DeepSeek is raising prices on its flagship V4 models by up to 4x, effective August 16. V4-Flash output goes from $0.28 to $1.32/M tokens at peak hours. V4-Pro output jumps from $0.87 to $3.96. Bloomberg reports the price hike comes "ahead of a potential initial public offering." The company faces what SCMP called "challenges to maintain its aggressively low prices amid fierce competition," with AI developer Michael Guo arguing that "new American models including Meta's Muse Spark and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna were competitive with DeepSeek models in both capabilities and price."

CFTC releases topics for its Aug. 20 Innovation Advisory Committee meeting. Agenda focuses on "crypto’s regulatory evolution," efforts for greater clarity, modernizing rules, and frameworks that support innovation while protecting market integrity.

UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, discloses $83.2 million holding in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF.

Franklin Templeton just signed on to Matthew Boyer's "Defenders Need the Frontier" open letter, which calls on frontier AI labs to give full-access intelligence to open-source defenders. Ties directly into the Bitcoin Red Team findings. The threat is real and the coalition is growing.

Bitcoin Red Team member @calle just dropped a field report after scanning virtually all of bitcoin's open source code with frontier AI. The summary: "everything is broken, bitcoin is burning" but it's getting stronger because of it. They're seeing "a massive collision between decades of human open source slop against 2 weeks of kimi k3." The low-hanging fruit is cleared, "a ton of real critical and high vulnerabilities" have been reported and validated by maintainers, unmaintained projects should be assumed vulnerable, and Lightning is "more broken than the average." He says "projects need their own AI audit pipeline going into the future." Oh, and "humans should never code in c (just stop)."

Trezor just disclosed that one of its shipping providers suffered a data breach exposing names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails for ~13,700 customers across 7 countries. Devices and systems are unaffected, but expect a wave of phishing attempts targeting these users.

Trump just signed a memo authorizing private U.S. companies to conduct offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal organizations, under federal oversight. Cyber Letters of Marque, essentially. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) has always allowed Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal, commissioning private actors to fight enemies on behalf of the state. That 18th century naval warfare concept just got a 21st century upgrade. Vetted companies can now conduct "Cyber Surveillance Operations" and "Cyber Effects Operations" (disruption, degradation, destruction of criminal infrastructure) against transnational criminal orgs. The era of purely defensive cybersecurity is over.

The White House is preparing to bring open-source AI models under its prerelease safety testing framework. Once open models reach frontier capabilities, they'd face a potential 30-day government testing period before public release. The catch: officials know that excluding open models creates a government-approved advantage for closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. But including them could slow US open-model development and hand China an edge. The framework is technically voluntary for now, but the competitive pressure to get a government seal of approval could make it mandatory in practice.

Sergey Brin is pushing Google DeepMind toward recursive self-improvement, the point at which AI can improve itself without human intervention. Per Reuters, Brin has been using his influence as co-founder to redirect resources and urge staff to catch up to the frontier after Gemini fell behind Anthropic and OpenAI. The leadership reshuffle last week moved Demis Hassabis to chairman and elevated his deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu to run the lab. The AI race isn't slowing down. It's accelerating.

Goldman Sachs just acquired a $1B bitcoin premium income ETF through its NEOS deal. "Better to leapfrog BlackRock's $BITA vs me too." - Eric Balchunas

The momentum behind giving open-source defenders access to frontier AI models continues to grow. Matthew Boyer's "Defenders Need the Frontier" coalition keeps adding signatories calling on AI labs to stop restricting the people trying to protect critical infrastructure.

Fidelity Digital Assets: 30-day realized volatility near multi-year lows. Spot BTC ETP inflows reaccelerating. Valuation metrics remain constructive. "These periods of compression don't tend to last forever. The key question for investors isn't whether volatility returns, but what happens when it does."

xAI just dropped Grok 4.6.

TFTC 782 w/ (whiteoakpasture): "A pound of that supermarket meat could contain the DNA of thousands of animals from all over the world. That's what you get when you buy industrial ground beef." We discuss: ⚡ Big beef ⚡ Industrial farming ⚡ Farming with low time preference

The OCC says America is "open for business" for digital asset banks. Companies working with digital assets and novel technologies should have a path to becoming national banks. The OCC has received 40 new bank applications in the past 18 months.

The SEC is reportedly preparing to roll out two major initiatives in the coming days that could "further turbocharge the US crypto industry," even as the Clarity Act stalls in Congress.

New peer-reviewed research published in Energy Economics finds that bitcoin mining can absorb 83% of the wind energy Ireland is forced to waste, lifting wind farm revenues by 32%. The paper highlights two key advantages over batteries. First, no subsidy required. "The co-investment is privately financed and operationally market-driven" and works "without requiring physical network upgrades or regulatory subsidy." Second, no performance degradation. "Unlike battery storage, mining incurs no round-trip efficiency losses or cycle degradation." Ireland currently wastes 11.4% of its available wind and that number is projected to hit 16% by 2030 even with storage and demand response built in. As Daniel Batten puts it, bitcoin mining is looking increasingly like "the only tax-neutral way to keep renewable energy transition targets on track." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988326003336?via%3Dihub

CNBC: "There's a lot more institutional buy in this time" for Bitcoin. On the 4-year cycle: "a bull market will come at the end of this year" with institutional demand helping "keep it afloat."

Bitcoin Mechanic says the rejection of BIP110 on Saturday "shattered a long-standing belief that Bitcoin's anti-fragility and hard-monetary properties would continue thanks to its decentralized network of nodes." He argues that mining pools acted as "a small cartel of centralized pool operators clearly acting on behalf of industry players who operated behind closed doors" to kill BIP110, while supporters "operated in public" using "neutral metrics that everyone had access to." His core concern is that "Proof of Work is completely pointless if the criteria for what constitutes validity is decided by the ones doing the work." He says he's now running a stalled Knots node at block 931,633 and is open to a hard fork with a new proof-of-work algorithm, stating "the only defense the network would have would be to hard-fork to a new Proof-of-Work algorithm." He closes by saying he has "no desire to attempt to call this new chain Bitcoin" and that captured Bitcoin "becomes a tool for the sickest of purposes."