#MegaProject# Over 1,100 AI companies. Leaders from 100+ countries and regions. More than 4,400 exhibits. From #robots# to open-source models, the future of #AI# is taking shape at #WAIC# 2026 in #Shanghai#. #WAIC2026#

#MegaProject# Russian President Vladimir Putin left Beijing on Wednesday night, concluding his state visit to China. In this episode, MegaProject takes a closer look at several major China- #Russia# #cooperation# projects. #infrastructure# #space#

KOSPI IS ALMOST BACK IN A BULL MARKET AFTER JULY’S HISTORIC CRASH. South Korea’s KOSPI jumped over +3.5% today to a three-week high as AI and semiconductor stocks rallied. The index has now recovered nearly +30% from its late-July low below 5,300. Samsung gained +40%, while SK Hynix rose more than +30% from their July lows. Before the crash, the KOSPI had tripled to +300% in since April 2025, reaching an all-time high of 9,100 in June. KOSPI then crashed over -40% as margin calls and 2x leveraged ETFs wiped more than $2 trillion from Korean markets. Assets in Korean leveraged ETFs have since fallen from $53 billion to around $25 billion, leaving the market less crowded. Foreign investors are now returning. Global funds bought $2 billion of KOSPI shares on Wednesday, while retail investors sold. Steady US inflation and strong US tech earnings revived confidence in AI demand. Also reports that Singapore’s Temasek may invest in Samsung and SK Hynix added to the momentum. Korea also plans to fast-track approvals for semiconductor and AI megaprojects. But the biggest risk remains: Samsung and SK Hynix still represent over 55% of the KOSPI, leaving the entire market dependent on global AI spending.

DAILY SITUATION RECAP: - Claude Fable 5.1 - SB Energy files for IPO - Physical Superintelligence makes a splash with a $58M seed round - Senator Bernie Sanders calls for an AI pause in Fox News op-ed Anthropic releases Fable 5.1 & Mythos 5.1. Anthropic released its latest frontier model with two versions: Fable 5.1 is generally available, while Mythos 5.1 gives vetted cybersecurity and life-sciences researchers access to more advanced capabilities. Anthropic says Fable 5.1 improves on Fable 5 across coding, knowledge work, and long-running agentic tasks, while costing an estimated 25% less for typical workloads and up to 45% less for highly agentic work. Also announced was Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), a new data privacy system that works by storing customers’ data in their own cloud infrastructure instead of Anthropic’s. EFS will be made available to eligible enterprise customers starting this fall. OpenAI says Astra reaches Critical cyber capability. OpenAI says Astra is the first model it has classified at the “Critical” cybersecurity level under OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, meaning it can devise and execute end-to-end cyberattacks against hardened targets based solely on a high-level goal. SoftBank’s SB Energy files for US IPO. SB Energy publicly filed for a NASDAQ listing (ticker: SBE). OpenAI has received warrants worth roughly $5.5B and NVIDIA has committed to invest $1.5B through a private placement priced at the IPO level. SB Energy reported revenue of $138.7M and a net loss of $3.21B for the six months ended June 30. Senator Bernie Sanders calls for a pause in AI development in a Fox News op-ed. Senator Sanders cites concerns over the environmental impact of data centers, the enrichment of the tech oligarchy, and the dangers of uncontrollable AI as reasons to pause AI development and seek arms-race-style agreements with China. Senator Sanders also cited the OpenAI Hugging Face incident as evidence that AI is becoming uncontrollable. Physical Superintelligence (PSI) emerges from stealth with a $58M seed round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. PSI is an AI lab focused on industrializing the discovery of new physics by creating virtual physicists. The company’s first commercial application is optimizing the power, cooling, and compute systems in AI data centers. South Korea doubles its AI/megaproject spend in its 2027 national budget. The government plans to allocate 24 trillion won ($17.5B USD) to semiconductor and AI-enabling infrastructure. OpenAI asks Gavin Newsom to sign youth AI safety bill in published letter. California SB 1119 would require companies that offer AI chatbots to determine users’ ages, conduct child-safety risk assessments, put default parental controls on teen accounts, and add other safety-focused features. AI security startup AIR raises $50M across two rounds: $10M led by Sequoia and $40M led by Greenoaks. AIR’s visibility product discovers what AI agents are being used across a company and its enforcement layer then blocks security risks.

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year. Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world. Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring. Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list): * The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals. * PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer * Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate. * Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds. * EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale. These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play. In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin. The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.