Cryptopolitan

Artificial intelligence in the sphere of finance is moving from the stage of experimentation into the level of a component of the operation of global currency trade. Ant International announced on Thursday that it upgraded its Falcon forecasting program to version 2.0 and signed contracts with six major banks, which will use its model in their foreign currency trading activities.
According to Kelvin Li, Ant International’s general manager of platform technology, the company has named Citi, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, and Barclays as partners. The list is notable in relation to cryptocurrency and payments. Some of these banks are also developing tokenized deposit and digital payment technologies to facilitate round-the-clock cross-border transactions.
A claim of 60% cheaper hedging, and a jab at general AI
Li positioned Falcon as a tool for a job that general-purpose AI isn’t yet capable of doing well. “Precise forecasting can slash foreign exchange hedging and allocation costs by over 60%,” he remarked, while stating that general-purpose large models have “yet to achieve a universal breakthrough in the financial sector.”
Prior uses help back up that assertion. As stated in an announcement by Standard Chartered in August 2025, Falcon has achieved over 90% accuracy in forecasting and is already handling over 60% of its foreign currency conversions.
Falcon is a transformer-based model with nearly two billion parameters. Ant documented the 2.0 release this month in an arXiv technical report and published its code on GitHub, making the underlying approach more open to scrutiny than a typical proprietary bank forecasting system.
What Citi, HSBC and StanChart already built with Ant
The launch of the new model solidifies the partnerships that had been formed for more than a year.
In July 2025, Citi launched its Falcon pilot project alongside the introduction of its Fixed FX Rates product, which allows online retailers to maintain their exchange rates in more than 70 different currencies. According to Citi, combining the two products has helped its airline client save money on hedging, which Li put at approximately 30%.
Standard Chartered combined Falcon with its Aggregated Liquidity Engine, also known as SCALE. According to the bank, this method allows for forecasting of Ant’s currency exposures with over 90% accuracy and decreases the costs required for liquidity management by 50%.
HSBC’s partnership also extends beyond foreign exchange (FX) forecasting into tokenized currency. The bank created the Tokenized Deposit Service with Ant and processed a cross-border payment using the ISO 20022 messaging standard in 2025.
That overlap matters because AI forecasting and tokenized settlement address different ends of the same problem: predicting where liquidity will be needed and moving money there more efficiently.
Why the timing lands as FX hedging costs bite
The rollout comes as currency risk has become harder for global companies and investors to ignore. Global FX turnover averaged $9.5 trillion a day in April 2025, up 27% from three years earlier, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The BIS linked part of the surge to firms rushing to hedge dollar exposure following US tariff announcements.
Higher interest rates since 2022 have also made some hedges more expensive and left investors weighing the cost of protection against currency risk. Against that backdrop, technology that can materially reduce hedging and liquidity costs has an obvious appeal to multinational banks and their clients.
The concentration risk sitting underneath the hype
There is a regulatory catch. Financial Stability Board work summarized by the BIS in June 2025 warned that financial institutions relying on a small group of AI providers — or on similar models trained on similar data — could create system-wide vulnerabilities.
The concern is not simply whether one model gets a forecast wrong. If multiple large institutions rely on the same signals, errors or biases could encourage correlated decisions precisely when markets are under stress.
Falcon’s adoption therefore cuts both ways. Wider use could make FX hedging and liquidity management cheaper and more efficient, while also creating a shared technological dependency that regulators will want to understand.
Ant, meanwhile, is spending to expand that reach. The company raised $1.2 billion in an equity financing round last month, giving it additional capital as it pushes its financial AI deeper into global banking.

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On August 19, FalconX transferred 198,750 HYPE to Gate, which represents roughly $14 million, leading blockchain intelligence company Onchain Lens to hypothesize that this sends signals of a probable sell.
The mere existence of one big exchange deposit may not say much. However, as it turns out that many institutional wallets seem to be lowering their exposure to HYPE, the moves attract traders’ attention.
The larger question is who controls crypto markets now. HYPE has grown into one of the top 10 tokens and the importance of institutional desks and over-the-counter (OTC) parties is getting bigger in the market. When many of these market players send coins to exchanges at the same time, the signal goes beyond Hyperliquid.
Several OTC buyers appear to be cashing out at once
The Gate transfer was not a unique occurrence. Onchain Lens reported another case when a wallet transferred 47,000 HYPE, worth nearly $3.35 million, to FalconX. Onchain Lens believes that this transfer was made to prepare for an upcoming sale. The wallet had received a total of 178,700 HYPE for nearly $11.5 million in the past two months and had unrealized profits of approximately $1.24 million prior to the transfers.
According to Onchain Lens, this process fits into a trend of buyers who have amassed HYPE via OTC desks during the summer and now appear to be selling out of their positions.
That’s particularly significant for HYPE compared to Bitcoin and Ether. Its market is much smaller and less liquid, so a major selloff by institutions ends up having a bigger impact on price.
Why exchange inflows keep spooking HYPE holders
Recent events have shown why this is a concern. A report published on August 19 by Cryptopolitan indicated that Multicoin Capital transferred 172,710 HYPE to Coinbase Prime.
The transferred amount was just a small portion of Multicoin’s total HYPE position, amounting to about 2.16 million HYPE worth more than $126 million. The importance of the transfer is that while HYPE had dropped below the June peak of $76.87, the total open interest was reported at nearly $11.8 billion.
A high level of leverage increases risks because the extra sell-side supply can lead to a liquidation and worsen negative price dynamics.
Multicoin had warned before against treating each transfer as a sale. After its and Paradigm’s liquidation of HYPE tokens worth $291 million in July, co-founder Tushar Jain rationalized the act by saying they “did not unstake to sell,” but rather moved the money around in their wallets and tried to keep their transactions private. In contrast, deposits at exchanges come under even greater scrutiny because they made selling easier.
Institutions now define which tokens move
The FalconX transactions are matching a market increasingly dominated by big players. Wintermute’s review of OTC transactions in the first half of 2026 revealed that institutions were responsible for a record 72% of spot flows through its desk, while transactions were being concentrated in fewer tokens. The volume of options in altcoins also tripled since late 2025, indicating how much exposure is being achieved through derivatives.
FalconX’s second-quarter analysis presented a similar weak environment. Bitcoin dropped 14% to around $59,000, while spot trading across major exchanges was down 42% year on year. In a thinner market, focused selling of a leading altcoin can bring about big price changes that would not have taken place in a stronger trading environment.
What still sits on the other side of the trade
HYPE still has significant backing. FalconX strategist Martin Gaspar pointed to approximately $300 million HYPE ETF inflows this quarter, which is quite remarkable for a token with a market cap close to $15 billion. However, the total ETF volume amounted to only 5% to 8% compared to the spot, which indicates that crypto venues continue to lead the price discovery process.
In addition, the tokenomics of HYPE introduce a balancing factor. It is estimated that roughly 99% of the fees from the protocol are used for the daily buybacks and burns of HYPE tokens. CoinShares calculated that this process has already used 44.4 million tokens that cost over $2 billion. Thus far, price action has held firm against selling sentiments.
According to Tokenomist, HYPE reached levels of approximately $69 on August 20th, making an incredible gain of over 19%. The next test regarding supply will take place on September 6th, with a release from Core Contributors coinciding with the most recent OTC flows making their way through the market.
Signal Interpretation $14M FalconX → Gate 🟡 Potential sell-side preparation FalconX has historically withdrawn HYPE from Gate 🟡 Shows two-way institutional flows Bitwise bought HYPE through FalconX 🟢 FalconX is an execution/prime venue, not necessarily a seller $57.6M long-term whale recently moved HYPE to FalconX/Coinbase Prime 🔴 Genuine distribution risk a16z-linked HYPE whale previously deposited $28M+ to exchanges 🔴 Broader supply overhang Today’s transaction independently confirmed by Lookonchain Not found yet Today’s transaction independently confirmed by Arkham Not found yet


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On August 19, the U.S. Treasury announced that starting September 9, it will at least double its long-end buybacks, and Bitcoin surged as much as 8.7%, reaching an intraday high of $69,749. Bitcoin’s biggest daily move since March 4 occurred not because of a cryptocurrency-related development, but due to a government announcement regarding debt management.
Bitcoin’s rally conforms to a simple macroeconomic thesis: larger Treasury buybacks put some downward pressure on long-term yields. If that downward pressure results in a significant drop in benchmark yields, it can lead to weakening of the dollar, relaxation of financial conditions, and a decline in the opportunity cost of holding Bitcoin.
The use of the word “if” is significant in this context. According to Treasury officials, this program has been designed to boost liquidity in older bonds, not deliver monetary stimulus. However, the scale of the program remains insignificant compared to the overall Treasury market.
Why a debt-plumbing notice moved crypto
Markets initially followed that chain almost step by step. Long-dated U.S. yields fell as much as 10 basis points, the 10-year yield dropped about 6 basis points to 4.66%, and the dollar index lost 0.84% to 98.80. Gold jumped 4.05%, while Bitcoin was up 6.06% at Reuters’ market snapshot before reaching its higher intraday peak reported by Decrypt.
This does not mean that the process can be termed “QE Lite” from a technical perspective. Quantitative easing (QE) is defined as the acquisition of assets by a central bank and expansion of its balance sheet, while the buying of Treasury securities is an operation in debt management. Nevertheless, the difference is of little importance for Bitcoin traders in the short run if the market reacts with lower yields and a weaker dollar.
Positioning played a hugely significant role in the move. According to CoinGlass data mentioned in Decrypt, $1.16 billion worth of crypto shorts were liquidated within one hour, of which $673.73 million worth of Bitcoin positions were liquidated. The spike occurred after the SEC proposed exemption from registration for certain crypto-asset issuers, decided on August 18, and a meeting with crypto regulators and financial regulators in the White House on August 19.
What the buybacks are actually built to fix
The objective of the Treasury Department is liquidity. In the announcement made on August 19, it raised the maximum purchase size for 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year nominal securities from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation until November 4. It attributed this decision to strong bids in the longer-dated sectors.
The research conducted by the New York Fed highlights the issue. At the time of conducting the research, there was more than $30 trillion in Treasury debt, but at the same time, on-the-run securities accounted for less than 4% of the entire sum while generating 65% of the average daily trading volume. As the securities transition to off-the-run, the trading volume declines, and transaction costs increase.
Scale remains an important factor. While buybacks can provide more liquidity and affect positioning, they cannot eliminate the factors behind rising yields. In fact, on August 18 yields rose in spite of a $2 billion expected buyback of bonds with maturities spanning from 20 to 30 years.
Yields, not headlines, still anchor the price
In its report dated August 19, Glassnode has made a similar observation with regard to Bitcoin. Prior to the rise, BTC was nearly trading at the cyclical lows hovering around $60,000 to $65,000 levels when the yield on the 10-year Treasury neared its 4.7% level. High nominal as well as real yields acted as the key macro constraint limiting Bitcoin’s behavior closer to that of a liquidity-sensitive risk asset instead of acting as an inflation hedge.
According to Glassnode, the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis stands at $68,500, lower than the True Market Mean of $75,800, a setup seen during capitulation events. The Realized Profit/Loss ratio holds at 0.75, still significantly above the levels below 0.5 that are considered seller exhaustion levels historically.
In this context, the rally initiated on Wednesday implies that Bitcoin is capable of reacting strongly to changes in yields. However, it still does not prove that the new market regime has begun.
A liquidity story that crosses borders
Arthur Hayes, the Chief Investment Officer of Maelstrom, has maintained that the breadth of Treasury debt management and availability of dollar liquidity can be more influential to Bitcoin’s performance than any specific news related to the cryptocurrency industry. In an essay published in December 2025, Hayes has even shown how Treasury buybacks lead to lower long-term yields.
“I believe Bessent will use buy backs to purchase 10-year treasuries, thus reducing the yield.” — Arthur Hayes
Hayes’ view is much more extensive compared to that of the Treasury, and hence it needs to be perceived as a macro thesis rather than a form of official government position.
The international transmission channel has less speculation. A study done by the Bank for International Settlements, which covered 184 nations, found that the global flow of Bitcoin, Ether and some major stablecoins reached the highest level of around $2.6 trillion close to the end of 2021. The main contributors to cross-border flows of native crypto-assets were global volatility, credit spreads, and funding conditions.
“Our findings highlight speculative motives and global funding conditions as key drivers of native crypto-asset flows.” <br>— BIS Working Paper No. 1265
Because of this, September 9th has become more important than just another date on the Treasury’s calendar. In case that larger buybacks boost liquidity at the longer end of the curve regularly enough so that Treasury yields could decrease and the dollar weaken, the jump of Bitcoin could be regarded as the first response to the easing of global financial conditions. However, if the yields go up again, the event would simply be considered a great short squeeze rather than the start of a liquidity-driven recovery.
Are bond yields more important than crypto-native news?
The Treasury market is approximately $32 trillion, while the buybacks are measured in billions. Reuters explicitly notes that the planned $83 billion of quarterly purchases represents only a small fraction of the market. Treasury’s decision to expand buybacks signaled a willingness to intervene in a stressed long-term bond market, helping drive yields lower.
Asset Aug. 19 reaction Bitcoin +6.06% Ether +10.13% Gold +4.05% U.S. dollar index -0.84% Long-end Treasury yields down sharply

If Bitcoin responds to Treasury-market interventions like a conventional liquidity-sensitive risk asset, traders may need to watch the 10-year/30-year yield spread, real yields, dollar liquidity, and Treasury auctions alongside ETF flows and crypto positioning.


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OpenAI will go public in 2027, chief financial officer Sarah Friar told employees at an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, per CNBC, which cited two people familiar with her remarks who were not authorised to speak publicly.
Friar said the company “will be a public company in 2027” and could debut earlier if the business continues to inflect. She played down what the listing means, describing it to staff as a milestone rather than a finish line and another way to raise money.
The firm earned $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation, which she believes provides the firm with some maneuverability. OpenAI filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission privately in June but hasn’t announced any date yet.
Friar’s 2027 timeline wins out over Altman’s earlier push
The 2027 date settles an argument that has run inside the company since the winter. As Cryptopolitan reported in June, Sam Altman was pushing for an IPO in Q4 2026 and refused to consider any valuation below $1 trillion, whereas Friar made the case internally to wait until 2027 due to the fact that the company was not ready for public disclosures.
Advisers presented leadership with two options, a faster listing at a lower price or a 2027 listing at the target valuation. Friar’s position is now the one being communicated to the whole company. It is also a contradiction of her own public stance. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event in November, she said that an “IPO is not on the cards right now” and that she was “not interested in getting tied up in an IPO”.
OpenAI says revenue growth is accelerating ahead of a listing
Friar presented figures alongside the timeline. Revenue run rate is up 35% quarter to date and enterprise run rate up 50%. The enterprise number is relevant since Friar said to investors on 14th August that business income was now greater than consumer income, starting the year with a reverse ratio of 60-40 and annualizing to $40 billion with growth of 32% in just July.
This meeting took place just days after the departure of the company’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, who is among several high-level executives who have left the firm this year. OpenAI bought back $7 billion in employee shares last week at the same $852 billion valuation set in March.
Anthropic still leads on valuation and reported run-rate revenue
Friar addressed the competition directly, telling employees Anthropic might reveal its filing in the coming weeks and go public in September, and that this was fine. Both companies have been informed by banks that whoever lists first will set the industry standards, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 on June 1 and was valued at $965 billion in May, $113 billion above OpenAI’s most recent private mark. According to Cryptopolitan, investors are discussing the possibility of a valuation in excess of $2 trillion when Anthropic goes public, and it achieved a run rate of $65 billion per year compared to OpenAI’s $40 billion in late July. Neither company has published a date.

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Crypto super PAC Fairshake backed winners in four of five congressional primaries on Tuesday. But a Democrat in the Miami area weathered more than $2 million in attack ads funded by Fairshake.
Fairshake sweeps four primaries and drops Florida’s 24th
Fairshake channels its spending through two affiliated PACs. Protect Progress backs Democrats. Defend American Jobs backs Republicans. The two committees spent about $3.6 million on primaries in Alaska, Florida and Wyoming.
Defend American Jobs spent about $1.5 million to support three Republicans. Two of them were winners. Sydney Gruters won Florida’s 16th district, and Representative Harriet Hageman won the Wyoming Senate race. The third, Nick Begich in Alaska’s at-large district, is expected to advance.
Protect Progress spent more than $150,000 on Democrat Lois Frankel, who won the primary in Florida’s 23rd district. The four will likely face challengers in the general election in November.
Florida’s 24th district was the one exception. Protect Progress spent over $2 million on negative ads and still lost. Oliver Gilbert took the Democratic primary with 34.4% of the vote, beating Shevrin Jones and Kendrick Meek.
On Aug. 12, Gilbert accused “[Donald] Trump’s tech billionaire buddies” of being behind “crypto con artists trying to buy a Democratic primary.”
The Protect Progress ads used fake Miami Herald headlines that misrepresented Gilbert’s positions. A PAC spokesperson responded that “the underlying facts in our ad are true.” Gilbert made no mention of crypto or the ad campaign in his Tuesday night victory speech.
A $193 million war chest points at the CLARITY Act
The network reported a $193 million war chest as of January, largely from Coinbase, Ripple and Andreessen Horowitz. In the 2024 cycle, it spent more than $130 million to help elect friends and to defeat critics. As of June, it had already spent more than $82 million in 2026 races.
Protect Progress spent ~$5.5 million in June to help Maryland state delegate Adrian Boafo win the Democratic nomination in that state’s 5th district, part of a total of about $11 million in outside spending on his behalf, according to Cryptopolitan‘s previous report citing FEC filings.
Federal records show Protect Progress reported $23.6 million in receipts for the 2025-2026 period, nearly all of it transferred in from affiliated committees, and $22.7 million in independent expenditures.
Fairshake spokesperson Geoff Vetter said that the group is “just getting started building the largest pro-crypto Congress in history.”
Congress is not in session until September, when the Senate will consider a cloture motion on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a bill meant to set comprehensive rules for digital assets.
In July of 2025, the House passed CLARITY by a bipartisan vote of 294-134. Senate Democrats have pushed for stronger ethics language related to the Trump family’s crypto holdings.
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Winklevoss Capital received a warrant for ~43.3 million shares of the company as part of Cypherpunk Technologies’ purchase of a new Zcash mining operation.
The structure dilutes existing shareholders and gives Gemini founders a bigger slice of the Zcash bet. Cypherpunk is trading on the Nasdaq as CYPH.
43,290,042 new shares dilute every CYPH holder
Cypherpunk paid the $33.33 million price by issuing Winklevoss Treasury Investments a pre-funded warrant for 43,290,042 common shares, exercisable at $0.001 per share. That equates to an implied stock price of $0.77 a share.
CYPH gained 15.85% in the August 18 session on volume about 4.2 times its daily average. About the same 15.4% jump the stock had after its May earnings report.
The operation, Cypherpunk Mining, is live and running Z15 Pro machines. They are generating ~4.2 GSol/s of Equihash hash rate, which the company estimates to be about 18% of the total Zcash network.
The fleet is distributed across US facilities, and Cypherpunk calls it the world’s largest Zcash mining operation. That is an addressable market of more than $250 million a year at current ZEC prices, compared to about 43,800 ZEC in monthly mining awards across the network.
Cypherpunk already owns 323,394.38 ZEC or about 1.92% of circulating supply and says it wants 5%. Chief Investment Officer Will McEvoy said the mined coins give the company “financial and operational flexibility to fund future growth, the acquisition of additional ZEC, and new privacy-preserving technology investments.”
The firm brought in longtime mining operator Kevin Zhang to run mining.
Cameron Winklevoss frames the deal as a US play
“Zcash hashrate has been concentrated in a small number of miners, pools, and ASIC makers, almost all of it outside the United States,” Cameron Winklevoss wrote on X after the announcement.
He added that Cypherpunk’s fleet is “deployed across U.S. facilities, owned outright, and zero debt and power costs locked in low.” He and his brother Tyler marketed the launch as a rare chance for public-market investors to gain exposure to Zcash mining.
The company originated as Leap Therapeutics, a biotech that renamed itself to Cypherpunk Technologies in November 2025 after a $58.88 million private placement led by Winklevoss Capital, as Cryptopolitan reported. At that time, its treasury held some 203,775 ZEC bought at an average price of $245 a coin.
Earlier in 2026, Zcash had a security scare when Shielded Labs researcher Taylor Hornby discovered a bug in Zcash’s Orchard pool zero-knowledge circuit.
In theory, it could have allowed an attacker to mint fake ZEC without detection. ZEC fell more than 50% at the time and Cypherpunk’s stock crashed about 40%. Developers released an emergency patch in early June, followed by the Ironwood upgrade in July.
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Sebastian Thrun, the engineer behind Google’s self-driving program that became Waymo, revealed on Tuesday that he is starting a new robotics company called Dulo.
Thrun mentioned the new company only briefly at the end of his keynote at Actuate, a robotics conference, in San Francisco. He named the venture but did not share any further details. “I am not speaking about the company yet,” he said, according to Business Insider. “It’s under stealth, it’s very small. But it’s in robotics.”
He did not share any information about funding, products, or a launch date. As of this week, there is almost nothing about Dulo that is public. The Insider article remains the only detailed report on the company.
The best clue comes from a simple webpage hosted by Stanford. It says Dulo builds “foundation models for hardware design,” aiming for “manufacturing at lightspeed.” Foundation models are large, general-purpose AI systems that have already changed how text, images, and code are created. Dulo’s idea is to use these same techniques to design and produce physical machines and their parts.
Dulo’s focus is a step earlier than most of its competitors. While recent investments have gone into humanoids and robots that interact with the world, Dulo is targeting the design and manufacturing stage. If the brief description is accurate, the company would sell to those who build machines, not to end users.
Dulo team includes alumni from Waymo, Google Brain, and SAIL
So far, the team’s background is the main source of information. The Stanford page, as reported by Business Insider, says Dulo’s team includes leaders from Waymo, Google Brain, and Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Thrun led SAIL earlier in his career and helped start Google Brain. These three organizations are central to the recent history of autonomy and machine learning.
Thrun is launching Dulo at a time when investors are eager to fund companies working with physical machines. Physical AI companies, those building machines that operate in real environments, raised a record $16.3 billion across 492 deals in the first quarter of 2026, according to PitchBook. Lower hardware costs, labor shortages, and efforts to bring manufacturing back onshore are fueling this growth.
People are paying attention to Dulo because of Thrun’s track record, even though the company has no product yet. In 2005, Thrun’s Stanford team completed a 132-mile desert course without a driver and won a major autonomous-vehicle race, according to Business Insider. After that, Google co-founder Larry Page hired him to lead the self-driving project that became Waymo, now the most well-known robotaxi company in the US.


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Zhibao Technology closed a $154.7 million share sale on August 17, paid for entirely in Bitcoin by a group of non-U.S. investors.
The Nasdaq listed Shanghai insurance technology firm was paid 2,380 bitcoins. Zhibao’s stock was recently trading for less than a dollar and it received a Nasdaq deficiency notice.
2,380 Bitcoin went straight to a company wallet at $65K a coin
Zhibao said in a Form 6-K that it changed the underlying Securities Purchase Agreement and completed the transaction the same day.
Investors sent 2,380 Bitcoin to a specific company wallet to pay the full cost of $154.7 million. That was based on a reference rate of $65,000 per coin, connected to where Bitcoin was trading on July 30.
Buyers purchased 442 million units at $0.35 each. Each unit consists of one Class A ordinary share and a two year warrant.
According to the filing, 395,678,152 units were issued at closing with the remaining 46,321,848 to be issued upon shareholder approval of a larger authorized share count, with no additional payment due.
Zhibao announced a non-binding term sheet on July 22. As Cryptopolitan reported then, the earlier plan had Joyertech and Information OPC subscribe to a PIPE of around 3,500 Bitcoin, or ~$220 million, and name a majority of the board after the deal had closed.
Zhibao’s existing team was to keep running the legacy insurance business until a “separation, disposition, or other restructuring,” the term sheet said.
The actual close was smaller at 2,380 coins and $154.7 million. The 6-K says the money came from a syndicate of non-U.S. investors whose identities were not disclosed and was signed by Zhibao chief executive Jinmei Guo Hellstroem.
Director Botao Ma called it “one of the most transformational moments” in the firm’s decade long history. He said the new backers bring crypto expertise that Zhibao can use to expand its AI powered insurance products.
Nasdaq gave Zhibao until January 2027, to clear $1
Zhibao’s market cap was around $12 million to $15 million this summer, Cryptopolitan reported. The Bitcoin coming in was worth around fifteen times the total equity value at July figures.
Zhibao, trading under ticker ZBAO, says it is the first company in China to operate an embedded “2B2C” digital-insurance model and launched the country’s first digital insurance brokerage platform in 2020.
ZBAO shares closed below $1 from May 27 to July 9 and Nasdaq sent the company a minimum bid-price deficiency notice July 15.
Zhibao must come back into compliance by January 6, 2027. The company had previously disclosed “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a going concern in SEC filings, citing accumulated deficits and cash outflows.
Zhibao has an all crypto structure. In contrast, Strategy, the company that wrote the playbook, has paused its weekly buys. Metaplanet of Japan is putting 2,100 Bitcoin, worth about $132 million, into a U.S. treasury vehicle.
About 40% of the top 100 Bitcoin treasury companies now trade below the net asset value of their coins, Cryptopolitan reported.


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Jonathan Gould, the Comptroller of the Currency of the United States, has said that the office will publish its final rulebook for payment stablecoins by November.
Gould delivered the GENIUS Act commitment during a fireside chat at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole on August 19.
He said, “So we are very intent on moving quickly and getting a final rule out by November so that we will be able to start processing applications within the new year.” Gould also stated that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) “will have a final rule out by November” once it finishes weighing industry feedback.
Federal agencies were supposed to lock in their GENIUS rules by July, one year after enactment of the Act. However, that date came and went without a finished OCC rule.
The statutory deadline was meant to be July 18, 2026. The new deadline per the Comptroller is November, and if the OCC delivers before that timeline, it will still be ahead of the law’s own effective date of January 18, 2026.
The clock the statute is running
President Donald Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins, or GENIUS, Act in July 2025, and it sets up a federal framework for payment stablecoins.
The rules are meant to come into force next year. So, it is understandable that the OCC is racing to beat that timeline, having missed the July deadline. Should it fail to meet its target, the act may take hold without a rulebook from the regulator.
What the proposed rule already covers
In February, the OCC floated a 376-page proposal that stakes out the agency’s authority over stablecoins and spells out capital and liquidity demands tied to risk management.
The draft posed more than 200 questions and closed its comment period on May 1, with reserve backing, compliance conduct, and bank-style capital standards all on the table for both chartered banks and non-bank applicants.
Other regulators are moving in step. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) have put out aligned proposals. Also, the Treasury Department and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) have addressed anti-money-laundering and sanctions duties for issuers.
On August 17, the Treasury Department called for public comments after issuing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) with regard to implementing section 3 of the GENIUS Act as the act comes into force in tranches.
Charter demand and a stalled Congress
Gould paired the timeline with numbers on how fast bank chartering has turned toward crypto. In the OCC’s own account of the event, he said the agency has fielded 40 new bank charter applications since Trump took office roughly 18 months ago, and 23 of them build in some form of digital asset activity.
He pointed out that the figure is an eightfold jump from the four applications that were recorded during the Biden administration, a record he told the audience showed “where the puck is going.”
Gould also shared his thoughts on the CLARITY Act, which seems to have hit a legislative gridlock, with some saying that it is unlikely to clear Congress this year.
The Comptroller said, “We don’t know if or when or what may be the end result of that process,” while adding, “What we have is the GENIUS Act. That’s been law for over a year now, and we need to execute on that.”
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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) wants to put money into Mercor, a company that it buys training data for AI models from.
The deal could value Mercor at $20 billion, but some experts worry that Nvidia’s “circular financing” could create risks for the financial system.
Is Nvidia funding its suppliers?
Nvidia is reportedly in talks to invest in Mercor, which sells the training data that AI models are built on and is one of the inputs Nvidia’s customers need to make its chips useful.
Venture capital firm General Catalyst is discussing leading the funding round. Mercor’s revenue crossed $2 billion in yearly revenue in June 2026. The company made $614 million in the first half of the year.
Mercor was valued at $10 billion after its Series C round in October 2025. A deal at $20 billion would double that in just nine months. Mercor’s customers already include OpenAI, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), and Anthropic. Nvidia pays Mercor to help develop its Nemotron open-source AI models.
Nvidia also signed deals with Apollo, BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Blackstone (NYSE: BX), Brookfield, Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), and KKR totaling up to $500 billion in order to mobilize money for AI infrastructure.
Nvidia previously paid to use technology from a chip startup called Groq. It later joined a $350 million investment round that valued the newly restructured Groq at $3.5 billion, about half of what Groq was worth at its peak in September 2025, according to Cryptopolitan.
Nvidia has also been connecting people who own its graphics processing units (GPUs) with data center operators in the Nordic countries, the United States, and Asia.
What is circular financing?
Nvidia has been fingered in circular financing accusations, which happen when a company invests in or lends money to its own customers or suppliers. Those companies then use the money to buy the first company’s products, making revenue look like it comes from real demand when it might actually come from the company’s own money.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned about this in its 2026 Annual Report, calling circular financing one of the three biggest risks to global financial stability. The Bank of England also said the pace of AI investment is “unprecedented historically” and heavy debt financing could strain credit markets if companies fail to make a profit.
Nvidia has backed cloud providers like CoreWeave, Nebius, and Nscale, and now these companies use Nvidia’s money to buy Nvidia’s chips.
OpenAI also has a $100 billion deal with Nvidia to build data centers using Nvidia chips, with Nvidia guaranteeing some of the loans. Notably, Nvidia’s stock dropped, and its credit default swaps hit record highs in July 2026.
The company has denied that its strategy of investing in its buyers is circular financing, arguing that its chips are “fungible.” This means they can be sold to other customers if one customer leaves. But a deal with Mercor would mean that they rise and fall together.
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Cryptocurrency broker FalconX and stablecoin protocol Ethena have partnered to launch a secured lending facility.
The launch was announced by the two firms, which gives large crypto investors a new credit channel built around bank-style custody controls.
How will Falcon X and Ethena’s facility work?
FalconX and Ethena have announced that they are partnering to release a $1 billion secured lending facility in which money would move through a dedicated special purpose vehicle (SPV) rather than a direct loan between the two companies.
FalconX will maintain a role as the originator, servicer and collateral manager, while the collateral behind each loan sits with qualified custodians.
Ethena is the main lender in a revolving credit deal. The borrower is a FalconX company called FalconX International Lending Opportunities SPC, which is structured so its assets stay separate and safe even if FalconX goes bankrupt.
FalconX International Lending Opportunities SPC uses Ethena’s money to buy crypto loans from FalconX and then hands those loans over to Ethena as collateral, giving it a chance to get its money back first if there’s a problem.
Ethena also gets daily updates on each loan and can see exactly which crypto wallets hold the backing assets. However, details about the interest rates, maximum loan amounts, and how much collateral borrowers must put up were not shared publicly.
Through the partnership, FalconX gets a new source of money to lend out to its big institutional clients while Ethena gets a new way to make money from the reserves that back USDe that doesn’t rely on futures trading.
USDe maintains its one-dollar value by pairing crypto collateral with short futures positions, unlike stablecoins like USDC, which are backed by actual dollars and cash equivalents.
Notably, FalconX already started offering USDe support across its trading, derivatives and custody services in September 2025.
Cryptopolitan reported that Ethena partnered with Anchorage Digital, Maple Institutional and Coinbase Asset Management on lending deals in March and April.
In June, Coinbase Ventures bought Ethena’s token (ENA) and teamed up with Ethena on savings products. That same month, BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) added USDe to its Aladdin platform, which is used by big investors to manage their portfolios.
What are the terms of the overcollateralized loan?
Borrowers under the facility must post assets worth more than the loans they draw, because it provides a cushion that lets the lender sell collateral if its value slides toward the outstanding balance.
LlamaRisk, a risk adviser, said good collateral rules are the best way to protect USDe’s money. They warned that if crypto prices drop, liquidation rights should allow a lender to sell its collateral fast without having to deal with delays from lawsuits or official notices.
Several crypto lenders have collapsed due to this in the past.
ENA has been trading around $0.085 this August with a market value of about $833 million, ranking 59th among all cryptocurrencies. That is far below its all-time high of $1.52 from April 2024. When the partnership was announced on August 13, ENA was still trading below its 200-day average of roughly $0.13.
The companies said they expect the lending program to grow as borrowing demand increases. They called it one of the biggest uses of on-chain money in secured institutional lending so far.
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Cryptocurrency broker FalconX and stablecoin protocol Ethena have partnered to launch a secured lending facility.
The launch was announced by the two firms, which gives large crypto investors a new credit channel built around bank-style custody controls.
How will Falcon X and Ethena’s facility work?
FalconX and Ethena have announced that they are partnering to release a $1 billion secured lending facility in which money would move through a dedicated special purpose vehicle (SPV) rather than a direct loan between the two companies.
FalconX will maintain a role as the originator, servicer and collateral manager, while the collateral behind each loan sits with qualified custodians.
Ethena is the main lender in a revolving credit deal. The borrower is a FalconX company called FalconX International Lending Opportunities SPC, which is structured so its assets stay separate and safe even if FalconX goes bankrupt.
FalconX International Lending Opportunities SPC uses Ethena’s money to buy crypto loans from FalconX and then hands those loans over to Ethena as collateral, giving it a chance to get its money back first if there’s a problem.
Ethena also gets daily updates on each loan and can see exactly which crypto wallets hold the backing assets. However, details about the interest rates, maximum loan amounts, and how much collateral borrowers must put up were not shared publicly.
Through the partnership, FalconX gets a new source of money to lend out to its big institutional clients while Ethena gets a new way to make money from the reserves that back USDe that doesn’t rely on futures trading.
USDe maintains its one-dollar value by pairing crypto collateral with short futures positions, unlike stablecoins like USDC, which are backed by actual dollars and cash equivalents.
Notably, FalconX already started offering USDe support across its trading, derivatives and custody services in September 2025.
Cryptopolitan reported that Ethena partnered with Anchorage Digital, Maple Institutional and Coinbase Asset Management on lending deals in March and April.
In June, Coinbase Ventures bought Ethena’s token (ENA) and teamed up with Ethena on savings products. That same month, BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) added USDe to its Aladdin platform, which is used by big investors to manage their portfolios.
What are the terms of the overcollateralized loan?
Borrowers under the facility must post assets worth more than the loans they draw, because it provides a cushion that lets the lender sell collateral if its value slides toward the outstanding balance.
LlamaRisk, a risk adviser, said good collateral rules are the best way to protect USDe’s money. They warned that if crypto prices drop, liquidation rights should allow a lender to sell its collateral fast without having to deal with delays from lawsuits or official notices.
Several crypto lenders have collapsed due to this in the past.
ENA has been trading around $0.085 this August with a market value of about $833 million, ranking 59th among all cryptocurrencies. That is far below its all-time high of $1.52 from April 2024. When the partnership was announced on August 13, ENA was still trading below its 200-day average of roughly $0.13.
The companies said they expect the lending program to grow as borrowing demand increases. They called it one of the biggest uses of on-chain money in secured institutional lending so far.
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Grayscale is making moves that, if successful, will make Zcash Trust a US spot exchange-traded fund that would trade on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH.
The latest move is that the digital asset-focused investment platform filed a fourth amendment to its Form S-3 registration statement for Grayscale Zcash Trust (ZEC) on August 18 to set the stage for what is to come.
If it is cleared, it would be the first American ETF tracking a privacy coin, giving stock-market investors a regulated route to ZEC.
What changes are in the fourth amendment?
The filing, listed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), restates how shares of the trust are created and redeemed.
According to the S-3/A, the trust will handle both creations and redemptions mainly through cash orders, while still allowing authorized participants to create shares in-kind by delivering ZEC.
Redemptions in-kind are not permitted as of the filing date.
The trust is a Delaware statutory trust sponsored by Grayscale Investments Sponsors, LLC.
Coinbase is the prime broker, and Coinbase Custody Trust Company holds the ZEC. The Bank of New York Mellon is acting as transfer agent and administrator, the filing states.
The trust will be renamed by Grayscale once the registration takes effect and the shares begin trading on the exchange.
A DCG affiliate could seed the fund with 200,000 ZEC
The amendment also discloses non-binding talks between the sponsor and DCG International Investments Ltd, an indirect subsidiary of Grayscale’s parent, Digital Currency Group.
Under the arrangement being discussed, DCG International Investments could buy shares through an authorized participant by handing over 200,000 ZEC.
Why a privacy-coin ETF is a first
ZEC is the token of the Zcash network, which lets users shield transaction details using zero-knowledge cryptography.
Regulated investment products have been wary of tokens with privacy features like ZEC, and this is why the conversion of Zcash Trust into a listed fund would break new ground.
ZEC has risen by more than 9% in the 24 hours after the filing was disclosed. It is currently trading around $555 per CoinMarketCap data.
Demand for the existing trust has been building for months. In April, ZCSH averaged roughly $1.7 million in daily volume, which is more than double March’s level, and the growth is seen as a sign that institutional appetite for privacy assets has not waned.
Over the same stretch, the share of ZEC sitting in shielded balances went up to nearly 30% of circulating supply, a record. The network’s Orchard pool grew from 1.92 million to 4.55 million ZEC over twelve months, according to data from The Block.
A privacy coin still recovering from a scare
While it has seen some growth, the year has been relatively rough for Zcash. After security researcher Taylor Hornby disclosed a flaw in the Orchard shielded pool in mid-2026 that could have let an attacker mint counterfeit ZEC, some investors lost faith in the token.
ZEC fell from $602 to near $299 when the news broke in June. However, the flaw was patched by its developers within days. They said that they found no sign that it was exploited and followed up with the Ironwood upgrade to detect any counterfeit coins.
A regulated ETF built on that same network would hand traditional investors exposure to an asset whose privacy design cuts both ways.
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Grayscale is making moves that, if successful, will make Zcash Trust a US spot exchange-traded fund that would trade on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH.
The latest move is that the digital asset-focused investment platform filed a fourth amendment to its Form S-3 registration statement for Grayscale Zcash Trust (ZEC) on August 18 to set the stage for what is to come.
If it is cleared, it would be the first American ETF tracking a privacy coin, giving stock-market investors a regulated route to ZEC.
What changes are in the fourth amendment?
The filing, listed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), restates how shares of the trust are created and redeemed.
According to the S-3/A, the trust will handle both creations and redemptions mainly through cash orders, while still allowing authorized participants to create shares in-kind by delivering ZEC.
Redemptions in-kind are not permitted as of the filing date.
The trust is a Delaware statutory trust sponsored by Grayscale Investments Sponsors, LLC.
Coinbase is the prime broker, and Coinbase Custody Trust Company holds the ZEC. The Bank of New York Mellon is acting as transfer agent and administrator, the filing states.
The trust will be renamed by Grayscale once the registration takes effect and the shares begin trading on the exchange.
A DCG affiliate could seed the fund with 200,000 ZEC
The amendment also discloses non-binding talks between the sponsor and DCG International Investments Ltd, an indirect subsidiary of Grayscale’s parent, Digital Currency Group.
Under the arrangement being discussed, DCG International Investments could buy shares through an authorized participant by handing over 200,000 ZEC.
Why a privacy-coin ETF is a first
ZEC is the token of the Zcash network, which lets users shield transaction details using zero-knowledge cryptography.
Regulated investment products have been wary of tokens with privacy features like ZEC, and this is why the conversion of Zcash Trust into a listed fund would break new ground.
ZEC has risen by more than 9% in the 24 hours after the filing was disclosed. It is currently trading around $555 per CoinMarketCap data.
Demand for the existing trust has been building for months. In April, ZCSH averaged roughly $1.7 million in daily volume, which is more than double March’s level, and the growth is seen as a sign that institutional appetite for privacy assets has not waned.
Over the same stretch, the share of ZEC sitting in shielded balances went up to nearly 30% of circulating supply, a record. The network’s Orchard pool grew from 1.92 million to 4.55 million ZEC over twelve months, according to data from The Block.
A privacy coin still recovering from a scare
While it has seen some growth, the year has been relatively rough for Zcash. After security researcher Taylor Hornby disclosed a flaw in the Orchard shielded pool in mid-2026 that could have let an attacker mint counterfeit ZEC, some investors lost faith in the token.
ZEC fell from $602 to near $299 when the news broke in June. However, the flaw was patched by its developers within days. They said that they found no sign that it was exploited and followed up with the Ironwood upgrade to detect any counterfeit coins.
A regulated ETF built on that same network would hand traditional investors exposure to an asset whose privacy design cuts both ways.
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Nvidia is introducing companies that hold its GPUs to Nordic data center operators with room to house them, sources have told CNBC, a sign the chipmaker wants to increase its influence spanning the entire AI buildout well beyond just selling chips.
Chipmaker turned matchmaker
According to CNBC’s reporting, published Wednesday, Nvidia reached out to at least one data-center company to talk through potential “offtakers.” These are buyers who lock in compute capacity ahead of time through purchase or lease agreements. One of the sources claimed the introductions were a part of Nvidia’s “value proposition to GPU customers.”
The company is not limiting the effort to Scandinavia and Iceland, as Nvidia has also tried to link an AI infrastructure firm with GPU holders in the United States and Asia. The aim of the effort is to ensure buyers with cash and demand can find the physical space to run the hardware they want.
This “matchmaking” interest from Nvidia extends its reach past just chips and processors, into where those chips will be used. This step will be one deeper into the AI supply chain than the company has previously ventured.
DGX-Ready program certifying Nordic sites
The matchmaking revolves around Nvidia’s DGX-Ready Colocation Data Center program, which vets facilities to run its heaviest AI workloads. Three Nordic operators have met the standards set by Nvidia, and they include atNorth, Bulk Data Centers, and Borealis Data Center.
To earn this certification, a site has to prove it can support liquid cooling, pass component validation, and provide the ecosystem support required to keep deployments from stalling after a customer brings in hardware.
All three certified operators are said to run entirely on renewable energy, and their locations help to keep cooling bills lower as the surrounding air stays cold for most of the year.
Cheap power, cold environment pull projects further north
The Nordic region boasts a great pitch focused on power, land, and temperature. Iceland taps into geothermal power, while Norway and Sweden lean on large hydroelectric supplies. Generally, cool conditions all across the region mean cooling systems draw far less energy than they would in other warmer markets.
Pure DC said in July it would spend 1.5 billion euros on a 110-megawatt campus in Finland, and Microsoft also took additional capacity at an Nscale site in Norway in April.
Crusoe teamed up with atNorth in August 2025 to grow its ICE02 site in Iceland, a build that pairs Nvidia’s DGX GB200 NVL72 systems with Blackwell GPUs. In Norway, the OpenAI-backed Stargate project is targeting 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026.
Over in Iceland, a Verne and nScale effort is aiming to create Europe’s largest liquid-cooled AI GPU installation, running about 4,600 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs.
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Mozilla added three new AI features to Firefox’s opt-in Smart Window on August 18. They include web search from a startup called Exa, automatic tab grouping, and visual history previews.
The beta is available only in English for users in the U.S. and Canada.
Smart Window sits beside Classic and Private modes
Smart Window is a separate window in Firefox, next to the browser’s Classic and Private modes, where users can chat with an AI assistant while they browse.
Users can choose the model themselves and turn the feature off entirely. Firefox added a one-click AI kill switch earlier this year.
“In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience. You decide when, how or whether to use it at all,” Mozilla said in its announcement.
Smart Window works only with the context a user chooses to hand over, such as open tabs and relevant history. Those permissions are located in the AI Controls panel in Firefox, which also includes a switch to disable Smart Window.
Smart Window now accesses live information from the web. It shows the sources for an answer directly, avoiding a separate results page, due to a new collaboration with Exa, an AI search and web-retrieval company.
Smart Window proposes groups of related tabs and marks duplicate tabs, so a user can close them with a single click.
The third feature has to do with memory. A user types in a natural-language prompt, for example, “running shoes I looked at last week.”
Then Smart Window surfaces visual previews of pages from browsing history so that the right one is easier to spot without opening each tab.
“The browser already has much of the context around what you’re trying to do,” said Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox. “With Smart Window, we’re exploring how to make more of that context useful while keeping you in control.”
AI Window became Smart Window after months of testing
Last November, Mozilla debuted an early concept, “AI Window,” then spent months watching how testers interacted with it and factoring in their feedback. The assistant was used for common tasks such as search and navigation.
Next up on the roadmap is surfacing recent browsing journeys and stitching related tabs and history together so a user has a starting point when returning to an unfinished task.
Mozilla is also looking at how Smart Window could assist in completing online forms. Both features use the same permission model.
There are now AI-focused browsers like Perplexity’s Comet, Microsoft’s Copilot-powered Edge, and Opera Neon. OpenAI closed its Atlas browser to work on a larger app. Brave built its LEO assistant with Anthropic as a privacy-first option.
Google controls more than 63% of the global browser market, according to Cloudflare figures cited by Cryptopolitan. It has already wired its Gemini models into Chrome for U.S. desktop users.
Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation, has said the group intends to let users decide which AI model to hook up to Firefox.
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Marvell Technology has given Google the right to purchase up to 58.97 million of its shares, a position said to be worth about $12.2 billion if fully exercised, with most of the stake being related to Google’s spending on custom chips until fiscal year 2033.
The deal deepens Google’s push to build its own AI silicon and sent Marvell’s stock surging on Wednesday.
Stake increases with Google’s spending
The warrant carries an exercise price of $206.58 per share and runs until August 18, 2033, according to Marvell’s filing with the US SEC. The chip maker issued it on August 18, even though the underlying commercial agreement was signed weeks earlier on July 29.
However, only a bit of the stake is guaranteed, with about 1.36 million shares vested in equal quarterly pieces over the deal’s first year. The rest, equal to about 57.61 million shares, is spread across 240 segments that unlock one at a time, each triggered by another $500 million in custom-chip revenue that Google generates for Marvell. These segments will run from Marvell’s third quarter of fiscal year 2027 until the end of fiscal year 2033.
This means Google’s ownership will climb relative to how much it procures. The warrant also cannot be handed to anyone outside Google’s controlled affiliates without Marvell’s sign-off, according to the filing.
Chips built for Google’s TPU stack
The partnership centers on Google’s tensor processing units, the custom chips Google designs to run AI workloads without leaning on Nvidia’s general-purpose processors.
Under the agreement, Marvell will supply a spread of components that plug into that ecosystem, which include AI inference accelerators, storage and network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near-memory compute.
Reuters reported that if fully exercised, Google’s stake would rank the tech giant as Marvell’s fifth-largest shareholder.
Marvell waltzes into Broadcom’s territory
Broadcom signed its own long-term agreement with Google in April to develop future generations of custom AI chips and related components, a deal that runs until 2031.
The competitive nature of Google’s deal with Marvell hit Broadcom’s stock significantly, as its shares dipped by more than 2% in premarket trading on Wednesday.
The driver for these deals remains the same within the chipmaking sector. Buyers continue to search for cheaper, workload-specific alternatives to Nvidia’s graphics processors, and demand for custom silicon aimed at AI inference has increased.
Investors rewarded Marvell, as the stock surged 10.94% to $239.62 in early Wednesday trading and hit an intraday high of $245.49, up from Tuesday’s close of $216. Alphabet’s own shares barely moved on the news.
The stock has gained about 200% over the last six months, climbing from $79.61 on February 19 to about $239 over this period.
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SK Hynix’s board has approved a 40 trillion won (about $29 billion) buyback and cancellation of its own stock, representing the largest treasury cancellation ever initiated by a listed South Korean company. The chipmaker’s management claims the action is guided by its view that the market prices the company below its actual worth.
Largest stock cancellation in Korean market history
The company disclosed the decision through a regulatory filing after a board meeting today, according to SK Hynix’s newsroom. The company plans to retire all of the repurchased stock instead of repurposing it as treasury shares, which will permanently shrink the share count and lift each remaining holder’s slice of the company.
Using the 1,662,000 won closing price from the session before the board vote, the 40 trillion won buyback will acquire about 24.07 million shares, or approximately 3.3% of the 730,492,365 shares outstanding, the filing states.
Buying starts on August 20 and is scheduled to go on for about three months, with cancellation to follow once the purchases are complete. SK Hynix has said this will pull forward a shareholder-return program it first mentioned in November 2024, a program that promised payouts from 50% of the company’s cumulative free cash flow for 2025 till 2027.
SK Hynix stock dips in Seoul but green in New York
The two sides of SK Hynix’s listing moved in opposite directions after this buyback was announced. In Seoul, the KOSPI-listed shares closed 9.75% lower at 1,500,000 won, down from the previous 1,662,000 won close, based on MarketWatch figures.
The reaction was, however, totally different on Wall Street. SK Hynix’s American depositary shares traded at over 6% more before the bell at about $163.98, after which it hit an early high of $163.80, up 5.25%, after trading opened.
The SK Hynix ADRs started trading on July 10, 2026, and have lost more than 7% since, though Nasdaq data shows a gain of almost 3% over the past month and 3.4% across the last five sessions. The stock has swung between an ATH of $194.80 and a record low of $124.80.
Demand for the company’s chips has seen an increase, but investors have continued to question the valuation. The buyback is the company’s answer to that investor pressure.
Payout target percentage phrasing changes
Alongside the repurchase, SK Hynix also lifted its plans for returns granted to shareholders. The target has changed from the earlier “within 50%” of cumulative free cash flow to “over 50%,” according to the company’s filing. Payouts will come through a dual track that pairs buybacks and cancellations with cash dividends, and SK Hynix said it is weighing both fixed and special dividends to further expand distributions.
SK Hynix’s net cash flow was positioned at almost 69 trillion won at the end of Q2 2026, which the company pointed to as evidence of stronger cash generation due to its lead in AI memory chip manufacturing. The company also claimed that the exact scale and timing of any additional returns will be stated after board approval at its third quarter earnings release.
As one of the world’s biggest producers of DRAM and NAND flash memory, the company is taking advantage of heavy AI-driven demand regardless of the spending worries hanging over the sector.
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Samsung has moved to cash in on the AI demand that has buyers scooping up more chips than production lines can deliver after reports that it is raising prices by as much as 15% on some of its advanced contract chipmaking.
Filings seen by news outlets also confirm that the South Korean giant has ambitions to continue to build out its Pyeongtaek fab complex. The price hike and expansion plans land as Samsung continues to make its case as an alternative to market-leading rival TSMC, which is already operating at capacity.
Samsung has increased chip prices
According to Reuters, Samsung customers started paying new, higher rates as of July, as demand has kept the firm’s SF4 line at Pyeongtaek fully engaged since late 2025. The line produces logic chips for customers and base dies for Samsung’s own high-bandwidth memory (HBM).
10% to 15% increment on the 4-nanometer SF4 process hardest for Chinese and American buyers.
5% to 10% increment on the 4-nanometer SF4 process hardest for customers in Taiwan.
Wafers on the 5-nanometer SF5 line climbed 10% to 15%.
The older 8-nanometer process rose by close to 10%.
Across the board, Samsung’s Chinese customers were the worst affected by the new revised rates.
TSMC’s win is Samsung’s gain
The Samsung price hike came after a domino that started to fall at rival TSMC, which has maxed out the capacity to meet demand. Every 3-nanometer chip that TSMC has the capacity to produce through 2027 is already paid for. Apple, Nvidia and AMD have already paid for all of TSMC’s 2-nanometer output for 2026.
As of the first quarter of 2026, 70% of all the money flowing into the foundry market went to TSMC, while Samsung is a fair way behind the market leader with about 7%, according to Counterpoint.
However, Samsung has recently gained a lot of prominence among fabless designers being the only other foundry that can currently produce 2-nanometer chips.
“As TSMC faces tight capacity and raises prices, customers are shifting to rivals such as Samsung and Intel, prompting Samsung to raise its prices as well,” Lee Min-hee, an analyst at BNK Investment & Securities, said, explaining the inevitability of the price hike.
Samsung is already doing its best to help Lee land his 2027 profitability projection. Local reports claim the firm has already filed to expand the core of its Pyeongtaek site into a “triple-fab” three-story design.
Samsung’s goal for this expansion is a 1.5X output gain. The filing still needs sign-off from the Gyeonggi provincial governor and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.
P5 broke ground in 2022, is due for completion in 2030, and ranks as the largest single semiconductor plant in the world.
A demand curve pulling the whole industry vertical
Memory demand from AI data centers sits behind both moves. Counterpoint projects the global memory market will swell from about 360 trillion won ($258 billion) last year to 1,500 trillion won this year and 2,100 trillion won in 2027.
SK Hynix is planning its new Yongin fabs on the same triple-fab template, a sign the industry is building upward as power, water and land grow harder to secure.
For Samsung, the stakes are sharpened by a foundry unit that industry estimates have kept in the red every year since 2022. Tom’s Hardware reports the division still trails TSMC roughly 11 to 1 by revenue and is running 2-nanometer yields near 55%, below the level needed to make advanced nodes pay.
A $16.5 billion contract to build Tesla’s AI6 processor, signed in July 2025, plus the price increases now flowing through, may be what finally narrows that gap. Samsung already posted a record quarterly operating profit for the second quarter of 2026 on the strength of AI memory, and is separately fast-tracking its Yongin chip cluster to 2029.
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