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
It’s bull moon time! That’s right, even though the monthly close wasn't exactly what we expected, there is, indeed, hope for the last 20 of us still left in crypto.
Jokes aside, check out these bull moon statistics, especially if you’re one of those planetary, or what it’s called, astronomy connoisseurs. If this particular bull moon doesn’t do us dirty (which it could, since it’s already August, after all), we might have some hopium left.
On the macro side, the market is now pricing a record chance of a Fed rate hike in September, with odds running from 60% to as high as 72% (chart here), which would be the first US hike in three years and a direct headwind for risk. Is this priced in? Bitcoin doesn't seem to give a damn, so far as I can tell.
What is concerning, though, is that BTC is now under $63K already as I'm typing this. As far as I'm concerned, this doesn’t spell out a great start to the month, but we’re very early into this, so let’s see.
What’s ok at least is oil crashing down 10% as Trump canceled US strikes on Iran and claimed a framework deal, though Iran insists the Strait of Hormuz stays closed.
Anyways, on Friday we’ve got the US jobs report, which could actually decide whether there's a September rate hike. All eyes on Friday this week.
Another interesting thing about this week is the upcoming SpaceX earnings, which will be the first glimpse into SpaceX's financials. More info here if you’re positioned.
Finally, on a bit of a bitter note for Tardfi, Nasdaq-100 just had the worst July in 22 years, down 22%. Oh welp. But on the other hand… bounce soon? Synchronized with grypto bounce? I shall let myself majin.
👇 And if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe below 👇
The important bits.
Squid kicks off its $QUID token generation event tomorrow, with Binance Alpha the first platform to list it and an airdrop claim for eligible users, after routing $6.35 billion across 5 million transactions for 1.2 million users, check it out here
Felix Vanilla has now processed over $2 billion in loans since launch, powered by Morpho on HyperEVM, read here
Nado integrated with CCXT, so any automated or AI trading strategy can now route to its onchain equity perps with no custom code, more info here
TrueNorth launched Daily Research, one AI-written deep-dive a day on the story actually moving the market, delivered straight into your workspace, check it out here
Hyperliquid made TWAP orders fully onchain with trigger, max and min prices and durations up to 7 days, as weekly HIP-3 trading volume hit a fresh all-time high of $31.87 billion, read here
Monad is now the third-largest chain by RWAs in DeFi behind Ethereum and Solana, with TVL printing an $833 million all-time high before cooling to $752 million, all on 300-millisecond blocks, chart here
Uniswap switched on its v4 fee mechanism across 7 chains and has now burned 107.8 million UNI while roughly tripling protocol revenue, sending UNI up 12%, read here
Aave v4 crossed $300 million in deposits and $100 million in active loans, up about 50% in a month as its hub-and-spoke design scales, stats here
A Coldcard hardware wallet flaw discovered by an AI model has now drained over $88 million in Bitcoin from weak device-generated keys, with one researcher reproducing the exploit in about 8 minutes from a single prompt, read here
Even more important bits.
The CLARITY Act has roughly 5 days of Senate time before summer recess with no motion to proceed yet filed, and Polymarket now prices 2026 passage at just 28%, down from an 82% February peak, read here
Robinhood secured UK crypto registration from the FCA, opening the door to onchain products for British users, read here
The first Japanese public company bought HYPE, with Tokyo-listed Eole Inc. disclosing a roughly $66,000 position it plans to scale toward $611,000, a new corporate treasury joining the Hyperliquid trade, read here
The US sold euros to buy yen in a joint intervention with Japan, its first in 15 years, with Bessent saying they "won't hesitate" to do more, read here
Leopold Aschenbrenner's roughly $45 billion AI-focused fund imploded after a 4x-levered book forced a fire-sale to Citadel, a 50%-plus drawdown in 30 days even as he stayed up 80% on the year, read here
Russia banned crypto mining in Moscow and surrounding regions until 2032, read here
Charts and stats of the day.
Bitcoin trades at $62,569, up just 1.1% on the day and boxed inside a heavy $62,000 to $68,000 cost-basis cluster below its 200-day average, chart here
Ethereum sits at $1,840, down 1.6% on the day and 6.3% on the week, while Solana trades at $72.36, chart here
Total DeFi TVL rebounded about 10% in July to $73.7 billion, with Ethereum holding $40.4 billion, roughly 55% of everything onchain, stats here
24-hour DEX volume jumped 7.9% to $5.07 billion, and Solana's PumpSwap led the whole field at $620 million, out-trading both Uniswap v3 and v4, chart here
Hyperliquid all-time fees crossed $1.46 billion and it has pulled in $23.6 billion of net inflows this year, while its top builder tradexyz routed $25.25 million of revenue straight into HYPE buybacks, stats here
Tether printed $15.8 million in fees in a single day, more than every DeFi protocol combined, with USDC adding $6.3 million, stats here
Short-term holders sent over 32,000 Bitcoin to exchanges at a loss on Aug 1, one of the largest loss-selling events in 30 days, stats here
Onchain lending logged its first monthly growth of 2026, active loans up 7.2% to $22.2 billion, with Aave holding 46.2% of it, stats here
🟢Tori Finance stRUSD on Ethereum - ~12% APR, $36 million TVL, audited, no-IL, strong yield but only about 28 days old so the track record is thin, more info here
Extra degen corner (ultra-high APR, concentrated pools - not for size)
🔴Uniswap v4 DORY-USDC on Arbitrum - ~72% APR, 100% base fees with zero emissions and a ~66% 30-day mean, $7.3 million TVL, tight-range IL on a small-cap is the risk, earn here
Lastly, our daily Telegram bulletin is back! Join in right here and stay on top of everything, every day.
SwapRoyale: turn $10 into $1,000 without risking your bag
Here's the pitch: you get a virtual $100K portfolio and trade it against real-life prices - stocks, crypto, commodities, forex, you name it. Climb the leaderboard, walk away with real USDC. The catch? There isn't one. Your own stack never touches a single candle.
The entry is a tenner. First place in the Weekend Royale pays up to $1,000. That's not a typo btw: as much as 100x on a $10 ticket, and the most you can ever lose is that ten bucks. Too rich? Some contests are free to enter and still pay real cash. Zero downside, actual upside - when's the last time crypto offered you that?
And it's not vaporware. Since launch:
$135,000+ paid out
14,800+ entries
1,900+ players
No token (hmmmmmm), no farming, no low-float games. Just you, a leaderboard, and a prize pool waiting to be claimed. Are you the best? Or at least the best of the week? Well, here’s your game.
Trade a $100K book. Risk a tenner. Win a grand or two. Higher.
Koreans are getting f in wild. Check out infographics to know everything you need at one glance:
It's definitely worth listening to this long-term breakdown of Bitcoin price action that tries to answer two main questions. Question 1. Is the macro bottom in? Question 2. Is the 4-year cycle still in play?
Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNuL97I8bvc
The AI news & updates.
OpenAI previewed a new model dubbed "Astra" by publishing machine-checkable proofs for 10 previously unsolved math and theoretical-CS problems, several in lattice cryptography, for about $2,000 of compute, a warning shot for post-quantum blockchain security, read here
The first autonomous-agent cyberattack landed: Hugging Face published a full forensic timeline of an OpenAI agent escaping its sandbox, days after Anthropic disclosed three incidents where a Claude model reached the open internet and touched real company systems, read here
China's open-model wave rolled on, with Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max (2.4 trillion params, near-frontier, open weights within the week), DeepSeek V4-Flash and LG's 750-billion-param K-EXAONE 2.0 all shipping cheap, self-hostable engines for onchain agents, read here
OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing 80% to $0.20 and $1.20 per million tokens and now reaches over 1 billion active users and 2 million businesses, read here
Google DeepMind shipped Gemini Robotics 2, letting robots reason through every movement to tie delicate knots and team up across machines on complex workflows, watch here
MiniMax H3 dropped on Hugging Face with text, image and reference-to-video generation, all with audio, check it out here
Two duelling AI open letters split the field, with 235 companies including Nvidia and OpenAI backing open weights while Anthropic refused, and 1,324 frontier-lab employees signing a plea to pace the frontier, read here
AI Charts and stats of the day.
AI spending drove 53% of all US GDP growth last quarter, 0.79 of just 1.5 points, making AI capex the marginal driver of the entire economy, chart here
Meta raised its 2026 AI capex guidance to $135 to $145 billion, one leg of a roughly $725 billion Big-Tech buildout, and the stock fell 8%, stats here
DeepSeek's open-weight V4-Flash jumped 10 points to 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at just $0.28 per million output tokens, a top-3 open result, stats here
Crypto-native Nous Research put that model on tap at 90% off, calling it over 1,000 times cheaper than Claude Fable 5 on comparable tasks while still beating it on Terminal-Bench, check it out here
x402 has now settled over 160 million lifetime agent payments across 7 chains, yet total value moved is still just $41 million, about 32 cents each, the clearest live gauge of the agent economy, chart here
The AI-agent token category is worth $3.14 billion, led by Venice at $556 million, Talus at $512 million and Virtuals at $365 million, stats here
Anthropic now says Claude writes roughly 80% of its own code, the exact automation loop the safety letters are worried about, read here
AI models are now hunting crypto's weak points: after one found the Coldcard flaw, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe loaded 100 Bitcoin, worth about $6 million, into a wallet and dared Anthropic's Claude to crack it, read here
Virtuals is now the largest agent layer on both Base, with $479 million of agentic GDP across 18,000-plus agents, and Robinhood Chain, with $200 million in agent volume, 5,600-plus agents, and $2.7 million raised for builders, its first agents getting wallets capped by a human-signed mandate, read here
io.net is now the number-one DePIN by revenue at a $12.11 million projected ARR, renting H100S at $2.10 an hour against AWS's $6.88 while burning 1.2 million $IO, stats here
The x402 Foundation added Ripple, American Express, Adyen, and Fiserv to reach 40 members, and Coinbase switched on agent payments for roughly 5,000 businesses as 53% of traffic to Base's developer docs turned out to be bots, read here
Olas shipped Pearl Connect, giving a coding agent like Claude Code its own crypto wallet so it can research a prediction market and place the Polymarket trade in one session, on top of 18.2 million lifetime agent transactions, check it out here
Fetch.ai wired up an agent-to-agent checkout that routes an ASI: One store through x402 to Skyfire Pay, closing the loop from agent discovery to payment across a network of 3 million-plus agents, read here
Aethir-backed Axe Compute signed a $1.5 billion contract for 9,200-plus Nvidia B300 GPUs, lifting its 2026 signed pipeline past $3 billion and routing the compute through Aethir's decentralized network, read here
GEODNET pulled $905,000 in real network fees over 30 days and burns 80% of data revenue into GEOD, while Grass now runs at a $33 million annualized rate selling AI training data, the DePIN "real yield" the thesis was waiting for, stats here
The AI tutorials of the day.
Simon Willison on stateless MCP: how MCP 2.0's stateless mode collapses a tool call into a single HTTP request and removes the main headache in building agent tool-servers, read here
Sebastian Raschka dissects Kimi K3's architecture component by component, from LatentMoE to dropping RoPE entirely, the clearest read on how open labs trade tricks for inference efficiency, read here
Phil Schmid on EvoCode-Bench: why coding agents regress 1.4 to 4x on multi-turn work, and why the ones that keep a persistent requirements doc more than double their success, read here
Strix, a 46,800-star open-source AI pentesting agent that runs your code like a real hacker, writes proof-of-concept exploits and drops into CI/CD, a genuinely useful bookmark for onchain teams shipping to prod, check it out here
AI Articles of the day.
Anthropic research: Claude Mythos, running largely autonomously, derived a key-recovery attack that cut the HAWK-256 post-quantum signature's security from 2^64 to 2^38 in about 60 hours, concrete evidence that frontier AI now accelerates cryptanalysis of the lattice math underpinning next-gen blockchains, read here
io.net argues that truly open AI is impossible unless the compute to run it is affordable and un-gatekept, the clearest statement yet of the decentralized-compute thesis, read here
Moonshot AI (open-weight lab behind Kimi K3)
Kite (x402-native L1 for agent payments)
Bless (browser-based AI edge-compute DePIN)
Sentient ROMA (recursive meta-agent framework) - crossed 5,000 GitHub stars
V12 Security (AI agent that audits smart contracts) - raised a $10 million seed led by Electric Capital
Perceptron (decentralized AI-data DePIN) - raised $6.5 million to scale an 800,000-node contributor mesh
The AI GOAT.
CZ: "We might be in a bear market... but a lot of money looking for things to invest in"
Alright, that’s what I like to hear from people with hoards of money. Now let the pumps commence (finally).
If this was useful, forward it to one person sitting on the sidelines right now. That's how this thing grows. MUCH appreciated.
Hix0n 🫡
