Cryptopolitan

Serve Robotics added Grubhub as a delivery partner and opened two more cities.
The sidewalk-robot company announced the moves Monday as it works to replace revenue it lost when its Uber Eats deal fell apart.
Where the Grubhub robots start rolling
Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Virginia, can now get food delivered by one of Serve’s autonomous robots.`
At launch, 100+ restaurants in Chicago and almost 200 in Los Angeles will be participating in the service, with Serve expecting more to sign up.
Grubhub is owned by Wonder, a food-technology company that also operates its own restaurant brand. Wonder’s Alexandria kitchen will dispatch orders to Serve robots too.
“Our partnership with Serve brings autonomous delivery to Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, while also enabling robot delivery from Wonder’s Alexandria location,” PJ Poykayil, Wonder’s EVP of Customer Delivery Operations, said.
Serve CEO Ali Kashani contextualized the deal in terms of scale. Each platform Serve taps into expands the number of restaurants and neighborhoods its ~2,000 robots can reach, he said.
Serve, Kashani told investors in last week’s second-quarter earnings call, isn’t planning to renew its Uber deal in 2027, citing what he described as “differing views” on how the robots should be deployed.
The volume of deliveries running through Uber fell for the first time since 2022, Kashani said. Serve cut its 2026 revenue guidance from $26 million to a range of $9 million to $10 million.
The day after the earnings call, Uber said it had sold its entire stake in Serve, a company that spun off from the ride-hailing firm more than five years ago.
“I have a lot of respect for Uber. They kind of helped us bootstrap this,” Kashani said. “We just have a different idea for what we want next.”
Serve Robotics expands to two new DoorDash cities
Serve opened its seventh and eighth U.S. markets Monday, both via DoorDash. They are San Jose, California, and Washington, D.C.
The two metros combined have about 8 million people, joining Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami on Serve’s map.
The company’s first Bay Area site, in San Jose, has already completed its first month of deliveries. The Washington rollout includes Dupont Circle and parts of downtown, and Talkin’ Tacos is among the first restaurants signed up.
Serve is utilizing small, existing sites for robot staging, charging, dispatch, and maintenance, including established parking structures for the Washington rollout.
The first one is opening in Miami, Serve says, and the model allows it to move into new neighborhoods without the typical build-out time.
As Cryptopolitan reported last year, DoorDash debuted an in-house robot called Dot in Phoenix.
Serve’s Diligent Robotics unit in health care has begun shipping Moxi 2.0, a hospital robot. The company claims Moxi 2.0 can sense its surroundings up to 15 times faster than its predecessor, features 10 times the onboard computing power, has a runtime of up to 18 hours, and charges 30% faster.
Early deployments include Endeavor Health Edward Hospital near Chicago, Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Los Angeles, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
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Serve Robotics added Grubhub as a delivery partner and opened two more cities.
The sidewalk-robot company announced the moves Monday as it works to replace revenue it lost when its Uber Eats deal fell apart.
Where the Grubhub robots start rolling
Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Virginia, can now get food delivered by one of Serve’s autonomous robots.`
At launch, 100+ restaurants in Chicago and almost 200 in Los Angeles will be participating in the service, with Serve expecting more to sign up.
Grubhub is owned by Wonder, a food-technology company that also operates its own restaurant brand. Wonder’s Alexandria kitchen will dispatch orders to Serve robots too.
“Our partnership with Serve brings autonomous delivery to Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, while also enabling robot delivery from Wonder’s Alexandria location,” PJ Poykayil, Wonder’s EVP of Customer Delivery Operations, said.
Serve CEO Ali Kashani contextualized the deal in terms of scale. Each platform Serve taps into expands the number of restaurants and neighborhoods its ~2,000 robots can reach, he said.
Serve, Kashani told investors in last week’s second-quarter earnings call, isn’t planning to renew its Uber deal in 2027, citing what he described as “differing views” on how the robots should be deployed.
The volume of deliveries running through Uber fell for the first time since 2022, Kashani said. Serve cut its 2026 revenue guidance from $26 million to a range of $9 million to $10 million.
The day after the earnings call, Uber said it had sold its entire stake in Serve, a company that spun off from the ride-hailing firm more than five years ago.
“I have a lot of respect for Uber. They kind of helped us bootstrap this,” Kashani said. “We just have a different idea for what we want next.”
Serve Robotics expands to two new DoorDash cities
Serve opened its seventh and eighth U.S. markets Monday, both via DoorDash. They are San Jose, California, and Washington, D.C.
The two metros combined have about 8 million people, joining Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami on Serve’s map.
The company’s first Bay Area site, in San Jose, has already completed its first month of deliveries. The Washington rollout includes Dupont Circle and parts of downtown, and Talkin’ Tacos is among the first restaurants signed up.
Serve is utilizing small, existing sites for robot staging, charging, dispatch, and maintenance, including established parking structures for the Washington rollout.
The first one is opening in Miami, Serve says, and the model allows it to move into new neighborhoods without the typical build-out time.
As Cryptopolitan reported last year, DoorDash debuted an in-house robot called Dot in Phoenix.
Serve’s Diligent Robotics unit in health care has begun shipping Moxi 2.0, a hospital robot. The company claims Moxi 2.0 can sense its surroundings up to 15 times faster than its predecessor, features 10 times the onboard computing power, has a runtime of up to 18 hours, and charges 30% faster.
Early deployments include Endeavor Health Edward Hospital near Chicago, Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Los Angeles, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
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Compound, one of the first protocols to make crypto lending work without a bank, has approved a record $52 million development budget and rebuilt its leadership around traditional-finance veterans.
It is also wagering its next chapter on institutions, which is seen as a move away from retail yield-chasers who once drove DeFi. Its native token, COMP, seems to have received a boost as a result of the announcement, as it has gone up by over 10% in 24 hours.
Projects that grew up serving retail now court banks, asset managers, and compliance departments to find their footing again, and Compound seems to be moving in that direction.
Compound’s foundation wrote on X that the protocol is “entering its next era.”
From $12 billion to $1.2 billion
The total value locked (TVL) on Compound has fallen to around $1.2 billion, which is a decline of around 90% from the $12 billion the protocol held at its September 2021 peak per DeFillama.
Compound TVL is down from its 2022 highs. Source: Defillama
The vast majority of the TVL is on Ethereum, with Arbitrum coming a distant second.
Compound’s figures are a far cry from Aave’s, which is the leading protocol in the DeFi lending space with a TVL of over $14.6 billion.
Ironically, Compound helped invent this category when it launched in 2018 and, by its own accounting, has processed around $480 billion in deposits and borrowing since.
However, the protocol’s growth stalled following the end of the incentive programs that helped to push up its metrics.
While COMP received a boost, it still trades far below its glory days. It currently trades around $18; however, it is still down by 98% from its 2021 record.
How does Compound plan on spending its $52 million?
The budget passed through the Compound DAO, and $14 million is cleared for immediate use. The rest unlocks in tranches tied to milestones, a structure that keeps the development team on a performance leash funded by the treasury.
The money splits roughly in two, with about $28 million for operations and the engineering behind a new protocol version, Compound V4, and $24 million for growth. Of that growth pool, $8 million to $10 million is earmarked for institutional partnerships rather than the old playbook of paying liquidity providers to boost headline numbers.
V4’s centerpiece is a “hub-and-spoke” design, which routes capital through a central hub instead of walling it off in separate markets, an approach meant to give professional counterparties tighter risk controls. Compound stated that more than 10 partners have committed, with over 20 more in talks.
A bench built from traditional finance
The leadership overhaul reads as a statement of intent. The new team includes Chief Operating Officer Christopher Donovan, previously COO at the Near Foundation, and Chief Product Officer Steven Liu, who grew Maple Finance’s assets from $500 million to $5 billion.
Aaron Schnarch, former CEO of Coinbase Custody, joins as an executive director, with other hires drawn from Anchorage Digital, HSBC, Broadridge Financial, and Maple.
In a statement, Schnarch said, “DeFi is a remarkable innovation; however, it has achieved limited institutional adoption.” He added that current products “fall short of meeting the traditional finance bar.”
However, not everyone is sold on credentials alone, and one of them is Himanshu Sahay of Arch Lending, who said that the budget and bench amount to “a serious move” but warned that institutions “aren’t underwriting teams, they’re underwriting structures.”
Why is everyone now chasing institutions?
Compound is late to a race it once could have led. Across crypto this year, the institutional turn has become the default survival strategy. In July, former Ethereum Foundation staff launched Ethereum Institutional, a non-profit “front door” for banks and asset managers backed by Bitmine, SharpLink, and Joseph Lubin, Cryptopolitan reported.
Tokenized real-world assets climbed to about $65 billion by May, and more than 2,000 institutions disclosed Bitcoin holdings through spot ETFs in Q1.
Ran Hammer of Orbs said, “Retail participation is a fraction of what it was,” as the chain “quietly become a venue for settlement, execution and interaction between financial institutions.” Standard Chartered projects the DeFi sector could reach $2.7 trillion by 2030.
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Unitree Robotics revealed its ‘Superman’ humanoid robot on Monday, with a reported top running speed of 12.66 meters per second and a two-meter standing jump, beating every human on record. The reveal comes only two days before Unitree starts publicly trading in Shanghai, after one of the most oversubscribed tech listings the market has seen.
‘Superman’ hits flying numbers
Superman cleared a two-meter standing high jump on legs measuring 0.85 meters, and hit 12.66 m/s, which is equal to 45.6 km/h in speed. The compared human marks the robot beat for the respective actions are a 1.8-meter standing jump and a 12.4 m/s sprint.
Usain Bolt reached a max speed of 12.42 m/s during his 2009 world-record race, meaning the ‘Superman” robot is faster than the world’s fastest man ever managed, if Unitree’s figures hold true.
The robotics company has, however, not released any independent verification for these figures, with the numbers all coming from a company video and not an independently measured event.
Unitree New Robot Preview: “Superman” Breaking the Limits of Humanity🥳
Standing high jump 2 m, top speed 12.66 m/s (0.85 m leg length)
Surpassing the standing high jump and running speed records of all humans around the world
This new machine has only been in development for a… pic.twitter.com/12i80ITU6p
— Unitree (@UnitreeRobotics) August 17, 2026
Three months of development
Unitree also stated that its engineers built the robot in a little over three months, and that the humanoid robot’s current hardware leaves plenty of room for improvement. The company’s founder, Wang Xingxing, hinted at the possibility back in March at the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum.
He predicted that humanoid machines would break human sprint limits by mid-2026, referring to cheaper parts and better algorithms as the reason for such a possibility.
The robotics company had introduced the As2W some weeks before, a wheeled quadruped robot built for cargo. The As2W weighs 25 kilograms, can carry a recorded max load of 180 kilograms, and can move a cargo of up to 16 kilograms continuously.
Unitree IPO close at hand
Unitree priced its coming IPO listing at 150.8 yuan and raised about 6.1 billion yuan, almost $905 million, in a deal that places the company’s valuation at about $9 billion. The IPO was oversubscribed by over 5000 times, and the company raked in 45% more than the 4.2 billion yuan it had initially targeted.
Real revenue also adds to the valuation, as sales hit 1.7 billion yuan last year, more than four times the 2024 figure, with net profit of 591 million yuan. Unitree sold over 5,500 humanoid units across all its G1, H1, and R1 units in 2025, with most of these going to research labs and entertainment buyers instead of factories and manufacturers.
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Unitree Robotics revealed its ‘Superman’ humanoid robot on Monday, with a reported top running speed of 12.66 meters per second and a two-meter standing jump, beating every human on record. The reveal comes only two days before Unitree starts publicly trading in Shanghai, after one of the most oversubscribed tech listings the market has seen.
‘Superman’ hits flying numbers
Superman cleared a two-meter standing high jump on legs measuring 0.85 meters, and hit 12.66 m/s, which is equal to 45.6 km/h in speed. The compared human marks the robot beat for the respective actions are a 1.8-meter standing jump and a 12.4 m/s sprint.
Usain Bolt reached a max speed of 12.42 m/s during his 2009 world-record race, meaning the ‘Superman” robot is faster than the world’s fastest man ever managed, if Unitree’s figures hold true.
The robotics company has, however, not released any independent verification for these figures, with the numbers all coming from a company video and not an independently measured event.
Unitree New Robot Preview: “Superman” Breaking the Limits of Humanity🥳
Standing high jump 2 m, top speed 12.66 m/s (0.85 m leg length)
Surpassing the standing high jump and running speed records of all humans around the world
This new machine has only been in development for a… pic.twitter.com/12i80ITU6p
— Unitree (@UnitreeRobotics) August 17, 2026
Three months of development
Unitree also stated that its engineers built the robot in a little over three months, and that the humanoid robot’s current hardware leaves plenty of room for improvement. The company’s founder, Wang Xingxing, hinted at the possibility back in March at the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum.
He predicted that humanoid machines would break human sprint limits by mid-2026, referring to cheaper parts and better algorithms as the reason for such a possibility.
The robotics company had introduced the As2W some weeks before, a wheeled quadruped robot built for cargo. The As2W weighs 25 kilograms, can carry a recorded max load of 180 kilograms, and can move a cargo of up to 16 kilograms continuously.
Unitree IPO close at hand
Unitree priced its coming IPO listing at 150.8 yuan and raised about 6.1 billion yuan, almost $905 million, in a deal that places the company’s valuation at about $9 billion. The IPO was oversubscribed by over 5000 times, and the company raked in 45% more than the 4.2 billion yuan it had initially targeted.
Real revenue also adds to the valuation, as sales hit 1.7 billion yuan last year, more than four times the 2024 figure, with net profit of 591 million yuan. Unitree sold over 5,500 humanoid units across all its G1, H1, and R1 units in 2025, with most of these going to research labs and entertainment buyers instead of factories and manufacturers.
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The Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Pyth Network contributor, Douro Labs, asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on August 17 2026, to end Rule 611. Rule 611 is the 2005 trade-through rule.
HPC and Duro Labs argue that Rule 611 is unable to properly describe how stock trades are settled on public blockchains and are urging the SEC to allow independent onchain price feeds. Their joint comment letter was filed under docket S7-2026-20, with the comment window closing the same day the letter was filed. It’s now left to the SEC to decide.
What Rule 611 made brokers do?
Rule 611 is at the core of the market-structure framework launched in 2005. The framework is referred to as Regulation NMS, and the role of Rule 611 was clear and simple: a broker handling a customer order cannot execute at a worse price when a better one is displayed somewhere else.
If an exchange displays a stock at $90.00 and another at $90.01, the broker has to use the $90.00 price.
For this to work, every US exchange had to be displayed in a single feed. Venues relay their prices to the securities information processors (SIPs), which post the NBBO (national best bid and offer), and it becomes a reference price for every broker executing an order.
On June 11, the SEC voted on a proposal to end two rules, Rule 611 and Rule 610(e).
Rule 610(e) prevents exchanges from publishing quotes that lock or cross each other.
Paul Atkins, the SEC Chairman, has opposed Rule 611 since its inception in 2005. If Rule 611 is repealed, it’s left to the broker to protect the customer’s interests as they are obliged to under FINRA rules.
Why the national benchmark breaks down onchain
The main claim in the letter filed on August 17 is that the NBBO is not suitable for blockchain venues. The letter states three problems:
The national benchmark is often inoperative when a trade occurs, as the SIPs do not trade through nights, weekends, and holidays when blockchain markets are trading
The benchmark does not accurately portray onchain conditions. Large asset holders like automated market makers do not post bids or offers; rather, they determine prices by formulas
The clocks are a mismatch. Refreshing a feed in microseconds does not move the needle for orders that are settled at a block boundary.
The letter pegs it at around 200 milliseconds on Hyperliquid, 400 on Solana, 12 seconds on Ethereum, and ~10 minutes on Bitcoin.
A different reference price
The letter enjoins the SEC to approve a “qualifying reference price” in place of the NBBO. The broker would use this price to measure onchain orders. The letter proposes four tests:
The price should be an aggregate of quotes from independent firms that typically set prices, with reported data on recency and validation
Make use of methods that are manipulation-resistant
Make its publishers and calculation logic public and easy to audit
Ensure periodic checks against data from SIP and external sources
The letter went on to state that Douro Labs has built the Pyth Pro reference price, a service meant to meet those tests.
Who is pushing for this, and why now
The Hyperliquid Policy Center is not a neutral party in all of this. The Hyper Foundation launched the HPC in February 2026 with 1 million HYPE tokens (~$ 30 million back then) and appointed Jake Chervinsky, an experienced crypto lawyer, as the CEO.
The letter beckons the SEC to maintain the best-execution policy anchored in FINRA rather than at individual exchanges. They argue that rules adopted with immediate effect in June by NYSE American, NYSE Arca, NYSE National, and NYSE Texas have a conflict, because exchanges compete for the same order flow they are to regulate.
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The Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and Pyth Network contributor, Douro Labs, asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on August 17 2026, to end Rule 611. Rule 611 is the 2005 trade-through rule.
HPC and Duro Labs argue that Rule 611 is unable to properly describe how stock trades are settled on public blockchains and are urging the SEC to allow independent onchain price feeds. Their joint comment letter was filed under docket S7-2026-20, with the comment window closing the same day the letter was filed. It’s now left to the SEC to decide.
What Rule 611 made brokers do?
Rule 611 is at the core of the market-structure framework launched in 2005. The framework is referred to as Regulation NMS, and the role of Rule 611 was clear and simple: a broker handling a customer order cannot execute at a worse price when a better one is displayed somewhere else.
If an exchange displays a stock at $90.00 and another at $90.01, the broker has to use the $90.00 price.
For this to work, every US exchange had to be displayed in a single feed. Venues relay their prices to the securities information processors (SIPs), which post the NBBO (national best bid and offer), and it becomes a reference price for every broker executing an order.
On June 11, the SEC voted on a proposal to end two rules, Rule 611 and Rule 610(e).
Rule 610(e) prevents exchanges from publishing quotes that lock or cross each other.
Paul Atkins, the SEC Chairman, has opposed Rule 611 since its inception in 2005. If Rule 611 is repealed, it’s left to the broker to protect the customer’s interests as they are obliged to under FINRA rules.
Why the national benchmark breaks down onchain
The main claim in the letter filed on August 17 is that the NBBO is not suitable for blockchain venues. The letter states three problems:
The national benchmark is often inoperative when a trade occurs, as the SIPs do not trade through nights, weekends, and holidays when blockchain markets are trading
The benchmark does not accurately portray onchain conditions. Large asset holders like automated market makers do not post bids or offers; rather, they determine prices by formulas
The clocks are a mismatch. Refreshing a feed in microseconds does not move the needle for orders that are settled at a block boundary.
The letter pegs it at around 200 milliseconds on Hyperliquid, 400 on Solana, 12 seconds on Ethereum, and ~10 minutes on Bitcoin.
A different reference price
The letter enjoins the SEC to approve a “qualifying reference price” in place of the NBBO. The broker would use this price to measure onchain orders. The letter proposes four tests:
The price should be an aggregate of quotes from independent firms that typically set prices, with reported data on recency and validation
Make use of methods that are manipulation-resistant
Make its publishers and calculation logic public and easy to audit
Ensure periodic checks against data from SIP and external sources
The letter went on to state that Douro Labs has built the Pyth Pro reference price, a service meant to meet those tests.
Who is pushing for this, and why now
The Hyperliquid Policy Center is not a neutral party in all of this. The Hyper Foundation launched the HPC in February 2026 with 1 million HYPE tokens (~$ 30 million back then) and appointed Jake Chervinsky, an experienced crypto lawyer, as the CEO.
The letter beckons the SEC to maintain the best-execution policy anchored in FINRA rather than at individual exchanges. They argue that rules adopted with immediate effect in June by NYSE American, NYSE Arca, NYSE National, and NYSE Texas have a conflict, because exchanges compete for the same order flow they are to regulate.
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OpenAI president Greg Brockman has dismissed the concern over the wave of senior executives departing the company, saying it is “not that atypical.”
According to Brockman, the concern is only due to the company’s popularity. Individuals within the company also claim that the reshuffling is needed and welcome.
Why does it matter that OpenAI is losing its executives?
Speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman argued that the departures of OpenAI’s executives only create such a buzz because the company is “so much in the spotlight,” and that it would be different if it were a smaller company.
He framed the departures as routine for a company that keeps reinventing itself, but stated that he and chief executive Sam Altman are constants. The two co-founded OpenAI with others in 2015.
Most recently, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, left after less than eight months in the job. Two days before that, Brad Lightcap, an eight-year OpenAI veteran and former operating chief, said he was moving on to start something new.
OpenAI has tapped Dali Rajic, previously president and COO of the cybersecurity firm Wiz, to fill the revenue role. Google bought Wiz for $32 billion.
At least a dozen senior leaders have left the company so far in 2026, including the CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, who stepped back last month after a chronic illness made a full-time return untenable, as well as Kevin Weil, Bill Peebles, and Srinivas Narayanan, who left earlier in the year.
Head of ethics Chloé Bakalar, head of safety systems Johannes Heidecke, and former mission alignment chief Joshua Achiam have all exited, with safety researcher Sandhini Agarwal leaving in July.
OpenAI has also reportedly disbanded its “preparedness” team, which studied catastrophic model risks. Those duties have been integrated into other groups as part of a “streamlining process” tied to Altman’s goal of refocusing on ChatGPT.
Will the departures affect OpenAI’s IPO?
OpenAI filed its prospectus confidentially with the SEC in June and carries an $852 billion valuation. Despite concerns about the exodus of executives, the company’s run rate climbed 20% month over month in July, with business customers up 32% over the same stretch.
Meanwhile, Brockman has reportedly been taking a bigger role across the company to build a leadership team that will push OpenAI past Anthropic in enterprise adoption. Individuals within the company reportedly think of the employee exodus as a long-overdue clearing of underperforming managers.
A security incident disclosed last month in which OpenAI models broke out of an isolated test environment, strung together a chain of vulnerabilities, reached the open web, and got into the developer platform Hugging Face, was also discussed on CNBC.
Brockman said the company treated the matter with the utmost seriousness and published a blog post meant to help other organizations defend against similar attacks.
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ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association have signed a memorandum of understanding to build copyright guardrails into the company’s Seedance and Seedream AI generators, the first deal of its kind between Hollywood’s main studio lobby and an AI firm, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Dispute started after popular Tom Cruise video
The truce ends a dispute that broke out approximately six months ago. The controversy dates back to a clip created purely by AI of Tom Cruise trading blows with Brad Pitt, built with Seedance, and then spreading widely all over the internet.
On February 20, MPA global general counsel Karyn Temple wrote to ByteDance general counsel John Rogovin, the Los Angeles Times reported, arguing that Seedance 2.0 had been trained on protected material and was turning out unauthorized clips of characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants alongside a recreated scene from “Stranger Things.”
Variety reported that the trade group accused ByteDance of “disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs” on a supposedly “massive scale.” Disney and other studios also objected to tools that could reproduce Marvel and Star Wars figures without permission, The News reported.
Results of constructive talks
The MOU then announced on Monday that it has created a structure covering ByteDance’s generative products, reaching users through TikTok, its separate U.S. TikTok app, CapCut, and Dreamina.
The MPA did not release the details of the specific barriers and deterrents in the deal to the public, the Los Angeles Times reported. Both companies have, however, pointed to newer releases as evidence that these safeguards have been initiated, with ByteDance claiming both Seedance 2.5 and Seedream 5.0 Pro, shipped last month, carry stronger IP protections.
“Today’s agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement, adding that the deal “reflects our shared determination to continue our work together to further fortify those guardrails.” Bytedance general counsel, John Rogovin, said the company “respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world” and said the MOU was “an important framework for continued collaboration as the technology evolves.”
OpenAI’s Sora shutdown resonates with IP crackdown
ByteDance is not the first AI company the MPA has pressured into concessions on their AI product. The association had initially gone after OpenAI’s Sora before the firm added limits, according to Variety, with OpenAI eventually shutting Sora down earlier this year after a similar wave of unauthorized character videos.
However, instead of fully retreating and shutting down its products, ByteDance is taking a different path, pouring more funds into Seedance, which is reportedly one of the most advanced video models available, alongside Google’s offerings.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Seedance has gained ground with independent filmmakers who find it cheaper than rival tools, a development that gives ByteDance a commercial reason to keep the studios afloat instead of completely disengaging from the market.
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ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association have signed a memorandum of understanding to build copyright guardrails into the company’s Seedance and Seedream AI generators, the first deal of its kind between Hollywood’s main studio lobby and an AI firm, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Dispute started after popular Tom Cruise video
The truce ends a dispute that broke out approximately six months ago. The controversy dates back to a clip created purely by AI of Tom Cruise trading blows with Brad Pitt, built with Seedance, and then spreading widely all over the internet.
On February 20, MPA global general counsel Karyn Temple wrote to ByteDance general counsel John Rogovin, the Los Angeles Times reported, arguing that Seedance 2.0 had been trained on protected material and was turning out unauthorized clips of characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants alongside a recreated scene from “Stranger Things.”
Variety reported that the trade group accused ByteDance of “disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs” on a supposedly “massive scale.” Disney and other studios also objected to tools that could reproduce Marvel and Star Wars figures without permission, The News reported.
Results of constructive talks
The MOU then announced on Monday that it has created a structure covering ByteDance’s generative products, reaching users through TikTok, its separate U.S. TikTok app, CapCut, and Dreamina.
The MPA did not release the details of the specific barriers and deterrents in the deal to the public, the Los Angeles Times reported. Both companies have, however, pointed to newer releases as evidence that these safeguards have been initiated, with ByteDance claiming both Seedance 2.5 and Seedream 5.0 Pro, shipped last month, carry stronger IP protections.
“Today’s agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement, adding that the deal “reflects our shared determination to continue our work together to further fortify those guardrails.” Bytedance general counsel, John Rogovin, said the company “respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world” and said the MOU was “an important framework for continued collaboration as the technology evolves.”
OpenAI’s Sora shutdown resonates with IP crackdown
ByteDance is not the first AI company the MPA has pressured into concessions on their AI product. The association had initially gone after OpenAI’s Sora before the firm added limits, according to Variety, with OpenAI eventually shutting Sora down earlier this year after a similar wave of unauthorized character videos.
However, instead of fully retreating and shutting down its products, ByteDance is taking a different path, pouring more funds into Seedance, which is reportedly one of the most advanced video models available, alongside Google’s offerings.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Seedance has gained ground with independent filmmakers who find it cheaper than rival tools, a development that gives ByteDance a commercial reason to keep the studios afloat instead of completely disengaging from the market.
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Groq has finalized a $350 million funding round valuing the AI chip startup turned data center operator at $3.5 billion, which equals almost half of the $6.9 billion the startup was worth only last September before Nvidia licensed its technology and hired away its founder.
Groq fall began from Nvidia poach
Groq started in 2016, building its own hardware to take on Nvidia in AI processing. This changed after Nvidia struck a licensing deal for the AI company’s technology and poached CEO Jonathan Ross along with other senior staff.
A deal of this type, alongside the subsequent change in staff has become prevalent in the AI industry. Google and Meta have done similar, licensing technology and bringing in engineers from AI startups instead of acquiring the companies. Large tech firms do this to secure great expertise without buying the business entirely.
The Nvidia deal stripped out leadership at Groq, leaving a company dedicated to rebuilding its staff and purpose over the last months.
$350 million round led by Disruptive
The round was led by Disruptive, a Dallas investment firm, according to Bloomberg. A Groq representative also said that Nvidia was investing money into the deal.
Disruptive was founded by Alex Davis, who also serves as Groq’s executive chairman.
The new valuation hits at about half of where the AI startup sat at its peak value. This September peak was stated to be $6.9 billion, pointing at a sharp reset for a company that was, until recently, one of the bigger names in the race to build silicon chips that could compete with Nvidia’s.
From selling chips hardware to renting compute
Groq has now restructured itself as a data center operator, chasing demand for the computing power that runs AI models in production, an area known as inference. The company raised $650 million in June to fund this shift, and reset its valuation at the time without attributing any specific numbers.
“Inference will without a doubt become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure,” Davis said in a statement to Bloomberg News, adding that the startup would concentrate on “supporting the most important model makers.”
Some of the fresh capital from the round has been set aside for the startup’s physical expansion. Groq plans to grow its total data center capacity to more than 200 megawatts by next year.
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Crypto company backed by President Donald Trump, World Liberty Financial, is connected to WorldClaw, a Hong Kong platform that offers access to Chinese AI models that have been marked by the U.S. government as security risks, according to a report by Reuters on Monday.
Flagged Chinese labs fill WorldClaw AI menu
WorldClaw has a catalogue of about 90 AI models on its routing service platform, with a Reuters review stating that 43 of them come from Chinese developers, including Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Moonshot. OpenAI and Anthropic also have models available on the platform.
Several of these Chinese firms have particular U.S. government labels regarding their use. The Department of Defense has named Alibaba and Baidu as Chinese military-affiliated companies, a status barring the Pentagon from working with them in any capacity.
Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, sits on the Commerce Department’s entity list, which restricts its access to U.S. technology and forces American firms to seek an export license that is presumptively denied. The government listing also accuses Z.ai of advancing China’s military capabilities through advanced AI.
DeepSeek and Moonshot complete the names of marked out AI companies. Trump admin officials have accused both of building their systems on intellectual property stolen from American rivals. Moonshot has denied these allegations, however.
USD1 stablecoin is the connection
WorldClaw accepts USD1, World Liberty’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, as a form of payment for its services on the platform. USD1 is backed by multiple assets including U.S. Treasury securities, and the Trump family is entitled to a cut of the interest earned from these reserves. Every purchase completed using the USD1 stablecoin helps towards sustaining the WLFI venture partly owned by the Trump family.
Token sales at World Liberty have delivered the Trump family more than $1.4 billion, part of The Trump family has acquired about $2.3 billion from crypto in total. The firm recently won preliminary U.S. approval for a national bank charter built around the same USD1 stablecoin.
It is also worth noting that Ryan Fang, World Liberty’s head of growth, has previously advised WorldClaw in a role the AI platform has described as strictly advisory and focused on USD1 adoption and wider access to AI services. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have also previously promoted WorldClaw on X.
Risks are even greater than trade policy
A senior fellow at the Center for New American Security who previously advised the State Department, Daniel Remler, has warned that Chinese models available on WorldClaw could expose users to Chinese government monitoring and malicious code that could potentially hijack independent AI agents.
WorldClaw also states on its website that the information users enter may be passed on to the companies whose models power the platform.
The WorldClaw platform claims it has over 10,000 users and handles over 50 million requested tasks a day, a demand driven in part by the lower cost of Chinese models. Usage of these models remains generally legal for individuals and companies in the U.S..
Both sides claim no “conflict of interest”
Both companies have vehemently rejected the consensus that this connection is a conflict of interest. David Wachsman, a World Liberty spokesman, said WorldClaw was an independent company and stated that large U.S. firms also resell Chinese-built AI. A WorldClaw spokesperson has claimed that the platform “helps American AI companies reach international users” and that the mdoel listings on the platform do not “constitute an endorsement of its developer.”
The White House offered the same defense. Spokesperson Anna Kelly said there “are no conflicts of interest” in the relationship and that “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public.”
However, external experts remain not as convinced. “As the U.S. government tries to respond to the rise and threat of Chinese AI, it seems hypocritical to go out through WorldClaw to use these tools from China to try and make a bunch of money,” said Sam Bresnick, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.


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Harmony has published a detailed rollback plan that would rewind its blockchain to cancel the effects of an attacker who forged billions of ONE tokens.
The move will discard every transaction confirmed on the network since the incident, deleting legitimate user activity along with the fraud.
What is Harmony doing to its blockchain?
The Harmony network has announced that it will return to the state it was in on August 11, 2026, at 23:25:37 UTC. All transactions that happened after that date and time, including the fake ONE tokens that were created by a hacker, as well as any legal buys, sells, or transfers that users made, will be erased.
The company chose this specific time because the first fake tokens appeared in the very next block on Shard 0, which was block number 92,730,036.
The block just before it, number 92,730,034 (Shard 1) was never attacked, but it is being rolled back at the same time to prevent any future problems. The network will then start creating new blocks from heights 92,730,035 and 94,978,279.
Harmony’s new client software, v2026.1.2, will refuse to accept the block hashes tied to the hack.
Before the team decided on a fixed rollback window, a targeted burn to destroy the fake token was considered as an initial solution. However, the fake ONE tokens had already been sent to exchanges, trading pools, and smart contracts; burning them could have accidentally taken money that belongs to innocent people.
The company also rejected the idea of a blacklist, because that would leave the fake supply in the system, and selectively replaying transactions was called “unworkable” because the state of the chain has changed. The idea of a full token migration was also rejected because it would have caused too much disruption for all users.
Simply using a built-in revert tool to move the chain head was also warned against, as this could leave behind unwanted data that might lead to another failure.
Harmony Network’s report states that an independent security firm reviewed the hack and agreed with the rollback solution.
How did the hack happen?
The hack was first noticed by on-chain expert “Juiceberg,” who estimated that the attacker used a flaw in how the network checks cross-shard receipts to process the same receipt more than once, creating tokens out of thin air.
After the attack was made public, the price of the ONE token fell, and it is currently around $0.0007.
Roughly 4 billion ONE, about 26% of the token’s supply, had been conjured through empty blocks.
Harmony says it is now investigating where the money went. The hacker tried to send 534 payments of 5 billion tokens each in just 106 seconds. Of those, 477 payments went through, moving a huge amount of 2,385,000,000,000 ONE.
The team tracked the flow of money and found that most of the fake tokens ended up in a wallet or reached a service like an exchange. Harmony says it is now working with exchanges, crypto bridges, and police to keep records and find the criminals.
Cryptopolitan reported that Harmony had a similar problem in December 2023, when a bug in its staking system created 146.28 million ONE tokens by accident, forcing the company to update its network.
Separately, Harmony’s Horizon bridge lost about $100 million in a June 2022 theft that the FBI attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
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Russia’s largest stock market, the Moscow Exchange, is going to add perpetual futures on Bitcoin and Ethereum to its crypto derivatives lineup.
The news comes ahead of the enforcement of the “digital currency” law next month, which thoroughly regulates investment in coins and related products.
MOEX to offer new futures contracts on BTC and ETH in September
The Moscow Exchange (MOEX) is expanding its crypto derivative offerings with new contracts based on the cryptocurrencies with the biggest market capitalization.
The stock trading venue plans to launch perpetual futures on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) in September, one of its top executives unveiled, quoted by local media.
The platform has been providing professional investors with access to monthly and quarterly crypto futures since last summer, including ones based on Solana, Ripple, and Tron.
“We plan to expand this line and eventually increase the number of coins to 10,” Maria Patrikeeva, managing director of the exchange’s derivatives unit, told reporters.
The stock market’s operator then intends to offer perpetual futures on these underlying assets, she added, as per the Interfax news agency, which quoted her as stating:
“In September, we will launch the first two perpetual futures on the Bitcoin and Ethereum indices.”
Moscow Exchange plans to also start trading perpetual futures on approximately 20 foreign stocks in the near future, the MOEX official revealed, too.
These will be based on some of the most popular shares, such as those of Amazon, AMD, Tesla, and Netflix, among others, Patrikeeva further detailed.
She highlighted that the derivatives department has presented 34 new instruments since the beginning of the year and wants to offer almost as many more by the end of 2026.
Russia prepares to build fully regulated crypto market
MOEX started trading cryptocurrency derivatives shortly after the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) authorized financial firms to offer such products in May 2025.
The exchange was among the first participants in the country’s traditional financial market to do so, alongside other established players such as Sber, Russia’s largest bank.
Both institutions have been subject to Western sanctions over the invasion in Ukraine, which severely limit their access to the global financial infrastructure.
State-controlled as well as private Russian entities are believed to have been using cryptocurrency to circumvent restrictions in the fiat realm to continue to trade internationally.
Initially, the monetary authority in Moscow permitted only “highly qualified” investors to acquire and sell digital assets and their derivatives, but this is about to change now.
The long-awaited law “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,” which comprehensively regulates crypto-related activities such as investment and trading, widens investor access to them.
Most provisions of the new legislation, which was adopted by both houses of Russian parliament and signed by President Vladimir Putin this summer, will enter into force on September 1.
It will allow even non-qualified investors to put money into crypto, although under restrictions such as an annual limit of 300,000 rubles per intermediary, or around $3,500 at the current exchange rate.
The digital assets available to ordinary Russians will also be limited to the most liquid, capitalized and globally traded cryptocurrencies on the market today.
Earlier in August, the Bank of Russia approved for public trading only Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether’s dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT, which currently meet its strict criteria, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
Perpetual futures are overnight contracts without a fixed expiration date that are automatically rolled over to the next trading day, giving market participants certain flexibility in managing positions.
Moscow Exchange to start trading cryptocurrencies
MOEX is yet to announce when precisely it’s going to begin trading cryptocurrencies themselves, the Bits.media website noted in its report on its announcement on Monday.
Quoting knowledgeable sources from the industry, the Russian crypto news outlet also remarked that the exchange is preparing to set up a special depository for digital settlement purposes.
Under Russia’s new law, starting next July, all crypto transactions must be conducted through licensed intermediaries such as financial brokers and capital management firms.
At the same time, existing stock market depositories and the newly established digital depositories will be responsible for safekeeping and accounting of coin holdings.
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Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) did not have fresh Bitcoin sales to report this week, with the main changes to the Saylor-led firm’s books coming from common stock sales that earned it $333.7 million, which it directed into paying dividends, buying back its own STRC preferred share and building its USD reserve to $4.8 billion.
The firm’s Bitcoin reserve remained unchaged at the 840,447 tokens reported in earlier Cryptopolitan coverage.
Did Strategy sell Bitcoin this week?
The SEC filing submitted on Monday, August 17, revealed that Strategy did not sell any BTC for the first time in three weeks.
Instead, the firm funded its $52.4 million in STRC dividend obligations and $132.2 million buyback of 1,388,720 STRC shares by selling 3,458,866 MSTR shares for $333.7 million. The rest of the funds it raised during the week went to topping up its dollar reserve by $150 million.
As of this Cryptopolitan report, Strategy controls an 840,447 BTC stack that it paid $63.36 billion for. The firm’s USD stash is now up to $4.8 billion, enough to cover up to 2.8 years of dividend payments.
Saylor’s firm held steady on its Bitcoin holdings. Source: Bitcoin Treasuries
The pause hands Saylor fresh ammo in his debate with skeptics calling out Strategy’s recent offloads as signs that the firm has become a seller. The firm has not bought a single Bitcoin token since it unveiled a capital framework that authorizes up to $1.25 billion in BTC sales in June.
In a July 31 post cited by Cryptopolitan, Saylor wrote that Strategy “never had a ‘never sell’ policy.” He added that the firm will return to adding to its stash in due time.
Strategy sold 1,690 Bitcoin for $108.6 million in the week before this.
Why Strategy is building cash reserve
The areas Strategy directed cash into signal the firm’s current priorities, with the largest ratio ($150 million) directed to lifting the firm’s dollar reserve to $4.8 billion. That cash injection pushed the firm’s “USD Duration,” which refers to the length of time it can fund preferred dividends and debt interest, by 41 days to 2.8 years.
About $653 million remains under its preferred-stock repurchase authorization, and the separate $1 billion program to buy back MSTR common stock has not been touched.
No STRF, STRK or STRD shares were sold or repurchased during the week.
MSCI decision looms over the trade
The capital maneuvering plays out against a threat to Strategy’s index status. MSCI has revived a consultation that could strip Strategy and Japan’s Metaplanet from its Global Investable Market Indexes under a new “non-operating companies” screen, Cryptopolitan reported.
Feedback closes September 30, a decision is expected around October 16, and any removal would land at the November 2026 index review, potentially forcing $2 billion to $2.8 billion in passive selling.
Strategy is pushing back publicly. In an August 14 post on X, the company said index providers “should measure markets, not decide which assets companies are allowed to own,” adding that “Bitcoin doesn’t need MSCI. Neither does Strategy.”
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Dutch prosecutors sold the cryptocurrency seized from collapsed platform Knaken for €2.2 million, or about $2.5 million, court-appointed trustee Carl Hamm said.
Thousands of customers who deposited an estimated €10 million to €12 million could face heavy losses.
The only money in the estate so far
Hamm, the Rotterdam trustee supervising the wind-down, said he is still looking to see if cash is elsewhere, if anyone owes Knaken money, and if other assets can be sold.
Beyond the customers, he said, there are hardly any other creditors, aside from a possible slice of unpaid payroll tax.
Hamm wrote to about 6,300 people who recently held a position with the firm. He warned them not to expect to get much back.
His estimate that Knaken saw €10 million to €12 million from customers is more than the sale brought in, suggesting a hole of several million euros.
In July, Cryptopolitan reported that prosecutors estimated the missing sum to be around €7 million and the customer base to be around 30,000 users.
The app enabled people in the Netherlands to buy, trade, and store crypto. It never had the license required by the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets.
On July 16, a Rotterdam court declared Knaken Cryptohandel B.V. and its related Stichting Knaken Payments bankrupt.
Hamm points out how the service was wired. Put €100 into Bitcoin, he said, and €1 went to Knaken as a fee while the firm used the remaining €99 to open a position on an exchange.
That position was in the name of Knaken. Customers saw the balance of crypto increase in the app, but what they owned was a claim on the value in euros, not the coins. Many assumed the tokens belonged to them.
Hamm said Knaken didn’t seem to have held crypto that matched the balances users were shown, and that trading and day-to-day costs had for a long time run into “one pot” while the business lost money.
€2.3 million routed to the owner’s own company
Owner Ronald J. transferred €2.3 million from a company account to a company he controlled. The court called the transfer a conflict of interest.
Those records trace Knaken’s troubles back to 2020, when 23 bitcoins were taken in a hack. J. blamed the theft for a loss of many millions of euros. The stolen coins were valued at ~€140,000 at 2020 prices.
In the years that followed, the company signed up to sponsor football clubs, including Feyenoord, Sparta, Heracles, and Heerenveen, and briefly Ajax.
It continued to sell certificates and let customers lend it money. It did not flag its financial problems to central bank supervisor De Nederlandsche Bank.
One of the customers’ lawyers challenged the right of justice officials to liquidate the holdings. “Whose crypto was it?” he asked, likening it to a garage going bust and selling the car left parked there while the owner sees “nothing of it.”
Prosecutors say there were good reasons for the sale and have refused to elaborate. They likely invoked Article 117 of the Dutch Code of Criminal Procedure, which provides for the sale of seized goods susceptible to depreciation.
Crypto prices are volatile, Hamm said, and had the coins not been sold and then fallen, the shortfall would only have grown.
Ronald J. said he does not acknowledge the €10 million to €12 million figure and cannot explain how it was arrived at.
Knaken worked as a broker, he said. The customer entered a buy order, and it was filled at the going rate, and the matched position ended up in that customer’s account.
He called Hamm’s suggestion that the money was never actually put into crypto “pertinent onjuist” and damaging.
He added that every order went through the firm’s liquidity provider and had an order ID, an executed price, and a timestamp that could be checked against the customer’s instruction.
J. also said he’s still working toward a settlement with creditors that he said could speed up the wind-down.
A separate criminal investigation by Dutch fraud agency FIOD, which raided the premises on June 29 and seized devices and assets but made no arrests, remains open.
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CISA upgraded the severity score for a macOS Screen Sharing vulnerability to a critical 9.8 out of 10 on Friday.
Dutch investigators have reported attackers gaining root control of internet-exposed Macs and quietly loading Monero mining software.
From 7.1 to 9.8 in a week
When Apple shipped its fix, CISA listed the bug, tracked as CVE-2026-65400, at 7.1 in the National Vulnerability Database. The agency changed it to 9.8, near the top of the CVSS scale.
The Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Centre took a similar approach. An update on August 12 revised an initial advisory to say that public proof-of-concept code was in circulation and that active abuse had been confirmed.
As of Friday, the flaw had not been included in a federal catalog of known attacked vulnerabilities maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Apple’s own CVE record with the Dutch agency still had the older 7.1 rating.
The vulnerability is due to the way Screen Sharing handles authentication. The security company Huntress traced it to a flaw in the service’s use of Secure Remote Password, the protocol used to verify a user’s identity before granting access.
Huntress says the practical effect is that the Mac thinks the outsider has signed in already. The failure occurs prior to any password verification. Resetting or deleting Screen Sharing passwords doesn’t shut the door.
“Anybody who leverages Apple’s Screen Sharing functionality on any supported macOS version needs to apply the most recent security updates immediately,” Huntress researcher Ryan Dowd wrote.
Apple delivered that fix in macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, Sequoia 15.7.9, and Sonoma 14.8.9 on August 6.
Tens of thousands of rented Macs in range
The NCSC found that victim machines were totally compromised. In each case examined by the researchers, the attacker accessed the system via port 5900, the default Screen Sharing port that remained exposed to the internet.
They then escalated to root privileges and deployed a Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency miner. The Dutch agency did not give the number of systems affected or name a suspect.
Screen Sharing is disabled by default. However, it is a standard tool for working with “bare-metal” Macs, which are physical Apple hardware rented and run inside remote data centers, where much of the exposure is concentrated.
With the internet-scanning tool Censys, Dowd said he found “tens of thousands of potentially vulnerable hosts.” Many, Huntress says, are machines rented by the hour from hosting services.
Cryptopolitan reported on the Reaper malware that hijacks Script Editor to drain wallets and fake macOS troubleshooting posts that lead victims to paste malicious Terminal commands.
Cryptojacking, stealing computing power to turn into coins, has long been a Monero activity. Unlike specialist rigs, Monero coins can be mined on normal CPUs, and its transactions are private by design.
The return per hijacked Mac is small. Monday’s price valued the about 432 XMR a day minted by the Monero network at ~$179,000, distributed across all the miners. XMR was trading at $413.47 on Monday, up about 0.9% over 24 hours.
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HIVE Digital Technologies announced Monday that its subsidiary BUZZ HPC has secured a five-year, ~$350 million contract for GPU cloud computing services with an unnamed investment-grade company.
The company expects the deal to drive its high-performance computing revenues to about $500,000 a day once the hardware is up and running in the fourth quarter.
BUZZ HPC stacks a second contract on the Bell deal
The agreement adds ~$70 million in annualized recurring revenue, and BUZZ HPC’s total annualized revenue rises to about $180 million.
Of that, about $35 million is realized today. The other $145 million is under contract to become operational through the end of 2026.
This is the second major GPU commitment HIVE has announced since June. At the same site, BUZZ HPC’s prior three-year, $220 million sovereign AI cloud deal deploys NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems for Bell and Cohere.
Chief executive Aydin Kilic said, “We are pleased to announce this agreement as we accelerate towards our year-end target of $200 million of ARR for our GPU cloud business.”
BUZZ HPC will be deploying a dedicated cluster of 2,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs under the contract. They are housed in Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networked GB300 NVL72 rack-scale systems and VAST Data storage.
The design is based on NVIDIA’s reference architecture and supports large-scale AI training and inference for enterprise customers, HIVE said.
The cluster is on its way to the Bell AI Fabric site in Merritt, British Columbia. HIVE says the site is powered 100% by renewable hydroelectric energy and uses closed-loop liquid cooling that does not continually use water. The company plans to roll out the system later this year.
Miners trade hashrate for AI contracts, and HIVE gets paid for it
For the cluster and related hardware and warranties, capital expenditure is about $185 million.
HIVE said it will fund the build in three ways. They are an upfront customer deposit of ~$35 million equal to 10% of the contract value, proceeds from its June 2026 zero-percent convertible bond, and equipment financing.
At the end of the term, HIVE still owns the infrastructure, which Kilic frames as a return play. The company is “using debt financing to lever the purchase of the GPUs to provide a very strong internal rate of return,” he said.
Executive Chairman Frank Holmes cited some 400 megawatts of Canadian capacity and the opportunity to bring more than 120,000 GPUs online over two years.
IREN struck a $9.7 billion cloud deal with Microsoft. Hut 8 signed a $7 billion data center lease linked to an Anthropic and Fluidstack partnership, and TeraWulf has joined a $9.5 billion Google-backed venture with Fluidstack.
HIVE stock was up 4% at the close Friday and trading up ~8% in Monday’s pre-market. In its most recent quarter, the company had $79.1 million in revenue, including $7.1 million from BUZZ HPC. Its contracted GPU cloud ARR has reached about $110 million.
In February, Cryptopolitan reported that the subsidiary had signed approximately $30 million in two-year AI cloud contracts. This was anchored by an initial 504-GPU deployment in Manitoba, with HPC segment revenue expected to climb from about $20 million to $35 million.
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China’s central bank has approved eight more lenders to run digital yuan services. Beijing is attempting to make the currency an option for everyday and cross-border use.
With the addition of these banks, the number of authorized digital yuan operators has risen to 30.
What banks can offer digital yuan services?
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has announced that Ping An Bank, Hengfeng Bank, Bohai Bank, Bank of Shanghai, Bank of Hangzhou, Huishang Bank, Bank of Changsha, and Guangxi Beibu Gulf Bank will connect to the central bank’s digital yuan system and begin offering services once it finishes technical and operational setup.
12 banks, including China CITIC Bank, China Everbright Bank, and Huaxia Bank, were previously added to the list in the last expansion. And before that round, only 10 institutions were cleared as operators. Six of these institutions were state-owned commercial banks, while the other four were two joint-stock lenders and two internet banks, respectively.
The central bank said adding more operators will help more people access e-CNY services and meet the public demand for safe, easy payments. It also plans to continue expanding the operator list to encourage more competition.
Cryptopolitan reported that the PBOC listed steady development of the digital yuan among its core tasks in its 2026-2030 reform blueprint published August 10.
What is the e-CNY being used for?
The PBOC reported that the value of cumulative e-CNY transactions reached 16.7 trillion yuan ($2.3 trillion) by late 2025, spread across roughly 3.48 billion transactions and about 230 million personal wallets.
However, Alipay and WeChat Pay still control more than 90% of China’s third-party mobile payments. Much of the e-CNY’s use is often in the background or incentivized through government initiatives, rather than being freely chosen by consumers over existing mobile payment giants.
That said, the central bank is also prepping the e-CNY for use in international payments. CBETS, the Cross-border e-CNY Transfer Services platform run by a Shanghai firm under PBOC management, signed its first 26 direct participants in June, including Standard Chartered Bank (China) and overseas branches of Chinese banks across Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Qatar, and other markets.
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