per second. The change also shortens a network epoch to roughly 24 hours from about 48 hours. It marks the final step in a four-stage rollout, implemented by Anza via the Agave validator client through the SIMD-0525 upgrade.

Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet is set to gradually raise its block gas limit from 60M toward a 200 million target as part of the network’s Layer 1 scaling push. Prysm 7.2.0 and Teku 26.9.1 support the Glamsterdam upgrade, but validators must manually change settings for the new preference to take effect, so the realized limit will rise block by block rather than jump instantly. Ethereum’s block gas limit previously increased from 30M starting in February 2025 to 45M, and later moved to a 60M default after Fusaka client releases.

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.