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.

Ethereum improvement proposal EIP-8363 would dynamically burn consensus rewards as total staking rises, potentially taking net staking yield to zero as staked ETH approaches 50% of supply. As of Aug. 8, about 41.18 million ETH was staked out of a total supply of 120.68 million ETH, or roughly 34.13%. SharpLink has disclosed plans to stake $100 million in ETH and pair it with $25 million in outside capital for DeFi liquidity protocols and other onchain strategies, according to a May SEC filing.

Bitcoin faces the risk of a BIP-110 soft fork activation, a proposal designed to cap the amount of arbitrary data that can be included in transactions. Activation requires a 55% threshold, but as of Thursday only 2.56% of blocks signaled support. About 22.65% of nodes run the Knots client and are expected to start rejecting blocks without a specific signal beginning at block height 961,632, raising the possibility that enforcement by a minority could still trigger a network split. With Bitcoin’s market cap around $1.3 trillion, any fork would introduce significant uncertainty.

Latest data show that 10% to 23% of blocks on the Solana network per hour consume compute units (CU) above the previous 60 million limit. The shift indicates a marked rise in on-chain smart contract complexity, the intensity of parallel execution, and dApp activity. As Solana’s native token, SOL’s value thesis is closely tied to network throughput, resource utilization, and ecosystem activity. The data are framed as a positive technical signal, with no reference to tokenomics changes or regulatory events.

The Cosmos ecosystem has activated 100M compute unit (CU) blocks on mainnet, following the SIMD-0286 technical proposal. The upgrade raises the per-block compute ceiling from 60M to 100M, representing a 66% increase. It is expected to improve on-chain transaction throughput, execution efficiency for complex smart contracts, and overall scalability. The change is also described as strengthening the network utility case and developer adoption interest for M, a core infrastructure token in the Cosmos ecosystem.

The post contrasts traditional card payments with the XRP Ledger’s settlement model. It says card networks can authorize a swipe in about 2 seconds, but the funds typically settle in 1 to 3 days. By contrast, it claims the XRP Ledger combines approval and final settlement into a single step that completes irreversibly in 3 to 5 seconds.

XRP Ledger developers are rushing to address multiple critical issues in xrpld v3.2.0, including performance regressions and node synchronization failures. Some operators say nodes running the release are falling behind mainnet consensus, while downgrading to v3.1.3 appears to restore normal performance. Other reports indicate certain Windows 10 nodes remain stuck in a “connected” state and fail to sync. Fixes are slated to be deployed via the fixCleanup3_2_0 protocol amendment on July 29, according to Coingape.