ChainFeeds’ latest research briefing, published on Aug. 8, pulls together five separate stories across digital-asset regulation, Ethereum governance, developer migration, and the expansion of Robinhood Chain.
TechFlow: AI is drawing core crypto builders away
One item in the roundup, credited to TechFlow, focuses on the move by Move language creator Blackshear to Anthropic and frames it as part of a broader talent shift from crypto to AI.
According to the report, Blackshear described an April roundtable on project security where he revisited a tool he had written during his Facebook years. He wanted to port it to Move and use it to scan Move code for potential vulnerabilities. He said that kind of migration used to take “a very, very long time.” After handing the task to Claude, the system completed the migration automatically and flagged a batch of potential bugs. His reaction, as quoted in the article, was: “whoa, we’re entering a new world.”
The piece argues that this kind of first-hand experience matters more than abstract claims about AI productivity. Once technical leaders see AI outperform expectations in work they know best, a career shift starts to look less like opportunism and more like a rational choice.
TechFlow says the pattern is spreading. In February this year, Ethereum Foundation co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak stepped down less than a year after taking the role. Stańczak previously founded Nethermind, one of Ethereum’s most important clients, and was deeply involved in the protocol’s evolution.
Data cited from Artemis for March this year shows weekly code commits across crypto projects dropping from about 850,000 at the start of 2025 to roughly 210,000, a 75% decline. Weekly active developers fell from around 8,700 to more than 4,600 over the same period. Ethereum’s developer count fell 34% in three months, Solana dropped 40%, and BNB Chain’s code commits slid 85%.
GitHub as a whole moved the other way. The platform added about 36 million developers in 2025, and total commits rose 25% year over year. The GitHub Octoverse report said much of that growth flowed into AI. AI-related repositories topped 4.3 million, while large-language-model SDK imports rose 178% in one year. Dragonfly investor Omar said the shift reflects attention moving to AI, weaker token-price incentives, and some teams moving from open source to closed development.
The security angle makes the trend harder to ignore. TechFlow says Coldcard disclosed a firmware vulnerability on July 30 after 1,196 wallets were drained in 41 minutes, with losses above 1,082 BTC, or about $70 million. The flaw had sat in the code for more than five years. After the incident, a Reddit developer reportedly fed Coldcard’s open-source code into Claude Code with the prompt “check for vulnerabilities,” and the system identified the issue in eight minutes. Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi wrote on social media that about “$2 of AI compute” could have prevented the attack.
The article closes on a blunt question: if AI-assisted attacks are getting better while the people who define security boundaries and audit base-layer code are leaving, can teams safely lean more heavily on AI without those human gatekeepers still in place?
a16z: why the U.S. crypto market needs the CLARITY Act
Another featured item summarizes an English-language post from a16z on the CLARITY Act, formally described as legislation intended to build a clearer regulatory framework for digital assets in the United States.
The central argument is straightforward. The bill is meant to spell out how authority is divided between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That division matters because crypto companies, trading venues, and investors have spent years operating without a consistent answer on which assets belong under securities rules and which fall into commodities oversight.
a16z says that uncertainty has carried real costs. It has raised compliance burdens for businesses and weakened the country’s competitive position in global digital-asset innovation. Backers of the bill say a clearer line between agencies would reduce overlap and make it easier for compliant firms to keep building in the U.S.
The post says the CLARITY Act would do more than split agency responsibilities. It also aims to create a broader regulatory structure for digital-asset trading, issuance, custody, and market participants. In that view, the bill is not just a jurisdictional patch. It is an attempt to give the sector a steadier operating environment.
One of the strongest criticisms of the current U.S. approach, as presented in the article, is that regulators have relied on enforcement actions rather than formal legislation. Industry participants have often described that as policymaking through enforcement. Supporters of the CLARITY Act argue that rules written by Congress would give firms a clearer basis for compliance and help the U.S. preserve a leadership role in financial innovation while lowering consumer risk.
That does not end the dispute. Opponents worry that going too far in the direction of lighter regulation could weaken investor protections and leave room for market risk to build. The fight around the bill, then, is not over whether crypto should be regulated at all. It is over how to draw the line between market development and safeguards.
a16z presents the issue as urgent. If the U.S. fails to establish workable digital-asset rules, innovation could keep moving to jurisdictions with more defined frameworks. The firm points to growth across stablecoins, blockchain-based payments, tokenized assets, and decentralized finance as evidence that the broader digital-finance stack is already taking shape. The outcome of the CLARITY Act debate, in that reading, could influence not only U.S. market structure but the wider global direction of crypto regulation.
Tiger Research: Asia’s prediction market problem is structural
Tiger Research’s contribution to the roundup focuses on prediction markets in Asia and says the region faces a $43 million regulatory gap.
The report says prediction markets are no longer a niche corner of crypto, yet their legal status remains unsettled. They may function as information platforms, but regulators still have not drawn a clean line between prediction contracts and gambling. That pushes the debate back to first principles: what counts as gambling, and what exactly counts as betting?
Tiger Research points to Section 9 of the U.K. Gambling Act 2005, which takes a broad view of the subject matter of a bet. If an activity carries economic value, it may fall under gambling rules. That scope includes the outcome of a race, competition, event, or process; the likelihood of something happening or not happening; and whether something is true. Under that kind of definition, prediction markets look structurally close to gambling because they attach economic value to an event outcome or truth claim.
From there, the report lays out three possible regulatory paths. One is to place prediction markets under traditional gambling rules. Another is to classify them as something closer to financial derivatives. The third is to create a separate category through stand-alone legislation.
The piece says Western jurisdictions have been more permissive than Asia, though not because they are culturally more accepting of gambling. The difference, it argues, is institutional. The U.S., the U.K., and the European Union each have legal structures that can make room for prediction markets without relying on a direct endorsement of gambling.
In the U.S., prediction markets have been routed through the derivatives framework under the Commodity Exchange Act. The 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, by giving an open-ended definition to “excluded commodities,” created room for non-financial variables to enter regulated markets. That allowed items such as election outcomes or weather events to be handled within a structure more familiar to financial regulation.
As that framework developed, licensed entities became central. Kalshi received designated contract market status in November 2020 and was able to offer a range of event contracts to retail users. Polymarket, after facing regulatory action in 2022, pursued a compliance route by acquiring licensed exchange QCEX in 2025.
Asia, by contrast, runs into two structural obstacles, according to Tiger Research. The first is the prevalence of state-controlled lottery and betting systems, which leaves little room for a general-purpose licensing regime for private intermediaries. The second is product classification. Countries such as South Korea and Japan use more closed definitions of underlying assets, making it difficult to reclassify non-financial variables like election outcomes as financial contracts.
The report says the core lesson from Europe and the U.S. is that prediction markets expand only when regulators choose a classification path that can actually contain them. Asia’s difficulty is that neither its gambling regime nor its financial-product regime currently offers a practical institutional base for the business model.
Tiger Research also rejects the idea that demand is the problem. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong all have legal betting markets. The issue is not social acceptance in the abstract. It is how to design a regulatory base that can absorb this type of market. In South Korea, the report says, discussion has not yet fully advanced to legal positioning or social value. Existing rules largely default to treating prediction markets as speculative products, which narrows the room for further policy debate.
Joseph Chalom’s case against EIP-8363
Another long English-language item in the briefing details four reasons Joseph Chalom opposes EIP-8363.
His first point is that DeFi remains Ethereum’s central application layer, and that future stablecoins and tokenized assets entering blockchains are also likely to depend on DeFi rails. Weakening DeFi, in his view, weakens the main destination for institutional capital moving onchain.
He describes staking yield net of costs and inflation, or “real yield,” as the base rate of the onchain financial system. Other rates form around it, much as traditional markets price around a risk-free rate. Chalom says liquid staking tokens, with about $35 billion in TVL, have become important collateral in onchain lending. Because staking yield can offset some borrowing costs, that structure helps attract capital into onchain applications while also supporting network security.
His second point is that cutting yield would break an unusual alignment of incentives. Participation in the network and protection of the network currently reinforce each other. If returns fall, the cost of capital onchain goes up and real yield could move close to zero. Once validator operating expenses, liquidity costs, and slashing risk are included, actual returns could turn negative. At that stage, staking would no longer look like compensation for providing security. It would look more like a fee users pay to gain eligibility to participate.
Third, Chalom argues that ETH’s yield-bearing character is a major reason institutions buy it instead of treating it like a simple directional bet. He says ETH differs from Bitcoin because it has productive capacity. That matters to institutional and retail investors alike because it allows ETH to fit into portfolios that require assets with income potential rather than assets that rely only on price appreciation. He links that quality to the tens of billions of dollars that have entered ETH through ETPs, DATs, and private funds. Investors buying ETH, he says, expect both capital appreciation and native staking income.
His fourth point is timing. Chalom says Ethereum is in a new phase of growth and that reducing one of ETH’s competitive strengths while it is outperforming Bitcoin and other major crypto assets would be the wrong move.
He lists several markers of that phase: about $159 billion in stablecoins, more than $15 billion in tokenized real-world assets already settled on Ethereum, and the possibility of trillions of dollars more coming onchain in the future. Over the past few weeks, Robinhood built a new chain on Ethereum Layer 2 and brought with it 28 million users and $369 billion in platform assets. BlackRock deployed tokenized shares of its multibillion-dollar money market fund BSTBL directly on Ethereum. BNY, described in the article as the world’s largest custodian, is bringing staking into its institutional custody platform through a partnership with Galaxy Digital.
Chalom’s point is not that these are crypto-native experiments. It is the opposite. He says some of the world’s largest financial institutions chose Ethereum after years of evaluation because of its stability and long-term performance, and that this recognition is now coming from the biggest asset managers in global finance.
Odaily: CashCat adds to Robinhood’s dual push in RWA and meme tokens
The fifth piece, from Odaily, looks at Robinhood’s listing of CashCat and places it inside a wider strategy built around both tokenized real-world assets and meme coins.
Odaily says Robinhood already supports a long list of meme assets, including DOGE, SHIB, PEPE, FLOKI, BONK, MEW, MOODENG, PENGU, PNUT, and TRUMP, the official meme token launched by Donald Trump in January last year. Even so, the article says CashCat stands apart for three reasons.
First, CashCat is tied directly to Robinhood’s own identity. It was an early mascot, and Robinhood chief executive Vlad Tenev has publicly confirmed that the company’s original name was CashCat.
Second, the token carries its own meme value and market heat. Odaily says the listing reflects acceptance of meme culture by both Tenev and the company. The article points to Robinhood’s regular social-media posts and to Tenev’s use of parody-style profile imagery as signs of that leaning. It adds that the name CashCat can even be read as a familiar meme-coin style phrase in Chinese crypto communities.
The report then turns to the larger buildout of Robinhood Chain. On July 1, the Layer 2 network officially launched, with tokenized stock trading available across more than 120 countries and regions, alongside a decentralized lending product called Robinhood Earn. Odaily says the move marked Robinhood’s expansion from traditional brokerage into crypto, tokenized assets, and AI-driven trading. Combined with its earlier prediction-market push, Robinhood had become one of the few platforms spanning several financial verticals at once.
In its first week, Robinhood Chain’s DEX volume reached $3.1 billion. The ecosystem’s meme token CASHCAT then hit a $100 million market cap in five hours, and developer activity briefly ranked first among blockchain networks, according to the report.
User-composition data suggests the network is pulling in fresh onchain participants. Odaily cites onchain researcher clemh59 as saying Robinhood Chain attracted more than 490,000 new addresses in its first 11 days. Cross-checking those addresses against users of major DeFi protocols including AAVE, Morpho, Ethena, and Pendle showed that only 1.7% had prior DeFi interaction records. The article says that figure sits well below the 20.6% historical low benchmark seen elsewhere, suggesting Robinhood Chain is bringing in a large number of users who were not previously active in DeFi.
Odaily argues that Robinhood’s brokerage base gives the chain a built-in advantage in both RWA expansion and meme-token distribution. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams previously said Robinhood Chain could become an important bridge between tokenized traditional assets and crypto-native assets.
On Aug. 6, Uniswap formally announced the launch of its Pools.trade platform. Data from arbdata, as cited by Odaily, showed that by Aug. 5, more than 12,000 tokens had already been deployed on Robinhood Chain through Pools.trade, exceeding the combined new-token deployment count of earlier leading launch platforms Flap and Pons in that ecosystem. The report adds that on its first day, Uniswap V4 volume on Robinhood Chain quickly moved past Ethereum mainnet, making it one of the most active networks. Hayden Adams said cumulative volume on Pools.trade had exceeded $150 million.
Headlines listed in the same briefing
ChainFeeds also included a separate headline list for Aug. 8. Those items said a SharpLink co-founder opposed Ethereum proposal EIP-8361 and called it harmful to DeFi and poorly timed; Galaxy Research said the Coldcard flaw had already led to more than $111 million in stolen funds and that there was no evidence affecting firmware released before March 17, 2021; Trump Media ended its CRO treasury company plan and dropped direct integration of prediction markets; Galaxy Digital and Sharplink launched an onchain yield fund with $125 million in initial capital; and Upbit said it would end support for BONK trading on Sept. 7.
