Cryptopolitan

President Donald Trump imposed a huge 100% tariff on imported drones to challenge China’s market grip. The White House has so far framed the decision as a national security measure, slapping a 100% duty on certain unmanned aircraft systems, including those exceeding 25 kilograms and those with specialized security capabilities, while smaller drone models are subject to a 25% import tax.
Some U.S.-allied nations are also facing relatively low tax rates. A 15% tariff will apply to drones and components from the EU, Japan, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan. Imports from the UK will be charged a 10% tariff if nearly all of their hardware, software, and technology are sourced domestically or from the U.S.
The drone tariffs will take effect in September
The White House has argued that the tariffs will help strengthen domestic manufacturing of drones and related parts while cutting dependence on foreign suppliers. It emphasized that the U.S. needs to quickly scale up drone manufacturing to protect its national and economic security.
At the moment, China leads the drone market. The Chinese company DJI alone commands over 66% of the global market. The new tariffs should dilute part of that market share, although this is not the first time the U.S. has sought to challenge China’s position in the industry.
In December, the Federal Communications Commission took steps to limit Chinese imports by withholding the certifications required for wireless communications products from adversarial nations. Tech expert Craig Singleton, working at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, even noted that the commercial sector will shift dramatically under these tariffs.
However, he noted that the U.S. should expect an immediate, capital-intensive realignment as buyers dump cheaper Chinese drones in favor of allied ones. The new tariffs will largely come into effect on September 3.
U.S. drone makers could be facing higher costs
The tariffs could be an opportunity for American drone manufacturers, but the transition away from Chinese suppliers might not be straightforward. Many U.S. companies are still relying on overseas suppliers for batteries, motors, cameras, sensors, and other critical parts. Higher import costs may increase production costs for drones made in the United States.
For consumers, the tariffs could also mean higher prices for commercial and consumer drone markets. Farmers, construction companies, filmmakers, and public-safety agencies that rely on relatively inexpensive Chinese-made drones may have to pay more or switch to other suppliers.
DJI’s dominant position would make that transition even more challenging. The company has built up a massive global ecosystem around its drones, with a lot of manufacturing capacity to run and low prices (and advanced imaging technology). While the tariffs could allow U.S. and allied manufacturers more room to compete, a switch back to China’s current supply chain will take time and investment.
Tariff escalation extends beyond drones
The tariff escalation comes just days after the U.S. set price floors and a 15% tariff on vital solar panel inputs. The rates also sought to prevent Chinese manufacturers from exploiting third countries to get around existing U.S. trade barriers. Current stockpiles buy consumers some time, but prices will absolutely climb by 2028, according to forecasts.
However, Anza president Aaron Hall does not expect the solar tariffs to lead to a major increase in U.S. manufacturing. He noted that some exports tied to China could remain competitively priced despite the added tariffs.
Rather than driving major changes in production, he said the duties could serve as leverage in negotiations to attract preferred investors.
The White House criticized countries for enabling transshipment
The White House on Thursday separately called out dozens of countries for letting China use them as backdoors into the U.S. market. The White House report, “The Great Transshipment Scam,” names Canada, Mexico, Japan, and the EU in a $60B tariff dodge. The report also cited estimates from U.S. government agencies and private-sector sources, which put transshipment volumes between $40 billion and $303 billion.
Peter Navarro, head of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, also said China has relied on highly advanced techniques to facilitate transshipment. He said the practice persists because last year’s U.S. tariffs created varying rates between countries, encouraging redirection.
“For years, the great transshipment scam has let communist China launder its exports to more than 40 countries, rob our Treasury of tens of billions of dollars and steal the pay cheques of American workers,” he commented.
With the new tariffs, Singleton noted, supply-chain laundering could stop.

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Gemini reported a second-quarter net loss of $107.7 million on August 13 and its shares fell by over 7% in after-hours trading. This is the clearest sign so far that a crypto downturn in the marketplace is now damaging exchanges that continue to generate revenue from trading fees.
The damage was primarily to Gemini’s business model. Trading volume on the main exchange of Gemini fell from $11.3 billion a year ago to $3.8 billion now, while total assets on the platform also decreased, from $18.2 billion to $8.4 billion because bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies had lost about half their price during the same time period.
For an industry that was celebrating record highs in 2025, this quarter provided a reminder of how fast the fee revenue disappears when prices change.
A trading business shrinking with the market
The exchange revenue is indeed telling a different story: there is a fall of 38% to just $12.5 million because customers have been trading less. In fact, the number of monthly transacting users went up by 11% year on year. So, customers didn’t stop trading but just weren’t motivated to trade as much.
This pressure is not specific to Gemini. When the firm released its first earnings statements as a public company, the entire sector was facing a downturn. As noted by one Goldman Sachs analyst, a diminishing crypto market cap “weighs on asset level-driven revenue streams.” Nearly one year later, this same force is at work on Gemini’s earnings numbers.
Credit cards and staking pick up the slack
The company intends to create a business independent of fluctuations in Bitcoin prices. Total revenue grew by 37% to $45.5 million from $33.3 million a year earlier, and net loss decreased by 19% from $133.2 million. Credit card revenue stood out, having increased by 231% to $16.2 million, while staking has generated $4 million, an increase of 50%.
Gemini’s prediction market, which was launched in December 2025, made $500,000, an increase from $400,000. However, the event contracts traded increased by 93% compared to the first quarter, and total contracts went beyond 225 million.
The company announced the launch of its own derivatives clearinghouse this month after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved it in April, allowing it to clear the contracts by itself and eventually include futures, options, and perpetuals. Chief Executive Tyler Winklevoss said in a statement:
“While we still have work to do as a company, this quarter’s results reflect our ongoing efforts to reduce operating expenses while diversifying revenue,” Chief Executive Tyler Winklevoss said in a statement.
President Cameron Winklevoss puts it more bluntly:
“The Gemini platform has changed more in the past nine months than it did in the past decade.”
Coinbase and Robinhood chase the same pivot
The pivot is a contest, and Gemini is not in the lead. Coinbase revealed its Q2 earnings in July, laying claim to the highest-ever share of crypto trading volume at 10.3%, up from 9.1% in Q1, and posting a 14th consecutive quarter of adjusted earnings despite “challenging market conditions.”
Its prediction-market contracts and revenue surged 106% quarter-on-quarter, and 88% of the firm’s net income now comes from sources other than bitcoin spot trading. In fact, Fortune noted that Coinbase generated almost 40 times more revenue than Gemini in the third quarter of 2025.
Robinhood, which has also disclosed its quarterly results as of June 30, has adopted a similar trajectory by combining crypto trading, prediction markets, and stock trading in a single application.
In July, Gemini moved directly into this space by providing commission-free stock trading in the U.S., thus transitioning to a wider marketplace. Earlier reports indicated that the company downsized its workforce by 25% and ceased operations in the U.K., European Union, and Australia to “double down on America,” and made some leadership changes.
Where the stock sits now
Gemini Space Station shares are currently trading at close to an all-time low of $4, which is quite a dip from the initial public offering price of $28 in September, which gave the company a value of about $3.3 billion. The stock also hit a high of $45.89 on the first day. Investors who took the Winklevoss twins at their word that Bitcoin would be worth $1 million in 10 years have been given a rude awakening for their efforts.

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Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has launched Gemini 3.7 Flash on Thursday, August 13. This is its second low-cost coding model in a matter of three weeks, despite delaying the Gemini 3.5 Pro it promised developers as far back as May.
For individuals and enterprise users banking on Google’s AI stack, they might be a bit disappointed, as Google’s recent focus has been on upgrading cheaper models rather than the flagship model many thought would compete with Anthropic & OpenAI.
The company‘s pitch to users is that 3.7 Flash is the strongest workhorse model for coding and agents. It comes just 3 weeks after 3.6 Flash was launched, and the company says the new model was born out of internal optimization work and feedback from developers.
Google has not stated whether newer versions of Gemini 3.5 Pro would be released.
Google built Gemini 3.7 Flash as a low-cost coding model
Google’s main selling point is price. The new model will cost $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens from now till then end of the year. Gemini 3.7 Flash will cost half of what Google 3.6 Flash cost when it was released.
The price cut aims to compete in a market where competitors are dropping their prices. OpenAI currently prices the Luna version of its GPT-5.6 lineup at $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, cheaper than Google’s 3.7 Flash.
Benchmarks move, but only just
Google backed the launch with a set of benchmark gains over 3.6 Flash. On coding, the DeepSWE v1.1 test increased from 49.0% to 65.3%, and FrontierCode 1.1 Main rose from 34.4% to 43.6%, according to Senior Director Tulsee Doshi. The model’s WebDev Arena score moved from 1,538 to 1,588.
Its knowledge work went up a notch as well. The GDP.pdf benchmark measures how a model manages complex documents, and based on the benchmark, 3.7 Flash scored 34.0%, a lot better than the older model’s score of 22.0%.
AutomationBench tests a model’s ability to handle everyday business workflows, and 3.6 Flash moved from 17.0% to 30.4%.
Who can use the new model?
Not everyone has access to the new model. Developers can use 3.7 Flash via the Gemini API, AI Studio, Android Studio, Google Antigravity, and the Gemini Enterprise platform. As for individuals, not everyone will have access; only Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will have access.
3.6 Flash still has the standard Gemini chatbot, and the upgrade to 3.7 has made it easier for Spark to handle multi-step tasks across Gmail, Google Docs, and other Workspace apps.
Where Google ranks in the AI race
The larger context surrounding the launch is not encouraging. Gemini 3.7 Flash trails behind other major AI models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 leading the way.
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Tether said on Thursday that KPMG U.S. completed a full audit of its 2025 financial statements and issued an unqualified opinion.
The audit in question is the first full one the company has experienced, despite USDT being the world’s largest stablecoin with more than $180 billion in circulation.
What did KPMG’s audit of Tether reveal?
KPMG has issued an unqualified opinion following its audit of Tether International, S.A. de C.V. for its 2025 financial year.
USDT has faced debate about whether the reserves behind the token were really there, but the audited statements now show that Tether had reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion at year-end.
KPMG auditors examined the transactions, systems, valuations, counterparties, and ownership records behind those numbers and even went to the vault to physically inspect each of Tether’s gold bars.
This is Tether’s first full audit, but the company has published quarterly reserve attestations for years. It most recently published a Q2 2026 report prepared by BDO. It disclosed in March that it had hired a Big Four firm without naming it, and KPMG was identified days later. PwC helped prepare the company’s internal systems for the process.
Why have Tether’s reserves been questioned?
In February 2021, Tether settled with the New York Attorney General for $18.5 million over a shortfall in its finances. That October, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined the company $41 million over claims that USDT was fully backed by U.S. dollars.
The recurring doubt became common enough that crypto traders gave it a name, “Tether FUD.” DefiLlama data puts USDT’s market capitalization near $183 billion, with more than 90 billion of that on Tron and roughly 74 billion on Ethereum.
Tether has also become one of the largest private holders of U.S. Treasuries through the reserves backing that supply.
Notably, the unqualified opinion given by KPMG means it found the financial statements to be fairly presented and in conformity with applicable accounting standards, but this does not guarantee the future financial health of the company or absolute safety for USDT holders.
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Nearly 14,000 Trezor buyers had their names and contact details stolen after ShipMonk, the hardware wallet maker’s shipping partner, was hacked.
The people affected now face a heightened risk of phishing and, in some cases, theft at their home addresses, as French users have experienced.
What details were exposed in the Trezor leak?
Trezor reported via its blog post that it became aware of the breach of the systems holding its order data when ShipMonk shared the information on Monday, August 10.
Specifically, the orders shipped between May 10 and August 8 were affected, Trezor’s own infrastructure was untouched, and user wallets themselves remain secure.
The company said there are 11,742 people whose names, email addresses, phone numbers, and shipping addresses were all taken, and another 1,947 who only had their names, cities, and email addresses taken. That puts the running total at 13,689 victims.
Trezor revealed that the buyers spanned seven countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy and Portugal.
The damage was slightly minimized due to ShipMonk’s policy of deleting or anonymizing order records three months after delivery. Trezor said that customers who bought through Amazon were spared as those orders moved through a different fulfillment channel.
The company has experienced similar incidents in the past, but Trezor said this was the first attack to expose customer phone numbers and shipping addresses. The company’s third-party support portal was breached in January 2024, affecting 66,000 users, and a separate 2022 event affected more than 106,000.
How did the Trezor hack happen?
ShipMonk said the attackers took advantage of a flaw in Metabase, an analytics platform it uses. Metabase publicly flagged the problem itself on August 6.
The bug was a critical SQL injection zero-day that handed intruders administrator access, and the same campaign hit other companies, including laptop maker Framework and form builder Tally.
Since then, despite Trezor saying it has no evidence the stolen records have been published, sold or used in any scam so far, ShipMonk has been receiving extortionary emails from the ShinyHunters group.
Ledger, Trezor’s main rival, saw a 2020 breach spill data on hundreds of thousands of users, and, as Cryptopolitan has reported, scammers were still mailing Ledger owners fake “Quantum Resistance Security Update” letters with malicious QR codes as recently as May 2026. Ledger disclosed a separate leak through its payment processor Global-e in January.
Worryingly, criminals have started using leaked personal data to pick targets for kidnappings and home invasions aimed at forcing victims to surrender their crypto. Chainalysis reported that more than $30 million was taken in violent attacks in the first half of 2026, and it is on track to pass 2025’s full-year figure of $58 million.
Trezor said affected customers were notified by email. It is also promising a more private shipping option equipped with lockers, neutral packaging, and automatic deletion of address data after delivery, aiming to launch in the EU by September and in the U.S. by year’s end.
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World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm with links to the Trump family, has announced the hiring of Ryan Ballantyne as chief business officer.
The new man is an experienced Wall Street executive and recently served as an executive at Coinbase. The announcement comes as the crypto venture seeks to go into tokenized real estate and apply for a banking license.
A Wall Street OG comes into Trump’s crypto firm
The announcement was made in an X post and described Ballantyne as an experienced head with a career that cuts across asset management, derivatives, capital markets, and digital assets over the last 30 years. He last worked at Coinbase, where he served as head of Corporate Client Strategy.
Co-founder and CEO of World Liberty, Zach Witkoff, expressed his joy in a one-line reply to the announcement post on X. Not much has been said about the scope of Ballantyne’s new role or when he will start.
The title of chief business officer already implies the company’s present focus: revenue, partnerships, and institutional relationships.
The hire epitomizes a busy H1
In July, World Liberty did a recap of its activities in the first half of a year that started with the firm supplying over $310 million via its WLFI Markets lending product. Then it launched USD1 on Solana and organized a World Liberty Forum at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The company also announced it was moving beyond pure decentralized finance and into banking proper, as it filed for a national trust bank charter.
World Liberty Financial has taken steps to solidify its hold on tokenized real estate. In February, it asked Securitize, a tokenization specialist, to structure and issue tokens to accredited investors for loan revenue from a Trump International hotel project in the Maldives.
Hiring a capital-markets OG fits the bill for a company looking to offer structured products to institutions.
The scrutiny of World Liberty
Ballantyne will be joining the Trumo-linked decentralized finance project at an awkward moment. Based on a New York Times investigation, World Liberty Financial was given $100 million by a suspect in a UK money-laundering scheme. The man, Guren “Bobby” Zhou, has not been charged.
Based on the reporting from the Times, a company owned by members of the Trump family will receive $75 million out of the $100 million.
According to Patrick Prinz, a compliance expert, Zhou’s profile ought to have raised alarms leading to AML checks before receiving such an amount. A spokesman for World Liberty, David Wachsman, said the company obeyed all relevant laws.
WLFI continues to struggle
The market reaction has not been positive. WLFI is currently at $0.0549, with a market cap of ~$1.74 billion. That is an 88% drop from its record high of $0.46.
The coin also hit a record low on August 9, trading at $0.0508. It remains to be seen whether Ballantyne can use his 3 decades of experience to transform expansion announcements into consistent revenue and a more stable token.
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In an August 12 memo, Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at asset manager Bitwise, said most crypto tokens other than Bitcoin are undervalued.
Investors are not aware of how much revenue protocols now pay back to holders. The clearest example is Hyperliquid retiring $1.3 billion of its HYPE token, he said. If the trend continues, the market “could see valuations double or more,” Hougan added.
Hougan says tokens now trade on revenue
For years, the main criticism of crypto was that networks could scale significantly, yet tokens captured little value.
Hougan said, “That era is over,” in the memo titled “Crypto’s Revenue Revolution.” He believes tokens are beginning to trade on the same yardstick as equities and bonds, which is revenue.
Hougan explicitly tied his valuation claim to his belief that the link between protocol revenue and token price is strengthening. Bitwise said the memo represents a snapshot assessment and is not investment advice.
Hyperliquid generated over $800 million in revenue in the last year. The DEX sends about 99% of its fees to buy HYPE on the open market and burn it, according to the Bitwise memo.
Since the token went live in November 2024, those purchases take $1.3 billion of HYPE out of supply permanently.
Hougan said HYPE is up about 800% since launch, at a time when Bitcoin has lost about a third of its value. He credits part of the HYPE’s run to buyers predicting that rising volume would feed straight into the burn.
HYPE changed hands at $57.77, up 2.8% over seven days and 11.1% over the past 30 days, according to CoinGecko data.
Uniswap and Aave copy Hyperliquid’s model
Uniswap’s December 2025 vote on “UNIfication” switched on protocol fees for the first time, instantly burning 100 million UNI, or about $590 million. It now generates about $100 million a year, and it spends all of that on buybacks.
Aave plans to burn about $30 million of AAVE per year, close to a fifth of its revenue. It has implemented an automated program called Aavenomics 3.0.
Pump.fun, doing $328 million in annual revenue, had burned $370 million of PUMP by April 2026. Lighter, a newer perpetuals venue, bought back about 6% of its LIT supply on $67 million of revenue.
“Revenue fever” has reached base-layer chains, Hougan said. Solana’s community has proposed SGP-0003 to increase its fee burn up to 14 times.
Aptos hiked gas fees tenfold this year. Activity on Aptos almost tripled, and annual token burns soared from ~90,000 to about 1.9 million.
A January Cryptopolitan report found that shrinking supply has not reliably lifted prices and that many tokens with regular buybacks still underperformed the market and failed to hold a floor.
Even Hyperliquid broke its initial “up only” pattern. Pump.fun, at one point, had repurchased more than 18% of its supply while the token sat near its lows.
Hougan stated that a token buyback is not like a stock buyback since there’s no contractual right to profits or assets. Governance can always rewrite or change the economics.
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The extortion gang Helix claims to have hacked Uber Freight, the logistics arm of the ride-hailing company.
They have begun leaking what they assert to be around one million stolen files. Uber Freight says the intrusion did not disrupt business.
Uber Freight confirms a breach but won’t discuss ransom
Uber Freight appeared on Helix’s data leak site on August 6, the date on which the gang began listing the company.
A few days later, the firm said it was investigating what it called a data security incident.
“We are investigating a data security incident involving unauthorized access to a portion of Uber Freight’s systems and repositories. The incident was identified, contained, and remediated, and we promptly engaged federal law enforcement,” the company said, adding that its systems were “secure and fully operational” with no impact on operations.
The company has not said whether it heard from the hackers at all or if any ransom changed hands.
Helix’s own tally runs to about a million files pulled from mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, the accounts receivable department, and other internal repositories. The leak listing adds accounts payable records and dispatch paperwork to that inventory.
Some of the documents appeared to be email exchanges between Uber Freight and its customers, with timestamps clustered around mid-June. The files could not be verified, and Uber Freight would not confirm or deny them.
Uber Freight says it is one of the largest managed-transportation networks in North America. It says it moves over $17 billion of goods in 18 million shipments each year.
Google ties Helix to a $10.6 million extortion crew
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group has linked Helix to a cluster it calls UNC6671, the same operation that also runs under the Redact, Pink, and Falcon banners. Google connects that group back to BlackFile, a brand retired in May 2026.
The intrusion method has been consistent across those labels. Operators call employees, often on personal mobiles, and impersonate IT helpdesk staff pushing an urgent, mandatory security migration, Google wrote in its August 7 report.
The calls lead targets to fake login pages where adversary-in-the-middle tooling collects passwords and multi-factor tokens, allowing access to cloud data in Microsoft 365 and Okta.
Google said an analysis of the group’s bitcoin wallets found at least $10.6 million was collected in ransoms from January to May. The crew has been targeting technology, transportation, and hospitality victims since June, veering away from the manufacturing, healthcare, and insurance targets it was working on earlier in the spring.
Cryptopolitan reported vishing attempts targeted Wall Street funds such as Point72, Citadel, Two Sigma, and Millennium this month, though the firms said client data remained secure.
In February, blockchain lender Figure Technology confirmed a breach after an employee was talked into granting file access. The breach was part of a campaign targeting companies that use Okta single sign-on, the same identity layer that UNC6671 targets.
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The extortion gang Helix claims to have hacked Uber Freight, the logistics arm of the ride-hailing company.
They have begun leaking what they assert to be around one million stolen files. Uber Freight says the intrusion did not disrupt business.
Uber Freight confirms a breach but won’t discuss ransom
Uber Freight appeared on Helix’s data leak site on August 6, the date on which the gang began listing the company.
A few days later, the firm said it was investigating what it called a data security incident.
“We are investigating a data security incident involving unauthorized access to a portion of Uber Freight’s systems and repositories. The incident was identified, contained, and remediated, and we promptly engaged federal law enforcement,” the company said, adding that its systems were “secure and fully operational” with no impact on operations.
The company has not said whether it heard from the hackers at all or if any ransom changed hands.
Helix’s own tally runs to about a million files pulled from mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, the accounts receivable department, and other internal repositories. The leak listing adds accounts payable records and dispatch paperwork to that inventory.
Some of the documents appeared to be email exchanges between Uber Freight and its customers, with timestamps clustered around mid-June. The files could not be verified, and Uber Freight would not confirm or deny them.
Uber Freight says it is one of the largest managed-transportation networks in North America. It says it moves over $17 billion of goods in 18 million shipments each year.
Google ties Helix to a $10.6 million extortion crew
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group has linked Helix to a cluster it calls UNC6671, the same operation that also runs under the Redact, Pink, and Falcon banners. Google connects that group back to BlackFile, a brand retired in May 2026.
The intrusion method has been consistent across those labels. Operators call employees, often on personal mobiles, and impersonate IT helpdesk staff pushing an urgent, mandatory security migration, Google wrote in its August 7 report.
The calls lead targets to fake login pages where adversary-in-the-middle tooling collects passwords and multi-factor tokens, allowing access to cloud data in Microsoft 365 and Okta.
Google said an analysis of the group’s bitcoin wallets found at least $10.6 million was collected in ransoms from January to May. The crew has been targeting technology, transportation, and hospitality victims since June, veering away from the manufacturing, healthcare, and insurance targets it was working on earlier in the spring.
Cryptopolitan reported vishing attempts targeted Wall Street funds such as Point72, Citadel, Two Sigma, and Millennium this month, though the firms said client data remained secure.
In February, blockchain lender Figure Technology confirmed a breach after an employee was talked into granting file access. The breach was part of a campaign targeting companies that use Okta single sign-on, the same identity layer that UNC6671 targets.
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Chip manufacturing giant AMD is preparing a debt offering of about $4 billion to $5 billion in what would be its largest investment-grade bond sale ever.
The chipmaker aims to acquire fresh cash for its AI expansion from this sale, while adding to the increasing pile of debt in the tech sector.
Sale in four offerings, maturities up to 10 years
The bond sale is positioned in four separate note offerings, with different terms running from three to 10 years. Early pricing on the notes dated to the furthest time of maturity yields about 1.15 percentage points more than US Treasuries.
No final decision has been made on the actual amounts AMD plans to actually raise, with the number still capable of moving based on investor demand.
In a filing with the U.S. SEC, AMD said the money would go toward general corporate purposes, a category that can include paying existing debt. The company has about $875 million in bonds set to be due next month.
Debt offering could double AMD debt load
Reports claim that AMD has almost $3.25 billion in long-term debt currently, a figure spread across several senior note series. Assuming the proposed debt offering goes ahead at the maximum price of the expected range, the tech giant could accrue debt of more than double what it already owes.
AMD is not the only top tech company involved in borrowing to fund itself. Nvidia and Alphabet have both tapped into the debt markets recently to bankroll their AI ambitions, and AMD now aims to join that line. AI compute demand continues to overrun available supply, with chipmakers spending heavily to keep up with this demand.
The company has also been closing the gap on Nvidia with its MI-series accelerators, and is now chasing contracts that used to be Nvidia’s alone. It has also signed cooperation deals with Anthropic and Microsoft, and separately committed as much as $5 billion to Anthropic, the Claude maker.
Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo are reportedly managing the bond sale.
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On-chain analytics firm BubbleMaps has warned that XST, a memecoin spreading fast through TikTok, has roughly 74% of its supply bundled in a small cluster of wallets.
BubbleMaps, which is popular for giving warnings right before some brutal crashes, has told buyers to skip the token.
Is it safe to invest in the TikTok-viral XST?
BubbleMaps has posted its analysis of the XST token on X, and it attached a characteristically terse one-word message: “bro.”
bro https://t.co/Qx1278eHsh pic.twitter.com/letj3Q8FLg
— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) August 13, 2026
The analysis found that about 74% of XST’s total supply is held by a tight group of addresses that could be coordinated to move the price. The firm has flagged this same distribution problem in many other projects.
The firm’s own XST bubble map, timestamped August 13, shows a single cluster of 244 wallets accounting for close to half the supply on its own, but TikTokers, who the project is being marketed to as a fast money bet through viral clips by influencers, may never know to check who controls the token supply.
BubbleMaps’ map listed XST up 28.8% at about $0.06 at the time of its snapshot, and its market capitalization was pegged near $70 million.
The trader Bando described XST on X as “a $70m rug shilled on TikTok,” reiterating BubbleMaps findings, and adding fake profit screenshots. AI-generated Trump videos are even part of the project’s tactics.
Jack Duval also made a post, calling the project a “fraudulent crime trump larp coin.”
He argued that the coin being listed on the trading platform FOMO lends it credibility and urged that the token be stripped of its verification badge and delisted.
What other projects has BubbleMaps warned about?
One day before it made its post about XST, LAB token, which BubbleMaps previously warned about, fell 99%.
Cryptopolitan reported that a 313-wallet presale group BubbleMaps tracked watched its combined holdings collapse from more than $1 billion in paper value to about $6.8 million. LAB token is now trading near $0.12 against an all-time high of $27.22.
BubbleMaps also issued a warning about CASHDOG back in July when it analyzed memecoins on Robinhood Chain. Holders of the token were funded through one-time contracts, suggesting that the coin had a coordinated launch instead of organic purchases.
The same review found that 63% of the 164,538 traders active in the chain’s top 50 tokens had lost money.
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Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) chairman Michael Saylor has mapped Bitcoin, two of his company’s yield products, and Tether onto a single monetary scale.
Observers are saying Saylor is trying to tell investors which digital assets to hold for growth and which to hold for stability; however, he did not confirm it.
Four labels, one sliding scale
Saylor shared his thoughts in a post on X on August 13, where he classified assets from most volatile to most stable.
Bitcoin was one of the assets that Saylor labels as “Digital Capital.” Saylor classified Strategy’s STRC as “Digital Credit,” the SR-strcUSX token as “Digital Money,” and Tether’s USDT as “Digital Currency.”
Digital assets volatility spectrum. Source: Michael Saylor via X/Twitter.
The assets were arranged on a table, with Bitcoin starting from the left, followed by STRC, SR-strcUSX, and USDT, with Saylor stating that volatility and return potential drop rightward, while stability and everyday usability rise.
Per Saylor, Bitcoin is the ultimate store of value, while a stablecoin like USDT is the ultimate medium of exchange in the digital economy. The two Strategy-linked instruments filled the space in between them.
Where does STRC sit in all of these?
STRC, nicknamed “Stretch,” is the piece doing the heavy lifting in Saylor’s middle tier.
It is Strategy’s variable-rate perpetual preferred stock, currently paying a 12% annual cash dividend in twice-monthly installments. Strategy’s board sets that rate and must declare each payment, and the stock can keep distributing cash even as its market price slides.
Saylor now brands it as digital credit, and he says it is a semi-stable, high-fixed-income store of value. He stated that financial engineering is what transforms digital credit into digital money.
Saylor wrote, “Digital Money combines the technology of Digital Currency with the economics of Digital Capital: stability, income, transactional utility, and a Store of Value.”
However, this is not the first time that Saylor is mentioning digital credit. On August 7, he told his followers that anyone hunting for “the next billion-dollar unicorn business in finance” should “study digital credit.”
Strategy, which holds a corporate Bitcoin treasury, has been recycling BTC into these preferred shares. The company sold 1,690 Bitcoin for $108.6 million on August 10 and used the cash to buy back roughly 1.15 million STRC shares, leaving it with 840,447 BTC.
The bridge lands on Solana
Saylor’s “digital money” tier points at strcUSX, a product that Solstice Finance put on Solana this week. Solstice Finance, which describes STRC as the link between Bitcoin and stablecoins, built a vault that hands users exposure to STRC’s dividend income and price risk without handing them the shares themselves.
Depositors put in Solstice’s USX settlement token and receive one of two tranches. The senior token, SR-strcUSX, gets paid first and aims for a 7% annual yield. Solstice calls it the first STRC-linked instrument on Solana.
Digital credit heads to Brazil
A few hours before he posted about digital assets on a monetary spectrum, Saylor had written about digital credit going to Brazil. He was responding to OranjeBTC’s announcement that it is launching DIGY11, which it calls “the first ETF of preferred shares from the Bitcoin ecosystem with monthly distributions.”
Saylor said that DIGY11, a B3-listed ETF, will carry STRC into Brazil with monthly payouts in reais, daily liquidity, and currency hedging.
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SK Hynix workers launched a fourth labor union on Wednesday, merging production and office staff from multiple worker regions into a single body that will speak for a majority of the chipmaker’s about 35,000 employees.
The union aims to work towards rescinding a proposed plan to pay workers’ bonuses in restricted company stock instead of cash.
One union across Icheon, Cheongju and Bundang
The new “Hynix Integrated labor union” allows membership regardless of if an employee works at Icheon, Cheongju or Bundang, and there are no restrictions related to office or fab workers. It already counts about 2,400 members, enough to overtake the company’s existing technical and administrative union.
Before the formation of this integrated union, SK Hynix negotiated with three separate groups which included full-time employee unions at Icheon and Cheongju tied to the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, and a technical and administrative union under the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions.
Each union previously bargained individually, and were split by factors such as job type and location. Putting all these workers from these unions into one body will combine their standalone demands into a singular voice.
Stock or cash for worker bonuses
SK Hynix had proposed paying some or all of its excess profit-sharing as bonuses paid in company stock, with a lock-up period barring sales for a set period of time. This proposal drew a heavy pushback from workers, and led directly to the workers’ drive to organize even better. The workers also complained that management disclosed too little about negotiations, and this added to the anger.
The newly formed integrated union’s top priority is keeping the worker bonuses and profit-sharing in cash. The stakes are significant, especially at a company that logged a record 60.54 trillion won ($41.2 billion) operating profit in the second quarter, according to KED Global.
SK Hynix union pushes for majority status
The union is targeting a headcount of 18,000 members, which would be more than half of SK Hynix’s workforce. This would make the union the legally recognized representative in talks with the company, giving it an actual voice in labor-management talks.
The journey to this majority status might require changing how the union runs. Proposed changes include putting negotiation agendas to a vote of all members instead of a few delegates, publishing meeting minutes, and bringing in external auditors. The union will stay independent, and will not be affiliated with either the KCTU or the FKTU.
It remains to be seen if the union can join this year’s wage talks, and worker bonus conversations remain unsettled. The union would sit in as an observer and press for transparency if it can’t attain the capacity to bargain directly, carrying its members’ views into the negotiation room.
The union is also weighing bringing in external allies. Yonhap reported the integrated union was considering partnering with the largest labor union at Samsung Electronics, while KED Global also claimed the group will explore working with Samsung employees on shared labor issues. This comes just after Samsung’s biggest union lost its majority status due to a bonus dispute that pushed non-memory workers out.
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Sonatype Research Labs released findings that six npm packages pull their command server locations from an attacker’s Ethereum wallet.
Three of the six npm packages were well-known libraries that attackers quietly took over. Anyone who installed the affected versions should remove them and look for any follow-on code that may have executed.
Attackers hijacked three real libraries
Sonatype researcher Adam Reynolds says the six packages fall into two buckets.
The publishing accounts of real libraries appear to have been compromised so a poisoned version could ship.
These are @kolbo/mcp@1.57.1, agentgui@1.0.1127, and godot-kit@1.0.1786316795. They placed the loader on the end of a file that already came with the package, thus preserving the original functionality.
The other three were custom-built packages to carry the malware. They are envpack-conf@1.0.1, postcss-initial-provider@3.0.4, and tailwindcss-motion-advanced@1.0.1.
The first package ships configuration helpers, the other ships a working PostCSS plugin, and the last package buries the loader inside a minified utility file.
Sonatype confirmed that all six code blocks are using the same payload and Ethereum wallet.
When the victim runs the code, the loader queries Ethereum for the wallet’s last outbound transaction and extracts bytes from the recipient field of that transaction.
Those bytes translate to two IPv4 addresses. They serve as primary and secondary command-and-control servers for the malware. The transfer exists only to stash instructions on where the malware should connect.
Sonatype researchers said the loader hits multiple Ethereum RPC providers at once and races them against each other. It then batches its JSON-RPC calls and falls back to the Blockscout API if direct queries fail.
Once it finds a server, it tries two more stages at the endpoints `/0x/cls` and `/0x/ls`, falling back to an `X-Payload-B64` response header when a plain GET does not deliver the goods.
What comes back is Base64- and XOR-decoded, then run in the current Node.js process through `eval()` or spawned as a detached child process.
NullReceiver is a leaner EtherHiding
This on-chain retrieval scheme was seen by OpenSourceMalware in two trojanized Tailwind CSS clones, bianira-ui and fluid-type-ui, and was named NullReceiver.
The activity is linked by the firm to the DPRK-linked Contagious Interview campaign associated with the Lazarus group. Sonatype verified the wallet match.
NullReceiver addresses a gap in EtherHiding, the technique Google Threat Intelligence attributed to a DPRK-linked actor in October 2025.
EtherHiding hides the secret inside the data field of a transaction and always sends to Ethereum’s public burn address, giving defenders a fixed point of reference to watch.
NullReceiver sends no data and does not reuse a destination. In the sample OpenSourceMalware deconstructed, the recipient bytes decoded to 166.88.134.62, with the trailing bytes spelling the string “helloipbot!!” as an attacker fingerprint.
In September 2025, Cryptopolitan reported that ReversingLabs had discovered npm downloaders colortoolv2 and mimelib2, which concealed malware URLs inside Ethereum smart contracts and were linked to Stargazer’s Ghost Network.
Sonatype said it is still looking into related npm activity. Affected developers should remove the flagged npm packages. They should also be looking for signs that a second-stage payload was executed.
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Data and AI platform Databricks has finalized a $5 billion financing round at a $190 billion valuation on Thursday, cementing its place among the most valuable private tech firms. The AI company’s CEO, Ali Ghodsi, has also argued that artificial general intelligence, going by an older definition, is already here.
Databricks valuation and underlying revenue
Databricks first disclosed the deal on July 16 at a $188 billion valuation, after signing a term sheet led by existing backer Coatue. CEO Ali Ghodsi told Forbes that the higher actual closing number at $190 billion reflects a larger raise and extra shares issued during the funding process.
Coatue led once again on the final round, where it was joined by Blackstone, MGX and T. Rowe Price, with Sixth Street Growth coming in as a first-time investor.
Forbes places the company’s revenue run rate above $7 billion with year-over-year growth hitting a maximum of 80%. This trajectory points to a fast revenue expansion being behind a valuation that has basically tripled since late 2024.
Valuation has seen a steep rise
Databricks was worth $62 billion in late 2024, moved past $100 billion by August 2025, and hit a valuation of $134 billion in December 2025. The latest funding round marks an almost 40% jump in about five months.
The company’s origins date back to Apache Spark, which was an open-source framework for processing large datasets built at UC Berkeley. Now the data company claims it serves more than 20,000 organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 500.
However, there is still a feeling among analysts that the price is still not settled. “ARR growing at 50%+ and gross margin stabilizing at 70%+ over the next few years should justify the valuation,” Owen Lau, an equity analyst at Clear Street, told Yahoo Finance.
He added a caveat, though, stating that “the ROI debate at the application layer is still not settled. If the enterprises can’t monetize these AI tools or increase productivity, they will likely cut back these data and AI investments.”
Databricks plans new products with fresh capital
CEO Ghodsi has earmarked the capital for three products he sees as the company’s major bets. These include Unity AI Gateway, Lakebase, and Genie.
Unity AI Gateway routes AI workloads across different models and lets companies set spending budgets. Lakebase, a serverless Postgres database aimed at software built by AI agents, has gotten past a $100 million revenue run rate, according to Forbes. The Genie product is designed to give AI the unorganized internal context including emails, meeting recordings and operational data needed to act within a business.
Ghodsi believes enterprises are moving from “tokenmaxxing to valuemaxxing.” Companies spent the early phase of AI consuming as many AI tokens as possible, he argues, and now want to maximize business results per dollar instead. He told Forbes that over one quadrillion tokens have been processed via the gateway, giving Databricks a direct read on how customers switch between models when a cheaper or stronger one appears.
Ghodsi believes AGI is here
Ghodsi’s AGI claim is dependent on a rather narrow definition. A system that can do the intellectual work humans do, and is smarter than most people most of the time, satisfies the criteria for AGI as discussed in the industry before 2022, according to Ghodsi.
What most people now call AGI, he said, is closer to superintelligence, and “if that is your definition, then of course it is not here.” He also explains why so little inside most companies currently looks autonomous, claiming a model cannot reason fully about a business without access to its records, rules and permissions.
The Databricks CEO claims, “The world remains largely unchanged, except that token spending is rising.” That gap, conveniently, is also the market Databricks is selling into, which feeds into its steep increase in valuation for the past two years.
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AI firm Cerebras Systems saw its stock fall as much as 17% in after-hours trading on Wednesday even with the chipmaker beating Wall Street’s expectations on most metrics and raising its full-year revenue forecast.
The reaction is important for investors in the AI infrastructure industry, as it helps in assessing if top AI infrastructure names can keep justifying steep valuations.
Cerebras (NASDAQ: CBRS) posted core revenue of $210 million for Q2, more than double the figure from the same quarter a year ago and ahead of the $191 million analysts had expected, according to CNBC figures cited by Quartz.
The company lost 5 cents a share on an adjusted basis, way smaller than the expected loss of 17 cents a share. Its adjusted operating loss of $34 million was also well under the $63 million estimate Barron’s penciled in.
GAAP total revenue hit $180.1 million, a 74% increase from one year ago.
Cerebras’ wafer engine sees stumble
Cerebras is known for its Wafer-Scale Engine, a design that keeps an entire 300-millimeter silicon wafer intact as one enormous processor built for AI and scientific workloads. The hardware earned the company its “Nvidia rival” label, however, in the second quarter, it took a beating.
Physical hardware revenue fell 23% year-over-year to $54.1 million, Yahoo Finance and Binance News both reported.
CEO Andrew Feldman stated that this was due to the timing of deliveries and not weak demand. “Hardware is going to be lumpy,” he said, explaining that the company sometimes cannot book sales because customers do not possess the data-center space to install machines the size of Cerebras’.
Cloud is the new engine
GAAP cloud and other services revenue reached $126 million, up 281% from a year earlier, while core cloud revenue climbed 287% to $127.7 million, according to Quartz. This means the company that markets itself as a chip challenger to Nvidia now draws its largest revenue stream from renting out compute, instead of selling hardware.
Cerebras also swung to a GAAP net loss of $450.5 million, or about $2.89 per share, reversing a $309.5 million profit a year earlier. The company pinned the reversal on $386.6 million in stock-based compensation, an expense tied to its May IPO.
Core gross margin was up almost 940 basis points from the second quarter of 2025 at 41%, attributed to the premium pricing on fast inference.
Guidance points offer upside
Management used the report to lift expectations, as Cerebras raised full-year 2026 core revenue guidance to a band of $880 million to $890 million, up from $855 million to $865 million. This was also above the $867.6 million analysts expected.
For the third quarter it guided to core revenue of $214 million to $216 million, ahead of a consensus close to $212 million per Koyfin, with gross margin projected at 38% to 40%.
CFO Bob Komin said the company intends to more than triple revenue in 2027 as production scales and component costs come down. CEO Feldman said in a statement that “Speed changes what AI can do,” adding that it “opens entirely new markets.” He also described gross margins as “in a good spot, and growing, because fast inference is priced at a premium.”
Cerebras balance sheet post-IPO
The May IPO left Cerebras well funded, with the company raising $6.4 billion in gross proceeds. The AI firm also ended June with $8.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investments, in addition to $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations.
Shares ended Wednesday’s regular session at a price of $262.06, which was about 42% above the $185 IPO price, just before the after-hours dip erased a portion of that gain.
The company is also building relationships to widen its reach, including a partnership with AMD and an arrangement to allow OpenAI run models such as GPT 5.6-Sol on its systems.
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Monaco’s government is attempting to scrap the Principality’s 2022 crypto law and rebuild its rules for crypto-asset service providers around the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).
The government filed Bill No. 1131 in early August, and if approved, it would change the licensing requirements for firms that offer crypto services, while the regulators will receive wider powers.
Has Monaco updated its crypto laws?
Monaco’s government has filed Bill No. 1131, which would repeal the 2022 law that split crypto and digital-asset work into issuance and operational services cleared by the State Minister, and crypto-linked investment services authorized by the Commission de Contrôle des Activités Financières (CCAF).
Under the 2022 law, providers were forced to register a company inside Monaco and foreign firms were banned from cold-marketing to residents.
The proposed change would require any firm wanting to offer crypto-asset services to gain clearance from the CCAF, but prior to that, the firm would have been reviewed by the Autorité Monégasque de Sécurité Financière and the Agence Monégasque de Sécurité Numérique.
The bill lists exactly which crypto services are allowed in Monaco and sets clear rules for how companies must run their operations, manage risks, and behave professionally. It also gives the CCAF more power to oversee and penalize firms, which the government says will help stop money laundering and other financial crimes.
Why is Monaco complying with MiCA?
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs found that firms that have not been authorized by MiCA are far more likely to carry a high or severe risk rating.
Monaco has sat on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list since the summer of 2024, and was added to the European Commission’s list of high-risk money-laundering jurisdictions more than a year ago.
The country’s alignment with MiCA is in hopes that it gets taken off these lists, as designations like this can result in slow international transactions, raised compliance costs and even increase borrowing costs for local businesses.
However, only 281 of 1,343 crypto service providers operating across the European Economic Area have secured MiCA authorization.
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The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the HTX (formerly Huobi) exchange have started talks to settle a lawsuit that accuses the Justin Sun-backed platform of illegally marketing crypto to UK consumers, according to court filings on Thursday.
HTX lawsuit first of its kind
The lawsuit that dragged HTX to London’s High Court in October 2025 was something the FCA had never done before. The regulator was suing a crypto firm over how it marketed services to British consumers.
The target of the lawsuit, HTX, known as Huobi until a rebrand, ranks among the largest crypto exchanges in the world. Justin Sun, the Chinese billionaire behind the Tron blockchain and cryptocurrency, took a controlling stake in the exchange in 2022.
The FCA’s suit named Huobi Global, incorporated in Panama, alongside “persons unknown” said to operate and control the exchange.
The regulator outlined its frustrations about the “reach” of global platforms in the lawsuit. These platforms can sit behind tangled corporate structures and still put marketing ads in front of UK users via the internet.
The FCA also claimed HTX ignored repeated attempts to make contact and ran what it called an “opaque operational structure.”
Settlement negotiations continue to extend
The two sides are currently not at loggerheads in court, with the High Court pausing proceedings until late August so they can try to reach a deal, according to the filings.
This pause to proceedings is the latest in quite the slow-moving negotiation. Reuters reports the parties traded emails in March, then went into three months of talks. On June 25, the court records show these talks were further extended by two months.
The FCA and HTX both declined to comment on where the talks stand, and lawyers for HTX did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. HTX’s public position is that it does not serve the UK at all. An undated notice on its website states that its products and services are not meant for UK users.
An HTX spokesperson offered a general statement instead of specifics on the talks when asked about the ongoing legal case. They said HTX “remains dedicated to upholding high standards of compliance, transparency, and user protection and we will continue working collaboratively with the regulators to support the sustainable development of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”
The FCA accused HTX of breaking promotion rules
The UK set its crypto promotion rules in October 2023. Firms marketing crypto assets to British consumers have to register with the FCA, clear anti-money-laundering and financial-crime checks, and attach risk warnings and suitability checks to their ads.
In February, the FCA formally accused the exchange of breaching those promotion rules. The regulator secured permission on February 4, 2026, to serve legal papers on the exchange internationally. The FCA has said HTX ads ran on major platforms including X, Telegram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.
The regulator has also tried to stifle HTX’s access outside the courtroom. The exchange was placed on the FCA’s list of unauthorized companies in 2023 and 2024, a warning that leaves users without any protection or a route to recover funds if the platform fails.
The FCA has also reportedly pressed social media firms to pull HTX products from UK app stores and block accounts for UK-based users.

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Ether.fi, one of the leading crypto neobanks, announced its Summer release, the next generation of its fintech product. The expansion will bring tools for savings, earning, trading, borrowing, and seamless spending, aiming to replace traditional banking services.
The Summer release will use the capabilities of decentralized systems, going beyond the possibilities of traditional finance and not just replicating its services.
The latest Ether.fi release will tap the latest trends in on-chain trading, to include tokenized stocks, metals, and the most active crypto assets. The user-facing app will integrate Aave, allowing users to lend their assets and borrow against their portfolio as collateral.
‘With ether.fi, we’re bridging the gap between decentralized finance and everyday financial needs,’ said Mike Silagadze, CEO of Ether.fi.
‘Our goal is to replace the traditional bank for most users and give them tools and benefits that were previously available only to institutions and high-net-worth individuals. That is the power of DeFi and self-custody,’ he said.’
Ether.fi users will also gain new fiat rails, allowing them to send assets globally and use their own named accounts. The app will also integrate over 30 new fiat currencies and additional payment methods, including Cash App, Apple Pay, and others.
Summer release aims to boost Ether.fi adoption
The recent neobank expansion aims to reach a much broader audience, the company announced. The neobank features are simplified, not requiring specialized crypto knowledge.
Ether.fi also announced its app would go beyond gambling use cases and high-risk trading, instead offering a more balanced exposure to assets, all with on-chain security.
The new release arrives at a time when other on-chain services are pivoting toward fintech, while using the existing platforms to offer a globally accessible market for any type of asset. Ether.fi was one of the leading Web3 lending protocols, which currently works with card issuers and partners to spread its consumer-facing fintech products.
As of August 2026, the platform still carries $3.5B in value locked and may boost its collateral value by including tokenized metals, equities, and other assets.
What will Ether.fi offer in its Summer update?
The latest feature update will set a new standard, moving Ether.fi toward its goal of being a full crypto neobank.
Users will experience a seamless fintech app, which will still give them access to the existing crypto liquidity ecosystem. The app will integrate xStocks, one of the most liquid and widely adopted forms of tokenized equities in the crypto space.
The app will have all the benefits of self-custody, lower fees, and a rewards program for DeFi users. The services will be integrated – a user can borrow against the value of their portfolio at a 4% rate, then use the Cash card to send funds, spend, or buy other assets.
In addition to trading, borrowing, and lending, users will benefit from programmatic ETHFI buybacks. ETHFI traded around $0.38 as of August 13, with the potential for a price boost due to buybacks. A wider user base may also increase the platform’s fees. Ether.fi produces over $219M in annualized fees, with over $50M in revenue. All new product revenues will set aside a share for ETHFI buybacks.
Additional benefits will include a 3% cash back on purchases with the Cash card, zero top-up fees on the card, and zero forex swap fees at higher membership tiers. The Summer update functionalities will be available to all new and existing users immediately. Some features, including trading on tokenized assets, may not be available in the USA and other regions.

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