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Elon Musk expects artificial intelligence to beat humans at hacking by the end of 2027. He put AI hacking first among the digital tasks machines will dominate.
The forecast followed a fresh security scare. The software company JFrog disclosed a critical flaw in Artifactory, the package registry that many software teams use to store and distribute code.
The Flaw That Reopened the AI Hacking Debate
JFrog published CVE-2026-82329 on August 28. The vulnerability scores 9.8 out of 10 on the standard scale. The company has since shipped patched builds.
Attackers need no password and no user interaction. Default configurations sit exposed. Because Artifactory holds build files, a single break can poison everything downstream. Such supply chain attacks spread through trusted downloads rather than direct break-ins.
Vercel Chief Executive Guillermo Rauch speculated that autonomous agents found and exploited the bug. The public record says otherwise.
OpenAI models discovered nine Artifactory zero-days during a July evaluation. JFrog patched those in version 7.161.15. The new flaw still affects later builds, so the two sets look separate. The July episode joined other cases of AI models breaching systems.
Musk Puts a Deadline on Machine Superiority
Rauch argued that 2026 keeps erasing the things AI supposedly cannot do. Musk agreed and went further.
AI will be able to do anything digital (that doesn’t require shaping atoms) at a superhuman level by the end of next year
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2026
Musk also credited Google co-founder Larry Page, who warned him a decade ago that AI hacking would outclass human experts. Musk has sharpened his AI growth predictions repeatedly this year.
Vercel Chief Technology Officer Malte Ubl reported a similar result. An open-weight model he tested wrote its own fuzzer while probing the company’s sandbox. Fuzzers hunt software bugs by flooding a program with malformed input.
Rauch draws a blunt conclusion for customers.
Our guidance for this new world: assume everything hackable will get hacked. And it will get hacked autonomously. You must also defend yourself autonomously, because your surface of attack is likely bigger and your code more vulnerable than you expect.
Guillermo Rauch, X
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong expects a rogue AI event within two years. Separately, OpenAI already ships a cyber-focused defense model to approved defenders.
Liability still lags the technology, however, and accountability for AI agents remains unsettled. Musk’s deadline leaves security teams roughly 16 months. The harder question is whether defenses scale as fast as AI hacking.

Luke Dashjr has resigned as chairman and chief technology officer of Bitcoin mining pool OCEAN. The Bitcoin hard fork he backs splits from the main chain on Tuesday.
The company also repurchased all of his equity. He now calls the main Bitcoin chain “Spamcoin.” On Tuesday, a Bitcoin hard fork he backs switches to BLAKE2b, a mining algorithm that existing Bitcoin machines cannot run.
Why Dashjr Walked Away From OCEAN
The exit closes a bruising month for the pool. OCEAN’s hashrate fell 96% in August. The pool had routed customer power to a minority chain for about 18 hours. Miners never gave clear consent and demanded leadership changes.
BIP-110, the anti-spam soft fork Dashjr championed, needed 55% miner support. Signaling peaked at 2.53%. Its chain stalled after two blocks, so backers regrouped around a September breakaway coin instead.
Inside Dashjr’s Bitcoin Hard Fork Plan
Dashjr argues that Bitcoin lost decentralized block construction years ago. He says BLAKE2b removes a shortcut called ASICBoost, which hands large miners an efficiency edge. He also says it punishes concentrated mining power.
Critics reject that reading. Adam Back had already called BIP-110 idiocracy in July. Ripple’s former chief technology officer David Schwartz dismissed the network under attack claim as nonsense.
Spamcoin isn't Bitcoin and operates under centralized management, just like the US dollar, but worse.Spamcoin does not allow miners to build their own template.DATUM has no purpose on Spamcoin. Claiming it decentralizes anything is false advertising.
— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) August 30, 2026
Luke Dashjr. Source: X
He says the legacy chain runs under centralized management and blocks miners from building their own templates. Dashjr now channels that into CONVOY, which he frames as a second run at decentralized mining. OCEAN, meanwhile, keeps operating as a non-custodial pool.
What Happens to BTC on September 1
Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $77,655, down 0.59% on the day. It has still gained 23.3% this month. Hashrate has drifted lower all year as miners leave the network for artificial intelligence contracts. That trend thins the pool of machines any breakaway chain could recruit.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
Holders face two practical questions, namely replay risk and which chain their wallet tracks. Dashjr recommends a light wallet over a full node. Both questions already surfaced during the August chain split.
A proof-of-work change mints a separate coin. The market then prices which chain carries value.
Dashjr’s previous fork attempt never cleared 3% support. Tuesday, therefore, tests one question. Either real hashrate follows BLAKE2b, or the split repeats the August stall and freezes within hours.

The S&P 500 has gained 13.5% in 2026, outpacing US consumer prices, which rose 3.4% over the 12 months through July.
The trend also holds over the longer term. Historical data show that the index has outpaced US inflation in 16 of the past 20 calendar years.
How the S&P 500 Has Performed Against Inflation
The S&P 500 delivered a 14.76% real return in 2025 after accounting for 2.70% inflation, according to The Kobeissi Letter. The index also recorded strong real returns in the previous two years, gaining 21.47% in 2024 and 22.11% in 2023.
“Stocks have historically been one of the best hedges against inflation,” the post read.
The record is thinner than the count suggests. The four years when stocks failed to beat inflation were 2008, 2011, 2018, and 2022.
Three of those four years ended with inflation below 3%. Consumer prices rose just 0.1% in December 2008, yet the S&P 500 plunged 37% that year.
S&P 500 vs. Inflation. Source: BeInCrypto
The 2022 result was different. The BLS reported a 6.5% year-over-year increase in consumer prices in December. The S&P 500 fell 18.11%. The real loss came to roughly 23%.
Only three years in the period ended with December inflation above 4%. The S&P 500 still outpaced inflation in 2007 and 2021 but fell short in 2022. The largest real return came in 2013, when the index gained 30.42%, and inflation stood at 1.5%.
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AI Earnings Are Carrying the Real Return
Earnings did most of the work in 2025. First Trust calculated that 13.5 of the index’s 17.9 percentage points came from higher earnings per share.
The strength of this market is unprecedented.The S&P 500 has traded for 22 consecutive sessions without a decline of at least -1.0%.Furthermore, the Volatility Index, $VIX, has closed at or below 16 points for 18 straight trading days.On Friday, the $VIX finished at 14.4… pic.twitter.com/MU6nKHopWO
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) August 30, 2026
According to FactSet, analysts project 28.2% year-over-year earnings growth for the third quarter of 2026. They expect 31.2% across the full year.
That growth is concentrated in a narrow group. Ben Snider of Goldman Sachs Research said in May that AI infrastructure beneficiaries should supply roughly half of index earnings growth this year. He also flagged narrowing market breadth as a risk signal.
Meanwhile, 9 of the decade’s 10 best S&P 500 performers trace to the same buildout. Nvidia leads that list by a wide margin, with gains above 13,000%.
Inflation has cooled since the spring. Consumer prices rose 4.25% in the year through May before easing to 3.4% in July.
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US spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) recorded $924 million in net inflows from Aug. 24 to Aug. 28. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) led with $938 million, according to SoSoValue data. Despite the demand, Bitcoin’s price stayed stuck below $80,000.
Spot Ether (ETH) ETFs added $824 million over the same stretch. BlackRock’s ETHA fund led that category too, extending its own inflow streak to 10 straight trading days. Both products drew strong institutional demand, even as Bitcoin struggled to hold its recent gains.
Why Bitcoin’s Price Isn’t Following ETF Money
The stall traces largely to the Federal Reserve. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivered a hawkish keynote at the Aug. 28 Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.
Bitcoin’s price is struggling to stay above $80,000. Image Source: BeinCrypto
He warned that inflation remained a bigger concern than the labor market and declined to rule out a rate hike. Bitcoin slid from around $79,500 to below $77,000 in the hours that followed. Traders priced in higher odds of a hike at the Fed’s September meeting.
Bitcoin also faces a longer-term technical hurdle. On-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant has pointed to a bull market confirmation tied to Bitcoin’s 365-day moving average, near $83,000. BTC has repeatedly failed to close above that level, despite its rally from the mid-$60,000s.
Inflow Streak Comes to an End
The nine-day Bitcoin ETF inflow streak that carried into last week’s total ended on Aug. 28. Funds recorded a $201.81 million net outflow that day. Even so, August remains 2026’s strongest month on record for the products, with more than $3 billion in net inflows.
Bitcoin recorded outflows on Friday last week. Image Source: CoinGlass
Whether Bitcoin can convert renewed ETF demand into a decisive break above $80,000 may depend on the Fed’s next moves. A close above its 365-day moving average would help, too, something it has not managed since the rally began.

John Ternus officially becomes Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, September 1, replacing Tim Cook, who moves into the role of executive chairman.
Apple’s board approved the succession unanimously in April, capping months of internal planning ahead of the changeover.
What History Says About Year One
Four prior planned tech CEO handoffs have a complete first year to judge, with returns ranging from a 38% decline to a 76% gain, a Motley Fool analysis found. The same analysis found no prior handoff triggered a rush to sell shares beforehand.
AAPL is up nearly 40% in the last 12 months. Image Source: Trading View
Bank of America reiterated its Buy rating on Apple ahead of the switch. Analyst Wamsi Mohan expects Apple’s core business to stay steady while Ternus considers a bigger AI budget.
Options activity in AAPL has stayed elevated heading into the handoff, with sentiment described as mixed rather than clearly one-sided.
A Hardware Veteran Takes Charge
Ternus spent 25 years at Apple, most recently leading hardware engineering across the iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch lines. His product portfolio also included the iPad, AirPods, and Vision Pro headset.
Cook will focus on government relations in his new post, and Arthur Levinson becomes lead independent director.
AAPL closed Friday at $319.70, up 1.63% on the day. Shares sit about 6% below the record close after Apple’s brief climb to a $5 trillion market cap in July.
The AI Question Ternus Inherits
The bigger test is not the handoff itself, but whether Ternus, a hardware veteran, can deliver Apple’s AI ambitions. Cook addressed the AI compute question directly on his final earnings call, noting demand could outstrip capacity.
“This probably would be a good problem to have.”
Tim Cook, CNBC
Apple’s next Mac software, macOS Golden Gate, is confirmed to arrive by September 22, alongside iOS 27’s Siri AI rollout. Ternus faces his first public test at Apple’s September 9 event, where a foldable iPhone is widely expected. That test will show whether hardware discipline can translate into an AI turnaround.

The crypto market will welcome tokens worth around $1.5 billion in the first week of September 2026. Major projects, including Hyperliquid (HYPE), Ethena (ENA), and Sui (SUI), will release significant new token supplies.
These unlocks could introduce market volatility and influence short-term price movements. So, here’s a breakdown of what to watch.
1. Hyperliquid (HYPE)
Unlock Date: September 6
Number of Tokens to be Unlocked: 9.92 million HYPE
Released Supply: 464.91 million HYPE
Total Supply: 1 billion HYPE
Hyperliquid is a leading decentralized perpetual futures exchange built on its own Layer-1 blockchain. It offers high-performance trading with low latency, on-chain order books, and sub-second transaction finality.
On September 6, the team could unlock 9.92 million tokens worth $797 million. Tokenomist noted that this is a long-range estimate. The tokens account for 2.37% of the released supply.
HYPE Crypto Token Unlock in September. Source: Tokenomist
The team has allocated the unlocked supply to core contributors. Tokenomist pointed out that HYPE has historically claimed far fewer tokens than its projected unlock amounts.
2. Sui (SUI)
Unlock Date: September 1
Number of Tokens to be Unlocked: 13.53 million SUI
Released Supply: 4.08 billion SUI
Total supply: 10 billion SUI
Sui is a high-performance blockchain designed to provide scalability, low latency, and an architecture for decentralized applications (dApps). It also distinguishes itself with an object-centric data model and the Move programming language, which seeks to address inefficiencies in existing blockchain architectures.
On September 1, the network will release 13.53 million SUI into the market, continuing its trend of cliff unlocks at the beginning of the month. The tokens are worth $9.73 million. Moreover, they represent 0.33% of the current released supply.
SUI Crypto Token Unlock in September. Source: Tokenomist
The network will split the unlocked altcoins 3 ways. Early Contributors will gain 7.47 million tokens. In addition, Community Reserve will receive 4 million tokens. Lastly, Mysten Labs Treasury will get 2.07 million SUI.
3. Ethena (ENA)
Unlock Date: September 2
Number of Tokens to be Unlocked: 40.63 million ENA
Released Supply: 8.9 billion ENA
Total Supply: 15 billion ENA
Ethena is a synthetic-dollar protocol built on Ethereum (ETH). Its flagship product is USDe, a synthetic-dollar stablecoin. Furthermore, ENA is the protocol’s governance token.
The team will release 40.63 million ENA tokens on September 2. The tokens, worth $6.05 million, account for 0.46% of the released supply.
ENA Crypto Token Unlock in September. Source: Tokenomist
Ethena will award the entire supply to the Foundation.
In addition to these three, EigenCloud (EIGEN), Gunz (GUN), and GoPlus Security (GPS) will also experience new supply entering the market in the first week of September.

Bitcoin (BTC) is up roughly 24% in August, its largest monthly advance of 2026. This month’s rally lifted the asset from the $60,000s to briefly over $80,000.
However, three warning signs now emerge: exchange balances, exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows, and spot demand have all turned less supportive during the closing days of August.
Bitcoin (BTC) 1 Month Price Chart. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
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Bitcoin Warning Signs Build as Binance Reserves Hit a 2026 High
Binance’s Bitcoin reserves have climbed to roughly 687,000 BTC, the highest level recorded in 2026, according to CryptoQuant data. Reserves dropped near 617,000 BTC in late April before reversing. The build then accelerated through August, as Bitcoin rallied.
Traders usually move coins onto an exchange to sell, hedge, or post collateral. Therefore, a rising balance during a rally makes more supply immediately available for sale.
The number alone proves nothing. Wallet reorganizations, custody shifts, and market-making transfers also lift exchange balances.
Still, that supply now sits on the largest venue while shrinking exchange stablecoin reserves leave less idle cash ready to absorb it.
“A yearly high in Binance reserves near major resistance is a warning sign. The next move above $80,000 will likely depend on whether spot and ETF demand can absorb the additional supply potentially available to the market,” XWIN Japan wrote.
ETF Inflow Streak Breaks as Weekly Demand Halves
Meanwhile, US spot bitcoin ETFs posted a $201.8 million net outflow on August 28, according to SoSoValue data. That red session ended nine consecutive days of inflows, which came as Bitcoin recorded its largest weekly dollar gain on record.
Other major products stayed green on the same day. Ethereum (ETH) funds drew $102.18 million, while XRP (XRP) and Solana (SOL) products added $26.2 million and $18.08 million.
Weekly flows cooled as well. Net inflows fell 51.8% to $924.5 million in the week ending August 28, down from $1.92 billion.
One negative session does not confirm a reversal. However, ETF flows are a major source of demand for Bitcoin, and that may be thinning.
Leverage, Not Spot Buying, May Be Driving the Move
Finally, analyst Crypto Rover argued that the weekend advance lacked spot participation.
“BTC is moving higher over the weekend while spot CVD remains almost flat, suggesting leverage is driving the move. Last time we spotted this same setup, Bitcoin dumped from $81K to $77K,” the post read.
Spot cumulative volume delta (CVD) tracks the balance between aggressive buyers and sellers in spot markets. A flat CVD during a rally can suggest that derivatives or leveraged positions, rather than strong spot demand, are driving the move.
Not every analyst reads the setup that way. GSR’s Andy Baehr has framed the $80,000 breakout as a new market regime built on ETF demand and short liquidations.
Seasonality offers thin comfort. September has averaged a 3.08% loss for Bitcoin since 2013, Coinglass data shows, the weakest average month of the year.
Bitcoin Monthly Returns Table Showing September Seasonality. Source: Coinglass
Recent years cut the other way. The last three Septembers all closed green, including gains of 5.16% in 2025 and 7.29% in 2024.
The coming sessions should show whether spot and ETF buyers can absorb the coins now parked on Binance.
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Hair loss biotechs are racing to deliver the first new baldness treatments in nearly three decades, and investors are positioning for the payoff.
Veradermics, Absci, and Cosmo Pharmaceuticals are advancing a pill, an injection, and a topical drug for pattern hair loss, a condition with no newly approved therapy since the late 1990s.
Hair Loss Biotechs Eye A Market Waiting For A Cure
Pattern hair loss affects an estimated 50 million men and 30 million women in the United States, according to Bloomberg. Current options are limited to decades-old drugs minoxidil and finasteride. Both are tied to side effects that include heart palpitations and reduced sex drive.
Veradermics (NYSE: MANE) is developing an oral pill, VDPHL01, and its stock has climbed nearly 500% since its February IPO. Absci (NASDAQ: ABSI) is testing an injection dosed two to three times over six months, and its shares have more than doubled so far this year.
Cosmo Pharmaceuticals posted positive late-stage trial results for a topical solution but has traded more cautiously against its US rivals.
Investors Chase A GLP-1 Style Trade
The enthusiasm echoes Eli Lilly’s stock rally, which reshaped investor appetite for consumer health biotech. Its weight loss drugs first drove that shift.
Eli Lilly’s stock is up nearly 350% over the last 5 years, with much of that gain driven by its GLP-1 drugs, Zepbound and Mounjaro. Image Source: Trading View
Eli Lilly has since invested $40 million in Absci, betting hair regrowth could follow a similar injectable playbook.
“Both obesity and hair loss are large consumer markets and that’s one reason why both of those categories can offer significant revenue potential.”
Geoff Hsu, portfolio manager at OrbiMed’s Biotech Growth Trust, Fortune
None of the three companies has an approved product yet. The earliest regulatory filings are not expected before 2027. Investors are pricing in demand years before any drug reaches pharmacy shelves.

BlackRock’s tokenized US Treasury fund, BUIDL, has reclaimed the top spot among products of its kind, with a market capitalization of roughly $2.8 billion.
Token Terminal data shows BUIDL now holds about 18.5% of the $15.1 billion tokenized Treasury market, narrowly ahead of Circle’s USYC.
A Fast-Changing Leaderboard
Tokenized Treasury funds let institutions hold short-term US government debt on a blockchain. Settlement happens around the clock, instead of the multi-day cycles typical of traditional bond markets.
BUIDL Regains Its Position as the Largest Tokenized U.S. Treasury FundToken Terminal data shows that BUIDL, a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund issued by Securitize, has a market capitalization of approximately $2.8 billion, accounting for 18.5% of the $15.1 billion market. It has… pic.twitter.com/ekGaLMt0jz
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 31, 2026
That structure has made them a popular option for institutions parking idle cash or posting yield-bearing collateral.
USYC only briefly held the top spot. The fund grew from about $600 million to nearly $3 billion over the past year.
It reached roughly $2.9 billion by late August, edging past BUIDL’s $2.7 billion, according to Token Terminal data. It then lost the lead again this week.
BUIDL is BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, administered by Securitize. USYC, meanwhile, represents a share in Circle’s Hashnote-based fund, which Circle folded into its stablecoin business after acquiring Hashnote in 2025.
Why the Swap Matters
Neither fund has held the lead for long, and that instability is itself notable. It suggests institutions are actively comparing competing Treasury products rather than settling on a single default option.
That competition signals this corner of the tokenized asset market is maturing into a genuine, contested category. It is no longer a niche dominated by a single early mover.
The bigger question is whether institutional interest stays confined to government bond products. It could instead spread into other parts of on-chain finance.
So far, the growth has stayed concentrated in Treasuries, even as the broader real-world asset (RWA) sector expands.

Eric Trump says American Bitcoin (ABTC) mines between 11 and 13 BTC daily at close to 49% gross margins, running nearly 90,000 miners. The company’s own quarterly filings largely support those figures.
Speaking on the Wolf Financial podcast, the co-founder and president’s son framed the output as proof of one of the sector’s most efficient mining operations, months after a public dispute over the firm’s true production costs.
Numbers Track With Recent Filings
American Bitcoin was founded in 2025 by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The venture merged with Gryphon Digital Mining to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ABTC in September 2025. Hut 8 Corp, which backed the venture, remains the majority owner.
The company’s treasury has grown to about 8,300 BTC as of late August, according to Trump. That is up from roughly 5,401 BTC at the end of 2025, continuing an accumulation strategy that has drawn comparisons to Strategy.
It mined a record 932 BTC in the second quarter of 2026, its highest output yet. Gross margins that quarter landed near 49%, matching the figure Trump cited.
Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $77,696 as of writing, up 0.49% over 24 hours. That gives the reserve a paper value above $600 million.
A Disputed Cost Basis
The margin claim follows a spring dispute over the firm’s true production costs. Forbes alleged American Bitcoin’s all-in cost ran closer to $90,000 per coin, above the roughly $57,000 figure Trump has repeated. Trump rejected the report as politically motivated.
Neither side has published a fully reconciled cost breakdown since. American Bitcoin markets its no-sale treasury policy as proof that mining bitcoin is cheaper than buying it outright. That claim hinges on which cost figure holds up.

President Donald Trump said the United States secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves. He announced the deal on August 28, calling it the biggest oil deal in history.
Brent crude, however, did not fall on the news. The benchmark instead climbed from about $88 to $90.48 by Monday, defying the deal’s promised supply boost.
The Barrels Are Reserves, Not Supply
The agreement gives a private venture a 100-year lease on 17 Venezuelan oil fields. The US holds a 55% stake in that venture, a US official told Newsweek.
Interim President Delcy Rodriguez said the fields hold proven potential of 65 billion barrels. She said the venture could draw more than $100 billion in investment.
Trump promised this deal would lead to lower gas prices. Image Source: Truth Social
None of that oil is flowing yet. Venezuela once pumped more than 3 million barrels a day in the late 1990s.
Output now sits close to 1 million barrels a day, according to OPEC data.
Rystad Energy projects production could rise only 17% by 2028. That growth depends on heavy investment in decayed infrastructure.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, offered this assessment to Newsweek.
“While the hope of lower gas prices sounds promising, it still will take billions of investment to get that oil.”
Why Prices Jumped Anyway
Brent had fallen from above $93 a barrel in late August. That slide tracked easing fears around the Strait of Hormuz.
However, Iran and the United States traded strikes over the weekend, reigniting the Middle East risk that had briefly eased. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard hit two US bases in Jordan on Sunday, retaliating for a US strike on Iran’s Larak Island.
Oil has risen back above $90 for Brent Crude. Image Source: Trading Economics
Goldman Sachs pegged Gulf oil exports at 15 million to 16 million barrels a day, roughly two-thirds of pre-conflict volume. Iran and Oman also struck a revenue-sharing deal over the waterway, though Tehran said it does not guarantee a reopening.
Sunday night’s rebound looks tied to that same risk story, not to Venezuela. The premium that drove oil for months has not fully unwound. Traders appear to be treating the distant Venezuelan barrels as background noise against a live supply threat elsewhere.
Two things will decide where Brent goes next. One is whether the Middle East risk premium keeps fading. The other is whether Venezuela’s oil venture attracts the investment Rodriguez is counting on.

Nine of the 10 best-performing S&P 500 stocks over the past decade trace to one theme, the buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure. There is also one clear winner out of the top 10: Nvidia.
Nvidia’s 10-year total return is near 13,589%, more than double the next-closest, AMD, at close to 6,000%. The other eight names span chipmakers, network gear, and one HVAC contractor.
The AI Common Thread
The top 10 best performers from the last 10 years:
Nvidia (NVDA) — +13,817%
AMD (AMD) — +6,099%
Micron (MU) — +5,486%
Comfort Systems (FIX) — +5,157%
Arista Networks (ANET) — +3,762%
Lam Research (LRCX) — +3,099%
Tesla (TSLA) — +2,545%
Lumentum (LITE) — +2,440%
KLA Corp (KLAC) — +2,401%
Seagate (STX) — +2,346%
Nvidia, AMD, Micron (MU), Lam Research (LRCX), and KLA Corp (KLAC) all supply chips or the equipment to make them. That equipment builds the servers inside AI data centers.
Arista Networks (ANET) sells networking switches for those same facilities. Lumentum (LITE) makes optical parts that move data between server racks. Seagate (STX), meanwhile, supplies the storage drives used in AI training clusters.
Comfort Systems (FIX), in contrast, benefits from a different angle. The mechanical and electrical contractor’s backlog climbed toward $12 billion as hyperscalers race to build and cool new data centers. That gives it AI exposure without selling a single chip.
Tesla (TSLA), however, is the outlier. Its return leans more on electric vehicle demand than AI infrastructure. Elon Musk’s push into self-driving and robotics does, however, add an AI angle of its own.
Two Years, Most of the Gains
Much of this run happened recently, not evenly across the decade. Nvidia’s market value rose from about $418 billion to over $4.5 trillion since the AI boom began in November 2022.
A similar acceleration shows up across the list, as hyperscaler spending on AI accelerated over the past two years.
Whether that pace continues depends on hyperscalers sustaining current construction schedules. JPMorgan analysts estimate that roughly 60% of data center capacity planned for 2027 has yet to break ground.
That gap could keep this group of stocks in focus through the back half of the decade.

The human brain runs on roughly 20 watts. The world’s fastest supercomputer, LineShine in Shenzhen, draws 42.2 million watts. That gap has become the internet’s favorite argument about AI energy use, and most of it is wrong.
The comparison itself holds up. However, the numbers circulating on social media trace back to a single paper. The most striking one has been misattributed for three years.
China just topped the global supercomputer ranking for the first time since 2017.LineShine. Shenzhen. 2.198 exaflops. 2 quintillion calculations per second. 20% faster than the US's El Capitan.built entirely on domestic Chinese CPUs. no Nvidia. no US chips. no export controls… https://t.co/Tuuk6svl6l pic.twitter.com/fwFKWN0Mr4
— IT Guy (@T3chFalcon) June 24, 2026
AI Energy Use: What 20 Watts Actually Buys
The 20-watt figure rests on decades of metabolic measurement. The brain accounts for about 2% of body weight and roughly 20% of resting oxygen consumption.
Neuron counts are shakier than they appear. The widely quoted 86 billion rests on four male brains and is currently under dispute in the journal Brain.
Viral posts often use 12 watts rather than 20. That figure appears in a 2023 paper in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, stated without any citation at all.
The same paper produced the number everyone shares. Its authors estimated that digitally recreating a human brain would draw 2.7 billion watts.
That estimate came from extrapolating a 10-million-neuron simulation to mouse scale, then multiplying by a thousand.
The paper also states that the simulation ran about 30,000 times slower than biology. Social posts drop that detail. Secondary sources then credit the figure to the Blue Brain Project, which never published it.
A Viral Post on LinkedIn Claiming How the Human Brain Only Needs 12 Watts to Think. Source: Evolving AI
Reliable numbers do exist elsewhere. Epoch AI estimated a typical ChatGPT query at 0.3 watt-hours in early 2025. A peer-reviewed study in Joule later landed on 0.31.
Two independent methods agreeing that closely is unusual. However, the figure changes sharply with workload, and reasoning models that produce longer answers can cost several times as much.
What Biology Does Differently, and What Silicon Copied
Cortical activity is sparse. Average firing rates are below 1 Hz, and energy follows change rather than clock cycles.
Modern AI reached the same conclusion independently. Kimi K2 activates 32.6 billion of its 1.04 trillion parameters per token, close to 3.1%.
That ratio is falling fast. Mixtral used roughly 28% of its parameters in 2023, while DeepSeek-V3 now uses 5.5%.
Biology also computes at low precision. Nothing inside a neuron resolves to 32 bits.
Chipmakers followed the same path. DeepSeek trained a 671-billion-parameter model in eight-bit precision. NVIDIA has since pretrained a 12-billion-parameter model in four-bit.
Power draw on a logarithmic scale, from a brain to a data center / Source: BeInCrypto
The third difference is the largest and the least copied. Brains hold memory and computation in the same physical place.
Digital machines separate them. Stanford’s Mark Horowitz showed the cost of that split. Fetching an operand from memory can consume hundreds of times more energy than the arithmetic itself.
The Brain-Shaped Chips That Never Arrived
Hardware built explicitly to imitate neurons has struggled. No neuromorphic or analog system has trained or run a frontier model in production.
Intel’s Hala Point packs 1.15 billion artificial neurons across 1,152 chips. It remains a research prototype installed at Sandia National Laboratories. Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab, speaking to The Register in 2024, said:
“We’re not mapping any LLM to Hala Point at this time. We don’t know how to do that.”
The commercial picture is thinner still. BrainChip is the sector’s flagship listed company. It reported $700,000 in customer receipts against $5.3 million of operating outflow last March quarter.
Others have stalled outright. Rain AI, which sought $150 million and failed to raise it, explored a sale in 2025.
Researchers inside the field describe a circular problem. Catherine Schuman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, stated:
“The hardware companies are waiting for there to be a killer application, but it’s really hard to understand how to build those applications without having hardware to prototype on.”
More than 20 researchers signed a 2025 consensus paper in Nature. It argued that the field still lacks the ecosystem it needs.
Biology’s principles won. The hardware built to embody them did not.
Everyone Is Bidding for the Same Electrons
Efficiency matters now because electricity has become the binding constraint. The International Energy Agency put global data center consumption at 485 terawatt-hours in 2025.
AI-focused facilities grew 50% during that year alone. The agency expects them to triple by 2030.
Grid access, rather than chip supply, now gates construction. Median time from an interconnection request to commercial operation exceeds five years, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in November that his company holds processors it cannot plug in. The shortage is powered buildings, not silicon. Institutional investors have raised similar questions about grid readiness.
Bitcoin miners spent a decade solving exactly that problem. They hold energized sites, signed power agreements, and interconnection rights that newcomers wait years to secure.
The result has turned mining into an energy and infrastructure business. Retrofitting a working site costs roughly $3 million to $4 million per megawatt. Greenfield construction runs $10 million to $12 million, VanEck estimates.
Announced deal values are enormous. Public miners have signed AI contracts worth more than $70 billion in aggregate.
Delivered capacity tells a quieter story. Second-quarter 2026 filings show roughly 750 megawatts actually energized across the sector.
Core Scientific accounts for about 437 of those megawatts. Galaxy’s Helios campus delivered 133; TeraWulf 102; IREN 50; and Riot 25. Hut 8 has contracted 949 megawatts and energized none.
Contracted capacity against what has actually been switched on / Source: BeInCrypto
The pivot has been costly. Combined quarterly losses at miners MARA and CleanSpark reached $851 million in August.
Most mining capacity will never convert. Preliminary Cambridge survey data presented in July showed that about 10% of miners had allocated power to AI.
The obstacles are physical. Mining tolerates interruption, whereas AI tenants demand firm power, dense cooling, and fiber that remote sites rarely have.
Even so, the direction of travel is clear. Core Scientific now earns 83% of its revenue from colocation and just 13% from mining itself.
Investors have priced that shift in. Miners holding signed leases trade at far higher multiples of their energized power. Meanwhile, the next AI bet increasingly looks like electricity rather than chips.
Why Efficiency Will Not Fix AI Energy Use
Efficiency gains have absorbed demand growth in the past. Global data center compute grew by 550% between 2010 and 2018, while energy use rose by about 6%.
Then the pattern broke. United States data center consumption climbed from 58 terawatt-hours in 2014 to 176 in 2023.
Evolution optimized under a hard ceiling. A skull drawing 200 watts would have killed its owner, so efficiency became the only available answer.
AI has never faced that ceiling. It has faced a capital ceiling instead, and capital stretches far more easily than electricity does.
That is now changing. The open question is no longer whether biology is more efficient. It is what AI becomes once power, rather than money, decides what gets built.

The European Central Bank (ECB) wants to issue euros directly onto a blockchain. Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel made that case at the Jackson Hole symposium on Friday, and she was very clear about stablecoins.
She is talking about money that banks use to settle with each other, not the euros in your account. Tokenized markets, she argued, need an asset only a central bank can create.
Why Schnabel Rejects Stablecoins as Settlement Money
A stablecoin can be built to be almost perfectly safe, and Schnabel accepts that. Her objection is about what happens next.
In a panic, everyone wants cash at once. A central bank can create more of it. A stablecoin issuer cannot.
Her precedent is the banking panic of 1907. Money was tied to banks’ holdings of government bonds, so the money supply could not expand. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 fixed that.
“Stablecoins are best understood as complements to central bank money, not substitutes for it,” read an excerpt in her speech.
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The supply numbers explain Europe’s hurry. Dollar-pegged stablecoins circulate about $304 billion, DefiLlama data shows. Euro-pegged tokens hold under $1 billion.
Total Stablecoin Market Cap. Source: DeFiLlama
If private tokens win settlement, Europe settles in dollars. Crypto only entered the Fed’s Jackson Hole agenda this year. Other central bankers have voiced similar warnings about stablecoins.
Pontes Launch Puts ECB Money on a Ledger
Pontes goes live next month, linking TARGET Services, the eurozone’s settlement backbone, to market blockchain platforms.
BREAKING:🇪🇺ECB confirms Pontes will go live in September 2026, linking market DLT platforms to TARGET Services for atomic settlement in central-bank moneyEurope is moving toward 24/7, programmable, multi-currency settlementThis is bullish for $QNT $LINK $XRPDeep dive later https://t.co/n54N9u2oXG pic.twitter.com/nMXQExbbuY
— X Finance Bull (@Xfinancebull) August 26, 2026
The pipes have been tested before, particularly from May to November 2024, when 64 institutions across nine jurisdictions ran 58 use cases. They settled nearly €1.6 billion in central bank money.
Cash finality remains within TARGET2 initially. Smart contracts and round-the-clock operation come later.
Schnabel weighed three routes:
Issue tokens directly
Bridge from today’s systems, or
Let a private firm tokenize reserves through an omnibus account.
She wants the first, while the other two leave the ECB watching from outside, unable to run repo operations in code.
A second project, Appia, is still deciding whether Europe needs one shared ledger or several. She cited France’s Lise, holder of Europe’s first tokenized exchange license, as evidence that tokenization opens markets to smaller firms.

Japan’s yen weakened again this week despite roughly $97 billion spent supporting it over the past month. Its slide puts renewed pressure on officials to act, with potential consequences for Bitcoin.
Why Japan’s Yen Rescue is Fading
The currency fell to 160.16 yen per dollar on Friday, 28 August, giving up more than half its gains since last month’s intervention. A weaker yen makes imports more expensive for Japanese households and businesses.
Japan spent ¥15.4 trillion supporting its currency between 30 July and 26 August. The campaign included rare joint action with the US on 31 July, when both countries bought yen to lift its value.
US interest rates remain higher than Japan’s, making dollar investments more attractive. The dollar gained further support this week when Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh pledged to bring inflation to target.
Japan’s Yen Evolution amid Intervention Spikes. Source: X/@GlobalMktObserv How a Stronger Yen Could Hurt Bitcoin
Bitcoin briefly fell below $77,000 after Warsh’s speech as investors expected higher US rates.
Japan could add to that pressure. Some investors borrow yen cheaply and use the money to buy investments elsewhere. This is known as the carry trade.
If fresh intervention or higher Japanese interest rates push the yen sharply upwards, those loans become more expensive to repay in other currencies. Investors may sell assets to cover their debts, potentially dragging Bitcoin lower.
Bitcoin Price Over the Past Week. Source: CoinGecko
This has actually happened before. Back in August 2024, the reversal of yen-funded trades amplified selling. Bitcoin and Ethereum suffered losses of up to 20%.
Metaplanet chief executive Simon Gerovich sees longer-term opportunity. Speaking in Hong Kong this week, he argued that Asian savers were ready to move beyond cash and embrace Bitcoin.
His company buys and holds Bitcoin, giving him a financial stake in that outlook. Such demand could grow over time. Bitcoin remains vulnerable to sudden market sell-offs.
“The buyers arriving now aren’t going anywhere. I believe the bottom is in. And I’m expecting a much brighter rest of the year,” Metaplanet’s CEO said.

The S&P 500 has gained 12.65% in 2026 and closed Friday at 7,711.75. A Wall Street Journal column argues the closest match for today’s trading frenzy is not 1999. It is 1901.
That boom ended in the Panic of 1907, with columnist Jason Zweig arguing the danger was never expensive stocks. It was borrowed money and trading that felt like gambling.
S&P 500 (SPX) Performance. Source: TradingView The Numbers That Rhyme With 1901
Zweig leans on one figure, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) turnover reached 319% in 1901. The entire market changed hands roughly every four months.
Today in 1901, the yearly NYSE turnover hits record 319% showing short-term investing isnt new, as investors held shares for avg of 15 wks
— MoAF (@FinanceMuseum) December 31, 2010
Bucket shops supplied the rest, letting small customers bet, at heavy leverage, on whether a stock would tick up or down. No shares ever changed owners. That bet is recognizable in the current market.
Same-day options made up 66.2% of all S&P 500 options volume in July, an all-time high, Cboe reported. Prediction market platforms widened their catalogues again, from token prices to sporting-event phrases.
Borrowing has also kept pace, with margin debt reaching $1.42 trillion in July, according to Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) filings. A year earlier the figure was $1.02 trillion.
BREAKING: US margin debt dropped -$85 billion in July, to $1.42 trillion, the largest monthly decline on record.This also marks the first monthly decrease since March.By comparison, the 2nd-biggest monthly drop was recorded in January 2022 at -$80 billion, just as the bear… pic.twitter.com/scrhStGdJd
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) August 18, 2026
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1907 Broke on Liquidity, Not Valuation
The trigger looked small, where two speculators failed to corner United Copper stock in October 1907. The damage followed, with runs hitting trust companies, lightly regulated lenders that kept about 5% of deposits in cash. National banks kept 25%.
Wall Street collapsed in October 1907 not because banks ran out of money, but because the shadow banking system had no lender of last resort.It started with a failed corner on United Copper stock by F. Augustus Heinze and Charles W. Morse. When the corner collapsed, the margin… pic.twitter.com/I1jEatIeJi
— MD (@MDKASHIF_9) August 21, 2026
Then money vanished. Call money rates ran from 9.5% to 70%, and to 100% two days later. J.P. Morgan hauled cash to the exchange loan post to keep trading alive. Congress created the Federal Reserve six years later.
The Dow lost 40.9% from its December 1906 peak to the November 1907 bottom, a National Bureau of Economic Research study found.
Valuation drives most earlier bubble comparisons. The Shiller price-to-earnings ratio sits near 42, against a long-run average of 17.4, and just under its December 1999 record. Zweig’s warning is quieter and harder to hedge.
Crypto shares the same funding pipes. Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $78,618 and has tracked the S&P 500 through past risk shocks.
Cash looks like dead weight while markets climb. It turns into leverage the moment everybody else needs it.

Sberbank plans to accept Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Tether (USDT) as loan collateral, deputy chairman Anatoly Popov told TASS on Friday.
Russia’s largest lender wants the coins as security, not as money. Paying with crypto in Russia remains banned when the country’s digital currency law takes effect on September 1.
Collateral is Legal, but Spending is Not
A Russian company can pledge Bitcoin to a bank, but it still cannot buy a coffee with it. Popov said Sberbank prepared for the rule change early and already handles digital assets. However, he made the expansion conditional.
“We plan to accept not only Bitcoin but also Ethereum and the stablecoin Tether as collateral… after the Central Bank, of course, allows them for public circulation,” local media reported.
President Vladimir Putin signed the law on August 4. The Bank of Russia published its first approved list a week later. Only three coins cleared the screen.
Regulators wanted size, high daily turnover, and at least 5 years of price history on foreign exchanges. Bitcoin, ether and USDT passed. Nothing else did, and the regulator is clear about the rest.
Crypto cannot be used in payments within Russia. Only exporters and importers get a carve-out for crypto payments in foreign trade.
No Rate, No Date, No Term Sheet
With the key rate standing at 14% as of August 28, money is expensive in Russia, and that number explains the demand. A miner can sell coins and lose the upside, or pledge them and pay interest.
Meanwhile, ordinary Russians will not get the option. Russia’s new crypto law caps non-qualified investors at 300,000 rubles (roughly $3,632) of crypto per year per intermediary. Corporate borrowers face no such ceiling.
Popov disclosed no loan-to-value ratio, interest rate, or launch date. He tied everything to permissions the central bank has not yet issued.
What exists today is smaller. Sber closed a crypto-backed lending pilot in December 2025 and targets a digital depository by December 1.
Notably, however, USDT is the quiet outlier, sitting at $0.9999, while Bitcoin moves every day. One coin needs a thin haircut, the other a deep one.
If a borrower defaults, Sberbank must sell those coins inside a country where spending them is illegal.

Helium (HNT) jumped as much as 167% over the weekend, establishing an intra-day high of $0.989 as of this writing. Traders who arrived late are asking whether it is too late to buy HNT.
The rally was not built on buyers, but on sellers being forced out.
Helium (HNT) Price Performance. Source: TradingView Why a Forgotten Token Moved So Fast
Helium runs a wireless network. Ordinary people host the hardware in their homes and shops. The industry calls this decentralized physical infrastructure, or DePIN.
The trigger was a Texas Wi-Fi deployment BeInCrypto reported on Saturday. The reaction dwarfed the news itself. HNT price, which had traded under $0.30 for most of the summer, surged by almost 170% in one weekend. Helium’s pitch has always been real customers.
In April 2025, developer Nova Labs paid $200,000 to settle SEC charges. Regulators said it wrongly claimed Lime, Nestle and Salesforce used the network. The case covered statements to stock investors, not the token.
What the Charts Actually Show
The HNT price did not climb in a straight line. It moved in two bursts, grounding from $0.33 up to $0.45 overnight. It then jumped to $0.70 by 09:00 and stalled for four hours. A second push from 15:00 carried it to $0.9782.
HNT Volume Outlook
During the pauses, forced buying ran out. Now volume. The daily bar is the tallest on Helium’s two-year chart. Earlier spikes topped out near $45 million. This one cleared $110 million, thresholds last tested in 2023.
HNT Volume. Source: Coinglass
In total, $248.26 million changed hands, while the whole token is worth only $154.8 million. So the token changed hands more than once in a single day. Most people holding HNT now bought it this weekend, near the top.
HNT Liquidations
Some traders had bet against HNT, borrow the token, sell it, and plan to buy it back cheaper. The price rose instead, and their losses grew with every tick. Exchanges liquidated them, closing those bets for them and bought the token back at market price.
HNT Liquidations. Source: Coinglass
Coinglass shows nearly $1.5 million worth of short positions were liquidated on Sunday alone and over $1.6 million across the weekend. There is almost nothing before it. Traders betting on a rise lost just $196,650.
Every forced closure is a purchase. That is how the price climbed without new buyers arriving. Traders call this a short squeeze.
HNT Funding Rates
Next comes the funding rate, the clearest chart of the five. On these markets, one side pays the other a small fee every few hours.
For eight months that fee sat flat at zero. This weekend it fell past minus 1.2% on a single payment. Traders betting against HNT now pay the ones betting on it.
HNT Funding Rate. Source: Coinglass
“The funding rate on Bybit HNT-PERP was close to -1000% this last print. A $60m market cap token with real users, with a chart that has no resistance for another 150%, down 99% from ATH. Shorts are trapped paying crazy funding with no spot supply,” one trader observed.
Finally, open interest. This is the total money riding on these bets. It shows the number of all open long and short positions for HNT price.
It jumped 197.6% to $13.64 million, the highest in about a year. When those bets get closed out, this number falls. Here it nearly tripled instead.
They are not surrendering, with new money and fresh capital entering the futures market as new contracts are created for HNT. They are being replaced faster than they are cleared out.
As HNT price rises alongside rising open interest, it signals strong bullish momentum. It shows high-conviction, aggressive bullish breakout driven by explosive leveraged demand.
Is It Too Late to Buy HNT?
That squeeze is already cooling, as HNT peaked at $0.989 and now trades near $0.88. Forced buying has nearly stopped. Only $22,920 of bearish bets closed in the most recent hour (as of this writing), against $1.61 million across the day.
Traders watching this setup tend to treat a vertical spike in open interest as a warning rather than an entry. Positioning is stretched, and a sharp drop can trigger a chain of forced closures in the other direction.
The signal they wait for is open interest flattening, or easing slightly, while the price holds. That combination suggests the market has accepted the higher level rather than simply leveraged into it.
Funding is the second gauge, and HNT reads in reverse of the usual case. A crowded long market shows sharply positive funding. Here it is deeply negative, so the crowd is still short and paying to stay there.
A move back toward zero would mean those bets have been closed or abandoned. The buying that came from forced closures stops at that point, and the price has to hold on ordinary demand.
One supply point favors holders, but with a caveat. Every HNT minted so far is already trading, so no locked block is waiting to vest. Issuance continues toward a 223 million cap though, with about 37 million still to come.
Once funding returns to zero, ordinary demand must hold Helium price data alone. Anyone buying now is betting on a second squeeze, not the first.

Michael Saylor says MicroStrategy is back. The two-word post landed after 10 weeks in which the company, now named Strategy, bought no Bitcoin (BTC) at all.
Three things in its finances have quietly shifted. Together they explain why traders read the post as a signal, not a slogan.
Strategy’s Debt No Longer Blocks Bitcoin Buys
Strategy holds roughly $6.69 billion in dollars. It owes about $6.71 billion on convertible notes. The company says that leaves net leverage at 0.1%.
Our USD Assets now almost entirely offset our debt, reducing net leverage to 0.1%. $MSTR pic.twitter.com/jP6MdQ8wNr
— Strategy (@Strategy) August 27, 2026
The gap ran the other way all summer, making traders price it in forced selling. It vanished last week, and MSTR stock rallied 12% as the two numbers met.
The freeze was real, considering MicroStrategy last bought BTC on June 22, adding 520 BTC at $67,068. It has sold four times since. August brought $3.28 billion in fresh capital, and all of it went into dollars, not Bitcoin.
The build was deliberate as most of the cash sits in a reserve for dividend payments. That reserve held $3.75 billion in July. It holds $5.10 billion now.
MicroStrategy USD Reserve. Source: Strategy STRC Is Almost Back at Par
STRC is a preferred share that MicroStrategy sells to raise cash. It pays a 12% dividend and is built to trade at $100.
It closed at $97.33 on August 28, up from a 12-month low of $71.25. Below $100, it costs the company money.
STRC Stock Performance. Source: TradingView
“Our objective is for STRC to trade over time at $99 to $100. If STRC trades below $100, we intend to repurchase STRC shares in a regular and disciplined manner,” CEO Phong Le said so in the second-quarter results.
Every dollar spent buying STRC back is a dollar not spent on Bitcoin. Strategy sold coins in August to fund that defense. Near $97, the drain almost stops.
The stakes have grown. STRC raised $2.47 billion in July 2025 at $90 a share, paying 9%. Today roughly $10 billion of it trades, at 12%.
Those dividends are not small. Strategy paid $400.7 million on its preferred shares in the second quarter alone.
Saylor Is Signaling, Not Filing
Saylor paired his post with a chart of 840,447 coins worth $65.72 billion. Hours earlier he wrote “Business as usual.”
Michael Saylor Hints at More Bitcoin Buys. Source: Saylor on X
Neither post is a filing, but purchases show up in weekly reports and the next one is expected on Monday, August 31.
MicroStrategy may have bought Bitcoin last week, but it is also possible that they did not. After all, he also declared Bitcoin had won in July, and the buying stayed frozen for another five weeks.
With Bitcoin traded near $79,183 as of this writing, up 1.3% in a day, MicroStrategy’s treasury is barely above water, given they paid an average of $75,388 a coin.

Elon Musk has backed a fringe physics theory that says quantum computers can only grow so big. Crypto traders turned his five word reply into proof that Bitcoin (BTC) is already safe from them.
But it is not proof. The theory comes from Oxford physicist Tim Palmer, predicting that quantum machines stall somewhere between 200 and 400 qubits.
What Musk Actually Said
Musk was not talking about Bitcoin. On August 29, he replied to an Institute of Art and Ideas post about Palmer’s work.
The universe is integer in units of Planck cubes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2026
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He agreed the universe comes in fixed chunks. He said nothing about private keys or Bitcoin’s quantum problem. Investor Fred Krueger cited him a day later anyway, under the headline that Bitcoin is already quantum-safe.
“Bitcoin may already be quantum-safe…The latest estimates require at least 835 logical qubits to break Bitcoin’s signatures with Shor’s algorithm…Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson have commented positively on this research,” he said.
The Physicist Behind the Theory
Palmer’s credentials are real, though they sit outside this field. He is a Royal Society fellow, elected in 2003, and spent his career building weather forecasting models at Oxford.
His paper ran in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in March. It argues nature contains no smooth continuum, so entanglement eventually hits a wall.
Palmer puts that wall at 200 to 400 qubits on current hardware, and says it will never pass 1,000. Ordinary quantum theory sets no such limit, which leaves him in a minority until a machine proves him right.
Quantum mechanics works perfectly in experiments, but Oxford physicist Tim Palmer argues it rests on a mathematical fiction: irrational numbers like √2 have no basis in physical reality. Strip them out, and quantum's strangest mysteries disappear. Palmer's theory makes a… pic.twitter.com/LyTNkMLyrg
— Institute of Art and Ideas (@IAI_TV) August 28, 2026
The Gap Nobody Can Close Yet
Cracking Bitcoin’s signatures takes an estimated 835 logical qubits. A July study by Han Luo and colleagues cut that from earlier figures of 1,098 and 1,175. Those shrinking qubit estimates are the part worth watching.
The hardware is nowhere near either number. IBM plans a machine with 200 logical qubits by 2029. That would test Palmer’s floor. It would not touch Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s price action has ignored the argument, with BTC near $78,449 after a 1.17% daily gain.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Developers are not waiting for physics either, and a post-quantum migration proposal is already circulating. The real test arrives around 2029.