Russian Influence Network Used ChatGPT to Masquerade as Academic Experts
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Security experts indicate that approximately $22 million in illicit funds flowed into HitBTC in 2026, and the platform repeatedly refused to cooperate with the investigation.
According to ChainCatcher, Darcy, co-founder of FlashRescue, disclosed that approximately $22 million in illicit funds flowed into the cryptocurrency exchange HitBTC in 2026. He pointed out that HitBTC refused to cooperate with police investigations on two separate occasions, a practice consistent with the platform's actions, as reported by several on-chain investigators. He mentioned that in the Bybit theft case, as much as $3.68 million from a money laundering network linked to DPRK (North Korea) flowed into HitBTC, but the platform again failed to cooperate with the relevant authorities in subsequent investigations.
Binance gave Russian authorities client data used in terrorism financing case: Report
Reuters reported that Binance supplied transaction records and identity documents later used in a terrorism-financing case against Yuri Belenkiy.
Base network outage recap: Two consecutive crashes caused by a sorter bug.
According to Mars Finance, official sources have confirmed that the root cause of the two consecutive outages of Coinbase's Layer 2 network, Base, last week was a software vulnerability in the Sequencer block building logic. The Base engineering team stated that after an invalid transaction failed to execute, the relevant journal state should have been cleared. However, due to a program defect, the old state was incorrectly retained, ultimately preventing the Sequencer and validator nodes from generating new blocks. This resulted in two block production outages on the Mainnet, the first lasting 116 minutes and the second lasting 20 minutes. The team stated that although a patch fixed the sequencer state update issue, a "race condition" appeared after the system restart, preventing the sequencer from recovering synchronization in time, thus triggering the second outage. In addition, some infrastructure issues also prolonged the overall recovery time. Base stated that it will strengthen protocol fuzz testing to improve its vulnerability detection capabilities under abnormal input scenarios and optimize the network recovery mechanism to avoid the need for manual restarting of validator nodes in similar future events. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Base has experienced outages due to Sequencer-related issues; it previously suffered network outages of approximately 17 minutes in September 2024 and 30 minutes in August 2025. Currently, Base remains the second-largest Ethereum Layer 2 network by Total Value Locked (TVS).
Anthropic says Claude used for cyberattacks and surveillance
A Russian-speaking operator targeted more than 20 organizations, while a Mali consultant used Claude to build a mass-surveillance platform.
USDT will return to the Bitcoin network; UTEXO will natively issue a Bitcoin version of USDT via the RGB protocol.
According to Mars Finance, on July 7th, Tether is preparing to natively issue USDT on the Bitcoin network based on the RGB v0.11.1 protocol, with UTEXO responsible for commercial issuance and distribution. This will mark USDT's return to the Bitcoin mainnet after many years, since its initial appearance on the Bitcoin network in 2014 via the Omni protocol. UTEXO co-founder Viktor Ihnatiuk stated that the company has received support from Tether, which is responsible for promoting the native Bitcoin USDT rollout. The RGB protocol employs client-side validation combined with the Lightning Network, enabling instant, low-cost, and privacy-focused USDT transactions while inheriting the Bitcoin UTXO security model. Users will be able to hold USDT directly through their native Bitcoin addresses and send and receive payments using Lightning Network wallets that support RGB, without relying on other public chains or intermediary service providers. Compared to the current account-based networks like TRON and Ethereum, where USDT is primarily circulated, RGB naturally supports one-time addresses using the UTXO model and combines this with off-chain payments via the Lightning Network, effectively enhancing transaction privacy. Meanwhile, UTEXO is deeply integrated with Tether, reducing intermediary fees and data collection. Users can also convert USDT between different public chains at low cost through its online cross-chain bridge.
The predictive behavior AI network THEA has raised $8 million in funding, led by Maven 11 Capital and others.
PANews reported on July 3rd that THEA, a predictive behavior AI network focused on the risk markets, has completed an $8 million funding round to build its Solana-based coordination layer and expand its AI infrastructure. The round was led by Maven11 Capital, Spartan Group, ManifoldTrading, HackVC, and Fisher8 Capital. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in the Cayman Islands, THEA's AI models are trained on over 35 billion real-world decision-making data points. Its core product is providing predictive behavior AI for the risk markets. The company plans to launch THEA Network—a coordination layer that routes inference requests and settles transactions on Solana, while keeping large amounts of data processing off-chain.