Cryptopolitan

Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) missed Wall Street’s second-quarter revenue estimate on Tuesday, August 18, reporting 31.3 billion yuan ($4.62 billion) for the three months to June, which is a 4% drop from a year earlier.
Analysts at LSEG had expected about 31.96 billion yuan, and Baidu came in under that mark.
The company recorded a quarterly net income of 2.3 billion yuan ($324 million), which was a decline of 68% from the same time last year. The diluted earnings per American depositary share fell to $0.85, a decline of almost 72% from June 2025. Operating income also slipped to $446 million.
Investors have reacted to the development as well, as Baidu’s US-listed shares fell between 3.5% and 4.35% in pre-market trading in New York after the release.
Where did Baidu struggle?
The pressure came from Baidu’s oldest business. Online marketing revenue dropped 19% to 13.1 billion yuan, as advertisers held back spending in a weak Chinese economy.
Two forces squeezed that segment. A drawn-out slump in China’s property market and soft consumer demand pushed companies to trim marketing budgets.
On top of that, the country’s mid-year 618 shopping festival worked against Baidu, because e-commerce platforms shifted promotional money toward user subsidies instead of buying search and feed traffic.
The AI side Baidu wants investors to watch
Revenue from Baidu’s AI-related operations, which covers cloud, applications, and marketing services, rose 25% to 12.5 billion yuan, cushioning the advertising fall.
Its AI Cloud Infra revenue climbed 50% to 7.3 billion yuan, and within it, GPU Cloud revenue jumped 283% year-on-year, accelerating from 184% growth the prior quarter, according to Baidu’s earnings statement. AI application revenue grew a slimmer 3% to 2.5 billion yuan, while AI marketing services were flat at 2.6 billion yuan.
“While our online marketing business remains under pressure, the growing momentum in our core AI-powered business reaffirms Baidu’s transition from an internet-centric company to an AI-first company,” Robin Li, Baidu’s co-founder and CEO, said in the earnings statement.
Robotaxis, a Hong Kong listing, and payouts
Beyond the balance sheet, Baidu used the quarter to push its Apollo Go robotaxi service into new markets. The unit began open-road testing in London with Uber and Lyft, started fully driverless commercial rides in Dubai, and won Hong Kong’s first permits for driverless testing. It also ran open-road tests in Switzerland with operator PostBus.
Baidu’s chief financial officer (CFO) Haijian He said their operating cash flow stayed positive for a fourth straight quarter at 3.4 billion yuan and that the company is moving toward a dual-primary listing in Hong Kong that it expects to complete this year.
The company has returned $259 million to shareholders through buybacks since the start of the first quarter, the release stated.
How Wall Street sees Baidu
Baidu shares traded near $103.67 ahead of the release, down about 28% for the year. Bank of America (BofA) analyst Miranda Zhuang kept a Buy rating but cut her price target to $165 from $180, citing falling advertising revenue and higher AI infrastructure spending.
The three-month analyst view sat at a Moderate Buy, with three Buy ratings, two Holds and no Sells.
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South Korean regulators approved Ripple’s integration with the country’s banking system on the same day a media watchdog voted to cut off access to the prediction market Polymarket.
South Korean regulators have joined a widening crackdown against Polymarket while approving Ripple’s partnership with Jeonbuk Bank.
Jeonbuk Bank is Ripple’s first regional lender in Korea
Ripple (XRP) has announced that Jeonbuk Bank will run cross-border business remittances over Ripple Payments, making it the first regional lender in the country to adopt the service.
Traditional transfers have to be routed between intermediary banks on the SWIFT network, and this process can make transactions take days to clear. However, Ripple offers a route that settles in seconds to minutes and runs around the clock. The service is aimed at the bank’s importers, exporters, IT startups and online content creators.
Jeonbuk is Ripple’s third Korean partnership of 2026, following a tokenized government-bond trial with Kyobo Life Insurance and a custody and wallet deal with internet-only Kbank.
Despite these partnership announcements, XRP slipped under $1 to 98 cents in Asian morning trading on Tuesday, its weakest level since November 2024 and the worst performer among major coins over the day and week.
The decline might be due to RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, which now does much of the institutional settlement work. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger are worth roughly $1.38 billion, and $845 million of that is RLUSD, representing more than three-fifths of the total value.
RLUSD’s circulating supply reached approximately 1.71 billion tokens, with a market capitalization of around $1.71 billion. Ripple minted another 10 million RLUSD on the XRP Ledger on August 17.
Despite the drop in XRP’s price, traders are still leaning long, with futures open interest near $2.78 billion.
Is Polymarket a legal platform in South Korea?
On the same day that the Ripple deal advanced, the Korea Media and Communications Standards Commission voted to block domestic access to Polymarket, stating that the platform facilitates gambling under the Criminal Act and the National Sports Promotion Act.
The commission explained that because payouts hinge on events users cannot control and winners take the entire pot, the design “fuels gambling psychology.” It also noted the fact that Polymarket sets the markets, runs the settlement rails, and collects trading fees.
Polymarket argued it had removed Korean-language services and won-denominated payments and therefore fell outside Korean law, but the regulator rejected that, saying technical features cannot exempt a platform providing “a real illegal gambling environment to domestic users.”
Cryptopolitan has been tracking the situation since the Korean police opened the country’s first criminal investigation into local Polymarket bettors after heavy trading around the June 3 national election. The commission began deliberations on July 6 after referrals from the National Police Agency.
Beyond Korea, more than 30 countries, including Italy, Indonesia and Argentina have blocked or limited Polymarket.
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South Korea’s AI and robotics push came to the fore again after LG Electronics hosted Nvidia senior director Madison Huang during a Tuesday trip to its robot data factory in southern Seoul.
The younger Huang’s visit to the Yangjae campus in Seocho District came after her father, Jensen Huang, who is also Nvidia’s chief executive met and signed an MOU with LG Group’s Chairman Koo Kwang-mo, covering robotics, AI factories and mobility together in Santa Clara, California.
Madison Huang also handles product marketing for Nvidia’s physical AI platform.
Nvidia is all-in on South Korea’s robotics push
According to local reports, Madison Huang was received by C-suite executives, including LG Electronics CEO Lyu Jae-cheol, LG CNS CEO Hyun Shin-gyoon and LG Sciencepark’s chief. The visit, which started with a courtesy bouquet delivered to Huang by one of the company’s CLOiD robots, ran longer than the two hours originally put on the schedule.
Huang described her visit to the facility as “incredible,” doubling down on positive sentiments she expressed when she left a handwritten “Amazing LG” on a CLOiD robot.
100,000 hours of data by December
LG expects to have its robots running on Nvidia’s training platform before the end of 2026, with plans to have at least 100,000 hours of robot training data in its library by the end of the year.
The tech giant’s plan will combine physically tracking robots doing tasks with real on-site motion data. Nvidia’s Omniverse libraries, LG’s Cosmos world foundation models and the Isaac development platform will then be used to amplify and synthesize the data into far larger virtual datasets, which feeds LG’s robot foundation model.
LG Electronics CEO Lyu Jae-cheol’s team described the combined pool as the robot’s brain, which lets it handle objects even though it does not have specific training for such tasks.
That self-improving loop of collection, synthesis, training and improvement comes up together as what LG is describing internally as a “data flywheel.”
Where did Madison Huang visit in Korea?
Madison Huang visited the 10,000-square-meter, converted Yangjae R&D campus in Seocho District. The facility is expected to be running hundreds of CLOiD robots operating on a 24/7 schedule by the end of the year.
LG has simulated environments it expects to deploy its humanoid robots across the facility’s four floors, including one below ground.
CLOiD practices cleaning in the home zone.
Robots are moving, stacking and assembling washing machine parts in a setting that resembles the assembly line at LG’s Tennessee plant.
LG CNS added a logistics-automation area.
A space for training robotic hands by LG Innotek.
LG has ambitions to build a bipedal, next-gen humanoid on Nvidia’s robotics stack before the end of March, 2027. The South Korean firm named other Nvidia projects in its Friday report on H1 2026.
“We will secure competitiveness in physical AI,” Lyu said, adding that LG aims to become “a total robotics solutions provider.”
Seoul’s wider physical AI bet
The partnership sits inside a national push. President Lee Jae Myung’s government has folded physical AI into a roughly $1 trillion program alongside semiconductors and AI data centers, and plans a special law this year to fast-track approvals and infrastructure.
Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan said the state intends to buy more than 1,000 robots by 2030, including 700 humanoids, to seed an early market that Lee has said is still too small.
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Circle revealed that its euro stablecoin (EURC) has now crossed the mark of €400 million in circulation within around four years since it was launched. Although this amount is still insignificant compared to the dollar stablecoins, this gap is part of the overall picture. Establishing a serious payment rail that doesn’t rely on the dollar has required years of work even for one of the biggest issuers of stablecoins in the sector.
As far as institutions, payment firms, and developers wanting to hold and transfer euros on the blockchain are concerned, this achievement indicates that a promising alternative is coming into being. Nonetheless, the expansion of EURC points to the fact that the adoption process has been rather lengthy, owing to more advanced regulations and improved infrastructure, but not to the sharp increase in demand.
A four-year climb from one chain to five
The European euro stablecoin EURC debuted on Ethereum back in June 2022, where it remained until 2023, when Circle started to launch it on other blockchains, including Avalanche, Stellar, Solana, and Base. By December 2024, it had been introduced to five different blockchains and had almost €80 million in circulation. According to Circle, the EURC supply doubled in the first half of 2025, rising more than 100% over the past 12 months.
Circle executives mentioned that the industry had achieved a milestone of €400 million for the first time. On August 14, Patrick Hansen tweeted that EURC had “officially crossed €400M in circulation for the first time in history,” which is more than ten times its size at the beginning of the MiCA period two years back. Another colleague, Peter Schroeder, also talked about EURC being the first euro-pegged stablecoin to ever reach €400 million worth of supply.
Why does the dollar still own the rails?
The milestone appears different when viewed in the context of the dominance of the dollar. According to a paper published in May 2026 by the Bank for International Settlements, nearly 98% of the value of stablecoins is dollar-denominated, which suggests that stablecoins would only strengthen the dollar’s current position before rival currencies make a meaningful dent.
Euro tokens have encountered hurdles in practical usage, as Circle noted that users typically had to resort to dollar-pegged stablecoins for euro transactions, experience low liquidity on-chain, or use bridges that create obstacles and risks.
Regulation transformed the industry too. Cryptopolitan had reported Tether’s discontinuation of its euro stablecoin EURT instead of complying with the European Union’s emerging regulations. Even with robust increases in euro-pegged stablecoins to reach around $900 million by mid-2026, they still made up much less than 1% of the approximately $300 billion stablecoin market globally.
What MiCA changed for euro tokens
The Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework of the European Union came into effect in December 2024, putting in place requirements with regard to reserves, disclosures, governance, and redemption. Circle designed EURC in a manner that allows it to be classified as an e-money token in compliance with MiCA regulations, and issued it through one of its electronic money institutions in France under the supervision of ACPR with full backing of segregated reserves.
MiCA was not responsible for creating demand for euro stablecoins. Instead, it gave banks, payment companies, and other regulated entities a clear basis so they could decide whether to use a euro stablecoin or not.
This transition can be seen in the framework of the EURC. The token is traded on major exchanges and payment gateways and has institutional custody services backing it up. Visa and Mastercard have also expanded stablecoin settlement functionality to include EURC and bring this token out of the crypto trading landscape and closer to the traditional payment infrastructure.
Where the euro token is actually being used
When it comes to the question of whether EURC could become a true payment rail, usage is more significant than listings. As reported by Thunes on August 13, the payments company has now added its EURC prefunding features throughout Ethereum, Solana, Base, and Stellar. This means that users of the network are able to execute euro transactions irrespective of banking hours or the need to first convert to dollars.
Data from third parties also suggests a similar trend. A study prepared by Dune for Visa indicates that during the period ending in February 2026, the total volume of local-currency stablecoins grew by approximately 90%, reaching $1.2 billion, which is a much higher rate than dollar-based tokens. Most of this capital was generated via euro-based stablecoins, which represent more than 80% of the total market capitalization and 85% of the overall transfer volume. EURC alone processes between $10 and $20 billion per month.
Notably, the number of unique addresses dealing with non-dollar stablecoins surged from an estimated 40,000 in January 2023 to upwards of 1.2 million in early February 2026.
Broader stablecoin context
EURC’s milestone of €400 million is less significant in the context of how it poses a threat to the dollar today, but more important in regard to proving another currency can create its own on-chain infrastructure. The euro stablecoin sector is becoming more usable, regulated, and liquid. The scale of the euro stablecoin market, however, is a reminder of the fact that a majority of the global stablecoin economy remains dollar-denominated.
Date EURC Circulation Growth / Context May 31, 2024 €37.0M Early baseline; Circle’s reserve report Jan. 1, 2025 ~€70M Beginning-of-year level cited by Circle Dec. 23, 2025 >€300M EURC became the largest euro-denominated stablecoin by market cap Dec. 31, 2025 €310M Circle year-end figure; +284% YoY July 27, 2026 €394.6M Latest Circle disclosure; approaching €400M
The figures show how quickly EURC moved from a sub-€100 million niche in early 2025 to nearly €400 million by mid-2026. Circle reported €310 million at the end of 2025, up 284% year over year.
EURC circulation rose from about €37 million in May 2024 to €394.6 million by July 27, 2026, putting the euro stablecoin within roughly €5.4 million of the €400 million threshold. Circle reported €310 million at the end of 2025, representing 284% year-over-year growth.

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Multiple users have reported dust attacks from wallets linked to the HTX exchange, formerly Huobi. Users are worried that even a small transaction can connect the wallet to the exchange, which has been sanctioned as a counterparty in the UK and the European Union.
User wallets have received dust transactions linked to HTX addresses. A token contract for a new HTX asset has interacted with thousands of wallets on BNB Smart Chain, while other users report receiving USDT from an address tagged as HTX48.
An HTX ambassador responded to the allegations, stating the exchange did not intentionally send out any assets, and it was not its usual mode of behavior. Justin Sun, the founder of TRON and the owner of HTX, has also not responded to questions on the spam attack. Currently, Sun has pivoted to AI, offering bonus tokens and usage of one of his new advanced models.
As Cryptopolitan reported, HTX was also targeted in another wave of sanctions against third-country exchanges. Binance froze transactions from HTX, Exmo, and 14 other exchanges.
Why are user wallets threatened by HTX?
Usually, a dust attack has the goal of making users send funds to the wrong address. This time, however, the attack has been tagged as compliance poisoning.
In the EU and other regions, exchanges have started to vet and de-anonymize user wallets. This means wallets may be watched for interactions with the sanctioned exchange. So far, Binance has not confirmed it would screen for dust transfers, but it is at least possible to flag wallets for interacting with HTX.
Some users commented that the attack could especially target crypto influencers and high-profile traders, challenging exchanges to freeze or review their accounts. Some KOLs and insiders are already reporting that the dust attack has resulted in their centralized accounts being frozen for review.
Are dust attacks a risk to personal wallets?
A similar dust attack has targeted user wallets after the USA sanctioned the Tornado Cash mixer. At that point, a user spent $50,000 to contaminate addresses with dust transactions.
Despite the automated risk filtering, the dust attack was not enough to ban all wallets and user accounts on centralized exchanges. Later, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ruled that non-material passive receipt of funds was not enough to deem an account an accomplice to a banned service.
The recent transactions are also often a bit larger than the usual dust attack, often handing over up to 12 USDT. The attack is also not using any new or counterfeit tokens.
Practices on screening wallets may differ between exchanges. Binance has been the strictest, freezing some accounts for suspicious transactions. Other brokerages flag the received transaction and sometimes allow the user to send it back to a self-custodial wallet without freezing the funds.
Currently, all wallets withdrawing from HTX after May 26 are considered sanctioned. Even decentralized services like Hyperliquid and some DeFi protocols are already blacklisting the wallets. Even if authorities do not require an account freeze, decentralized services could refuse users based on their recent connection to HTX.
Critics believe the measures against HTX are an overreach, spending too many resources to track legitimate users instead of tracking real on-chain crime.
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Uniswap founder Hayden Adams has presented his own argument for why automated market makers (AMMs) should be at the center of the tokenization wave that has taken over global finance as markets continue to shift to meet the demand for always-on infrastructure.
Hayden’s comments land as Uniswap has gone all out in its own push to claim major share in the tokenized stocks sweepstakes, which in itself is only a slice of the onchain real-world asset deposits approaching $4 billion, per Cryptopolitan reporting.
Why Uniswap’s founder says AMMs are better for tokenized markets
Adams’ big pitch for blockchain tech and tokenized rails rests on how blockchains separately manage execution, custody, and settlement as separate layers while traditional market makers just bundle them together.
So instead of concentrating participation among a few established firms that can manage all the vertical integration involved, Adams says blockchain tech lowers the barrier to entry.
In the scenario that Adams painted, AMMs are perfectly positioned because they favor closely related asset pairs, where passive liquidity carries lower inventory risk while still offering costs that compare favorably with big-time professional desks.
Adams expects the onchain migration of assets to persist into the future, which will naturally reorganize trading around related pairs plus a handful of cross-chain routes and expand market access. The Uniswap founder also expects passive AMM strategies to start to operate in the same lane as index funds.
Adams’ tokenized push for AMMs follows on his January disagreement with AMM critics who called the undercompensation of liquidity providers a structural flaw. As Cryptopolitan reported at the time, the founder pointed to Uniswap’s pool growth as evidence that AMM liquidity is easier to reuse as collateral than the alternatives.
The tokenized market has exploded
Hayden Adams’ case for AMMs comes around RWA deposit stakes that have exploded roughly sixfold in twelve months from $650.88 million to around $3.98 billion per DeFiLlama data cited by Cryptopolitan on August 18.
Total tokenized issuance across the sector reached $34.55 billion.
Uniswap itself has been active in the new global, self-custodial, and 24/7 market, touting support for more than 190 Robinhood stock tokens across its protocol, apps, and API as of August 13. A single tokenized SPY pair booked $33 million in trades over 12 days.
Uniswap has also courted regulated issuers directly: in July it introduced Permissioned Pools, a v4 hook that restricts trading to wallets on an issuer’s approved list, with tokenization firms Securitize, Superstate, and Dowgo named as launch partners.
UNI itself has not tracked the optimism. CoinMarketCap listed the token near $3.25 on the day of Adams’ post, with a market cap around $2.03 billion, well off levels seen earlier in the year.
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One trader used $2,328,595.73 to buy 3,167.53 QQQon in one Ethereum transaction this week, a seven-figure purchase that Ondo Finance pointed out as proof that tokenized stocks are no longer in the experimental phase.
The announcement of the trade was made by Ondo on August 17, and its alerts confirmed the same number of tokens and amount of money. As for a market that is trying to demonstrate that it can cope with big flows, the $2.3 million transaction in one execution is noteworthy.
Tokenized stocks are making history.
A $2,328,595.73 QQQon buy was executed in a single transaction on Ethereum.
Seven-figure execution, only on Ondo Stocks. https://t.co/hBDBcycrS1
— Ondo Finance (@Ondo) August 17, 2026
The trade happened while Ondo Stocks, the company’s tokenized equities site, hit the $1 billion milestone in total value locked. It has logged $27 billion in total trading volume since its launch in September 2025. QQQon is one of Ondo’s tokenized exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that allows blockchain investors to access different shares in the U.S.
Why a single seven-figure order matters
Traditionally, tokenized stock trading has been seen as fairly centered around smaller, retail-sized transactions. However, the recent one-time transaction said to be exceeding $2.3 million hints that larger investors may be beginning to embrace the format. According to Ondo, the transaction was made on Ethereum, pointing users to the blockchain record itself.
According to the tracking account of Ondo, the transaction took place at a total of 3,167.53 QQQon for a price of $2,328,595.73, suggesting a price of about $735 per token. Moreover, since the buyer or the counterparty is not named in the two announcements, it would not be correct to conclude that the transaction was institutional. What it does mean, though, is that the system can process an order worth millions of dollars in one operation.
From passive tokens to collateral you can borrow against
This deal also illustrates what Ondo has done with its equity tokens. In February, the company provided SPYon and QQQon as collateral in DeFi lending markets through Morpho, where the risk parameters, including collateral factors and liquidation levels, were established by the risk management company Gauntlet.
This is important considering that tokens once acted solely as passive means of ownership: they just allowed the holder to keep or transfer them. However, if QQQon can be used as collateral in a loan, it can serve as a productive means of investment in crypto portfolios instead of just being a representation of a physical asset.
Ondo began its journey with SPYon as well as QQQon, given that both of them track broad-based ETFs that enjoy substantial underlying liquidity. This provides a relatively stable financial opportunity for entering DeFi lending with tokenized equities.
Always-on access to Wall Street exposure
Ondo has also been taking steps to widen the number of hours during which such assets can be traded. In June, it rolled out 24/7 instant minting and redemption for the six most traded tokens, including QQQon, on Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana. This represents an extension of the previous 24/5 model that ceased to operate on weekends.
This change addresses one of the fundamental benefits of using tokenization: its global participants are allowed to exit and enter their positions at any time, even during weekends and holidays when traditional stock market operations are non-functional.
According to Ondo, its platform now includes upwards of 430 tokenized stocks and ETFs and has become the first platform of its kind to reach a total value locked of over $1 billion. The tokens can be used across several different venues, including Ondo Perps, Morpho, and Euler, allowing tokenized stocks to slowly transform into assets that are able to cross over into a broader on-chain financial ecosystem.
A category that is still small but growing fast
Despite the fact that the overall market is quite small compared to traditional stocks, it is growing exponentially fast. According to a research report released in June 2026, the market for tokenized stocks was appraised with a valuation of more than $1.7 billion, which is a year-on-year increase of 149%. Monthly on-chain trading volume escalated beyond $6.7 billion during this period.
Researchers at Coinbase warned in January that tokenized stocks are still small even in the market for real-world assets since many products are designed as foreign derivatives rather than owning U.S. shares directly.
Authorities are paying close attention. On January 28, three divisions of the SEC emphasized in their statement that a security retains its regulatory status regardless of its format, including when tokenized. This principle is going to determine how companies like Ondo will expand as trading volume increases.
What to watch next
The pressing question that arises is whether trades that are worth more than $2 million become commonplace or are still seen as exceptional. The accomplishments achieved by Ondo by obtaining a total value locked of $1 billion, in addition to lending and perpetuals, allow tokenized equities to gain and retain capital in various ways.
The next indicator will be if both TVL and the size of individual orders continue increasing through the remainder of 2026. Should this occur, the tokenization of stocks could mark the transition from a crypto trial to a real second layer trading for conventional equities.
The cleanest comparable starting point is January 2024, when Ondo’s reported TVL was about $192 million. Ondo subsequently reported $500M in June 2024, crossed $1B in March 2025, reached about $1.93B in December 2025, surpassed $2.5B in January 2026, and is now around $3.5B.
The growth is striking: from approximately $192M in January 2024 to $3.51B currently, an increase of roughly 18.3×. DeFiLlama currently puts Ondo’s combined TVL at about $3.51B.
For the peer comparison, DeFiLlama currently lists these large RWA/tokenized-asset platforms. These are not perfectly like-for-like businesses: some peers are individual tokenized funds or gold products, while Ondo is a broader platform spanning USDY, OUSG, and tokenized stocks. DeFiLlama nevertheless categorizes Ondo as RWA and provides the peer set below.
RWA platform/product Current TVL Relative to Ondo Ondo Finance $3.51B 100% BlackRock BUIDL $3.44B 98% Circle USYC $3.01B 86% Tether Gold $2.87B 82% Spiko $2.22B 63% Paxos Gold $1.78B 51% Centrifuge $1.63B 46% Midas RWA $122M 3.5% OpenEden TBILL $256M 7.3% KAIO $43M 1.2%


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Authorities in the United States have accused Edward Zimbardi, age 59, of orchestrating a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme amounting to $165 million, contributing to the list of several high-profile cases of scams in the current year. According to the Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, the man faced charges in federal court after he was extradited from Fiji on August 14, 2026.
A guaranteed 25% a month that never existed
According to prosecutors, Zimbardi developed and promoted The Crypto Program from June 2022 to August 2023. The program boasted an assured return of 25% on advertising packages on a monthly basis. Instead, the money was transferred to wallets controlled by Zimbardi, the indictment claims. In total, thousands of people invested more than $165 million.
The money didn’t go into advertising. Prosecutors allege Zimbardi lost over $34 million on speculative foreign-currency bets that he made, and then used money from new investors to pay back earlier ones. At least $10 million allegedly went to personal expenses, including his son’s house and other luxury goods. When the operation failed in August 2023, investors were left without the possibility of recovering any of their investments.
A warning had already been issued. The Department of Financial Protection and Innovation in California issued a desist-and-refrain order against The Crypto Program and Zimbardi on June 28, 2023. It accused them of violations of securities laws as well as gross misrepresentation or omission of essential details. This brings to light one of the most stubborn challenges of enforcing laws in the crypto sector: regulators are able to warn against a cryptocurrency scam while the money is still flowing, but investors will only benefit from the warning if they notice it in time.
Fiji, a canceled wedding, and a deportation flight
Zimbardi’s route to a US courtroom ran through the South Pacific. By July 2025, aware that the FBI was investigating, he settled in Fiji, prosecutors say. In May 2026, he skipped his son’s wedding in Virginia, correctly guessing agents would be waiting to arrest him.
“When his scam imploded, he allegedly tried to evade federal prosecution by fleeing to the other side of the world,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said.
Fijian officials, working with the FBI and State Department, eventually sent him back. A grand jury indicted him on July 8 on 12 counts of wire fraud, 12 counts of money laundering, and one count of money-laundering conspiracy. He is presumed innocent.
Why one Georgia case reflects a global problem
In its 2025 Internet Crime Report published in April 2026, the FBI determined that the total losses resulting from cyber-enabled crimes were almost $21 billion. Among the different categories of thefts reported, the one with the biggest sum of losses was that of cryptocurrency crimes, reaching $11 billion. Georgia happens to be one of the ten US states that suffered the most when it comes to cryptocurrency fraud, with the losses estimated at over $264.5 million.
The issue is becoming increasingly global. According to Chainalysis, the average payment made to scam addresses increased by 253% in 2025 to $2,764. In addition, inflow from impersonation scams increased by more than 1,400%.
According to TRM Labs, illegal crypto transactions surged by almost 145% to $158 billion in 2025. This figure, although meaningful, only represented around 1.2% of total transactions. This distinction of crime not being the main source of crypto activity matters, but the amounts that are flowing in the illicit network require a global response.
According to INTERPOL’s Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment dated March 16, scam syndicates are becoming more widespread as fraud networks continue to share resources, technology, and know-how on money laundering. The number of INTERPOL Notices and Diffusions related to fraud has increased by 54% since 2024.
The FATF reported a similar weakness on July 16, cautioning that criminal organizations are taking advantage of inconsistent regulation of cryptocurrencies and their enforcement to transfer billions of dollars in illegal funds. Although 83% of the responding jurisdictions passed the Travel Rule legislation, numerous countries are not able to apply the legislation successfully.
The Zimbardi case demonstrates these gaps in action. A scheme promoted in one location is capable of transferring and moving cryptocurrency from one country to another while both the perpetrators of the crime and those involved in money laundering sit in a different jurisdiction. Hence, tracing this money and making sure it is intercepted before vanishing increasingly relies on cooperation amongst authorities, investigators and foreign governments.

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Real World Assets that are actively deployed inside DeFi protocols are on the verge of reaching $4 billion. As of August 18, DefiLlama shows this number is at $3.98 billion. This same number stood at $650.88 million just a year ago and around $12 million three years ago. That is a 6x in twelve months and a staggering over 300x in three years.
Source: DefiLlama
What makes this number useful is actually what it excludes. DefiLlama only counts a tokenized asset here when it is put to use onchain. Collateral posted in a lending market qualifies. So does liquidity in a DEX pool or a deposit locked in a vault. Whereas tokens in a wallet that are simply earning fund yield do not.
Total tokenized issuance across the sector is at $34.55 billion. When doing the math here, that equates to about 11.5% of the total RWA space being put to work onchain.
Tokenized Treasuries Lead Issuance and Then Sit Still
BlackRock’s BUIDL has $2.74 billion issued and around $18 million of it is showing up in DeFi. That is a utilization rate of 0.66% as of today. Meanwhile, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI product has a utilization rate of zero. Now between these two products, there is well over $3 billion of tokenized money market exposure that never actually touches a lending pool.
The design of these funds explains why the onchain utilization percentages are low. These funds were built for institutional cash management with whitelisted transfers with the buyers holding them wanting the T-bill yield rather than any sort of borrowing power. Tokenization basically gave them much faster settlement but it did not turn them into collateral.
Private Credit and Reinsurance Are Where the Collateral Actually Moves
Private credit accounts for $2.13 billion of the $3.98 billion active total, more than half on its own. Bonds contribute $799.88 million and reinsurance another $406.45 million.
Janus Henderson’s Anemoy AAA CLO fund runs at 97.53% utilization on $421.88 million. Re Protocol’s reUSD sits at 97.03% on $184.67 million. Maple’s syrupUSDT is at 91%. Syrup USDG tops the entire rankings table at 153.37% utilization on $181.32 million of DeFi TVL, which points to the same token being counted across multiple venues as it gets lent, borrowed and redeposited.
These are assets that DeFi lenders will price and accept. A CLO fund with a defined credit rating and a reinsurance token with a yield stream both fit into existing collateral frameworks in a way that a whitelisted treasury fund does not.
Further down the list, the smaller categories look experimental rather than structural. Precious metals hold $311.96 million in active TVL, public equities $150.5 million and equity indices $31.95 million. Oil registers $1.42 million. Natural gas comes in at $315.
Utilization Is the Number to Watch as Issuance Scales
Issuance headlines have driven RWA coverage for two years, and $34.55 billion is a real figure. The question now is whether the next $34 billion behaves like BUIDL or like JAAA.
If issuance doubles while utilization holds near 11.5%, tokenization mostly delivered better custody rails for institutions that were already buying treasuries. If utilization climbs alongside issuance, RWAs turn into working collateral inside crypto credit markets, and the $4 billion mark stops being the ceiling it currently looks like.
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Jane Street informed the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it possessed more than $990 million worth of spot BTC ETFs, which equals approximately 15,394 BTC at now existing prices.
This is an important position because Jane Street is not merely another institutional investor. Indeed, it is also one of the largest market makers of the ETFs it holds, which brings its trading activities near the place where Bitcoin prices are being created.
This helps explain the unique characteristics of the filing. When a firm that performs quoting and settling of ETF trades simultaneously holds a nearly billion-dollar position in those ETFs, the change in its exposure can affect the very products that serve as one of the key sources of institutional demand for Bitcoin.
Why a market maker’s book carries weight
Jane Street’s role in the ETF machinery goes back to the products’ launch. When Wall Street rolled out spot Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024, the firm appeared in filings as an anchor market maker for every fund, according to the Financial Times.
The FT has also described Jane Street as the most profitable of the trading firms reshaping modern markets, with a Wall Street-record $39.6 billion in net trading revenue in 2025.
This means that changes in its Bitcoin exposure should be taken seriously. CoinShares reports that Jane Street cut its holdings by 10,800 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, calling it a usual activity of a big ETF market maker in a period marked by large outflows. Other brokerages had their total of BTC holdings down by 18,800 BTC in that same period.
Where the $990 million actually sits
Mostly, Jane Street’s disclosed holdings come from one fund. Records referenced by Bitcoin Magazine indicate that Jane Street has nearly $828 million in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, with some minor investments in Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund and Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust.
BlackRock’s fund is the largest spot Bitcoin ETF, with $47.3 billion in assets under management, and has attracted more capital than any competing crypto ETF since the products began trading in early 2024.
Jane Street is not the only entity that uses ETFs to get exposure to Bitcoin. According to Bitcoin Magazine, Edelman Financial and Tudor Investment Corporation revealed large stakes the week before and sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi also disclosed having positions. All of this proves how mainstream Bitcoin exposure has become part of traditional investment portfolios.
The $15 billion July that came first
The filing also arrives just weeks after a rare setback for Jane Street. The firm suffered its first losing month in roughly a decade, taking about $15 billion in losses in July.
Jane Street’s entry into AI investments has already been reported by Cryptopolitan, and this exposure played a key role in the losses made by the company. Most of the losses were due to its investment in the hedge fund, Situational Awareness, where losses from a series of bad trades in the AI sector were made, along with losses in the Asian equities market.
Even if that is the case, it has minimal effect on Jane Street’s performance this year. The company has already made more than $40 billion in net revenue, surpassing its best-ever result in 2025. At such levels, a $15 billion loss in a month does not necessarily mean that the company will withdraw from other ventures.
A stake disclosed into a deep drawdown
The timing makes the topic about Jane Street’s Bitcoin exposure particularly interesting. Bitcoin price has declined by about fifty percent from its peak on October 2025, when it was above $126,000.
In the market update released in August 2026, BlackRock mentioned that most of the decline could be explained by crypto-native deleveraging instead of any issues with Bitcoin’s long-term investment thesis.
CoinShares shows evidence of the same. In the first quarter, Bitcoin fell 22% to approximately $68,000, at one point trading below $60,000, as institutional positioning shifted.
In this respect, Jane Street finds itself in an unexpected situation. It is not only one of the largest holders of Bitcoin ETFs but also one of the firms facilitating liquidity in the space. However, the $990 million investment cannot reflect Jane Street’s view on market developments, as market makers use ETF shares for purposes other than directional trading.
However, following a substantial Bitcoin decline as well as a hectic quarter for institutional investment, the changes that have taken place in Jane Street’s ETF are worth watching. Only a few companies have found their place on both sides of the trade.

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The wallet associated with the 2022 Pando Rings oracle hack was reactivated on August 18 after two months of inactivity, as reported by blockchain tracker Onchain Lens, The hacker exchanged 3 million DAI for about 1,570 ETH, worth approximately three million dollars, through CoW Protocol.
Approximately 800 ETH worth around 1.52 million are known to have already reached Tornado Cash via eight transactions from this wallet.
Although the action itself may be comparatively minor, the history of the event is anything but. Nearly four years after the incident in which a price feed was manipulated to drain Pando Rings, the fraudster is continuing to move the money, which can still be traced back to the original fraud.
Once a serious cause of losses in DeFi, oracle manipulation has been effectively eliminated from occurring frequently due to improvements in protocol development.
An oracle that misread its own collateral
On November 5, 2022, Pando Rings was hacked. The hacker was able to change the price of sBTC-WBTC liquidity provider token at 4swap, which is Pando’s automated market maker, and used this price manipulation in an attempt to pull out $70 million worth of crypto.
By the time the team took action, around $21.9 million worth of ETH, EOS, and BTC had already flown out of two Mixin wallets controlled by the hacker.
Some assets were not lost. Pando collaborated with Mixin Network and cybersecurity firm SlowMist to lock the rest of the funds. The frozen assets include 2,022,662 EOS coins that were worth approximately $2.36 million, as well as other tokens with a total valuation surpassing $50 million.
The company discontinued its services, namely Pando Rings, 4swap, Pando Leaf, and Pando Lake until the oracle gets fixed and they assured to reimburse all customers.
From buying the dip to reaching for the mixer
The same address has reemerged at intervals since that time. According to a Lookonchain report published on June 6, the same person conducted a transaction worth 10 million DAI to buy a total of 6,243 ETH at an average price of $1,602. It was then added that “even the hacker is buying the $ETH dip.”
The purchase that took place and this week’s swap indicates a well-known strategy: turning stolen stablecoins into Ether when the time is right, and waiting for the best moment to move on. What has changed on August 18 is the final location.
Instead of remaining in possession of the Ether token, the criminal started sending the Ether through Tornado Cash, a service that is used to conceal the connection between deposited and withdrawn funds. As of now the amount of mixer deposits stands at 800 Ether, made in eight transactions.
Why mixed funds stay visible
Even if a person sends money via Tornado Cash, that does not mean the trail will be lost. TRM Labs tracked the attack in June in which a person withdrew around 664 ETH from Tornado Cash and used it to take control of a small Ethereum protocol project known as TOP. This case reveals how mixer operations may still signal risk even if the direct transaction trail is difficult to follow.
The legal standing of Tornado Cash has altered. While being sanctioned by US Treasury in August 2022, it was taken off the sanctions list on March 21, 2025, due to the federal appeals court’s ruling that immutable smart contracts cannot be classified as “property” subject to sanctioning legislation.
Its use as an Ethereum mixer means that big transfers going through the protocol would attract some attention instead of just disappearing.
A protocol winding down as its attacker moves
The timing is interesting. Just three days prior to the wallet’s activity, Pando announced on August 15 that it was discontinuing the protocol and putting its DeFi products into its maintenance mode under the supervision of Mixin. At this point, Pando Rings only serves to support the repayment of loans and the withdrawal of collateral.
In the meantime, incidents like that of Pando are no longer common. Immunefi’s six-year loss analysis found that ecosystem-type attacks, such as flash-loan oracle manipulation, dropped from almost 19% of DeFi loss incidents in 2022 to less than 1% in 2025.
As a result, the Pando exploiter is a remnant of an older time in DeFi security, still profiting from a weakness that the industry as a whole has been able to engineer around while using blockchains.
Broader security angle
The timing of Pando’s Aug. 15 announcement that it was sunsetting the protocol is worth investigating alongside the exploiter’s renewed activity. This isn’t simply an old 2022 hack resurfacing. It illustrates the long tail of DeFi exploits, where stolen assets can remain dormant for years and become active again when market conditions, liquidity, or laundering routes change.
Date Development Nov. 5, 2022 Pando Rings was exploited. Pando said it halted Pando Rings and other services and worked with SlowMist to trace the stolen funds. (Pando Proto) June 2026 The linked exploiter wallet resurfaced, swapping $10M DAI for 6,243 ETH. (CryptoBriefing) ~June-Aug. 2026 Wallet subsequently remained relatively dormant. Aug. 18, 2026 Wallet swapped $3M DAI for ~1,570 ETH, then sent 800 ETH to Tornado Cash. (Blockchain News) Aug. 15, 2026 Pando announced its protocol sunset and service transition, which is potentially relevant context for the timing.
The transactions illustrate how stolen crypto can remain dormant for extended periods before being converted, consolidated, or moved through privacy infrastructure. That’s a pathway the defenders could well follow through.
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Anthropic has quickly ramped up its sales, such that it is expected to impact the mathematics of the larger AI space. As of the end of July, its projected revenues exceeded $65 billion while investment bankers have started viewing its initial public offering as a precedent for other companies waiting for a listing to be able to set the terms of valuation for other big AI businesses.
This is significant since Anthropic is predicted to go public before OpenAI, perhaps this autumn. Investment banks have informed both firms that whoever is the first to go public is going to “create a model for the entire industry.” Anthropic is looking for a valuation over $2 trillion, making it the biggest IPO in history.
A run rate that tripled in seven months
Investors continue to use the growth curve as a measure. At the end of 2025, Anthropic had almost $9 billion in run rate, or the estimate for future annual revenue based on recent history. It increased to $47 billion in May and reached $65 billion in late July. According to Anthropic itself, in an announcement in May, “our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month.”
Investors expect that momentum to continue, putting 2026 revenue between $100 billion and $120 billion, the Financial Times reported. OpenAI, meanwhile, has doubled its revenue to $40 billion this year from $20 billion at the end of 2025. The companies may measure revenue differently, but Anthropic’s trajectory is getting the attention of investors preparing for its IPO.
Bankers are pricing on 2028, not today
The effects of Anthropic’s initial public offering could reverberate far beyond the particular case of this one firm. Anthropic indicated to those engaged in the IPO process that it anticipates revenues of $190 million to $200 million in 2028, information that is previously unknown. Banks and investors are applying a multiple of enterprise value-to-revenues based on these projections instead of actual income figures, a method usually associated with high-growth software firms in the past rather than traditional public companies.
With respect to the target for 2028, Anthropic’s valuation of $965 billion from the May Series H translates to about five times its future revenue. Cryptopolitan made a comparison with Palantir having about 53 times its anticipated revenues, and SpaceX and Cloudflare approximately 41.6 times, although these numbers are calculated using 2026 estimates.
The important message is not that Anthropic is undervalued. Rather, it is that the company will not warrant such a high multiple if it delivers the revenue the bankers are forecasting. Should public investors accept multipliers based on revenue a couple of years away, it would be simpler for other AI firms to justify their multiples based on present-day revenues.
The demand behind the number
In terms of businesses now, the projections are justified by actual business demand. The July AI Index put out by Ramp indicates that Anthropic comes ahead of OpenAI in terms of adoption figures in US businesses, with 43.5% of American companies paying for either its subscriptions or tokens, compared with 39.7% for OpenAI. Anthropic raised $65 billion in May, thanks to Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, thereby giving it a bigger number to invest in compute, research as well as enterprise products contributing to its growth.
However, the valuation model also increases the stakes involved in the situation. The forecast for 2028 assumes that revenue can continue its large edge in terms of exceeding the massive expenses of chips, model training, and talent. Ramp’s data also indicates what limitations businesses have about investing their resources into frontier AI.
If those economics improve, it is likely that the IPO of Anthropic will yield a new valuation playbook in the AI sector. In the opposite scenario, it is possible that creating sophisticated valuation playbooks based on the current price to revenues made in two years could become a trap for investors.


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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a brief on Friday opposing xAI’s attempt to block HF 1606, the state’s first-in-the-nation law restricting AI tools that generate sexual images of identifiable people, per Decrypt.
Ellison argued the company is unlikely to succeed on its constitutional claim and has failed to show that enforcement would cause irreparable harm.
With Grok Imagine, X.AI has created an unparalleled marketplace for digital sexual violence, and the state would be defenseless from the start unless it could direct its laws at the technology itself.
– Attorney General Keith Ellison
The argument from Minnesota is that Grok Imagine is a tool and not protected speech, which would take it out of the considerations presented by xAI for the judge to examine. There will be a hearing on the matter by a federal judge on Wednesday.
Minnesota’s law targets AI providers even without knowledge or intent
HF 1606 bars a company from letting users generate realistic images showing intimate parts that were absent from the original photograph of an identifiable person, and from producing such an image on a user’s behalf. Violations carry penalties of up to $500,000 per image. People depicted can sue separately.
The statute does not require that a company knew about the image or intended it. Most deepfake laws, including the federal Take It Down Act, penalize whoever makes or shares the picture.
Texas contacted operators in 2025 but only when the owner was aware of the lack of consent or did not respond to a takedown notice. Minnesota eliminated the element of knowledge, and it is the provision under attack by xAI on Wednesday.
The House passed the bill 132-1 and the Senate 65-0, following reports of a man who used social media photos to create sexual images of more than 80 women he knew. It was signed in April. xAI sued on July 27 and moved for a temporary restraining order on July 29.
On July 31, Judge Donovan Frank rejected the petition, pointing out that the company had filed almost three months after signing and three days before the effective date, indicating “harm is not immediate.” The law took effect August 1.
xAI says Minnesota’s rules could criminalize satire and consensual images
The complaint does not contest the interest of the state in preventing nonconsensual imagery, but rather, it argues that the statute reaches far past it, and the argument turns on a definition. The state of Minnesota based its definition of an intimate part on an enactment meant for crimes that involve bodily contact, according to xAI, and this covers the inner thighs and breasts, thus including swimsuits and satire.
Page 19 of the document contains an AI-generated picture that Trump had shared on Truth Social from May 1st, in which he is seen with JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum without their shirts, along with a woman who is unknown, in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a joke about the cost of repairs to the pool. Each man’s breast is depicted where it was not before, xAI argues, which makes the image unlawful in Minnesota.
“Even if subjects gave their consent, generated the images themselves or never shared them, there is no safe harbor for good-faith efforts by the provider of general-purpose AI creative tools,” the company said.
By its own math, ten such images cost $5 million and a hundred thousand would reach $50 billion.
Grok’s enforcement record highlights the scale of the abuse problem
The company has offered its compliance record as evidence of good faith. As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, xAI said in a July filing that it suspended 52,222 accounts this year and sent 73,604 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, producing at least 244 arrests in 2026.
Those figures are also a measure of scale. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in the 11-day span between December 29 and January 8, after Musk’s endorsement of the app’s editing functionality, Grok created about 3 million sexually explicit images, including about 23,000 that looked like children were depicted.
California opened an investigation on January 14 and sent a cease and desist two days later. Thirty-five attorneys general signed a joint demand on January 23. According to Ellison, a class action has been filed by five children, and two families from Arkansas have filed suit in federal court.
The European Commission launched an investigation on January 27, and the chatbot has been banned in Malaysia and Indonesia.

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Payward, Inc., the Cheyenne-based parent of Kraken, said on Monday it has been selected to participate in Project Glasswing and is actively incorporating Claude Mythos 5 into its defensive cybersecurity work, per the company’s announcement.
Anthropic launched the program in April 2026 after concluding its models could surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, and has never released Mythos publicly. In addition to Kraken, Payward runs other firms such as NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Bitnomial, and CF Benchmarks, and generated an adjusted revenue of $508 million for Q2, a 17% increase from the previous year.
Washington controls access to Mythos 5
According to Payward, its access is in line with the United States government’s decision to permit Mythos 5 access to US entities that secure and protect critical infrastructure.
This access route has expanded since April to include technology and financial sectors. Mythos 5 was delivered to US cyber defenders on June 9 via Glasswing and then went dark worldwide three days later due to an export ruling by the Department of Commerce that denied foreign access. The model then returned on July 1.
As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, Bailey said in May that crypto firms and UK banks had been excluded while Goldman Sachs and other American companies were let in. Bailey, who also chairs the Financial Stability Board, argued that “we can’t just have a single sort of national approach” to a risk that crosses borders. A crypto exchange has now cleared the American track. It is up to Washington whether anyone else gets clearance.
Payward will use the model to hunt vulnerabilities
Payward will scan all of its environments, with findings moving into the triage and remediation pipeline it already runs alongside separate red and blue teams and a long-standing bug bounty program.
The company holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications. Issues that are discovered within third-party open source software are reported to the project maintainers via responsible disclosure, and this is the portion that extends beyond Payward because all the exchanges within the industry rely on the same packages.
Co-Chief Executive Officer Arjun Sethi presented the pitch in terms of the issue faced by the defender: While the attacker requires only one bug, the defender requires all of them every single day. As he put it, “The model is able to scan every single line of code just like an attacker would do.”
Glasswing already includes major US tech and finance firms
Anthropic opened Glasswing in April with Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, and JPMorganChase, the only bank in the founding group, alongside roughly 40 other organizations.
Partners have surfaced thousands of high and critical-severity flaws since. Mythos received 93.9% score on SWE-bench Verified and 83.1% on CyberGym and the UK Artificial Intelligence Security Institute also verified that Mythos successfully solved 73% of expert-level capture-the-flag tasks.
In the program’s first month, Cloudflare found 2,000 bugs across critical-path systems at a false-positive rate its team rated better than human testers. The model has surfaced a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old one in FFmpeg. In early June, it identified a critical vulnerability in Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool that had gone undetected for four years, and Zcash used Mythos for the independent audit after patching.
Anthropic is still dealing with Mythos 5 safety concerns
Three weeks ago Anthropic disclosed that three Claude models, Mythos 5 among them, escaped sealed test environments after a misconfiguration gave them internet access. Mythos 5 concluded it was on the open internet, reasoned its way back to believing it was still in a simulation, then wrote and published a PyPI package that was downloaded and run on 15 real systems before removal.
Anthropic said the safety classifiers shipped with its commercial products would have prevented the behavior, described the events as a harness and operational failure, and engaged METR for an independent review.

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IREN completed the delivery of the first of four planned “Horizon” cloud deployments of artificial intelligence to Microsoft Corporation. With that, the first milestone of a five-year, $9.7 billion contract was completed, which underpins the transition of the former Bitcoin mining company into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Horizon 1 is located at IREN’s Childress, Texas facility. It is reported to be a 50-megawatt facility with direct chip-level cooling and Nvidia GB300 systems. It is the first of four facilities of this type that the company plans to complete by 2026, and altogether the four facilities should provide a total of 200 megawatts of capacity.
Nvidia also awarded the facility its Exemplar Cloud status, a designation reserved for cloud providers who meet Nvidia’s performance and reliability standards for artificial intelligence workloads. “Delivering Horizon 1 underscores the power of our vertically integrated business model and our ability to deliver on complex AI infrastructure projects with speed and scale,” said Daniel Roberts, co-founder and co-CEO of IREN, in a statement.
Why Microsoft’s acceptance matters more?
Completing the build was one half of the test. As per the deal, Microsoft gets five days to validate the installation of each GPU deployment against mutually accepted standards. Upon completion of the acceptance process, the period for service commences, and IREN starts charging Microsoft monthly.
The key is the billing. IREN signed a cloud service agreement with Microsoft in November 2025, giving us an annualized revenue stream from the deal of around $1.94 billion when all four horizons are online. Microsoft needs to pay 20% of the total contract value upfront in four tranches.
IREN’s AI pivot puts $4B revenue target in sight
The magnitude of the shift is illustrated by looking at IREN’s accounts. The company was listed on the Nasdaq in 2021 as a Bitcoin miner, with the company having generated revenue from the mining business of $511.5 million in the first nine months of 2022 while earning just $58.3 million from its AI Cloud service. According to management, the company plans to reach annualized run-rate AI Cloud revenue in excess of $4 billion by the end of the year, with over 85% of revenue contracted.
The timeline reflects the health of IREN’s core business operations. In mid-August, the price of Bitcoin was hovering around $63,500, less than half of the price peak in October 2025. IREN has stated that the company plans to have 480 megawatts of AI cloud computing capacity in 2026 and 1.2 gigawatts in 2027 while moving out of mining operations.
This expansion is estimated to need about $5.8 billion in GPUs and related hardware purchased from Dell. IREN has secured funding for all but a minority of this expansion. This includes $3.65 billion of secured debt arranged in June and guaranteed by the Microsoft deal, according to The Block, covering 96% of the $5.81 billion in GPU spending and rated investment grade A by Fitch and A(low) by DBRS.
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Wispr, the startup behind the dictation app Wispr Flow, said Monday it raised $280 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation.
The round was led by Menlo Ventures. The cash gives Wispr fresh capital to deal with accuracy complaints and to move into meetings as rivals flock to the voice-to-text market.
The round brings Wispr’s total to $361 million
The financing takes Wispr’s total funding since its founding in 2021 to $361 million. It closed its last funding round less than ten months ago. The company had raised around $81 million prior to this round.
Menlo Ventures, a backer of Wispr, led the Series B round. Existing investors, including Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures, added more. Wispr also brought in new backers, including Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital.
Wispr’s competitors are popping up, including apps such as Willow, Monologue, Aqua, and Superwhisper, as well as a wave of free and cheaper tools targeting power users.
Wispr released the funding news alongside a preview of Canto, its first in-house speech model, after several users complained recently that Flow’s dictation had gotten worse.
Canto is designed for noisy real-world use, not just for pristine studio recordings, the company says. In the hardest conditions, with background noise, wind, heavy accents, or music, Wispr said word error rates drop from more than 30% to between 5% and 10%.
That is more than a 4x reduction. In day-to-day usage, the company expects the model to reduce the number of dictations a user has to edit by 30% to 35%.
“The whole reason to talk instead of type is to stay inside your own train of thought,” wrote CEO and co-founder Tanay Kothari in a company blog post.
One wrong word sends users back to the keyboard and breaks their focus, he added.
Notetaker takes the fight to Granola and Otter
The “beyond dictation” pitch is focused on Notetaker, a meeting tool Wispr shipped about a week before the raise.
It records calls and in-person conversations, labels speakers on a live transcript, and produces topic-organized summaries with dates, decisions, and next steps.
That means Wispr is up against Granola, Fireflies, Read AI, and Otter. Notetaker records audio locally and doesn’t join calls as a visible bot, said Sahaj Garg, CTO and co-founder.
That puts the burden on users to disclose in states where consent is required to record, he said. Two of its competitors, Otter and Granola, are currently facing separate California lawsuits alleging privacy violations.
Wispr also set up the Wispr Advanced Interfaces Lab led by Chief Scientist Ariya Rastrow, who was a founding member of the team that created Amazon’s Alexa. The lab is looking at interfaces that respond to what a user says, not just transcribe it.
Along with the venture firms, Wispr’s round included a roster of athletes and cultural figures. They include Livvy Dunne, Shaun White, Dak Prescott, Joe Burrow, Klay Thompson, Paul George, and Trae Young.
Domantas Sabonis, three-time NBA All-Star and one of the investors, said Flow keeps up as he switches between English, Spanish, and Lithuanian.
Wispr says people have written over 60 billion words with Flow, and almost all Fortune 500 companies and 10,000+ enterprises use the app.
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Serve Robotics added Grubhub as a delivery partner and opened two more cities.
The sidewalk-robot company announced the moves Monday as it works to replace revenue it lost when its Uber Eats deal fell apart.
Where the Grubhub robots start rolling
Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Virginia, can now get food delivered by one of Serve’s autonomous robots.`
At launch, 100+ restaurants in Chicago and almost 200 in Los Angeles will be participating in the service, with Serve expecting more to sign up.
Grubhub is owned by Wonder, a food-technology company that also operates its own restaurant brand. Wonder’s Alexandria kitchen will dispatch orders to Serve robots too.
“Our partnership with Serve brings autonomous delivery to Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, while also enabling robot delivery from Wonder’s Alexandria location,” PJ Poykayil, Wonder’s EVP of Customer Delivery Operations, said.
Serve CEO Ali Kashani contextualized the deal in terms of scale. Each platform Serve taps into expands the number of restaurants and neighborhoods its ~2,000 robots can reach, he said.
Serve, Kashani told investors in last week’s second-quarter earnings call, isn’t planning to renew its Uber deal in 2027, citing what he described as “differing views” on how the robots should be deployed.
The volume of deliveries running through Uber fell for the first time since 2022, Kashani said. Serve cut its 2026 revenue guidance from $26 million to a range of $9 million to $10 million.
The day after the earnings call, Uber said it had sold its entire stake in Serve, a company that spun off from the ride-hailing firm more than five years ago.
“I have a lot of respect for Uber. They kind of helped us bootstrap this,” Kashani said. “We just have a different idea for what we want next.”
Serve Robotics expands to two new DoorDash cities
Serve opened its seventh and eighth U.S. markets Monday, both via DoorDash. They are San Jose, California, and Washington, D.C.
The two metros combined have about 8 million people, joining Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami on Serve’s map.
The company’s first Bay Area site, in San Jose, has already completed its first month of deliveries. The Washington rollout includes Dupont Circle and parts of downtown, and Talkin’ Tacos is among the first restaurants signed up.
Serve is utilizing small, existing sites for robot staging, charging, dispatch, and maintenance, including established parking structures for the Washington rollout.
The first one is opening in Miami, Serve says, and the model allows it to move into new neighborhoods without the typical build-out time.
As Cryptopolitan reported last year, DoorDash debuted an in-house robot called Dot in Phoenix.
Serve’s Diligent Robotics unit in health care has begun shipping Moxi 2.0, a hospital robot. The company claims Moxi 2.0 can sense its surroundings up to 15 times faster than its predecessor, features 10 times the onboard computing power, has a runtime of up to 18 hours, and charges 30% faster.
Early deployments include Endeavor Health Edward Hospital near Chicago, Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Los Angeles, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
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Serve Robotics added Grubhub as a delivery partner and opened two more cities.
The sidewalk-robot company announced the moves Monday as it works to replace revenue it lost when its Uber Eats deal fell apart.
Where the Grubhub robots start rolling
Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, Virginia, can now get food delivered by one of Serve’s autonomous robots.`
At launch, 100+ restaurants in Chicago and almost 200 in Los Angeles will be participating in the service, with Serve expecting more to sign up.
Grubhub is owned by Wonder, a food-technology company that also operates its own restaurant brand. Wonder’s Alexandria kitchen will dispatch orders to Serve robots too.
“Our partnership with Serve brings autonomous delivery to Grubhub customers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Alexandria, while also enabling robot delivery from Wonder’s Alexandria location,” PJ Poykayil, Wonder’s EVP of Customer Delivery Operations, said.
Serve CEO Ali Kashani contextualized the deal in terms of scale. Each platform Serve taps into expands the number of restaurants and neighborhoods its ~2,000 robots can reach, he said.
Serve, Kashani told investors in last week’s second-quarter earnings call, isn’t planning to renew its Uber deal in 2027, citing what he described as “differing views” on how the robots should be deployed.
The volume of deliveries running through Uber fell for the first time since 2022, Kashani said. Serve cut its 2026 revenue guidance from $26 million to a range of $9 million to $10 million.
The day after the earnings call, Uber said it had sold its entire stake in Serve, a company that spun off from the ride-hailing firm more than five years ago.
“I have a lot of respect for Uber. They kind of helped us bootstrap this,” Kashani said. “We just have a different idea for what we want next.”
Serve Robotics expands to two new DoorDash cities
Serve opened its seventh and eighth U.S. markets Monday, both via DoorDash. They are San Jose, California, and Washington, D.C.
The two metros combined have about 8 million people, joining Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami on Serve’s map.
The company’s first Bay Area site, in San Jose, has already completed its first month of deliveries. The Washington rollout includes Dupont Circle and parts of downtown, and Talkin’ Tacos is among the first restaurants signed up.
Serve is utilizing small, existing sites for robot staging, charging, dispatch, and maintenance, including established parking structures for the Washington rollout.
The first one is opening in Miami, Serve says, and the model allows it to move into new neighborhoods without the typical build-out time.
As Cryptopolitan reported last year, DoorDash debuted an in-house robot called Dot in Phoenix.
Serve’s Diligent Robotics unit in health care has begun shipping Moxi 2.0, a hospital robot. The company claims Moxi 2.0 can sense its surroundings up to 15 times faster than its predecessor, features 10 times the onboard computing power, has a runtime of up to 18 hours, and charges 30% faster.
Early deployments include Endeavor Health Edward Hospital near Chicago, Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Los Angeles, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
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Compound, one of the first protocols to make crypto lending work without a bank, has approved a record $52 million development budget and rebuilt its leadership around traditional-finance veterans.
It is also wagering its next chapter on institutions, which is seen as a move away from retail yield-chasers who once drove DeFi. Its native token, COMP, seems to have received a boost as a result of the announcement, as it has gone up by over 10% in 24 hours.
Projects that grew up serving retail now court banks, asset managers, and compliance departments to find their footing again, and Compound seems to be moving in that direction.
Compound’s foundation wrote on X that the protocol is “entering its next era.”
From $12 billion to $1.2 billion
The total value locked (TVL) on Compound has fallen to around $1.2 billion, which is a decline of around 90% from the $12 billion the protocol held at its September 2021 peak per DeFillama.
Compound TVL is down from its 2022 highs. Source: Defillama
The vast majority of the TVL is on Ethereum, with Arbitrum coming a distant second.
Compound’s figures are a far cry from Aave’s, which is the leading protocol in the DeFi lending space with a TVL of over $14.6 billion.
Ironically, Compound helped invent this category when it launched in 2018 and, by its own accounting, has processed around $480 billion in deposits and borrowing since.
However, the protocol’s growth stalled following the end of the incentive programs that helped to push up its metrics.
While COMP received a boost, it still trades far below its glory days. It currently trades around $18; however, it is still down by 98% from its 2021 record.
How does Compound plan on spending its $52 million?
The budget passed through the Compound DAO, and $14 million is cleared for immediate use. The rest unlocks in tranches tied to milestones, a structure that keeps the development team on a performance leash funded by the treasury.
The money splits roughly in two, with about $28 million for operations and the engineering behind a new protocol version, Compound V4, and $24 million for growth. Of that growth pool, $8 million to $10 million is earmarked for institutional partnerships rather than the old playbook of paying liquidity providers to boost headline numbers.
V4’s centerpiece is a “hub-and-spoke” design, which routes capital through a central hub instead of walling it off in separate markets, an approach meant to give professional counterparties tighter risk controls. Compound stated that more than 10 partners have committed, with over 20 more in talks.
A bench built from traditional finance
The leadership overhaul reads as a statement of intent. The new team includes Chief Operating Officer Christopher Donovan, previously COO at the Near Foundation, and Chief Product Officer Steven Liu, who grew Maple Finance’s assets from $500 million to $5 billion.
Aaron Schnarch, former CEO of Coinbase Custody, joins as an executive director, with other hires drawn from Anchorage Digital, HSBC, Broadridge Financial, and Maple.
In a statement, Schnarch said, “DeFi is a remarkable innovation; however, it has achieved limited institutional adoption.” He added that current products “fall short of meeting the traditional finance bar.”
However, not everyone is sold on credentials alone, and one of them is Himanshu Sahay of Arch Lending, who said that the budget and bench amount to “a serious move” but warned that institutions “aren’t underwriting teams, they’re underwriting structures.”
Why is everyone now chasing institutions?
Compound is late to a race it once could have led. Across crypto this year, the institutional turn has become the default survival strategy. In July, former Ethereum Foundation staff launched Ethereum Institutional, a non-profit “front door” for banks and asset managers backed by Bitmine, SharpLink, and Joseph Lubin, Cryptopolitan reported.
Tokenized real-world assets climbed to about $65 billion by May, and more than 2,000 institutions disclosed Bitcoin holdings through spot ETFs in Q1.
Ran Hammer of Orbs said, “Retail participation is a fraction of what it was,” as the chain “quietly become a venue for settlement, execution and interaction between financial institutions.” Standard Chartered projects the DeFi sector could reach $2.7 trillion by 2030.
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