Crypto and AI newsflow accelerated between Aug. 12 and Aug. 13, with funding rounds, protocol incidents, stablecoin launches, regulatory developments and whale transactions landing within hours of each other.
Funding rounds and infrastructure spending
Swedish AI coding startup Lovable closed a $400 million Series C round at a $13.3 billion valuation. Menlo Ventures and the European Union-backed Scaleup Europe Fund co-led the financing, with Tencent and other institutions participating. Lovable was founded in 2023 and offers AI tools that let users build websites and apps through natural-language prompts. Its enterprise customers include Adidas, Deutsche Telekom and Hearst.
Crypto market maker Wintermute said it plans to spend about $1 billion over the next five years on high-frequency trading and AI data center infrastructure as it expands into traditional markets including equities, commodities and foreign exchange. The spending is expected to be funded through retained earnings. Non-crypto markets currently account for about 10% of the firm’s revenue, and the company is targeting more than 50% by the end of 2027. Wintermute’s average daily trading volume this year has fallen to $10 billion from roughly $15 billion last year.
AI investment platform Thrive Holdings said it completed a $2 billion financing at a $12 billion valuation, with SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners and Altimeter Capital among the participants. Thrive Holdings was founded in 2025 by Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner. Unlike conventional investment firms, it does not directly back developers of large AI models. Instead, it acquires traditional service businesses and integrates AI into operating workflows with the stated goal of bringing advanced AI into key industries relied on daily by millions of businesses and individuals. The company had previously raised about $1 billion in initial funding.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is seeking about $600 million through a secondary financing designed to extend holding periods for OpenAI and four other assets while adding a new investment commitment to Anthropic. The deal, internally code-named Project Mercury, involves Lightspeed’s Select V and Opportunity II funds as well as a separately managed account. Those positions would be moved into a continuation fund, while existing investors would receive cash back. In addition to OpenAI, the assets slated for transfer include security technology company Verkada, workforce management company Rippling, AI startup Reflection AI and enterprise search platform Glean. Coller Capital is acting as lead buyer for the continuation fund, and UBS is advising on the transaction. Lightspeed has invested in Anthropic across multiple rounds, including its latest financing, which valued Anthropic at $965 billion.
Nvidia-backed AI code review platform CodeRabbit said it raised $143 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Atomico and Smash Capital co-led the round, with BMW i Ventures, Datadog and others participating. CodeRabbit’s total funding has now topped $200 million. The company uses AI to automatically review software code, helping developers identify defects, security risks and other issues. Its product reviews both AI-generated and human-written code during development and provides feedback and improvement suggestions.
Tencent earnings and WeChat model rollout
Tencent Holdings reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of 204.8 billion yuan, up 11% year over year and slightly above Bloomberg’s compiled estimate of 202.8 billion yuan. Net profit came in at 56 billion yuan, below the market expectation of 58.4 billion yuan. Non-IFRS operating profit reached 75.64 billion yuan, up 9%.
Capital expenditure climbed to 52.78 billion yuan because of AI infrastructure investment, well above the expected 32.1 billion yuan and the 19.1 billion yuan recorded a year earlier. That pushed free cash flow to negative 13.8 billion yuan. Excluding prepayments for AI computing power purchases, free cash flow would have been 37.6 billion yuan.
Domestic gaming revenue rose 17% to 47.3 billion yuan, while marketing services revenue reached 43.57 billion yuan. Tencent said AI-related prepayments will be used for Hunyuan model upgrades, inference demand tied to WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy, WeChat AI initiatives and cloud service demand.
The WeChat team also released the WeLM family of general large language models, framing resource efficiency as the core principle behind deployment across WeChat’s large-scale ecosystem. WeLM-80B, with 3B activated parameters, has already been integrated into the WeChat AI agent Xiaowei, where it supports dialogue and search, operation of native WeChat functions and access to mini-program services. The in-development WeLM-617B, with 23B activated parameters, uses a mixture-of-experts architecture and is intended for more complex tasks inside the WeChat ecosystem, including intelligent mini-program development and tool generation for Xiaowei.
Stablecoins and on-chain finance
Anchorpoint, backed by Standard Chartered, has started phase one of the rollout of its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HKDAP, offering the token through test access to institutional distributors and professional investors. Anchorpoint is a joint venture formed by Standard Chartered, HKT and Animoca Brands. In April, it received one of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s first stablecoin issuer licenses alongside HSBC.
HKDAP’s initial focus is cross-border payments and settlement and distribution for tokenized real-world assets. Authorized distributors will also provide conversion between HKDAP and fiat currencies for institutions, corporate users and professional investors. HashKey Exchange has completed the first HKDAP mint and redemption transaction as a distribution partner. Earlier, in May, Anchorpoint and OSL completed a full lifecycle test of HKDAP on Ethereum mainnet, covering Hong Kong dollar funding, reserve allocation, token minting, transfer and full redemption.
According to Whale Alert, USDC issuer USDC Treasury minted 250,000,000 USDC on Solana, equivalent to about $250 million.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Investment Management issued a no-action letter to Franklin Templeton, allowing its traditional registered funds to invest in the firm’s on-chain U.S. government money market fund, BENJI, for cash management without meeting certain physical custody requirements. Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart said the move effectively opens the door for Franklin’s traditional funds to hold its on-chain fund even if those funds do not fully fit custody rules under the Investment Company Act of 1940.
The decision allows traditional Franklin funds to use BENJI’s operating features, including faster transaction processing and more frequent pricing updates. BENJI launched on Stellar in 2021 and later expanded to Ethereum and Solana. It currently manages about $726 million in assets, mostly on Stellar. The SEC cited a 1992 no-action letter involving Franklin as precedent, saying BENJI’s on-chain recordkeeping model is sufficiently similar to traditional book-entry registration that the investment can proceed without those physical custody requirements.
Macro data and regulation
U.S. July CPI on a non-seasonally adjusted annual basis came in at 3.4%, matching expectations and marking the smallest increase since March.
With a Senate vote on the CLARITY Act delayed, Hyperliquid and Morpho are stepping up lobbying efforts aimed at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hyperliquid wants regulators to allow regulated firms to offer perpetual contracts on its chain. Morpho has already been in contact with the SEC over regulation of on-chain lending vaults. If legislation continues to stall, the area may shift toward rulemaking by regulators.
The CFTC issued new guidance warning that incentive programs used by prediction market platforms may have compliance flaws. The agency said rewards aimed at encouraging high-volume participants could induce traders to transact only to hit volume targets, raising the risk of wash trades, prearranged trades and other fraudulent or manipulative conduct. It also said market-making programs that guarantee net profits or cover losses through fixed subsidies and rebates may encourage improper behavior. The CFTC added that filings for such incentive programs often contain procedural or substantive defects, making it harder to judge whether platforms have adequately disclosed terms and assessed compliance. The commission said it is supporting development of prediction markets while directing the industry to follow existing rules through guidance and advisory opinions.
New York City Council has sent letters to Kalshi, Polymarket, Coinbase and Gemini Titan, opening an investigation into prediction market platforms over alleged false, deceptive or abusive marketing aimed at younger users. Lawmakers will review allegations that Polymarket paid social media creators to film promotional videos showing fake bets and fake profits on imitation sites outside the platform. State officials in multiple jurisdictions have already raised concerns over whether sports-event contracts amount to illegal gambling. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has also signed an executive order barring state employees from using insider information to place prediction market bets. New York Attorney General Letitia James recently sued Kalshi over alleged illegal gambling operations and is seeking penalties and disgorgement on a scale of at least $36 billion.
Exchanges and market plumbing
Coinbase said it will suspend trading in 10 perpetual contracts at around 21:00 UTC+8 on Aug. 26: Memecoin (MEME-PERP), The Sandbox (SAND-PERP), Moonbirds (BIRB-PERP), Blur (BLUR-PERP), Katana (KAT-PERP), SPX6900 (SPX-PERP), ZORA (ZORA-PERP), Axie Infinity (AXS-PERP), Gensyn (AI-PERP) and LayerZero (ZRO-PERP). All open positions will be automatically settled using the average index price from the 60 minutes before suspension, and the funding rate for the final settlement period will be set to zero. Coinbase said it reserves the right to halt trading at any time and adjust the final settlement price to what it considers a reasonable level.
Prediction market platform Kalshi said it will distribute real-time order book data through DoubleZero’s DoubleZero Edge network as a subscription service for institutional trading firms. The first dataset covers Kalshi’s sports-event contracts and crypto perpetual contracts, including Level 1 data that shows best bid, best offer and trades, plus Level 2 data with multiple layers of buy and sell orders. The feed is sent in machine-readable format through synchronized multicast and can be used for pricing, hedging and automated trading. Kalshi said it will waive its own data licensing revenue share for the first year, with subscription fees mainly covering network transmission. DoubleZero said the move gives prediction market participants professional-grade market data infrastructure similar to what is available in traditional finance.
Boltz said Wednesday that its original founders have exited the project immediately and that an anonymous group of veteran Bitcoin enthusiasts has agreed to take over the suspended swap service. The new operators will provide funding and engineering resources and are currently investigating and fixing vulnerabilities. Boltz is not naming the group for now and said the goal is to restore swap functionality as soon as possible. The original founders will not remain in any formal or management role, and any future participation in open-source software development would be voluntary.
Boltz suspended services on Aug. 3, saying the frequency, intensity and complexity of attacks from AI-assisted attackers had risen for months. The company said multiple attacks succeeded and caused losses, but users’ funds were never at risk because the service is non-custodial. Boltz described itself as a bootstrapped startup with only five people and said it could not fend off this type of attack over the long term. As of Wednesday, its web app still showed swaps as disabled, while the API remained available for cooperative refunds, and unilateral refunds did not rely on Boltz infrastructure.
Security incidents and protocol events
Harmony said it traced the movement of fraudulently minted tokens across 409 wallets and 10,288 transfers, and sent alerts to partner exchanges about hundreds of suspicious deposit transactions. Those exchanges have already blocked hacker wallets, according to the team. So far, 53% of validators have completed an emergency patch upgrade that was released four hours earlier. Harmony said it is preparing a remediation plan, and a rollback currently appears to be the preferred workable option. More details are expected within hours.
Solana came close to a network-wide halt on Wednesday after a routing failure at one data center temporarily knocked nearly 29% of staked SOL offline. That left the network about 20 million SOL short of the freeze threshold, the point at which more than one-third of stake being offline would stop finality across the network. Staking platform Marinade said about 90 validators were affected, with a combined loss of 333 SOL in staking rewards, to be covered by validator bonds.
The incident was traced to faulty network routing at a Teraswitch facility in Miami that spread to multiple data centers in Europe and Asia. A single operator, AS2032, at one point controlled more than a quarter of all staked tokens on the network, well above Solana’s stated safety ceiling. Several affected validators, including Helius, were unable to switch successfully to backup connectivity for about 33 minutes. The episode highlighted concentration risk tied to reliance on one connectivity provider.
Bitcoin wallet Electrum released version 4.8.1 with what it called an important security fix and urged users to upgrade as soon as possible. Developers involved in reproducible builds have also provided independent signatures for binaries on the download page so users can verify that release packages match the source code.
Israeli cybersecurity firm ASecurity said in a new report that a researcher used publicly available AI models to find multiple flaws in Zoom’s annotation tool and build an exploitable attack chain in under 24 hours using fewer than 20 prompts. The vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2026-53413, CVE-2026-53414 and CVE-2026-53415. According to the report, an attacker could use them to execute code remotely during a meeting without any user action by the victim, take control of the device, steal data and activate the microphone or camera.
ASecurity said the attack was successfully tested on Zoom for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, calling it a nation-state-level capability. It said building this sort of exploit previously required months of work by specialist teams and a large budget. ASecurity reported the first flaw to Zoom on June 10, and Zoom released fixes between June 22 and July 20. But server-side protections in end-to-end encrypted meetings could not filter malicious messages, meaning users still need to update manually. A Zoom spokesperson confirmed the issue has been resolved and recommended that users stay on the latest version.
A previously unknown wallet lost $25.6 million in crypto assets early today. The attacker swapped all assets, including WBTC, cbBTC, LDO, USDS and CRV, into DAI and ETH. The same wallet had also lost $24.23 million in September 2023 after a malicious token approval, and the attacker eventually returned about 90% of the funds.
AI model and product releases
SPACEXAI announced Grok 4.6, a new large model now available in Cursor and Grok Build and accessible through an API and partner platforms including OpenRouter, Vercel and Cloudflare. The company also published usage-based pricing: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.
DeepSeek V4 Pro has been rolled out to the API under the same model name. The updated version significantly strengthens agent capabilities and supports the Responses API and Codex integration. API documentation shows pricing of 3 yuan per million input tokens, 6 yuan per million output tokens and 0.025 yuan per million cached input tokens.
Benchmark results for the production version of DeepSeek V4 Pro showed a score of 87.9 on Terminal Bench, close to Fable 5’s 88.0. PANews said the model also outperformed Fable 5 on CyberGym, an AI security agent benchmark, and on the higher-difficulty AutomationBench benchmark.
The PANews digest also said xAI’s Grok 4.6 put added emphasis on long-running agents and interactive visual work. The company said it matched GPT-5.6 Sol with a score of 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index while keeping API pricing unchanged.
DeepSeek V4 Pro also reached the top of Weibo’s trending list after its release, according to the digest. The model is currently available only through API access, and the company has not yet published a formal announcement page.
SpaceXAI also introduced Grok Bot, a persistent AI agent service with its own cloud computing environment that can log into commonly used apps and complete multi-step tasks. The company said the bot will not interrupt users before a task is finished and will report back only when needed.
Public companies and corporate updates
Tokenization company Securitize reported its first quarterly earnings since listing, and the results fell short of expectations. The stock dropped 20% in after-hours trading. Second-quarter revenue was $14.4 million, down 5% year over year and below the expected $20.6 million. Loss per share was $2.37, far worse than the expected loss of $0.15. Net loss reached $21.7 million, while adjusted EBITDA swung from a profit of $1.8 million a year earlier to a loss of $5.5 million.
Chief executive Carlos Domingo described the quarter as relatively soft, though first-half revenue still grew 16% year over year, with first-quarter revenue hitting a record $19.5 million. Assets under management on the company’s tokenization platform reached a record $4.3 billion, up 16%, while trading volume surged 147% to $5.3 billion. Securitize provides tokenization infrastructure for clients including BlackRock’s BUIDL and KKR and is working with the New York Stock Exchange on infrastructure for tokenized securities trading.
Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich said the company moved 5,014 BTC between custody addresses today as part of routine wallet management. He said no bitcoin was sold and that the company’s holdings remain at 43,000 BTC.
Market talk cited in the digest said Anthropic is reportedly planning to acquire AI startup DeCart for $6 billion.
Whale activity and large positions
An Ethereum ICO whale that bought in 2015 at $0.311 per ETH has now transferred all 2,000 ETH, worth $3.77 million, into Coinbase, according to the PANews roundup. Over 11 years, the initial $622 position grew to $3.77 million, a 6,060x return.
Address bc1pz…t6vwr has sent a cumulative 2,300 BTC, worth $142 million, to Wintermute deposit addresses since June 25 at an average transfer price of $61,813. The latest transaction came six hours ago and involved 800 BTC worth about $50.72 million. The funds came from Paxos, though the ownership of the address has not been confirmed.
A whale holding a $114 million BTC short has realized losses of $978,000 and has reduced positions to cut losses three times in the past week. At about 8:30 p.m. last night, the trader trimmed another 650 BTC for a loss of $167,000, then added 269.35 BTC at 23:00, taking the position up to 1,412 BTC worth $89.79 million. The position was showing a floating profit of $456,000 at the time of the digest.
A whale that used leverage to chase ETH higher in early June has now taken profit and unwound leverage, booking a $4.3 million gain. On June 7, the trader borrowed 30 million USDS from Spark by looping ETH collateral and bought 18,212 ETH at an average price of $1,647. Today, the trader sold 15,993 ETH at $1,889, repaid a 30.2 million USDS loan and locked in the reported $4.3 million profit on the leveraged portion.
KAITO has fallen 67.3% over half a month, sliding from a July 29 high of $1.3764 to $0.45. Two addresses that opened $6.94 million in 5x leveraged long positions on Hyperliquid on Aug. 3 have both stopped out, with combined losses of $2.874 million.
Other market and legal developments
After more than a month of brokerage data collection and account-by-account trade analysis, U.S. options market makers Susquehanna International Group and Citadel Securities, acting as plaintiffs, have narrowed the alleged Futu and Tiger Brokers options insider trading case to 47 accounts controlled by 45 people. After comparing account-level trading profits, returns, contract counts, expiries, brokers, locations and opening times, the total suspected illegal profit increased to $155 million.
The identities of the 45 individuals have not been disclosed, but the digest said the overwhelming majority are outside the United States, with most residing in mainland China and Hong Kong. One person is said to control three accounts. Some individuals allegedly made tens of millions of dollars, while even the smallest gains were in the hundreds of thousands.
Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl said in a new report that Bitcoin adoption should continue to rise over the medium and long term even though price has been under pressure recently. He cited three reasons: growing concerns that persistent U.S. government debt growth could raise inflation and currency debasement risks, broader use of stablecoins and tokenization that could make blockchain infrastructure commonplace in financial services, and stronger digital asset preference among younger investors. Pandl said alternative assets have become a standard part of portfolio construction and that institutions, wealth platforms and individuals are likely to keep adding Bitcoin to diversified portfolios through exchange-traded products and other tools. Grayscale said the current bear market has not changed its view that Bitcoin adoption will keep increasing.