Retail is ALL IN on robotics. Don’t take my word for it, just look at what happened with Unitree’s IPO.
Retail investors placed 9.8 million orders for a stock that sold 40.4 million shares. The offering was oversubscribed 5,526x by them.
Unitree priced the deal at 150.8 yuan a share (about $22.35), raised 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million), and is heading into its STAR market debut later this month at a 61 billion yuan valuation, roughly $9 billion, making it mainland China's first-ever publicly traded humanoid robot maker.
Let. That. Sink. In.
All the big bois are in the picture, too. DeepSeek is a strategic investor here, with a 2.31% stake locked up for three years. China Southern Power Grid, China Telecom, and China National Petroleum Corp also have substantial stakes.
About a fifth of the whole raise went to strategic money before retail even got a look in, YET retail broke the book by thousands of times over.
Good time to trade the perps version, I’d say. (NFA though!)
This IPO has paved the path for a bunch of other Chinese firms like Leju Robotics and Deep Robotics to go public next.
This story aside, in today’s newsletter we’ll also get into:
Nikita Bier’s exit and things that make you go “hmmm”
How Pokémon cards have fared better than both the S&P 500 and BTC on the YTD front
New York’s attempt to shut down Kalshi and the CFTC’s “ykw, keep going” intervention
👇 And if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe below 👇
In four out of the first twelve days of this month, RWAs have managed to rake in a higher volume when compared to crypto. From the $7 billion high created on the August 4, the number is currently hovering around $3.5 billion.
On another note, Pokémon cards have fared better than both the S&P 500 and BTC on the YTD front. Literally everything is outperforming crypto at the moment, smh.
As far as the bigger picture is concerned, semis and AI hardware, biotech and pharma, energy, and crypto stocks have had a better 24-hour period when compared to other sectors like space and defence, L2s, memecoins, AI, and onchain trading.
Every asset will soon be tradable onchain. 100+ already are: stocks, commodities, forex, indices, pre-IPO. The problem is knowing where to get exposure.
We’ve started keeping track of it all on onchainmarkets.fun, the aggregator for onchain traditional asset perps. Go check it out!
Keen to get into the future of RWA perps? This is the one. Give it a listen.
Btw, TrueNorth has also just kicked off a two-week trading competition with Ondo, with a HUGE prize pool. Could be worth checking out if you’re trading anyway.
Aight, a quick glance at the ABC headlines:
AI (Robotics, ML, Automation, and all that jazz):
Agentic trading has one golden result-maxing metric: PnL - watch the panel thesis here
“This is the third industrial revolution” - J.P. Morgan chief investment strategist - hear why from the man himself
Claude Fable 5’s biology safeguards to be loosened to reduce false positives - all details in this post
SpaceXAI launches Grok Bot in early beta - can't really imagine going back to the old way of working
Is the AI rebound moving in sequence? the signs, explained
Anthropic is looking to go public in September or early October - why now?
OpenAI’s Free & Go users get unlimited text chats with GPT-5.6 - more about the deal here
Dyan Robotics unveils Dyna-2, a world-action model pre-trained on ONE MILLION HOURS of human video - there's no stopping in scaling, innit?
xAI co-founder’s AI startup River AI secures $1.1 billion in its seed/Series A round - who are the investors? - all in here
Monthly active users on Google Gemini surpass 1 billion. 63% of users talk to Gemini out loud
Blockchain & Crypto:
Peapods Finance teases “Strategies” with convex payoffs in both directions
Russia proposes $3,645 annual crypto purchase cap for retail investors, limited to BTC, ETH, and USDT
Aster DEX rolls out AOS-2 perpetual listing framework, with 1 million ASTER staking requirement
Not sure what Squid actually is? Here's a breakdown
Buterin says, “Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant”
Trump is looking to slash capital gains tax
Chinese yuan hits its strongest level against the US dollar in three years
Nillion is building Encrypted Markets - check out their seven-phased plan here
I remember waking up exactly a week back and opening X. The first tweet that popped on my feed read, “Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster. I'll be stepping back from leading product for 𝕏 and will continue on as an advisor.”
Yep, I’m talking about Nikita’s tweet.
'Now, was the timing merely a happy coincidence? Or was there something more to it?
Gonna let Benjamin do the talking.
Moving on to the next key story - If you remember, New York’s AG had recently asked a court to halt Kalshi’s operations and was seeking at least $36 billion in damages.
The entire argument was based on how its prediction markets amounted to illegal gambling and put users at a “serious personal and financial risk.”
Now, the CFTC just stepped in, exercising its ‘emergency authority’ and ordered Kalshi to keep trading under federal rules, with Chair Michael Selig saying, “New York has no business regulating these interstate financial matters.”
What a time to be alive.
Squid’s token went live earlier this month, and we gave you a quick look at how the numbers were shaping up.
Today, let's get into the staking side of things. If you’re holding the token and wondering how to put it to work, here’s the lowdown.
Head to the staking page
Connect your wallet where you’re holding QUID - you’ve a bunch of options to choose from (Rabby, Phantom, Brave, MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, etc)
Specify how many tokens you want to stake and make sure you click on “approve & stake”
Right after, you’ll have to sign your transaction that’ll eventually move your tokens to the staking contract
Easy breezy, yeah.
A couple of things to note: Staking is live on Base. There’s no lockup period per se, so you can unstake and claim your rewards anytime.
We might be stuck in the consolidation phase, but coins like FWA have managed to keep the pump party on by scripting (almost) new ATHs. More on it in the article by Emiri.
Dropped a quick post about Unitree’s blockbuster IPO.
Paul joined us this week to chat about all things performative AI spend, neobanks, and the onchain card explosion.
Robots need to learn from physical interactions: how things move, break, spill, wobble, and what not. So, where does that data come from before there’s a robot everywhere? Dropped a video with Axis Robotics’ Chris Feng to do a deep dive on it all.
What do we think of Zuck’s superintelligence manifesto? Check out this mini-article to find out.
While the market remains in its humdrum phase, there are projects out there that are using this time to continue building. Here’s a bunch of them we’re keeping tabs on.
The next billion wallet infra users won’t be humans. They’re going to be AI agents, and traditional rails simply cannot serve them. With institutions well and truly digging their toes into the crypto payment rails sand, we had a quick look at some of the players building the infra for this new and upcoming era.
If you’ve bookmarked this week’s pod but still haven’t checked it out, here you go. Just dropped the RSS version today, so it should be wherever you normally listen to us.
Before we move on to the next section, it’s worth noting that Plasma One has been scripting one record after another. As of the end of last week, it had processed $32 million in card volume, and mind you, July single-handedly chipped in around half of that figure, with monthly volume jumping to $15.2 million (a 69% rise).
If you’re looking to sign up, tap here. They’ve got a bunch of travel and AI cashback offers running right now, so go check ‘em out.
Tracking live markets via PolymarketScan.
Em woke up and chose to blurt out the truth 😭
We’re switching things up a little. Instead of landing in your inbox every day, we’re making the blocmates newsletter a weekly thing.
That’ll give you more time to actually dig into the stories we talk about here. We’re taking the best bits from across the week, giving them a bit more breathing room, and putting together one proper issue that’ll land in your mailbox every Thursday.
Same newsletter, just a little less often and hopefully a lot more worth opening.
Guess this one hit the nail on the head. We’ll be back next week, same time, same place.
Cheers,
Lav!
