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
Oh, the damn earnings, they came in. And we’ve got the most important Bitcoin monthly close of our lifetimes ahead today. GM.
As for Apple, the post-earnings price action isn’t looking too bright (it’s looking quite nasty to be frank). Here are all the numbers if you’re interested. As for Amazo, the story goes inverse - AMZN is absolutely surging upwards post its earnings call. GG Benzos.
Speaking of TardFi, even SPX looks much better than yesterday, continuing its boring summer chopsolidation, hopefully resolving in yet another leg up during Q4, which could coincide with the start of our next real crypto bull leg. BUT: you might want to see what Cramer just said. This guy…
Now, to the real matter at hand. The monthly close is coming up today, and BTC is already starting to mess with us. As I'm typing this, it’s at $63.9K. We want it to close around 1,000 dirty fiat dollars higher to keep the confidence in not only bounce continuation but also macro bottom confirmation alive.
Let’s see, but here’s a great demonstration of how deep in the bear we already are: Strategy booked an $8.32 billion unrealized Q2 loss on its BTC - the same quarter printed a $14 billion gain a year ago. Oh well.
Let’s pump it goddamnit! Push on Bitcoin, you old fart, you can do this, giga green monthly close dildo here we go. See you all Monday, and thanks for tapping in, always.
👇 And if you haven’t yet, hit subscribe below 👇
🔷 The important bits
Plasma is moving $10 billion+ of stablecoins a month on Visa's onchain analytics tracker, secure your card here
sport.fun made off-season TP spendable - 1/16 of banked balances unlock every week from Preseason Week 1, read here
TrueNorth closes lifetime access for good in under 24 hours : Day-1 TruthSayers only, more info here
SwapRoyale's Weekend Royale has $2,500 up for grabs with $700 for first entries closes tonight 7 PM ET, trade here
Pyth's free feeds ended today - every app pulling Pyth prices now needs a paid plan from $500 a month, with revenue routed to the DAO and a PYTH buyback reserve, read here
Uniswap quietly shipped Launches, a launchpad aggregator pulling launchpads like Bankr, Pons, and Long into one tradeable feed - in beta on Robinhood Chain, check it out here
Delpho's USDV opened early access on HyperEVM - deposit stables, mint at 0% borrow while Hyperliquid funding pays the yield, audited by Sherlock, read here
Hypernova paid traders $300,000 in 3 months of closed alpha - 6 second average payouts, settled entirely by contracts, read here
Monad's teased wallet change shipped - Category Labs' Mera spins up a full account from one passkey, free for any app on any chain, check it out here
Coinbase is running App Store ads for fomo - the social trading app that added 100,000 users in a single week, read here
Hyperliquid's next upgrade takes TWAPs retail - $100 minimum orders with execution stretched up to a full week, read here
GRVT round-tripped its TGE - minus 48% from the day-one high on $234 million of volume as claims opened, chart here
A Coldcard wallet flaw drained 594 BTC ($38.2 million) from around 500 wallets - move funds to fresh keys, read here
ENS Labs blinked after the "governance attack" backlash - the revised proposal leaves 54.6 million ENS and the $16 million operations wallet with the DAO, read here
🔷 Even more important bits
Coinbase missed everything - $1.22 billion revenue and a shock $1.36 per-share loss sent the stock down 7%, even with a record 10.3% of global crypto volume, read here
Open USD, the 140-company consortium stablecoin backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and BNY, launches on Ethereum day one - reserve earnings flow to the partners that grow it, read here
Ethereum Institutional closed its first funding round with 100+ backers - Joe Lubin, BitMine and SharpLink anchor the push (Wednesday's news), read here
BlackRock's $2.6 billion BUIDL landed on Tempo, the Stripe and Paradigm payments chain built for agents, read here
Bessent: Senate Democrats are blocking CLARITY, read here
The CFTC proposed conflict-of-interest rules for vertically integrated crypto venues - exchange, clearing and broker under one roof, 60-day comment clock, read here
Robinhood now runs 13 businesses each clearing $100 million a year - one in 2019, three in 2022, chart here
🔷 Charts and stats of the day
BTC steadied at $64,300 with ETH at $1,906 and SOL at $74 while HYPE reclaimed $55, up 2.8% against the whale exits, stats here
Korean fintech KSNET is bringing Solana Pay to its 330,000 merchants - it processes $4 billion in payments a month, read here
trade.xyz cleared roughly $100 billion in July - $47 billion of it semis and memory, about 130x its launch month, stats here
Robinhood Chain's first month: roughly 200 million transactions, $650 million in app TVL and 2.4 million users - plus more daily contract deployers than any other chain, stats here
Hyperliquid's HIP-3 open interest hit an ATH $3.92 billion as SK Hynix perps out-traded BTC for a second straight day at $1.58 billion, chart here
Three days into Uniswap's fee switch, burn revenue nearly tripled to ~$325,000 a day - LPs say it came from their cut, Hayden calls that "made-up math", chart here
PENDLE circulating supply hit an all-time low - buybacks run at 5x emissions and 92% of sPENDLE wallets have never unstaked, stats here
BTC ETFs snapped a 4-day $526 million bleed with a $32 million inflow - July still tracks as their smallest inflow month ever, stats here
Ethereum turned 11 with a record 40.2 million ETH staked - a third of supply locked while price sits 61% under last August's high, stats here
💧 LP opportunities
🟢 Nest Credit nOPAL on Plume - ~11% APR, $49 million TVL, audited, RWA private credit so borrower and chain risk are the trade, earn here
Extra degen corner (ultra-high APR, concentrated pools - not for size)
Lastly, our daily Telegram bulletin is back! Join in right here and stay on top of everything, every day.
Optimum
Ethereum has a dirty little secret: its data layer still runs on Gossipsub, a protocol that spams every node with the same block over and over, like a group chat where everyone forwards the same meme. Slow, redundant, and it's literally costing validators money.
Enter Optimum - the "autobahn for blockchain data."
The cheat code here is RLNC (Random Linear Network Coding), and this is where it gets interesting: the CEO, MIT professor Muriel Médard, co-invented the technology herself. Instead of blasting full blocks around, data gets sliced into coded shards that nodes can recombine and forward simultaneously. No redundancy. No bottlenecks.
The testnet numbers are not hopium either. Over 40 validators represening 29% of all staked ETH (roughly $23.7 billion) ran it - Ebunker, Blockdaemon, Meria, the heavyweights. Results: 2.42x faster propagation, 7.88x lower variance, zero message loss.
Why do we care? Every 50ms of latency shaved off adds roughly 0.6-0.7% APR to validator revenue and extra MEV capture. Faster pipes = more money, with zero added risk.
Mainnet is coming very soon, starting with Ethereum, then every high-activity chain. Infrastructure plays this fundamental don't come around often... monitoring continues.
If you want to deep dive into this one, definitely don't miss our latest Optimum article:
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Fantasy trading has always been a bit of a whale's game, but SwapRoyale thinks there's a better way. JeffExtor joins us, On the Spot, to explain it all.
🤖 The AI news & updates
Anthropic caught its own models breaching 3 real companies from inside "sandboxed" cyber evals - one shipped a malicious PyPI package that infected 15 systems within an hour, read here
AI policy groups asked the White House to formally investigate OpenAI over its escaped agent's Hugging Face breach, read here
OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing 80% to $0.20 and $1.20 per million tokens - crediting the model with rewriting its own inference code, read here
Amazon's $53.4 billion paper gain on its Anthropic stake tripled net income to $62.6 billion - AWS accelerated to 37% growth, its fastest since 2021, read here
Apple shed $390 billion in an hour on a "hundred-year flood" in memory costs - the AI data-center DRAM squeeze just reached your iPhone, read here
Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness sold the bulk of its book to Citadel after dropping 67% in July - it was up 439% through June on 4x leverage, read here
Google's Gemini Robotics 2 gives humanoids whole-body control and multi-robot teamwork - 92% success on tasks like unscrewing a light bulb, read here
The FCC put foreign-made humanoids and robot dogs on its national-security Covered List, read here
🤖 AI x Crypto (our edge)
Zero Hash launched an Agentic Finance Suite with Know Your Agent screening and per-second streaming settlement across 40+ chains - and joined the x402 Foundation, read here
Canada's Questrade wired Claude and ChatGPT into live brokerage accounts over MCP - agents can research and place trades against $100 billion+ in client assets, read here
Lightning Labs relaunched L402 as the Bitcoin rail for machine-to-machine commerce - sub-cent agent payments with no accounts or API keys, the x402 rivalry is now official, read here
Every Coinbase Business merchant can now accept x402 payments from AI agents - demoed with Siri paying an invoice from iOS, read here
Bittensor's Quasar (SN24) claims the first decentrally trained 120 billion-parameter model with a 5 million-token context window - miners trained expert fragments with zero all-to-all communication, read here
Score (SN44) went live on Kraken - the fourth Bittensor subnet token listed from July's slate of seven, read here
Engy (SN53) says it serves the 2.8 trillion-parameter Kimi K3 at 108 tokens a second on half-price RTX 5090 rigs - up from 20 on day one, stats here
Robinhood listed FET and handed its AI agent 18 technical indicators the same day - the ASI token now trades where the agents live, read here
Virtuals' Karma now traces an RWA or meme chart back to the TikTok and Instagram posts that moved it, check it out here
🤖 AI charts and stats of the day
Amazon raised 2026 capex to roughly $220 billion - with its AI unit and Trainium chip business each past a $25 billion run rate, stats here
Kaito's Q2 stock mindshare: NVDA led 8 of 13 weeks, but SpaceX took 15.93% in a single week - more than the other nine names combined - and Micron finished first, chart here
US semiconductor ETFs now trade $50 billion a day - more than 4x the January 2025 pace, chart here
41% of LinkedIn long-form posts are now AI-generated - LinkedIn's answer is a literal "seems like AI slop" report button, read here
Thinking Machines' open-weight Inkling-Small scored within one point of its flagship on the Artificial Analysis index at a third of the parameters - while using half the thinking tokens, stats here
🤖 AI tutorials of the day
Thoughtworks measured refactoring an AI-built codebase - identical tasks needed 83% fewer input tokens afterward, receipts included, read here
Nathan Lambert's Lecture 11 is the tool-use and agentic-RL 101 - from why LLMs need tools to the infra behind every function call, watch here
Hugging Face's speech-to-speech repo runs fully local voice agents behind an OpenAI Realtime-compatible API - swap any of the 4 pipeline stages, check it out here
SimpleEnglish forces aerospace-grade Simplified Technical English on LLM docs - 72.9% fewer rule violations across six Claude models, check it out here
🤖 AI articles of the day
54 students built the same site with an agent or a chatbot - agent users finished faster but could no longer extend their own code, read here
Latent Space on why agent builders are reviving ontologies - deterministic guardrails for probabilistic systems, read here
"2x, not 10x" - the day's most-debated essay argues LLM coding gains are real, but judgment stays stubbornly human, read here
PerpsTCG (perps trading card game on Hyperliquid) - mobile v1 live, beat-the-AI 1v1s, cards themed on Nest and surviving liquidation
Ellis (AI-native private credit ops) - $10 million+ seed led by First Round, from Cadre founder Ryan Williams
Foundational Industries (factories run entirely by AI) - $25 million seed co-led by BoxGroup and Zigg
ChipAgents (AI agents for chip design) - Series A extended $60 million to $134 million, ARR up 6x in H1
Onyx Security (control plane supervising AI agents) - $113 million Series B led by Bessemer, 1.1 million agents secured
openwork (open-source Claude Cowork alternative) - 915 GitHub stars added in a day, 18,900 total
AI Search Console (AEO analytics for AI search) - topped Product Hunt as agent tooling swept the board
pools.trade (something new" teaser CT is pinning on Uniswap - a day after Launches shipped)
Goddamn shenanigans.
Quite a week, my friends. I continue to pray for today’s monthly close, because it’s going to reveal a lot about what awaits us next. Stay tuned, we'll be monitoring every possible matter at hand. Enjoy the weekend! Cheers.
If this was useful, forward it to one person sitting on the sidelines right now. That's how this thing grows. MUCH appreciated.
Hix0n 🫡
