You asked, we added it." Plasma just dropped Grok in, so ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all earn you up to 10% back. Your AI habit, finally paying rent, frens.
Fair warning: AI cashback's a paid-tier perk (5% on Core, 10% on Platinum, with monthly limits). But the free Lite card already does the heavy lifting:
💸 Up to ~6% yield on idle USDT/USDC (variable, no lockup)
🪙 Up to 2% cashback in XPL on every swipe
🔑 Your keys, your coins — self-custodial Visa
👉 Claim your free Plasma One card: plasma.org/download/BLCMTS
So, now we know! Yesterday’s FOMC show revealed that the Fed decided to hold at 3.50 to 3.75% in a 9-3 vote with three dissents pushing for a HIKE. GM.
Markets now price in two hikes in 2026 (here’s a perfect summary of the whole thing), but I still believe we should focus more on the possibility of upcoming cuts. The markets are pricing in possible hikes already (TardFi doesn’t look too great), so why not?
What’s nice is BTC held $64,000 through the Fed circus with ETH at $1,919. Not too shabby, honestly. Monthly close tomorrow, and if there are no major dumps between now and then, I will personally happily stay deployed in the market or LP through the boring choppy period.
This is especially nice to see, considering the June PCE numbers from today - yes, they came in in line with expectations, but US inflation is (according to the official numbers, make of that what you will) running at nearly double the 2% target.
It’s also important to note that if we see a major weakness today or, more importantly, tomorrow, I would prepare for quite an annoying August. It doesn’t have to be one, but being prepared and saving your nerves is a good choice.
Oh, and I have no idea what the Koreans are doing, but the index numbers might surprise you, check it out here. Brutal.
👇 And if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe below 👇
The important bits.
Squid confirmed the $QUID token is coming - the teaser stacks $6.35 billion moved, 5 million transactions, and 1.2 million users behind it, more info here
sport.fun introduced $FUN Manager Buybacks, going live as an initial test next Friday under the new $FUN Seasons, read here
Nado plugged into CCXT, the open-source standard automated strategies are built on - bots can now reach Nado with zero custom integration, check it out here
Ethena's Liquid Leverage went live on Aave - 50/50 sUSDe and USDe deposits earn ~12% APY in promo rewards while skipping the 7-day cooldown, read here
Aave proposed a full exit from six chains - Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos - deprecating 96 reserves holding $98.1 million, read here
Solana raised its block limit 66% to 100 million compute units as SIMD-0286 went live at epoch 1009, read here
Uniswap's v4 fee switch went live across 7 chains with fees burning UNI, and UNI reclaimed $4 (+5.4%), leading the top 40, read here
1inch launched Aqua, the first shared liquidity layer where one wallet balance backs multiple LP positions at once - live on 13 chains with 8 audits, more info here
Kamino listed AUTO on Solana, the first permissionless RWA backed by near-prime US auto loans, read here
Hyperliquid published its SK Hynix perp postmortem - an oracle anomaly triggered ~$57 million in liquidations with RWA perps now over 52% of volume, read here
Ostium's post-mortem pinned its $23.75 million drain on a compromised oracle-signer key, not the contracts, read here
Solflare suspended its card program after issuer Kulipa hit solvency trouble - funds are safe, and a new card lands within weeks, read here
GRVT's TGE airdrop claim opens at 21:00 UTC today, more info here
Monad says its "wallet experience changes tomorrow" - that is today, more info here
Even more important bits.
Robinhood smashed Q2 with $1.31 billion revenue (+32%) - Coinbase reports tonight carrying two straight losing quarters, read here
Binance added 10 tokenized stocks to bStocks (Apple, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, and more) with maker fees waived until August 31, read here
Binance.US will file for a CFTC license in August to run a federally regulated prediction market against Kalshi and Polymarket, read here
Tether's GENIUS-compliant USAT ($185 million) deployed on Celo - its first chain beyond Ethereum, read here
Morgan Stanley's staked Solana ETP MSOL debuted with $19 million in day-one volume as the ETF fee war heats up, read here
Brian Armstrong called CLARITY "at the one-yard line" while Polymarket odds of passage crashed to 27%, read here
Grayscale pegged Hyperliquid as a $1 billion revenue business by 2027 on an earnings-per-token framework, read here
Blockaid counted $1.1 billion stolen across 212 exploits in H1 - the most hacked half-year ever, with North Korea behind ~66% of it, read here
Jump Capital closed its largest fund ever at $350 million, with crypto moved to the center of the thesis, read here
Charts and stats of the day.
BTC held $64,000 through the Fed circus with ETH at $1,905 and SOL at $73.5, while $435 million got liquidated across 113,000 traders, stats here
BTC ETFs bled a 5th straight day (-977 BTC) while ETH ETFs notched a third straight week of inflows, chart here
WalletConnect users moved nearly $4 billion through Solana in H1 2026 across 766 apps, stats here
Felix Vanilla utilization averaged 79.4% over 30 days - Hyperliquid borrow demand keeps outrunning supply, stats here
Pump.fun's graduation rate hit 6.7% - roughly 8x the June average - after BOOST became the default launch mechanic, stats here
Aave V4 deposits nearly doubled in a month, forcing the eleventh deposit and borrow cap raise since launch, chart here
Onchain tokenized-equity holders hit a record 759,000 - up 92% in 30 days and 522% year-to-date, chart here
VC funding: infra fell from 50.9% to 14.8% of deployed capital in two years - DefiIgnas
LP / Yield opportunities of the day.
🟢 Accountable USDC vault on Monad - ~18% APR, $100 million TVL, audited, fee-driven, no IL, earn here
Extra degen corner (ultra-high APR, concentrated pools - not for size):
🔴 gmtrade SOL-USDC on Solana - ~165% APR, 100% fees with a ~158% 30-day mean, but only $2.5 million TVL on a young unproven venue, earn here
Lastly, our daily Telegram bulletin is back! Join in right here and stay on top of everything, every day.
GRVT: The TGE of the day
TardFi pedigree meets onchain perps. Whether that combo beats Hyperliquid at its own game is the real question. The license gets institutions in the door, but traders follow liquidity, not lawyers. Anyhow, this one definitely gets a lot of attention already.
GRVT's TGE went live today, and it seems this one isn't your usual degenerate casino. Ex-Goldman CEO, $33.3 million raised from ZKsync, Further Ventures, and 500 Global, and the world's first actually regulated DEX - a real Bermuda license.
Quick numbers: 1 billion fixed supply, community allocation bumped from 20% to 28%, with a 280 million token airdrop pool split across Season 1 and Season 2 farmers. Claims open at 21:00 UTC today, and Bybit has already opened deposits ahead of the spot listing.
Not so fast, though. Your airdrop drips out in batches over twelve months. I guess that’s annoying for some (but good for those wanting to buy right away), and the other 72% of the supply sits with the team, investors, and ecosystem on a vesting schedule, so let’s see if we got some shill-worthy news about the use cases for the remainder of the supply.
🟢 GRVT's TGE airdrop claim opens at 21:00 UTC today. Watch the official GRVT account closely, whether you want to trade the open or claim your airdrops.
How Ethereum Can Catch Cardano and Should Open-Source Models Be Banned? w/ @chang_defi
Probably should check out what’s going on at Monad:
The AI news & updates.
Microsoft posted $90 billion in revenue with Azure accelerating to +43% past $100 billion a year - the stock jumped 8% after hours, read here
Meta grew revenue 28% to $60.8 billion, but net income fell 14% under the AI capex load - the stock dropped 9%, read here
OpenAI opened ChatGPT for Academic Researchers - free frontier access scaling to 100,000 scientists under a $250 million commitment, read here
xAI shipped Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0, debuting #2 on speech-to-speech and #1 on agentic voice at 0.70 seconds to first audio, stats here
Perplexity open-sourced Numbat, a detection-and-response layer that blocks rogue agent actions before they execute, check it out here
Claude went down worldwide for nearly 3 hours - a reminder of how much of the economy now sits on one API, read here
Google DeepMind dismantled the team behind Nobel-winning AlphaFold, per the FT, read here
AI x Crypto.
MoonPay launched PayBox, an MPC payment vault letting Claude and ChatGPT pay over x402 across 8 chains including Solana, Base and Hyperliquid - consumer AI just got a wallet, read here
The Virtuals-powered agent economy on Robinhood Chain passed $200 million in volume with 5,600+ agents launched and $2.7 million raised for builders - and Zerion just became its discovery front-end, stats here
Robinhood's agentic trading accounts topped 100,000 users with $100 million+ in assets - options just shipped and Tenev says crypto is next, read here
Kaito introduced Katalyst - creator campaigns that pay on conversion, with TGE pools split 80% to creators and 20% to KAITO stakers, read here
peaq launched peaqOS Monetize - idle machines register their compute and sensors, get discovered by buyers, and settle revenue to their own onchain wallets, read here
ERC-8004 agents near 400,000 across 29 chains - Base leads real usage with 360,000+ reputation entries while BNB Chain just mints identities, stats here
Bittensor subnet 19 (BlockMachine) added Base RPC as its third chain, after serving 32.9 billion requests in under 3 months, read here
Kuru's Agent Arena on Monad is down to 4 AI traders from 512, with a $30,000 predict-the-winner pool closing Thursday 13:00 UTC, more info here
Olas shipped Pearl Connect, giving any AI coding agent a crypto wallet to trade Polymarket or buy agent forecasts (Tuesday's news, still the biggest Olas release in months), read here
AI Charts and stats of the day.
Microsoft ($41 billion) and Meta ($31 billion) spent $72 billion on capex in ONE quarter - tracking toward roughly $290 billion of AI infrastructure in 2026, stats here
Claude holds #1 and #2 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, with open-weight Kimi K3 now within 3.6 points of the closed frontier, chart here
x402 processed ~75 million agent payments worth ~$24 million in 30 days - a $0.32 average, true machine micropayments, stats here
Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats, with 50,000+ seat mega-deployments up 7x year over year, stats here
GPT-5.6 found serving optimizations that cut OpenAI's inference costs by 20% - the model is optimizing its own economics now, read here
The AI tutorials of the day.
Simon Willison walks through wiring a custom MCP server into both Claude and ChatGPT - the steps nobody documented, read here
TurboFieldfare runs Gemma 4 26B in 2 gigabytes of RAM on any M-series Mac - local models just got trivial, check it out here
A local merge queue that lets parallel Claude Code agents land changes without trampling each other, check it out here
Sebastian Raschka's architecture notes on Kimi K3 - how the open-weight frontier got this close, this cheap, read here
AI Articles of the day.
Hugging Face published the full forensic timeline of last week's AI-agent intrusion - 17,600 attacker actions over 4.5 days, the first post-mortem of its kind, read here
Matthew Green's sober read on Claude's post-quantum cryptanalysis result: AI's edge is exhaustive synthesis, not new mathematics, read here
New COLM benchmark: the best agent follows long policy documents in just 36.2% of trials - your system-prompt rulebook binds less than you think, read here
GRVT (hybrid CEX/DEX) - TGE today, 4 exchanges listing same day, community allocation raised to 28%
Pangram (AI-content detection) - raised $9 million led by Menlo Ventures, shipped Pangram 4 the same day
Encore AI (enterprise AI voice agents) - raised $30 million Series A led by Team8
Birdai Labs (onchain execution-quality infra) - $4 million seed led by Castle Island, ex-Franklin Templeton founders
Dow Protocol (RWA payment financing) - $9 million seed with OKX Ventures and Animoca participating
COTI (privacy L2) - #1 on CoinGecko trending, +127% on the week with no confirmed catalyst
open-code-review (Alibaba's agentic code reviewer) - 16,200 GitHub stars in ten weeks
Hint (Martha Stewart's AI home platform) - launched nationwide in the US
I'm actively praying for a very strong monthly close so we can get this bear market over with. I'm not even joking I actually did visit a temple and prayed for all of us you guys. Wagmi.
If this was useful, forward it to one person sitting on the sidelines right now. That's how this thing grows. MUCH appreciated.
Hix0n 🫡
