Wall Street opened August with a broad risk-on move as falling oil prices, lower Treasury yields and a renewed bid for AI and cloud stocks pushed major U.S. indexes higher. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.32% to a record close, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 2.13% and the S&P 500 climbed 1.48%. Markets repriced energy risk after U.S. President Donald Trump said talks with Iran had begun and suggested the Strait of Hormuz could reopen soon. Iranian officials denied direct talks with Washington, saying discussions were limited to shipping security arrangements with Oman, but crude still sold off sharply. WTI dropped 7.42% and Brent fell about 6%, easing inflation pressure and helping Treasuries rally. The 10-year U.S. yield slipped about 5 basis points to around 4.68%, while gold held above the $4,000 mark. The strongest equity action came from AI and cloud names. Amazon rose 4.58% and crossed a $3 trillion market capitalization for the first time after stronger-than-expected AWS results. Nvidia gained nearly 3% and moved back above $5 trillion, Meta rose more than 6%, and Microsoft and Google each added close to 5%. Crypto-linked stocks also mostly advanced, with SoFi Technologies up more than 10%, IREN up over 8%, and Hut 8 and Robinhood both up more than 4%.

Jim Cramer said he plans to sell his entire Bitcoin position, arguing that quantum computing could break Bitcoin’s security in about three years. His remarks came as concerns around post-quantum cryptography resurfaced in the crypto market. On July 30, IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said in an interview that quantum computing could pose a challenge to modern cryptography within the next three to four years. Separately, a March paper from Google Quantum AI estimated that fewer than 500,000 physical qubits may be needed to break the relevant cryptography, roughly one-twentieth of earlier projections. Even so, current quantum systems remain far smaller, with physical qubit counts still in the hundreds to thousands, while the number of highly reliable logical qubits is limited. Researchers also estimate that about 30% of Bitcoin’s supply, or 6 million to 7 million BTC, sits in addresses with exposed public keys. The remarks add to a long-running debate over how quickly quantum advances could become a practical threat to Bitcoin and broader cryptographic systems.

Circle has acquired nearly 1,000 blockchain patents from IBM, covering more than 680 patent families tied to blockchain systems, financial services, and enterprise infrastructure. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the deal and did not say whether it plans to enforce the patents against competitors. Circle said the portfolio will support businesses including USDC, Circle Payments Network, and its Arc blockchain. Fortune said the limited disclosure around the transaction has raised concern that the patents could become legal tools used against rivals or startups. Circle has not announced a defensive patent pledge or any licensing program tied to the portfolio.

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has secured a limited purpose trust charter from the New York Department of Financial Services, adding a fresh state-level approval as it expands its regulated footprint. The company said it will operate under the new charter as Circle New York Trust, building on the BitLicense it obtained in 2015. CEO Jeremy Allaire described the approval as a longstanding goal and a key milestone for the firm, saying it reflects more than a decade of regulatory commitment and places USDC within a well-established framework. The charter puts Circle New York Trust under NYDFS supervision, though the entity will not be able to take customer deposits or make loans like a traditional bank. Instead, it can offer services including digital asset custody and fiduciary functions under New York banking law. After the announcement, Circle shares climbed 8.4% to about $68.40, according to Yahoo Finance. The approval comes after other recent steps by the company, including OCC approval earlier this month for a national trust bank application and Monday’s acquisition of IBM’s blockchain patent portfolio, which added nearly 1,000 patents tied to blockchain, financial services, and enterprise software.

PANews’ July 31 daily roundup pulled together a wide range of market, regulatory, corporate, funding, and crypto trading updates. The report said New York’s attorney general has sued prediction market platform Kalshi and is seeking at least $36 billion. ByteDance unveiled its Seedance 2.5 video generation model, which can produce a 30-second high-quality clip in a single run, while several companies including XPeng and AgiBot are set to adopt it first through Volcano Engine partnerships. In public markets, South Korea’s KOSPI surged 17.91% to 6,595.44, marking the largest single-day closing gain on record, with SK hynix up 30% and Samsung Electronics up nearly 27%. The roundup also covered a string of crypto-linked developments. Strategy posted an $8.2 billion net loss in the second quarter, largely tied to unrealized losses on its Bitcoin holdings, while Coinbase reported $1.22 billion in Q2 revenue, below the $1.29 billion market expectation, and said its stock fell about 5% after hours. Elsewhere, Block traced a Coldcard wallet theft incident to a random number generation flaw affecting Mk2 through Mk5 devices, though another item in the same roundup noted there is still no evidence of a Coldcard RNG defect or supply-chain attack in the separate transfer of roughly 594 BTC from 500 single-signature addresses. The report also listed fresh ETF flow data, options expiry figures, AI startup financing, and sharp gains in crypto mining stocks pivoting toward AI.

Swiss trader Doctor Profit said he closed his Bitcoin short near $120,000 on July 18, kept his equity shorts in place, and started dollar-cost averaging back into BTC and ETH, according to a post he published early July 30 Taipei time on his official Telegram channel. He also disclosed the unrealized performance of eight stock shorts, with MicroStrategy down 64.8% and Coinbase down 51.8%, ahead of SanDisk, Palantir, Netflix, IBM, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Apple, up 26.2%, and the S&P 500, up 4%, were the positions moving against him. The article noted that the two biggest decliners on his list were not AI stocks but crypto-linked equities, while Nvidia, a core AI name, was down only 8.6%. It also tied the broader market move to the Federal Reserve’s 9-3 decision to hold rates at 3.50% to 3.75%, after which the 30-year Treasury yield climbed to 5.201%, touching 5.244% intraday, and major U.S. indexes closed lower. Bitcoin was described as still trading in a dense turnover zone between $62,000 and $68,000, with roughly $316 million in liquidations over 24 hours after the Fed decision.

Corporate use of stablecoins and blockchain rails is moving well past small-scale crypto experiments and into payment operations, collateral management and debt issuance. The article contrasts that shift with a much older form of financial engineering: in the 1970s, U.S. companies exploited check-clearing delays to keep cash on their books for a few extra days when interest rates were above 10%. Today, the same underlying corporate goal — freeing trapped liquidity and speeding settlement — is being pursued with tokenized money and digital ledgers instead of distant bank branches and mailed checks. The piece points to several examples. Siemens first issued a €60 million bond on Polygon in February 2023 with a two-day settlement period, then completed a €300 million issuance in September 2024 via SWIAT and settled it in minutes using the Bundesbank’s trigger solution. Deel, which handles payroll for more than 40,000 companies and 1.5 million workers across more than 150 countries and territories, now lets firms use stablecoin treasuries for payroll and has introduced DLUSD. JPMorgan’s Kinexys processes roughly $5 billion a day and has cleared $3 trillion in total, while Tether generated $10.09 billion in profit in 2025 with a team of about 300. The central argument is that automation can remove operational friction in moving cash, collateral and securities, but it does not erase the cost of judging counterparties. Credit assessment, KYC, fraud reviews and margin calls still require people, even as the pipes become faster.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used what the source describes as his second-ever X post to announce the Open Secure AI Alliance, a new coalition with 37 founding members spanning chipmakers, cloud companies, security firms, and open-source communities. The alliance argues that closed and open models should coexist, but says open models and testing harnesses are essential for cybersecurity work. The source draws a sharp contrast between the alliance roster and an earlier open-weight letter backed by 32 companies. Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Cisco, Dell, Hugging Face, IBM, Palantir, and SpaceXAI are described as backing both efforts. OpenAI and Google later signed the public letter but did not join the alliance. Anthropic, according to the report, did neither. The article also links the alliance’s case to a July security incident disclosed by Hugging Face and later claimed by OpenAI on July 21. In that account, commercial frontier models refused to analyze attack logs because of guardrails, while Hugging Face used the open-source model GLM 5.2 on its own infrastructure to review more than 17,000 actions and cut forensic work from days to hours. The source further argues that Nvidia’s push for open models also aligns with its interest in expanding the market for local GPU computing as major AI customers pursue in-house chips.