Aave, the largest decentralized lending protocol, has proposed reducing its exposure to governance risks within the Ethereum layer-2 network, Scroll’s ecosystem.

The initiative, submitted on Sept. 11 by the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), comes amid mounting instability in Scroll’s decentralized governance model.

The proposal outlines several defensive measures to protect Aave’s users and liquidity pools. These include raising the reserve factor for all listed assets to 90%, lowering supply caps to existing levels, and cutting borrowing caps for all borrowable assets.

According to ACI, these steps will help contain exposure to Scroll-based assets, reinforce protocol safety through conservative risk parameters, and ensure Aave can respond swiftly if governance disruptions escalate.

ACI pointed out that the proposal’s implementation will proceed through the Direct to AIP process, which allows for faster deployment of urgent changes.

Data from DeFiLlama shows that Aave currently holds about $6 million in total value locked (TVL) on Scroll, making it the chain with one of its smallest liquidity pools.

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Scroll’s DAO issues

The urgency of Aave’s proposal stems from internal turmoil at Scroll’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Scroll announced earlier in the day that it had halted new proposals within its DAO as part of a plan to redesign governance.

Scroll said the decision would allow experimentation with governance models emphasizing efficiency, effectiveness, and alignment. The team also stressed that the pause aims to safeguard stability in the short term while laying the groundwork for sustainable growth.

Meanwhile, Scroll stressed that proposals that have already been approved will proceed. However, fresh submissions will be paused until the new structure is introduced.

This move comes after leadership turbulence within the DAO. Olimpio, a Scroll delegate, confirmed that the DAO’s lead, known as Eugene, resigned earlier in the week.

According to Olimpio, this departure has left the community facing uncertainty, with several proposals now stalled. These include a treasury management initiative, the formation of a governance council, and a test of a DAO timelock mechanism.

Bitcoin Decay Channel Hints At $200K–$290K Top, Tips Cycle To Extend To 2026

In an X post on September 5, a Bitcoin researcher with the X username Sminston With shares some important data from the Bitcoin Decay Channel on a potential peak price for the current market cycle.

For context, the Bitcoin Decay Channel is a long-term logarithmic regression model that attempts to map Bitcoin’s price cycles, specifically its historical peaks and bottoms, within statistically derived boundaries. This pricing model shows that while Bitcoin follows boom-and-bust patterns, its growth rate decays over time as each cycle delivers smaller percentage gains than the last.

Notably, data from the Bitcoin Decay channel chart shows the premier cryptocurrency is steadily climbing within the 0.05 quantile support and upper bound resistance lines, with oscillations that mark historical overheated zones. The embedded oscillator suggests BTC is not yet at a euphoric peak, leaving room for further upside before a long-term top forms.

Based on more data, Sminston With explains that the present Bitcoin market cycle could see a price top between late 2025 and late 2026. If Bitcoin peaks in December 2025, the price range would sit between $205,000 and $230,000.  However, should the cycle extend into 2026, projections rise incrementally, i.e. $208,000-$235,000 by Jan 2026, $219,000–$250,000 by April 2026, $230,000-$265,000 by July 2026, $243,000-$282,000 by October 2026, and as high as $250,000–$292,000 by year-end 2026.

Regardless of which price top scenario, the Bitcoin Decay Channel presents a potential peak zone between $205,000 and $292,000 within the next 12-15 months. This presents a possible price gain of 86% in the base case and 167% in a bull case scenario.

Bitcoin Price Outlook

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $110,900, reflecting a 0.45% price increase in the past day. Meanwhile, weekly gains are now up by 2.89% showing a moderate recovery. Interestingly, Coincodex analysts are predicting the premier cryptocurrency to maintain this rebound, rising to $121,276 in five days. With a market cap of $2.2 trillion, Bitcoin remains the largest currency and fifth largest in the world. 

We’ve been keeping an eye out for Labor Day smartwatch deals, but they’ve been slim pickings this weekend. Only one deal we’ve spotted is truly intriguing: The Galaxy Watch 6 Classic 47mm LTE is $192.99 ($287 off) on Best Buy, as the site puts all of its Classic models on clearance.

We don’t know how many Watch 6 Classics are left, but this may be your last chance at a new model, rather than a refurbished one. We also spotted the same 60% off deal at Amazon, though most other sizes come from third-party resellers.

The Galaxy Watch 8 Classic is a respectable smartwatch with fast performance and the rotating bezel that long-time Samsung fans love. But its hard-edged, bulkier design has polarized these same fans, who felt that the old Galaxy Watch 6 Classic design lives up to that old-timey aesthetic much better.

So rather than spend $499 on the new model (or $549 with cellular), you can spend less than half that on the Watch 6 Classic LTE, which is still due to receive three more major version updates through the end of 2027.

Recommended if: You have a Galaxy Watch 4 Classic or Watch 5 and want a more traditional design than the newer 8 Classic; you care more about style than getting the newest features; or you hate other Galaxy Watches’ touch bezel controls.

Skip this deal if: You care more about a lighter design than a rotating bezel, and would prefer the Galaxy Watch 7 for $199 to get slightly newer hardware and sensors.

You can look elsewhere for the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic, but it’s either refurbished or sold from third-party Amazon sellers that may or may not have truly “new” models. That’s why this is your last chance to grab a Classic with some semblance of quality assurance before it’s off the market for good.

You can see in the photo above how the Watch 8 Classic and 6 Classic compare; the older model has a more subtle look, but it’s about the same weight and thickness. It has a slightly older Exynos processor, but the same amount of RAM for similar performance, making it capable of running Gemini commands swiftly.

While this model doesn’t have the new health sensors for niche data like your antioxidant index or vascular load, you’re still getting the core Galaxy Watch experience.

Also keep in mind that Samsung always offers enhanced trade-in credit for its old watches. So if the Galaxy Watch 9 series looks more tempting a year from now, this Watch 6 Classic deal will end up being a down payment when you trade it in for something better!

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Solana core developers have pushed a sweeping consensus overhaul, “Alpenglow” (SIMD-0326), into the ecosystem’s formal governance track, setting up a validator vote that, if approved, would replace TowerBFT and re-architect finality and validator incentives on mainnet-beta. The proposal’s authors—Quentin Kniep, Kobi Sliwinski, and Roger Wattenhofer—describe Alpenglow as “a major overhaul of Solana’s core consensus protocol,” designed to supplant “the existing Proof-of-History and TowerBFT mechanisms” with a design that targets block finalization “as low as 100–150 milliseconds.”

Voting Process For Solana ‘Alpenglow’ Starts

The governance post lays out a three-phase timeline: discussion through epochs 833–838, stake-weight capture in epoch 839, and a binding vote across epochs 840–842 using claimable vote tokens sent to “Yes,” “No,” or “Abstain” accounts. Passage hinges on a supermajority threshold: Yes must be at least two-thirds of Yes+No, with a 33% quorum that counts abstentions. As of today, Solana is in epoch 834, making the discussion window active and the vote window scheduled several epochs out.

At the heart of Alpenglow is Votor, a direct-vote, leader-pipelined finality protocol that shifts Solana away from on-chain vote transactions and heavy gossip toward off-chain vote exchange with local signature aggregation. Validators vote to notarize or skip blocks; leaders aggregate those votes eight slots later and submit compact proofs. The authors argue this design cuts latency dramatically and reduces bandwidth, while a “20+20” liveliness model aims to tolerate up to 20% adversarial and 20% unresponsive validators without halting progress. “Alpenglow… enables much lower latency, improved fault tolerance, and generally greater protocol efficiency,” the post asserts.

The upgrade also rewires validator economics. Because voting moves off-chain, the SIMD introduces a Validator Admission Ticket (VAT), a fixed per-epoch fee “initially set to 1.6 SOL per epoch,” burned to maintain an economic barrier roughly comparable to today’s on-chain vote-fee regime. Validators are “required to cast exactly one valid vote per slot”; conflicting votes are detectable, and persistent non-participation renders a validator ineligible for rewards and at risk of removal from the active set.

Leaders receive compensation equal to the per-slot vote rewards of the votes they aggregate, plus a flat bonus when they include fast-finalization/finalization certificates. In a follow-up thread post, Wattenhofer explains the 1.6 SOL figure as approximately 80% of current vote costs to ensure no operator is worse off at the “AlpenSwitch.”

If adopted, Alpenglow would make a visible semantic change at the client layer: the authors note that optimistic confirmation would be superseded by actual finality at sub-second timescales. The stated aim is to bring confirmation latencies in line with Web2 user expectations while tightening safety guarantees that were harder to formalize under TowerBFT. The proposal’s documentation points readers to a 50+ page white paper and independent analyses, but emphasizes that the initial rollout focuses on finalization and voting; a new data dissemination protocol, Rotor, would follow in a separate SIMD.

Governance mechanics for the vote mirror Solana’s prior advisory processes but with higher stakes. Vote tokens will be claimable via an adapted Merkle distributor; validators then send those tokens to the designated choice accounts during the epoch-bounded window. The foundation’s governance post states, “If the sum of Yes votes is equal to or greater than 2/3 of the total sum of Yes + No votes, the proposal will pass,” and “Abstain” contributes to quorum but not to the supermajority tally. Stake weights and a public tally script will be published for independent verification.

Community feedback has quickly homed in on operational risk and rollout discipline. One validator-oriented response urges the SIMD authors to embed “a testing, deployment and fallback plan” before a mainnet decision, likening the scope of change to other industry-scale protocol transitions. Others probe specifics around the VAT level, transaction expiry in a post-PoH world, leader equivocation handling, and effects on MEV auctions and client UX when slices of a block are ignored under certain failure modes. These threads underscore that while the performance headline—150 ms finality—is eye-catching, the vote will likely hinge on the comfort level with safety proofs, incentive edge-cases, and the migration path.

At press time, SOL traded at $181.89.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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In an August 10 video entitled “ETH Price Prediction for 2025 (Using AI) – You Are Not Bully enough,” Crypto Analyst Miles Deutscher said Ethereum’s latest breakout has shifted the market beyond “a very important level in the $4,000 zone” to what is considered a structurally strong advance towards a new, outstanding high. “We actually concluded every day,” he pointed out, adding that weekly closures over the same area “has not been closed every week since November 2021” — underscoring the importance of the movement. In the Deutscher framework, nearby it is “a much bigger run confirmation.”

How expensive is Ethereum?

Deutscher centered on analytics on a simple question (how high Ethereum is) and answered it with a fusion of technical context and model-driven probability. Before calling out the AI, he sketched the “eye test” pass, where price discoveries “develop well in this range here between $6,000 and $8,000.”

He even came up with a benchmark in the direction of “I think the price forecast will be $7,000.” To that end, he ran two large language models on a shared input set, and sought odds for a specific price range by the end of 2025.

Related readings

He said the 2025 peak probability of the first model favored continuance. He won $6K by clearing his previous highs around 4.7k, over 60%, over 5K, and around 30%, earning $6K to reach $6K and breaking over $7.5K, and backing about 30% chance to reach $6K to tag 10K this year.

When I enlarge the window until 2026, these odds are essentially raised, with him having confidence from 4.7k to 5k to 5k, about 40% at 6K, about 40% at $7.5k, and an untrivial tail, “In addition to 10k, you get an 18% chance.”

Performing the same exercises on Grok created a more aggressive outline. As Deutscher relayed it, Grok’s “base case could be $10,000.” The $8,000-$15,000 band was in the plausible cycle top range.

He explicitly cited the model’s technical guardrail. “The break above $4,800 marks the new all-time best chase. A break below $3,800 could potentially invalidate bullish papers.” In contrast, his own trade nullification has been strained by the trend, warning that “if Ethereum falls under the daily money noodles, it’s now something like $3,400, structurally, it could start to invalidate bullish moves, at least in the short term, at least in the short term.”

Etheric counter winds

The projection stack is on the macro-to-micro chain of tailwind, which Duteshire claims to be more directly supportive than his previous cycle. He consistently cited positive ETF flows – “We’ll be getting around $17 billion over the last 60 days, $11 billion in July alone,” particularly towing to the etheric side.

He surrounded the recent US policy procedures as a short-term acceleration in on-chain finance, saying that the genius act revealed a series of cryptocurrency treatments and “regulates some of the major stable coins,” thereby expanding the opening for facility yield strategies and tokenization. In his view, these are growth funnels that are particularly Ethereum-centric, as “Ethereum is the largest blockchain that promotes asset tokenization and defi.”

Related readings

Deutscher also combined the flow discussion with observations of market structure: fresh height stability, price resilience marked with “selling… relatively short-lived”, and, if it continues, the turn of Bitcoin domination preceded by a wider alt rotation with the ETH of props.

He emphasized that this did not imply a straight line. Deutscher expects the cycle to vibrate through bitcoin strength, etheric catch-ups, and higher beta Alt expansions than a single monolithic “Altseseason.”

He lays a pencil in the second window that could be until 2026, and warns that “you don’t know what will happen” to match the political and financial calendar points, highlighting the need for a clear invalidation.

Still, the directional conclusion is not clear. The combination of structural influx, clarity of regulations on on-chain finance, and a shift in Ethereum’s technical regime has biased him upside down. “This is a difficult momentum to slow down from short to medium,” he said, adding that the true “FOMO” phase will only begin once ETH is price discovery above the $4,800 peak.

At the time of pressing, ETH traded for $4,303.

Featured images created with dall.e, charts on tradingview.com

Why it matters: Most people think of multi-frame generation when they hear about Nvidia DLSS 4, but the transformer model upgrade in DLSS Super Resolution might be the update’s most consequential upgrade. Many games can already benefit from the feature, and it’s likely to become the standard across upcoming releases.

The latest version of Nvidia’s DLSS Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction SDK, released on Wednesday, brings the transformer model out of beta. Promoting the upscaling technology into DLSS’s stable branch will likely broaden its adoption in upcoming PC games.

First introduced in January alongside Nvidia’s RTX 50 series graphics cards, the vision transformer model replaces the long-standing convolutional neural network previously used in DLSS. This marks the most substantial improvement to Nvidia’s image reconstruction method since DLSS 2 popularized the technology in 2020.

Also read: DLSS 4 Upscaling at 4K is Actually Pretty Amazing

Although DLSS has earned praise for using machine learning to scale images to higher resolutions with good image quality over the past several years, the process isn’t without visual flaws. Issues that often occur include ghosting, shimmering, and smearing. Ray Reconstruction, which combines denoising for ray tracing with the DLSS algorithm, can also sometimes worsen the problem.

DLSS 4’s transformer model alters the algorithm to minimize these blemishes, resulting in a noticeably cleaner image, even when upscaling from half resolution in performance mode.

Our testing shows that, while AMD’s competing FSR 4 method beats DLSS 3, DLSS 4’s transformer model takes the lead. While Nvidia’s marketing for DLSS 4 mostly focuses on multi-frame generation, which is exclusive to the RTX 50 series GPUs, the transformer model which improves upscaling quality on games supports RTX 20 series and newer.

Also check out: DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction Analysis: Fixing Ugly Ray Tracing Noise

While many prominent games such as Doom: The Dark Ages, Dune: Awakening, Stellar Blade, and F1 25 have adopted the beta version of DLSS 4 since January, some notable recent titles still default to DLSS 3, such as The Alters, Oblivion Remastered, Expedition 33, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

The next major game to upgrade to DLSS 4 will likely be Diablo IV when the Season 9 update launches on July 1.

Users can also force DLSS 4’s transformer model into many older DLSS-compatible titles in the Nvidia App by navigating to Graphics > selecting the desired game > clicking on DLSS Override Model Presets under Driver Settings > and selecting Latest in the drop-down menu.

You can also try third-party apps like DLSS Swapper, DLSS Updater, or Optiscaler.

Google Imagen 4, which is the company’s state-of-the-art text-to-image model, is rolling out for free, but only on AI Studio.

In a blog post, Google announced the rollout of the new Imagen 4 model, but reminded users that it’s free for a “limited time” only.

Unlike the old text-to-image model, Imagen 4 offers significant improvements and takes the text-to-image generation quality to the next level.

Google says it has two new Imagen models.

The first one is called “Imagen 4” and it’s optimised for regular tasks, but the Imagen 4 Ultra is the flagship text-to-image model.

“Designed to handle a wide range of image generation tasks with significant improvements in quality, particularly for text generation, over Imagen 3. Imagen 4 is priced at $0.04 per output image,” the company noted.

On the other hand, Imagen 4 Ultra is priced at $0.06 per output image because it precisely follows instructions aligned with your text prompts, giving better results compared to the competitors.

Gemini doesn’t have access to the Imagen 4 model at the moment. However, it’ll arrive for paid users in the coming weeks.