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Bitcoin (BTC) is up roughly 24% in August, its largest monthly advance of 2026. This month’s rally lifted the asset from the $60,000s to briefly over $80,000.
However, three warning signs now emerge: exchange balances, exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows, and spot demand have all turned less supportive during the closing days of August.
Bitcoin (BTC) 1 Month Price Chart. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
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Bitcoin Warning Signs Build as Binance Reserves Hit a 2026 High
Binance’s Bitcoin reserves have climbed to roughly 687,000 BTC, the highest level recorded in 2026, according to CryptoQuant data. Reserves dropped near 617,000 BTC in late April before reversing. The build then accelerated through August, as Bitcoin rallied.
Traders usually move coins onto an exchange to sell, hedge, or post collateral. Therefore, a rising balance during a rally makes more supply immediately available for sale.
The number alone proves nothing. Wallet reorganizations, custody shifts, and market-making transfers also lift exchange balances.
Still, that supply now sits on the largest venue while shrinking exchange stablecoin reserves leave less idle cash ready to absorb it.
“A yearly high in Binance reserves near major resistance is a warning sign. The next move above $80,000 will likely depend on whether spot and ETF demand can absorb the additional supply potentially available to the market,” XWIN Japan wrote.
ETF Inflow Streak Breaks as Weekly Demand Halves
Meanwhile, US spot bitcoin ETFs posted a $201.8 million net outflow on August 28, according to SoSoValue data. That red session ended nine consecutive days of inflows, which came as Bitcoin recorded its largest weekly dollar gain on record.
Other major products stayed green on the same day. Ethereum (ETH) funds drew $102.18 million, while XRP (XRP) and Solana (SOL) products added $26.2 million and $18.08 million.
Weekly flows cooled as well. Net inflows fell 51.8% to $924.5 million in the week ending August 28, down from $1.92 billion.
One negative session does not confirm a reversal. However, ETF flows are a major source of demand for Bitcoin, and that may be thinning.
Leverage, Not Spot Buying, May Be Driving the Move
Finally, analyst Crypto Rover argued that the weekend advance lacked spot participation.
“BTC is moving higher over the weekend while spot CVD remains almost flat, suggesting leverage is driving the move. Last time we spotted this same setup, Bitcoin dumped from $81K to $77K,” the post read.
Spot cumulative volume delta (CVD) tracks the balance between aggressive buyers and sellers in spot markets. A flat CVD during a rally can suggest that derivatives or leveraged positions, rather than strong spot demand, are driving the move.
Not every analyst reads the setup that way. GSR’s Andy Baehr has framed the $80,000 breakout as a new market regime built on ETF demand and short liquidations.
Seasonality offers thin comfort. September has averaged a 3.08% loss for Bitcoin since 2013, Coinglass data shows, the weakest average month of the year.
Bitcoin Monthly Returns Table Showing September Seasonality. Source: Coinglass
Recent years cut the other way. The last three Septembers all closed green, including gains of 5.16% in 2025 and 7.29% in 2024.
The coming sessions should show whether spot and ETF buyers can absorb the coins now parked on Binance.
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Hair loss biotechs are racing to deliver the first new baldness treatments in nearly three decades, and investors are positioning for the payoff.
Veradermics, Absci, and Cosmo Pharmaceuticals are advancing a pill, an injection, and a topical drug for pattern hair loss, a condition with no newly approved therapy since the late 1990s.
Hair Loss Biotechs Eye A Market Waiting For A Cure
Pattern hair loss affects an estimated 50 million men and 30 million women in the United States, according to Bloomberg. Current options are limited to decades-old drugs minoxidil and finasteride. Both are tied to side effects that include heart palpitations and reduced sex drive.
Veradermics (NYSE: MANE) is developing an oral pill, VDPHL01, and its stock has climbed nearly 500% since its February IPO. Absci (NASDAQ: ABSI) is testing an injection dosed two to three times over six months, and its shares have more than doubled so far this year.
Cosmo Pharmaceuticals posted positive late-stage trial results for a topical solution but has traded more cautiously against its US rivals.
Investors Chase A GLP-1 Style Trade
The enthusiasm echoes Eli Lilly’s stock rally, which reshaped investor appetite for consumer health biotech. Its weight loss drugs first drove that shift.
Eli Lilly’s stock is up nearly 350% over the last 5 years, with much of that gain driven by its GLP-1 drugs, Zepbound and Mounjaro. Image Source: Trading View
Eli Lilly has since invested $40 million in Absci, betting hair regrowth could follow a similar injectable playbook.
“Both obesity and hair loss are large consumer markets and that’s one reason why both of those categories can offer significant revenue potential.”
Geoff Hsu, portfolio manager at OrbiMed’s Biotech Growth Trust, Fortune
None of the three companies has an approved product yet. The earliest regulatory filings are not expected before 2027. Investors are pricing in demand years before any drug reaches pharmacy shelves.

BlackRock’s tokenized US Treasury fund, BUIDL, has reclaimed the top spot among products of its kind, with a market capitalization of roughly $2.8 billion.
Token Terminal data shows BUIDL now holds about 18.5% of the $15.1 billion tokenized Treasury market, narrowly ahead of Circle’s USYC.
A Fast-Changing Leaderboard
Tokenized Treasury funds let institutions hold short-term US government debt on a blockchain. Settlement happens around the clock, instead of the multi-day cycles typical of traditional bond markets.
BUIDL Regains Its Position as the Largest Tokenized U.S. Treasury FundToken Terminal data shows that BUIDL, a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund issued by Securitize, has a market capitalization of approximately $2.8 billion, accounting for 18.5% of the $15.1 billion market. It has… pic.twitter.com/ekGaLMt0jz
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) August 31, 2026
That structure has made them a popular option for institutions parking idle cash or posting yield-bearing collateral.
USYC only briefly held the top spot. The fund grew from about $600 million to nearly $3 billion over the past year.
It reached roughly $2.9 billion by late August, edging past BUIDL’s $2.7 billion, according to Token Terminal data. It then lost the lead again this week.
BUIDL is BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, administered by Securitize. USYC, meanwhile, represents a share in Circle’s Hashnote-based fund, which Circle folded into its stablecoin business after acquiring Hashnote in 2025.
Why the Swap Matters
Neither fund has held the lead for long, and that instability is itself notable. It suggests institutions are actively comparing competing Treasury products rather than settling on a single default option.
That competition signals this corner of the tokenized asset market is maturing into a genuine, contested category. It is no longer a niche dominated by a single early mover.
The bigger question is whether institutional interest stays confined to government bond products. It could instead spread into other parts of on-chain finance.
So far, the growth has stayed concentrated in Treasuries, even as the broader real-world asset (RWA) sector expands.

Eric Trump says American Bitcoin (ABTC) mines between 11 and 13 BTC daily at close to 49% gross margins, running nearly 90,000 miners. The company’s own quarterly filings largely support those figures.
Speaking on the Wolf Financial podcast, the co-founder and president’s son framed the output as proof of one of the sector’s most efficient mining operations, months after a public dispute over the firm’s true production costs.
Numbers Track With Recent Filings
American Bitcoin was founded in 2025 by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The venture merged with Gryphon Digital Mining to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ABTC in September 2025. Hut 8 Corp, which backed the venture, remains the majority owner.
The company’s treasury has grown to about 8,300 BTC as of late August, according to Trump. That is up from roughly 5,401 BTC at the end of 2025, continuing an accumulation strategy that has drawn comparisons to Strategy.
It mined a record 932 BTC in the second quarter of 2026, its highest output yet. Gross margins that quarter landed near 49%, matching the figure Trump cited.
Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $77,696 as of writing, up 0.49% over 24 hours. That gives the reserve a paper value above $600 million.
A Disputed Cost Basis
The margin claim follows a spring dispute over the firm’s true production costs. Forbes alleged American Bitcoin’s all-in cost ran closer to $90,000 per coin, above the roughly $57,000 figure Trump has repeated. Trump rejected the report as politically motivated.
Neither side has published a fully reconciled cost breakdown since. American Bitcoin markets its no-sale treasury policy as proof that mining bitcoin is cheaper than buying it outright. That claim hinges on which cost figure holds up.

President Donald Trump said the United States secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves. He announced the deal on August 28, calling it the biggest oil deal in history.
Brent crude, however, did not fall on the news. The benchmark instead climbed from about $88 to $90.48 by Monday, defying the deal’s promised supply boost.
The Barrels Are Reserves, Not Supply
The agreement gives a private venture a 100-year lease on 17 Venezuelan oil fields. The US holds a 55% stake in that venture, a US official told Newsweek.
Interim President Delcy Rodriguez said the fields hold proven potential of 65 billion barrels. She said the venture could draw more than $100 billion in investment.
Trump promised this deal would lead to lower gas prices. Image Source: Truth Social
None of that oil is flowing yet. Venezuela once pumped more than 3 million barrels a day in the late 1990s.
Output now sits close to 1 million barrels a day, according to OPEC data.
Rystad Energy projects production could rise only 17% by 2028. That growth depends on heavy investment in decayed infrastructure.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, offered this assessment to Newsweek.
“While the hope of lower gas prices sounds promising, it still will take billions of investment to get that oil.”
Why Prices Jumped Anyway
Brent had fallen from above $93 a barrel in late August. That slide tracked easing fears around the Strait of Hormuz.
However, Iran and the United States traded strikes over the weekend, reigniting the Middle East risk that had briefly eased. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard hit two US bases in Jordan on Sunday, retaliating for a US strike on Iran’s Larak Island.
Oil has risen back above $90 for Brent Crude. Image Source: Trading Economics
Goldman Sachs pegged Gulf oil exports at 15 million to 16 million barrels a day, roughly two-thirds of pre-conflict volume. Iran and Oman also struck a revenue-sharing deal over the waterway, though Tehran said it does not guarantee a reopening.
Sunday night’s rebound looks tied to that same risk story, not to Venezuela. The premium that drove oil for months has not fully unwound. Traders appear to be treating the distant Venezuelan barrels as background noise against a live supply threat elsewhere.
Two things will decide where Brent goes next. One is whether the Middle East risk premium keeps fading. The other is whether Venezuela’s oil venture attracts the investment Rodriguez is counting on.

Nine of the 10 best-performing S&P 500 stocks over the past decade trace to one theme, the buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure. There is also one clear winner out of the top 10: Nvidia.
Nvidia’s 10-year total return is near 13,589%, more than double the next-closest, AMD, at close to 6,000%. The other eight names span chipmakers, network gear, and one HVAC contractor.
The AI Common Thread
The top 10 best performers from the last 10 years:
Nvidia (NVDA) — +13,817%
AMD (AMD) — +6,099%
Micron (MU) — +5,486%
Comfort Systems (FIX) — +5,157%
Arista Networks (ANET) — +3,762%
Lam Research (LRCX) — +3,099%
Tesla (TSLA) — +2,545%
Lumentum (LITE) — +2,440%
KLA Corp (KLAC) — +2,401%
Seagate (STX) — +2,346%
Nvidia, AMD, Micron (MU), Lam Research (LRCX), and KLA Corp (KLAC) all supply chips or the equipment to make them. That equipment builds the servers inside AI data centers.
Arista Networks (ANET) sells networking switches for those same facilities. Lumentum (LITE) makes optical parts that move data between server racks. Seagate (STX), meanwhile, supplies the storage drives used in AI training clusters.
Comfort Systems (FIX), in contrast, benefits from a different angle. The mechanical and electrical contractor’s backlog climbed toward $12 billion as hyperscalers race to build and cool new data centers. That gives it AI exposure without selling a single chip.
Tesla (TSLA), however, is the outlier. Its return leans more on electric vehicle demand than AI infrastructure. Elon Musk’s push into self-driving and robotics does, however, add an AI angle of its own.
Two Years, Most of the Gains
Much of this run happened recently, not evenly across the decade. Nvidia’s market value rose from about $418 billion to over $4.5 trillion since the AI boom began in November 2022.
A similar acceleration shows up across the list, as hyperscaler spending on AI accelerated over the past two years.
Whether that pace continues depends on hyperscalers sustaining current construction schedules. JPMorgan analysts estimate that roughly 60% of data center capacity planned for 2027 has yet to break ground.
That gap could keep this group of stocks in focus through the back half of the decade.

The human brain runs on roughly 20 watts. The world’s fastest supercomputer, LineShine in Shenzhen, draws 42.2 million watts. That gap has become the internet’s favorite argument about AI energy use, and most of it is wrong.
The comparison itself holds up. However, the numbers circulating on social media trace back to a single paper. The most striking one has been misattributed for three years.
China just topped the global supercomputer ranking for the first time since 2017.LineShine. Shenzhen. 2.198 exaflops. 2 quintillion calculations per second. 20% faster than the US's El Capitan.built entirely on domestic Chinese CPUs. no Nvidia. no US chips. no export controls… https://t.co/Tuuk6svl6l pic.twitter.com/fwFKWN0Mr4
— IT Guy (@T3chFalcon) June 24, 2026
AI Energy Use: What 20 Watts Actually Buys
The 20-watt figure rests on decades of metabolic measurement. The brain accounts for about 2% of body weight and roughly 20% of resting oxygen consumption.
Neuron counts are shakier than they appear. The widely quoted 86 billion rests on four male brains and is currently under dispute in the journal Brain.
Viral posts often use 12 watts rather than 20. That figure appears in a 2023 paper in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, stated without any citation at all.
The same paper produced the number everyone shares. Its authors estimated that digitally recreating a human brain would draw 2.7 billion watts.
That estimate came from extrapolating a 10-million-neuron simulation to mouse scale, then multiplying by a thousand.
The paper also states that the simulation ran about 30,000 times slower than biology. Social posts drop that detail. Secondary sources then credit the figure to the Blue Brain Project, which never published it.
A Viral Post on LinkedIn Claiming How the Human Brain Only Needs 12 Watts to Think. Source: Evolving AI
Reliable numbers do exist elsewhere. Epoch AI estimated a typical ChatGPT query at 0.3 watt-hours in early 2025. A peer-reviewed study in Joule later landed on 0.31.
Two independent methods agreeing that closely is unusual. However, the figure changes sharply with workload, and reasoning models that produce longer answers can cost several times as much.
What Biology Does Differently, and What Silicon Copied
Cortical activity is sparse. Average firing rates are below 1 Hz, and energy follows change rather than clock cycles.
Modern AI reached the same conclusion independently. Kimi K2 activates 32.6 billion of its 1.04 trillion parameters per token, close to 3.1%.
That ratio is falling fast. Mixtral used roughly 28% of its parameters in 2023, while DeepSeek-V3 now uses 5.5%.
Biology also computes at low precision. Nothing inside a neuron resolves to 32 bits.
Chipmakers followed the same path. DeepSeek trained a 671-billion-parameter model in eight-bit precision. NVIDIA has since pretrained a 12-billion-parameter model in four-bit.
Power draw on a logarithmic scale, from a brain to a data center / Source: BeInCrypto
The third difference is the largest and the least copied. Brains hold memory and computation in the same physical place.
Digital machines separate them. Stanford’s Mark Horowitz showed the cost of that split. Fetching an operand from memory can consume hundreds of times more energy than the arithmetic itself.
The Brain-Shaped Chips That Never Arrived
Hardware built explicitly to imitate neurons has struggled. No neuromorphic or analog system has trained or run a frontier model in production.
Intel’s Hala Point packs 1.15 billion artificial neurons across 1,152 chips. It remains a research prototype installed at Sandia National Laboratories. Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab, speaking to The Register in 2024, said:
“We’re not mapping any LLM to Hala Point at this time. We don’t know how to do that.”
The commercial picture is thinner still. BrainChip is the sector’s flagship listed company. It reported $700,000 in customer receipts against $5.3 million of operating outflow last March quarter.
Others have stalled outright. Rain AI, which sought $150 million and failed to raise it, explored a sale in 2025.
Researchers inside the field describe a circular problem. Catherine Schuman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, stated:
“The hardware companies are waiting for there to be a killer application, but it’s really hard to understand how to build those applications without having hardware to prototype on.”
More than 20 researchers signed a 2025 consensus paper in Nature. It argued that the field still lacks the ecosystem it needs.
Biology’s principles won. The hardware built to embody them did not.
Everyone Is Bidding for the Same Electrons
Efficiency matters now because electricity has become the binding constraint. The International Energy Agency put global data center consumption at 485 terawatt-hours in 2025.
AI-focused facilities grew 50% during that year alone. The agency expects them to triple by 2030.
Grid access, rather than chip supply, now gates construction. Median time from an interconnection request to commercial operation exceeds five years, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in November that his company holds processors it cannot plug in. The shortage is powered buildings, not silicon. Institutional investors have raised similar questions about grid readiness.
Bitcoin miners spent a decade solving exactly that problem. They hold energized sites, signed power agreements, and interconnection rights that newcomers wait years to secure.
The result has turned mining into an energy and infrastructure business. Retrofitting a working site costs roughly $3 million to $4 million per megawatt. Greenfield construction runs $10 million to $12 million, VanEck estimates.
Announced deal values are enormous. Public miners have signed AI contracts worth more than $70 billion in aggregate.
Delivered capacity tells a quieter story. Second-quarter 2026 filings show roughly 750 megawatts actually energized across the sector.
Core Scientific accounts for about 437 of those megawatts. Galaxy’s Helios campus delivered 133; TeraWulf 102; IREN 50; and Riot 25. Hut 8 has contracted 949 megawatts and energized none.
Contracted capacity against what has actually been switched on / Source: BeInCrypto
The pivot has been costly. Combined quarterly losses at miners MARA and CleanSpark reached $851 million in August.
Most mining capacity will never convert. Preliminary Cambridge survey data presented in July showed that about 10% of miners had allocated power to AI.
The obstacles are physical. Mining tolerates interruption, whereas AI tenants demand firm power, dense cooling, and fiber that remote sites rarely have.
Even so, the direction of travel is clear. Core Scientific now earns 83% of its revenue from colocation and just 13% from mining itself.
Investors have priced that shift in. Miners holding signed leases trade at far higher multiples of their energized power. Meanwhile, the next AI bet increasingly looks like electricity rather than chips.
Why Efficiency Will Not Fix AI Energy Use
Efficiency gains have absorbed demand growth in the past. Global data center compute grew by 550% between 2010 and 2018, while energy use rose by about 6%.
Then the pattern broke. United States data center consumption climbed from 58 terawatt-hours in 2014 to 176 in 2023.
Evolution optimized under a hard ceiling. A skull drawing 200 watts would have killed its owner, so efficiency became the only available answer.
AI has never faced that ceiling. It has faced a capital ceiling instead, and capital stretches far more easily than electricity does.
That is now changing. The open question is no longer whether biology is more efficient. It is what AI becomes once power, rather than money, decides what gets built.

The European Central Bank (ECB) wants to issue euros directly onto a blockchain. Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel made that case at the Jackson Hole symposium on Friday, and she was very clear about stablecoins.
She is talking about money that banks use to settle with each other, not the euros in your account. Tokenized markets, she argued, need an asset only a central bank can create.
Why Schnabel Rejects Stablecoins as Settlement Money
A stablecoin can be built to be almost perfectly safe, and Schnabel accepts that. Her objection is about what happens next.
In a panic, everyone wants cash at once. A central bank can create more of it. A stablecoin issuer cannot.
Her precedent is the banking panic of 1907. Money was tied to banks’ holdings of government bonds, so the money supply could not expand. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 fixed that.
“Stablecoins are best understood as complements to central bank money, not substitutes for it,” read an excerpt in her speech.
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The supply numbers explain Europe’s hurry. Dollar-pegged stablecoins circulate about $304 billion, DefiLlama data shows. Euro-pegged tokens hold under $1 billion.
Total Stablecoin Market Cap. Source: DeFiLlama
If private tokens win settlement, Europe settles in dollars. Crypto only entered the Fed’s Jackson Hole agenda this year. Other central bankers have voiced similar warnings about stablecoins.
Pontes Launch Puts ECB Money on a Ledger
Pontes goes live next month, linking TARGET Services, the eurozone’s settlement backbone, to market blockchain platforms.
BREAKING:🇪🇺ECB confirms Pontes will go live in September 2026, linking market DLT platforms to TARGET Services for atomic settlement in central-bank moneyEurope is moving toward 24/7, programmable, multi-currency settlementThis is bullish for $QNT $LINK $XRPDeep dive later https://t.co/n54N9u2oXG pic.twitter.com/nMXQExbbuY
— X Finance Bull (@Xfinancebull) August 26, 2026
The pipes have been tested before, particularly from May to November 2024, when 64 institutions across nine jurisdictions ran 58 use cases. They settled nearly €1.6 billion in central bank money.
Cash finality remains within TARGET2 initially. Smart contracts and round-the-clock operation come later.
Schnabel weighed three routes:
Issue tokens directly
Bridge from today’s systems, or
Let a private firm tokenize reserves through an omnibus account.
She wants the first, while the other two leave the ECB watching from outside, unable to run repo operations in code.
A second project, Appia, is still deciding whether Europe needs one shared ledger or several. She cited France’s Lise, holder of Europe’s first tokenized exchange license, as evidence that tokenization opens markets to smaller firms.

Japan’s yen weakened again this week despite roughly $97 billion spent supporting it over the past month. Its slide puts renewed pressure on officials to act, with potential consequences for Bitcoin.
Why Japan’s Yen Rescue is Fading
The currency fell to 160.16 yen per dollar on Friday, 28 August, giving up more than half its gains since last month’s intervention. A weaker yen makes imports more expensive for Japanese households and businesses.
Japan spent ¥15.4 trillion supporting its currency between 30 July and 26 August. The campaign included rare joint action with the US on 31 July, when both countries bought yen to lift its value.
US interest rates remain higher than Japan’s, making dollar investments more attractive. The dollar gained further support this week when Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh pledged to bring inflation to target.
Japan’s Yen Evolution amid Intervention Spikes. Source: X/@GlobalMktObserv How a Stronger Yen Could Hurt Bitcoin
Bitcoin briefly fell below $77,000 after Warsh’s speech as investors expected higher US rates.
Japan could add to that pressure. Some investors borrow yen cheaply and use the money to buy investments elsewhere. This is known as the carry trade.
If fresh intervention or higher Japanese interest rates push the yen sharply upwards, those loans become more expensive to repay in other currencies. Investors may sell assets to cover their debts, potentially dragging Bitcoin lower.
Bitcoin Price Over the Past Week. Source: CoinGecko
This has actually happened before. Back in August 2024, the reversal of yen-funded trades amplified selling. Bitcoin and Ethereum suffered losses of up to 20%.
Metaplanet chief executive Simon Gerovich sees longer-term opportunity. Speaking in Hong Kong this week, he argued that Asian savers were ready to move beyond cash and embrace Bitcoin.
His company buys and holds Bitcoin, giving him a financial stake in that outlook. Such demand could grow over time. Bitcoin remains vulnerable to sudden market sell-offs.
“The buyers arriving now aren’t going anywhere. I believe the bottom is in. And I’m expecting a much brighter rest of the year,” Metaplanet’s CEO said.

The S&P 500 has gained 12.65% in 2026 and closed Friday at 7,711.75. A Wall Street Journal column argues the closest match for today’s trading frenzy is not 1999. It is 1901.
That boom ended in the Panic of 1907, with columnist Jason Zweig arguing the danger was never expensive stocks. It was borrowed money and trading that felt like gambling.
S&P 500 (SPX) Performance. Source: TradingView The Numbers That Rhyme With 1901
Zweig leans on one figure, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) turnover reached 319% in 1901. The entire market changed hands roughly every four months.
Today in 1901, the yearly NYSE turnover hits record 319% showing short-term investing isnt new, as investors held shares for avg of 15 wks
— MoAF (@FinanceMuseum) December 31, 2010
Bucket shops supplied the rest, letting small customers bet, at heavy leverage, on whether a stock would tick up or down. No shares ever changed owners. That bet is recognizable in the current market.
Same-day options made up 66.2% of all S&P 500 options volume in July, an all-time high, Cboe reported. Prediction market platforms widened their catalogues again, from token prices to sporting-event phrases.
Borrowing has also kept pace, with margin debt reaching $1.42 trillion in July, according to Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) filings. A year earlier the figure was $1.02 trillion.
BREAKING: US margin debt dropped -$85 billion in July, to $1.42 trillion, the largest monthly decline on record.This also marks the first monthly decrease since March.By comparison, the 2nd-biggest monthly drop was recorded in January 2022 at -$80 billion, just as the bear… pic.twitter.com/scrhStGdJd
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) August 18, 2026
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1907 Broke on Liquidity, Not Valuation
The trigger looked small, where two speculators failed to corner United Copper stock in October 1907. The damage followed, with runs hitting trust companies, lightly regulated lenders that kept about 5% of deposits in cash. National banks kept 25%.
Wall Street collapsed in October 1907 not because banks ran out of money, but because the shadow banking system had no lender of last resort.It started with a failed corner on United Copper stock by F. Augustus Heinze and Charles W. Morse. When the corner collapsed, the margin… pic.twitter.com/I1jEatIeJi
— MD (@MDKASHIF_9) August 21, 2026
Then money vanished. Call money rates ran from 9.5% to 70%, and to 100% two days later. J.P. Morgan hauled cash to the exchange loan post to keep trading alive. Congress created the Federal Reserve six years later.
The Dow lost 40.9% from its December 1906 peak to the November 1907 bottom, a National Bureau of Economic Research study found.
Valuation drives most earlier bubble comparisons. The Shiller price-to-earnings ratio sits near 42, against a long-run average of 17.4, and just under its December 1999 record. Zweig’s warning is quieter and harder to hedge.
Crypto shares the same funding pipes. Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $78,618 and has tracked the S&P 500 through past risk shocks.
Cash looks like dead weight while markets climb. It turns into leverage the moment everybody else needs it.

Sberbank plans to accept Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Tether (USDT) as loan collateral, deputy chairman Anatoly Popov told TASS on Friday.
Russia’s largest lender wants the coins as security, not as money. Paying with crypto in Russia remains banned when the country’s digital currency law takes effect on September 1.
Collateral is Legal, but Spending is Not
A Russian company can pledge Bitcoin to a bank, but it still cannot buy a coffee with it. Popov said Sberbank prepared for the rule change early and already handles digital assets. However, he made the expansion conditional.
“We plan to accept not only Bitcoin but also Ethereum and the stablecoin Tether as collateral… after the Central Bank, of course, allows them for public circulation,” local media reported.
President Vladimir Putin signed the law on August 4. The Bank of Russia published its first approved list a week later. Only three coins cleared the screen.
Regulators wanted size, high daily turnover, and at least 5 years of price history on foreign exchanges. Bitcoin, ether and USDT passed. Nothing else did, and the regulator is clear about the rest.
Crypto cannot be used in payments within Russia. Only exporters and importers get a carve-out for crypto payments in foreign trade.
No Rate, No Date, No Term Sheet
With the key rate standing at 14% as of August 28, money is expensive in Russia, and that number explains the demand. A miner can sell coins and lose the upside, or pledge them and pay interest.
Meanwhile, ordinary Russians will not get the option. Russia’s new crypto law caps non-qualified investors at 300,000 rubles (roughly $3,632) of crypto per year per intermediary. Corporate borrowers face no such ceiling.
Popov disclosed no loan-to-value ratio, interest rate, or launch date. He tied everything to permissions the central bank has not yet issued.
What exists today is smaller. Sber closed a crypto-backed lending pilot in December 2025 and targets a digital depository by December 1.
Notably, however, USDT is the quiet outlier, sitting at $0.9999, while Bitcoin moves every day. One coin needs a thin haircut, the other a deep one.
If a borrower defaults, Sberbank must sell those coins inside a country where spending them is illegal.

Helium (HNT) jumped as much as 167% over the weekend, establishing an intra-day high of $0.989 as of this writing. Traders who arrived late are asking whether it is too late to buy HNT.
The rally was not built on buyers, but on sellers being forced out.
Helium (HNT) Price Performance. Source: TradingView Why a Forgotten Token Moved So Fast
Helium runs a wireless network. Ordinary people host the hardware in their homes and shops. The industry calls this decentralized physical infrastructure, or DePIN.
The trigger was a Texas Wi-Fi deployment BeInCrypto reported on Saturday. The reaction dwarfed the news itself. HNT price, which had traded under $0.30 for most of the summer, surged by almost 170% in one weekend. Helium’s pitch has always been real customers.
In April 2025, developer Nova Labs paid $200,000 to settle SEC charges. Regulators said it wrongly claimed Lime, Nestle and Salesforce used the network. The case covered statements to stock investors, not the token.
What the Charts Actually Show
The HNT price did not climb in a straight line. It moved in two bursts, grounding from $0.33 up to $0.45 overnight. It then jumped to $0.70 by 09:00 and stalled for four hours. A second push from 15:00 carried it to $0.9782.
HNT Volume Outlook
During the pauses, forced buying ran out. Now volume. The daily bar is the tallest on Helium’s two-year chart. Earlier spikes topped out near $45 million. This one cleared $110 million, thresholds last tested in 2023.
HNT Volume. Source: Coinglass
In total, $248.26 million changed hands, while the whole token is worth only $154.8 million. So the token changed hands more than once in a single day. Most people holding HNT now bought it this weekend, near the top.
HNT Liquidations
Some traders had bet against HNT, borrow the token, sell it, and plan to buy it back cheaper. The price rose instead, and their losses grew with every tick. Exchanges liquidated them, closing those bets for them and bought the token back at market price.
HNT Liquidations. Source: Coinglass
Coinglass shows nearly $1.5 million worth of short positions were liquidated on Sunday alone and over $1.6 million across the weekend. There is almost nothing before it. Traders betting on a rise lost just $196,650.
Every forced closure is a purchase. That is how the price climbed without new buyers arriving. Traders call this a short squeeze.
HNT Funding Rates
Next comes the funding rate, the clearest chart of the five. On these markets, one side pays the other a small fee every few hours.
For eight months that fee sat flat at zero. This weekend it fell past minus 1.2% on a single payment. Traders betting against HNT now pay the ones betting on it.
HNT Funding Rate. Source: Coinglass
“The funding rate on Bybit HNT-PERP was close to -1000% this last print. A $60m market cap token with real users, with a chart that has no resistance for another 150%, down 99% from ATH. Shorts are trapped paying crazy funding with no spot supply,” one trader observed.
Finally, open interest. This is the total money riding on these bets. It shows the number of all open long and short positions for HNT price.
It jumped 197.6% to $13.64 million, the highest in about a year. When those bets get closed out, this number falls. Here it nearly tripled instead.
They are not surrendering, with new money and fresh capital entering the futures market as new contracts are created for HNT. They are being replaced faster than they are cleared out.
As HNT price rises alongside rising open interest, it signals strong bullish momentum. It shows high-conviction, aggressive bullish breakout driven by explosive leveraged demand.
Is It Too Late to Buy HNT?
That squeeze is already cooling, as HNT peaked at $0.989 and now trades near $0.88. Forced buying has nearly stopped. Only $22,920 of bearish bets closed in the most recent hour (as of this writing), against $1.61 million across the day.
Traders watching this setup tend to treat a vertical spike in open interest as a warning rather than an entry. Positioning is stretched, and a sharp drop can trigger a chain of forced closures in the other direction.
The signal they wait for is open interest flattening, or easing slightly, while the price holds. That combination suggests the market has accepted the higher level rather than simply leveraged into it.
Funding is the second gauge, and HNT reads in reverse of the usual case. A crowded long market shows sharply positive funding. Here it is deeply negative, so the crowd is still short and paying to stay there.
A move back toward zero would mean those bets have been closed or abandoned. The buying that came from forced closures stops at that point, and the price has to hold on ordinary demand.
One supply point favors holders, but with a caveat. Every HNT minted so far is already trading, so no locked block is waiting to vest. Issuance continues toward a 223 million cap though, with about 37 million still to come.
Once funding returns to zero, ordinary demand must hold Helium price data alone. Anyone buying now is betting on a second squeeze, not the first.

Michael Saylor says MicroStrategy is back. The two-word post landed after 10 weeks in which the company, now named Strategy, bought no Bitcoin (BTC) at all.
Three things in its finances have quietly shifted. Together they explain why traders read the post as a signal, not a slogan.
Strategy’s Debt No Longer Blocks Bitcoin Buys
Strategy holds roughly $6.69 billion in dollars. It owes about $6.71 billion on convertible notes. The company says that leaves net leverage at 0.1%.
Our USD Assets now almost entirely offset our debt, reducing net leverage to 0.1%. $MSTR pic.twitter.com/jP6MdQ8wNr
— Strategy (@Strategy) August 27, 2026
The gap ran the other way all summer, making traders price it in forced selling. It vanished last week, and MSTR stock rallied 12% as the two numbers met.
The freeze was real, considering MicroStrategy last bought BTC on June 22, adding 520 BTC at $67,068. It has sold four times since. August brought $3.28 billion in fresh capital, and all of it went into dollars, not Bitcoin.
The build was deliberate as most of the cash sits in a reserve for dividend payments. That reserve held $3.75 billion in July. It holds $5.10 billion now.
MicroStrategy USD Reserve. Source: Strategy STRC Is Almost Back at Par
STRC is a preferred share that MicroStrategy sells to raise cash. It pays a 12% dividend and is built to trade at $100.
It closed at $97.33 on August 28, up from a 12-month low of $71.25. Below $100, it costs the company money.
STRC Stock Performance. Source: TradingView
“Our objective is for STRC to trade over time at $99 to $100. If STRC trades below $100, we intend to repurchase STRC shares in a regular and disciplined manner,” CEO Phong Le said so in the second-quarter results.
Every dollar spent buying STRC back is a dollar not spent on Bitcoin. Strategy sold coins in August to fund that defense. Near $97, the drain almost stops.
The stakes have grown. STRC raised $2.47 billion in July 2025 at $90 a share, paying 9%. Today roughly $10 billion of it trades, at 12%.
Those dividends are not small. Strategy paid $400.7 million on its preferred shares in the second quarter alone.
Saylor Is Signaling, Not Filing
Saylor paired his post with a chart of 840,447 coins worth $65.72 billion. Hours earlier he wrote “Business as usual.”
Michael Saylor Hints at More Bitcoin Buys. Source: Saylor on X
Neither post is a filing, but purchases show up in weekly reports and the next one is expected on Monday, August 31.
MicroStrategy may have bought Bitcoin last week, but it is also possible that they did not. After all, he also declared Bitcoin had won in July, and the buying stayed frozen for another five weeks.
With Bitcoin traded near $79,183 as of this writing, up 1.3% in a day, MicroStrategy’s treasury is barely above water, given they paid an average of $75,388 a coin.

Elon Musk has backed a fringe physics theory that says quantum computers can only grow so big. Crypto traders turned his five word reply into proof that Bitcoin (BTC) is already safe from them.
But it is not proof. The theory comes from Oxford physicist Tim Palmer, predicting that quantum machines stall somewhere between 200 and 400 qubits.
What Musk Actually Said
Musk was not talking about Bitcoin. On August 29, he replied to an Institute of Art and Ideas post about Palmer’s work.
The universe is integer in units of Planck cubes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2026
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He agreed the universe comes in fixed chunks. He said nothing about private keys or Bitcoin’s quantum problem. Investor Fred Krueger cited him a day later anyway, under the headline that Bitcoin is already quantum-safe.
“Bitcoin may already be quantum-safe…The latest estimates require at least 835 logical qubits to break Bitcoin’s signatures with Shor’s algorithm…Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson have commented positively on this research,” he said.
The Physicist Behind the Theory
Palmer’s credentials are real, though they sit outside this field. He is a Royal Society fellow, elected in 2003, and spent his career building weather forecasting models at Oxford.
His paper ran in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in March. It argues nature contains no smooth continuum, so entanglement eventually hits a wall.
Palmer puts that wall at 200 to 400 qubits on current hardware, and says it will never pass 1,000. Ordinary quantum theory sets no such limit, which leaves him in a minority until a machine proves him right.
Quantum mechanics works perfectly in experiments, but Oxford physicist Tim Palmer argues it rests on a mathematical fiction: irrational numbers like √2 have no basis in physical reality. Strip them out, and quantum's strangest mysteries disappear. Palmer's theory makes a… pic.twitter.com/LyTNkMLyrg
— Institute of Art and Ideas (@IAI_TV) August 28, 2026
The Gap Nobody Can Close Yet
Cracking Bitcoin’s signatures takes an estimated 835 logical qubits. A July study by Han Luo and colleagues cut that from earlier figures of 1,098 and 1,175. Those shrinking qubit estimates are the part worth watching.
The hardware is nowhere near either number. IBM plans a machine with 200 logical qubits by 2029. That would test Palmer’s floor. It would not touch Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s price action has ignored the argument, with BTC near $78,449 after a 1.17% daily gain.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
Developers are not waiting for physics either, and a post-quantum migration proposal is already circulating. The real test arrives around 2029.

Cronos stopped its entire blockchain on Sunday after an attacker drained Tectonic, the biggest lending protocol on the network. Crypto.com said its own app and exchange were never touched.
Most of the money never left the chain before validators pulled the plug, likely explaining why the CRO token price remained unaffected, surging nearly 5%.
Cronos (CRO) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto How Cronos, Tectonic, and Crypto.com Fit Together
These are names, representing three different things. Crypto.com built Cronos, an Ethereum-style chain, and issues the CRO token securing it.
Tectonic is not Crypto.com’s code. It launched in December 2021 out of the Cronos Labs incubator and runs independently.
That makes the Crypto.com reassurance true but narrow. The exchange was never exposed. Tectonic depositors are another matter.
Tectonic was still almost the whole lending market on Cronos. It held about $121.6 million, or 46% of all DeFi value on the chain, DefiLlama data shows. The next biggest lender holds about $30,000.
What the Companies Confirmed
Cronos Network said it found the exploit and halted block production. Tectonic warned depositors to stay away.
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the app and exchange ran normally, with a postmortem to follow.
There has been a security breach on a Cronos lending protocol Tectonic. Cronos team is investigating, with assistance from https://t.co/JNeHyErmqH security team. https://t.co/JNeHyErmqH app and exchange were not affected and are operating as usual. All funds are safe. I will…
— Kris (@kris) August 30, 2026
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Nobody has said whether Tectonic depositors will be repaid.
Why This Tectonic Exploit Could End Differently
Researcher Weilin Li put the drain at roughly $75 million. Only about $6 million reached Ethereum before the freeze, Li said. Some $60 million sits stranded on Cronos. That is about 91% of the haul, going nowhere.
Update, another attacker controlled address with ~8M on Cronos: https://t.co/CjZgR36ZwD. Making total loss at around 75M.
— Weilin (William) Li (@hklst4r) August 30, 2026
Treat those numbers as provisional, as nothing is confirmed until the postmortem lands.
Compare the $8.7 million Moonwell exploit three days earlier. Base kept producing blocks. The money walked.
Cronos could stop because of how it is built. It runs on Tendermint with a cap of 100 validators, making a coordinated pause realistic.
We identified an exploit in Tectonic.The Cronos Network has been halted and we'll provide updates here
— Cronos Network (@CronosNetwork) August 30, 2026
There is also precedent. A bridge exploit minted $570 million on BNB Chain in October 2022. Within five hours, 26 validators paused the network and recovered close to $470 million.
The trade-off is the one raised by the Linea chain halt debate. A chain somebody can switch off is also a chain that can claw money back. Same property, judged twice.
Validators now pick. Roll back, blacklist the attacker, or restart untouched. That decides whether the tentative $60 million comes home.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on Friday. They say the company used BitTorrent to take songbooks, then fed them to Claude.
While Anthropic has already admitted torrenting books, it has never conceded that music sat inside those files, hence the copyright case.
Anthropic Music Lawsuit Explained
The complaint names two hauls, both from shadow libraries and containing unlicensed copies of published works.
Roughly 5 million books came from Library Genesis in June 2021.
Another 2 million came from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022.
According to the publishers, sheet music and songbooks sat in those collections. Torrenting is not the only route in the filing.
The publishers also say Anthropic scraped lyrics from Musixmatch and LyricFind. Both sites pay for the right to display them.
“…one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” the opening line of the complaint reads.
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Why Torrenting Is the Dangerous Part
A judge has already drawn this line once. Buying books and scanning them leaned toward fair use. Taking them from pirate sites did not. The same judge described those downloads bluntly.
“…straightforward piracy but at massive scale.”
That is why Anthropic’s destructive book scanning program survived court, while its downloads ended in a settlement.
Torrenting sits on the wrong side of that line, and it carries a second problem. The software uploads while it downloads. Every copy taken is also a copy shared.
Two of the four counts rest on that point, with both naming Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individuals, not as employees. Companies settle. People give depositions.
What It Could Cost
The publishers want up to $150,000 for each song a jury finds was knowingly infringed. The publishers say hundreds of their songs sat in those files. They put the wider training claim in the tens of thousands.
Notably, however, Anthropic has beaten these publishers before. It beat their bid to block Claude’s training in a 2023 case over lyrics. It agreed to run output guardrails instead.
It has not commented on this one.
Everything now turns on discovery. Did the songs reach Claude through a purchase, or through a swarm?

Delaware Life Insurance Company relabeled $16.4 billion of its investments this year. The money sits in private loans tied to companies it is connected to. Federal prosecutors and securities regulators are now investigating.
That money came from annuities and life policies sold to ordinary savers. Few of them know what backs the promise.
Prosecutors are Already Asking
The company’s second-quarter filing reveals grand jury subpoenas served in February. Clear Spring Life and Annuity Company also received them.
They came from the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened a parallel investigation.
Delaware Life restated its related-party investments from ~$1.3B to ~$18B after grand jury subpoenas.Bloomberg had that in July.Nobody printed what is in the next column: $25,121,775,179 across both insurers. 43% of everything they own.
— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) August 14, 2026
Both are examining one question. Should loans introduced by an affiliate have been flagged as related-party deals? Nobody has been charged.
Credit raters have already moved, with A.M. Best, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch each grading Delaware Life A-minus. All three attach a negative outlook or watch.
Private Credit Now Backs Retirement Promises
A survey published August 26 found something striking. It said 77% of US adults call crypto risky inside workplace retirement plans. Nearly half called it very risky.
Americans have mixed views on cryptocurrency in retirement plans; the majority view it as risky. Source: NIRS
“Americans are telling us that retirement security is becoming harder to achieve as they struggle with the affordability of everyday life. Housing, healthcare, debt and other expenses are competing with the need to save for retirement,” Dan Doonan, NIRS executive director, said in the report.
Their insurance money was already funding loans that have no public market prices. That gap says a lot about how savers judge risk.
Private equity firms drove the shift. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) counted 137 insurers under their ownership at the end of 2024. The count was 90 in 2018. Together, those firms held $704.3 billion.
Italy Already Ran This Experiment
Illiquidity only matters if people ask for their money. They can.
Cashing out an annuity early usually costs about 10%, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That fee falls each year.
Annuity policyholders pay surrender charges (7-10% in years 1-7). That friction is what holds the platform together. But:• $82.1B annual inflows = Ponzi mechanic• 1M+ savers, mostly retirees who watch the news• A single Gretchen Morgenson NBC story + 60 minutes = run…
— Nick Nemeth (Mispriced Assets) (@NickNemo17) May 19, 2026
Roughly half of global surrender values can be withdrawn within a week. The loans behind them take months to sell.
Eurovita showed what happened next after the Italian life insurer watched its solvency ratio slide from 230% to nearly 130% during 2022.
Rates rose, bond values fell, and customers cashed out.
Its private equity owner, Cinven, offered 100 million euros. The regulator wanted 400 million.
Italy froze withdrawals in February 2023, and the freeze held until October. Five rival insurers absorbed the policies, and savers lost nothing.
Eurovita/Cinven: flop raises concerns on buyout push into insurance https://t.co/V3MlNKsXPL | opinion
— Financial Times (@FT) July 3, 2023
Private credit is not crypto. It has a regulator, an investment-grade label, and decades of actuarial math behind it.
Still, private credit stress signals have reached levels last seen in 2017. The difference is that savers knowingly chose one of these risks.

Tim Cook leaves the Apple chief executive job on Tuesday, September 1. He never put a single Bitcoin on the company’s balance sheet. John Ternus takes over and has never said in public whether he agrees.
Cook answered the Bitcoin question once, in 2021, and never moved off it. Five years later, the numbers suggest he was not wrong to say no.
What Tim Cook Actually Said About Bitcoin
Apple sat on $146.5 billion in cash and marketable securities as of June 27, its own filing shows. A pile that size keeps the question alive.
Cook was asked about it at a New York Times DealBook event in November 2021. He said he owned crypto himself. Then he shut the door on Apple doing the same.
“I wouldn’t go invest in crypto, not because I wouldn’t invest my own money, but because I don’t think people buy Apple stock to get exposure to crypto,” he explained.
He never said how much he holds, and did not reveal the assets either, declining to give details.
The scoreboard since then favors him, as Bitcoin set a record near $68,991 the next day. The pioneer crypto traded near $77,244 on Sunday, about 12% higher. Apple shares closed 2021 at $175.35 and ended Friday at $319.70, roughly 82% higher.
Bitcoin Price Performance vs Apple Stock Performance Since November 2021. Source: TradingView Why Stablecoins Matter More Than a Treasury Bet
Ternus is a hardware engineer. Apple’s incoming chief executive spent 25 years on devices, not finance. Cook stays on as executive chairman with a policy brief.
So the live decision sits in payments, not treasury. Services brought Apple $30.7 billion last quarter. Apple Pay moves card transactions, not tokens.
Reports in 2025 tied Apple to early talks about using stablecoins to cut settlement costs. Nothing shipped, and Apple has never confirmed it.
That would be plumbing, not a keynote. It would still reach further than any treasury buy, because Apple already gates crypto apps through App Store rules.
Cook answered the question early and stuck to it. Ternus has not been asked yet.

A free coding trophy just turned into roughly $20,000 after a US high school student sold his Telegram Gift NFT for 15,000 Grams. Pavel Durov held the sale up as startup money.
The price cleared about 40 times what Telegram guaranteed the average prize was worth. Durov posted the result on his channel and urged other winners to go build something.
How a Free Prize Became $20,000
Jonathan He won gold at the 2026 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Durov ranked him seventh in the world.
Instead of the usual medal or cheque, the prize was an Algorithm Cup, a digital collectible that lives on TON, the blockchain behind Gram. Winners can sell theirs to anyone.
Jonathan He competes for Team USA and interns as an engineer at trading firm Liquid. He sat fifth after Day 1 on 246 points out of 300, co-founder Franklyn Wang said.
One of our interns is currently fifth in the world.Jonathan He, a Liquid engineering intern and member of Team USA, is sitting in 5th place after Day 1 of the 2026 International Olympiad in Informatics, the world’s most prestigious competitive programming competition.He… pic.twitter.com/2ub9OK5CB9
— Franklyn Wang (@frank_liquid) August 12, 2026
Telegram promised the 235 medalists a combined $117,000 in Algorithm Cups. That averages close to $500 a cup. One of them sold for 40 times that.
Gram (GRAM), the token rebranded from Toncoin in June, traded near $1.36 on Sunday. That puts 15,000 Grams at about $20,400.
GRAM Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Durov Calls It Seed Money
Pavel Durov highlighted the sale in a Sunday post on Telegram, calling on other winners to put their Grams to similar use.
“…20 years ago, $20K was enough for me to launch my first company. Within months, it had reached 1M users and raised $12M at a $60M valuation,” he wrote.
That company was VKontakte. Durov left the Russian social network in 2014, then built Telegram, the company that handed out this year’s cups.
He now buys these collectibles himself. In June, he paid 7,500 Grams for a Plush Pepe NFT, his third such purchase since December 2025. The teenager’s cup fetched twice as many Grams.
Gram has lost 56% of its value over the past year. A Telegram collectible still cleared $20,000. The buyer and the marketplace remain undisclosed.

Crypto traders want a token that can move a real share price. The closest thing yet is on BNB Chain, where meme coins now trade directly against tokenized GameStop.
Binance says every tokenized share it issues is backed by a real one held at a custodian.
GameStop’s Tokenized Share Became a Meme Coin
A token called memestock trades against GMEB, Binance’s tokenized GameStop, in a PancakeSwap pool created on August 12. The pool holds more than $200,000 and turned over $543,000 in a day.
MEMESTOCK Price Performance. Source: GeckoTerminal
There are others, with at least 10 meme coins now using GMEB as their quote asset, among them stockmemes, LONGCZ and BURN. Together, those pools moved about $2.2 million in 24 hours.
GMEB arrived through bStocks, the tokenized stock lineup Binance launched in June and has expanded in batches since.
Welcome to bStocks.Gain stock exposure anytime, anywhere, 24/7, across both the exchange and Binance Wallet.The market has opening bells. bStocks doesn't.Find out more 👉 https://t.co/DmfJr2eRS7 pic.twitter.com/kXsTbbDXUJ
— Binance (@binance) June 11, 2026
Binance describes each bStock as fully backed by a real US share held at a regulated custodian. BTech Holdings Limited issues them, and Nest Trading Limited arranges conversions at one token per share.
The Numbers Are Nowhere Near Wall Street
Every tokenized GameStop share on the chain adds up to 292,353 tokens worth $5.3 million. GameStop closed Friday worth $8.02 billion.
GameStop (GME) Stock Performance in the Last 5 Days to August 28. Source: Yahoo Finance
So the onchain version is roughly 0.07% of the company. The meme coin attached to it is worth about $3.7 million.
Robinhood Chain shows the same gap, albeit in a sharper form. Its biggest meme coin experiment, Artificial Inu, is valued near $98.6 million and trades against a tokenized Nvidia supply worth just $9.3 million. Nvidia itself is a $5.25 trillion company.
The plumbing also runs one way, with Binance offering bStocks out of Abu Dhabi and stating that they are not sold to US persons.
Only eligible users can convert between tokens and shares, so onchain enthusiasm does not automatically reach a New York order book.
“the real question is, when are we going to get a memecoin paired to a penny stock and then onchain activity leads to that stock going up 100-200%?” crypto trader Schoen posed.
Traders rule GameStop out as far too big, calling for a company valued between $50 million and $250 million. No company that small has been tokenized and paired yet, which leaves the experiment fully specified and still unrun.
somebody said this is GME, no it’s not.GME is $8B MCap, we barely can get a $100M memecoinneed a stock in the $50M – $250M MCap range