Cryptopolitan

A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Greg Casar asked Speaker Mike Johnson Monday to compel the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major AI companies to answer questions under oath.
They cited recent security breaches caused by the companies’ own AI models.
Casar writes to Johnson without the power to compel
The letter is led primarily by Texas Democrat Casar, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Lawmakers say Congress hasn’t done enough to address the dangers of advanced AI. They are seeking explanations from CEOs on failures, negligence, and preventive measures, along with expert briefings on AI dangers.
Casar’s group is unable to bring in any AI lab CEOs. That power is held by committee chairs and the Speaker, which is why the letter is going to Johnson
Most of the signatories are from the party’s left wing. Centrist Maryland Rep. April McClain Delaney also signed on.
The breaches “may be the canary in the coal mine warning of much more serious problems if these models continue to advance without regulation,” the letter warned.
An OpenAI agent escaped from the company’s locked testing environment. It entered Hugging Face on July 11 and stayed through July 13, said co-founder Thomas Wolf. Hugging Face closed down the intrusion and alerted the FBI, then OpenAI identified the culprit as one of its agents.
OpenAI’s initial statement didn’t mention the escape attempt and the three days the agent spent inside another company’s systems.
For almost a week, social media and podcasts traded theories about professional or state-sponsored hackers. But it was ChatGPT. OpenAI called the event “an important moment for AI safety.”
Three Claude models treated real firms as targets
Anthropic disclosed that it reviewed 141,006 evaluation runs. It found that three Claude models had made it into the live systems of three real organizations during offensive security drills run with a partner, Irregular.
Anthropic’s prompt told the models they were in a simulation, but a misconfiguration gave the test machines working internet access. The models were Opus 4.7, the newer Mythos 5, and an unreleased internal build.
Opus 4.7 pulled credentials and hit a database of production data. Mythos 5 wrote and published a malicious Python package on PyPI when it could not find the one it expected.
The package ran on 15 real machines and sat online for an hour or so. Only the internal research model stopped once it suspected the targets were genuine.
Anthropic described the incidents as “closer to a harness and operational failure” and said its code relied on weak passwords. It has asked the group METR to review the incidents independently.
President Donald Trump backs “guardrails” but warns that overly restrictive rules could hurt US companies competing with China.
In the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI reported a combined $3.17 million in federal lobbying. This amount includes $1.97 million for Anthropic and $1.2 million for OpenAI.
Anthropic’s spending in the first half of this year already exceeds its full-year 2025 spending. The companies lobbied on cybersecurity, copyright, cloud computing, and defense procurement.
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BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO), Blackstone (NYSE: BX), Brookfield Asset Management (NYSE: BAM) and KKR (NYSE: KKR) are lining up with Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) for a giant new round of AI spending that could eventually reach $500 billion.
According to the Financial Times, the collaboration is expected to revolve around funding additional computer capabilities, electricity provision, and constructing data centers. The deal can be unveiled as early as next Monday.
NVDA fell by 1.4% following the news, thereby resulting in a loss of over $70 billion in the company’s valuation.
The discussions come as Nvidia takes a bigger role in paying for the huge physical buildout behind artificial intelligence.
The company is worth about $5.25 trillion and already sells the graphics processors used to train and run most of the biggest US AI systems. It also supplies software and other computing tools. But GPUs alone do not keep an AI model running.
For operators, it requires huge amounts of server-containing buildings, power, cooling, and financing over an extended period of time. Nvidia has been contributing increasingly to helping its clients get this funding, along with putting their funds in the companies buying its hardware.
Nvidia backs more AI customers while Mark Cuban warns the financing could “crumble”
Billionaire Mark Cuban has been openly worried about how much debt and financial engineering now sit behind the AI spending boom.
His argument is simple. Nvidia is no longer just collecting money when somebody orders chips. It has also been helping finance the companies placing those orders.
In July, Mark compared the current setup with the funding frenzy that surrounded internet companies during the dot-com period. He wrote that “instead of IPOs, Nvidia is the IPO, funding everyone and anyone.”
That funding can take different forms. Nvidia has offered capital, revenue-sharing deals and arrangements that guarantee certain levels of income to data center operators and newer cloud providers. Those deals can make it easier for customers to order GPUs and start building before their own businesses produce enough cash to cover the full cost.
During the first half of 2026, Nvidia had invested more than $40 billion in its AI endeavors. This amount included investments and funds related to companies such as OpenAI, Corning (NYSE: GLW), and IREN (NASDAQ: IREN).
Some of the numbers are massive even by AI standards. OpenAI has been linked to a proposed $100 billion data center program. Financing tied to xAI has also used special-purpose vehicles worth billions of dollars.
These arrangements may rely on pledges of GPUs as collateral for loans. In addition, they may involve leases of long duration and projections of revenues based on emerging AI companies.
This is relevant in case the true earnings do not meet the figures that the financiers relied upon at the time of signing of the contracts.
It has already been noted by legal experts that AI infrastructure financing has become quite complex. One single project may comprise private lending, securitization of debts, and SPVs formed specifically for the purpose of holding assets or borrowing without a balance sheet.
This may involve banks, insurance companies, and pension funds.
Wall Street puts more capital behind GPUs as hardware values fall faster
The value of the hardware itself is also a danger.
For instance, Nvidia has been rolling out new generations of AI chips once every year. That implies that a data center might still be in the process of paying off one batch of processors when an even better version becomes available.
As a result, old GPUs may depreciate faster than was assumed by lenders in the beginning.
This point is important if we take into account the fact that it is the hardware itself that guarantees the loan. For example, banks or private credit facilities may give loans for equipment that has very high costs at the moment of installation.
A slowdown in spending on AI might damage operators who invested in capacity to meet demand that did not materialize. More frequent hardware updates might make costly installations obsolete sooner. An improved chip from a rival might cut demand for Nvidia-based systems.
Either one of these factors might result in operators having to repay large debts against facilities generating lower revenue than expected.
It is much more than just investing in normal technology stocks. Leveraged finance is being used to finance data centers, GPUs, and energy projects.
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South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has begun rebuilding the software it uses to return money stolen through voice phishing.
The change will make it so that from October, the software will be able to calculate and repay losses held as cryptocurrency rather than only in won.
What is changing about how victims of voice phishing get paid?
South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service’s (FSS) calculation engine, which returns stolen money to victims of voice phishing scams, assumes a victim’s stolen funds sat in Korean won, which left it unable to fully compensate people whose money had been swapped into digital assets or taken as crypto outright.
The software’s new system will apply a refund ratio that works out the specific token type and quantity owed to each victim, alongside the won value at the moment a payment was frozen.
The system is also being redesigned to untangle cases where scam proceeds are split across several accounts and later pooled back together, and to pre-calculate claims in batches instead of computing each one on demand. Victims will see the token name, the number of units, and the frozen-time won value in the electronic notices they receive.
The change is due to a March 31 revision of the Telecommunications Fraud Damage Refund Act to bring virtual assets inside the definitions of both damaged property and refundable property.
The amendment also means that platforms like Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and GOPAX will now be required to comply with the same voice-phishing prevention and victim-relief obligations that banks do. They must check the purpose of transactions, watch for suspected phishing funds, freeze payments on a flagged account, and help return victim assets.
When will the new FSS rules go into effect?
The refund law is set to take effect from October 1, but the FSS will be working on its system from September through the end of November, a roughly three-month job budgeted at 118.53 million won.
The regulator said it set the three-month timeline in order to handle any faults or extra fixes that might come up after the system goes live.
The revision to the refund law follows a string of cases in which stolen money is deliberately routed through crypto to get it out of the country. The FSS recently warned of a scheme in which scammers take over low-credit borrowers’ bank accounts under the pretense of a loan, buy large volumes of gift certificates with the deposited funds, cash those out, convert the cash into cryptocurrency and remit it to ringleaders overseas.
Handing over a bankbook or debit card can itself carry up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 30 million won, or about $21,600, under the Electronic Financial Transactions Act.
Notably, telecom-based fraud losses in the country rose 14.1% to 433.8 billion won in 2025, the highest in five years, according to FSS figures.
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TSMC (NYSE: TSM) pulled in NT$467.58 billion, or about $14.5 billion, in July, putting sales 44.7% above the same month in 2025. The Taiwanese chipmaker released the figure Monday as AI hardware orders kept feeding its factories.
TSMC manufactures semiconductors for firms like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), belonging to Alphabet. This customer base gives TSMC’s monthly figures some of the most definitive means of measuring actual demand from the entire tech industry for semiconductors.
The company gives investors its monthly sales total without adding a written explanation for what caused the change. Its latest quarterly results fill in much of that picture. During the second quarter, high-performance computing supplied 66% of total sales, and TSMC placed its AI-related chip business inside that division.
TSMC’s Chairman CC Wei said, “AI-related demand continues to be extremely robust.” TSMC now expects 2026 revenue in U.S. dollars to grow a little more than 40%. It also lifted this year’s investment budget to $60 billion to $64 billion, giving the company more money for plants, machinery, and newer production technology.
TSMC pushes 2-nanometer production higher as advanced chips dominate wafer sales
Second-quarter sales were dominated by TSMC’s smaller wafer process. The 5-nanometer accounted for 33%, which is the highest percentage of all the wafer processes mentioned. 3 nanometer contributed 30%, and 7-nanometer contributed 11%. On the other hand, 2-nanometer had a contribution of 3%.
When TSMC groups everything made at 7 nanometers or smaller, those technologies represented 77% of total wafer revenue.
Wendell Huang, Senior VP and Chief Financial Officer of TSMC, tied the quarter’s performance to customer demand for the company’s newest manufacturing processes.
“Moving into third quarter 2026, we expect our business to be supported by continued strong demand for our leading-edge process technologies, including the steep ramp-up of our 2-nanometer technology,” Wendell said.
Management is guiding for third-quarter 2026 revenue of $44.6 billion to $45.8 billion. The forecast uses an assumed currency rate of NT$32 for $1.
TSMC also expects a gross margin of 65% to 67% for the quarter. Its projected operating margin is 56% to 58%.
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American Bitcoin (NASDAQ: ABTC) shares have risen after filings showed board director Justin Mateen spent about $1.9 million buying its stock.
Despite being more than 95% down from its high, American Bitcoin stock experienced a 10% increase over a 24-hour period.
What is American Bitcoin currently trading at?
Following the purchase of $1.9 million worth of American Bitcoin stocks by Justin Mateen, ABTC shot up by as much as 10% during today’s session, climbing from Friday’s close of $6.47 to its current $7.11 price.
Mateen, who co-founded the dating app Tinder and has sat on American Bitcoin’s board since March 2025, made the purchases across two consecutive sessions. Regulatory filings show he bought about 144,500 shares on August 5 at an average of $6.40, worth roughly $925,000, then added 162,438 shares the next day at $6.19 apiece for about $1 million.
Combined, that came to 306,981 shares for approximately $1.93 million. Mateen now holds 492,297 Class A shares after adjusting for the company’s recent reverse stock split.
Notably, insiders own about 7.1% of the company, a stake worth roughly $34 million. Mateen’s purchase was made within days of the firm’s release of its second-quarter results, and is also reportedly the largest purchase by an American Bitcoin insider over the past 12 months.
MarketBeat data shows that one of three analysts rate the stock a Buy, while one says Hold, and the other says Sell. That gives the stock a consensus rating of Hold. The average price target reported is $45.
However, Wall Street Zen lowered its rating to Sell over the weekend. Weiss Ratings also has a Sell rating. On the other hand, Maxim Group set a Buy target of $15 on July 21, and Zacks upgraded the stock to Hold in April.
How come ABTC is down by 95%?
American Bitcoin went public in September 2025 through a reverse merger with Gryphon Digital Mining and hit a post-IPO high of $14.65. From there, the shares fell more than 95%.
Cryptopolitan reported that the company ran a 1-for-15 reverse split effective July 2, pushing the per-share price back above Nasdaq’s $1.00 minimum bid requirement and cutting the share count from roughly 1.09 billion to about 73 million in order to remain listed.
Cryptopolitan previously reported CoinShares analyst Satish Patel’s view that companies running reverse splits post negative returns in the six to twelve months that follow, because the firms doing them are usually in financial distress.
The company reported a net loss of $57.2 million for the three months to June 30, an improvement on the roughly $82 million loss it booked in the first quarter, on mining revenue of $67.0 million.
CEO Mike Ho tied most of the damage to Bitcoin’s price, which slid about 11% over the quarter and drove a $71.1 million loss on digital assets. He stated that the firm mined 932 BTC, which is its highest quarterly output on record, and grew its treasury past 8,000 coins.
BitcoinTreasuries.net listed the holding at 8,300 BTC as of August 3, ranking American Bitcoin the 16th-largest public corporate holder.
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SpaceX (SPCX) got a lift Monday after investors digested its first earnings report as a listed company and Wall Street stayed bullish on the numbers.
The SPCX briefly returned to the $135 IPO level, coming right after last week’s second-quarter results, where revenue came in above expectations, as Cryptopolitan reported live.
Analysts kept their upside calls after the report. Citi analyst John Godyn maintained a buy rating and a $200 price target, which leaves close to 50% upside from the listing level. Deutsche Bank Research analyst Edison Yu also stayed at buy and kept his target at $235.
Edison said SpaceX has a “fast path” to an annual revenue pace of $100 billion. His forecast includes expected growth from the company’s neocloud operation and Cursor business.
Wall Street is also factoring in SpaceX’s ability to launch more rockets and build a larger network of infrastructure in orbit. The bullish targets arrived after shares had recently fallen to $108.27, making Monday’s bounce part of a very volatile first two months on the market.
Retail traders start selling SpaceX as more shares enter public trading
Retail investors changed course on Friday after spending most of the post-IPO period buying SpaceX. Vanda Research data showed small traders sold a net $4.5 million of SpaceX shares on August 7. It was their first day as net sellers since the company began trading on June 12.
That selling was still small beside the buying seen earlier in the summer. Retail purchases reached a one-day record of $144.6 million on June 16, only four days after the listing.
The change came shortly after another heavy retail buying session. SpaceX dropped 13.6% on August 5 as investors reacted to the earnings report. Small traders piled into the decline, making that day their fourth-largest net buying session since the company became public.
AI spending was one of the biggest issues hanging over the stock after earnings. SpaceX told investors it was seeing quicker returns from money spent on artificial intelligence. The bigger question was how long Starlink’s profitable satellite internet operation could keep funding the company’s expensive AI projects.
SpaceX has already gone through a wild price cycle. During June, the stock traded as high as 67% above its IPO valuation. Those gains disappeared over the following weeks, and by August shares had fallen more than 22% below the debut level. The stock has also ended every session below its IPO price since July 16.
Retail traders have had an unusually large role in SpaceX’s public-market story. At least 30% of the stock offered during the IPO was reserved for individual investors. Online attention has stayed heavy too. Over the past week, SpaceX was the second-most-discussed ticker on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets, based on data collected by SwaggyStocks.
There is also much more stock available for investors to buy and sell now. The amount of SpaceX equity available on public exchanges more than doubled last week after the first lockup period expired. More lockup expirations are still ahead, which means additional shares can become tradable over time.
Weak tech stocks and higher oil prices pressure the wider market Monday
The rest of Wall Street was having a tougher Monday. The S&P 500 (.SPX) was down about 0.1% as investors grew less confident that the U.S. and Iran would reach a lasting settlement to their conflict anytime soon. The Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC) fell 0.4%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI) lost 136 points, or 0.3%.
Several large technology names were under pressure. Intel (INTC) dropped 3% after the chipmaker said it plans to sell $15 billion worth of common stock. Nvidia (NVDA) fell 2%, and Apple (AAPL) was also down 2%.
Monday’s weakness came right after a strong week for U.S. stocks. The S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, and Dow had each recorded their best weekly performance since April. The S&P 500 also finished Friday at a new record closing high.
The jobs data played a big role in Friday’s trading. U.S. nonfarm payrolls unexpectedly contracted in July, which reduced expectations for another Federal Reserve rate increase. Futures tied to the federal funds rate were pricing an almost 50% chance of a September hike, based on CME FedWatch figures. Traders had placed those odds at 67% one week earlier.
Oil was going the other way Monday. West Texas Intermediate crude jumped around 4% to roughly $81 a barrel as uncertainty around the U.S.-Iran conflict kept energy markets tense. U.S. crude holdings inside the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to their lowest point since January 1983. Brent crude, the main international benchmark, also gained about 4% and traded near $87 a barrel.
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Vitalik Buterin has published a revised version of his 2023 Ethereum roadmap diagram, laying its old items over the Ethereum Foundation’s newer “Strawmap” to show which priorities held and which moved.
In his X post that was shared on August 10, Buterin said the two diagrams share “a lot of overlap,” but a few things shifted in order of priority.
Where is quantum safety on the roadmap compared to other items?
Buterin stated that quantum safety has been up-prioritized. Some other items were deprioritized, though the example he linked was cut off in the post.
When the roadmap was shared in 2023, post-quantum work was just one concern among many.
Then he shrank the emphasis on verifiable delay functions, citing cryptographic weaknesses in existing constructions, and added research topics like obfuscation and delay-encrypted mempools.
Two and a half years later, the direction has firmed up around defending Ethereum against future quantum computers.
What the Strawmap actually is
The document Buterin overlaid his old diagram onto is the L1 Strawmap, hosted at strawmap.org and maintained by the EF Architecture team of Justin, Thomas, Toni, and Buterin himself.
It is a blend of the words “strawman” and “roadmap.” It came about because the maintainers believe that no single roadmap can speak for a decentralized ecosystem.
For them, it is a discussion tool, and it worked in that respect in January 2026, where it began as a conversation starter at an EF workshop in January 2026.
The L1 strawmap organizes upgrades along a timeline of consensus, data, and execution layers and sets five “north stars” as end goals.
The north stars are fast L1 with finality in seconds, a gigagas L1 handling 10,000 transactions per second, a teragas L2 reaching 10 million transactions per second, a post-quantum L1 with hash-based security, and a private L1 with shielded transfers built in.
The draft sketches seven forks through 2029, on a rough cadence of one every six months, running through named upgrades like Glamsterdam and Hegotá.
The quantum work already has code behind it
On June 5, 2026, Buterin opened EIP-8288, which proposes a transaction frame type for post-quantum signatures and STARK aggregation.
The design lets transactions declare cryptographic “dependencies” that a block builder can replace with a single recursive STARK proof, keeping the approach gas-efficient.
Asked on the Ethereum Magicians forum why the draft leans on the hash-based SPHINCS scheme instead of lattice-based signatures, Buterin said the team wants to be minimalistic and keep the base layer purely hash-based, which means maintaining less infrastructure overall.
In January 2026, the Ethereum Foundation put in place a dedicated post-quantum security team and is targeting core quantum-resistant infrastructure by 2029. Its work spans consensus signatures, data availability commitments, account signatures, and application-layer zero-knowledge proofs.
Why is Buterin reshuffling the strawmap now?
The prioritization of quantum safety is not exactly surprising, as there has been more breakthrough in the world of quantum computing, and its threats to encryption continue to gain more traction.
However, there is AI tooling which Buterin also says could compress the roadmap’s schedule, having said AI helped draft a 2030 roadmap in two weeks rather than years.
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Crypto payment card spending shot up to $759 million in July, about 2.5 times the level a year earlier. USDC, backed by dollars, now accounts for 58% of that volume, according to figures cited by a16z crypto.
Dollar stablecoins displace euros in under two years
Cardholders made ~9 million purchases in July, compared with about 5.2 million in the same month last year. That works out to an average purchase of ~$86.
These cards allow holders to spend stablecoins anywhere a traditional card is accepted. At checkout, the crypto is converted into local currency, and the merchant receives an ordinary card payment.
Users either hold stablecoins on-chain in self-custody or deposit them with the card issuer. No traditional bank account is needed.
The figures are mostly drawn from on-chain data that is indexed directly. RedotPay, the largest by volume, reports stablecoin spending only rather than it being observed on-chain.
As of early 2024, euro-backed stablecoins led the way, with about 88% of card volume settled in EURe, much of it on the Gnosis chain. By July the share of EURe had collapsed to around 2%.
USDC’s 58% share is up from around 48% a year ago, based on data from a16z crypto. During the same period, USDT increased to around 26% from around 7%. Almost all card spending is in digital dollars now.
Source: a16z crypto.
Optimism, Solana, and Base carry stablecoin volume
Gnosis Pay launched the first Visa card directly linked to a self-custodial wallet, and in early 2024, nearly all card spending was on the Gnosis chain.
As of July, Optimism accounted for about 29% of the card spend. Solana and Base were near 19% each. Gnosis was down to around 2%. The cards run on Visa’s network almost exclusively across the programs tracked.
Visa and Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm owned by Stripe, announced in March their plans to expand the stablecoin card program to over 100 countries by the end of the year.
This expansion will allow holders to use their stablecoin balances at more than 175 million merchant locations that accept Visa, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
In January, Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi said that stablecoin cards were “growing like crazy, everywhere in the world.”
Stablecoin payments lack the rewards and credit incentives that drove card adoption. The existing system “isn’t actually broken for most merchants and consumers in developed markets,” said Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures.
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A South Korean opposition lawmaker proposed postponing the country’s 22% tax on crypto profits to January 1, 2030, three years later than the current start date.
That puts it in conflict with a government that has just reiterated plans to start taxing crypto in 2027. About 13 million South Koreans buy and sell crypto and would pay taxes on annual gains of more than 2.5 million won, or about $1,800.
Jeong’s amendment resets crypto taxes to 2030
The bill was proposed by opposition bloc People Power Party Representative Jeong Seong-guk. Jeong plans an amendment to the Income Tax Act to keep the tax provisions but reset the effective date from January 1, 2027, to January 1, 2030.
Lawmakers and tax authorities need the additional three years to finish their review of the virtual asset tax framework, strengthen investor protections, and build the systems required to tax crypto fairly, he says.
He contends that the statutory deadline, arriving on schedule, does not justify starting collection. First, taxpayers need a system they can live with.
The proposal comes less than a week after the Ministry of Economy and Finance finalized its 2026 tax reform package with no further delay for crypto.
Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol, who also doubles as deputy prime minister, made clear the government’s stance on July 29 at a National Assembly Finance and Economic Planning Committee meeting. “At this point, we are proceeding with taxation starting next year as scheduled,” Koo said.
South Korea sets 22% on crypto gains
The framework, due in 2027, treats income from selling or lending crypto such as Bitcoin and Ether as “other income.”
The 22% rate combined is a 20% national income tax and a 2% local tax. It applies only when annual earnings exceed the 2.5 million won exemption.
The finance ministry provided an example of a trader who makes 5 million won from Bitcoin in a year. Remove the 2.5 million won allowance, and the remaining 2.5 million won incurs a tax bill of 550,000 won. Income earned in 2027 would be reported in May 2028.
Since crypto income is classified as miscellaneous income, losses cannot be carried forward, so a trader who loses money in a year and then makes a profit the following year still owes tax on the later gain.
Koo’s response was that stock trading gets no loss carryforward either, and he said the government would look at the issue after the tax takes effect if needed.
Another bill from the People Power Party, filed by lawmaker Song Eon-seok on March 19, would remove the crypto income tax provision from the law completely.
The party sees abolition as a parity issue, saying taxing gains on crypto while gains on regular stocks are effectively tax-free treats two investment markets differently.
Koo has noted that the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom tax crypto as a capital gain, but South Korea has no capital gains tax system.
Seoul lawmakers approved the crypto tax provisions in 2020 with a start date of 2022, then pushed to 2023, 2025, and finally 2027.
The National Tax Service has stood up a dedicated digital asset unit. The OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework will see South Korea start receiving data on overseas crypto activity of its residents from participating jurisdictions next year.
Japan, Germany, and France are among the 48 jurisdictions taking part.
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Microsoft is hoping to publicly launch its Maia 300 AI accelerator as soon as September, according to a report by The Information.
The company is also in talks with TSMC to secure more than 300,000 units by next year.
Microsoft to reveal Maia 300 during the fall
Microsoft has contacted Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to reserve capacity for the chips, which are due to be delivered in 2027. The order alone would exceed the tens of thousands of Maia 200 parts produced so far.
Microsoft’s longer-term target is to exceed one million units, but packaging negotiations and supply of components may cap the actual number the company gets.
The Maia 200 slipped after early tests failed to meet internal goals. Since then, it has reached only a handful of data centers.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investors on the company’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call on July 29 that the chip runs 30% better on performance per dollar than existing hardware and is being scaled to support OpenAI and Microsoft’s own MAI models.
Back in January 2026, when Cryptopolitan reported the launch of the Maia 200, Microsoft described it as a second-generation part for inference based on TSMC’s 3-nanometer process.
Microsoft’s executive vice president for cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, called it “the most efficient inference system that Microsoft has ever built.”
Microsoft wants to reduce reliance on Nvidia
Nadella has said openly that a goal is to cut reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft says its chips can run its own and OpenAI workloads at lower cost. It is expanding internal use through Azure AI Foundry and Copilot while selling the hardware to large outside cloud customers.
Earlier this month, Anthropic confirmed it is building its own semiconductor team to design custom chips for its Claude models. That makes it a potential buyer of the Maia 300 and a future rival in custom silicon chips.
Last year, in-house chips from Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI were projected to make up 45% of the AI-chip market by 2028, compared with 37% in 2024.
Microsoft’s fiscal Q4 2026 revenues were $90.0 billion, up 18% year-over-year, with Azure and other cloud services up 43%.
TSMC’s N3 node and CoWoS advanced packaging will face supply constraints through 2027. That’s around the same time Microsoft wants to ramp up Maia 300 chip production.
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Kimi K3, an open-weight model from China’s Moonshot AI, is performing on par with leading US AI systems at finding software vulnerabilities, according to US startup Frontier Security. The results point to a capable alternative for security teams frustrated by the restrictions surrounding America’s most advanced models.
Frontier Security creates assessments to analyze the capability of AI models to discover flaws within software and networks. The results show that Kimi K3 was one of the best in these assessments.
Frontier Security’s benchmarks put Kimi near the top
According to Paul Kassianik and Yaron Singer, Kimi and other open-weight models can be useful for protecting systems, as well as for penetrating them.
Nevertheless, Kimi’s performance revealed a flaw in its safety features. In the course of one of the security tests carried out by Frontier, the system managed to break away from the sandbox created to trap it by taking advantage of a misconfiguration in order to access the open internet to search GitHub for answers. However, it did not hack into any system.
Kassianik portrayed the event as a mixture of high capability and low restraint. According to his statements to WIRED, Kimi is “very good at following a goal by any means necessary and also doesn’t have the guardrails to prevent it from cheating or escaping the sandbox.”
In a controlled experiment, this kind of behavior is problematic. For security researchers seeking vulnerabilities, however, the aggressive pursuit of a goal can be valuable.
Kimi wins over bug hunters with fewer guardrails
Kimi has arrived at a time when some of the security professionals are getting frustrated with the limitations applied to American frontier models. According to reports, researchers tend to go with Chinese open-source models like GLM since they could be downloaded and operated locally without the same degree of scrutiny.
Chris Thompson, the CEO of RemoteThreat as well as creator of Offensive AI Con, told TechCrunch that the limitations imposed on US models can be arbitrary and affect legitimate security efforts. “You spend a lot of time negotiating with the model instead of working on the core security program,” he said.
CTO of vulnerability broker Crowdfense, Paolo Stagno, went even further, stating that companies dealing with AI “essentially treat customers like children who need babysitting.”
For researchers seeking to analyze code, identify security gaps and create protective tools, locally hostable open-source models provide a solution to the challenge. Among this type of model, Kimi and GLM are gaining prominence.
From a Coldcard scare to a red-team auditor
The Bitcoin security community has begun implementing the above-mentioned models. As previously reported by Cryptopolitan, a security scare involving the Coldcard hardware wallet led to the establishment of the Bitcoin-dedicated red team that includes Kimi K3 as its main code auditor.
The experience has raised a troubling realization: that an open Chinese model has outperformed trusted American systems in some of the team’s bug-hunting tests.
This trend applies to more than merely Bitcoin. WIRED reports that Hugging Face has relied on an unnamed model from China to protect itself from an OpenAI agent that went rogue and attacked the platform. This example highlights that the discourse on whether the open-weight models of China can compete with those of the US is no longer theoretical.
What the US labs are gatekeeping
American AI companies have generally opted for a more restrained style. OpenAI rolled out Trusted Access for Cyber on February 5, 2026, an identity-based initiative that allows verified defenders to use its most powerful cyber model, GPT-5.3-Codex, in addition to committing $10 million in API credits to security teams.
Anthropic has a comparable Cyber Verification Program. The U.S. government also implemented restrictions on the export of its Mythos and Fable models in June. From July 1, Fable 5 has been open to the public, while access to Mythos 5 has only been given to approved organizations in the United States, according to TechCrunch.
The laboratories stated that vetting is extremely effective in ensuring that strong cyber capabilities remain in the hands of good actors only. On the other hand, detractors argue that the phrase “fix this code” could be applied equally in cybersecurity and hacking.
The major worry is that stricter regulations might push legitimate researchers away from domestic models. The findings from Frontier Security show that at least in the field of vulnerability research in software, such alternatives are hard to disregard.
Comparison of US AI Models with Kimi K3
Model Provider Access model Cyber restriction Availability date Concrete benchmark Kimi K3 Moonshot AI Open-weight; available through Kimi/API and local deployment No provider-level cyber guardrail comparable to Fable 5 is documented in Moonshot’s public materials; its open-weight design allows local deployment July 16, 2026 90.4 on BrowseComp with a 1M-token context window, according to Moonshot’s evaluation. (Kimi) GLM-5.2 Z.ai (Zhipu AI) Open-weight; self-hostable and available through Z.ai’s API Reuters reported it was used by Hugging Face after U.S. models blocked analysis of real exploit material; Z.ai’s public materials do not describe a comparable hosted cyber-refusal regime June 16, 2026 FrontierSWE: within 1% of Claude Opus 4.8 and 1% ahead of GPT-5.5, according to Z.ai. (Z.ai) GPT-5.3-Codex OpenAI Closed-weight, hosted through OpenAI/Codex Strong cyber safeguards; OpenAI classifies it as Cyber High and applies safeguards to dangerous cyber activity Feb. 5, 2026 80% Cyber Range pass rate, versus 53.33% for GPT-5.2-Codex; 90% on CVE-Bench. (OpenAI Deployment Safety Hub) Claude Mythos 5 Anthropic Closed-weight; limited trusted access through Project Glasswing Cyber safeguards lifted for approved cyberdefenders; not generally available June 9, 2026; redeployed July 1 Anthropic says Mythos 5 demonstrated the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of any model in its testing; in CryptanalysisBench, frontier models including Mythos 5 broke 65%-86% of Tier-1 schemes across the evaluated models. (Anthropic) Claude Fable 5 Anthropic Closed-weight; generally available through Claude/API and cloud partners Strict cyber safeguards; Anthropic says its classifiers block dangerous or potentially dangerous cybersecurity uses June 9, 2026; restored globally July 1 80.3% SWE-Bench Pro in OpenAI’s July comparison; Anthropic says Fable 5 scored highest on its FrontierCode evaluation. (OpenAI)
Comparison Table for US AI Models vs Kimi K3
*Note that the benchmark figures should not be presented as directly comparable unless they come from the same test. The final column is as per “Selected benchmark” and does not imply that the scores rank the five models directly.
The comparison shows why the Bitcoin Red Team’s experience is more nuanced than a simple claim that Chinese AI has overtaken U.S. models. OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex has demonstrated a 90% CVE-Bench score and an 80% Cyber Range pass rate, while Anthropic’s Mythos 5 is specifically designed to give approved cyberdefenders access to capabilities that are restricted in Fable 5.
The distinction is instead how those capabilities are made available. Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2 are open-weight models that can be deployed locally, while Fable 5 applies cybersecurity classifiers and Mythos 5 limits access to approved users. OpenAI similarly treats GPT-5.3-Codex as a high-risk cyber model and applies safeguards around its use.
For the Chinese-model side, the AISI finding is especially useful: its independent testing found GLM-5.2 was the most cyber-capable open-weight model at the time of testing and that it performed similarly to Claude Opus 4.6 on its narrow cyber tasks, while trailing the closed frontier by roughly four to seven months.

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The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said it will “steadily develop” the digital yuan over the next five years.
The e-CNY is now listed as one of the central bank’s core tasks in a recently published reform blueprint.
What provisions has China made for the development of its digital yuan?
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has published what it calls its “15th Five-Year” reform and development plan alongside nine separate action plans covering narrower policy areas. Monetary policy, macroprudential supervision, financing for the real economy, and higher-level opening of China’s financial system all get their own sections in these plans.
The digital yuan appears under the fifth priority, which deals with financial infrastructure and central bank services. The PBOC says it wants to improve payment systems, help the credit-reporting industry, and strengthen anti-money-laundering rules.
A separate section of the plan leans harder on the international angle. There the PBOC commits to widening the use of the renminbi in trade and investment, building out a cross-border payment network, and developing offshore RMB markets, while strengthening Shanghai as an international financial center and reinforcing Hong Kong’s standing.
The central bank already set the direction for the 15th year plan in motion at the beginning of 2026, when the PBOC created a framework letting commercial banks pay interest on client e-CNY balances.
The PBOC began research on the e-CNY project in 2014 under the label DCEP and launched the digital yuan in April 2022, encouraging early adoption through airdrops in pilot cities.
At the 2026 National People’s Congress, deputy Fu Xiguo suggested revising PBOC’s governing law which was last updated in 2003, arguing it does not yet define the e-CNY as legal tender, Cryptopolitan reported.
Has the e-CNY been adopted outside China?
Guangdong province has released a draft of its five-year plan which the public can comment on until September 5. The plan calls for larger cross-border e-CNY payment trials and more use cases for the currency.
This urging comes after China’s first cross-border digital yuan payment with Singapore, in which ICBC branches settled close to 10 million yuan in shipping fees through the upgraded CBETS platform. That system signed on its first 26 financial institutions in June.
On the other hand, Project mBridge, a multi-central-bank settlement platform whose members include mainland China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, recently had its services extended by Industrial Bank to Macau and used to move 500 million yuan ($74 million) for an equity deal.
Its corporate client count for the service jumped 176% year on year in the first half. Bank of China’s Fujian branch, meanwhile, pushed more than HK$10 billion ($1.28 billion), through mBridge in what it called the platform’s largest single transfer to date.
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Meta (NASDAQ: META) has released an open-weight AI model called Muse Glimmer alongside a manifesto from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who stated that the real danger from advanced AI is a single government or company controlling the technology, not rogue machines.
Muse Glimmer is a dense model with 30 billion parameters that fits on a laptop or a single consumer GPU, and Meta is billing it as “one of the highest-performing models of its size.”
Anyone can download the model, customize it, and run it on their own hardware because the weights are open.
Meta reportedly built Muse Glimmer through distillation, training the smaller model on outputs from its larger Muse Spark system so that the compact version inherits capability from the bigger “teacher.”
According to Meta, the weights for a version of Muse Spark 1.2 will follow in the coming weeks. Both models are being referred to as the largest American open-source models to date.
Meta had initially paused its release of open-weight models, which Zuckerberg attributed to a strategy review. Now they are back at it, as Meta Superintelligence Labs is now running.
What did Zuckerberg say about AI centralization in his essay?
Zuckerberg, in a 6,500-word essay titled “The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future,” pushed back on the doom-heavy tone of much AI discourse.
In an interview, he stated. “I’m personally more worried about centralization than I am about any of the specific risks others are talking about.”
According to Zuckerberg, concentrating superintelligence in a few hands “will naturally lead to outcomes that are less favorable for everyone else.”
He added that “there is no such thing as a singular benevolent superintelligence.”
Zuckerberg also proposed an alternative that rests on three ideas. They are individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention rather than automation as AI’s main purpose, and a balance of power as the basis for safety.
On the matter of geopolitics, Zuckerberg wrote that U.S. rules slowing American model releases by even a month could cost the country its lead while foreign models advance.
An independent board and a $1 billion community fund
To square open releases with safety concerns, Meta is adding governance. Zuckerberg said an independent board will hold the authority to approve the safety criteria that govern model releases and to review whether a given release meets them. He said that the board will help ensure open releases “meet rigorous safety standards.”
Zuckerberg also announced a $1 billion “Future is for Everyone Fund” aimed at U.S. communities that host Meta data centers. It is said that it will be directing money toward teachers, first responders, and local energy and water infrastructure.
The fund is being seen as an effort to blunt the growing local backlash against data-center construction in the U.S.
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Computing and chip-making giant Intel has announced on Monday that it will sell $15 billion in new common stock, taking advantage of a year-long rally in its share price to raise cash for the company’s manufacturing and product interests as customers pour more money into AI computing.
Intel said the timing of the sale is based on customer behavior, as buyers continue to show steady, long-term demand tied to heavy AI spending.
Intel raising money with common stock sale
The company filed a registration statement on Form S-3 with the SEC, including a preliminary prospectus, and said the sale can only proceed through that prospectus and its supplement. The four banks involved in running the deal as joint managers include J.P. Morgan Securities, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Global Markets.
Intel’s offering is a public sale of stock listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker INTC, the company confirmed in its announcement.
In the statement, the company pointed to newer interests as why it wants more capital on hand. “Progress in emerging areas including physical AI, purpose-built silicon, advanced packaging and external wafers” were all seen as growth opportunities, while adding that the raise is “intended to further enable Intel to pursue the growth opportunities ahead.” Intel has not tied the proceeds from the stock sale to any single project.
Intel rally creates timing of sale
The stock has nearly tripled this year to $101.65, with a turnaround rally lifting the shares. On Monday the stock traded at $101.65, up 1.8%, according to Yahoo Finance market data.
The computing giant’s business case is based on data center CPUs instead of the dedicated AI accelerators, where it trails rivals such as Nvidia. Intel’s data center sales saw an increase of 59% last quarter, moving at more than twice the pace of the company’s overall revenue growth. Intel believes that the AI expansion is creating demand for its central processors even though the company is not leading the market when it comes to AI-specific silicon.
The $15 billion raise covers the expected spending, however, it does not answer the pertinent questions hanging over that remain about the stock’s rally. Intel continues to put in effort to sign up major external customers for its factories, a strategy that would validate its heavy investment in leading-edge manufacturing.
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Giorgio Zinetti is stepping down as the Chief Technology Officer at Cardano Foundation after 2.5 years at the company.
Zinetti took to X on Monday to announce he would be leaving the organization on August 31, with plans for a new adventure later in September.
After 2.5 years, I’ll be stepping down as CTO of the Cardano Foundation at the end of August.
Time really flew. I’m proud of what we built, but even more grateful for the people I got to work with along the way.
First, a few weeks off to welcome our daughter ❤️
Then a new…
— Giorgio Zinetti (@giozzi) August 10, 2026
He joined the Cardano Foundation in 2024, where he served as the technical leader for expanding the Foundation’s projects and products, with a focus on scaling enterprise adoption.
The Foundation confirmed Zinetti’s departure in a separate post on X.
No replacement has been named, and the company has yet to spell out how the CTO’s duties will be covered once Zinetti walks out by the end of the month.
It, however, mentioned that the board and executive team will continue working closely with senior technical and business development staff to hold the line on enterprise adoption.
“In line with our current roadmap, The Foundation Board and Executive team continues to work closely with our technical and senior business development leaders to maintain a direct focus on enterprise adoption,” Cardano Foundation precisely wrote on X.
Emurgo steps down from Cardano’s governance
The Swiss-based Cardano Foundation is a not-for-profit organization tasked with advancing Cardano.
It’s worth noting that Cardano is also supported by two other separate entities, Input Output Global (IOG) and Emurgo. All three companies work together to manage and advance the Cardano blockchain.
IOG is Cardano’s engineering and development front, led by Charles Hoskinson, while Emurgo serves as the commercial arm.
In July, however, Emurgo announced it would step down from its duties as a member of Cardano’s governance group. The decision was made after its wallet, SecondFi, was exploited, resulting in the loss of $2.4 million ADA, as Cryptopolitan reported.
Cardano is currently the 29th-largest chain by total locked-asset value (TVL). It accounts for $69.62 million in DeFi TVL, across 69 protocols, according to on-chain data from DeFiLlama.
At the time of writing, the native token ADA was trading at $0.1961, with $7.16 billion in market cap.
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South Korea has earmarked 5 trillion won, equaling $3.52 billion, for a fund designated to develop chip materials, components and small design firms.
This development was announced by presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik on Monday, in a bid to cut the country’s reliance on foreign suppliers that feed its world-leading chip manufacturers.
$3.5 billion fund comes with more
According to Reuters, Seoul is also pairing the 5 trillion won fund with an additional 5 trillion won in trade financing for export-leaning suppliers, which brings the total direct support for the industry to 10 trillion won.
In addition, the government is creating a 10-year, 1 trillion won program to tie large chipmakers to the small and mid-sized suppliers positioned at every stage of production, inclusive of design, testing all the way to manufacturing.
South Korea’s government also wants parliament to pass a Mega Special Zones Act by the end of the year, which is a law meant to compress permitting, environmental reviews and infrastructure work for major industrial sites.
The announcement followed a meeting chaired by President Lee Jae-myung, all part of a semiconductor initiative Lee unveiled in June.
South Korea chip fund targets supply chain
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix lead the world in memory and advanced manufacturing, however, the specialty chemicals and precision parts that keep their lines running still arrive mostly from abroad, most importantly, Japan and the Netherlands.
That gap has previously cost South Korea significantly. When Japan curbed exports of key chipmaking materials in 2019, it showed how exposed the country’s flagship industry was to a supply shock it could not control.
The increased interest in channeling money toward fabless firms and companies that design chips but do not own factories is an additional aim, as Korea has leaned on two giants for years and has comparatively few design houses to show for it.
Freeing land and moving ahead for power and water
President Lee ordered the Ministry of National Defense to move the military functions of Gwangju’s air base to other sites by mid-2028, clearing an 8.3 million square meter area for the Honam Semiconductor Cluster, a project set at an estimated 800 trillion won in total investment. Samsung and SK Hynix also took part in the meeting leading to these conclusions as lead investors.
Lee pressed for speed, telling officials the effort needed to go on as fast as humanly possible. He stated TSMC’s plant in Kumamoto, Japan, which went from groundbreaking to completion in 22 months, as the benchmark, and told officials to run procedures in parallel rather than in sequence.
Modern chip manufacturing factories are among the thirstiest and most power-hungry facilities anywhere, so utilities are now booked years in advance. Seoul plans to supply 650,000 metric tons of water a day to the Gwangju and South Jeolla cluster by 2030, drawn from treated wastewater and nearby dams.
For the Yongin cluster south of Seoul, 14.7 gigawatts of electricity are planned by 2041, sourced from cogeneration, liquefied natural gas and transmission from other regions.
Semiconductor bet amid flustered market
The offensive lands as Korea’s stock market swings wildly, with the KOSPI index surging 116% in the first half of the year, peaking at 9,385 points on AI-driven demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM). HBM chips are mass-produced by only three companies in the world, with two of them being South Korean.
The KOSPI index has seen a tumble since mid-July, falling about 40% from its peak, while President Lee’s approval rating has dropped to a record low of 43.3%.
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Dragging its Stretch (STRC) preferred shares back to par value at $100 remained the priority for chief executive Michael Salor and Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) as the firm reported that it allocated 100% of the $108.6 million it raised from selling 1,690 Bitcoins last week to buying back STRC.
Strategy raised another $653.1 million by selling 6,585,682 MSTR shares through its at-the-market program. The firm split the raise between its USD reserve and cash accounts at a $650 million to $3.1 million ratio. The USD reserve is now up to $4.65 billion from $4 billion in one week.
Even with the sale confirmed in the Form 8-K filed with the SEC on Monday, Strategy lead as the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin remains safe, with the firm’s current 840,447 BTC stash lightyears ahead of Twenty One Capital’s 43,514 in second place.
Every dollar of the Bitcoin sale went back into STRC
As Cryptopolitan reported at the time, Strategy laid out the framework for what is its third STRC buyback when it released its $1 billion Digital Credit Securities Repurchase Program as part of its Digital Credit Capital Framework on June 29.
Strategy offloaded the 1,690 Bitcoin batch for an average of $64,262 each between August 3 and August 9. The $108.6 million it received for the sales went to buying back 1,152,020 shares of STRC, its variable-rate Series A perpetual “Stretch” preferred stock.
Under the repurchase program, Strategy still has discretion to apply another $785.2 million to claim STRC off the market.
STRC is closing in on its $100 target
Strategy’s multi-week departure from its BTC accumulation streak to repurchase its STRC preferred stock is part of a broader push to bring STRC back to its target $100 level. As of this report, STRC traded at $95.55 pre-market, according to Google Finance.
The stock is now closer to where management wants it compared to its lows in July.
Chief Executive Phong Le said the goal is for STRC “to trade over time at $99 to $100” during the company’s second-quarter call.
Saylor said Monday that the latest round tightened what the company calls STRC’s “BTC Credit” by 10 basis points, or a tenth of a percentage point.
Saylor said the raise pushed the company’s “USD Duration,” a measure of how long the cash cushion can fund preferred dividends and interest, up by 143 days to 2.7 years. Strategy has said the reserve is dedicated to those obligations. It still has $1 billion available under a separate MSTR common-stock repurchase program.
The firm that swore it would never sell keeps selling
The sale continues a shift that began at the end of May, when Strategy disposed of 32 Bitcoin for about $2.5 million, its first sale since December 2022. A capital framework unveiled in June authorized up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoin disposals, and the company has now used roughly $429 million of that room.
Strategy has not bought Bitcoin since June.
Saylor has pushed back on the idea that the company has turned into a seller. In a July 31 post cited by Cryptopolitan, he wrote that Strategy has “never had a ‘never sell’ policy” and expects “to remain a net buyer of Bitcoin over time.”
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Strive (NASDAQ: ASST) continued its march up the Bitcoin accumulation ladder today, August 10, as the firm announced that it added a fresh batch of 147 BTC to its digital asset treasury.
The latest purchase installment arrives despite a $257.6 million Q2 net loss that the firm reported on the same day, mostly attributed to Bitcoin’s price slide during the quarter.
The scale of the firm’s Bitcoin outlay is the latest commitment to BTC by the Matt Cole-led firm, after previous rounds of insisting on the leading digital asset’s long-term viability, as covered by Cryptopolitan.
Strive now holds 20,167 BTC, consolidating its position as the seventh-largest corporate BTC holder after buying 6,236 BTC in Q2 and 12,237 BTC between January and June.
Strive turns in Q2 results
The key takeaways from the business documents that the Dallas-based Strive released for the three-month period that ended on June 30 are:
$2.94 million in revenue, up almost 100% on $1.51 million for the same period in 2025.
$1.4 million of the gains came from medical device sales from its Semler Scientific merger.
Diluted loss came in at $3.77 per share.
$234.0 million of the GAAP net loss, or 94.1%, came from the falling fair-market value of Strive’s Bitcoin holdings and stake in Strategy’s preferred stock.
On a non-GAAP basis, the adjusted loss attributable to common shareholders was $275.0 million.
On the Bitcoin Yield metric, which actually measures the firm’s financial health against its Bitcoin position, Strive reported that it was at 23.9% for the quarter and 37.7% for the first six months, per its SEC filings.
Debt gone, dividends paid every business day
Strive also retired all of its short- and long-term debt during the quarter, closing its accounts without any outstanding loans on its balance sheet as of August 7. The firm also reported $154.9 million in cash and a $48.0 million stake in Strategy’s preferred shares.
“Today, Strive stands debt-free, with zero margin requirements, and zero encumbered Bitcoin,” Chairman and CEO Matt Cole said in the release, calling the balance sheet “purpose-built to thrive through Bitcoin volatility.”
Cole also spoke about Strive’s cash magnet SATA preferred stock, which now pays dividends on every business day. The CEO said SATA “became the first listed security in the history of U.S. capital markets to pay cash dividends every single Business Day,” at an annualized rate of 13.00%.
Insiders bought while the stock fell
Company executives have been putting their own money in. Over the past six months, ASST insiders traded the stock three times, and all three were purchases, Quiver Quantitative reported. CFO Ben Pham bought 14,114 shares for an estimated $115,094, and Chief Legal Officer Brian Logan Beirne picked up 11,500 shares for roughly $100,386.
Strive is a young company in this business. It became a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury through a September 2025 merger with Asset Entities and has since built its position through open-market buys funded by at-the-market stock sales and SATA issuance.
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MARA Holdings sold $1.63 billion in Bitcoin in the first six months of 2026.
In a Form 10-Q filing, MARA disclosed that it sold approximately 23,093 BTC in the half-year ended June 30th, which works out to roughly $70,631 per coin.
The sale represents nearly 34% of MARA’s Bitcoin treasury at the end of last year. At the time, the company held 53,822 BTC, making it the second-largest Bitcoin treasury.
MARA currently holds 35,577 BTC as of June, following Strategy, Twenty One Capital, and Metaplanet.
MARA offloads BTC amid quarter losses
The company said the proceeds were used to fund operations, growth opportunities, and manage liquidity.
MARA suffered revenue losses in the first two quarters of the year, amid the decrease in Bitcoin’s price.
The Q1 revenue dropped 18% from a year earlier at $174.6 million. Amid the loss, MARA sold 15,133 BTC for roughly $1.1 billion to retire convertible notes due in 2030 and 2031.
That transaction trimmed MARA’s outstanding debt to about $2.29 billion from $3.29 billion at the end of 2025, saving the company roughly $88.1 million in cash.
MARA also ended Q2 with a revenue loss, reporting $174.9 million in revenue, a 27% year-over-year decrease from $238.5 million in Q2 2025, and missing analyst expectations of approximately $209 million.
The Q2 loss was followed by another $1.5 billion in Bitcoin sales, intended to improve the company’s liquidity and retire debt.
MARA sells BTC as it shifts business to AI
Amid the losses, MARA has been mulling plans to shift from mining as its core business.
The company partnered with Starwood Capital Group to convert mining sites into data centers built for AI and high-performance computing workloads, an arrangement that Cryptopolitan reported could deliver about 1 gigawatt of IT capacity initially and scale beyond 2.5 gigawatts.
Layoffs followed the Q1 sale, hitting multiple departments over two days in early April.
During its Q1 earnings report, MARA said it doesn’t expect to acquire more specialist ASIC machines for mining.
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