Just as I was about to go to sleep, the timeline suddenly started firing. I open the charts, and baaaang, BTC and ETH had finally made a move.
Whether we liked it or not, were feeling a bit left out all this while as every other market continued making all-time highs after all-time highs. After months of nothing but chop and boredom, crypto finally put in a decent move.
BTC pumped 11.5%, and ETH pumped almost 25%. It’s been a while since we’ve seen moves like that on majors.
This came after Trump’s speech, giving clarity on a regulatory framework to bring crypto activity to the US.
He also did another thing.
He mentioned Hyperliquid by name, stating that they are “working to bring Hyperliquid to the US.”
This resulted in a 27% pump for HYPE, and now everyone is believing again.
Hopefully, this move sustains. Fingers crossed.
This story aside, in today’s newsletter, we’ll also get into:
The return of Arthur Hayes
Institutional movement in crypto
Another record-breaking week for fomo
👇 And if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe below 👇
With a relatively quiet week across the industry, the hottest sector remained the pre-IPO market, with Unitree taking all the plaudits, as highlighted in last week's newsletter.
This week, let’s look at all sectors as a whole and see what’s doing well and what isn’t.
It’s the Energy sector as well as Stablecoin & Yield that have fared the best, while things like Nuclear, Space, and Defense got hit the hardest. Crypto in general, whether it be memecoins or any other form of onchain trading, also took a tumble this week.
An uneventful week, to say the least.
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!
Alright, let's take a look at some of the major headlines for the week.
AI (Robotics, ML, Automation, etc):
Anthropic posts its first operating profit, $559 million on $10.9 billion Q2 revenue, arriving roughly two years ahead of the company's own schedule.
Sebastian Thrun is back and he’s building foundation models for hardware. The Waymo/Google Brain/Udacity co-founder launched stealth robotics startup Dulo, reportedly focused on foundation models for hardware design.
Google just made AI agents dramatically cheaper to run. Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash, targeting coding, autonomous agents, and multi-step business workflows, at an introductory $0.75/million input and $3.75/million output tokens.
AI infrastructure demand is getting stupid. CoreWeave now has a $104 billion backlog. Even more interesting, demand for older A100 GPUs remains strong enough that CoreWeave has contracts extending into 2029.
Tesla's humanoid gets its voice from a rival lab. Optimus V3's ramp at Fremont continues, and its "brain" pairs Tesla's new AI5 chip with xAI's Grok for voice. Here’s the scoop.
Chip money is chasing the AI buildout too. Chip startup Etched has surged to a $21 billion valuation as AI increasingly compresses chip design timelines
The AI boom is now creating a new software category, AI code insurance. CodeRabbit raised $143 million at a $1.5 billion valuation as companies struggle to review and monitor the enormous quantities of code being produced by autonomous coding systems.
Chery's robotics division wants to IPO, after already deploying 3,000+ robots. AiMOGA Robotics has also deployed 110 humanoid police robots in Chinese cities.
SoftBank just put $200 million behind autonomous construction equipment. Gravis Robotics is using AI and robotics to automate heavy construction machinery, another sign that physical AI is moving beyond humanoids into economically valuable industrial equipment.
Blockchain & Crypto:
BitMart's CEO is getting cornered by his own users. Users and staff are publicly demanding that CEO Sheldon answer by August 19 over alleged withdrawal restrictions, unpaid salaries, and missing funds.
SEC proposes a crypto-specific regulatory framework that could exempt certain token issuances from traditional securities rules, including a one-time exemption for up to $5 million and annual offerings up to $75 million.
Tether completes its first full independent financial statement audit with KPMG, giving the world's largest stablecoin issuer its first comprehensive external audit. Take that, Tether Truthers.
Ansem launches a memecoin index called z500.
Curve founder says FATF pressure could actually make DeFi more decentralized. Michael Egorov argues that regulatory pressure may push protocols toward stronger security and genuinely decentralized architectures rather than the opposite.
Citi to launch Bitcoin custody later this year inside its new Custody+ platform, letting institutions hold BTC alongside traditional assets.
Compound is betting $52 million on becoming an institutional DeFi protocol. The veteran lending protocol replaced its leadership team and is shifting its strategy toward institutional adoption.
Jane Street's crypto book just got a lot more visible. The trading firm disclosed owning over $990 million in Bitcoin ETFs in a new SEC filing.
Okay, be real with yourself for a second. How many tabs do you have open right now trying to figure out if you should buy or sell? How many Discord chats you’re scrolling for ‘alpha’ that’s just someome else’s guess dressed up nicer?
TrueNorth puts all of that in one place. Research, execution, tracking, all in one interface. It’s got agents that do most of the heavy-lifting, leaving just the execution part in your hands. And now, you can do that directly from Telegram whenever you’re ready.
One of the biggest stories of this week is, of course, the recent pump in majors like BTC and ETH.
While everyone attributes it to bullish statements from Trump, there’s also the consideration of catching out short sellers in a low-liquidity environment.
In fact, over $2 billion in shorts were liquidated within 24 hours, making this the second-largest short liquidation event in the history of crypto.
Speaking of getting rekt…
One day, after losing even more money on shitcoins, I opened Twitter just to get greeted with this face.
He’s back.
Although he’s built a bit of a reputation as a top signal in recent years, Arthur Hayes did pioneer what’s crypto's most used innovation, perps.
He’s now taking a bet on something new.
That bet is FLOP, the food for AI agents.
In other news, some of the bigger names in the DeFi world have been cooking up a storm.
Ondo’s tokenized stocks offering hits $1 billion in total value locked.
Second, as most of you may know, Circle is making its very own chain called Arc. Well, Uniswap has now confirmed that they will be working with them and fully deploying the V4 AMM on mainnet.
Then we have what has quite easily been the darling app of the crypto world this year, fomo.
They have been absolutely smashing records and growing at an unprecedented rate. Having crossed the $1 billion volume mark recently, they added almost another $300 million in cumulative volume this week and are very close to smashing through the $1.5 billion threshold.
Speaking of fomo, the trench world has had an interesting story come out of it.
As the rotations become more aggressive and the coins lose steam because people are now launching 75,000 coins an hour, CZ seems to be fed up with everything.
He publicly announced that he will be abandoning his public wallet simply due to the amount of memecoin spam he receives every second.
Crypto degens forcing a billionaire exchange founder to abandon his wallet is the most crypto thing ever.
Inside the UK’s robotics and automation scene
What’s up with Bank of England and the digital pound?
Will AI replace your job?
What is compute? The new super-asset reshaping AI and crypto markets
How to trade physical assets onchain?
TrueNorth walkthrough
Alibaba’s AI models just hit 3 billion downloads
A little reminder to never forget the basics
How we got targeted with a Ledger scam and won
Heading to KBW, TOKEN2049 or a well deserved holiday?
Flights, hotels, taxis, dinners, coffees, the spending adds up quickly.
Instead of off-ramping crypto to your bank before the trip, deposit directly into Plasma One from supported chains and spend from there.
And if you’re going to spend thousands travelling anyway, you might as well earn while doing it.
Load up Plasma One before you fly and make it your card for the week.
In case you have no clue about the card features/benefits, here’s a quick article that could help you - Why use the Plasma Card?
The tweet of the day has to be this absolute gem from Rasmr.
He claims he is so over his ex that he sends her $1.5k on stream.
Yeaaaaaa, sureee buddy.
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.
We’ll be back next week, same time, same place.
Cheers,
Em!
