It's Tuesday, August 18, 2026.
The SEC proposes Regulation Crypto Assets. Sherlock introduces its Audit Engine. The EF ESP allocates $5.5 million in grants. And Hayden Adams outlines how AMMs win.
The SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, a securities offering framework tailored for investment contracts involving crypto assets. The proposal creates two exemptions from Securities Act registration requirements The fist exemptions is a one-time offering of up to $5 million over four years with principles-based narrative disclosures. The second is a recurring exemption of up to $75 million per 12-month period requiring financial statements and ongoing reporting.
The SEC also proposed a conditional safe harbor from the definition of security. If its conditions are met, a crypto asset would be deemed not to be an investment contract, and therefore not a security, under both the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act. The proposal also prevents state securities law registration requirements for compliant offerings and certain secondary market transactions.
Smart contract security auditing firm Sherlock introduced Audit Engine, a coordinated security review platform that runs LLMs, purpose-built AI auditors, and human security researchers against the same codebase in one structured engagement. Audit Engine coordinates across frontier model, AI auditor, and human researcher layers and consolidates findings into one validated, deduplicated audit result.
Audit Engine scales across three tiers depending on the stakes and scope of the code. Performance attribution tracks which models, tools, and researchers found each confirmed issue, giving teams data to optimize future reviews. Sherlock piloted the Audit Engine on Polygon's Heimdall v2 upgrade, which involved over 20 AI auditors and surfaced 217 valid findings.
The Ethereum Foundation's Ecosystem Support Program released its Q2 2026 allocation results, awarding $5.5 million in grants across zero-knowledge proofs, client diversity, formal verification, and open-source tooling projects. The figure comes at nearly half of what it allocated in Q1 following heavy budget cuts and a reorganization at the Ethereum Foundation. This quarter also marked the first time the program issued grants in ETH by default. To date, ESP has awarded over $177 million to more than 1,700 project.s
In other news, Hayden Adams explains how correlated asset pairs help AMMs dominate global capital markets. MöB launches its exchange on Robinhood Chain. Vlad comments on Tokenized Stocks in America.
Ethernews introduces front page news aggregator for Ethereum. Peer releases a P2P marketplace for selling AI token credits. And Justin Sun dusts USDT from HTX into Coinbase and Binance addresses
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