Web3 Newsletter: Industry Highlights and Must-See Trends This Week

Foresight News brings you a quick overview of this week's hot topics and recommended content:

01 Crypto Buzz

"Bloodshed in Paraguay: The Tragic Fall of Harry Yeh from a 30-Story Building"

"588 Days, 300+ Web3 Projects Sink into Oblivion"

"From Avenir to UMX: Li Lin's Return and New Challenges"

"Bitcoin Community in Turmoil! Understanding the New Bitcoin Scaling War Triggered by BIP-110"

02 Black Swan Reappears

"Three Years After Being Phished, DeFi Whale Loses Another $25 Million"

"11,742 Shipping Addresses Leaked Along with Trezor Orders"

"Hackers Print 30 Trillion ONE: Veteran Blockchain Harmony Struck Again"

"Even American Crypto Circle Figures Can't Escape Fraud? She Scammed $5 Million by Impersonating Exchange Customer Service"

"Bybit Sues North Korean Hacker Group in US Court, 90% of Funds May Be Unrecoverable"

03 Project Insights

"Privacy, Quantum Security, Native Rollups: What’s New in Ethereum’s Roadmap?"

"After Eight Years of Investment, Why Did Ethereum Suddenly Abandon Poseidon?"

"Shutting Down 8 ETFs, Laying Off 14%: Why is Bitwise Still Launching New Products?"

"What Kind of Company is Trump Media Becoming?"

01 Crypto Buzz

The volatility of wealth in the crypto industry is staggering. The tragic fall of Harry Yeh, a Chinese crypto professional in Paraguay, from a 30-story building has shocked the community. Numerous doubts surrounding the incident have sparked speculation, and the police have yet to reach a conclusion. Reflecting on the tumultuous journey of his algorithmic stablecoin project, this tragedy serves as a warning to crypto participants chasing high returns: behind the fervent wealth-building myths, risks and uncertainties lurk closely.

"Bloodshed in Paraguay: The Tragic Fall of Harry Yeh from a 30-Story Building"

On August 7, 2026, local media in Paraguay, "La Tribuna," reported that a Chinese man was found dead outside the luxurious Jade Park apartment building in the Trinidad district of Asunción. His preliminary identity was confirmed as Harry Chun Tak Yeh, founder and managing partner of Quantum Fintech Group, with the social media handle @harryyeh. According to local police reports, it is estimated that his fall occurred last Tuesday morning, local time, from the 30th floor of one of the tallest buildings in the area. His body was found completely naked and covered with a black plastic bag. Investigators later examined the associated 30th-floor apartment, finding the door wide open and the interior in disarray. Another apartment on the 27th floor, also linked to him, was examined by the criminal technical department. Harry Yeh's 29-year-old Brazilian girlfriend, who lived on a lower floor, stated to authorities that she knew nothing about the incident. The homicide and criminal technical departments of the Paraguayan police have collected physical evidence and handed it over to the prosecutor's office. The prosecutor's office is currently investigating multiple possibilities, including accidental death, suspected suicide, and homicide. The body has been sent to the judicial morgue for an autopsy. As of now, there is no official final conclusion.

In nearly 588 days, over 300 Web3 projects have quietly closed down, and the industry reshuffle continues to accelerate. Capital is no longer willing to pay for hollow narratives; self-sustainability has become the baseline for survival. With broken funding chains, lack of demand, and homogenization, many once-promising projects have collapsed one after another. Amid the pain of bubble clearing, the industry bids farewell to reckless growth; only builders who anchor real demand and possess sustainable business models can weather the cycle.

"588 Days, 300+ Web3 Projects Sink into Oblivion"

Every industry on the road to prosperity must undergo a round of "carnage" elimination, and Web3 is no exception. According to Foresight News's analysis of publicly available information, since 2025, at least 78 Web3 projects with total funding exceeding $1.5 million have announced shutdowns, among which 69 projects with confirmed funding have collectively taken over $900 million in investment. If we also count those small projects that quietly died without institutional funding, the total number far exceeds 300. This means that in the past nearly 600 days, an average of one Web3 project has died every two days, whether known or unknown.

After thirteen years, Li Lin returns to the industry spotlight with UMX, incubated by Avenir Group. From building digital asset trading channels during the Huobi era to positioning cross-market financial infrastructure from the perspective of capital allocators, he has captured the turning point of the integration of crypto and traditional finance. By unifying accounts to bridge crypto assets with US stocks and ETFs, UMX attempts to solve the pain point of asset fragmentation, opening up a new track at the intersection of the two financial systems.

"From Avenir to UMX: Li Lin's Return and New Challenges"

When Li Lin founded Huobi in 2013, he had just turned thirty, focusing on a glaring gap in a rough market, wielding the no-fee knife with a fierce approach, flexible stance, and a simple and direct goal: to create a better Bitcoin trading website. Thirteen years later, that young man is now in his forties. Having experienced a complete industry cycle and transitioned from a frontline entrepreneur to an investor and asset allocator, his perspective on the market has changed. The biggest change may still be the question itself. The previous generation of trading platforms faced the question of "how to trade digital assets better." Today, as more and more professional investors hold BTC, stablecoins, US stocks, ETFs, options, and various income-generating assets simultaneously, the new question is: how can these assets be used within the same capital and risk framework? From Avenir Group's investment landscape over the past few years to the current incubation of UMX, this thread is becoming increasingly clear. Whether UMX can succeed depends on real users and market cycles for validation; it is too early to draw any conclusions now. But at least this summer, that young man who once spoke of decentralization in flip-flops at a garage café stands once again at the starting point of industry narrative. Only this time, the market has changed, and the questions are no longer the same.

The long-dormant Bitcoin scaling debate has reignited, with the BIP-110 proposal causing a severe split in the community. Luke Dashjr's push for the new regulation triggered a brief chain fork. The essence of this conflict is a game over the use of block space and the modification of consensus rules, reaffirming that Bitcoin's paper proposals cannot determine the direction; computing power, miners, and user consensus are the ultimate arbiters.

"Bitcoin Community in Turmoil! Understanding the New Bitcoin Scaling War Triggered by BIP-110"

On August 10, Luke Dashjr, who has long served as an editor for Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP) and is a co-founder and CTO of Ocean Pool, was removed from the editorial team and lost editing privileges for bypassing the discussion process and prematurely numbering the proposal while contributing little to editorial work in recent years. The trigger for this disciplinary action was the first real chain split since the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in 2017. On August 8, the Bitcoin network split into two at block height 961,632: one part of the nodes refused to follow the main chain and insisted on executing the BIP-110 soft fork proposal drafted by Luke, which prohibits non-transfer data from being included in transactions. A minority chain added only one block before coming to a complete halt, while the main chain continued to operate normally, quickly pulling ahead by dozens of blocks.

02 Black Swan Reappears

A seasoned DeFi whale has once again fallen victim to asset theft, with approximately $25 million in assets stolen within just 15 minutes. This victim had previously suffered a phishing attack worth millions three years ago, and although most of the funds were recovered, security measures were not adequately improved. The hacker possesses a mature on-chain money laundering path, and this incident serves as a warning to holders of large crypto assets: security rectification after a theft cannot merely stop at increasing vigilance.

"Three Years After Being Phished, DeFi Whale Loses Another $25 Million"

In the early hours of August 13, the on-chain security agency Scam Sniffer tweeted that a user's two wallets were emptied within 15 minutes, with DAI, WBTC, aUSDC, LDO, sUSDe, and native ETH all transferred out, totaling approximately $25 to $26 million in value. The affected address had previously suffered a phishing loss of $24.23 million in September 2023. The address, which did not change after the three-year lesson, was hit again three years later. According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin, the affected wallet had a total of three wallets, one of which was a clean wallet (0x8f3...914) that had never had any token authorization records and was also emptied, indicating that this was not merely a case of authorized phishing; the attacker likely had direct access to the private key.

The data leak incident involving Trezor's logistics partner raises alarms: while hardware wallets can protect private keys, they cannot completely sever the connection between identity and holding behavior. The logistics labels explicitly marked product information and customer address information, amplifying the risks of social engineering fraud. The security of crypto assets extends beyond on-chain keys; comprehensive privacy protection throughout the entire process from ordering, transportation to data retention has become the first line of defense that self-custody users cannot ignore.

《11,742 Shipping Addresses Leaked Along with Trezor Orders》

A hardware wallet protecting Bitcoin has inadvertently exposed its owner. On August 11, a Trezor user shared a photo of the Trezor Safe 3 he just received. What surprised him was not the device inside the box, but the shipping label on the outside: instead of using a vague term like "electronic device," it clearly stated—"Trezor Safe 3 Bitcoin Only." This means that before the package was delivered, the courier, sorting personnel, and possibly neighbors who saw the package had the opportunity to know that the recipient had purchased a Bitcoin hardware wallet. The poster, Angelus Borgia, noted that this was a package sent within the United States, not subject to international customs declaration, and questioned: "Why does the product name have to be printed in full on the outside?" Two days later, on August 13, Trezor revealed a more serious issue: its logistics partner ShipMonk had suffered a data breach, affecting the names, emails, phone numbers, and shipping addresses of nearly 14,000 customers.

Recently, the well-established sharding public chain Harmony encountered a significant security vulnerability, with hackers exploiting a cross-shard receipt validation flaw to illegally mint over 30 trillion ONE tokens, causing a sharp drop in the token's price. This marks the third crisis related to token supply for the project. Once boasting a TVL of $1.4 billion, the public chain now faces liquidity exhaustion, and this incident serves as a reminder of the substantial risks associated with the underlying code security and mechanism design of small-cap public chains.

《Hackers Mint 30 Trillion ONE: Veteran Public Chain Harmony Strikes Again with a Fatal Blow》

Hacking attacks are becoming the "number one killer" of crypto protocols. On August 12, X user Juiceberg tweeted that on-chain data indicated that the Harmony protocol had been exploited, with attackers illegally minting about 4 billion ONE tokens (worth over $3 million), accounting for 26% of its total supply. Approximately 2.8 billion tokens were quickly transferred to exchanges during the price crash, while Harmony's total supply endpoint failed to reflect this increase in token issuance, leading to a discrepancy between the actual on-chain supply and public data. The attackers retained about 115 million tokens on-chain (about 2.9% of the minted amount), with the vast majority having entered exchange accounts, either sold or stored in recharge wallets. Following the announcement, the price of ONE plummeted from $0.00118 to a low of $0.00056, currently recovering to $0.00078, with a nearly 38% drop over 24 hours.

The crypto industry continues to be plagued by impersonation scams, with a minor scammer in the U.S. posing as an exchange and hardware wallet customer service representative, tricking victims into revealing asset information and accumulating $5 million in crypto assets. After successfully scamming, the fraudster openly flaunted the stolen funds and mocked the victims. Such social engineering scams have surged in recent years, and since crypto asset transfers are irreversible, users must be vigilant about unsolicited calls and never disclose their mnemonic phrases.

《Even U.S. Crypto Circle Can't Escape Fraud? She Scammed $5 Million by Impersonating Exchange Customer Service》

A phone call rings, with the caller claiming to be from the exchange's security team, speaking in a professional and urgent tone, informing that there is unusual activity on the account and immediate identity verification and asset transfer are needed to secure the funds. On the other end of the line, someone is recording, preparing to use this harvest as material for their next bragging session. On the evening of August 10, on-chain detective ZachXBT released a detailed investigation thread revealing how a scammer in the U.S. using the alias Tiffany Milanovich impersonated exchange and hardware wallet customer service to scam at least $5 million in crypto assets, mocking victims multiple times during phone calls and publicly flaunting the stolen funds on social media. ZachXBT confirmed that she is a minor, with some media reports stating she is about 17 years old.

In 2025, Bybit faced the largest theft of crypto assets in history, with the Lazarus Group stealing approximately $1.46 billion in cryptocurrency. Subsequently, Bybit initiated a lawsuit in the U.S. and applied for asset freezing, but hackers quickly laundered the funds through mixing and cross-chain channels, making over 90% of the assets untraceable. The proportion of recovered funds through multi-agency law enforcement collaboration is extremely low, highlighting the severe challenges of network attacks and on-chain asset tracing in the crypto field.

《Bybit Takes North Korean Hacker Group to U.S. Court, 90% of Funds May Be Unrecoverable》

As of now, Bybit, in collaboration with blockchain analysis companies, multiple exchanges, and international law enforcement agencies, has recovered approximately $48.4 million of the stolen assets and frozen about $30.5 million of the involved assets across more than 28 exchanges and custodians, totaling approximately $78.9 million, which accounts for only about 5% of the total stolen amount. The FBI confirmed that the Lazarus Group was responsible for the attack, and law enforcement agencies from multiple countries coordinated to take follow-up action, with German authorities dismantling the involved cryptocurrency exchange eXch, and German and Swiss authorities jointly shutting down the mixing platform Cryptomixer.io. Despite some success in law enforcement collaboration, the vast majority of stolen funds have escaped tracking through cross-chain bridges, mixers, and over-the-counter trading channels. The injunctions in the lawsuit documents are only effective for identifiable on-chain assets, while funds that have been mixed and converted across chains into entities or individuals that do not cooperate with judicial freezing are extremely difficult to recover. When stolen, the price of ETH was about $2,730, and it is currently about $1,920, a drop of about 30%. Even if some assets are located in the future, their actual value has significantly diminished.

03 Project Insights

Vitalik updates Ethereum's Strawmap roadmap, showing significant adjustments in the focus of underlying development compared to the 2023 plan. Strong privacy and post-quantum security upgrades have risen to primary goals, with native Rollups, new state architecture, and protocol simplification expansion plans accelerating. Many related EIPs are still in the early stages, and this long-term blueprint outlines Ethereum's evolution direction in response to future cryptographic risks and large-scale applications.

《Privacy, Quantum Security, Native Rollups: What’s New in Ethereum's Roadmap?》

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released a comparative diagram of its 2023 technical roadmap and the current Strawmap on August 10. He stated that the overall overlap is high, but some items have been prioritized (such as quantum security), while others have been deprioritized (such as VDF and multiple EVM improvements), and some plans have been replaced by better constructions (such as Verkle trees being replaced first by unified binary trees and then by PBT, and the state expiration plan being replaced by new state types). The current roadmap features several new directions that were completely unaddressed in 2023, reflecting priority changes, including strong privacy protection being listed as a primary concern for the first time; advancing aggressive scaling in the post-quantum context; simplifying protocol specifications to assist formal verification, as he noted that the emergence of AI makes it possible to conduct complete formal verification of all protocol content; introducing concepts of block and gas futures; introducing native Rollups (previously SNARK technology was not mature enough); and opening up more design space for "the future of EVM," with the protocol potentially offering users a non-EVM instruction set architecture in the future.

After eight years of research investment, the Ethereum Foundation has made significant adjustments: abandoning the Poseidon hash algorithm at the L1 layer in favor of traditional hash solutions like SHA2 and BLAKE2. Leveraging breakthroughs in binary field SNARK technology, the efficiency of traditional hash zero-knowledge proofs has been significantly improved. In the face of the looming quantum threat, Ethereum has chosen mature cryptographic primitives that have undergone long-term cryptographic validation, accelerating the layout of its post-quantum security roadmap.

《Why Did Ethereum Suddenly Abandon Poseidon After Eight Years of Investment?》

On August 13, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake tweeted that the Ethereum Foundation decided to abandon the SNARK-friendly hash algorithm Poseidon at the L1 layer and instead adopt traditional hash functions like SHA2 or BLAKE2. This decision is backed by eight years of research, tens of millions of dollars in investment, and a significant revision of the post-quantum cryptography roadmap.

Crypto asset management giant Bitwise is simultaneously laying off staff, liquidating eight ETFs, and continuing to develop new products. With client assets shrinking by over $4 billion, the company is proactively cutting down on the operational burden of Web3 and options products, shifting resources towards staking and tokenization tracks. This adjustment of "concurrent slimming and expansion" reflects a new trend in the industry, shifting from a broad product line approach to focusing on high-value tracks.

《 Why is Bitwise still launching new products despite shutting down 8 ETFs and laying off 14% of its staff? 》

During the exit of eight ETFs, Bitwise is still increasing products in other directions. In April, the company launched an Avalanche ETP with internal staking arrangements in the European market; in May, the Hyperliquid ETF officially went live; in June, the company took over the Crypto Carry Fund under Superstate, which has over $267 million in assets, entering the field of tokenized fund management. These new products will also generate demands for custody, staking, compliance, and distribution, and changes in product direction cannot be directly equated with a decrease in overall operational burden. It indicates that the company is still willing to allocate resources for new tracks, and it allows layoffs and product expansion to appear on the same business list. In an announcement released on June 30, Bitwise stated that the company has 70 investment products, serving over 5,500 private wealth management teams, registered investment advisors, and family offices, and collaborating with more than 20 banks and brokerage firms. The number of products means that the company needs to continuously bear operational tasks such as compliance, custody, trading support, information disclosure, and customer service. After reducing the team by about one-seventh, the product structure will directly affect the complexity of the business that the remaining personnel need to maintain. Observing the centralized clearing of the eight ETFs alongside the new products launched during the same period, Web3-themed funds and options income strategies built around single assets are exiting, while products that directly track underlying crypto assets, come with staking yields, and tokenize fund shares continue to receive investments. After the staff decreased from 180 to 155, the remaining products will be managed by a smaller team. Bitwise has not specified which positions are related to the product adjustments, nor disclosed any one-time layoff costs.

Trump Media Technology Group is no longer just a social platform operator. Financial reports show that Truth Social's main business is struggling with growth and incurring continuous large losses. The company is simultaneously increasing its Bitcoin investments, launching a low-latency data API for Wall Street, and advancing a significant merger with fusion company TAE. Social media, crypto assets, and cutting-edge technology are packaged into the same publicly traded company, creating a cross-border capital experiment filled with political narratives.

《 What kind of company is Trump Media becoming? 》

A company that earned only $1.67 million in revenue in the second quarter recorded a net loss of $238 million; it just scrapped a listing plan for a CRO treasury company, and then swapped about $160 million in Bitcoin-related equity securities for spot BTC; the latest business launched is selling public posts from top accounts to Wall Street via low-latency data interfaces. Finally, management tells investors that the most important value driver for the company in the future is a fusion company. These seemingly unrelated businesses are now all concentrated in Trump Media Technology Group. On the surface, Trump Media's second-quarter revenue grew by 89% year-on-year, seemingly finally finding growth. However, a closer look at the financial report reveals that the original advertising revenue from Truth Social is actually declining, and the massive losses mainly stem from fluctuations in crypto asset prices. The $1.9 billion in "financial assets" that the company heavily promotes does not equate to cash that can be freely used, with only about $425 million being cash and short-term investments. Meanwhile, it is attempting a more unique new business: selling public posts from top accounts, including Trump, to Wall Street trading firms at lower latency. Therefore, what truly deserves attention in this financial report is how Trump Media is redefining what it relies on to make money.