Bitcoin and ether climbed sharply in August, reviving crypto market sentiment, but the rally is viewed less as decentralisation being realised than as crypto technology being absorbed into traditional financial infrastructure. Industry figures say crypto has influenced payments, settlement and tokenisation, and that DeFi has matured, even as major firms exit and regulation pulls the sector into the mainstream. Use has spread, but complexity and custody risks persist.

A study found signs that AI wrote or heavily edited content on 35% of webpages posted after ChatGPT launched. Using Common Crawl data, Pew Research Center analysed 10,000 webpages and found AI-writing signals in 9.6% of the overall sample. The share rose to 35% when limited to pages posted since November 2022. The pattern was most common on .com domains and far lower on .edu and .gov sites, it said.