PANews published a weekly selection of stories spanning crypto, AI, macro themes, regulation, and market structure.
AI, infrastructure, and capital allocation
One featured piece examined where money from the top 100 U.S. VC and CVC firms went in the first three quarters of 2026. In Q3 alone, 27 financings worth at least $1 billion were said to be concentrated in data centers, GPUs, and power. CVCs accounted for 87.9% of AI deals, with capital directed more toward buying capacity than picking eventual winners.
Another article focused on cybersecurity. Two PHP2Shell vulnerabilities were disclosed before patches were released, and demo videos also leaked. The websites of the Dutch parliament and the NCSC, along with Japan’s niconico, went offline that same night. OpenAI said the vulnerability was discovered with assistance from GPT-5.6.
PANews also reviewed on-chain revenue across 130 crypto AI projects. The report said verifiable model-payment revenue over the past 30 days was only about $8.7 million, and Venice alone accounted for 83% of that figure. It added that token-consumption metrics across the sector were widely inflated.
In an interview with three core partners at Andreessen Horowitz, the firm’s crypto fund was described as having expanded into Frontier. Andreessen said open-source large models plus cryptography form an anti-monopoly card, while Dixon argued that the revenue-sharing contract behind internet content has been broken by AI scraping.
Another story said Claude ran for 53 hours to redesign a quantum circuit for elliptic-curve point addition, cutting Toffoli gates to about one-seventeenth of the prior level. The author stressed that this was only a single module and did not mean Bitcoin could be broken 17 times faster.
Macro views and regulatory developments
On the macro side, NDV revisited the U.S. stagflation period from 1966 to 1982. According to the piece, prices tripled over that stretch while the Dow fell 20%. Passbook savings rates were capped at 5.25% even as inflation reached 14.8%, leaving household savings steadily eroded under regulation and oil shocks.
China International Capital Corporation proposed an “AI dollar” framework. In that framework, the stock markets of the U.S., Japan, and South Korea were positively correlated with the dollar, while India and Hong Kong equities were negatively correlated. For hedging an AI pullback, the report pointed to dollar-depreciation trades and said gold had a 92.3% win rate, ahead of U.S. Treasuries.
On crypto regulation, the SEC’s public comment period for new crypto asset rules has ended. Of 171 comments, 70% were conditionally supportive. The article’s author said the odds of implementation were high, with disclosure rules, insider lockups, and the exit path from safe harbor likely to be the key issues.
HTX Research also looked at the U.S. midterm elections and crypto markets. Its report said the Federal Reserve had already raised rates to 3.75%-4% in September, while a market structure bill failed by a 49-50 vote. Elections can shift policy expectations, it said, but the ceiling for the market is still set by inflation and capital flows.
PANews also highlighted the rollout of U.S. stablecoin rules. The OCC’s final rule implementing the GENIUS Act will take effect on Jan. 18, 2027. It bars issuers from paying interest directly, but does not preserve a presumption that third-party reward programs are automatically non-compliant, leaving the boundary to case-by-case judgment.
Institutions, public figures, and market mechanics
Among the institutional and personality-driven stories, one asked why investors would still buy MSTR instead of a spot Bitcoin ETF. The article broke down the company’s flywheel as issuing shares at an mNAV premium in exchange for growth in Bitcoin per share. On the cited measure, that premium stood at only 1.08x. The next phase, it said, depends on whether BTC, net equity per share, and the premium can all expand together.
The founder of Folius Ventures said he has spent nearly two years away from primary crypto investing, shifting attention to AI and secondary markets. His view was that crypto VC may disappear, with the remaining opportunities centered on putting everything on-chain and bringing dollars into everything.
Another piece revisited the first class of 10 interns at HRT in 2015. Ten years later, PANews said, they had gone on to support companies including Scale AI, Hyperliquid, and Cognition, together representing valuations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The common thread was the use of algorithmic thinking to rebuild traditional industries.
Delphi Digital framed speculation as the defining theme of the next decade, arguing that technological change and institutional distortion are now running at full speed at the same time. Its conclusion was that the steadier path is not to bet on the game, but to own the casino platform around it.
MSCI is considering removing Strategy from its indexes, a move that could trigger $2.8 billion in passive outflows. The author argued that holdings can describe risk but do not fully define a business model, making the dispute a clash between old classification systems and new forms of capital organization.
Projects, trading venues, and on-chain opportunities
In its “early opportunity” section, PANews covered Pearl, which applies matrix multiplication used in AI inference to a mining narrative. The token rose nearly 9.5x in four months, but the article also pointed to concentrated ownership, liquidity dependence on smaller exchanges, and the lack of a clear link between AI revenue and token demand.
On TCG, PANews wrote that once Pokémon cards were put on-chain, the physical cards stayed in storage while certificates changed hands repeatedly. A single card changed hands eight times a month on average, with random packs and instant buybacks increasing turnover.
For DeFi, PANews listed five projects to watch: Mezzanine, INFINIT, IRIS, RISEx, and Boros. INFINIT’s managed vaults were said to be running at about 32% annualized returns in live trading. IRIS adds fixed rates, RISEx uses a fully on-chain order book, and Boros is building around the funding-rate market.
Pump.fun’s partnership with PreStocks opened trading in pre-IPO tokens tied to eight companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. Those tokens can also be used as paired assets for minting. The article noted that the tokens do not represent equity, and the companies involved had previously denied SPV transfers.
PANews also reviewed 20 crypto trading front ends. Phantom generated more than $7 million in revenue over the past 30 days, with derivatives contributing $1.2 million. Wallet products were described as turning traffic into fee income by integrating Hyperliquid.
Web3 data and chain-level trends
OUSD reached a circulating supply of $825 million in three weeks, but the number of independent holding addresses was only 2,200. The top 10 addresses controlled 82% of supply, and capital utilization was 13.5%. PANews said the setup looked more like targeted capital injection by major players than organic payment demand.
HiddenFunds scanned 203 chains and found $2.61 billion spread across more than 6 million wallets. Of that amount, 88% could still be claimed by users themselves. Most of the funds were stuck at the final step of unstaking or during token migration, while USDT on Omni no longer had liquidity.
Circle disclosed its books for the first time. The company reported about $1.4 billion in revenue in the first half, with $819 million shared with distribution channels including Coinbase and Binance, and another $473 million reinvested into compliance and liquidity. Net margin was only 7%. In a separate headline, USDC’s annual settlement volume was said to have exceeded $36 trillion.
On public chains, Story shut down its own L1 and moved to Sui, while Lisk and Polygon zkEVM also pulled back. PANews cited data showing that 343 out of 588 chains had less than $1 million in TVL, suggesting that launching a chain is no longer a competitive edge by itself.
IOSG’s breakdown of Papertrade said that over 212 hours, 23,000 addresses deposited 335 million and lost a net 63.2 million. Of the losses, 86% was returned to stakers, while the staking wallets were themselves the losing wallets, creating a cashback loop.
Key news items of the week
- OpenAI is set to complete a fundraising round of up to $30 billion, led by an investor from the United Arab Emirates.
- HSBC has launched its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, RedCoin.
- Aave’s founder said a new tokenomics model will include AAVE buybacks, staking, and burns.
- Dune reported that on-chain trading volume for tokenized stocks and ETFs topped $37 billion in Q3, with monthly volume up nearly 18x this year.
- BIT launched Switzerland’s first spot Bitcoin ETF and has already rolled out U.S. and Hong Kong stock services this year.
- The Ethereum Foundation delayed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, with no date yet announced.
- Robinhood stock tokens have been integrated into the Morpho lending market and can be used as collateral for on-chain borrowing.
- Hong Kong’s secretary for financial services and the treasury said the city’s tokenization push is moving toward implementation.
- Since October, 40 new wallets have withdrawn 9,458 BTC worth $771.5 million from Wintermute.
- CZ said AI can still cause damage without breaking Bitcoin cryptography, and that data leaks have already fueled phishing and social engineering attacks.
- Spot gold fell below the $4,000 level.
- SoftBank shares have halved from their June high, with heavy AI spending and debt pressure weighing on sentiment.
- The WAX multichain bridge was attacked, and the attacker extracted about $75,000 across chains.
- The Bank of Korea plans to revise the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act to tighten oversight of stablecoin payments.
- Market chatter said Gate has obtained U.S. IB qualifications and may launch prediction-market services by year-end.
- Blackstone’s president pushed back on the AI bubble narrative, saying demand is growing in a “parabolic” pattern.
- South Korea’s Financial Services Commission will study allowing crypto exchanges to participate in the STO market.
- Kimi is set to release K3.1 and has published a teaser video.
- Chainlink has entered a strategic partnership with LG CNS, the technology arm under South Korea’s LG Group.
- Tether-backed Utexo has launched Utexo Mint, opening early access to USDT on the Bitcoin network.