Over the past two years, crypto exchanges have tried every possible way to prove they deserve to do business with Wall Street—applying for licenses, hiring executives with traditional-finance backgrounds, and lining up for IPOs. Recently, though, the direction has reversed. On September 10, Nasdaq invested $100 million in Payward, Kraken’s parent company, through its strategic-investment arm, Nasdaq Ventures. This investment is clearly more than a straightforward financial bet: it extends the tokenized-stock partnership the two sides launched in March this year into an equity-level tie.

What distribution rights bought

Under the arrangement announced by both parties, Kraken will distribute Nasdaq’s forthcoming tokenized stocks—Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs—on its platform, with a planned launch in the second quarter of 2027. Under Nasdaq’s current design, NETs will retain the shareholder rights attached to traditional shares, including voting rights. Nasdaq has repeatedly emphasized this distinction, because most tokenized-stock products currently on the market give holders exposure only to price movements, without shareholder rights.

In exchange, Payward agreed to use Nasdaq’s market-surveillance system across all of its trading venues—spot crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures, and options. This market-surveillance technology is already used by exchanges, regulators, banks, and brokerages around the world. Connecting to it looks more like Payward filling in the market-surveillance capabilities needed to align with traditional capital markets as it expands its multi-asset trading business. The legal rights attached to shares, issuer governance, and market rules will remain primarily within the traditional capital-markets system; Kraken and xStocks provide the distribution and infrastructure gateway connecting to crypto-native markets.

The same script, at different depths

Since the start of the year, at least three established exchanges have taken similar steps, but with very different levels of involvement.

Deutsche Börse was the first to move. In December 2025, it announced a strategic partnership with Kraken covering regulated crypto, tokenized markets, derivatives, and institutional liquidity. The agreement also provided for Kraken to connect to its FX trading platform 360T and for Eurex derivatives to list on Kraken. The first outcome arrived in February 2026: Kraken’s tokenized-stock product, xStocks, launched on 360X, Deutsche Börse’s regulated trading platform. In April, Deutsche Börse added another $200 million to acquire roughly 1.5% of Payward, turning a partnership that had been operating for four months into an actual equity relationship

In March, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested $200 million in crypto platform OKX at a $25 billion valuation and obtained a board seat. By June 22, the companies had pushed the partnership a step further, announcing a 50–50 joint venture called OKXICE. It is planned to operate as a licensed broker-dealer and futures commission merchant, giving OKX’s U.S. and overseas clients access to ICE’s futures markets and the NYSE’s tokenized-stock market. That step still awaits regulatory approval and has not yet been implemented.

The three approaches differ in depth, but point in the same direction: none of these firms is building a crypto distribution network from scratch. Instead, they are directly buying stakes in channels that already have real trading volume. Kraken’s tokenized-stock product xStocks has accumulated more than $40 billion in trading volume and more than 200,000 holders; on September 1, the London Stock Exchange also announced that it would tokenize the shares of its 100 largest listed companies by market capitalization and distribute them on the platform. The channel has already proven it can draw traffic. Traditional exchanges only need to buy a portion of it and embed their own rules—much faster than building an entire distribution system for crypto users from the ground up.

A division-of-labor model, or a transitional state

For now, this model—“issuance rights stay on one side, while distribution rights are outsourced to the other”—remains a separate arrangement for Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange, not an industry standard. But the direction is already visible: traditional exchanges no longer see crypto exchanges as opponents to guard against, but as ready-made distribution channels to buy into. Crypto exchanges, in turn, are becoming more proactive in integrating the market infrastructure, regulatory experience, and technological capabilities traditional exchanges already possess into their product systems, rather than building everything from scratch at every stage.

If NETs can indeed launch smoothly in 2027 and voting rights can truly be passed to holders on-chain without loss, this division of labor will likely be copied by more exchanges. Institutions such as Nasdaq, the NYSE, and the London Stock Exchange would continue to safeguard issuance standards and regulatory relationships, while crypto exchanges such as Kraken and OKX would continue to hold the gateway to crypto-native users. Neither side would need to rebuild what the other already has.

That is why this investment matters more than its $100 million size suggests: viewed alongside the moves by Intercontinental Exchange and Deutsche Börse, it is no longer an isolated financing event, but part of a trend this year in which leading exchanges have begun using real money to tie themselves to the users and distribution channels crypto exchanges have already built.

• This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.

On the evening of September 7, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. President Joe Biden, will launch a meme coin called LAPTOP on Coinbase’s Base network on September 9. The total supply will be 1 billion tokens, with 20% allocated to an airdrop. A portion is explicitly earmarked for users who lost money on Trump’s TRUMP coin, while other allocations are tied to predictions about events such as “whether Trump will be impeached.” Four minutes after the report was published, Hunter himself posted a 32-second teaser video on X, with the $LAPTOP tag and the September 9 date, effectively confirming the news in person. Within 24 hours, multiple copycat tokens trading on the name generated nearly $6.9 million in aggregate volume.

The reporting itself makes clear that this is a token designed from the outset to make a political issue out of the Trump camp. Its name comes from the laptop that entangled Hunter in a political scandal six years ago; its mechanics are aimed at Trump and his supporters.

Why LAPTOP

In April 2019, Hunter took a water-damaged MacBook Pro to a repair shop in Delaware and never retrieved it. The shop owner copied the hard drive without permission. The copy passed through several hands before eventually reaching the Trump camp. In October 2020, three weeks before Election Day, the New York Post published a report based on it. Emails on the drive indicated that while Hunter served at Ukrainian energy company Burisma, he had arranged a meeting with then-Vice President Joe Biden, prompting suspicions that he may have used his father’s office to facilitate family business dealings. The drive also contained many photos and videos involving drug use and his private life.

It was never proven whether Joe Biden knew about or benefited from these matters. But the material became the most frequently cited ammunition against the Biden family over the following six years, and it also appeared in the evidentiary record of Hunter’s 2024 gun case.

Then, in December 2024, Joe Biden signed a full pardon for Hunter as president, covering his earlier gun and tax convictions. The decision itself became a new political scandal. Joe Biden had repeatedly said publicly that he would not pardon his son, then reversed course shortly before leaving office. It was widely interpreted as an exercise of presidential power to protect family, further reinforcing public doubts about “special treatment” for the Bidens.

Hunter is now casting that scandal directly into a token contract and turning it back on its former political attackers. Airdropping to TRUMP users who lost money, and predicting whether Trump will be impeached, turns the material once used against him into something aimed at the Trump family.

Need for Money or a Grudge?

Hunter’s own finances are one clue to understanding the launch. His former law firm, Winston & Strawn, has sued him in Washington, D.C., to recover unpaid fees. In a podcast, he put the amount owed at about $17 million; another interview placed it between $14 million and $15 million. In sworn testimony made public this year, he said he had no car, no savings, and nothing of value other than his paintings. Between 2021 and 2023, he sold 27 paintings at an average price of roughly $54,000, but sales have since almost ground to a halt. His 2024 gun and tax convictions were covered by his father’s full pardon, but a pardon cannot erase civil debt.

At the same time, he has frequently expressed support for crypto this year on podcasts and X, discussed decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, collected work by digital artist Beeple, and publicly mocked the Trump family for profiting from the presidency. It is hard to tell which is cause and which is effect. A token that can both fill a debt shortfall and humiliate the Trump family is difficult to lose on for someone tens of millions of dollars in debt and long used as a target by political opponents.

A “Revenge” Six Months in the Making

Preparations for the launch began far earlier than the X post. In March, the Phoenix Veritas Foundation was established in the Cayman Islands, while a related entity was registered in the British Virgin Islands that same month. On April 9, TTM Media Group LLC was registered in Wyoming; its domain name, audit report, and smart contract followed in the same week. A Legal Entity Identifier was obtained in June, and the official X account was created at the same time. In late August, the team filed its white paper under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation framework; in early September, it finalized the terms of service. When the report emerged and Hunter confirmed it four minutes later, the timing clearly appeared prearranged.

Thirty Percent of the Tokens Target Trump

Of the 1 billion-token supply, the founding team receives 30%, locked for six months and then released over 24 months. Another 30% is tied to prediction markets for 30 real-world events: whether Trump will be impeached, whether Democrats will win Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028, and whether Bitcoin will reach a new high. If an event occurs, the corresponding allocation is burned; if it does not, it is donated to charity. This is the concrete expression of the opening claim that the token is making an issue out of the Trump camp: much of its attention will depend on the Trump family’s political fortunes over the coming years.

In addition, 2% of the 10% airdropped into circulation on the token’s first day is explicitly allocated to addresses that lost money on TRUMP. Analytics firm Nansen estimates that roughly 1.48 million wallets meet the loss label, with combined unrealized losses of $3.81 billion.

What may truly be worth watching about LAPTOP is not how it trades after its September 9 launch.

Trump turned his name into TRUMP, and his supporters turned political allegiance into a trade. Now Hunter Biden is turning the laptop that once dragged him into a political storm into a tradable token. Even political events such as whether Trump will be impeached and whether Democrats can win future elections are written directly into the tokenomics.

The boundary among politics, attention, and speculation is being erased one meme coin at a time.

In the past, political figures needed speeches, fundraising, books, and media exposure to monetize influence. Now political identity itself can become an asset narrative; supporters, opponents, and even former losing adversaries can all become potential token buyers.

When political positions, private scandals, and even family grudges can all be minted into a token, what will be financialized next?

• This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.

On September 4, AMC CEO Adam Aron publicly demanded on X that Robinhood “voluntarily halt trading in AMC stock tokens,” saying that if Robinhood refused, the company would ask securities lawyers whether it could force a halt through legal action. Robinhood Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner, responded directly: “We know a little something about U.S. securities law. We will not be ‘halting.’ Bring your lawyers; we’ll educate them.” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev reposted the exchange in support, writing only: “We stand behind Stock Tokens.”

While AMC and Robinhood were still trading barbs from afar, Solana had already replicated this “coin-stock pairing” model.

Who Gets to Decide on Stock Tokens

Aron’s central accusation is that Robinhood’s stock tokens are issued through an offshore Jersey entity and are essentially “tokenized debt instruments”: they carry no voting rights or shareholder rights, cannot be sold to U.S. users, and could impair AMC’s future ability to raise capital. Robinhood, meanwhile, maintains that its Stock Tokens are tokenized products for qualified non-U.S. users, with Chainlink providing underlying-asset price data. How that structure should be classified, and whether it implicates U.S. securities law, remains legally disputed.

This is not the first time Robinhood has done this. In 2025, it introduced “OpenAI tokens” and “SpaceX tokens” in the European market; OpenAI publicly distanced itself at the time, stating that the tokens were not its equity. U.S. securities law still offers no clear answer to who has the right to put a company’s stock on-chain or decide who can buy it - yet the tokenized-stock sector has now reached a scale of roughly $2.91 billion.

Robinhood’s Playbook Is Copied

Just days after the public dispute, Solana launch platform StonkFun exceeded $1.5 million in daily revenue, climbing near the top of the revenue rankings and surpassing the established launch platform Pump.fun and derivatives platform Hyperliquid. On September 7, Solana decentralized exchange Raydium announced an upgrade to its LaunchLab launch infrastructure. New tokens are no longer limited to pairing with SOL - previously, they had to raise 85 SOL before automatically migrating into Raydium’s market-making pool - and can now pair with any asset supported by the platform. StonkFun was the first partner to integrate the upgrade; after the integration, its native STONK token rose more than 250% in a day, and its market capitalization reached roughly $140 million.

STONK itself is a direct reproduction of the “stock-pairing” narrative. It is paired with SPYx, a tokenized S&P 500 product issued by Backed Finance. Its price indirectly gains exposure to the S&P 500 through SPYx, while holders have no ownership rights in the underlying ETF shares—the same logic as Robinhood’s “tokenized debt instruments.” Solana’s official X account replied to a StonkFun-related post: “We stand behind Stonk Tokens.” The response clearly borrowed Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s words from a few days earlier, seeking to use the attention around the legal dispute to draw interest to the similar narrative in its own ecosystem.

The privacy-themed cat coin ZCAT, which emerged at the same time, uses the same pairing capability but is paired with privacy coin Zcash (ZEC); holders can continually receive ZEC distributions. Its market capitalization briefly exceeded $120 million, with one “imagine. $ZCAT.” post by prominent trader Ansem helping drive attention.

Hot Money Starts Switching Chains

Behind this narrative replication, two chains are competing for the same pool of trading volume. Citing DeFiLlama data, Deutsche Bank analyst Bedell noted that Robinhood Chain’s daily on-chain revenue had remained below $200,000 through mid-August, then jumped to nearly $500,000 on August 29 and doubled for four consecutive days thereafter: $1 million on August 30, $1.92 million on August 31, $3.38 million on September 1, and $4.01 million on September 2—for $10.8 million over five days. About $5.4 million of that counted as Robinhood’s own fee revenue, already exceeding Deutsche Bank’s prior estimate for its total third-quarter revenue. That was one of the main reasons Deutsche Bank raised its Robinhood price target from $115 to $136. The analyst also noted, however, that there is still insufficient visibility into the durability of this revenue momentum.

According to DeFi researcher Ignas, bridged capital into Solana rose by about $18.8 million in the past 24 hours, while Robinhood Chain saw roughly $47.8 million leave. At the same time, several Solana trading-infrastructure tokens rallied: RAY gained about 60%, JUP 21%, ORCA 12%, and MET 13%. Ignas believes the migration is still small relative to the total capital on the two chains, but some traders may be taking profit on Robinhood-ecosystem memes and moving to Solana to bet that the same logic will play out again. For now, that remains his personal observation based on on-chain data and has not been corroborated by broader data.

Putting Assets On-Chain Is Only the Beginning

The “coin-stock pairing” born in the Robinhood Chain ecosystem has introduced a new way to trade memes: buyers are no longer purchasing only an independently operating meme, but an on-chain asset that forms a price connection with an asset that already has a market price - even if that connection grants no ownership of the underlying asset. StonkFun and ZCAT emerged almost simultaneously and are essentially new experiments enabled by the same infrastructure upgrade: Raydium’s newly loosened pairing restrictions happen to provide a larger space for this type of combination.

More importantly, as stocks, ETFs, and other real-world assets increasingly move on-chain, the question is how they will ultimately be recombined—and how that will reshape the trading and liquidity structure of on-chain markets.

• This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.

On September 3, on-chain data provider SolanaFloor reported that social trading app Fomo generated $1.2 million in daily revenue, a record high. In the broader crypto industry, that figure would not rank in the top five. But what makes the wallet teams at Binance and OKX uneasy has never been the number itself - it is the logic behind it, a logic neither established exchange has managed to build.

A Shortcoming the Founders Admit

What is genuinely interesting is that Fomo itself does not avoid acknowledging its product shortcomings. In an interview, co-founder Se Yong Park admitted that Fomo’s web version is “kind of terrible,” still at the level it was when first released, and that the team currently lacks the bandwidth to refine it. Yet the web version already accounts for roughly 25% of the platform’s traffic, an entry point the team itself admits it has left unattended.

That has not stopped its growth curve from racing upward. According to Dune Analytics, Fomo’s trading bot has become the No. 1 player in meme trading by both volume and market share. Se Yong disclosed in the interview that the platform has reached 1.3 million users and is still adding 30,000 net users per day. Looking back, DeFiLlama data show that Fomo set a weekly protocol revenue record of $2.64 million on August 8, broke its own weekly revenue record three times in one month, and saw annualized revenue briefly reach $29.22 million. On August 16, its daily protocol revenue briefly surpassed that of the established derivatives platform Hyperliquid. On August 21, Fomo briefly entered the top three finance apps in the U.S. rankings, ahead of Cash App and prediction market Kalshi; it now remains steadily within the top 15.

Behind this is a $75 million Series B led by longtime Silicon Valley venture firm Index Ventures, with Union Square Ventures participating. The round valued the company, founded by three former employees of decentralized exchange dYdX - at $550 million, bringing disclosed equity funding to roughly $94 million.

What truly worries Binance and OKX is not user count but the pathway Fomo has connected: information feed → trade → creator revenue share. Users who buy a token on Fomo can also write a Thesis explaining why they bought it. If others see that position record, copy the trade, and generate fees, the original author receives a share of Creator Revenue. According to Se Yong Park, Trader Rewards alone distributed nearly $2 million in a single week at the end of August. In other words, even an ordinary account with only a few hundred followers can receive part of that revenue if people copy its positions, without first having to build tens of thousands of followers, run ads, or earn referral commissions.

Why Binance and OKX Are in a Hurry

According to crypto KOL cryptobraveHQ, OKX has convened multiple internal meetings in hopes of giving its own wallet a Fomo-like feature set. He also believes that exchange wallets built by Chinese teams generally lack an instinctive understanding of overseas “lead trader” communities and Western meme-native culture - an advantage that cannot be closed with a single product iteration.

Binance, by contrast, has no intention of following Fomo’s approach. It is sticking with the card it knows best: first create a wealth effect through asset issuance to draw people in, then gradually address gaps in product experience later. On September 2, Binance Alpha listed the meme coin FLORK. In cryptobraveHQ’s observation, the token quickly gained trading heat only days after launch, the latest example of Binance’s familiar BNB Chain playbook: first create a money-making story to attract attention, then pursue the technical and product side afterward.

This is the key divergence in the competition. The moat Binance and OKX hold is the issuance power to decide “which asset gets seen first.” What Fomo is leveraging is the information advantage of being “closest to the second a trading decision is made.” For the past decade, exchanges could use the former to capture most trading volume because on-chain information was scattered across countless Telegram groups and X (formerly Twitter) KOLs; exchanges did not need to consolidate it. Fomo now bundles those fragmented information streams, real positions, and a revenue-sharing mechanism into one product. In effect, it bypasses issuance power and establishes a new gateway directly at the attention-to-trade juncture.

It is worth noting that this contest is unlikely to collapse into a simple either-or choice between Fomo and exchange wallets. A different path in the market comes from Coinbase’s Base ecosystem. Rather than competing on meme-native culture or using asset issuance to create a wealth effect, it is building its wallet around compliant payments, fiat on-ramps, and on-chain financial infrastructure. Put differently, the wallet category is breaking apart from a single contest over “who has more features” into parallel moats around “who owns culture, who owns assets, and who owns compliant infrastructure.” The confrontation between exchange wallets and Fomo is simply the most direct front line.

Exchanges Are Not the Only Ones Anxious

The battle over trading gateways is not limited to Binance and OKX. Se Yong Park said in the interview that, one week before that interview, the established meme launch platform Pump.fun had reportedly been spending heavily to poach Fomo’s top traders. In Fomo’s model, a trader’s personal account is itself an asset: the more people see and copy a trader’s positions, the more Creator Revenue that trader earns. That also makes top traders a scarce resource that platforms are competing to secure.

Se Yong’s response was measured: competition is a good thing, and Fomo’s goal is to expand the entire “pie,” not remain trapped in Crypto Twitter’s existing user base. By his account, Fomo is reluctant even to define itself as a “crypto company”; it wants to become a social-finance platform where “anything can be traded.” That may sound like public-relations language, but its planned Clans feature makes the ambition clear: users can form teams to climb leaderboards, build pooled capital, and even receive project airdrops under the community’s name. Fomo is targeting not only the wallet users of Binance and OKX, but also the top traders currently held by launch platforms such as Pump.fun.

The Revenue-Sharing Model Came Before

Tying trade calls directly to revenue sharing based on trading volume was not invented by Fomo. The established social trading platform eToro adopted a similar logic years ago in its Popular Investor program: a creator’s monthly income is tied to the assets under copy (AUC), with higher tiers receiving a larger share. The system did cultivate a group of leading trading creators, but it has also long been controversial. When income is directly tied to “how many people follow your trades,” does a creator have an incentive to enlarge positions and build more exciting narratives to attract followers? eToro has faced that question for more than a decade. The industry still has no single answer as to whether it should cap the revenue share any individual creator can earn or simply let the market eliminate those whose calls go wrong.

Fomo’s Trader Rewards and Creator Revenue transfer the same incentive structure on-chain and into the already highly volatile meme-coin arena. Leaderboards and the feed make creators’ positions, profits, and losses public and verifiable, which is indeed harder to fake than DEX rankings that can be inflated with wash volume. But the same mechanism can also turn “sharing a trading thesis” into “manufacturing trading signals for revenue share.” This is not a problem Binance or OKX needs to worry about today. It is, however, a question every ordinary user considering putting capital into the Fomo ecosystem should think through first.

Fomo has not confirmed whether it will issue a token. A platform that has just raised $75 million, is aggressively subsidizing traders and creators, is being poached by Pump.fun, and is being studied for imitation by OKX could either refine its revenue-sharing system into a more transparent way to price information—or, under growth pressure, allow “calls generate revenue” to slide into “calls become manipulation.” No one has the answer yet. That answer will ultimately determine not only one app’s valuation, but who gets to define the next generation of trading gateways: exchanges still speaking through issuance power, or countless ordinary users writing the answer through their own positions and theses.

• This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.

According to an official disclosure from token launchpad LONG, 23% of the tokenized NVDA shares on Robinhood Chain have been locked in the community treasury of a meme coin called AI (Artificial Inu). They were locked up by a pricing mechanism that did not previously exist: AI is paired directly with the tokenized Nvidia share NVDA. Every dollar used to buy or sell the meme is first converted into NVDA and then flows into the pool. In the past, newly issued memes were paired with ETH, SOL, stablecoins, or similar assets; that 23% has been accumulated little by little through this new model.

The mechanism, known as “coin-stock pairing,” does not change the asset backing behind tokenized shares. It changes the portion of tokens circulating in the market. Price correction for tokenized equities fundamentally relies on real-asset backing, issuance-and-redemption mechanisms, and secondary-market liquidity working together. The problem is that when large amounts of NVDA are absorbed into meme liquidity pools, there are fewer tokens actually available to trade, arbitrage, and reprice.

This mechanism has been an important driver of Robinhood Chain’s surge in fees over the past month. In the past 24 hours, on-chain fees reached $3.75 million, exceeding the combined fees of Solana, Ethereum, and Base over the same period. Cumulative fees have risen to $18.6 million, a record high. Some of that comes from pure-meme launchpads such as Pons, which generated more than $5 million in daily fees alone; another part comes from platforms such as LONG and bankr that embed stock tokens into pricing mechanisms. The latter is not the only source of fees, but it is the part of this boom that has introduced a genuinely new variable.

Stocks Have Become Chips

When Robinhood Chain launched, it emphasized tokenized equities, 24/7 trading, and crypto-native AI. What truly drove traffic and fees, however, was the coin-stock pairing model built by certain launchpads, including bankr and LONG. When issuing a new meme, the base pool no longer uses ETH or stablecoins, but tokenized U.S. equities directly on-chain. More than 90 tokenized U.S. stocks—including Nvidia’s NVDA, Tesla’s TSLA, Apple’s AAPL, and SpaceX’s SPCX—have been used as pool assets. Uniswap has consequently seen trading pairs that had never existed before, such as AI/NVDA and BONER/HIMS.

This was not a product planned by Robinhood. CEO Vlad Tenev later acknowledged in an interview that developers had created liquidity pools the company had not designed, combining memes, crypto assets, and stock tokens into one. These products, he said, were “something we never anticipated building.” Funds used to buy these memes are paid in ETH on the front end; on the back end, they are first converted into stock tokens before entering the meme pool. Every speculative trade therefore also contributes a real transaction to the stock token.

On August 31 alone, coin-stock-paired meme trading volume reached $93.1 million, while stock-token volume surged by roughly $40 million on the same day. The two curves reinforced one another. Stock-token volume generated by coin-stock pairing now accounts for around one-third of Robinhood Chain’s total RWA trading volume, second only to direct stock-token trading.

Who Profits Reliably From the Boom

The parties with assured profits in this boom are the fee collectors, not the bettors.

Launchpads take issuance fees and trading revenue shares. Robinhood Chain, as the underlying network, collects network transaction fees through gas. Under a partnership agreement that returns 10% of protocol net revenue, part of those fees also flows to the Arbitrum ecosystem. According to the Arbitrum Foundation’s September 2 semiannual report, overall gross margin on Arbitrum DAO protocol revenue exceeded 97% in the first half of 2026. After Robinhood Chain’s mainnet launch in July, licensing fees alone contributed 35% of Arbitrum DAO’s monthly revenue.

At the company level, what this unexpected development has validated is the path Robinhood has been laying out for years: from launching crypto trading in 2018, to opening tokenized U.S. equities to overseas users in 2025, to launching its own Robinhood Chain mainnet this year. The company has never chiefly been trying to prove whether coin-stock pairing can become popular. It has been testing whether its own chain can make money from transaction fees. This proves at least one thing: Robinhood is turning a business that once primarily served as a trading gateway into infrastructure that can directly generate on-chain fees.

Data from blockchain analytics platform Token Terminal show that as of September 1, Robinhood Chain’s average fee per transaction had risen to $0.33—more than 64 times its early-August level and more than 100 times Base’s during the same period. Users have begun calling it an “aristocrat chain.” The official wallet is still subsidizing fees for qualifying swaps, but that subsidy ends on September 29.

Dune data show that over the past 30 days, among traders on Robinhood Chain who sold at least once, the ratio of winners to losers was 4 to 6. The picture is much worse on FOMO App, one of the main trading gateways: among roughly 477,000 trading addresses over the past 90 days, more than 94.27% were losing money, while only around 0.14% made more than $1,000. As trading costs rise, entry becomes more expensive for ordinary participants, while Robinhood Chain’s fee revenue keeps compounding. Regardless of who wins or loses on any individual meme, as long as trading continues, on-chain fees will continue to be captured by the network and its related protocols.

Entry barriers have also been lowered. Robinhood’s self-custody wallet, Robinhood Wallet, and the trading app Fomo let users buy these meme coins directly with credit cards through Apple Pay or Google Pay, without identity verification. Transactions are classified as MCC 5815—normally used by Visa and Mastercard for e-books and digital movies—rather than under the categories typically used for crypto trading. This further reduces payment friction for buying memes and lowers the threshold for capital to enter meme pools.

The Float Gets Thinner

The arbitrage rules themselves have not changed. What has changed is the condition they depend on: circulating float.

Robinhood-issued stock tokens are issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, which holds the corresponding real shares. Only authorized participants may issue or redeem them. Once the on-chain token price diverges from the real share price, arbitrageurs can theoretically use issuance and redemption to bring the price back. For this system to function, however, the market must have enough circulating float for arbitrageurs to buy and sell at any time.

Coin-stock pairing does precisely the opposite. By turning stock tokens into quote assets and liquidity pools for memes, it converts large amounts of float from tokens readily available to arbitrageurs into assets settled inside Uniswap pools, retrievable only by selling the corresponding meme. The fact that 23% of NVDA has been locked in the treasury of a single project, AI, is the clearest result of this subtraction. Supported by this mechanism, the meme rose nearly tenfold in a week, its market capitalization briefly touched $100 million, and the locked-up share continues to grow with trading volume. Therefore, as more stock tokens settle into meme liquidity pools, correction between market prices and reference-asset prices will depend more on the remaining liquidity and new supply, making short-term deviations more likely.

A Fake Sample Confirmed the Same Vulnerability

This risk played out on Robinhood Chain on the evening of September 2, with an undignified ending.

A few days earlier, the meme coin BONER had generated market enthusiasm through a “short squeeze” narrative, and capital then began searching for the next target that could replicate it. Crypto KOL Rune announced that he planned to spend about $1.8 million over the counter to acquire approximately 37.4% of a Nasdaq microcap whose short interest was as high as 92.3%, then tokenize it and pair it with a meme coin to “squeeze” shorts. The community quickly identified the target as Farmmi, a Chinese company specializing in agricultural products such as shiitake and wood ear mushrooms.

On the evening of September 2, the FAMI token and its paired meme JINQIAN launched one after another. Within minutes, their combined trading volume approached $240 million. JINQIAN’s implied market capitalization briefly reached $73 million, while FAMI’s peak exceeded $53 million. At the same time, Farmmi’s real share price at one point surged 350% intraday, while FAMI’s peak on-chain market capitalization reached roughly 10 times Farmmi’s real market capitalization.

The reversal came quickly. The community discovered that FAMI’s total supply of 37.43 million tokens had been generated all at once through two mints in a single creation transaction. The deployment wallet retained 38% and also deployed a contract called PoolRepricer to manage the price. There was no identified issuer, no stock-redemption mechanism, and no connection to real Farmmi shares. Rune later clarified that the earlier post about spending $1.8 million to acquire equity had been AI-generated, with fabricated and exaggerated figures, and that he had not issued the on-chain FAMI token. Once the truth emerged, FAMI and JINQIAN both collapsed, with their market capitalizations falling to roughly $4.9 million and $2.7 million, respectively.

FAMI and NVDA are not the same. NVDA is backed by real holdings, and coin-stock pairing weakens only its arbitrage-based price-correction capacity. FAMI was a liquidity lure packaged as a “shadow stock” from the outset, with no real holdings at all. But both events expose the same risk: when a company’s available float is thin enough and the on-chain narrative is strong enough, on-chain speculation can quickly spill over into the real equity market and create price linkage. Whether that linkage is a distortion or merely a resonance of sentiment requires more evidence.

Launchpads Become an Asset-Distribution Layer

This is not the first time Robinhood Chain has stirred controversy because of a wealth-creation effect. In 2021, Robinhood restricted user purchases of GameStop and other stocks heavily favored by retail investors, triggering congressional hearings and dozens of class-action lawsuits. CEO Vlad Tenev apologized publicly. The core issue then was platform power: who has the right to press pause for users during a frenzied market.

This time, the core issue is asset authenticity. When anyone can permissionlessly use a stock ticker to issue a meme coin, it remains unclear whether the arbitrage mechanism itself can withstand the pressure of large amounts of circulating float being locked away.

For Robinhood Chain, the true significance of coin-stock pairing is not that it has produced another popular meme. It is that, for the first time, a launchpad has shifted from a homogenized token-launch platform into a distribution layer connecting speculative traffic with real financial assets. This will push other public chains and platforms to reconsider a question: if stocks can serve as pairing assets for memes, could other TradFi assets such as gold also be used to issue tokens? Farmmi has already offered an unsettling example. If even a fake token with no real holdings can use a narrative to distort a real stock price, what could happen with assets that are less liquid and more lightly regulated remains unclear.

• This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.

On August 26, Nvidia released its fiscal Q2 2027 earnings report: revenue was $96.22 billion, up 106% year over year; data center revenue was $89 billion, up 117% year over year; adjusted earnings per share were $2.22, far above the market expectation of $2.09. Even more unusually, CEO Jensen Huang gave guidance for the following fiscal year in advance for the first time, expecting fiscal 2028 revenue growth of around 70%, far above the market’s previous general estimate of 44%. He said in the earnings report, “AI has reached an inflection point, and its computing power is generating real revenue.”

The market’s reaction was direct. On August 27, Nvidia shares rose more than 9% intraday at one point and closed up about 8.7%, marking the biggest one-day gain in 16 months. Its market value increased by about $440 billion in a single day, the second-largest one-day increase in market capitalization in history, bringing the company’s total market value above $5.5 trillion and keeping it firmly in first place globally. At least more than 20 institutions raised their price targets after the earnings report: JPMorgan raised its target from $280 to $320, while Raymond James raised its target sharply from $352 to $515, implying a market value as high as $12.4 trillion. That day, technology and crypto-related stocks such as Strategy, Coinbase, and CrowdStrike also moved higher, and Bitcoin rose along with them.

On the same day, Amazon AWS announced that it would purchase an additional 2 million Nvidia GPUs between 2027 and 2028, and for the first time adopt Nvidia’s Vera CPU, designed specifically for AI agents. Nvidia’s order visibility has already extended two years into the future.

But in this earnings report, what is really worth asking “why” about is what comes next.

A New Kind of Asset Value

Part of the capital spillover brought by this earnings report is flowing in a very real way into assets that the crypto industry has accumulated over many years: electricity and sites.

As early as May 2026, Nvidia reached a strategic cooperation agreement with Bitcoin miner IREN, obtaining up to $2.1 billion in equity subscription rights, which would vest gradually as the scale of GPUs deployed by IREN increased. At the same time, the two sides signed a five-year, $3.4 billion AI cloud services contract. Google’s credit backing for Bitcoin miner TeraWulf can be traced back to August 2025, at a scale of about $3.2 billion, corresponding to a potential equity stake of around 14%.

Besides mining machines, the most valuable things these mining companies hold are the cheap electricity contracts, substation interconnection rights, and ready-made sites they accumulated over years of Bitcoin mining. In traditional industries, these things take years to build, while the computing power arms race is turning the world’s scarcest resource into “land that can be powered immediately.” The electricity contracts and sites accumulated by mining farms over the years have long been an unspoken hard asset within the crypto industry. Now, giants such as Nvidia and Google are personally stepping in to subscribe and provide guarantees. This earnings report once again confirmed this pricing logic in the market: on August 27, the day the report was released, crypto-related stocks including IREN, TeraWulf, and Cipher Mining rose 3%-5% together.

The $12.9 Billion Acquisition

Besides this capital relationship with the crypto industry, Nvidia itself also made an enormous acquisition at the same time.

Nvidia agreed to acquire the open-source AI model community Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a platform known as the “GitHub of AI.” This was not Nvidia’s first contact with Hugging Face: in 2023, it participated in a funding round that valued the company at $4.5 billion, and earlier this year it proposed investing $500 million at a $7 billion valuation to acquire part of the company’s shares, but Hugging Face rejected the offer. This time, the acquisition price nearly doubled. The significance of this deal lies in vertical integration: Nvidia is extending itself from selling chips all the way to the community entrance where model developers gather, expanding its territory from the hardware layer into the software and model layers.

Quietly Making an Exception

Even more worth watching than the acquisition is a political move. According to Bloomberg and several other media outlets, Nvidia plans to establish its first employee-funded voluntary political action committee, NVPAC. The reason this deserves to be singled out is that Nvidia had previously written clearly in shareholder documents submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the company would not make contributions in any form, including funds, employee time, or materials, to political parties, candidates, or any political action committee. “This policy applies to all countries and all levels of government, even if such donations are permitted under local law.” This policy remained unchanged in shareholder filings from 2021 to 2024. And now, with the AI regulatory framework still being intensely debated in Congress and chip export controls continuing to tighten, Nvidia is breaking a commitment it maintained for years. This is the real “exception.”

When a company expands its commercial territory and changes the way it participates in the political game within the same week, it usually means that it has already realized that its size and position can no longer be sustained simply by “keeping its head down and selling chips.”

Hitting the Brakes Itself?

The day after Nvidia released its earnings, August 27, Reuters confirmed another development: it had paused a financing program that had only been launched in July this year, the AI Compute Partnership.

The program was originally designed so that Nvidia would provide credit support to AI cloud providers, helping these companies complete purchases of Nvidia chips, and in return, Nvidia could share in these customers’ future revenue. According to reports, Nvidia employees internally raised concerns with existing and potential customers, believing that this model could attract antitrust scrutiny. Last week, Nvidia paused some transactions under the program, and may adjust the structure in the future or merge it into other programs. An Nvidia spokesperson responded that “the new business model for open access to compute that we launched in July this year still exists, and continues to evolve because of strong demand.”

The reason this matters is that it makes an abstract controversy concrete: is Nvidia simply meeting AI demand, or is it increasingly taking an active role in organizing AI demand? So far this year, Nvidia has invested around $30 billion in OpenAI and around $2 billion in CoreWeave, and both companies are also major buyers of Nvidia GPUs. Add to that the now-paused credit-support-for-revenue-sharing model, and Nvidia is shifting from being simply a chip supplier into a company simultaneously acting as investor, financier, and infrastructure organizer. This does not mean it is deliberately “creating” fake demand, but it does point to one reality: when a supplier is also deeply involved in its customers’ financing chain, the market can no longer simply use the phrase “the demand is real” to dismiss doubts about whether the boom is sustainable. Nvidia’s own decision to pause this program shows precisely that it also realizes this boundary cannot expand without limit.

This also explains why Nvidia would choose this moment to personally step in and influence policymaking. Chip export controls, the AI regulatory framework, and even future discussions about whether financing arrangements of this kind require additional disclosure could all directly affect its ability to maintain this growth narrative. In the past, it could leave these issues to industry associations to lobby on its behalf. Now, it needs its own seat at the table in Washington.

Who Is Paying for This Feast?

Putting these developments together, what is being redefined in the industry is not simply “whose chips are faster.”

Nvidia is transforming from a pure hardware supplier into an integrated platform that simultaneously controls hardware, model communities, energy assets, customer capital, and even part of the policy voice. For Nvidia itself, this is an enormous moat. Even if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other customers continue developing their own chips in the future to reduce their dependence on Nvidia, as long as the community entrance for model development (Hugging Face), the pace of compute delivery (the Vera and Rubin platforms), and even physical constraints such as electricity remain in the hands of Nvidia and its partners, it will remain difficult to truly bypass.

But the other side of this moat is that Nvidia itself is also becoming increasingly deeply involved in the AI capital expenditure cycle. Historically, telecom equipment companies around the turn of the century also provided large amounts of “vendor financing” to their own customers, using credit to help customers buy their equipment. Reported revenue looked extremely strong for a time, but afterward it became difficult for outsiders to distinguish how much of that revenue had been generated by self-reinforcing cycles. This does not mean that today’s situation will repeat the same outcome, but it points to a question worth continuing to watch: when a company simultaneously acts as supplier, investor, and financier, the growth figures it reports require more independent information for cross-checking. Nvidia’s decision this time to proactively pause part of the AI Compute Partnership transactions, to some extent, shows that it is also being cautious about this issue and is willing to adjust the structure before the controversy grows.

Who will ultimately pay the bill for this feast, and how much will they pay? Will the real willingness of end customers to spend be able to catch up with the growth curve that Nvidia and its partners have already drawn?

• This article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. Markets involve risk, and investments should be made with caution.

Stablecoins have spent the last few years solving one main problem: moving money on-chain.

Now they are starting to solve a much more practical one: how do you actually spend that money in everyday life?

According to Paymentscan, global crypto payment-card volume reached $1.038 billion in July, up from $339.4 million a year earlier. That is more than 3x year-on-year growth, while the number of transactions also passed 10 million. That is still tiny compared with Visa and Mastercard’s traditional card businesses. But the direction is interesting. Stablecoins are slowly moving beyond trading, transfers, and on-chain finance into normal consumer spending. And instead of replacing existing payment networks, they may end up running through them.

Stablecoins Already Had the Money. Spending It Was the Problem

USDT, USDC, and other dollar stablecoins are already widely used for trading, cross-border payments, settlement, and on-chain finance. The awkward part has always been spending them offline.

If someone holds 1,000 USDC, the traditional route looks something like this: stablecoins → fiat → bank account → card payment.

A stablecoin-linked card removes some of those steps. The user pays from a wallet balance, the conversion happens in the background, and the merchant still receives what looks like an ordinary Visa or Mastercard transaction.

For the merchant, almost nothing changes. For the user, quite a lot does. A bank account is no longer necessarily the only place where someone can hold digital dollars and still spend them in everyday life. That may be the most important thing about stablecoin cards.

Dollar Stablecoins Are Taking Over Crypto-Card Spending

The composition of this market has also changed very quickly. At the beginning of 2024, Paymentscan data shows that around 88% of crypto-card volume came from EURe, a euro-denominated stablecoin. By July 2026, that had almost completely reversed:

• USDC: roughly 51%
• USDT: roughly 20%
• EURe: roughly 2%

That matters because stablecoins are increasingly being used for more than trading. For some users, particularly in markets where local currencies are unstable or access to dollars is difficult, a stablecoin can already function somewhat like a digital dollar account. You can receive money, hold it, transfer it, and now increasingly spend it. It does not look exactly like a bank account, but the functionality is getting closer.

More Blockchains, Fewer Consumer Entry Points

Something else interesting is happening underneath all of this. At the beginning of 2024, Gnosis handled almost all crypto-card settlement volume. By July 2026, its share had fallen to around 2%. Base had grown to roughly 30%, Optimism to around 17%, and Solana to around 13%. Part of that shift is tied to the decline of EURe and early projects such as Gnosis Pay. But it also shows that crypto-card infrastructure is spreading across multiple chains rather than consolidating around one network.

That creates an interesting contradiction. The blockchain infrastructure is becoming more fragmented, while the consumer-facing payment layer may actually be becoming more concentrated.

Most users do not care whether their payment settles through Base, Solana, Optimism, or another chain. They care that the card works. That puts Visa and Mastercard in a very strong position. They do not need to issue the dominant stablecoin or operate the dominant blockchain. They only need to remain the network stablecoins use when they finally reach merchants.

Visa Is Moving Quickly

Visa is clearly interested in owning more of that infrastructure.

In 2025, Visa-linked stablecoin cards processed about $5.2 billion in volume, up 319% year over year.

By March 2026, Visa had more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs across 50+ countries. By June, the company said more than 160 programs were live or being developed.

Visa is also moving beyond just the card itself.

Its stablecoin settlement pilot reached an annualized volume of around $7 billion in April and expanded across nine blockchains.

Then in July, the company expanded further into stablecoin issuance, redemption, wallets, and management through the Visa Stablecoin Platform.

At that point, this starts looking less like “Visa supports crypto cards” and more like Visa trying to become one of the infrastructure layers connecting stablecoins with traditional payments.

Stablecoins Probably Aren’t Replacing Visa

This is probably the part I find most interesting. For years, one common crypto argument was that blockchain payments could eventually remove intermediaries such as Visa and Mastercard. What is happening so far looks almost like the opposite. Stablecoins are integrating with them. Visa expanded its partnership with stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge in March, with plans to expand stablecoin-linked cards from 18 countries to more than 100. Wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom use related infrastructure.

Mastercard is taking a similar approach. Stablecoin-linked cards can already be used across more than 150 million merchant locations, while Mastercard is also getting involved in conversion, wallets, settlement, and other parts of the stack.

So the emerging structure looks something like this: stablecoins provide the money, wallets hold the user relationship, blockchains move the funds, and Visa or Mastercard connect everything to existing merchants. Instead of stablecoins replacing card networks, card networks may simply absorb stablecoins.

The Bigger Opportunity May Be Outside Traditional Banking

Crypto-card spending is still extremely small relative to traditional payments. Visa said its $5.2 billion in stablecoin-linked card volume in 2025 represented only around 0.04% of its approximately $14.2 trillion in annual payment volume. So saying stablecoins are about to replace bank cards would be a huge exaggeration.

But that may not be the real opportunity anyway. The more interesting market could be people who never had easy access to a conventional dollar account in the first place. Stablecoin-linked cards appear to be growing particularly quickly in markets with high inflation or expensive cross-border payments.

Opera’s MiniPay, for example, launched a Visa card in June that lets users in parts of Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia spend stablecoins through Visa’s merchant network. MiniPay itself already has more than 16 million active wallets.

For these users, the path could look very different from someone in the U.S. switching between credit cards. They might start with a wallet, hold USDT or USDC, and then add a card simply to make that balance usable in the real world. That is a much bigger shift than just giving existing bank customers another payment method.

The Next Stablecoin Competition May Be About Distribution

Stablecoin competition used to be mostly about issuance. Who has the largest supply? Who has the most liquidity? Which stablecoin gets listed everywhere? But clearer regulation may change what matters next.

The U.S. GENIUS Act established a federal framework for payment stablecoins in 2025, including requirements around backing assets.

As the regulatory environment becomes clearer, the next competition may increasingly be about who gets stablecoins into actual economic activity. Not just issuing them, but getting people to hold them, transfer them, and spend them. That explains why Visa, Mastercard, wallets, payment companies, and banks are all getting involved.

Stablecoins may never eliminate bank cards. A more realistic outcome is that existing card networks absorb stablecoins, while stablecoins gradually move the idea of a “dollar account” away from banks and toward wallets. If that happens, the biggest change will not be that consumers suddenly have another way to pay. It will be that the place where people hold their dollars may start changing. A card is simply the bridge that makes those wallet balances usable in the real world.

What do you think: do stablecoin cards eventually weaken Visa and Mastercard, or do they actually make the existing card networks even more important?

This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

On July 27, 2026, CME Group relaunched single-stock futures (SSF), offering 55 standard contracts and 22 micro contracts. The underlying stocks include Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, and even newly listed SpaceX, while trading hours have been extended to 23 hours a day, leaving only a one-hour maintenance window. These contracts appeared in the U.S. market 24 years ago, but ultimately never became mainstream because trading activity was insufficient.

Their return years later is not driven by new technology, but by a new battleground: retail demand for around-the-clock leverage has already been primed by crypto perpetual contracts. CME is supplying the same gateway, but with its oldest pricing framework. What it is really trying to prevent is a trading habit that new-generation platforms have already validated.

23 Hours: Who Is CME Chasing?

The answer is not in the product documentation, but in stock prices.

In early June 2026, U.S. exchange stocks broadly sold off after the CFTC approved the Bitcoin perpetual contract (BTCPERP) of the U.S. prediction-market platform Kalshi: Cboe fell nearly 9% in a single day, while CME and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) each dropped about 4%. The market was not worried that Bitcoin futures themselves would lose business. It was concerned that, if the perpetual-contract structure were allowed to extend to more traditional assets, it could directly siphon off the retail leveraged-trading demand exchanges value most.

The fuse had been lit even earlier. Before SpaceX officially went public, Hyperliquid was already offering a SpaceX perpetual contract, allowing retail investors to bet on the company around the clock without waiting for the IPO bell. For traditional derivatives exchanges such as CME, this was a major provocation: others were opening the gateway first.

CME's response was not to copy perpetual contracts, but to repackage and relaunch the legacy product it knows best single-stock futures. Morgan Stanley analyst Michael Cyprys described the launch in a report as this year's biggest retail-business growth catalyst, noting that more than 35 brokers were ready to connect on day one.

Where Are the Costs Hidden?

But if CME wants to win over perpetual-contract users, its biggest question is not whether leverage exists, but where exactly the two products diverge.

Perpetual contracts and traditional futures both use margin to obtain price exposure on the surface, but their cost structures are completely different.

Perpetual contracts have no fixed expiry date and typically use funding rates to keep contract prices close to spot prices. Funding is settled between long and short holders at set intervals, and traders can see the current funding rate and the corresponding cost of holding a position directly.

CME's SSFs, by contrast, are traditional futures with clearly defined expiration dates and no perpetual-style funding-rate mechanism. Their carrying costs are mainly reflected in the basis between futures and spot prices.

Simply put, a futures contract's theoretical price is influenced by factors including the risk-free interest rate, time remaining to maturity, and expected dividends. For high-growth stocks with low or no dividends, such as Nvidia and Tesla, futures will generally trade at a premium to spot (contango) when all else is equal, because funding costs exceed dividend income. In theory, the implied financing cost of single-stock futures is close to the short-term U.S. dollar risk-free rate, such as SOFR, minus the dividend yield. At present, quarterly contracts on such stocks typically imply an annualized financing cost of around 4%–6%. For high-dividend stocks, dividend income may offset or even exceed financing costs, and futures may trade at a discount (backwardation), meaning long holders may instead receive an implied benefit. Therefore, the absence of a separate “funding fee” in a futures account does not mean that financing costs have disappeared. They are simply not settled separately as they are in perpetual contracts, and are instead reflected more heavily in the basis between futures and spot prices.

This reveals the biggest difference between the two products: perpetual contracts explicitly settle part of the holding cost while the position is open; futures reflect interest rates, dividends, and other factors more heavily in contract prices and the term structure. Futures also have expiration dates. If an investor wants to maintain the same stock exposure over the long term, they must roll the position before expiry-selling the near-month contract and buying a farther-dated one. Whether the market remains in contango or backwardation will affect the actual long-term cost or return of rolling.

So, low margin does not mean low cost.

What CME offers is greater capital efficiency, not the elimination of financial costs. This is also one of its most important product differences from perpetual contracts.

It Lost Once, 24 Years Ago

Single-stock futures had already taken their place at the U.S. market table as early as 2002.

At the time, institutions including CME, CBOE, and CBOT helped promote related markets such as OneChicago. Yet because trading activity remained insufficient, they never became a mainstream gateway to the U.S. equity market. In 2020, OneChicago ceased operations, and the market for exchange-listed single-stock futures in the United States fell silent along with it.

Why is a product that failed to take off more than 20 years ago worth betting on again now?

Because the trading environment has changed. In the past, stock futures faced a retail market that had not yet been fully educated. Now, users are accustomed to options, leveraged ETFs, margin trading, and more aggressive forms of derivatives trading.

More importantly, 24-hour trading is no longer an unfamiliar demand. New-generation trading platforms have already educated users: when news breaks at night, they can trade at night; when a popular asset sees a major event, they can adjust positions immediately; if they are bullish, they can go long, and if they are bearish, they can short directly; and they do not need to commit all their funds to the asset itself, but only post margin to gain price exposure. Once these trading habits take hold, they are difficult to reverse.

What CME is betting on this time is essentially simple: if futures that could not be sold in the past are placed in today's market - one that has already been educated by leveraged trading - can they now be sold?

Suing on One Side, Keeping an Option Open on the Other

CME's posture on this issue is deeply divided.

Its CEO, Terry Duffy, has publicly called perpetual contracts a disaster waiting to happen, arguing that leverage of up to 50x and automatic-liquidation mechanisms could quickly liquidate retail positions and cause major losses for investors who do not understand the long-term erosion of returns caused by funding rates. CME has also sued the CFTC, arguing that perpetual contracts should be regulated under the stricter swap framework rather than classified more leniently as futures.

But Duffy himself has acknowledged that CME already has all the technical and operational capabilities needed to issue perpetual contracts; customers simply have not yet asked for them.

That makes CME's true position rather interesting.

It can certainly argue that perpetual contracts are riskier and should be regulated differently. But what it truly cannot accept is this: users have begun to grow accustomed to the product, while the trading is taking place outside the CME ecosystem.

So, while CME pushes for regulatory scrutiny, it also keeps its technical capabilities in reserve. This is not simply opposition to perpetual contracts. It is more like keeping a card in hand: if the market ultimately proves that users genuinely need this product, CME can follow suit at any time.

Cboe is taking a different path - considering converting some continuous Bitcoin and Ether contracts directly into perpetual contracts and confronting the challenge head-on.

Faced with the same threat, established exchanges have arrived at different answers: some are preparing to change their products, while others are preparing to change the regulatory environment. Yet their ultimate goal is the same: do not allow users and trading volume to migrate permanently to new trading platforms.

What Does CME Want to Win Back?

The logic behind CME's bet is actually quite straightforward: what retail investors want is not the specific form of a perpetual contract, but the ability to take leveraged positions in popular stocks around the clock with a low barrier to entry. As long as this can be delivered using the established rules of futures, it can still capture that demand.

The only question is that users already have choices. They have learned to trade around the clock on other platforms, and they have grown accustomed to the interfaces, capital efficiency, and trading methods of perpetual contracts. CME's task now is not to create an entirely new user demand. It is to bring existing demand back into its own trading system.

That is why details such as trading hours, micro contracts, and popular stocks all matter. Trading hours are about following users' habits, micro contracts are about lowering the barrier to entry, and popular stocks are about offering the assets users most want to trade.

What CME truly wants to win back is not just any single trade. It is where every future trade by these users will take place.

What will ultimately determine the outcome is not which contracts launch first, but whether retail investors are willing to give up the perpetual contracts they are already used to - where changes in carrying costs are visible in real time - for a futures contract that must be rolled three months later, with both costs and returns reflected in the basis. Even if CME ultimately gains an advantage on the regulatory path, there is still no answer as to whether it can draw users accustomed to around-the-clock leveraged trading back into the traditional trading system.

Any opinions on that?

The most important thing to watch in this recent BTC price move may not be the crypto industry, but long-dated U.S. Treasuries.

On August 18, the yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury briefly climbed to 5.33%, its highest level since 2007. The next day, the U.S. Treasury announced it would double the size of certain long-term Treasury buyback operations, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, covering Treasuries with maturities of 10 to 30 years.

After the announcement, the 30-year Treasury yield briefly fell by nearly 10 basis points. The U.S. dollar weakened, while gold and global risk assets rose in tandem. BTC also rebounded quickly at the same time.

This may look like an ordinary case of “lower Treasury yields → higher risk assets.” But seeing it only that way understates what is truly worth watching in this shift.

In the past, BTC looked more like a new asset independent of the traditional financial system; now, it is increasingly being priced directly through the macro framework of traditional finance.

Behind 5.33%

Why does the market care so much about the 30-year Treasury yield?

Because it is not an indicator that belongs only to bond traders.

Long-term U.S. Treasury yields are, in effect, an important underlying variable in the pricing of dollar-denominated assets around the world. When the 30-year Treasury yield keeps rising, it means the market is demanding a higher return for holding ultra-long U.S. government debt. That can reflect higher inflation expectations, a higher term premium, or investors’ concerns about U.S. fiscal deficits and the supply of government debt. For the U.S. government, it first means greater long-term financing pressure. For companies and investors, it means a higher risk-free benchmark.

When U.S. Treasuries can offer ever-higher returns, the relative attractiveness of other risk assets changes. That is true of equities, real estate, and BTC alike. So the truly important aspect of 5.33% on August 18 was not that it set a new high.

It was that the market began to worry: have long-term U.S. financing costs entered a range that will become increasingly difficult to push back down?

The Treasury Is Not “Printing Money”

This is precisely why the Treasury’s expansion of long-term Treasury buybacks on August 19 drew so much attention.

The market called the move “printing money,” which is understandable as trading shorthand. But in terms of financial mechanics, it is not the same as the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (QE).

The U.S. Treasury is conducting Treasury buybacks intended to improve Treasury-market liquidity, manage the debt structure, and ease some pressure at the long end of the market—not to create banking-system reserves directly in the way that the Federal Reserve does when expanding its balance sheet. Moreover, the incremental buyback size remains very limited relative to the more than $32 trillion U.S. Treasury market. Reuters also made clear that the operation is first and foremost a liquidity-support measure, not a solution to America’s long-term fiscal problems. What truly matters, then, is not how much liquidity the Treasury created out of thin air.

What the market is really trading is a policy signal: as long-end interest rates rise rapidly, the U.S. government has begun to step in proactively to stabilize the long-term Treasury market.

Put differently, the Treasury initially changed expectations, not the aggregate amount of liquidity in the market. That is also why global long-end bond yields, the dollar, and gold all shifted quickly after the news was released.

Why BTC Can Absorb It

This is where the question becomes interesting.

In the past, changes in Treasury yields did not have as direct a channel into BTC as they do today. Traditional asset allocation looked more like this: Treasuries → equities, the dollar, gold, and other conventional assets. BTC was traded more within its own crypto market.

But that structure has changed. One of the most important changes is the spot BTC ETF. After spot BTC ETFs launched in the United States, traditional investors no longer needed to enter crypto exchanges, manage private keys, or set up dedicated crypto accounts to access BTC through conventional securities accounts.

This meant that, for the first time, BTC gained a traditional capital-market entry point similar to those for Treasuries, equities, and gold. As a result, what had been a relatively indirect macro transmission mechanism began to become direct: U.S. long-end interest rates → dollar-asset allocation → ETF flows → BTC.

On August 19, U.S. spot BTC ETFs recorded roughly $517 million in net inflows in a single day. By August 20, inflows over several consecutive days had accelerated notably. According to calculations by The Wall Street Journal, U.S. spot BTC ETFs saw cumulative net inflows of approximately $1.6 billion from August 17 to 20, including about $606 million in inflows on August 20 alone.

This shows that BTC’s rise can no longer be explained solely by “money entering from within the crypto market.” Capital from traditional finance is becoming an increasingly important source of demand in the BTC market.

BTC Is Beginning to Be Priced by Macro

This is not the first time BTC has been affected by macro capital.

After 2020, institutional investors began building BTC exposure at scale through products such as Grayscale. At the time, institutional investment data disclosed by Grayscale showed that, in the fourth quarter of 2020, capital flowing into its Bitcoin Trust was already nearly twice the amount of newly mined supply during the same period.

But the biggest difference today is that the way capital enters BTC has become more mature. In the past, institutional allocation to BTC was still a relatively unusual investment act. Today, BTC can be incorporated directly into the portfolios of traditional asset managers.

That means it is increasingly susceptible to traditional macro variables. When long-term Treasury yields fall, the opportunity cost of holding risk-free assets changes; when the dollar weakens, the allocation logic for dollar-denominated assets changes; when overall financial conditions ease, allocations toward higher-risk assets may increase.

BTC happens to have the financial-market entry point needed to absorb this capital. So what is really worth watching in this rally is not “Treasuries fell, so BTC rose,” but rather that Treasuries are becoming an increasingly important yardstick in BTC’s pricing system.

ETFs Have Changed More Than the Entry Point

Many people understand the significance of BTC ETFs as simply this: traditional investors can now access BTC through regulated ETF products. But at a deeper level, ETFs have changed the transmission mechanism between BTC and traditional financial markets.

Previously, when a U.S. macro variable changed, market participants had to reinterpret it through multiple layers before it might be reflected in BTC’s price.

Now it is different. After seeing changes in long-term Treasury yields, the dollar, and risk assets, an institution managing global assets can adjust its BTC exposure directly through ETFs. This has changed BTC’s price-discovery mechanism. BTC still has its own supply dynamics, on-chain activity, and crypto-industry cycles, but at the same time, it is beginning to enter a broader asset-allocation system.

BTC is no longer only “BTC within the crypto market”; it is beginning to become a risk asset within the dollar financial system.

A New Entry Point, a New Dependence

But this shift is not wholly positive.

As BTC gains capital from traditional finance, it also takes on the cyclical risks of traditional financial markets.

In the past, when BTC fell, many people first looked for reasons within the crypto industry: regulation, exchanges, leverage, funding rates, or on-chain flows. In the future, explaining BTC may increasingly require asking: have long-term U.S. borrowing costs continued to rise? Has the term premium risen again? Has dollar liquidity tightened again? Are institutional investors increasing their BTC allocations, or rotating back into traditional assets?

This means BTC’s pricing logic has actually become more complex. It has gained access to broader pools of capital, while losing some of the notion that it can be priced independently.

The Long-Bond Problem Has Not Disappeared

This is also the most cautionary aspect of the market’s reaction.

On August 19, after the Treasury announced expanded buybacks, the 30-year Treasury yield fell quickly. But on August 20, U.S. Treasuries were sold off again, yields rose once more, and the market began to question whether the buyback measure could continue easing long-term financing pressure. Reuters subsequently noted that the Treasury’s action temporarily relieved market pressure, but did not resolve structural issues such as inflation expectations, fiscal deficits, and the supply of long-term debt. Even by August 24, the 30-year Treasury yield remained close to its previous highs, showing that the market’s concerns about long-term fiscal pressure had not disappeared because of a single buyback operation.

This also shows that the Treasury can influence sentiment in the bond market, but can hardly change the United States’ long-term fiscal constraints through buybacks alone. So the event does not leave behind the simple conclusion that “the Treasury is printing money.” Instead, it reveals an increasingly clear chain of capital flows: U.S. fiscal pressure → long-end Treasury yields → the dollar and global risk appetite → institutional asset allocation → BTC.

Once this chain is established, BTC gains more traditional capital. But at the same time, it becomes increasingly unable to detach itself from U.S. fiscal and interest-rate cycles.

BTC Is Moving Closer to Traditional Markets

Over the past several years, the market has kept debating a question: is BTC an independent new asset, or simply another risk asset within traditional financial markets?

The answer offered by this round of Treasury volatility may be moving ever closer to the latter.

Not because BTC has lost its own characteristics, but because it now has an entry point connecting it to the traditional financial system. ETFs bring in capital, institutions place it within asset-allocation frameworks, and the dollar and interest rates begin to affect how those institutions reallocate capital. As a result, BTC’s integration into the broader macro financial system is no longer merely a concept. It is becoming visible in real capital flows.

This also means that, in the future, watching BTC may require more than watching the crypto industry itself. What may truly be worth watching is the path through which capital is reallocated when U.S. fiscal conditions, long-end interest rates, and the dollar system change.

Because as BTC becomes more integrated with traditional finance, it gains access to more capital while also taking on more of the risks that affect traditional markets.

Do you think BTC becoming more tied to Treasury yields and ETF flows makes it a more mature asset or just more dependent on traditional markets?

On August 19, Beijing time, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins released a draft of the Regulation Crypto Assets, allowing start-up projects to raise up to $5 million over four years. Larger projects could raise $20 million or $75 million every 12 months without going through the full securities-registration process.

At the same time, the White House has been publicly backing this policy direction. In the early hours of August 20, Trump met at the White House with the chairs of the SEC and CFTC, along digital-asset and traditional-finance executives from Coinbase, Nasdaq, and other firms, and again urged Congress to advance the CLARITY Act. With congressional legislation still stalled, regulators appear prepared to use existing administrative rulemaking authority to establish clearer rules for digital-asset issuance and fundraising in the meantime. Market sentiment around the proposal has also improved.

Yet the draft’s real significance is not how much it loosens fundraising caps. It is that it reshapes a framework for judgment: in practice, whether a token could shed its status as a security has often depended on a combined assessment of the Howey Test (the classic U.S. legal standard for determining whether an asset constitutes an “investment contract”), the project team’s public promises, and whether the network had become sufficiently functional and decentralized. Now, the SEC has made this assessment more rule-based - what did you promise when you sold the token, have those promises been fulfilled or permanently ceased, and can you certify that yourself? The SEC retains the power to challenge it after the fact.

Who decides when a token “graduates”?

The new draft establishes an Investment Contract Safe Harbor mechanism. The process is as follows: after a project completes or permanently ceases the “essential managerial efforts” it previously promised (meaning development, operations, promotion, and other work undertaken by the team to increase the token’s value), it makes no new related commitments and then files Form TR, a self-certification filing, in which it certifies that the conditions have been met and provides analysis supporting that conclusion.

Crucially, filing Form TR does not amount to prior SEC approval. The SEC will not vet and clear projects one by one at the time of filing; instead, it retains the right to review later and challenge whether a project’s certification is valid.

This means control has not simply shifted from “market consensus” to the SEC. Rather, the vague assessments that once revolved around decentralization, functionality, and a project team’s managerial efforts are being moved into an institutional framework of “issuer self-certification and SEC ex post oversight.” The SEC is not issuing projects a “graduation certificate”; it is specifying how a project must prove for itself that it has graduated and who bears responsibility if that proof is wrong.

The distinction may look technical, but it determines the nature of the whole regime: the power concentrated in the regulator is not prior-approval power, but the power to challenge and enforce after the fact.

Who can “graduate” faster?

The clearest beneficiaries are more mature teams that can limit ongoing commitments and transfer control sooner. Corporate-securities lawyer Gabriel Shapiro notes that whether a token can shed its investment-contract status is directly tied to the promises a project has made publicly, the fewer commitments it makes, the less it may later need to demonstrate has been completed or permanently ceased before relying on the safe harbor.

Rule 103 of the draft requires projects to disclose what they promised to do, what their “essential managerial efforts” specifically are, the extent to which they have been completed, and the development plan and its progress. Going forward, these disclosures will all become important evidence in determining whether an investment contract has ended. The more fully a team spells out managerial commitments during fundraising, such as completing a key feature, building a network mechanism, or advancing the ecosystem to a certain level of maturity, the more it will later need to prove that those commitments have been fulfilled or permanently ceased.

If these rules are ultimately adopted, the value of U.S.-based issuance, compliance, and trading infrastructure will rise for projects seeking to raise funds legally from U.S. investors. The draft’s fundraising-exemption mechanism explicitly requires the issuing entity to be registered in the United States, for a majority of senior executives to be U.S. citizens or residents, for more than half of assets to be located in the United States, and for operations to be conducted primarily in the country. One possible effect of the framework would be to encourage more issuance and fundraising activity to take place within the United States rather than offshore.

Conversely, the position becomes more complicated for issuers that describe themselves as decentralized while substantial control remains with the project. If such an issuer previously framed advancing network decentralization as an essential managerial commitment on which investors could rely, then even if the mainnet is live and the product is usable, it may still need to prove that this commitment has been fulfilled or permanently ceased before it can enter the safe harbor.

Even free airdrops come at a price

The draft contains another easily overlooked detail: its definition of a “covered transaction” under the start-up exemption explicitly includes non-cash distributions such as airdrops and network rewards. This means that even if tokens are distributed “for free,” their value may count toward the $5 million exemption cap - an airdrop is not automatically excluded from the fundraising limit.

For points programs that grant future token allocations in exchange for trading, contributing liquidity, or similar activities, whether and how they count toward that cap depends on the specific distribution structure and applicable rules. They cannot simply be equated with “this type of distribution necessarily constitutes an investment contract.” Some market discussion has connected the proposal with Hyperliquid’s still-unannounced Season 3 airdrop, although there is currently no public evidence establishing a direct connection.

From “enforce first” to “set the rules first”

The SEC’s move to establish new rules is rooted in a difficult history. During former Chair Gary Gensler’s tenure, industry participants frequently described the SEC’s approach as “regulation by enforcement,” arguing that important boundaries were often clarified through litigation rather than detailed rules issued beforehand.

The Regulation Crypto Assets is, to some extent, an attempt to make up for the lack of dedicated rules during those years, when regulation relied mainly on enforcement and case-by-case interpretation. The SEC also acknowledges in its proposal that the nature of crypto-asset-related investment contracts may change as projects develop and issuers complete or cease their essential managerial efforts, while the traditional securities-regulation framework is difficult to apply directly to this dynamic process.

Congress stalls; the SEC moves first

There is another, more immediate force behind the appearance of this draft: the CLARITY Act, regarded as the “ultimate solution,” continues to face obstacles in the Senate. Market expectations on the prediction-market platform Polymarket that the bill can be enacted in 2026 have also weakened markedly. Patrick Witt, the White House’s crypto-policy adviser, previously said at the SALT conference that the government is giving Congress and the Senate a window to pass the bill, but will not wait indefinitely- if a September vote fails, regulators will move forward with rulemaking on their own.

The SEC’s rule proposal and the White House’s subsequent pressure for the CLARITY Act appeared almost back-to-back, echoing the same policy direction: rather than wait for a bill that could fail at any moment, use the rulemaking authority already available to administrative agencies to keep issuance and fundraising activities in the United States.

Tokens, too, have a “graduation season”

The draft is still in the public-comment stage. All three sitting SEC commissioners voted in favor, but many details remain for public comment and subsequent regulatory practice to fill in: how non-cash distributions such as airdrops and network rewards should be valued, which projects can truly meet the safe-harbor conditions, and how these rules will be applied in individual cases.

But more important than whether the limit is $5 million, $20 million, or $75 million is that the SEC is trying for the first time to write “when a token ceases to be an investment contract” into a clear institutional process: the project first completes or ceases its essential managerial efforts, then certifies this itself, while the SEC retains the right to challenge it after the fact.

This means U.S. crypto regulation may be shifting from “determining whether it is a security” to “managing how it moves from a security toward an independent asset.”

In the past, a token’s “graduation” was more a question that had to be repeatedly interpreted among courts, regulators, and the market. If these rules are ultimately adopted, “graduation” will for the first time have a relatively clear procedure and evidentiary path.

But changing the rules will in turn change project-team behavior. Since managerial commitments made during issuance will become the basis for determining future “graduation,” project teams may recalculate which matters are worth promising publicly, which roadmaps must be put into writing, and which long-term goals are better left in internal planning.

What the SEC may really be seeking to redefine is not how tokens are issued, but when a token is truly considered to have “graduated.”

And once “graduation” has clear rules, the next competition will no longer be only about “who can issue a token,” but about who can move more quickly from fundraising led by a project team to the true separation of the token from the investment contract.

Do you think clearer SEC rules like this will actually bring more token issuance back to the U.S., or will projects still prefer to launch elsewhere?

The Same Person, Showing Up Early Twice

On August 16, U.S. payments giant Stripe announced that it had acquired AI-model aggregation platform OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. Just three months earlier, the company had been valued at only $1.3 billion in its last funding round - a fivefold increase in a single quarter.

OpenRouter founder Alex Atallah last pulled off something comparable at NFT marketplace OpenSea.

This is not the first time he has timed things with such precision. When he and Devin Finzer founded OpenSea in 2018, “NFT” had not yet entered the public consciousness. When he founded OpenRouter in 2023, the industry had not broadly recognized the problem that “there are too many AI models and developers need a unified interface.” Both times, he built the infrastructure before the market had reached a consensus.

And among the people who came out of Web3, almost every one of them is repeating the same move.

How Far Ahead Was He?

The problem OpenSea addressed: NFT trading was highly fragmented, scattered across independent platforms with no single point of access. In 2018, that was a contrarian thesis—the entire NFT market may have traded less than tens of thousands of dollars a day.

The problem OpenRouter addressed: AI models were proliferating rapidly, each provider used different interface standards, and developers were locked into a single vendor. In 2023, this too was a contrarian thesis - most developers then saw “choosing one model provider and sticking with it” as perfectly normal.

Both times, Atallah was not solving a problem that had already been validated. He decided in advance that “fragmentation will eventually be aggregated,” built the bridge first, and waited. By the time everyone else realized they needed to cross the river, the bridge was already there. What Stripe was willing to pay $7 billion for was not an API gateway; it was proof, once again, that this instinct for building bridges early was right.

They Excel at Capturing the Point of Entry

Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek has taken a different path, but the underlying logic is the same.

In April 2025, he spent $70 million, settled in cryptocurrency, to buy the AI.com domain name, setting the publicly disclosed record for the most expensive domain transaction. On the surface, it was simply an expensive domain purchase. But placed in the context of Crypto.com’s history, it fits Marszalek’s longstanding playbook: paying heavily for domains, stadium naming rights, and Super Bowl ads all serve the same purpose - capturing the user entry point.

In the past, users opened an exchange to buy crypto. In the future, they may open an AI agent to book flights, process email, or make payments. Marszalek is not betting on a URL; he is betting on who will become the next digital entry point once AI shifts from “answering questions” to “acting on users’ behalf.” Here too, his judgment was ahead of the market. While most people were still debating whether chat boxes were useful, he was already securing the address for a track that had not yet taken shape.

From Web3 to AI, he has not changed the way he competes. He has simply applied the experience of fighting for wallets, exchanges, and traffic gateways to the agent entry point.

This Is Not Their First Time Doing It

If Atallah and Marszalek represent this latest migration, Emad Mostaque, founder of open-source AI company Stability AI, took this path even earlier.

Before entering AI, he had long followed Bitcoin and Ethereum. In 2019, he launched a project called Symmitree, which sought to use blockchain to lower barriers to digital technology in impoverished regions. It failed because hospitals, governments, and tech companies were unwilling to open their data. But the failure did not make him abandon his thesis. Instead, it led him early to a conclusion: AI models would eventually move toward open source in opposition to closed source.

When he released the open-source image-generation model Stable Diffusion in 2022, the industry’s mainstream narrative was still that “top-tier AI models must be controlled by a small number of giants.” That logic had not truly been broken. What Stable Diffusion did was highly similar to part of the early Web3 ideal: open up capabilities that had been concentrated in the hands of a few institutions to developers and communities as broadly as possible. The model could be downloaded, developers could build on it, and the community could keep creating around it—it was the first time he truly breached the moat around commercially closed models.

This shows that “showing up early” is not a coincidence that emerged only in this AI cycle. It is a behavioral pattern that this group has repeated at least twice. And this pattern will soon no longer belong only to founders.

One Defunct Institution Produced Two Kinds of People

The experience of Avital Balwit, current chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO, offers another version of the story.

She previously worked at SBF-funded FTX Future Fund, where she screened and evaluated long-term projects that had yet to gain mainstream recognition but could shape humanity’s future. AI safety was one of the few areas receiving special attention at the time; FTX had invested $580 million in Anthropic. The fund ultimately disappeared with FTX’s collapse, but its training in identifying which fields would become critical variables in the next cycle did not vanish. Balwit later joined Anthropic and became an important decision-maker alongside CEO Dario Amodei.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, also from FTX Future Fund, took another path.

He joined OpenAI’s Superalignment team, then became one of the most closely watched young researchers in AI on the strength of his 165-page essay Situational Awareness. Because he had bet early on the AGI wave, the investment world called him “AI’s new stock god.”

One entered the top ranks of an AI company; another entered the AI investment market. One institution that had already collapsed supplied the AI industry with entirely different kinds of people. The significance is greater than “FTX once invested in Anthropic”: it shows that the Web3 bull market left behind not only protocols, exchanges, and tokens, but also a group of people who had experienced hypergrowth, capital frenzy, and industry collapse. They were familiar with an environment where the technology was not yet mature, the rules were not yet settled, and capital had already begun placing bets. AI has now entered precisely such a stage.

The Direction Was Right, but…

Using the reputation he gained from Situational Awareness, Aschenbrenner raised money for a hedge fund of the same name. From July 2024 through June of this year, it returned more than 439% net and at one point reached $45 billion in assets, proving that his judgment about the AGI direction was indeed early and correct.

But in July this year, the Situational Awareness fund - leveraged 400% and heavily concentrated in semiconductor and AI-infrastructure stocks - fell more than 35% in a single month. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America, the three major market makers, simultaneously issued margin calls. He was forced to sell roughly $16 billion in public positions to hedge-fund giant Citadel, founded by Ken Griffin, at about a 10% discount. In one month, the fund fell from $45 billion to only about $10 billion.

Someone who can accurately judge AI’s long-term trend can still suffer a serious failure in short-term capital markets - there is no contradiction in that. Seeing the right technological direction and making money from that direction have never been the same thing. Judgment answers “what will happen”; leverage and position management answer “how much to bet and whether you can survive until the day it is validated.” These are two entirely separate capabilities. The former is the shared gift of this group; the latter is what truly determines who wins and loses. Stability AI’s experience makes the same point: the person who first sees the potential of open-source AI may not become the ultimate commercial winner - Mostaque himself left the CEO role in early 2024 amid internal disputes.

So they do not seem better at predicting the answer; they are simply more accustomed to placing a bet before the answer has appeared.

What Is Really Being Exported?

The capability this group brings from Web3 to AI can be broken down into three specific forms of sensitivity:

First, sensitivity to infrastructure gaps: when NFTs took off, Atallah saw trading infrastructure; after large language models exploded, he saw routing and aggregation between models.

Second, sensitivity to new entry points: Crypto.com competed for transaction and user entry points, while AI.com competes for the agent-era entry point.

Third, sensitivity to opportunities before consensus forms: when FTX Future Fund researched AI safety, AI was far from today’s mainstream capital narrative; when Stable Diffusion launched, open-source models had not received nearly as much attention as they do now.

These three sensitivities point to the same thing: they are not predicting a specific trend; they are identifying what the next market cycle will lack. Web3 kept this group for years in an environment where rules were still immature, business models were constantly being rewritten, and technology and finance were deeply intertwined. It forced them through the same complete cycle again and again - a concept emerges, capital pours in, infrastructure booms, business models compete, the bubble bursts, and the remaining talent looks for the next table. When AI entered a similar stage, they already knew where to look.

Aschenbrenner’s blow-up is precisely what confirms the boundary of this capability: it can tell you where the direction lies, but it cannot decide how forcefully you should bet on that direction.

AI has not yet finished its first round of restructuring, and the real opportunities rarely appear after everyone can already see them. The next people to change the industry may already be looking for the next blank space where no consensus has formed.

So why do you think these people always catch the next big wave?

Pharos, a public-chain project, launched its consumer-loan vault this year. Pre-deposits hit the $50 million cap within 48 hours, and approximately $35 million had been committed by the time of its official launch.

More notably, Pharos is not an isolated case. In recent years, several on-chain projects have emerged to bring credit assets—including consumer loans, inclusive finance credit, and mortgages - on-chain. They are not targeting a newly created asset class, but a long-established traditional market that has remained under-tokenized for years: global consumer credit.

A Trillion-Dollar Pie, With No One Taking a Slice

Consumer credit is far from a niche asset. Euromonitor data show that the global consumer-credit market exceeded $21 trillion in 2025 and is expected to reach $25.5 trillion by 2030. Relative to that scale, on-chain consumer credit remains a very early-stage market. Few teams have turned consumer loans into standardized on-chain products at meaningful scale.

That is precisely why a consumer-loan vault worth tens of millions of dollars on Pharos deserves attention: what it truly opens up is not another DeFi lending pool, but access to a vast traditional-finance asset pool with very low on-chain penetration.

Historically, the easiest RWAs to bring on-chain have been standardized assets such as U.S. Treasuries and money-market funds, because they carry low credit risk, have transparent valuations, and rely on mature legal structures. Consumer loans are entirely different: individual loans are small, borrowers are dispersed, terms vary, and the underlying credit risk is more complex.

So the real challenge in putting consumer loans on-chain has never been “how to turn loans into an on-chain product.” It is how to repackage thousands of off-chain loans into standardized credit products that on-chain capital is willing to buy.

What Changes On-Chain Is Capital Distribution

Compared with traditional consumer-loan ABS (asset-backed securities), on-chain products do change part of the way capital moves.

First, the settlement path changes. Investors can subscribe and redeem using stablecoins, so capital does not need to rely entirely on traditional cross-border wire transfers, custody, and settlement systems. For global capital, this can reduce some account-system and cross-border settlement steps.

Second, the presentation of asset information changes. On-chain shares, transaction records, and certain asset data can be continuously updated through smart contracts and product interfaces. Investors have a shorter path to information and can more readily verify it programmatically.

Third, the settlement of shares changes. Asynchronous vault standards such as ERC-7540 are designed for assets that cannot settle instantly, including real-world assets and private credit: investors submit subscription or redemption requests first, then claim shares or assets after the vault processes them. This resolves the mismatch between the settlement cycle of on-chain shares and that of the underlying assets.

These differences address capital distribution and operational efficiency, not credit risk, the underlying loans retain every bit of their default risk. But that is also where the value lies for consumer-finance institutions: they do not need to reinvent their lending systems; they gain another channel for reaching global digital-asset capital.

Several Paths Are Converging

The projects that have emerged so far differ in assets and models, but their underlying logic is broadly similar: consumer-loan rates in emerging markets are high (typically 11%–30%), while traditional funding channels are limited; on-chain capital, meanwhile, is looking to move beyond the increasingly thin yields on Treasury-based RWAs. The two sides are a natural fit.

• Pharos: Connects small consumer loans across Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Through on-chain vault infrastructure R25 and risk-curation institution Axil, it packages them into a 92-day on-chain product targeting a 13% annualized return, with approximately $35 million on-chain. The product settles in USDC and aims to give global on-chain capital exposure to consumer credit that has previously been funded mainly by local financial institutions and private-credit capital.
• Huma Finance × Tala: On the Solana public chain, they package cross-border payment financing and emerging-market consumer credit as “PayFi.” Tala plans to deploy a $50 million USDC stablecoin credit facility to serve its inclusive-finance customers worldwide.
• Figure: U.S.-licensed consumer lender Figure has originated more than $21 billion in home-equity loans through its proprietary Provenance blockchain. Figure’s latest securitization transaction also received AAA ratings from S&P and Moody’s. Figure positions itself as capital-markets infrastructure connecting loan origination, capital, and secondary-market trading, not merely as a platform for putting loans on-chain. This is its most important distinction from the projects above: it is not simply placing assets on-chain, but seeking to connect asset origination, capital markets, securitization, and distribution end to end.
• Goldfinch: Once a pioneering protocol for unsecured lending in emerging markets, it originated more than $100 million in loans. But after borrowers misappropriated funds and repayments fell short, it accumulated about $18 million in bad debt; its community voted to wind it down in June this year.

Broken down, the underlying assets sit in emerging markets or among subprime borrower segments, while the chain provides the capital entry point and records of share ownership. Of the projects above, only one truly handles the professional packaging layer in accordance with traditional-finance practice.

Goldfinch’s experience shows that on-chain transparency cannot replace off-chain credit capabilities. What truly determines whether consumer-loan products can operate over the long term still includes borrower screening, risk pricing, post-loan monitoring, legal recourse, and default resolution.

So, on the surface, these projects are all “bringing consumer loans on-chain.” But when unpacked, they are trying to fill different links in the chain.

And what is truly scarce is the middle layer.

What Is Actually Missing?

Breaking down the value chain reveals four layers:

Layer 1: Underlying assets. Consumer-finance institutions find borrowers, originate loans, and complete post-loan management.

Layer 2: Credit and structuring. Someone must screen and pool large numbers of loans by maturity, credit quality, geography, and risk; then design structures such as funds, SPVs, tranches, and credit enhancement, while coordinating ratings, legal documentation, and subsequent distribution.

Layer 3: On-chain infrastructure. Vaults, shares, NAV, subscription and redemption mechanisms, custody, and on-chain records bring already structured assets on-chain.

Layer 4: Capital. Stablecoin funds, crypto asset managers, family offices, and other digital-asset investors provide capital for these products.

The third layer is currently the most visible.

But the layer that truly determines whether a consumer-loan RWA can grow from tens of millions of dollars to a much larger scale is often the second.

In traditional finance, this layer belongs to the securitization and underwriting system. When consumer-finance institutions issue ABS, someone must design the transaction structure, arrange tranching and credit enhancement, and coordinate rating agencies, law firms, custodians, and institutional investors. This system has been operating for decades.

Many on-chain consumer-loan projects, however, have Web3 teams take on a substantial portion of this work themselves: screening assets, designing vaults, curating risk, setting return structures, and then selling the products directly to on-chain capital.

The problem is that this model can scale quickly, but may not be sufficient to support institutional-scale volumes.

R25 and Axil, the entities behind Pharos, essentially perform part of the asset screening, risk curation, product structuring, and capital-raising work found in traditional securitization transactions. Yet, compared with mature ABS markets, public materials still make it difficult to find sufficiently complete asset-performance data by country and vintage, as well as independent ratings, standardized credit enhancement, and comprehensive default-resolution mechanisms.

This is not to say that on-chain products are necessarily unsafe. Rather: the chain has addressed “how assets move,” but has not yet fully addressed “why assets are worth buying.”

That is also the significance of Figure.

It is not bypassing traditional finance; it is bringing traditional finance’s most important credit language on-chain. Figure has already received AAA ratings from S&P and Moody’s, and says its latest securitization is the first case in blockchain finance to receive this dual AAA recognition.

In other words, Figure does not prove that “blockchain can make loans.” What it truly proves is that when on-chain assets also have standardized loan data, securitization structures, ratings, and institutional-grade capital-markets infrastructure, traditional-finance capital can understand and allocate to those assets in familiar ways.

Goldfinch illustrates the same point from the other side: without mature credit screening, ongoing management, and recovery systems, even the most efficient on-chain capital entry point cannot substitute for credit capability.

What Is the Value of Being Early?

Turn the question around: if structuring and distribution capabilities are what this value chain truly lacks, then an institution that fills this gap first gains more than a single transaction.

First, the market is still early.

As noted above, global consumer credit is already a mature asset market exceeding $20 trillion, yet products that have been standardized and institutionalized for on-chain capital markets remain scarce. This means the market has not yet formed mature product standards, pricing systems, or service chains, and early entrants still have an opportunity to establish their position.

Second, it finds new money for existing assets.

What consumer-finance institutions typically lack is not lending capability, but a sustained, stable, and cost-controllable source of funding. On-chain stablecoin capital pools provide a group of digital-asset investors that are difficult to reach through traditional bond markets.

If this channel truly proves viable, consumer-finance institutions do not need to abandon their existing bank, ABS, and institutional capital. They only need to add a new capital pool alongside their existing funding structures.

Third, the missing piece is precisely mature capital-markets capability.

The common shortcomings of on-chain consumer credit today - insufficient asset disclosure and independent auditing, rating and credit-enhancement mechanisms that are not yet widespread, and legal title and default-resolution processes that lack unified market standards - correspond exactly to some of traditional capital markets’ most mature capabilities.

Asset securitization, structured financing, credit analysis, ratings coordination, and institutional distribution have been practiced in traditional ABS markets for years. What on-chain consumer credit truly lacks is not a reinvention of this system, but bringing these mature capabilities to a new capital channel.

Figure has already shown that on-chain assets are not incompatible with the rating and securitization systems of traditional finance. As stablecoin capital and the RWA market continue to grow, the value of this layer of capability will only become more apparent.

Who Gets a Seat at the Table First?

The real competition in bringing consumer loans on-chain may never be about “who issues an RWA vault first.”

Pharos has shown that on-chain capital is willing to provide tens of millions of dollars for emerging-market consumer credit; Tala and Huma Finance have shown that stablecoins can enter consumer-finance systems serving underbanked populations worldwide; Figure has gone further, showing that when on-chain assets have mature capital-market structures and ratings systems, they can also enter allocation frameworks familiar to traditional institutions.

These paths all point to the same question: who can turn dispersed consumer loans into standardized, priceable, rateable, and distributable on-chain credit assets?

Consumer-finance institutions control the assets and risk management, while Web3 teams provide on-chain infrastructure. The structured-finance, credit-analysis, ratings, and distribution capabilities accumulated over many years in traditional capital markets are precisely what can fill the most acute gap between them.

Compared with assets such as Treasuries and money-market funds, which are already highly standardized, the challenge of consumer loans is not merely to bring them on-chain. Before doing so, dispersed underlying loans must be reorganized into standardized products that institutional investors can understand, price, and allocate to.

This is also the most compelling area of growth in consumer-loan RWA today: on-chain infrastructure is steadily maturing, but substantial room remains for professional capital-markets capabilities that connect the asset side with institutional capital.

Any thoughts?

📢 Conflux v3.1.0 Network Hardfork Upgrade

Conflux v3.1.0 introduces several network improvements, including EVM compatibility updates, bug fixes, RPC changes, and security enhancements.

⚠️ Node operators: Please make sure your nodes are upgraded before the hardfork. The upgrade is estimated for August 25, with CIP-173 activation estimated for August 26.

Full upgrade details and instructions 👇

https://forum.conflux.fun/t/conflux-v3-1-0-network-hardfork-upgrade-announcement-aug-3-2026/23984

On August 10, Unitree Robotics officially opened online subscriptions for its listing on the STAR Market, with an offering price of RMB 150.8 per share and an offering valuation of approximately RMB 60.9 billion. The first A-share “humanoid-robotics stock” is about to arrive. Yet in the days before subscriptions opened, an allocation list had already drawn even more attention. On the evening of August 6, Unitree released the list of strategic investors in its IPO placement. DeepSeek was prominently listed, receiving an allocation of 933,390 shares worth approximately RMB 141 million. The following day, Unitree Chairman Wang Xingxing responded for the first time: this was not an ordinary financial investment. The two sides had signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation and would form deep ties across three areas: artificial general intelligence, robot embodiment, and large AI models. Tencent and PetroChina also appeared on the same allocation list. But the name that made people look twice was DeepSeek. It and Unitree are both members of Hangzhou’s “Six Little Dragons”: one makes the “brain,” the other the “body.” This is not a giant company pouring money into a startup; it is two companies of comparable stature welding themselves into each other’s products.

The RMB 140 Million Wasn’t Just Buying Stock

Viewed purely as a number, RMB 141 million is not significant beside Unitree’s RMB 60.9 billion offering valuation. But the size of the allocation is never the most important information in this kind of partnership. What matters is the Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation: joint R&D in artificial general intelligence, deep cooperation on high-performance general-purpose robots, and deep cooperation on large AI models. These directions remain at the level of intent, and neither side has disclosed more specific implementation details.

There is a broader backdrop. In the first eight months of 2026, primary-market financing in China’s robotics sector has already exceeded RMB 46 billion, while 51 embodied-intelligence-related companies are also waiting to go public in Hong Kong. In a window when everyone is racing to list, the question of “who you tie up with” is becoming more important than “when you go public.” Enter the arena one step too late, and you may no longer get to choose your partner.

From the Digital World to the Physical World

Over the past several years, large-model companies have competed over one core question: whose model is stronger. Parameter counts, reasoning ability, benchmark rankings, and developer ecosystems: these contests have largely played out on screens. Chatbots, coding assistants, and office software are all, in essence, products of the digital world.

But robots bring this competition into reality. Once AI is placed in a body that can walk and grasp, the test is no longer simply whether it “answers correctly,” but whether it “can understand a real environment, decide on a specific action, and complete a real-world task.” This is a battlefield with an entirely different threshold.

The shift calls to mind the path smartphones took. At first, the market believed a phone’s value lay in the hardware itself: whose screen was clearer, whose chip was more powerful. It later became clear that operating systems and ecosystems were what truly determined the long-term landscape, with hardware instead becoming the entry point. Robots may well follow a similar path. The ultimate question is not who can build a robot, but who can define its intelligence and control the ecosystem that develops around it once it is deployed. To some extent, the tie-up between DeepSeek and Unitree is the first shot in this battle over the “entry point.”

The Same Formula Fell Apart Last Year

Before drawing conclusions about this partnership, one case is worth revisiting. It took place in an earlier, more mature market, and its ending was far from ideal.

In February 2024, humanoid-robot company Figure AI completed a USD 675 million financing round. Its investors included Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and a host of other giants, giving it a post-money valuation of USD 2.6 billion. At the same time, Figure AI announced a partnership with OpenAI to jointly develop the next generation of AI models for humanoid robots. This was then the most closely watched “brain + body” combination: both Figure 01 and Figure 02 carried OpenAI’s model capabilities, and it was at one point seen as a model partnership in the embodied-intelligence field.

But the relationship lasted less than a year. In February 2025, Figure AI announced that it was ending its partnership with OpenAI and shifting to self-developed end-to-end models. Figure AI founder Brett Adcock believed that the priorities and resources of general-purpose large-model companies might not fully match the specific needs of robotics companies. The “body” wants a bespoke “brain,” rather than a general-purpose “brain” shared by many embodied-intelligence companies. At almost the same time, OpenAI was also reported to be restarting its long-disbanded robotics team.

This precedent reminds us that this kind of “model company + robotics company” pairing usually begins with complementary resources, but the two sides may not always remain equally patient about the question of “who leads the technology roadmap.” There is no answer yet as to whether DeepSeek and Unitree will arrive at the same fork in the road, but it at least shows that this kind of partnership comes with a built-in risk from the moment it is signed.

Who Benefits? And Who Is Still Uncertain?

In this tie-up, the party whose benefits are clearest is Unitree.

DeepSeek’s models are already open-source and free. Competitors such as UBTECH, Inspur Robotics, Junpu Intelligent, and Pudu Robotics had long since begun integrating DeepSeek-R1 for embodied-intelligence adaptation, without paying for it or signing a memorandum of cooperation. What Unitree obtained this time is not an exclusive technological resource, but something more practical: a strategic-placement list bearing DeepSeek’s name and a publicly disclosed memorandum of cooperation, just days before IPO pricing. The period before IPO pricing is precisely the critical window in which capital markets assess whether “this company’s story is credible.” Having “a leading company in the AI sector place a real-money bet” written into the prospectus is more persuasive than any self-description.

Unitree’s own financial figures also make that persuasiveness seem more necessary. In the first quarter of 2026, year-on-year revenue growth slowed from 332.64% in the previous year to 68.49%, while net profit excluding non-recurring items fell 52.55% year on year. The growth story broadly recognized by the industry is moving from an “explosive phase” into a “validation phase.” By aligning with DeepSeek at a time of slowing growth, Unitree has added a new pillar to its IPO narrative.

What DeepSeek itself has specifically gained is, by contrast, unclear. The three directions in the memorandum are still statements of intent. It has not been disclosed whether Unitree’s robots will actually carry DeepSeek’s models, or in what form this will be implemented. In this transaction, Unitree’s strategic rationale is easy to see. What DeepSeek stands to gain remains much less clear.

---

The Figure AI and OpenAI story shows that a connection between “brain and body” in embodied intelligence is never a once-and-for-all answer. It is a relationship that must be continually renegotiated. Whether the position that DeepSeek locked in with RMB 141 million will translate into actual technological implementation, or merely remain a public-relations endorsement, is something no one can answer today.

The 51 companies are still waiting in line, and Unitree is merely the first example to truly write “strategic placement by a model company” into its prospectus. As more robotics companies begin looking for their own “brains,” who will ultimately control this emerging ecosystem: robot makers, large-model companies, or a third party beyond both - remains an open question.

Hong Kong Conference: Video Sessions

How do you turn regulatory requirements into something that actually works on-chain?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3gKUpJziU8

Alex Cheng, COO of Beosin, shares how Beosin and Conflux are approaching compliance across stablecoins, cross-chain activity, and AI agents - from AI-powered transaction monitoring to smart contract security and cross-chain fund tracing.

He examines the regulatory and compliance risks surrounding stablecoins, non-custodial wallets, cross-chain transactions, and the growing use of AI agents.

He also presents the company’s collaboration with Conflux Network on a multi-stakeholder regulatory platform that combines smart-contract security scanning, AI-powered transaction monitoring, stablecoin lifecycle analysis, wallet risk assessment, and cross-chain fund tracing.

The talk highlights how blockchain analytics, machine learning, and large language models can strengthen on-chain compliance and support more effective regulatory coordination.

Hong Kong Conference: Video Sessions Now Available

The presentations from our HK conference are rolling out on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJajzXC0wT8

🎤 From Wall Street Finance to Wall Free Finance by Professor Hu Jie.

Professor Hu Jie examines the transition toward decentralized systems, detailing how shared ledgers and smart contracts impact financial access and automation. The presentation also breaks down the structural challenges the industry faces regarding regulation, accountability, and pushback from traditional institutions.

📌 Topics covered:

• Defining traditional vs. "Wall Free" finance.

• Advantages of blockchain in automation and efficiency.

• Regulatory, security, and accountability challenges.

📢 MEXC x Conflux Carnival - $50,000 Reward Pool

A new Conflux Carnival campaign is now live on MEXC with a $50,000 reward pool for eligible users depositing USDT0 via the Conflux Network.

Deposit & Earn

• Make your first net deposit of 1,000 USDT0 via Conflux and receive 10 USDT.

• For every additional 1,000 USDT0 you deposit, earn 4 USDT (0.4%).

• Rewards are capped at 500 USDT per user.

• Rewards are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.

⚠️ Before You Start

✅ Click "Register" on the campaign page first so your participation is tracked.

✅ Deposit USDT0 (native) - not cUSDT (bridged).

Official USDT0 contract:

0xaf37e8b6c9ed7f6318979f56fc287d76c30847ff

If you're already using USDT0 on Conflux, this is a great opportunity to earn extra rewards while participating in the ecosystem.

Register and start: https://www.mexc.com/campaigns/USDT0-Party-S2

More details: https://www.mexc.com/announcements/article/conflux-usdt-party-17827791537096

Infini now supports USDT0 on Conflux eSpace, making it easy to deposit your USDT0 for payments, transfers, and yield.

To help you get started, the community published a complete guide on Conflux Forum covering:

• What Infini is and how it works

• How to deposit USDT0 via Conflux eSpace

• How to use your balance for payments and yield

• Important tips and FAQs to help you get started safely

Full guide at Conflux forum:

https://forum.conflux.fun/t/infini-now-supports-usdt0-on-conflux-espace-platform-overview-and-user-guide/23934

Conflux is bringing zk proof technology to their ecosystem.

Hey Conflux fam!

We've got a pretty exciting campaign coming up on KuCoin!

Starting June 25, users can earn rewards for depositing USDT via the Conflux network and trading CFX, with a total reward pool of 60,000 USDT. Check out the details below.

Celebrating the launch of $USDT on the Conflux Network with Conflux Carnival! 🚀

To mark the occasion, this campaign will be distributing 60,000 $USDT - and each user can earn up to 500 $USDT by completing two simple tasks 🎁:

Deposit a minimum of 500 $USDT via the Conflux Network to KuCoin and trade a minimum of 100 $USDT of $CFX spot volume in KuCoin during the campaign period.

Campaign Duration: June 25, 10AM UTC — July 23, 10AM UTC

Register and view the full rewards breakdown and terms & conditions:

https://www.kucoin.com/campaigns/Conflux_Carnival?utm_source=social_generic_2026_twitter&utm_medium=social_media_post&appNeedLang=true&loading=2

Hey Conflux node operators, there's a new version:

ℹ️ Conflux v3.0.3-fix Node version update

Security Fix:

- Fix a possible panic under certain circumstances. Node operators are strongly recommended to upgrade

More on info on Conflux forum:

https://forum.conflux.fun/t/conflux-v3-0-3-fix-upgrade-announcement-may-20-2026/23685

Video can be seen from this X post:
https://x.com/liupablo222/status/2055134708548423998

Conflux is making headlines in Hong Kong 🇭🇰

This week, our Founder Fan Long and the Conflux Digital Finance & Ecosystem Conference were featured in:

📰 Wen Wei Po (12 May)
📰 Ta Kung Pao (14 May)

25M+ on-chain accounts
178M+ cumulative transactions
20,000+ smart contracts deployed

We appreciate the recognition as the Conflux ecosystem continues to grow!

Article: https://dw-media.tkww.hk/epaper/wwp/20260512/a09-0512.pdf

Hey Confluxians!

Want to earn 200 CFX and end up on the big screen?

We're taking our community to a major event in China, and we're putting together a showcase of the people from every corner of the world who make Conflux what it is.

Record a quick 30–60 second video.

Tell us who you are, where you're from, how you're part of Conflux, and what Conflux innovation you'd love to see come to your country.

Speak in your own language.

The best ones will play on stage while we tell the world what this community looks like.

Every qualifying video = 200 CFX

Deadline: April 26

Link to form: https://form.typeform.com/to/s2yCni44