Cryptopolitan

According to reports, the software firm known as Temporal, which developed the “durable execution” technology that allows AI agents and other long-running applications to recover from malfunctions without having to start again, is in the process of seeking approximately $500 million at a valuation of not less than $12 billion.
If the funding round comes to an end at that level, Temporal’s valuation would have increased twofold within a period of six months. It would also indicate the gradual transfer of investor focus from only “frontier-model” developers to infrastructure providers ensuring the stable running of AI systems in operations.
This change is significant for the larger market of AI. Although model developers continue to lure in the biggest rounds of financing, companies that tackle the less visible issues that come with the mass implementation of the technology are now demanding higher market valuations. According to Temporal, OpenAI, ADP, Block, and Yum! Brands are among their clients who have deployed the technology.
A valuation that has quadrupled in a year
The worth of Temporal has surged rapidly. The firm obtained funding of $146 million in the first quarter of 2025, which valued it at $1.72 billion and then got a secondary deal of $105 million in the month of October that increased its valuation to $2.5 billion.
Andreessen Horowitz led a Series D of $300 million in February that valued Temporal at $5 billion post-money based on the participation of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, etc.
A valuation of $12 billion would put Temporal at over four times its valuation from about 18 months ago. The company hasn’t confirmed the news about the latest fundraising talks.
Why agent builders are paying up for durability
The reason behind Temporal’s appeal lies in the technical challenge that has bigger consequences continually.
The company describes its platform in terms of its Durable Execution service, which allows applications to “ride out” the crashes, retry certain operations on their own automatically, and continue from the point of failure as opposed to having to restart the process from scratch.
This is particularly essential with AI agents. While a simple chatbot query can only be answered quickly, an agent can operate for hours or even days; it can go through several steps, rely on external services, and even change its path depending on the outputs of its model. It is obvious that the longer the process goes on, the more chances that something will go wrong.
Temporal says demand is already showing up in its numbers. When it announced its February funding round, the company reported revenue growth of more than 380% year over year, weekly active usage up 350%, and installs up 500% to more than 20 million a month. Temporal Cloud had processed 9.1 trillion lifetime action executions, including 1.86 trillion for AI-native companies.
Venkat Venkataramani, OpenAI’s VP of App Infrastructure, said in Temporal’s February 17 announcement that “as AI systems become more complex and long-running, durability is as important as performance.”
The cost math driving the infrastructure bet
The investment case becomes clearer when the cost of running AI is considered.
On August 17, Gartner has made a prediction that the expenditure for agentic AI workflows will increase by five times by 2028. They have called this phenomenon the “Inference Paradox”, which means that while the cost of each token goes down, the total expenditure for AI increases significantly due to the higher number of tokens involved.
As per Will Sommer, a senior director analyst at Gartner, product leaders “cannot rely on more efficient token economics to rationalize AI costs.”
This means reliability is not only a technical matter, but a financial one, too. Every time a workflow fails and needs to restart, it translates to more model calls, more tokens, and higher computing costs. Temporal believes organizations using AI on a large scale will be willing to spend to prevent this type of waste.
There is evidence of a very similar sentiment among investors. Crunchbase reported that global venture funding in the first half of 2026 reached a record amount of $510 billion. More than 70% of all funding in the second quarter went to AI startups, with OpenAI and Anthropic alone accounting for $217 billion, which represents 43% of startup funding in the first half of the year.
A Temporal round at a $12 billion valuation would be more than just another substantial AI transaction. It would signal a wider trend occurring in the marketplace: investors are betting billions of dollars not only on AI models themselves, but also on the infrastructure that is necessary to ensure the functioning, scalability, and profitability of these models.


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On August 18, Onchain Lens, which tracks blockchain transactions, reported that Multicoin Capital had moved about 172,710 HYPE (about $10.15 million) to Coinbase Prime, a destination that has often been associated with selling by traders.
Given that HYPE is currently among the top 10 crypto tokens, the action by one of its major institutional backers is likely to attract attention far beyond Hyperliquid users.
This is important as HYPE’s market cap is almost $13 billion and is currently priced at about $58.59, as per DefiLlama. Given that market cap, the token movements are far from taking place independently. Major transfers to exchanges can quickly shape traders’ perceptions of imminent risks across the market.
A transfer that still leaves Multicoin heavily exposed
When viewed relative to Multicoin’s current holdings, the $10.15 million transfer is actually rather insignificant. Onchain Lens estimates that the fund has approximately 2.16 million HYPE left, currently valued at around $126.63 million. To put it differently, the Coinbase Prime transfer actually seems to be a trim rather than an exit.
Coinbase Prime is the institutional platform of Coinbase, which provides services such as custody, execution, and funding for the institution’s clients. It also serves as a facility through which institutions sell large amounts of their positions using the regulated market. Onchain Lens classified this transfer as “likely to sell”, thus alerting the trading community.
Why the crypto market reads exchange inflows as a warning
This anxiety isn’t without some recent background. HYPE is trading well below its June high of $76.87 according to DefiLlama; meanwhile, open interest is at almost $11.8 billion. This creates a large number of leveraged positions, which can amplify any sudden downward movements.
Traders consider the transfer of tokens to exchanges to be a sign of supply entering the market. With HYPE’s liquidity still smaller than that of big cryptocurrencies, even an experienced trader may find the order book hard to manage. After a summer of observing the movement of tokens from Hyperliquid’s biggest holders, any other Multicoin transfer keeps the market on alert.
Multicoin has insisted it is not selling
Multicoin previously opposed similar rumors. For example, in the latter part of July, after Multicoin and Paradigm unstaked a total of $291 million worth of HYPE tokens, causing the price of HYPE tokens to fall below $60, the co-founder of Multicoin, Tushar Jain, issued a statement saying, “We did not unstake to sell,” and stated that the unstaking had occurred solely for privacy and wallet rotation purposes, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
At that time, on-chain specialists at Markets Alpha confirmed this reason, showing that the tokens were moved to custody instead of going to exchanges. The recent transfer is important due to the change in destination: Coinbase Prime has a more direct path to settlement. This does not prove that the tokens have been sold, but it explains why a $10 million movement is on the front pages.
What still underpins HYPE
The negative evaluation also needs to be considered alongside Hyperliquid’s fundamental figures. In its valuation report for June, Multicoin noted that the platform earned approximately $873 million in revenue on trading volume of about $2.9 trillion in 2025, which accounts for over 59% of open interest in the DeFi perpetual markets.
HYPE’s token economics are another part of the bull case. Roughly 99% of protocol revenue is directed toward HYPE buybacks, with the purchased tokens subsequently burned. Multicoin argued in the same report that HYPE could reach around $319 by 2028.
The transfer of $10.15 million does not conclusively resolve the debate between fundamentals and prevailing short-term selling pressure. However, given that Multicoin continues to hold more than $100 million in HYPE, major events involving Multicoin’s HYPE wallets are bound to have a significant impact on market movements.


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OpenAI’s revenues increased by 18% in the second quarter to reach $6.7 billion, while Anthropic’s revenue doubled to more than $11.6 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal’s report on August 18.
The annualized revenue run rates demonstrate an even bigger difference in revenues between OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI’s revenue growth increased from about $20 billion by the end of 2025 to more than $40 billion, while Anthropic has jumped from around $9 billion in revenue to over $65 billion in late July.
Run rate is not the same as audited annual revenue, and private companies don’t publish their financials in a manner similar to public companies. However, investors are still interpreting the disparity as an indication of the movement of enterprise AI demand.
The implications reach beyond the two companies. The anticipated initial public offering of Anthropic may occur even before that of OpenAI, with investment bankers saying the first major AI IPO will help set a precedent for the entire industry, according to Cryptopolitan. This means OpenAI’s slower rate of development gives relevance to every AI company trying to justify its very high valuation.
Where the business money is actually going
The shift in the nature of business demand can be clearly seen in the valuations of the two companies by investors, with Anthropic’s last funding round resulting in a value of $965 billion, as compared to OpenAI’s $852 billion last value.
The gap could increase even more, once these firms become public, as Anthropic investors are reportedly considering the firm’s future at $2 trillion, which is a much larger figure than OpenAI’s target figure of up to $1 trillion. This allows to conclude that the value at which the companies are being traded demonstrates not only the recent growth of Anthropic but also the growing importance of the enterprise-demand gap.
The valuation gap can be better understood through Ramp’s AI Index for August 12. Anthropic succeeded in getting 43.5% of American companies to subscribe to AI services, a rise of 1.1%. OpenAI only grew by 0.23 points to get 39.7%, while xAI went up by 0.94 points to 4%.
Yet Anthropic’s newest model complicates the picture. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian called Fable 5 the best model to reach the market, but it represented only 6% of Anthropic tokens purchased by businesses in its first month and 11.4% of spending. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol accounted for 25% of its tokens and 23% of spend.
Fable 5’s cost is around $10 for every million tokens used; therefore, Fable 5 is twice as expensive as the competition. This means that effective and better performance does not automatically guarantee that companies will opt for its heavy use given the cost.
It should be also mentioned that Ramp points out that the data from models used in this case is much more technology-heavy than the general AI Index, so the outcomes obtained by Ramp must be interpreted more as partially illustrating the desire of corporations rather than as giving a complete overview of the situation.
The spending ceiling everyone is now watching
Data provided by Ramp indicates that the amount of money spent on corporate AI is still not the same for everyone. According to them, in July, the top 1% of businesses spent, on average, $7400 per employee on AI, the top 10% spent $650, while the median company spent only $11.95 per employee.
According to Kharazian, the future growth will be contingent upon the companies which are already spending a good amount of money. The companies which belong to that group also try to explore the possibility of open-source or low-price alternatives and run the risk of forcing the frontier laboratories to prove that their high price actually gives enough value to customers.
On May 11, Goldman Sachs also expressed the same worries. James Covello, who leads Global Equity Research, stated that even if semiconductor firms had reported their highest sales and profits, the majority of AI companies have not yet achieved significant profit from the sector. He regarded the situation as “unprecedented and unsustainable.”
On August 17, Gartner raised another alert, projecting that AI inference costs associated with agentic workflow will increase by more than five times by 2028. Its “Inference Paradox” explains that although tokens are getting cheaper, total costs are increasing because of the consumption of tokens by more sophisticated AI agents.
OpenAI continues to enjoy its existing advantage of scale. In April, the company indicated that ChatGPT had 900 million users per week, whereas as reported by Reuters in June, about 2 million enterprise clients of OpenAI were contributing to 40% of its revenues.
However, size by itself might not trigger the subsequent stage of competition in AI. The main focus is which corporation will be able to convert model capability into quantifiable business success at prices customers will be willing to pay. In case price discipline plays an important role in the industry, inexpensive models and platforms used for allocation of workloads among providers would gain along with frontier laboratories.


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Meta rejected accusations on Tuesday that it deliberately built Facebook and Instagram to addict children, as opening statements began in Oakland federal court in a case brought by 29 states. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are leading at trial.
California deputy attorney general Megan O’Neill told the jury Meta’s model was to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can,” and then to take what those users generated and keep the company’s own findings from the public. It had worked particularly well on children, she added.
She said the states were not trying to put the company out of business and acknowledged that social media benefits some people. Meta shares closed down 4.4% at $543.67.
Meta Platforms Inc shares | Source: Google Finance
States say Meta made teen engagement a product goal
O’Neill said Meta had studied the psychology of youth seeking rewards and validation from others and used that knowledge to develop its product. She provided an example of an internal email to Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, about targeting teen usage time, and how employees had referred to Instagram as a drug and themselves as pushers.
Meta’s own findings favoured early adoption, she said, the earlier the better. As for users below the age limit, O’Neill made it clear to the jury that once the company identified a Facebook user as being under 13 years old, it would disable that profile while keeping the Instagram profile active.
Paul Schmidt, lawyer for Meta, said to the jurors that there is no disagreement about some people having difficulty; however, he said that there was no proof that the use of these social media platforms by teenagers harms their well-being, and that addiction is not an agreed-upon description. He admitted that sometimes employees used casual language, but jurors would hear what the employee who called Instagram a drug did next.
He says that during the past four years, the company has identified 1.4 million accounts that displayed evidence that they belonged to someone underage. Meta has separately said the states are seeking penalties as high as $1.4 trillion, roughly its entire market capitalisation.
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman called the case the largest consumer protection lawsuit in American history.
Former safety executive says Reels launched without enough safeguards
The states called Arturo Béjar first. He was an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, whose cyberbullying work brought him public prominence, and he returned as a contractor on safety from 2019 to 2021.
Béjar testified that what the company learned about safety never made it into the products, citing eating disorder content where engineers “had very good ideas on how to make it better.” He described a pattern of releases in which safety was not weighed at all, naming Reels.
Zuckerberg and Mosseri are expected to testify. The trial is scheduled for six weeks, with an advisory jury and US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers deciding liability.
A New Mexico judge ordered $567 million, then refused the design changes
The trial follows two adverse outcomes. As Cryptopolitan reported, a Los Angeles jury in March ordered Meta and Google to pay $6 million combined to a woman who said the platforms harmed her as a child. That same month a New Mexico jury found 75,000 violations of state law and imposed $375 million.
On August 6, Judge Bryan Biedscheid added $567 million for a youth mental health abatement fund, bringing New Mexico’s total to $942 million, and ordered five years of safety changes. He declined to order the structural remedies the state wanted, including removing infinite scroll, auto-advancing video and visible like counts, ruling that mandating design changes would run into the First Amendment and Section 230. Meta is appealing.

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Five economists at the European Central Bank published an analysis on Monday arguing that stock market valuations are likely to correct, and that the argument holds whether or not today’s prices are rational.
The post, by Malin Andersson, Johannes Breckenfelder, Stefano Corradin, Kalin Nikolov and Maria Antonietta Viola, puts US valuations close to their historical peak on the CAPE ratio, a measure comparing share prices against inflation-adjusted earnings averaged over the preceding decade.
Euro-area valuations have risen as well, by less. Research on past technological revolutions, the economists write, points to “a worrisome conclusion.”
The views are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent the ECB.
Rational valuations and investor exuberance point to the same outcome
This post gives both the rational and behavioural explanation. According to the rational explanation, extreme uncertainty with regard to a new technology’s efficiency would be enough to justify the valuation of its stocks at very high levels since one loses nothing much by trying it out and there is no way to tell the limit on the upside. This asymmetry creates an option value which increases price-to-earnings ratios for early adopters.
Nvidia is used by the economists as an example where the rationale of investors has been that a firm will be the next Google. This theoretical framework is based on research conducted by Ľuboš Pástor and Pietro Veronesi in 2009.
Prices can still fall from there. While a technology sits in a few firms, failure is diversifiable. As adoption spreads, the same uncertainty becomes economy-wide and can no longer be diversified, so investors demand a higher risk premium. Profits need not fall for prices to. Adoption helps cash flows, but historically the rising premium prevails unless profit growth is strong enough to compensate.
The behavioral approach goes hand-in-hand: overconfident investors bid beyond fundamentals, and once that overconfidence diminishes, the market may crash even further. “The exact moment cannot be predicted in advance,” state the economists, and “these sequences can be identified only retrospectively.”
Euro-zone households have €440bn exposure to US tech sector
Most euro-area investments in the Magnificent Seven are via mutual funds and exchange traded funds, as opposed to being direct shareholdings. Households, increasingly channelling money into low-cost ETFs, carry around €440 billion of exposure to US technology equities without necessarily being aware of the concentration risk.
Insurance companies and pension funds hold significant positions too. The holdings data is measured as of the third quarter of 2025.
The fund structure is itself a transmission channel. A market correction can compel funds to liquidate in order to satisfy redemptions, starting with their most liquid holdings and finishing with their troubled assets, thereby driving prices down and causing further redemptions. This is why the economists consider the Mag7 market correction to be a matter of financial stability for the euro area.
“The real risk,” they say, “is not only the equity market correction but one that takes place in an environment where the authorities have much less room than normal to ease monetary and fiscal policies in order to alleviate the impact.”
Europe looks less stretched than 2000, but remains exposed to a US selloff
A home-grown crash looks less likely, the post argues. Euro-area price-to-earnings ratios remain considerably lower than US levels, productivity and markups in the information and communication technology sector are rising, and the business climate in euro-area digital services does not appear exuberant.
Firms’ AI adoption is rising notably a few years after ChatGPT launched in 2022, and digital investment across the region over the past decade grew more than three times the cumulative growth in GDP.
As Cryptopolitan reported in December, the ECB drew the dot-com comparison in its financial stability review then as well, and Morningstar chief equity strategist Michael Field noted that the Magnificent Seven accounted for 40% of the Morningstar US index.
The limiting factor for such protection, however, lies in correlation. US and euro-zone stock markets have traditionally moved in tandem, and the economists predict that an AI catastrophe in the US would not just remain a problem for the US.

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Three engineers who once helped build rocket engines for SpaceX raised $15 million to open an automated steel-fabrication plant in Cincinnati.
Startup 1872 held a ribbon-cutting at its Factory One site on July 22, 2026. Its purpose is to provide steel components for AI data centers and small nuclear reactors.
Raptor team turns to steel skids
The three founders, Dan Summers, Brian Mongilio, and Michael Grant, all worked at SpaceX. Summers, now CEO of 1872, led the team that integrated and fabricated the Raptor engines that powered the Super Heavy booster for the Starship launch system.
He said the Raptor team paired software engineers with hardware engineers to build not just the engine but the system that made it.
That approach, he said, got Raptor from a first full-scale concept to production in three years compared with a jet-engine development cycle that he said can run past two decades.
1872 produces steel skids, which are the rectangular frames that act as a moveable base for modular buildings.
Summers described them as lower-precision parts than an aerospace component, which leaves more margin for an automated system to get things wrong and still turn out something usable.
The American Welding Society projects that the U.S. will need 320,500 new welding professionals by 2029. This demand is driven by retirements and increasing needs from data centers, chip fabs, and shipyards. Tighter immigration policy under the Trump administration squeezes welding-heavy sectors further.
“The problem that we are trying to solve is, how do we build more things with a decreasing pool of skilled labor to do it with,” Summers said.
1872 is looking to sell its skids to companies building AI data centers or small modular nuclear reactors. Both consume large amounts of fabricated steel.
Robots weld at $0.12 per inch
The welding is the result of a partnership with Columbus-based Path Robotics, whose robotic arms are used for automated arc welding.
Path Robotics says its systems get first-pass yields of 95% to 100%, the percentage of parts that go through inspection without rework or scrap.
Its arms run with the arc on about 70% of the time, versus 10% to 12% for human welders, who spend more of the task positioning and repositioning metal.
Path Robotics puts robotic welding at ~$0.12 per weld inch versus ~$0.78 by hand, an 85% reduction.
Welding a skid runs two to four hours. But assembling the cut components beforehand can eat four to five days, Summers said. “The whole name of the game is how do we keep that machine fed,” he said.
1872 describes a software stack in two parts. An “Architect” system takes a customer’s digital design files and builds a full manufacturing plan, including pricing and material sourcing.
A “Conductor” runs the floor, shuttling material and coordinating robots, which could include self-driving vehicles delivering parts or rail-mounted arms along a production line, Summers said.
He added that 1872 may reach 80% autonomous operation and just stop there if the quest for 100% stops paying off. It hopes to have its prototype factory automating most of the fabrication process by 2027.
1872 said the $15 million round, led through private funds advised by The O.H.I.O. Fund, ranks among the largest seed investments in Ohio history.
The plant sits in Camp Washington’s Spring Grove Avenue industrial corridor, inside the former David Hummel Building Company site, a 1903 structure whose namesake worked on Cincinnati City Hall and Union Terminal.
“Camp Washington has been one of Cincinnati’s most important industrial districts for more than 150 years,” said Jill Meyer, a founding partner of The O.H.I.O. Fund, who added that 1872 shows “its next chapter is being written right here.”
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Citi will begin holding bitcoin for institutional clients later this year. The bank is rolling the cryptocurrency into Custody+, the same platform its Investor Services arm uses for traditional securities, it said Tuesday.
The move matters to asset managers who have wanted a regulated US bank, not a crypto-native company, to custody digital assets.
Citi uses one framework for tokens and traditional securities
Citi is merging digital asset custody into Custody+, a new Investor Services platform focused on markets that trade 24/7 and settle faster than the old T+1 beat. Clients will be able to reach both their traditional holdings and their bitcoin in one place.
Citi said the crypto service is built on a common digital-asset architecture. That same platform already moves tokenized deposits almost instantly, 24 hours a day, in select markets.
Bitcoin is the first token supported. Custody+ also bundles in real-time asset servicing, instant settlement, liquidity tools, and what Citi calls AI-powered market intelligence.
Citi announced native crypto custody in November 2025. The project has been in development for close to three years, Biswarup Chatterjee, the bank’s global head of partnerships and innovation, said in October.
Chatterjee said at the time that Citi wanted to offer “a credible custody solution” for asset managers and institutional clients, with the bank holding native tokens itself rather than routing them through outside exchanges.
Some services would be built in-house, while others might rely on a “third-party, lightweight, nimble solution,” he said. Tuesday’s update connects the offering to Custody+ and a launch window of later this year.
The OCC cleared banks for crypto custody in 2025
The GENIUS Act made it easier for banks to deal with stablecoins and other blockchain assets. In May 2025, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) told institutions they could offer crypto custody.
The SEC repealed Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, the guidance that had made it capital-intensive to hold client crypto, and replaced it with the friendlier SAB 122.
Cryptopolitan previously reported that in September 2025, U.S. Bancorp re-launched its institutional bitcoin custody service with NYDIG as sub-custodian, joining BNY Mellon, Fidelity, Coinbase, and Anchorage Digital.
Deutsche Bank of Germany has said it will launch custody in 2026 with help from Bitpanda. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, on the contrary, said his bank will let clients buy crypto but won’t hold it for them.
In January, Citi worked with Intercontinental Exchange on tokenized deposits across its clearinghouses. In July, the bank joined a Swift pilot testing 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits.
The bank is also among the US lenders supporting a tokenized deposit network via The Clearing House, which plans to launch in the first half of 2027. Bitcoin was trading at around $64,660 when the news broke.
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Citi will begin holding bitcoin for institutional clients later this year. The bank is rolling the cryptocurrency into Custody+, the same platform its Investor Services arm uses for traditional securities, it said Tuesday.
The move matters to asset managers who have wanted a regulated US bank, not a crypto-native company, to custody digital assets.
Citi uses one framework for tokens and traditional securities
Citi is merging digital asset custody into Custody+, a new Investor Services platform focused on markets that trade 24/7 and settle faster than the old T+1 beat. Clients will be able to reach both their traditional holdings and their bitcoin in one place.
Citi said the crypto service is built on a common digital-asset architecture. That same platform already moves tokenized deposits almost instantly, 24 hours a day, in select markets.
Bitcoin is the first token supported. Custody+ also bundles in real-time asset servicing, instant settlement, liquidity tools, and what Citi calls AI-powered market intelligence.
Citi announced native crypto custody in November 2025. The project has been in development for close to three years, Biswarup Chatterjee, the bank’s global head of partnerships and innovation, said in October.
Chatterjee said at the time that Citi wanted to offer “a credible custody solution” for asset managers and institutional clients, with the bank holding native tokens itself rather than routing them through outside exchanges.
Some services would be built in-house, while others might rely on a “third-party, lightweight, nimble solution,” he said. Tuesday’s update connects the offering to Custody+ and a launch window of later this year.
The OCC cleared banks for crypto custody in 2025
The GENIUS Act made it easier for banks to deal with stablecoins and other blockchain assets. In May 2025, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) told institutions they could offer crypto custody.
The SEC repealed Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, the guidance that had made it capital-intensive to hold client crypto, and replaced it with the friendlier SAB 122.
Cryptopolitan previously reported that in September 2025, U.S. Bancorp re-launched its institutional bitcoin custody service with NYDIG as sub-custodian, joining BNY Mellon, Fidelity, Coinbase, and Anchorage Digital.
Deutsche Bank of Germany has said it will launch custody in 2026 with help from Bitpanda. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, on the contrary, said his bank will let clients buy crypto but won’t hold it for them.
In January, Citi worked with Intercontinental Exchange on tokenized deposits across its clearinghouses. In July, the bank joined a Swift pilot testing 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits.
The bank is also among the US lenders supporting a tokenized deposit network via The Clearing House, which plans to launch in the first half of 2027. Bitcoin was trading at around $64,660 when the news broke.
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France will use “sovereign” AI providers such as Mistral, not OpenAI, to test government systems for security vulnerabilities, Budget Minister David Amiel said Tuesday.
The announcement came days after a breach at the national tax agency exposed data of about 700,000 taxpayers.
“This excludes OpenAI”
After a cabinet meeting in Paris, Amiel told reporters the state would turn to what he called sovereign AI companies, “such as Mistral,” to do the work. “This excludes OpenAI,” he said.
Amiel had confirmed the plan itself earlier that day. The government would use AI tools to identify its own services’ vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. The catalyst was the tax agency breach disclosed the previous Thursday. The French Finance Ministry said the data of some 700,000 taxpayers had been taken.
Mistral, the Paris startup backed by chipmaking-equipment supplier ASML, has become the go-to company for France when it wants to demonstrate it can operate critical systems without relying on American technology.
In June, Amiel unveiled a government plan called “Notre IA,” or “Our AI,” to distribute sovereign tools across public services. The state digital agency DINUM developed its centerpiece, an assistant called “L’Assistant,” based on Mistral’s model and hosted it in SecNumCloud-certified datacenters. The tool was being rolled out to close to a million state employees.
A breach that keeps growing
France’s tax administration chief Amelie Verdier said Monday that her teams had uncovered a second data breach. She said the intrusion is still being assessed.
Earlier this month, Cryptopolitan reported the first breach was on the Directorate General of Public Finances. A compromised internal VPN was used by an attacker to reach a taxpayer search tool using a stolen identity, the DGFiP said.
The access was traced back to late June 2026 and was closed by the end of the month. By that time, the attacker had already seen and pulled records.
The data include names, birth details, postal and email addresses, telephone numbers, tax identification numbers, withholding rates, and correspondence with officials, the DGFiP said.
The agency said usernames and passwords were not among the exposed data. France’s privacy watchdog CNIL was notified, and the DGFiP said it would file a criminal complaint.
France has been hit by a wave of violent attacks on crypto owners in 2026, Cryptopolitan has reported. In April, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on X that the country had seen 41 kidnappings of crypto holders in the first three and a half months of the year. He blamed leaked personal data, including records held by tax authorities.
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France will use “sovereign” AI providers such as Mistral, not OpenAI, to test government systems for security vulnerabilities, Budget Minister David Amiel said Tuesday.
The announcement came days after a breach at the national tax agency exposed data of about 700,000 taxpayers.
“This excludes OpenAI”
After a cabinet meeting in Paris, Amiel told reporters the state would turn to what he called sovereign AI companies, “such as Mistral,” to do the work. “This excludes OpenAI,” he said.
Amiel had confirmed the plan itself earlier that day. The government would use AI tools to identify its own services’ vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. The catalyst was the tax agency breach disclosed the previous Thursday. The French Finance Ministry said the data of some 700,000 taxpayers had been taken.
Mistral, the Paris startup backed by chipmaking-equipment supplier ASML, has become the go-to company for France when it wants to demonstrate it can operate critical systems without relying on American technology.
In June, Amiel unveiled a government plan called “Notre IA,” or “Our AI,” to distribute sovereign tools across public services. The state digital agency DINUM developed its centerpiece, an assistant called “L’Assistant,” based on Mistral’s model and hosted it in SecNumCloud-certified datacenters. The tool was being rolled out to close to a million state employees.
A breach that keeps growing
France’s tax administration chief Amelie Verdier said Monday that her teams had uncovered a second data breach. She said the intrusion is still being assessed.
Earlier this month, Cryptopolitan reported the first breach was on the Directorate General of Public Finances. A compromised internal VPN was used by an attacker to reach a taxpayer search tool using a stolen identity, the DGFiP said.
The access was traced back to late June 2026 and was closed by the end of the month. By that time, the attacker had already seen and pulled records.
The data include names, birth details, postal and email addresses, telephone numbers, tax identification numbers, withholding rates, and correspondence with officials, the DGFiP said.
The agency said usernames and passwords were not among the exposed data. France’s privacy watchdog CNIL was notified, and the DGFiP said it would file a criminal complaint.
France has been hit by a wave of violent attacks on crypto owners in 2026, Cryptopolitan has reported. In April, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on X that the country had seen 41 kidnappings of crypto holders in the first three and a half months of the year. He blamed leaked personal data, including records held by tax authorities.
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Perplexity’s monthly mobile revenue in India was $156,000 in July 2026, compared to about $34,000 in January 2025.
Its free Pro subscriptions, distributed through telecom operator Airtel, had already begun to expire.
A $200 subscription, handed to 360 million customers
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest carrier, to provide a 12-month free trial of Perplexity Pro to its 360 million subscribers. The plan usually costs about $200 a year, or 17,000 rupees.
Perplexity was downloaded 5.9 million times in all of India in July 2025, a 625% increase from the previous month and more installs in four weeks than the app had amassed during the entire first half of the year.
Daily downloads increased from around 11,200 in the week before the offer to ~223,000 in its first week, reaching ~305,000 a day by mid-October.
New users could get in on the deal for seven months. In that stretch, there were 56 million downloads, more than nine times the downloads in the prior stretch.
Monthly active users doubled to 8.9 million and peaked at nearly 22 million in October.
Airtel stopped new redemptions on January 16, 2026. India saw 3.3 million installs between February and July, a decline of more than 90% from the previous six months.
From February to mid-August, Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India was about 60% higher than during the giveaway window.
India’s revenue for the first seven months of 2026 was estimated at $878,000, 16% above its total for all of 2025.
Monthly actives were close to 14 million in July, down 37% from their October peak but still more than five times the 2.6 million Perplexity averaged in early 2025.
“Ongoing usage has remained resilient,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, said.
Users say the ‘free’ plan asked for card details
The earliest Airtel customers activated their year of Pro last summer, so their free access began running out in July 2026, with auto-renewal enabled by default. People who did not cancel before the renewal date were charged.
From July 18 through August 12, when those first subscriptions expired, daily in-app purchase revenue averaged 9% above the prior 30 days and 27% above the 2026 average.
In February, Airtel and Perplexity made it mandatory for users to add a credit or debit card to continue the free trial.
The companies say the cards are only used for verification, nothing is charged during the free period, and users can cancel before any paid renewal.
Subscribers said the original pitch was as a perk, with no payment details asked for. Several said their access was paused until they input a card.
The change disrupted the work of students, freelancers, and small business owners who had integrated the tool into their daily research and writing.
On X, some said the two companies were using forgotten cancellation dates to turn trials into charges. “At least 50% will forget their trial end date and get charged,” one user wrote on January 15.
India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market with 700 million users, and low data costs and an internet base of over a billion people.
OpenAI offered free access to its low-cost ChatGPT Go plan in India for a year in August 2025, as reported by Cryptopolitan, and eventually turned India into its second biggest market.
Google has struck a deal to offer eligible Reliance Jio users 18 months of its AI Pro subscription for free.
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Two of the United States’ financial regulators, headed by Trump-appointed chiefs, are planning to write cryptocurrency rules on their own while the CLARITY Act remains stuck in the Senate.
Lawmakers have only about 14 working days after they return from recess to pass the CLARITY Act before the October election break.
What are the proposed placeholders for the CLARITY Act?
The CLARITY Act, the crypto industry’s top legislative priority, has been put off for another month after the Senate left for a five-week recess without voting on it.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed a cloture motion setting a procedural vote for September 15 that would need 60 votes, and a failure there could effectively end the bill. Lawmakers have only 14 working days after they return before an October election recess.
Opposition to the bill comes from Democrats who want tougher anti-money-laundering safeguards and tighter ethics rules, while CME Group sued the CFTC in June over its approval of perpetual crypto futures.
Republicans updated the bill in July to bar the president and other federal officials from issuing or sponsoring crypto, with penalties reaching $250,000 a day, but the two parties still disagree over whether the Justice Department or state attorneys general should enforce that ban.
How the Trump admin is advancing crypto regulation
As a workaround to this delay, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected within weeks to propose a rule that would exempt some token offerings from securities requirements.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), meanwhile, is set to put crypto on the agenda at an industry event later this week.
Meanwhile, the White House is reportedly expected to host executives from crypto, prediction markets, and traditional finance on Wednesday.
Nate Geraci, president of Nova Dius Wealth, wrote on X that expected attendees include SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, Acting CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, and executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Polymarket, and Gemini, alongside Wall Street names such as Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, CME Group, and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
The meeting happens one day before the CFTC holds its first Innovation Advisory Committee, a panel drawn from crypto, gambling, finance, and prediction market firms.
Why does the industry still want a law?
Executives are open to the cryptocurrency rules from the SEC or CFTC, but rules written by regulators can be challenged in court, and a future administration could scrap them. The Trump administration already reversed dozens of Biden-era SEC and consumer-protection policies. Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler also sued dozens of crypto firms under President Biden.
On August 14, the SEC canceled a meeting where it was set to vote on proposing its first formal crypto-specific rulemaking, known as “Regulation Crypto.”
The proposal would have created three ways for companies to offer tokens, including one that would have let startups raise about $5 million without full SEC registration and another path that would have allowed fundraising of up to $75 million.
The SEC canceled the meeting where it was going to vote on this proposal because officials worried that the SEC moving forward on its own could hurt the chances of the CLARITY Act passing in Congress.
However, with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who leads the agency’s Crypto Task Force, set to leave the agency in November 2026, there is more pressure on the SEC to finish its work before she goes.
The SEC also delayed another plan called the “innovation exemption” that would have let crypto firms issue and trade digital versions of stocks and bonds without going through the full SEC registration process.
But traditional finance groups like the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association pushed back on the system, arguing that big changes like this should go through proper rulemaking procedures, not exemptions that skip the normal process.
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Justin Sun, the founder of TRON and owner of the HTX exchange, has dismissed a wave of reports that exchange wallets had been spraying small crypto transfers at unrelated addresses.
Sun said that the claims were fabricated, writing in Chinese on X on August 18, which, when translated to English, reads, “The investigation is clear: it’s all made up.”
However, he did not provide supporting details to the post. Sun linked to an unspecified follow-up but did not name the accusers, describe the transfers, or explain what his team had investigated.
Sun’s post comes after what is being seen as a noisy day for his exchange, HTX, formerly Huobi. Traders on the platform had been circulating for hours screenshots of unsolicited USDT landing in wallets that blockchain explorers tagged as belonging to the exchange.
A trader known as 紫夜 (0xZiye) wrote that he had received 7.5 USDT to his Coinbase account, and he attributed it to Sun’s exchange.
0xZiye wrote, “HTX is crazily transferring out small amounts, polluting other addresses.” The trader claimed that Coinbase informed him that his account would be closed unless he explained where the funds came from.
What users actually received, and what happened next
The amounts that were transferred to the respective addresses were small, with some reportedly receiving as high as 12 USDT. The transferred funds are not near zero, as is usually seen in dust attacks.
Phyrex, a widely followed analyst on X, later confirmed that 0xZiye’s Coinbase account had returned to normal and that anyone in a similar position could ask Coinbase support to review the case. He said that he had contacted the Coinbase Singapore arm, adding that “They have escalated the feedback to relevant departments at Coinbase, including the legal team.”
Phyrex also added that he is in communication with the HTX team.
Why is a few dollars of USDT setting off alarms?
The concern of the users who received these USDT deposits has not been theft but compliance.
HTX is being treated as a sanctioned counterparty in the United Kingdom and the European Union. So wallets that withdrew from HTX after May 26 are considered in breach of those sanctions. That was what led to some of the freezes that some users, like 0xZiye, experienced when the funds entered their Coinbase addresses.
Binance has frozen transactions tied to HTX, Exmo, and more than a dozen other exchanges and some decentralized venues. Even Hyperliquid, a decentralized platform, has begun blacklisting HTX-linked addresses.
What is HTX saying, and are there new freezes on its ledger?
In an official statement, the exchange said it had “not conducted any related transfers or testing activities” and would not speculate before finishing its review.
Molly, HTX head of marketing, said that the platform “absolutely” did not behave this way and blamed either a misunderstanding or deliberate sabotage.
The exchange also pointed to attribution as a possible culprit. Explorers and analytics firms assign wallet labels using ownership disclosures and clustering, and a displayed tag is not proof that the named exchange authorized a payment.
HTX said it was checking whether address tagging or on-chain source identification had produced a false link.
Later in the day, the representative said HTX had reviewed tens of thousands of deposit and withdrawal orders across platforms and found no new frozen cases.
HTX has denied sending the transfers, and so far, a security researcher has publicly connected the disputed deposits to a specific operator.
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OpenAI has started rolling out a version of ChatGPT built specifically for Teens aged 13 to 17.
The rollout comes after OpenAI has been dragged through the courts over lawsuits tying ChatGPT conversations to teen suicides.
How will the teen ChatGPT work?
OpenAI is rolling out a new version of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, which will automatically place users aged 13 to 17 in the teen version. Users under 13 are barred from ChatGPT entirely.
Even if teens try to trick the system by signing up with a fake birthdate, the system will consider signals such as the topics an account discusses, the hours it is active, and how long it has existed, in order to decide if a user is under 18 or not.
Users who are still wrongly sorted can get their age verified through Persona, a third-party firm that reviews a government ID or a live selfie and deletes the upload within seven days.
Ann O’Leary, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, said the goal is to stop exposing teens to material “they shouldn’t be exposed to.”
Parents who link an account to a teen user can lock access to the chatbot at chosen times. They also receive alerts in limited high-risk cases, although OpenAI says the controls do not let them read a teen’s messages.
Is OpenAI adding new safety features?
OpenAI’s teen version brings together its existing safety features rather than create new ones. For instance, the age prediction feature has existed since the start of the year, while OpenAI’s parental controls and study mode were launched roughly a year ago.
The company first revealed its plans for a teen tier in September 2025. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also made an official inquiry into OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, xAI, Snap and Character.AI over how they protect minors around that period.
The FTC specifically targeted “companion” chatbots following multiple tragic incidents, including the suicide of a 16-year-old who had interacted extensively with ChatGPT.
A 2025 study from Common Sense Media found more than 70% of U.S. teens have used AI chatbots for companionship, and half use AI companions regularly.
A separate research found that ChatGPT would, when asked, tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, hide an eating disorder, or draft a suicide note. Sam Altman has called emotional overreliance on the technology “a really common thing” among young people.
The teen experience will be available for eligible accounts on either free or paid personal plans. From August 18, the teen version will be available for eligible accounts with no restrictions for free accounts. The company is also planning a full rollout in Australia, expected by September 8.
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Superplanet (Nasdaq: SLE) opened trading hot on Tuesday, August 18, after Metaplanet revealed its plan to take over roughly 95.7% stake in Super League Enterprise’s (Nasdaq: SLE) business in exchange for 2,100 Bitcoin and $2.5 million in cash.
The deal closed with the Nasdaq-listed gaming firm getting a rebrand as a US Bitcoin treasury company, with the backing of the third-largest corporate holders of the asset. Once the transaction closes, Superplanet will drop the Super league era SLE ticker for its new SUPA label.
Metaplanet and Super Planet have gone out of their way to emphasize that they are entering a private placement of new securities into an existing firm, which is different from a reverse takeover or a SPAC deal.
How Metaplanet entered the US
The agreement with Super League (Nasdaq: SLE) gave Metaplanet a route into the United States. That way, the Simpn Gerovich-led firm gains a second listed vehicle in a different currency and under a different regulator.
For the deal to go through, the Japanese firm put up 2,100 BTC (4.9% of its 43,000 BTC stack), valued at about $132.1 million, and another $2.5 million in cash in exchange for 44,859,400 newly issued Super League shares priced at $3.00 per share. Metaplanet also received preferred stock and warrants.
Put together, Metaplanet committed about $134.6 million to get the arrangement over the line. The valuations were calculated based on Bitcoin’s closing price on Coinbase at 4:00 p.m. New York time on August 14.
Before the deal, Santa Monica-based Super League was an advertising and gaming-media company, and that part of the business is expected to continue to operate as a distinct segment.
The US market is the prize
Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich was optimistic about landing in the United States, saying “Superplanet is how we build in America, the deepest capital market in the world,” in the announcement.
Gerovich confirmed that the two firms would run “one consolidated Bitcoin position, compounding through two listed platforms in Japan and in the U.S.”
Some of the particulars already disclosed in how the group will handle its financials are:
Bitcoins contributed by the group stay inside it and get folded into Metaplanet’s financial statements.
When Superplanet raises money without printing new common shares, through instruments such as perpetual preferred stock, the Bitcoin behind each common share is expected to rise, and so is the Bitcoin attributable to each Metaplanet share.
This deal has been cooking since at least April, as Gerovich intimated that a small internal team had been “working on something we could not talk about.”
Metaplanet gains board rights in Super League
Metaplanet will gain voting rights and name a majority of Superplanet’s board with the 100 convertible perpetual preferred stock shares it received from Super League.
The Japanese firm also gets ten-year warrants over as many as 381 million common shares across four tranches. A separate investor, Evo Fund, receives warrants for up to 10 million shares.
Metaplanet can subscribe for up to 2.1 million shares of junior liquidity preferred stock at $100.00 apiece for 24 months after closing. That’s a $210 million lever if it’s needed.
As a counterweight, every share Metaplanet gets at closing, and any it later acquires through warrants or conversions, is locked for five years. That lockup is being touted as evidence of Metaplanet’s long-term commitment.
Traders sent SLE from $3 to $7
The market read it as a catalyst. Before the deal hit, SLE looked broken, down 10.6% in Tuesday premarket to $2.70 and near its 52-week low of $2.12, capping a year in which the stock had shed more than 92%.
Then the announcement landed. SLE jumped about 120% intraday and ran from roughly $3.30 to just above $7.00 in the first half hour before fading toward the mid-$6s. Google Finance logged a session high of $7.37 against a $3.02 prior close.
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Crypto companies raised $1.36B across 41 VC rounds in July. Investment fell only 6.8% from June, but round count dropped 28%, and one $400M strategic round supplied almost a third of the total.
Key Takeaways
$1.36B was invested across 41 VC rounds. Investment slipped 6.8% from June, while round count fell 28.1% to a 12-month low.
Crypto.com‘s $400M strategic round supplied 29.4% of monthly VC investment. Excluding it, investment would have been $960M, down 34.2% from June.
Series A and later rounds attracted $661M, nearly twice June’s total. Augustus, Prime Intellect and Gauntlet accounted for 65.8% of the stage group.
The number of unique institutional investors fell 30.7% to 140, broadly matching the decline in completed rounds.
Buyer activity held steady at 17 M&A transactions. None had a publicly disclosed value, leaving no measurable acquisition total.
Introduction
Headline investment was resilient, but market breadth weakened. Crypto companies raised $1.36B in venture capital, only $100M less than in June. The number of completed rounds fell by 16, and the number of institutional investors fell by 62. Investment became concentrated in a smaller set of transactions.
The ten largest rounds accounted for 85% of VC investment, and the largest round alone contributed 29.4%. Stage, category and investor data tell the same story. Large cheques remained available to selected companies while financing breadth contracted.
Fundraising Activity
Monthly VC Investment Held as the Market Narrowed
July’s $1.36B in VC investment sat near the middle of the range since August 2025. Round count did not. At 41, the total was the lowest in the 12-month window and 63.1% below the 111 rounds completed in July 2025.
The mean round rose from $25.6M in June to $33.2M in July, but that increase disappears after excluding the largest transaction. Without Crypto.com’s $400M strategic investment, VC investment would have been $960M across 40 rounds, or $24M per round. The data therefore point to concentration rather than an improvement in the typical financing environment.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Venture Remained the Largest Funding Channel
CryptoRank identified $2.13B in publicly disclosed investment across transaction types. VC rounds supplied $1.36B, or 63.9%. Strategy‘s $466.7M post-IPO raise contributed 21.9%, and Alpaca‘s $300M debt facility contributed 14.1%.
The total is a floor rather than a complete measure of economic activity. All 17 acquisitions had private terms, so M&A added transactions but no publicly disclosed value. The mix should therefore be read as a distribution of published investment values, not of all money committed.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Later-Stage Investment Nearly Doubled
Series A and later rounds were the only major stage group to expand. Investment rose 94.4% from $340M in June to $661M in July. Augustus, Prime Intellect and Gauntlet supplied $435M, or 65.8% of that total, so the recovery was substantial but narrow.
Strategic investment fell 8.8% to $542M, while Seed and Pre-Seed investment declined about 18% to $100M. Later-stage and strategic rounds together represented 88.5% of VC investment, leaving early-stage financing as a small share of the disclosed total.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Category Analysis
Exchanges Led Investment While AI Led Activity
Exchange projects attracted $543M across seven rounds, the highest investment of any category. Crypto.com supplied 73.7% of the category total. Payments followed with $244M across four rounds. AI ranked third with $232M but led by transaction count with eight rounds.
AI investment was also concentrated. Prime Intellect and Venice AI raised a combined $195M, or 84.1% of the category total. The category had the broadest deal pipeline, but most of its investment still came from two transactions.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Largest Rounds in the Leading Categories
The table combines rounds of at least $10M in the three leading categories and lists selected investors for larger syndicates.
Table 1. Largest July rounds of at least $10M in Exchange, Payments and AI.
CategoryProjectRaisedStageSelected investorsExchangeCrypto.com$400MStrategicCitadel SecuritiesExchangeEDX Markets$76MSeries CSBI HoldingsExchangeSkew$33MStrategicHyperion DeFiExchangeMercado Bitcoin$20MStrategicTetherExchangeExtended$12.5MStrategicJump Crypto, Alber Blanc, eToroPaymentsAugustus$180MSeries BTiger Global, QED, Variant, Brevan Howard DigitalPaymentsVelocity$38MSeries ACapital One Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Ripple, Dragonfly, QEDPaymentsCyclops$20MSeries AGPT Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Castle Island VenturesAIPrime Intellect$130MSeries ANVentures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Radical VenturesAIVenice AI$65MSeries ANorth Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, DragonflyAIAxis Robotics$12MSeedNomad Capital, Pi Network, 10K Ventures, Hack VC
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Investor Activity
The Investor Base Shrunk With the Deal Pipeline
CryptoRank identified 140 unique institutional investors in July, down 30.7% from 202 in June and 66.1% from 413 in July 2024. This was the lowest observation in the corrected 25-month series.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Most Active Funds and Lead Investors
Coinbase Ventures was the most active fund with five investments, equal to 12.2% of July’s 41 rounds, but it was not listed as the lead investor on any of them. Nascent followed with three investments. The other funds in the top ten made two investments each.
Lead-investor activity was more selective. Hack VC and Dragonfly led both of their recorded rounds, while several active funds participated only as co-investors. Overall investment count measures activity across rounds, while lead-investor count isolates rounds in which a fund was identified as the lead.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Deal Concentration
Ten Rounds Accounted for 85% of VC Investment
The ten largest disclosed rounds attracted $1.16B, equal to 85% of July VC investment. The four largest supplied $835M, or 61.4%. This concentration explains why total investment stayed close to June even as round count and investor participation fell sharply.
The largest transactions spanned several themes. The top four included a strategic exchange investment, a Series B payments round, a Series A AI round and a Series C DeFi round. The data support a conclusion about large cheque sizes, not a claim that one category captured the entire market.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
M&A Activity
Deal Count Held Steady With No Public Deal Values
CryptoRank identified 17 acquisitions in July, matching June and sitting slightly above the 12-month average of 16.4. None had a publicly disclosed value. The absence of a reported M&A total reflects private deal terms, not a lack of activity.
Announcement count is the more consistent measure of buyer activity. Monthly deal count ranged from five to 23 over the past year, while disclosed values ranged from $94M to $5.55B in months with at least one public price. A few priced transactions can dominate the value series, and an active month can have no measurable total when all terms remain private.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Infrastructure and Exchanges Led Consolidation
Infrastructure led July M&A with five targets, followed by Exchange with four and DeFi with three. Together, those categories represented 12 of 17 transactions. Infrastructure and Exchange alone accounted for 52.9%, consistent with buyers adding operational rails, licences and distribution.
Fundraising and acquisition activity targeted different categories. AI led VC round count but had no July acquisitions, while Infrastructure attracted two VC rounds and five acquisitions. One month is too short to establish a durable preference, but the split suggests that primary financing and consolidation were focused on different parts of the market.
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Selected July Transactions
Because no deal values were made public, the transactions cannot be ranked by size. The table therefore presents ten examples and the capability or market access each acquirer added.
Table 2. Selected July M&A transactions.
TargetCategoryAcquirerStrategic roleNewton LabsInfrastructurePayward (Kraken)Embedded non-custodial wallet infrastructureCoinhakoExchangeSBI HoldingsLicensed exchange distribution in SingaporeBybit IndonesiaExchangeBybitRegulated Indonesian exchange operationsGlidePaymentsMoonPayCross-chain deposit and funding infrastructureStaking RewardsAnalyticsThe TieStaking yield and validator dataLiquidity LandDeFiThe TieAutomated Solana yield allocationbloXrouteInfrastructureFalconXLow-latency transaction relay and MEV toolingOdinBotDeFiCieloCopy-trading execution on SolanaRaven MarketDeFiPremiaFixed-payout digital optionsCypherPaymentsNiumSelf-custodial card and payment infrastructure
Source: CryptoRank MCP
Conclusion
July’s headline investment did not collapse, but it reached fewer companies. One $400M transaction kept the monthly total close to June, while round count, unique investors and early-stage investment all moved lower. Later-stage financing improved, but three rounds supplied almost two-thirds of that stage group’s investment.
Two cautions matter. Investor rosters may rise as CryptoRank backfills participation, and acquisition value cannot be assessed because every July transaction had private terms. Neither limitation changes the direction of the breadth indicators, but both constrain how strongly the data should be interpreted.
The next test is whether round count and unique investors recover while investment outside the largest transactions expands. A rebound across those measures would indicate broader financing conditions. Another month led by a handful of large rounds would reinforce July’s concentration pattern.

Etched is already eyeing a fresh funding round that will more than double the AI inference chips startup’s valuation at around $21 billion, barely one month after its late July Sequoia-led $300 million Series C round that valued the firm at $10.3 billion.
The new numbers cited in the Wall Street Journal’s August 18 report represent a fourfold expansion of the firm’s $5 billion valuation in December 2025. Etched also closed on Jane Street as its first customer, delivering a server rack filled with AI processors optimized for rapid inference computing to the Wall Street quantitative trading giant.
The scale of the firm’s growth after only coming out of stealth on June 30 signals the rush for alternatives to Nvidia’s big lead at the head of the supply chain that supplies the silicon powering the AI boom.
“This round reflects a growing industry conviction that the challenge demands a new entrant willing to rebuild the stack from first principles,” co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said in a statement.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), SK Hynix, Jane Street and Diffusion Capital also joined the July 31 financing round.
What do Etched’s chips do?
Etched sells full rack systems optimized for the inference portion of the AI compute stack, which occurs after users submit prompts. The firm believes its inference focus allows it to build specialist chips compared to Nvidia, which builds all-purpose GPUs for both AI training and inference.
Etched splits the work into the prefill and decode phases.
The prefill phase reads and interprets prompts using what Etched co-founder Robert Wachen calls low-voltage inference. That design choice allows the chip to run cooler with more transistors and a higher clock speed.
The decode phase, where the model writes its answer one token at a time, uses a Cluster Scale Memory design. The shared memory design allows accelerators inside one rack to draw data from another memory pool instead of having to copy the data themselves.
Etched said its systems are already inside DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba, and Llama models.
Big money is flowing into inference
Etched is riding the hot hand in a broader market that forecasters back as the fastest-growing slice of a hot AI sector. The company delivered on its promise to start shipping chips by the summer, filling over $1 billion of booked orders, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
Bloomberg Intelligence set a $1.3 trillion target for the inference sector, doubling the size of the AI training market by 2032. Iron Mountain and Structure Research back inference capacity to overtake training capacity this year and continue to grow to account for 80% of AI compute load by 2030.
The rush for AI data centers has created a steady demand route fed by names such as Nvidia, Cerebras, and AMD, which are also building inference-specific systems on the same prefill-and-decode split that Etched describes.
Etched now employs more than 400 people and reported first-pass silicon success on TSMC’s N4P process. It runs a 2-megawatt data center at its San Jose headquarters and has opened a new 80,000-square-foot, 10-megawatt facility in nearby Milpitas, TechCrunch reported.
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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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