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Is Amazon now a compute stock or a consumer stock? People have been asking that question for a long time, but no one has really needed to answer it. AWS has been running so hot that whether the retail ledger looks good or not barely affects the share price. This week is different. Oil has climbed back above the integer-level mark, and rate-hike expectations have been pushed to the highest levels before the meeting. And these two things are exactly what pressure the retail ledger. As for the compute ledger, it has just turned free cash flow negative.

First, lay out the books from the company’s late-July earnings report. AWS grew 37% year over year in a single quarter—its fastest pace in eighteen quarters. The company also said that backlog orders amount to $496 billion, up triple digits year over year. During the earnings call, Jessie said that by 2027, capacity has essentially been fully booked, and most AI compute contracts are signed for five years or more. These are orders that have already been signed.

The cost shows up on the cash flow statement. The company raised its full-year cash capital expenditure guidance from a bit over $200 billion to $220 billion. CFO Alseforsky’s reason was that storage chip prices have risen and pushed that figure up. The result: free cash flow over the past twelve months turned to negative $7.6 billion. A year earlier, using the same metric, it was positive $18.2 billion. At the same time, operating cash flow wasn’t bad—$161.4 billion. But capex consumed $173 billion. The prior state—where operating cash flow was thick enough that no matter how much you burn you’d still have some left—has disappeared from the accounting books.

One more thing—net profit. That line item is easy to misread lately. Included there is $53.4 billion from the revaluation of Anthropic’s equity. It doesn’t generate a single cent of cash, and it’s unrelated to operations. Strip it out and you can see the company’s real operating tempo.

Now the other side of its body. In the same call, Alseforsky proactively mentioned transportation costs: fuel inflation has raised transportation expenses. He then added that excluding the impact of fuel and mainline shipping rates, the pace of fulfillment freight still lags behind the global growth rate in shipped volumes. He said that back at the end of July. This week, Brent closed at $101.21. On the same day, only the energy sector rose, while discretionary consumer was down—its decline was the biggest on the list. The cost pressure he described then has tighter readings now than when he spoke.

The market treats these two ledgers as parallel, and I think it has weighted them wrong. AWS is growing fast, retail is growing slowly, so the market prices the stock based on the ledger that’s running faster. A lot of people read it that way. But they’re actually upstream and downstream: retail and ads are the pump that steadily generates operating cash, while AWS is the capital project that consumes all (and then some) of the cash that the pump produces. Once the buffering runs out, whether retail is profitable is no longer just background noise. When the market buys Amazon as a compute stock, it effectively assumes that this pump won’t be squeezed by the macro environment. This week’s oil prices and rate-hike expectations are exactly testing that assumption. #USStocks

Wall Street’s disagreement also fits into the same crack. After earnings, Morgan Stanley raised its price target, arguing that the long-term upside for AWS hasn’t been priced enough. Meanwhile, it’s almost done nothing at all at U.S. Bank—still placing AWS at the center of the cloud monetization narrative, believing that this round of infrastructure spending will translate into sustained margin expansion. The cautious camp doesn’t deny AWS demand either. They worry that valuation has already priced in all the good news. If the pace of AI monetization falls a half-step behind, returns on invested capital will slide, and the visibility of cash flow is now worse than it was a year ago. Both views hold up—they just bet on the same thing, at different points in time.

I’m closer to the first half, but for reasons that differ from theirs. Backlog orders are contracts, and pre-booked capacity is also a contract—I'm not doubting that part. I don’t accept the interpretation that simply turning free cash flow negative is inherently a dangerous signal. A company building capacity ahead of a signed five-year revenue stream should produce exactly this kind of cash flow pattern. On the flip side, I also can’t comfort myself by saying operating cash flow is thick enough—the numbers from the past twelve months already show the buffer has run out.

So what you should focus on has shifted position. This quarter, I’ll look first at operating profit from the North America segment. Last quarter it was $9.1 billion. If oil-price transmission doesn’t happen as fast, this number should still hold up—and that earlier inference above should be dialed back a bit. If this figure clearly softens, it means the pump’s efficiency is declining, and then AWS’s spending pace would need to be rethought. Backlog growth is the other side of the coin. The moment capex keeps rising while backlog orders no longer double in growth, the contract-locked story starts to loosen. The storage chip quotation is also the reason the company itself gave for the capex increase—an early indicator that ordinary people can track. #AI_Capex

Two nearer-term items are also moving to the front: tomorrow’s inflation reading and next week’s rate decision meeting. The market currently assigns about a 60% probability to a rate hike. At this level, any hot-biased reading will first hit the consumer leg.

As for Binance spot, $AMZNB is quoted at $252.50. Over the past week it has mostly churned in place, not clearly taking a side early.

Next, you can take another look at the operating margin for the North America segment in the next quarter. It can explain how long this round of capex can keep burning longer than AWS growth alone.

Blockstream’s federated signers didn’t lose a single private key this time. Their signing process ran end to end exactly as designed: the function nodes that were supposed to verify did verify, and then, according to the rules, they released the Bitcoin. The problem is that the batch of L-BTC that requested withdrawals was created out of thin air—no one noticed.

The incident happened on September 6. Someone exploited a flaw in Elements to mint about 4,000 L-BTC on Liquid that had no Bitcoin backing. These credentials were then handed to the federated member SideSwap, and the peg-out process proceeded through what appeared to be a completely normal workflow. A little over half an hour later, nearly 4,000 ($BTC ) left the federated custody address; at the then-current price, that was worth more than $300 million. Before the incident, that address held 4,205; after the withdrawal and the subsequent processing, only 197 were left. The chain was then shut down and still hasn’t been restarted.

The flaw lies in the confidential transactions layer. Liquid hides the transfer amount; nodes use range proofs to confirm that a transaction’s accounting is balanced. Verifying one of these proofs burns a lot of computation. So Elements caches the verification result and reuses it. The cache key is missing the context of the asset and script layers. That means a proof that was verified somewhere else can be reused to provide endorsement for a completely new issuance. In the official Elements 23.3.4 that was later released, the fix is described as: harden the cache key for range proofs, and also add a switch so nodes don’t cache them at all.

The threshold itself wasn’t the problem. Out of fifteen keys, once eleven signers are assembled, that’s the rule—and the signers are all real. What the function nodes verified was whether this peg-out was initiated by a federated member holding PAK permissions. Whether those specific L-BTCs actually originated from real Bitcoin backing was outside their scope of verification. SideSwap’s nodes and the globally distributed function nodes run the same Elements code, hit the same caching flaw, and therefore get the answer from the same place—there’s no notion of independent verification by each side. Raising the threshold would not change the outcome.

As for what to call this group, the outside world hasn’t settled on a label yet. They left a message on the main chain calling themselves a white hat and asking to contact them on-chain; Blockstream replied with a security email address. Late on September 7, 3,400 Bitcoins returned to the custody address, and the remaining 598.5 has not moved since. At the time, Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet said a white hat wouldn’t drain a bridge and then come asking you for contact details. Later he softened his wording a bit, admitting it really wasn’t the behavior of a typical white hat—but ordinary criminal organizations also wouldn’t proactively contact their victims. Keeping that money, he would rather call it extortion. JAN3’s Samson Mow also noted that the request to transfer funds to Signal came from another address.

I don’t accept the term “white hat.” People who bargain while holding the money aren’t white hats. But whether the money can be recovered is a separate question, and Blockstream doesn’t have a better lever right now.

In this incident, what failed was the verification of accounting. The custody layer, in fact, wasn’t broken—this is worth remembering. In Blockstream’s May roadmap there’s a BitVM-style 1-of-n bridge. Its original purpose is to reduce trust from “a bunch of people who might collude” to “just one honest person is enough.” That design covers collusion and running away; it can’t cover everything like “everyone runs the same poisoned code and looks at the wrong data in the same place.” Even if there are a hundred honest members in the federation, they’re still reading the same compromised ledger.

So for those holding various wrapped BTC or cross-chain BTC, the number of signers matters less. I’d ask three questions: who has the right to mint new credentials; after they mint them, what exactly gets used to verify them; and whether the verifying parties independently computed the answers. The third one is the key to this case. #Bitcoin The main chain itself is completely fine—the issue has always been this layer sitting next to it.

The federated model also has its upside here, we have to admit it. If the chain gets halted, the bad debt stops there. But if a chain that no one can stop meets an inflation flaw, unbacked credentials would propagate all the way down to every downstream system, and you can’t pull them back once they’re out.

The patch was released in the early hours of September 9, yet the chain is still paused at the same point from early September 7. The code side is already in place; what’s stuck is how to remove that invalid peg-out from the ledger, and who will make up the gap. The custody address currently holds 3,601 Bitcoins. Outside, there are still more than 4,100 L-BTC waiting to be redeemed. The official said that on restart they will reject the invalid withdrawal and restore full backing, but they didn’t say who would fill the hole. If the gap is ultimately paid for by Blockstream or by the federated members themselves, then this is just a code accident, and criticism aimed at custody wouldn’t land squarely. If the shortfall is passed onto the L-BTC holders, then the criticism would have proof.

Pay attention to the balance in that custody address. Once the chain resumes producing blocks, whether the balance is made whole will be more direct than any announcement.

Oracle is holding software industry orders no one has ever seen—and its bondholders are paying the most expensive price in years for default protection. The stock market and the credit market are reading the same company in opposite directions.

In the after-hours of Thursday in U.S. Eastern time, and the early hours of Friday Beijing time, Oracle reported its fiscal Q1 FY27 earnings. The headline focus is whether cloud revenue can land in the growth range of 58% to 64% that management provided. That number matters, but it doesn’t determine how the company will move over the next two years.

Let’s start with orders. In the most recent annual report through the end of May this year, remaining performance obligations stood at $638 billion—up more than threefold in one year. Nearly half of that comes from a single customer: OpenAI’s $300 billion, five-year compute contract, which only begins billing in 2027. In this #AI infrastructure buildout, Oracle is the one taking the hardest hits for orders.

The problem is what those orders will be delivered with. In the same fiscal year, Oracle generated $32 billion in cash from operating activities, then turned around and spent $55.7 billion building capacity. As a result, free cash flow became negative $23.7 billion. Management’s guidance for the new fiscal year calls for net cash capital expenditures to step up another notch to around $70 billion, and the accounting-based measure would be even higher. To fill that gap, the company needs to keep raising capital, including $20 billion for a direct secondary-market stock issuance.

Revenue has to wait until 2027, but the data center and GPU costs must be paid now. For the next two years in between, the bridge is covered by debt and equity.

The bond market’s reaction is more direct than the stock market’s. On July 9, S&P downgraded Oracle’s long-term issuer credit rating to BBB-, directly citing OpenAI’s customer concentration risk, and also projecting that the free-cash-flow shortfall would widen in the new fiscal year. This is already the last tier within investment grade. Moody’s still has a negative outlook. The premium on five-year credit default swaps has been running to the highest levels in history—wider than during 2008—and it’s happening in a standalone way, with other hyperscale cloud providers not really moving much.

The bearishness isn’t only in the bond market. Michael Burry has publicly held put options on Oracle since January, arguing that capital expenditures, the financing approach, and customer concentration all stack up together. In mid-July he closed out half the position; his explanation was that the position had won too much, not that the logic was wrong. Jim Chanos, by contrast, questioned the quality of the orders themselves—he is focused on that $300 billion contract that still hasn’t started any performance or billing obligations.

Chanos’s point isn’t being nitpicky. The contract only begins generating payment obligations in 2027. What OpenAI’s own revenue curve looks like in the meantime is something Oracle can’t control. This past spring, news circulated in the market about OpenAI’s internal users and sales targets not being met. Oracle’s stock price fell along with it for those days. Meanwhile, the company is also looking externally for customers, and it has signed deals with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, but in the short term the order book’s concentration can’t be changed.

There’s weight on the other side too. Morgan Stanley just raised its target price on September 8, but its rating remains Neutral. The reason given is improving profit-margin visibility, which has nothing to do with the orders themselves. The average sell-side target price is far above the current price, with Guggenheim posting the highest level on the street.

I’m closer to the bond-market camp. The orders are most likely real, and they’re also likely deliverable. My doubt isn’t here. The mismatch is in the timetable. The collection schedule can’t keep up with the spending schedule. Over the next two years, the difference is being financed by existing shareholders—so the $20 billion issuance is effectively the bill.

So in this earnings report, whether revenue and earnings per share beat expectations has limited reference value. The revenue target for the new fiscal year has already been largely locked in by the order book, and it’s not easy for that figure to run out of control. I’ll look at a few other lines first. Did this quarter’s net cash capital expenditures deviate from the full-year track of $70 billion? Add customer prepayments and the portion of customer-supplied hardware: the total was $75 billion at the end of the prior fiscal year. Is it still trending upward this quarter? That’s the only line that can pay for things on shareholders’ behalf. And finally, how much did the equity issuance really amount to.

What could overturn this view? I’ll spell it out. If the share of prepayments keeps rising enough to cover most of the construction costs, or if management pulls capital expenditures back, then the line of the financing gap breaks. Credit spreads would repair first, and the re-rating upside in the stock could become even larger than what the order book itself is offering.

On pricing: Binance’s $ORCLB is currently quoted at $162.40, down 2.54% over the past 24 hours. There was a round of rebounds in recent days, triggered by the reputation for OpenAI’s new model and Morgan Stanley’s price adjustment. After it spiked intraday on Tuesday, it was pushed back down. Measured from last September’s peak, the stock is down by more than half already. The bearish money has long already made a round of profits; standing on either side now, the payoff odds are worse than they were a year ago.

Oracle’s story this year has shifted—from whether it can win the deals, to how it will pay the bills after winning them. You can read next Friday’s morning report in line with that thread.

This week in the English-speaking zone, we talk about Zcash. The loudest line is that Wall Street has started buying privacy assets. The claim is based on Grayscale’s spot ETF, which just got listed, with its assets jumping steadily upward. I read through the latest 8-K it filed with the SEC, and I don’t think this story holds up.

Of the $500 million total size, $100 million comes from DCG International Investments subscribing for its own share. DCG is Grayscale’s indirect parent company—that is, the fund’s sponsor’s boss—and the filing spells out this related-party relationship clearly. Through authorized participants, it delivered 85,705.32 ZEC worth about $100 million in equivalent shares. The same document also contains a telling detail: when the investment was first discussed, the parties used 200,000 ZEC to correspond to that $100 million. But by the time of actual settlement, the coin price had more than doubled, and DCG only paid out a little over 80,000 ZEC to fulfill the commitment.

In its press release, Grayscale gives another figure: more than $70 million in cumulative net inflows from within two weeks, including both external and internal flows. Out of the $500 million, related parties account for $100 million, while the new money coming from outside is just over $70 million. The rest is the large chunk of accounting numbers that were already sitting inside an old trust for years, which rose along with the price during this rally. Not a single dollar in that portion is newly raised.

So the truly new money coming from outside is only about $70 million over two weeks. With ZEC currently valued around $20 billion and ranking about tenth, it has already left DOGE behind. $70 million isn’t enough to move a market of this size.

If we ask who pushed up the price, I’d rather look at how thin the tradable float is. ZEC’s circulating supply is less than 17 million coins. More than a quarter is locked in shielded pools, and that proportion has been rising over the years. The shielded pool share is one of the few metrics on the Zcash chain that outsiders can check and that directly corresponds to what coin holders are doing: once coins enter the pool, it’s basically the same as someone intending to hold, not just sell at any moment. Coins in the shielded pool don’t show up on exchange order books, and the hundreds of thousands of coins held by ETF custody don’t either. After also removing addresses that have been inactive for a long time, the portion that can be sold immediately in the market is far smaller than what market cap numbers suggest. When the float is this thin, you don’t need much buying pressure to push the price up. Right now, ZEC is around $1,180; a year ago it was only a little over $40.

The contract-side readings support this interpretation. ZEC’s perpetual futures open interest dropped from about 600,000 coins on September 5 to about 540,000 coins now, while the price during the same period continued to climb, and the funding rate has stayed close to zero. The longs didn’t add leverage to surge in; spot trading pushed the price up, but the perpetuals traders were actually reducing positions. This is different from the kind of行情 (market move) people are used to, where price is driven by liquidations forcing everyone along. It also explains why the rally was so sudden yet no chain-reaction liquidations showed up.

The disagreement is also laid out clearly. Chun Wang, a co-founder of F2Pool, publicly said on September 8 that this round is a narrative auction. He listed three reasons: founder rewards early in issuance, a governance dispute between ECC and the Foundation, and the Orchard shielded pool vulnerability disclosed only in May this year. On the other side, Arthur Hayes has said he sold part of his Bitcoin to buy ZEC, and Multicoin has been building its position since February. Their reasons are similar: the surveillance pressure of the AI era will turn privacy into a necessity.

Chun Wang says this round is driven by story—I agree. But the problems he listed have been attached to Zcash for a long time; they don’t explain why it just took off now. My view is that the pricing power in this move isn’t in the ETF; it’s in the tradable float. The ETF is more like a channel that delivers the narrative into brokers’ accounts, causing small money to create a big displacement—while the tradable coins have been drained by shielded pools and long-term holders.

This view could be disproven. If ZCSH’s external net inflows start to ramp up week by week, and it’s no longer dependent on related parties injecting capital to support the size, then Wall Street is clearly picking up the coins—and my explanation should step aside. If the price keeps rising, open interest grows in sync, and the funding rate turns positive, then it becomes a leverage-driven market, and the risk structure would need to be recalculated.

A thin float can be equally vicious in the other direction. Between May and June this year, ZEC fell more than 60% from the highs. Back then, it was also in an uptrend, and when it dropped, it still didn’t follow logic. The Orchard vulnerability lay undiscovered in the pool for years; the shielded pool’s lack of auditability is both the selling point of this asset and also what makes it hardest for external parties to verify. The Ironwood upgrade adds a total-quantity verifiability mechanism—yes, that’s a patch, not an immunity.

Next, we can look at ZCSH’s weekly external net inflows and how they align with perpetual open interest and price. These two readings can explain who is buying better than the headline of $500 million. #Zcash

Apple has not even finished swapping CEOs before the new one is already stepping onto the stage to deliver the results. The hardware side has been stockpiling foldable phones for years and now it’s time for them to finally be unveiled. The outgoing CEO also has old debts that need to be settled—especially the one that was repeatedly pushed back and, at the end, effectively outsourced: Siri. In the days leading up to the event, both English and Chinese pre-release drafts are betting on foldable pricing and the quality of Siri’s demonstration. But what I care about is which one will truly change Apple’s financial ledger.

First, Siri. Apple ultimately chose Google’s Gemini as the underlying engine for the new Siri. Industry reactions to this deal have split into two camps. Gene Munster tallied the numbers: to get Siri from “works” to “good,” Apple would still have to spend a large amount of money, and outsourcing is the most financially efficient option. Dan Ives at Wedbush put it more bluntly: this move can turn the more than 1.6 billion iPhones Apple has in use overnight into an AI distribution channel. On the other hand, skeptics have a point too. Ming-Chi Kuo has noted that the new Siri must be better than the Gemini core itself to count, and being delayed for so long only means it’s catching up—it won’t persuade anyone.

I’m on the first side. Apple’s moat has long been in distribution and the end devices, not the model itself. One user won’t switch phones just because the voice assistant’s engine changed, but every year they must decide whether the device they already have can last another year. So whether Siri’s demo looks impressive tomorrow won’t have as much marginal impact on valuation as the market thinks.

What will move the ledger is gross margin. Apple’s June-quarter results were actually among the most solid in the big group. Revenue came in at $109.4 billion, up 16.4% year over year. iPhone alone rose 21.7%, and gross margin stood at 50.1%. For a company being called behind on AI, there’s no sign of any deterioration in its hardware sales ability.

But management’s own guidance for the next quarter looks less appealing. The gross margin range was compressed to 47%–48%, and the company explicitly said supply constraints are expected to worsen. On the cost side, things are indeed changing. This year’s memory price hikes are an industry-wide event. Per TrendForce, in the second quarter Apple’s NAND contract prices rose about 70%–80% quarter over quarter. The Android camp is hit even harder—nearing a doubling. Institutions have repeatedly lowered their shipment forecasts for global smartphones this year. What phone makers generally do is raise prices and cut specs at the same time. Over the past decade-plus, the tradition has been to trickle flagship specs down to mid- and low-tier models; this year, that trend starts to reverse.

Foldables hit that cost environment perfectly. Ming-Chi Kuo’s price range is $2,300 to $2,500, and the production capacity target this year has been lifted to around 10 million units. Erik Woodring at Morgan Stanley called this the most important product launch since the iPhone X era. On the revenue statement, it will look good. But 10 million units compared with the iPhone’s annual shipment volume looks more like a high-price, narrow product line. Hinges and foldable panels are already expensive; add memory price increases on top and it can lift revenue while also dragging down gross margin. In the financial statements, this kind of product tends to split: the line for revenue looks great, while the gross margin line trails.

That’s where the disagreement comes from. The bullish side treats foldables as the starting point for a new category and is willing to restart valuation based on the replacement cycle; Morgan Stanley’s target price is as high as $360. The bearish side treats it as simply a more expensive configuration—if it won’t sell, it won’t sell. Until now, Dan Ives’s colleague at DA Davidson has held a $270 target. Same company, same product—yet the two sides’ room to move differs by one-third.

Tomorrow, the most important thing to watch is the pricing page. It’s management’s public answer to cost pressures. The starting price lands at the upper end of Kuo’s range, and it doesn’t come with large-scale installment plans or trade-in subsidies, suggesting Apple has the confidence to shift costs to consumers. If it’s priced near the lower end—or if shipments are pushed to later in the year, as Kuo suggested—then it’s prioritizing volume while absorbing the costs itself. In that second scenario, the gross margin guidance for the December quarter will look worse than the foldable’s product impact itself. The event day won’t include any gross margin numbers, but pricing and the shipping cadence have already written the answer into the plan. The rest will be confirmed during the earnings call.

The biggest counterargument to my view also comes from memory. In terms of procurement scale and contract terms, Apple is taking less of a hit than Android during this round of price increases. When costs rise, the Android hardware gross margins—already thinner—cannot take it. If a price war really breaks out, that would actually be an opportunity for Apple. Plus, service revenue is still growing at double digits. Its gross margin is far higher than hardware’s; as its share rises, it can offset part of the hardware pressure. If these two things work, gross margin might not fall to the low end of the guidance.

The price has already moved. The $AAPLB spot price is currently $318.92. Even more telling is the timing: on the day the new boss was appointed, the stock surged, reaching an intraday high of $330.66 on September 3; afterward, it retreated back to where it is now. #苹果发布会 hasn’t opened yet, and expectations have already leaked some in advance.

Tomorrow, the truly valuable information is hidden in the pricing page and the gross margin range for the December quarter. You can look at those two places and then decide how to view this stock. The parameter list on the product page can be left for reviewers to argue over.

This month, good news around $SOL has almost never stopped. Brokerage firms announced they would add it to their own crypto accounts, and regulators specifically named it along with $ETH , writing them into an exchange’s commodity trust rule set. The first on-chain governance vote with binding effect also passed, and there’s another protocol upgrade scheduled for this week. Each item on its own would be enough for an entire article—but when you lay these announcements and the price of $SOL side by side on a timeline, the sequence doesn’t line up.

First, let’s talk about the easiest thing to verify yourself. In the entire month of August, SOL closed up 41.4% on the monthly chart, ending nearly a year of uninterrupted red months. This figure gets cited the most, and it’s also the easiest to misunderstand. Within the same month, Ethereum rose a bit more than 30%, while Bitcoin gained about 25%. The turning point was August 19, when the entire market kicked off at the same time: SOL’s daily trading volume suddenly expanded, and the price climbed from the seventies all the way to 103 at the end of the month.

Move the starting point to the August 18 close and calculate again. SOL went from $77 to $103 today, a cumulative gain of 33.9%. Over the same period, Ethereum was up 29.6% and Bitcoin 22.0%. SOL outperformed—but the portion of outperformance versus Ethereum is only a little over four percentage points. Brokerage listings, regulatory classification, the governance vote, and the protocol upgrade—stack all the SOL-specific positives together, and the market priced it at those four points. The remaining 30-odd points are the entire crypto market moving up together.

The governance vote is the one most worth breaking out separately. SGP-0002 will double the annualized token supply reduction speed of #Solana , bringing new token issuance down to the floor years earlier. The vote passed with 67% in favor, just barely clearing the threshold. In the final moments, Kraken and Galaxy validators changed their votes. Helius’s Mert Mumtaz has been pushing for this all along. Among those opposing, Solana Company is the most prominent—its reason is that the supply should not be adjusted in the first governance cycle. The company’s Q2 revenue was 99.4% from staking rewards generated by its own holdings. Conflicts of interest are on full display; neither side is hiding it.

Passing a vote and taking effect on-chain are two different things. Today, using Solana mainnet RPC to read getInflationGovernor, the taper field is still 0.15—the reduction speed hasn’t changed. Read getInflationRate again: the current annualized inflation is 3.66%, matching the original curve calculations exactly. Corresponding SIMD-0550 is still in the implementation stage; the client needs to add a feature gate before it can be activated. The market has already bought the supply-reduction story, but on-chain money is still being issued under the old rules. Either of these calls can be run by anyone once; it’s faster than reading and interpreting articles.

Transaction v1 scheduled for this Wednesday is the same kind of upgrade. It increases how much content can fit into a single transaction, so large multisig and zero-knowledge proofs no longer need to be split into several separate transactions; the old format still works as usual. That’s good news for developers, but it has almost no same-day impact on price. The moment when this kind of upgrade affects prices is when it breaks.

Now let’s restore the regulatory item to its original form. The SEC approved Nasdaq Texas modifying the provisions of 5711(d), specifically listing BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP as eligible for commodity trust listing standards, and also allowing a small portion of net asset value to be allocated to assets that temporarily don’t meet the requirements. This is an exchange rule approval by the regulator; it’s the regulator’s interpretation at the current stage, not legislation. The watershed is September 15: the Senate will cast a procedural vote on the CLARITY bill, and it needs votes from both parties to move into formal debate. Brokerage firm announcements are similar: they say it will go live in the coming months, without giving a date—what would be opened as a traffic gateway hasn’t opened yet.

What the price is supported by right now is still something else. In the previous complete week, net inflows into US spot SOL ETFs dropped from the prior week’s $142.7 million to $4.9 million—nearing a full stop. The price didn’t fall with it; since September it has been trading a little above 100 sideways, and today it’s at $103.21. At the same time, the net short position reduced by four tenths in CME leveraged funds; Binance perpetual holdings are down by more than 10% compared with the late-August peak; funding rates are hovering near zero, moving back and forth.

The fuel from August was mainly the market-wide beta. Short-covering added acceleration; ETF money surged into the market in its strongest week, then retreated after a week. This price level is being held after both leverage and incremental funds have already exited—it’s being propped up by spot “chips” not being dumped outward. This structure is more solid than peaks built purely from leverage, but it also indicates that moving higher requires new buyers, and right now there’s no clear source of that demand.

In late February, Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick lowered his SOL year-end target. He believes SOL won’t outperform Ethereum in 2026 to 2027, because its main use cases need to shift from meme trading to stablecoin small-value payments, and that transition takes time. The August move topped him a bit, but the magnitude was far smaller than the impression the narrative created. The portion of his argument about use-case conversion taking time hasn’t been disproven yet.

If you treat this cycle as a return of SOL fundamentals, you’ll likely be disappointed. What changed is its access status—being written into exchange rules and getting added to brokerage listing rosters. These kinds of changes are realized quarterly, not weekly. The on-chain supply reduction that can be used to support valuation is still only in the “vote passed” state today.

There are a few metrics you can watch yourself; you don’t need to rely on anyone else’s interpretation. When the on-chain inflation rate starts dropping from 3.66%, that will be the signal that SGP-0002 is truly live. When brokers turn SOL from “planned” into “tradable,” that will be the signal that the channel is really open. And there’s the SOL-to-Ethereum relative valuation: around mid-August it was near 0.0402; if it falls back there, it means the premium paid when buying in August has been taken back, and the SOL-specific logic needs to be recalculated. Around the September 15 vote, these three numbers explain more than the price itself.

The pricing for that September meeting shifted completely in the other direction after last Friday. They were originally debating whether the Fed would cut rates, but now the discussion is whether it will raise rates instead. The employment data far exceeded expectations. There is PPI on Thursday and CPI on Friday—those two data releases directly moved ahead of the meeting. This week has no meaningful earnings reports, so interest rates are the only main storyline.

On the interest-rate futures side, the probability of a September rate hike is currently hovering around 60%. Today is the U.S. Labor Day holiday, and the quotes on $CRWVB are basically just carrying forward last Friday’s move—there’s nothing to see there. In the meantime, I’ll take advantage of the lull to go back and review CoreWeave’s accounts again.

Its predecessor was an Ethereum-mining operation. Today, its business is building clusters out of Nvidia GPUs and renting them out. On its customer list are OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Google. As of the end of June, contract backlog is roughly $104 billion. On the demand side, there’s nothing much to argue about.

The problem is how those cards were bought back.

At the end of the second quarter, its balance sheet shows total debt with recourse and without recourse of about $35.1 billion. In the same quarter, net interest expense was $640 million. In the company’s guidance for the third quarter, interest expense is expected to rise to between $860 million and $940 million, while adjusted operating profit in the same guidance is between $200 million and $260 million. Interest alone is roughly three or four times operating profit—this ratio isn’t just especially ugly in one quarter; it has been like this all along.

If you extend it to the full year, the ratio becomes even more extreme. Management’s capital expenditure guidance is $35–39 billion, while revenue guidance for the same year is only a bit more than one-third of that—everything in the gap has to be covered by financing. The interest CoreWeave pays each quarter is real cash—changes in interest rates flow directly into its income statement, without having to wait for valuation-model transmission.

If rate hikes land on its head, my original thought was about the valuation layer. But the announcement of the new $2.6 billion loan on August 10 changed that—there’s harder stuff baked into the liability structure.

That was a $2.6 billion delayed-draw term loan priced at SOFR plus 550 basis points, with a maturity of about five years. The announcement itself states that the underlying customer contracts have an average remaining term of about three years.

The assets mature in three years, but the liabilities are not fully repaid until five years. The two-year gap in the middle has to be filled by renewals or new customers. When the market is hot, this isn’t a problem—the cards are scarce and renewals queue up. But once the demand rhythm changes, those two years become an open exposure.

How the company explains this money is one thing, and how you read the terms is another. The CEO’s explanation on the earnings call was that this structure allows the company to serve enterprise customers that only want to sign for two to three years—sounds like it opens up a new market. Truist analyst Arvind Ramnani gave bullish reasons at the end of August, and his conclusion lands precisely on long-term contracts. He thinks the pricing increase will first pass through into customer contracts, and cost increases on Nvidia’s side won’t show up until the machines that ship in early next year. Over the intervening months, the contribution margin from long-term deals would be lifted clearly.

The company is opening the door to short-term contracts, yet the bullish logic is built on the margin from long-term contracts. Both can be true at the same time, but they point to two different businesses.

How exactly this rate line will hit, the CFO has already given the calibration. He said that over the past year, the weighted average cost of debt was lowered by about 300 basis points. Based on the debt balance at quarter-end, that saves roughly $1.1 billion in interest per year. Those 300 basis points came from improving credit conditions and opening up financing channels—not from the benchmark interest rate. If you flip that same logic and apply it the other way: for the same debt size, if the benchmark rate rises by 25 basis points, the additional interest paid in a year comes to nearly $100 million. After two or three hikes, a large chunk of what management worked hard to save would be eaten away.

So if this round truly moves into a rate-hike path, what the market needs to reprice first is CoreWeave’s ability to refinance and the financing-cost curve; the P/E multiple comes later. On the demand side, I don’t doubt it—those four biggest model companies have signed, and you can’t draw those orders out of thin air. What I question is whether, in an environment where borrowing gets more expensive, the three-year-to-five-year gap might shift from a technical arrangement into a real problem.

Evidence to overturn that view should come this week. If Thursday’s PPI and Friday’s CPI both cool off, and the rate-hike bets get cut back to below 40%, then the stress-test calculations above would be discounted overall. Conversely, if both data points come in hot, only next week’s meeting will put this logic on the table.

For a heavy-asset AI company, that contract backlog number is so large that it can lull people into complacency. When the next earnings report comes—#CoreWeave —you can check whether the gap between interest expense and adjusted operating profit continues to widen. How much that gap has expanded, more than how much the backlog has grown, is what better shows how far the company can hold on into which year.

Around HYPE setting a new all-time high, the explanations on the market have been highly consistent. Since it kept climbing right around the monthly vesting date, it must have been protocol buybacks absorbing the sell pressure. That sounds plausible, but there is one link in the middle that nobody checked: whether the coins written into the vesting schedule ever actually left the custody address.

Hyperliquid’s own supply interface is public, and the answer is there. The address that holds the core contributors’ vested share received 238 million tokens at genesis, and today it reads 241.16 million, a bit more than at launch. The extra amount is staking yield, because the entire balance at that address is delegated, and the available balance is zero. The 9.92 million tokens that vest each month have never become part of the circulating supply on the protocol’s own ledger. That number appears on the calendar every month, but not in the market. Vesting expiration only removes one restriction; for the coins to actually reach the market, someone still has to actively un-delegate, withdraw, and place sell orders. On-chain, those are three separate actions, and each one has to be deliberately executed.

The price picture also should not be overread. The all-time high was touched on the evening of September 6 at 89.66, but the close that day did not hold above it, and spot today is quoted at 86.39 on OKX. Touching an intraday high and holding above it are two different things; treating a wick as trend confirmation turns a single candle shadow into a conclusion.

Let’s do one more layer of arithmetic. Suppose those tokens were actually claimed in a given month and dumped all at once the same day. At current prices, the notional amount would be around $860 million. Over the same time frame, Hyperliquid’s protocol revenue over the past 30 days was $55.35 million, and that is the full ammunition of the assistance fund for buying back HYPE. Using one month’s revenue to absorb one month’s nominal unlock amount would only cover a small fraction. So attributing this new high to buybacks is looking in the wrong direction. Right now, HYPE is being priced off the 299 million tokens that are actually circulating; the vesting schedule numbers never entered that pool.

The real point worth scrutinizing is the revenue line. OAK Research’s Lilian Aliaga compiled a set of figures in late August. Quarterly protocol revenue fell from $357 million in Q3 2025 to $202 million in Q2 this year, and the assistance fund’s buyback amount was cut roughly in half as well. She sees this as an active choice: Hyperliquid is giving more and more fees to developers building products on top of it, trading revenue for activity and market share.

I agree with her on the direction, but I would not stop the risk analysis at revenue. Declining revenue is a slow variable; there are signs before the quarterly report comes out, and readers have time to react. The fast variable is the custody address balance. The 241 million tokens there are equal to 80% of the circulating supply. Although unstaking takes time, the queue is only a few days. If nobody is claiming today, that is a holder’s deliberate choice after doing the math; the contract has not welded these tokens shut. The calculation is actually straightforward. Tokens left staked keep earning yield; withdrawing them means giving up that yield in exchange for an uncertain sale price. As long as HYPE keeps trending upward, staying put is the most profitable move. But that logic depends on the price trend, and trends change; once they do, the answer the same group of people calculates will change too.

The assistance fund is also a two-sided story. Its 47.04 million HYPE were accumulated at an average cost of $27.22, a position close to one-sixth of circulating supply, and the protocol itself is the largest single holder in that pool. When the market rises, this acts as a thick buffer; when revenue falls, it becomes a buyer that is forced to slow down more and more, and everyone knows it cannot keep buying as aggressively.

The vesting story around #Hyperliquid is a false issue right now, but it can turn into a real one at any moment, and the trigger condition is clearly identifiable. If the delegated balance at the custody address starts to decline month by month, that means contributors have begun cashing out, and my interpretation above would fail immediately. If protocol revenue continues to fall along the slope seen in Q2, then buyback support will be reduced to little more than a narrative. Checking these two numbers every month is more useful than staring at the vesting calendar.

Conversely, don’t overstate the risk either. For staked coins to come out, they have to be un-delegated first, and that action is visible on-chain. They won’t suddenly dump out of nowhere at some unannounced dawn.

Next time you see a headline saying some token unlocks billions worth on a given day, first take a look at the project’s own supply interface. How much remains in the custody address? Is it fully delegated? You can check it in two minutes. The gap between nominal unlock amounts and actual circulating supply increases is often an order of magnitude or more, and $HYPE is just the clearest example of that gap right now.

GameStop will report its full second-quarter earnings after the close on Tuesday. Its core business is selling games and collectibles, but the biggest asset on its balance sheet is an eBay stake. This spring, eBay’s board rejected its takeover proposal, calling it neither credible nor attractive. Ryan Cohen did not stop after being turned down; instead, he kept buying, and now he is eBay’s most troublesome shareholder.

The preliminary results at the end of August already told us the big picture. Net profit came in at $290 million to $310 million, up from $168.6 million a year earlier, almost doubling; revenue was $780 million to $800 million, down from $972.2 million a year earlier, a drop of nearly 20%. Profits doubled, but revenue shrank. When those two numbers sit on the same statement, the first question is where the extra money came from.

The announcement itself made it clear. Derivatives and equity investments in eBay generated about $238 million in net gains, partly offset by roughly $75 million in losses from digital assets and related receivables. The in-and-out from those two items accounted for a large share of quarterly net income. Neither was earned from selling merchandise.

I checked the $75 million myself. GameStop held 4,710 BTC, and its second quarter ended on August 1. BTC closed at $78,687 on May 2 and at $62,823 on August 1, a drop of more than $15,000 per coin. Multiply that by 4,710 coins and you get about $74.7 million. That almost exactly matches the roughly $75 million in the announcement. That loss had nothing to do with how well games sold; it was simply the price of bitcoin moving down over those three months.

There is an easy-to-misread detail here. Of those 4,710 coins, 4,709 were pledged as collateral at Coinbase, which had the right to rehypothecate them. Under U.S. accounting rules, those coins have to be removed from the balance sheet and reclassified as digital-asset-related receivables. So the line in the financial statements is a receivable, not a pile of coins. The company also wrote covered calls against this position, and the premium and exercise outcomes are mixed into the same line. The accounting check above matches so closely because the direction is right, but it is not a perfect identity. If Tuesday’s full report shows the number of coins changed, this reconciliation will have to be redone from scratch.

What is being obscured by these two mark-to-market swings is the operating profit line: $150 million to $170 million, up from $66.4 million a year earlier. Revenue fell 20%, yet the money made from selling products more than doubled. Last quarter, its gross margin was already clearly improving, and collectibles had become the largest revenue category for the first time; that trend is still at work.

Steve Eisman said in April that GameStop’s profit improvement was driven by cost cutting, and that expecting it to transform through acquisitions was a fantasy. The cost-cutting part no longer holds up very well; gross margin improved because the mix of what it sold changed. But he also said this was still a shrinking business, and the second-quarter revenue backs him up.

The eBay story needs a few words too. GameStop initially built the exposure through derivatives, then in the second quarter turned it into direct share ownership, causing cash and marketable securities to fall from more than $8 billion a year earlier to just over $5 billion. After the takeover proposal was rejected, Cohen tried to lower the threshold for calling a special shareholder meeting. That proposal was rejected at the June shareholder meeting, with opposition votes clearly exceeding support. Governance went nowhere, so the remaining option is to go around the board and make an offer directly to eBay shareholders. He has publicly said he will not stop and will not walk away.

What concerns me more is that the direction of these two positions has already flipped. On August 1, the 43.4 million eBay shares had a carrying value of $4.947 billion, or about $114 per share. Last Friday, eBay closed at $103.41. On a static basis, that position was worth more than $400 million less than at quarter-end, which is larger than the newly confirmed $238 million gain. At the same time, BTC was back at $79,896, above the August 1 level, so the digital-assets line is now in the money. Last quarter stocks made money and coins lost money; so far this quarter, it is exactly the reverse.

That position also carries another layer of trouble. Nearly 10% of the equity is being used as pressure, not as something to be freely sold at any time. If he really reduced the stake, the price would likely fall first, and the market would immediately read it as Cohen surrendering, which would also kill the acquisition storyline. The mark-to-market gains and losses come and go on the statements every quarter, but whether they are ever realized depends on whether eBay is ultimately taken over. Reading this report as if it were just a portfolio of securities that can be sold at any time would overstate its certainty.

A retailer’s quarterly profit statement is now being determined by two mark-to-market prices, and earnings day is just a snapshot of them. Whether the snapshot looks good has already become a separate question from how well the company actually performed over the quarter.

On Tuesday, I will first look at operating profit and gross margin, because those are the only parts of the report that say anything about the business itself. Then I will check whether collectibles continue to account for a larger share of revenue, and exactly where the 20% decline came from. If gross margin falls back on Tuesday and collectibles stop growing as a share of revenue, then the operating-profit improvement in the first half of the year looks more like a comparison boosted by a weak base last year, and Eisman’s other point will start to hold again. As for whether the eBay takeover bid is still on the table, management probably cannot avoid that question. If you own $GMEB , or just want to understand how $BTC gets recorded once it is placed on the balance sheet of a #美股 -listed company, it is worth taking a look at this full report.

The people standing in the way of the crypto industry in Washington this week are not on the Democratic side. Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Kansas’s Jerry Moran have both said that if the stablecoin rewards language is not changed, they will vote no. In the same camp, Oklahoma’s Lankford and South Dakota’s Rounds have also put the concern about community bank deposit outflows on the table. These lawmakers are from the same party as the bill’s backers.

The Senate has set the vote for 2:15 p.m. Eastern Time on September 15. What is being voted on that day is whether the bill can be brought to the floor for debate; the bill itself will not yet be up for passage, and the threshold is also 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats, so by the simplest math they would need at least seven Democrats to reach 60. But if two or three of their own defect first, the number of Democrats needed rises to more than ten.

CLARITY is trying to settle who regulates a token. The bill gives the CFTC authority over spot digital commodity markets, while the part deemed to be securities remains with the SEC. The House has already passed it, and it is stuck in the Senate. After a year of talks, three issues remain unresolved: conflict-of-interest rules for government officials and their families holding crypto assets, the language on enforcement and anti-money-laundering, and the one closest to users: whether stablecoins can pay yields at all.

That last issue has recently changed in nature. Tillis and Alsobrooks worked out a compromise in the spring: rewards economically equivalent to bank deposit interest would be banned, while rewards tied to usage would be allowed. If you use it to pay or trade, the platform can give you rebates; if the money just sits in the account, the platform cannot calculate yield on a daily basis. The banking industry rejects that carve-out. The Bank Policy Institute and the American Bankers Association say that as long as stablecoins can pay any form of yield, deposits will flow out of the regulated banking system, with community banks hit first. Coinbase takes the opposite view, arguing that rewards programs are a competitive necessity and are different from deposit interest. Lummis is on the side of allowing them.

So Republican senators from agricultural states ended up on the banks’ side, clashing with their own party leadership. The conflict between crypto and banking has already been rewritten on #CLARITY法案 as a conflict inside the Republican Party, and the vote gap has never been only on the other side.

The Democratic side has not balanced its books either. A seven-senator joint statement at the end of July said it plainly: the text Republicans have proposed is not enough yet, and ethics, consumer protection, illicit finance, conflicts of interest, and market integrity all need to be strengthened. The signers were Cortez Masto, Alsobrooks, Booker, Gallego, Hickenlooper, Warner, and Warnock. Those seven happen to be the very bloc most likely to break ranks. In late August, Gillibrand made her position final: without an enforceable ban on profit for sitting officials, she will not vote for it.

Prediction markets are more informative than headlines. On Polymarket, the contract on the bill being signed into law this year was at 14.5% this morning; in February it was above 80%, and it has been sliding for seven months. More telling is the adjacent set of contracts broken down by vote total: the contract for the final vote to get more than 50 votes was at 28%, and the one for more than 60 votes was at 23.5%, only a little more than four percentage points apart. Bettors think that if the bill really makes it to a final vote and gets a simple majority, it has basically already found its 60 votes. It will not die in the tally; it will die before it ever reaches the floor.

On the same page there is also a set of contracts betting on whether a particular senator will vote yes. Hawley is at 18.5%, Moran at 14.5%. Those numbers should be discounted, because the settlement rules say that if there is no final vote this year, everyone is settled as not having voted yes, which drags all prices down a layer based on whether the vote happens at all. What can be read is the relative order. In that order, Democrats Warnock and Andy Kim are both around 40%, well above Hawley and Moran. Bettors judge that this bill will lose more Republican votes internally than Democratic votes.

Galaxy’s Alex Thorn cut the odds of enactment this year to 10% in mid-August, arguing that after the Senate reconvenes on September 14, there are only two or three usable weeks left and neither the ethics issue nor the banking issue has been resolved. Armstrong said he expects support from more than 60 votes. That comes from the CEO of the biggest beneficiary, so it can be treated as an industry line, not a vote count. I lean toward Thorn’s view, based on the structure shown by the contract breakdown above: the bottleneck is whether the negotiation can be closed, not persuading Democrats.

$BTC was at $79,929 this morning and barely moved over the course of the day. Over the past seven months, the odds on this bill have fallen from 80% to 15%, and $BTC has not collapsed along with them; the market had already priced in failure. If the September 15 vote falls short, the price is unlikely to make much of a move. What has not been priced in is the other side.

There is only one signal that could overturn the judgment above: a new version of the stablecoin rewards language, followed by one of Hawley, Moran, Lankford, or Rounds publicly changing his position. If that happens, the Polymarket line will move first, and the vote will just be a formality. The Senate reconvenes on September 14, voting starts on the afternoon of the 15th, and there is only a little more than one day in between; who gives way during that window will tell you the outcome sooner than the roll call on the day itself.

The FOMC rate decision comes out on the afternoon of September 16, right after this procedural vote. If the bill fails on the 15th, the next day’s macro news can wash it away within hours, and the week’s crypto policy narrative will be trailing the Fed.

Over the next week, watch the public statements of those Republican senators and whether a new draft of the stablecoin rewards language appears. This line will tell you more clearly than Washington’s upbeat spin how far the bill has actually progressed.

After the clinical data for the cancer vaccine came out, Moderna's management immediately went to the bond market and sold a batch of convertible notes. The notes pay no interest, and the conversion price was set well above the stock price at the time. The terms for the institutions willing to put up the money were simple: the stock would have to rise much further before the paper they bought would start to be worth anything.

The company behind $MRNAB had just posted its biggest single-day gain in history, then turned around and financed itself this way. Management's attitude is already written into the action. At the current price, selling options is more attractive than selling stock.

On August 19, Merck and Moderna announced the results of INTerpath-001. The personalized neoantigen therapy intismeran autogene, combined with Keytruda, was used in patients with high-risk melanoma after complete resection. The primary endpoint of recurrence-free survival was met, and the key secondary endpoint of distant metastasis-free survival was also met. mRNA #癌症疫苗 achieved a phase 3 positive result for the first time, and it was also the first time for the personalized neoantigen approach. On the day of the news, Moderna's common stock jumped from $62.96 to $174.38, its biggest single-day gain since listing.

Only the conclusion was announced. The two companies did not provide a hazard ratio, nor did they give any specific efficacy figures. They only said the results were statistically significant and clinically meaningful, with detailed data to be presented later at a scientific conference, while overall survival is still being followed. The money that rushed in on August 19 was buying a qualitative statement.

And it was buying far more than melanoma. The platform also has nine other trials under way, covering lung cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, pancreatic cancer, and gastric cancer. Success in one tumor type at phase 3 was treated as a pass for the whole pipeline. Simon Baker of Rothschild & Co Redburn downgraded the stock from neutral to sell on September 3, while sharply raising the target price to $81. He said the data were unquestionably good, but the stock's reaction implied the therapy would work across nearly all tumor types, even though there is almost no data for those cancers right now.

Sell-side analysts split into two camps. Myles Minter of William Blair ran the numbers. For melanoma alone, on a 50-50 split with Merck, Moderna's annual peak sales could reach $5.4 billion. The opposing view focused more on the mechanism. Daina Graybosch of Leerink Partners pointed out that melanoma is already the most suitable cancer for a vaccine approach. Extrapolating success here to other cancers involves several additional steps, and the cost of individualized manufacturing is still very real. Cory Kasimov of Evercore ISI noted that the risk-reduction benchmark management used this time was a step back from the phase 2 result.

The phase 2 numbers are public. Follow-up data from KEYNOTE-942 showed the combination therapy reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49%. With phase 3 scaling the sample to more than one thousand patients, no one knows where the hazard ratio will land today.

Back to the balance sheet. Over the past twelve months, Moderna's revenue of $2.23 billion is still declining, net loss is $3.15 billion, and market cap is $58.1 billion. This combination cannot be explained by conventional valuation methods; what is holding it up is confidence in a pipeline that has not yet disclosed the numbers.

The cash line is clearer. At the end of June, cash and investments stood at $6.9 billion, down from three months earlier, and the company's own year-end guidance is for that to fall to around $5 billion. At that burn rate, without financing, the remaining runway would only be two to three years.

The $3 billion zero-coupon convertible note solved that problem in one shot. The private placement was completed on September 1, with maturity in 2032 and a conversion price of about $210.58. An additional capped call was also put in place, raising the effective dilution threshold another notch. The cost of funds is zero; the price paid is giving up part of future upside.

That $210.58 figure says more than the financing size does. Management was willing to sell future upside at this level, which shows they are at least comfortable with the current stock price. Not paying interest is the other side of the same signal: institutions were willing to give up all coupon income because the stock's current volatility made the embedded option value high enough that interest was unnecessary. And that volatility comes from a risk ratio no one has seen yet.

This stock is currently in a state that cannot be priced, which is a different issue from whether it is expensive. Baker's target price of $81 is not one I really buy. He himself admits the data are good; the source of the $81 number is the valuation model, and it has little to do with this readout. On a biotech stock waiting for a key data readout, assigning a target price precise to the nearest dollar from a valuation model is not convincing.

Whether the view changes depends on when that hazard ratio is released and where it lands. If the phase 3 hazard ratio is close to the phase 2 level, then doubts about extrapolation lose their footing, and the $5.4 billion peak-sales assumption gets a foundation. If it is clearly lower, near the benchmark Kasimov described, the drug will likely still win approval, but the $58 billion-plus market cap will lose its anchor.

That judgment could also be wrong. If William Blair's view proves right, melanoma alone could support a substantial portion of today's valuation, and the other eight tumor types would amount to free options. Merck is covering half the development cost and providing Keytruda along with its entire commercial infrastructure, which is a real burden reduction for a company that is still losing money. Once the financing is in the bank, balance-sheet risk is much lower than it was a month ago, and that alone should lift the valuation of the whole pipeline.

Before the hazard ratio is published, the price is mainly supported by confidence. $MRNAB spot is now quoted at $144.68, down 5.74% in 24 hours, and the common stock has also been trending lower this week. If you want to follow this line, watch for when the companies announce which conference will host the data presentation, and when the first readout outside melanoma in the nine trials comes out. Those two things matter more than the daily price swings in determining whether the valuation can hold.

The Fed is no longer speaking a single language. At the Jackson Hole meeting at the end of last month, Chairman Warsh said that the recent moderate inflation readings did not indicate a substantial improvement in underlying trends, and the market immediately priced in a September rate hike. A few days later, Governor Waller stated that if the data in the next two weeks continued in the current direction, he tended to support keeping rates unchanged, and the odds of a rate hike were reduced that day. The next day, the August non-farm payrolls data was released, and the odds were pushed back up. The market priced in the same policy meeting three times in one week.

What needs explanation is the day in between. On the very trading day that Waller reduced the odds, the US spot Bitcoin ETF received a net inflow of $731 million, the highest single-day inflow since mid-January of this year. BlackRock's IBIT alone absorbed $454 million, and $BTC closed with a large bullish candle that day. The next day, the non-farm payrolls report showed 162,000 new jobs, more than double market expectations. The unemployment rate remained unchanged, pushing the probability of an interest rate hike to 58%, and the price fell back below 80,000, currently hovering around 79,538.

Whether that money entered based on expectations of an interest rate cut or simply ignored interest rates completely leads to entirely different outcomes. This can be discerned from the position structure alone.

First, examine whether leverage has kept pace. The funding rate for Binance's BTCUSDT perpetual contract only reached a maximum of 0.0089%/8h during the entire rebound, failing to even touch the neutral benchmark of 0.01%. The bulls consistently failed to pay a premium for their positions; the driving force behind the price increase wasn't in the contract market.

Open interest speaks even more directly. On September 3rd, the price rose by five points, but the open interest in this Binance contract actually contracted that day. Price increases coupled with declining open interest typically indicate that short sellers are being forced to liquidate their positions, rather than new long positions being established. On that day, nearly $250 million worth of short positions were forcibly liquidated across the entire market ($BTC contracts). A significant portion of this price increase came from short sellers being squeezed out, not from continuous buying.

On non-farm payroll day, the direction reversed. Prices fell, but open interest jumped from 107,000 contracts to 112,700 contracts, with the extra 5,000-plus contracts representing newly opened short positions. Marginal participants were betting with real money that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates; today, open interest has fallen, and some of those short positions have been realized.The sell-side assessments over the past two months have been quite contradictory. In July, Citi slashed its 12-month target to 82,000 and simultaneously reduced its ETF net inflow forecast for the next year to zero. Two months later, 731 million flowed in in a single day. Another theory circulating in the market suggests that the recent rebound was mainly driven by derivatives and leverage, with weak spot demand.

The previous two figures do not support this view. Funding rates did not rise, and open interest shrank on the day of the price increase. These two simultaneous events point to spot absorption and short covering. This money is more akin to allocation trading; it entered from the spot market without leverage. Citi's assumption of zero net inflow for the entire year now seems too extreme.

However, I don't believe the 731 million is the trigger for a new round of upward movement. A large portion of the September 3rd increase was contributed by forced liquidation; this won't repeat itself. Spot buying alone requires a much larger volume to drive prices. ETF daily inflows are inherently volatile, and a significant net outflow occurred on September 1st. A single day's extreme value doesn't indicate a trend.

What could refute this assessment? We'll have the answer next Monday. ETFs will release inflow data for September 4th and 5th. If money continues to flow in during these two days when the probability of an interest rate hike has been pushed to 58%, it suggests that this passive buying is indeed unrelated to short-term interest rate paths, and Citi's assumptions need to be rewritten. If it turns into a net outflow, the money from September 3rd was simply quick money chasing short squeezes, unrelated to asset allocation.

I admit the strongest point of contention cannot be ruled out. ETF subscriptions follow price; price precedes subscription orders. Using inflow volume to demonstrate allocation demand inherently carries the risk of misinterpreting cause and effect. Only time will tell whether the inflows can withstand a negative news window. The CPI data in mid-September and the interest rate meeting on the 15th and 16th are that window of opportunity, and the premise of Waller's statement has already been half-destroyed by the non-farm payrolls report.

In the coming period, we can observe whether the daily net inflow of the #比特币 spot ETF can remain positive for several consecutive days, and whether the funding rate will leave the neutral range. These two figures can be checked daily and will tell you the nature of this money much earlier than any target price.

In Broadcom’s earnings call, analysts kept pressing Hock Tan on gross margin, and he told them outright not to focus on that metric, but on operating margin instead. When a CEO actively asks the market to use a different yardstick to measure the company, it usually means the old one is starting to look bad. The recent move in $AVGOB has been following that old yardstick.

The reading on the old yardstick is this: for the quarter ended August 2, gross margin was 75%, next quarter guidance is 73%, and it was still 78% in the same period last year. The CFO said the reason is that custom XPU products now contain more and more memory, and that memory has to be bought from outside and packaged in. That part of the product goes through Broadcom’s books as revenue, but it dilutes margins. The more AI chips Broadcom sells, the thinner the margin gets.

Tan’s statement holds up in accounting terms. This quarter’s operating margin was actually higher than last year’s, because expenses did not increase at all, and R&D spending was even lower than a year ago. When revenue nearly doubles and expenses stay flat, leverage naturally appears. But that kind of leverage can only happen once. Next quarter’s operating margin guidance has already been cut to 66%, while AI revenue is still supposed to head toward $115 billion in 2027 and $230 billion in 2028. At that scale, R&D and capacity investment cannot stay suppressed forever, while gross margin is still trending lower.

The earnings report itself was actually solid. Revenue came in at $29.59 billion, about twice the level of a year earlier, and both revenue and EPS beat expectations. AI semiconductor revenue was $16.7 billion, up 221% year over year, with next-quarter guidance at $21.7 billion. The company also raised its 2027 AI target from the figure it gave last quarter. Even so, the stock fell more than 6% after hours. Most reports blamed that on total revenue guidance of $34.8 billion coming in slightly below sell-side estimates, but a gap of just a few billion dollars hardly explains such a large reaction.

What was re-priced was the structure of growth. The company now really has only one leg left, #AI ; non-AI semiconductors are up just 5% year over year and flat sequentially, and wireless is still a drag. Infrastructure software guidance for next quarter also ticked down slightly, as the growth from VMware’s shift to subscriptions has reached a plateau. Almost all of the incremental revenue next quarter will come from AI. Traditional businesses provide no cushion; if the AI curve slows, the entire income statement slows with it.

Tan said that in 2027 Broadcom’s biggest XPU customer will switch to Anthropic, with OpenAI second, and that the long-term Google agreement also amounts to shipments in the tens of billions of dollars per year. He added another point: next year’s supply is already locked in, demand exceeds the company’s guidance, and the bottleneck is now on the customer side, where it is still unclear when data centers will actually get powered on. He said the company gives guidance conservatively because once chips are shipped, they may not be installed into racks on time.

That shifts the risk elsewhere. Broadcom is no longer worried about orders or capacity; it is worried about other people’s construction projects. Whether AI revenue arrives on schedule now depends on the buildout progress and financing pace of a few customers, and those customers are highly concentrated.

That is where the disagreement lies. On September 3, Bernstein raised its target price to $575, arguing that the multi-year guidance itself matters more than a single quarter’s gross margin and that confirmed demand is more important than one gross margin print. On the same day, RBC kept a Neutral rating and a $400 target, saying that component supply and data-center readiness are not in Broadcom’s hands, and that on 2027 earnings the stock is about 30% more expensive than Nvidia.

The strongest argument on the other side is cash. This quarter free cash flow was $13.67 billion, nearly half of revenue, so even if customers’ construction projects are delayed by a year, Broadcom itself can still handle it.

I side more with RBC’s ranking of the risks. Confirmed demand is certainly a good thing, but the timing of delivery has been handed over to customers, and among those customers, two are still going through round after round of fundraising, with money coming from capital markets rather than operating cash flow. For $230 billion to be real, their capital expenditure plans have to be executed without a single year of cuts. Betting on Broadcom’s execution is one thing; betting on someone else’s cash flow is another. This time, that is what is really being sold.

What could most easily overturn my view is still gross margin. If next quarter’s actual gross margin comes in above the 73% guidance, that would mean memory cost pressure is not as rigid as feared, and Tan’s request to change the yardstick would make more sense. $AVGOB is currently at $359.87, up 1.64% over 24 hours, still below its pre-earnings level. In the two days after earnings, trading volume jumped to several times normal, then fell back again. Where gross margin lands next quarter is worth watching.

The next Ethereum upgrade still doesn’t have a mainnet date. The date that’s been circulating in Chinese-language crypto communities turns out to be for the testnet. After developers raised it during a meeting, the plan was pushed again to the next meeting. Countdown posters and posts about “the last chance to get on before the upgrade” ran much faster than the schedule itself.

Ethereum’s core developers maintain a fork registry. In the row for Glamsterdam, the fields for activated block, timestamp, and epoch are all blank; the status is still marked as planned; and it doesn’t list which EIPs will ultimately be included. In the same repository, the mainnet upgrade and emergency response plan also has empty date tables, and the client team’s contact list is blank too. A fork time for the Sepolia testnet was proposed for September 28. No one objected at the meeting, but it stopped at the “proposed” stage. Treating it as the upgrade date is equivalent to taking developers’ draft notes and mistaking them for the actual schedule.

This matters because, in August, $ETH delivered Ethereum’s best month of the year. If you calculate using Binance’s spot monthly chart, August rose by a little over 30%, and the ETH/BTC price relationship has been climbing for a second straight month. The market attributes this rally to three things: ETF inflows, upgrade expectations, and a macro shift. Of the three “legs,” only one holds up under scrutiny.

The ETF leg is real—but the size isn’t as thick as rumor suggested, and it only just reversed. On September 3, the U.S. spot Ethereum ETF saw net outflows of $48.07 million, ending more than two weeks of net outflow. On the same day, the spot Bitcoin ETF recorded net inflows of $101 million; the two split for the first time. Looking one layer deeper, BlackRock’s Ethereum product with staking had net inflows of $52.91 million that day—the single biggest source sucking in the money. The money is still in Ethereum; it just moved from a non-yield “shell” to one that can capture staking rewards. This kind of reshuffling provides far less marginal upward pressure on price than genuinely new capital would.

The upgrade leg is the one that can’t stand up to close examination. Glamsterdam’s current main thrust is actually the act of changing how blocks are produced. ePBS writes the relationship between proposers and builders into the protocol, and in doing so reduces the MEV fee-cut space. Block-level access lists let execution run in parallel, and there’s also a round of gas repricing. The beneficiaries are block producers, stakers, and L2s that consume throughput. But between them and what ETH as an asset should be worth, there are multiple layers of transmission.

And those middle layers are precisely what’s leaking. In Q2, Ethereum mainnet captured only 4.9% of the economic value created by the applications running on top of it; the rest remained with L2s and the applications themselves. Standard Chartered estimated that just the fee diversion from Base alone is equivalent to extracting several tens of billions of dollars from Ethereum’s market value. Matthew Sigel of VanEck has long held a negative view on the long-term value prospects of L2 tokens. That objection flips the other way just as well—once activity moves to rollups, how much can the base asset still receive? ePBS and parallel execution don’t solve this problem: they make the network run faster, but they don’t make ETH collect more money. #Ethereum

The macro leg, if anything, has been underestimated. The direct trigger for the September 3 green candle was a Waller comment: inflation can take a bit more time, and this meeting doesn’t need to move interest rates. The odds of a September rate hike dropped sharply that day; Treasury yields eased, and both gold and U.S. stocks strengthened together. ETH rose a bit more than BTC that day, but the direction was the same. Once risk appetite returned, assets with higher elasticity jumped first—that’s beta, and it has little to do with what Ethereum itself did to “create” that move.

The most credible bullish voice on the long side is Tom Lee. He set an end-of-year target above $5,000, and he gave specific reasons: stablecoin supply scale, tokenized assets, corporates putting ETH on their balance sheets, and the completion of regulatory groundwork. In that logic, there’s not a single reliance on Glamsterdam. Anyone who is genuinely bullish on Ethereum isn’t betting on that upgrade date.

In August’s rally, macro beta did most of the work. A real but not large institutional buy order did some of the remaining part. Upgrade expectations mostly only contributed sentiment—and that sentiment was built on a date that doesn’t even exist. There’s one hard piece of evidence on the long side that I need to make clear: during the period when prices rose, the open interest in perpetual futures didn’t keep stacking up; the funding rate stayed near the benchmark line. Price was bought up gradually in spot rather than via much leverage. This kind of rally is sturdier than a short squeeze, and it’s less likely to trigger a chain of liquidations on a pullback. The August gains themselves hold up; the market just gave credit to the wrong place.

There are two scenarios that would make my explanation fail. In the rest of September, if the ETF keeps seeing net outflows while the ETH/BTC ratio still climbs, that would mean there’s buying demand in pricing that I haven’t accounted for, and I would need to reduce the weight I assigned to the institutional capital leg. The other scenario is if once the Glamsterdam mainnet date is set, the ETH/BTC ratio breaks out into an independent trend—that would mean I underestimated the upgrade.

Compared with the testnet time on September 28, September 15 is the one that should stay on the calendar. The procedural voting schedule in the Senate for the CLARITY Act is set for that afternoon. You need to gather 60 votes to move it forward, and the current number of seats held by Republicans isn’t enough—you have to pull votes from the other side. The outcome of that vote directly determines the rules under which the stablecoins and tokenized assets on Ethereum will be run next year, and it’s much closer to how block production is scheduled in the protocol than how it relates to ETH pricing. If you want a time point that can help verify who’s right—bulls or bears—you can start by looking at that day.

The companies that can’t get their AI data centers powered on the grid, and the queue is too long, some businesses simply move generators into their parks and generate their own power. That’s what Bloom Energy’s business is: solid oxide fuel cells placed on customers’ own land, connect to a natural gas pipeline, and they produce electricity. Construction timelines are measured in weeks. The most common criticism it faces these days is also the most familiar: if it’s burning natural gas, and the war in the Middle East flares up and oil prices surge, won’t its gross margin get wiped out by fuel costs? This question is aimed at the wrong target.

Fuel costs have never been on Bloom’s books. In the long-term power supply agreements it signs with customers, Bloom locks in the equipment, maintenance, and the electricity price. The natural gas is broken out separately—customers buy it themselves. The risk disclosure in its annual report says it plainly: rising natural gas prices could make its batteries less attractive to potential customers, reducing demand. The risk sits on the demand side, not the cost side.

The revenue structure makes the point even more firmly. In the second quarter, total revenue was $1.065 billion. Out of that, the money Bloom earns from owning power plants and selling power by burning gas was just $9.95 million—less than one percent. $BEB more like a generator manufacturer, with the power-operations segment so small it’s essentially negligible. The manufacturer’s gross margin comes from equipment pricing and production-line efficiency. In Q2, the gross margin of 33.4% was generated this way—gas prices can’t touch it.

Even stepping back, if you’re really worried about demand on that side, it’s not like the timing is on your side either. What’s been moving up in the past couple of days is crude oil and European natural gas. Brent is back above $95. Behind that is a fresh round of tensions between Iran and the U.S. Bloom’s machines are plugged into U.S. pipelines and track the market around Henry Hub. Right now it’s a bit above $3 per million BTU—roughly the same as a year ago. Middle East tensions don’t transmit into U.S. gas prices. Blaming Bloom’s fuel cost for this is mixing up two different “gases.”

Besides, the people buying Bloom’s machines aren’t buying them because they think electricity will be cheaper. Getting connected to the grid for a data center means waiting in line for years. From signing to turning on power, Bloom counts weeks. They’re buying time. As long as this shortage remains, a slightly higher or lower gas price won’t change customers’ choices—like Oracle’s. If gas prices truly could suppress demand, the prerequisite would be that the grid side first shortens the queue—and that’s not visible right now.

What’s on the order side is much more concrete. In early 2024, Oracle increased the size of on-site power it buys from Bloom from 1.2 GW to 2.8 GW. The financing framework Brookfield set up to support AI infrastructure has also been scaled up by several multiples. In the second quarter, the company recorded its first-ever quarterly revenue above $1 billion. Full-year guidance has been raised to nearly double last year. In the founders’ call, they said all major U.S. cloud providers have verified and approved its power supply solution. These things actually happened—not wishful thinking.

So where’s the problem with this stock? Start with where the price has gone: a forward P/E of 61x, and the share price has jumped several-fold in the first half. Jefferies cut its rating last month to underperform the broader market, citing that valuation is detached from fundamentals and visibility beyond 2026 is insufficient, plus evidence that investors are already getting overheated. Bank of America is also in the underperform bucket. Morgan Stanley and UBS are on the other side, believing the data-center power gap is big enough and that it’s the main beneficiary. Both sides are arguing about whether the good news has already been priced in at this level, whether the business is actually doing well, no one disputes.

There’s another issue that’s closer to gross margin and comes up less often. The warranty accrual balance rose from $20 million at the end of last year to $77.8 million by the end of June. The company’s explanation was fleet degradation. That’s exactly what the short seller Crossroads Capital focused on. If the electrochemical stacks on-site can’t last as long as the company claims, then each additional 1 GW order is also a batch of replacement costs arriving earlier. And the stacks just happen to contain scandium. In July, Hunterbrook’s report questioned whether its scandium supply can get around China, and the stock fell by 30% that month. The company then filed an 8-K and denied it point by point, saying scandium supply is sufficient to cover existing demand and backlog orders and has no dependency on China.

The distance between degradation and gas prices is actually shorter than it looks on the surface. If stack efficiency drops, you need to burn more gas to generate the same unit of electricity. The contracts Bloom sells protect a performance baseline. If efficiency doesn’t meet the standard, that money either has to be covered by Bloom itself under its commitment—or shows up as an extra slice in the customer’s gas bill. When gas prices truly rise, Bloom’s costs stay flat, but customers will start watching degradation rates and doing the math. The detour may be far, but it’s real.

Longs and shorts are talking about the same story, just two halves. The bulls estimate how big demand is; the bears estimate what physical costs it will take to deliver this batch of demand. Sooner or later, those two books will meet on the same income statement. The more equipment gets sold and the more stacks run in the field, the harder it is to explain warranty accruals with only one-time factors. The warranty line tells you earlier than any GW figure whether gross margin can hold up at scale.

Even when judgment runs out of steam. If Bloom shifts its business focus from selling equipment back toward holding power plants and selling electricity itself, then the fuel-cost channel would reopen, and many of the earlier points would no longer hold. The good news is that both scenarios are already laid out in its own quarterly reports—you don’t have to wait for someone else to interpret them.

$BEB Today the stock is $216.87, up 2.71% over the last 24 hours. The market itself isn’t bringing anything truly new. When the next quarterly report comes out, you can look at two things: whether the line item for power revenue has started to get bigger, and whether warranty accruals are still outpacing revenue growth. The GW numbers will keep looking good—that segment has been talked about far too many times already. #AI infrastructure

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Mitsubishi UFJ—this group of names gathered into the same announcement, saying they plan to co-found a company and issue a dollar stablecoin. In the past couple of days, most Chinese-language posts have stalled at translating the list of names and adding a line about traditional finance making a comeback. The roster is indeed impressive, but it doesn’t answer the more important question: once this money actually comes in, which side does this stablecoin business end up being passive on?

Let’s get the facts straight. A total of 21 institutions signed the letter of intent. In North America, there are also Wells Fargo, Toronto-Dominion (TD), Scotiabank, PNC, and First Capital, plus two asset managers, Fidelity and WisdomTree. Europe includes Santander, BBVA, Crédit Agricole, Lloyd’s, Rabobank, and Commerzbank. Africa is Standard Bank, and the Middle East is Sirius.

The company hasn’t been named and hasn’t been formally established yet. The announcement says it’s intended to be set up, and that delivery is subject to conditions. The entity plans to be built in the second half of this year, with the token targeted to launch in the first half of next year—starting with the dollar, and then expanding to the euro and other G7 currencies. Nothing has happened yet; they’ve simply written down when it will happen.

The issuer’s revenue comes only from the reserves side: collecting users’ dollars and buying short-term treasuries to earn interest. The hard part has always been the distribution side—how to get users to let their money sit in your coin instead of someone else’s. The GENIUS Act rewrites the relationship between the two ends: the issuer is not allowed to pay you, in any form, any interest or yield merely because you hold that stablecoin; cash, tokens, and other consideration are all included. Once this lands, the path of grabbing customers by offering higher yield is effectively sealed. If users hold anyone’s coin, the yield is zero. The only thing left to compare is who occupies the position where users keep their deposits.

Circle’s earnings report describes it more directly than any analysis. In Q2, its total revenue plus reserve income totaled $701 million, with reserve interest alone making up $668 million—so it claims the company has only one item of income, which isn’t an overstatement. In the same quarter, distribution and trading costs were $412 million, with the bulk paid to Coinbase. For every dollar Circle earns from reserve interest, more than half has to go to the party that helps it secure user custody. Since the law doesn’t let it pay users, it can only route the money through channels.

By the end of June, that group already moved with this logic. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, BlackRock, and more than 140 other companies came together to form Open USD. The mechanism explicitly states that the vast majority of reserve earnings are returned to growth partners that help drive the platform’s growth, while it keeps only a small management fee. The payment Circle makes to Coinbase was directly turned into product design.

At this point, the banks’ targeted position becomes clear. They don’t need to win anyone on yield. They already sit in places like corporate accounts, cross-border settlement, and correspondent bank clearing. Customers’ dollars were already in their hands. #稳定币 is more like giving existing channels another layer of settlement rails—it isn’t about acquiring customers from scratch.

The rate side, on the other hand, is actually a tailwind. The federal funds rate is still above three percent, and in September’s meeting the market is even pricing in rate hikes. Every dollar sitting in reserves now earns more than at this time last year. The issuer’s trouble has never been the level of interest rates; it’s always been whether the money will stay with it.

USDT’s current circulating supply is roughly $183.3 billion, and over the past six months it’s been basically flat. $USDC is roughly $73.8 billion—back in March this year it was at higher levels, and then it shrank steadily, bottoming out in early August, only recently coming back a bit. In early August, Morgan Stanley downgraded Circle from Neutral to Underweight, cutting the target price to $38. The reason was how deeply USDC contraction exposes Circle’s reliance on reserve income.

My view is that the bank group’s move basically doesn’t overlap with USDT. USDT is positioned where emerging markets use it—using cash and doing over-the-counter settlement—supporting most of the exchange’s quotes. A bank coin, compliant-first and aimed at institutional wholesale settlement, cannot squeeze into these places in 2027. What’s being targeted is USDC. It competes with this bank coin for the same customer: institutional dollars within the U.S. regulatory framework. That customer cares about compliance and also about who holds the account—both are the bank’s home turf.

The most fragile part of this scenario is timing. The body only gets established in the second half of this year. The token has to wait until the first half of next year. Even the OCC implementation details are delayed until November for finalization, and after that there will be a rollout window. For a joint venture company formed by 21 shareholders, how slowly decisions get made is something anyone who has run cross-border projects knows well. If one shareholder drops out midstream or they revise the wording, the schedule gets pushed back—and in the meantime Circle can swap several rounds of channel partners.

It’s also possible I’ve got the direction backwards. If, at the end of the day, this coin is only used for wholesale settlement among banks and never truly issued to end users, then it wouldn’t overlap with USDC’s customers, and everything above would not hold. The announcement also mentions two use cases—wholesale transfers for institutions and retail payments. Which level they actually reach will only be known once the product comes out.

There’s one more variable on the rules side, and it favors banks. Banks are currently lobbying regulators to expand the interest-payment ban from issuers to affiliates and exchanges, closing the loophole that effectively routes interest back to users via channels. If this gets written into the final rules, the hardest hit would be the USDC incentive scheme Coinbase runs. But the bank group doesn’t rely on returning interest to acquire customers in the first place.

Over the next few months, this likely won’t leave much of a footprint in market pricing. Structural changes at the beginning are like this—if you really want to track it, watch USDC’s circulating supply. Circle’s own transparency page updates weekly; whether supply is shrinking or growing is more honest than any interpretation. As for the joint venture, you can see whether it truly gets registered by year-end, whether it has a name, and whether any shareholders exit along the way. The day the name is announced is when this goes from being a press release into a real company.

On the day Cook handed over, the market didn’t give Apple any special courtesies. Global bond yields surged, oil prices climbed, and the Nasdaq was all green. Against that backdrop, Apple itself carved out an upward line, turning into one of the few large-cap tech names that finished the day in the red.

What’s even more thought-provoking than the upside is what kind of company the board chose to hand to its next chairman at this point.

First, the person. It began with Timbas in product design, and he rose all the way to senior vice president of hardware engineering. He’s had a hand in every major product line—iPad, AirPods, and Apple Watch. After spending more than twenty years at Apple, he’s a hardware engineer to the core. Cook moved over to become executive chairman.

The outside world’s first reaction was basically unanimous. The biggest question marks around Apple right now are AI and software. Siri was rebuilt, delayed for more than two years and still not delivered, yet the board chose a hardware person as the next leader. If they wanted to make up the software shortfall, they brought in the person most skilled at tightening screws.

If you go through Apple’s own books, though, the board’s choice is actually quite coherent.

In the last quarter, Apple’s revenue was up 16% year over year, setting a record for the June quarter, and iPhone revenue rose 22%. The idea that products can’t sell isn’t something Apple has to worry about—at least for now. The pressure is in gross margin. After excluding tariff refund adjustments, Apple’s gross margin was 49.3% in the March quarter, fell to 48.1% in the June quarter, and guidance for the September quarter came in at 47% to 48%.

At the late-July earnings call, CFO Parekh laid out the explanation plainly: changes in memory costs can account for more than 100% of the quarter-over-quarter decline in gross margin. Other cost items added together are, in a way, helping—the entire drop is driven by memory, and it even dragged a bit further.

In that same call, Cook described memory price hikes as a once-in-a-century flood. As a result, Apple reluctantly raised the prices of the iPad and Mac. He added one more, more important point: looking beyond September, memory market pricing would continue to rise, and the impact on the business could be even bigger.

The reason for shortages tells the story even better. Cook said it was a demand-forecasting issue. iPhone and Mac are selling far better than the company’s own expectations. Apple could get the supply—what it didn’t do was order enough at the start. Meanwhile, memory manufacturers are prioritizing AI data centers, where profit margins are higher.

After taking over, after the swap, Apple will be fighting a battle for materials and capacity over the next two years. He has to bring negotiations with Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron to squeeze down prices and secure allocations. Internally, he also needs to cut redundant single-device memory usage during the design stage and push Apple’s in-house chips forward to offset the external price increases. All of these are hardware-engineering tasks. It’s far more fitting to let someone who has spent more than twenty years doing hardware at Apple manage this than to put a model expert in charge.

As for AI, Apple has already answered with actions. The rebuilt Siri’s underlying layer uses Google’s Gemini, costing roughly $1 billion per year. In that model battle, Apple doesn’t plan to win purely by doing it all itself—by buying this layer, it keeps its strength focused on devices, chips, and the privacy architecture. Tenas’s appointment aligns with this strategy.

Wall Street has meaningful disagreement with this logic. Wedbush’s Dan Ives raised his 12-month target price to $400 before the new CEO took office—on the optimistic end among mainstream institutions. His bet is on the iPhone 18 cycle, plus the re-acceleration in services revenue once Siri is rolled out. Jefferies’s Edison Lee went in the opposite direction: in August he cut Apple from “hold” to “underperform,” and cut the target price to $263.66. His basis is supply-chain research: problems hit the yield rate for a fully glass iPhone slated for 2027, and both memory costs and the slower pace of AI deployment are lagging as well.

My ranking differs somewhat from both sides.

If you trade this leadership change as an inflection point in the AI narrative, the order flips. Apple’s toughest constraint right now is cost. The layer of model capability is already paid for. Whether it’s done well or not will be answered by the September 9 keynote, but whatever it reflects in the financial statements won’t show up until next year. Memory is the kind of item that’s actively eating into gross margin right now—and, by Cook’s own words, it’s still worsening.

Apple also did another underappreciated thing. At the spring earnings call, Parekh announced that the company was abandoning its long-standing goal of net cash neutrality and switching to independently assessing cash and debt. That move loosens the leash on the balance sheet—going forward, it means more flexibility to carry out large AI acquisitions or ramp up R&D spending, with one less layer of accounting constraint. Uncapping the ammunition at the moment the torch is passed to the new CEO doesn’t feel coincidental.

The counterargument holds up as well. On September 1, Apple strengthened on its own even as the broader market fell. That was due to the interest-rate logic—there was essentially no fundamental change that day. When the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries pushes higher, capital tends to seek companies that don’t need to expand by taking on new debt. Apple doesn’t have a capital expenditure cycle like that, and its free cash flow is thick—so in this environment it’s naturally a safe haven. This logic can temporarily outweigh the gross margin issue, but it doesn’t solve gross margin.

Valuation is also indeed not cheap. Based on the data cited by 24/7 Wall St. on September 1, the Street consensus target price was still below the then-current share price. In other words, the good news had largely already been priced in. Analyst ratings are nearly unanimous on the buy side—this kind of consensus itself signals that expectations aren’t low. The sentiment around this #美股 area is closing the distance with the fundamentals.

What could overturn this view? If after September 9, Apple’s December-quarter gross margin guidance returns to above 49%, it would suggest I overestimated the memory constraint. If after the new Siri is delivered, services revenue can truly re-accelerate, then AI would be the main storyline for Apple next—and I would need to overturn the ranking I’m making today.

$AAPLB is now quoting at $326.71, already above the leadership-swap headline.

Over the next two months, rather than fixating on what the new CEO says, you may want to pay more attention to the tone Apple sets for the new Siri at the September 9 keynote, and where the December-quarter gross margin guidance lands in the late-October earnings report. That later number is more truthful than the keynote.

After SGP-0002 passed, I went to a Solana mainnet RPC node to check the current inflation parameters. The “decay rate” field still returned the same value as before. The winning side has already celebrated on Twitter, and not a single on-chain rule has been changed.

The vote approved was an authorization—nothing in the protocol itself had moved yet. This interim period determines when the issuance of $SOL will truly start decreasing.

Since genesis, SOL’s issuance follows a downward curve: each year it decays by 15% from the previous year, until it hits a floor of 1.5%. SGP-0002 doubles the decay speed to 30%, leaves the floor unchanged, and cuts the time to reach the endpoint in half. Projecting from the mainnet’s current inflation rate, the old rule would take six more years to reach the floor, while the new rule reaches it in three. For the portion that is reduced, the model in the proposal estimates about 18.90 million fewer SOL issued over the next six years. That figure comes from two Helius engineers; since nothing has been delivered on-chain yet, the quoted number needs to include that caveat.

The vote’s drama is bigger than the proposal itself. The “yes” side pushed through the supermajority threshold by locking in more than two-thirds, with only a 0.334 percentage-point margin. More than an hour before the close, the “yes” votes were still far behind. The batch of delegated votes that Kraken had on hand first flipped from support to opposition, pushing the vote counts below the line; at the last moment, it moved the vast majority back into the “yes” column. Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz said that in the final hours he had been calling nonstop to pull votes, and the votes came in during the last few seconds.

Setting a two-thirds threshold on a network where stake is concentrated effectively hands the outcome to real-time judgment by seven or eight institutions. This time it tilted toward a direction of production reduction—next time, it may not.

Figment and Everstake, two major staking service providers, voted against. Everstake has publicly stated the reasoning: the pace of changes is too fast, small validators will be squeezed out disproportionately, and both staking participation and delegators will face pressure. That argument makes sense from the validator’s position—when returns are compressed, the first to be pushed out are indeed the small, cost-inflexible nodes.

Putting the conflict of interest on full display was Solana Company. This listed company publicly announced its opposition to SGP-0002 on August 21, and in its second-quarter revenue, 99.4% came from staking rewards on its own holdings. It also holds a large amount of delegated stake for vote-by-proxy; its stance on the production-reduction vote needs no explanation. Governance rules allow this. It’s not exactly “cheating,” but people who delegate their votes have the right to know what ledger backs that vote.

During the voting period, Mert’s claim was that certain so-called “stakeholders” make money for themselves by diluting token holders through additional issuance—his model is said not to hold up. The proposal document even describes the algorithm used by his camp. On the whole network, 41% of validators charge a 0% commission on the issuance portion; reducing issuance won’t hit this group of nodes. The remaining nodes have their decay rate adjusted—since the current-period interest rate doesn’t change, revenue won’t collapse overnight.

What I don’t buy is reading this vote as a direct deflationary positive for $SOL . Spreading 18.90 million coins across six years, placing them into SOL’s daily trading float is just a drop in the bucket. These three days of market action didn’t give it face either: SOL kept giving back gains, sliding to 101.74, down 3.17% over 24 hours—tracking the broader-market rhythm.

The value of this vote is elsewhere. In the same batch of proposals, a constitution-related proposal passed with a high vote count, while SGP-0003—which changed transaction fees into a resource-pricing model and significantly increased the amount burned—only got 53.9% and failed. Taken together, the community’s message is quite concrete: it’s willing to mint fewer coins, but unwilling to turn SOL from a cheap execution chain into an asset that captures value by burning fees. Reducing issuance is essentially re-cutting the cake between token holders and validators; changing fees would shift costs onto application operators, and that faces much stronger resistance. This signal is more useful than the 18.90 million coins for judging Solana’s value-capture path.

Back to the parameter at the start that hasn’t changed yet. The protocol needs to use the technical proposal SIMD-0550 to make the change. In the warehouse’s status fields for this document, as of today it still says “Review.” The field that records the enable/disable switch value is still a placeholder waiting to be filled.

On Anza’s side, in early August they already merged the implementation into the Agave mainline. Their approach is to add a feature switch, and to re-anchor the curve at the epoch boundary when it becomes effective.

The problem is dated August 24. Two engineers from Jump and Firedancer opened an issue in the proposal repository. SIMD-0550 requires all clients to compute the results of exponentiation bit-for-bit consistently. But under IEEE 754, this operation is implementation-defined. Swapping the same code to a different CPU architecture, a different libc, or a different compiler version can lead to mismatched mantissas. The wording from the Firedancer engineer is that the feature switch should be blocked, and the suggestion is to revise the proposal so it uses no floating point at all.

In a single-client era, this wouldn’t be a big deal. In the current multi-client parallel stage, it becomes a consensus safety problem. Issuance rewards would go into the bank hash; if two clients compute a difference of even one bit, the chain forks. Anza’s engineer later proposed a patch that removes floating point from the inflation and rent paths. So far, it has only received a basically approving response that said to wait for others to review; it hasn’t been merged.

The governance layer approved it, but the spec layer is still waiting to change things. The client implementation is being questioned as not safe to launch. So activation can’t really be discussed yet. Until this path is completed, not a single coin of issuance will be reduced. #Solana

The circumstances that could overturn this assessment are also easy to list. Once the patch is merged, a new version is released, and validators are activated—if the staking ratio and the number of validators haven’t fallen—then the opponents’ concerns would be overblown, and I’d scale down the weight I gave to their worries. Conversely, if the switch gets stuck for months, or after activation small nodes exit in batches, then this close call victory would turn into a headache.

If you want to personally monitor this line, you can check Solana mainnet RPC’s getInflationGovernor interface. The taper field in there is still the old value for now. Only when it doubles will the production reduction truly begin.

Since going public, almost all sell-side analysts covering SpaceX have been overwhelmingly bullish—yet the stock price is still hovering near its issue price. It’s not strange that there are disagreements for a new stock. What’s strange is the magnitude. With the same set of financial results in front of everyone, the “reasonable” prices derived by the most optimistic and the most pessimistic analysts can differ by several multiples.

First, let’s clarify the unlock timeline—many people were scared by it. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq with an offering price of $135 in mid-June. Now, $SPCXB is trading at $140.59, having looped back to roughly where it started after more than two months. The first batch of insider shares became unblocked on August 6: 1.115 billion shares, more than the number issued in the IPO. Normally, that would be a heavy blow—yet the stock rose rather than fell that day. On August 20, the second batch took effect. There was a sell-off during the trading session, but the decline was fully bought back within a week.

The market has already been treating unlocks like scheduled events. These shares were always meant to be released in multiple tranches. After the listing, they were laid out day by day; the two batches in September and the two in October haven’t finished running through yet. What cut the stock from the June peak all the way down to late July—breaking below the offering price—was the Q2 report released on August 4.

In that quarter, revenue nearly doubled year over year. In the same quarter, the company spent $18.4 billion in capital expenditures, far more than the amount it pulled in. Of that $18.4 billion, $15.8 billion went into the AI segment.

You don’t have to worry about this money for now. The net proceeds from the IPO, plus the investment-grade bond investment at the end of June, leave the company with plenty of cash and marketable securities—enough to burn through several more quarters like this. What’s not sustainable is what comes years later: the AI segment will need to generate cash flow by then, or else the company will have to return to the market for more funds.

Profits only come from the connection business, with operating profit of $1.66 billion in Q2. The aerospace segment is still losing money on Starship development, and the AI segment’s operating loss is even larger. After adding back depreciation and amortization, adjusted EBITDA only barely turns positive. On the balance sheet, it’s effectively a satellite broadband business funding two cash-burning departments—one of which consumed the vast majority of this quarter’s capital expenditures. The company also announced it would bring Cursor in via acquisition, with the deal expected to be completed in Q3, and the AI segment’s weight will only increase.

Even within the connection business, things are changing. Subscribers doubled to 12 million over a year, but the average monthly revenue per user has fallen to $66, a step down from a year ago. More new users are coming from markets with lower pricing. Starlink has expanded coverage, but pricing power hasn’t kept up. This portion is the foundation of the entire valuation, and its own growth is now thinning the load-bearing capacity.

That’s where the disagreement is concentrated. Nicolas Owens at Morningstar assigns a fair value of $62, and after the Q2 report he reaffirmed the same number. His rationale is that the return on AI investment cannot be verified, and both Starship’s full reuse and the space data center are still on paper. According to Morningstar’s own wording, he is the only analyst on Wall Street who reaches an overestimation conclusion. Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley maintained a $300 price target on August 26, saying the stock’s valuation is attractive. In his target, more than half comes from the AI business brought in through the xAI merger; the rest is allocated to launch services and Starlink. In the same week, the company just announced plans to build an unprecedentedly large launch facility in Louisiana.

The gap between the two valuations is nearly fivefold, yet they’re arguing about the same thing. Owens doesn’t accept the pricing for the AI segment, while Jonas’s target price relies on the AI segment for more than half. Rockets and satellite broadband are not the issue—everything hinges on what that $15.8 billion in capital expenditures can buy back. The average sell-side target price sits at $219, more than half higher than the current quote. The missing gap in the middle is precisely the question that still has no answer.

So this stock shouldn’t really be treated as a “space/aerospace stock” anymore. People buying it for rockets and Starlink are, in reality, making a bet on the return on AI compute investment—and with a fairly high weight. This recognition gap is far more dangerous than unlock selling pressure, and it’s discussed far less.

There aren’t many things that can be validated going forward. Whether operating profit in the connection business can keep climbing determines whether this valuation foundation is solid; whether the cloud service contracts signed by the AI segment can turn contract amounts into ongoing revenue determines how long the premium can be sustained. Of the remaining unlock tranches in September and October, if any tranche creates a noticeably deeper hole than the first two, it’s more likely that someone is rebalancing their positions by timing it with the schedule—not that it has much to do with the unlock selling pressure itself.

The easiest place for my view to be overturned is right inside Starlink. Once the growth rate of operating profit in the connection business drops off—or if average monthly revenue per user continues to decline—then no matter what story the AI segment tells, the foundation will loosen first. And when that day comes, $62 won’t be an extreme viewpoint anymore.

After U.S. stocks open this week, you can keep an eye on whether the connection business has any new government/enterprise contracts coming through. For a company with a scale like #SpaceX , story changes in this market are never completed in a single day. Where the money flows will be plainly explained in the company’s quarterly reports, one quarter at a time.

Coinbase’s official account posted a weekend image with only a few words in its promise: no selling the coins, no additional margin calls, and no taxable event. The day before, Brian Armstrong’s post was even more direct: get the house, and keep your exposure to Bitcoin. The product officially opened last week for qualifying U.S. homebuyers. I checked every one of these lines against the original wording; they all hold up. It’s just that they “stand” in a way that differs from what most rewrites in the Chinese-speaking market say.

What gets most crushed here is the structure. There are two loans. The first follows Fannie/Freddie’s standard compliance-approved framing: the collateral is the house, and it has nothing to do with crypto assets. The second is a separate down-payment loan, used to cover the cash down payment that the buyer can’t come up with; the collateral is the Bitcoin pledged for it, and it also adds a second mortgage lien on the house. Hardly anyone mentions that second lien, but it determines the order of default: Better can go after the house first; the coins are merely a later-layer backstop. The interest rates and amortization term are the same for both, and each month they’re merged into a single repayment.

By putting all Bitcoin volatility into the second loan—carried by Better—the first loan remains the kind of compliant asset that Fannie/Freddie can simply take and hold. Because of this design, the product doesn’t need to wait for any new regulatory guidance to be finalized before it can operate. This layer is especially easy to mix up. FHFA chair Pulte signed a directive at the end of June last year instructing the two housing agencies to treat crypto assets held on regulated U.S. exchanges as part of the reserves for mortgage qualification, without needing to convert them into U.S. dollars first. Even up to mid-year this year, that line still has no final guidance. Including Senators Warren and Sanders, several lawmakers sent letters questioning whether it would shake up the housing market. Whether Fannie/Freddie recognizes the coins, and whether Better uses the coins for a down-payment pledge loan, are two separate matters that don’t depend on each other. Writing that Fannie/Freddie started accepting Bitcoin directly is wrong.

The “no selling the coins” line holds—because the price is embedded in the loan-to-value ratio. The down-payment loan requires the pledged Bitcoin to be no less than 250% of the loan amount. If you want to borrow $100,000 for the down payment, you must pledge $250,000 worth of Bitcoin. The coins are transferred into Better’s custody account via Coinbase Prime and locked until the loan is repaid or refinanced. At the current price of $78,075 for $BTC , a $100,000 down-payment loan would consume more than three whole Bitcoins. Those more-than-three Bitcoins may be unable to move for as long as the next thirty years, and they can’t be used elsewhere as collateral. It doesn’t generate interest, but the years they’re locked up have a cost—just not one that shows up in the marketing materials.

The “no additional margin calls” line is even more counterintuitive. A drop in the coin price by itself doesn’t change the mortgage terms, and it won’t trigger a forced liquidation because the collateral value shrinks. The trigger for liquidation is switched to repayment delinquency: after being late for sixty days, Better would then be entitled to dispose of the pledged Bitcoin.

In this way, the risk exposure shifts from price to cash flow. It doesn’t care how much your coins fall; it only cares whether you can make your monthly payment each month. The 250% is what you paid for that promise—an upfront over-collateralization replacing an entire dynamic margining/mark-to-market backstop mechanism.

For borrowers, that’s a good thing, but the risk just changes shape. The worst path is when a major drop in coin price happens at the same time as your income dries up: two months of delinquency, Better sells your coins at the bottom, and that second lien on the house remains. People heavily concentrated in holding coins especially can’t avoid this combination; their income source often ties to the same industry. When things are good, both sides have breathing room; when trouble hits, they hit together. The “no additional margin calls” part is true. The missing half is that the liquidation switch has been moved onto your paycheck.

The “no taxable event” line also fails under the same path. The pledge itself indeed doesn’t constitute a disposal. But at the moment of a passive closeout, it becomes a real sale; the capital gains tax you owe is not one cent less, and it happens when your cash is tight—precisely when you least want to sell.

In Better’s disclosed numbers, one figure is even more telling than the 250%: among its pre-approved customers, 41% have both income and credit that pass the bar, and what blocks them isn’t affordability—it’s simply that they can’t produce the down-payment cash. Earn enough and you can borrow; the money is all in the coins. The intended loan size corresponding to the waitlist stage exceeds $260 million. These are the company’s own disclosed figures. They may work as marketing numbers, but the 41% points to a real gap.

For a few institutions that do non-compliant loans, their attitudes are close to one another: they all think adding crypto assets to mortgage qualification is inevitable, and they all stress that their version is conservative. Rate’s Kate Amor directly calls their product a conservative non-compliant one. The objections concentrate on the two-agency (Fannie/Freddie) line—not on this product. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York study in 2024 mentioned that when crypto assets are under pressure in traditional markets, their volatility is comparable to traditional assets; once the crypto market starts breaking on its own, the volatility will be much more severe.

Structurally, this product is conservative to the point that it doesn’t really look like a typical crypto product. The first source of repayment is the house; the second is your income. Bitcoin comes third—and you’re required to provide thickness of 2.5 times. The criticism that it brings crypto volatility into the housing market misses the mark: on the compliant mortgage side, it doesn’t touch the coins at all. What should be watched is the other side: it wraps a 30-year liability that needs cash-flow discipline into an option where coin holders supposedly don’t have to make trade-offs.

This judgment breaks down in two situations. First, as the loan-to-value ratio is competitively squeezed as peers enter the market—say 250% drops to one hundred-something—the thickness provided by over-collateralization may no longer hold. Second, if these down-payment loans begin getting packaged and sold off rather than staying on Better’s own books, once the risk is transferred away, the incentive to maintain strict issuance standards also moves away. Both of these can be inferred from public product terms and securitization trends; you don’t need to wait for something to happen.

This round around $BTC started on August 19 and, over ten days, climbed from just over $64,000 to $81,479 intraday on August 28; it has now come back to $78,075. At this level, a 250% collateral requirement looks comfortable; three weeks earlier, at that earlier price level, it looked like an entirely different story. The natural peak in signing such products falls when the collateral looks most plentiful—and that’s also when it’s most expensive.

To judge whether the numbers add up, you can start with a crude calculation: value the portion of coins you must pledge assuming they can’t move for thirty years, then ask yourself: if in any year in between you need to use it, do you have other money on hand that can cover the need? The answer is far more important than how high Bitcoin might rise.