BlockBeats reports that on August 4, crypto developer tool Kurtosis closed a $20 million Series A round of funding led by hedge fund Coatue, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Chainsmokers' Mantis VC and angel investor Olivier Pomel.

According to Decrypt, MetaMask's parent company, which has 30 million monthly active users, said after closing a huge funding round that it will soon launch a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO, "which will not manage MetaMask, but it will fund the creation of new MetaMask." CEO Lubin did not provide more details about the DAO or a release date, but did confirm that MetaMask intends to release Token, which the head of MetaMask operations said last month at Ether Denver would be done discreetly.

In chain news, the Bitcoin network is expected to undergo a Taproot soft fork upgrade in 24 hours (at block height 709632) at the current Bitcoin block-out rate.Taproot, announced by Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell in 2018, will be able to significantly increase the flexibility of Bitcoin smart contracts by combining the Schnorr signature with the Merkle Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST) and Tapscript's new scripting language, which can dramatically increase the flexibility of Bitcoin smart contracts while enhancing Bitcoin's privacy and scalability.