Odaily reported that U.S. stock analyst Paradis said in a post on X that Leopold Aschenbrenner, known by some market watchers as an "AI stock guru," and his fund Situational Awareness may be active again. According to Paradis, a mysterious pool of capital has been aggressively buying concentrated, customized FLEX call options tied to several AI-related names since last Friday. The reported positions carry a combined premium of $315 million, with delta exposure of $1.1 billion and vega of $5.8 million. Paradis listed seven trades: SNDK, BE, INTC, CRWV, DRAM, SKHY, and AMD, all in January-dated call structures with different strike combinations and sizable premium outlays. He added that if similar block FLEX call purchases later appear in MU, NBIS, and TSM, that would strongly support the view that Leopold and his fund are behind the activity. Paradis said the data came from CBOE, while trading desks at Nomura and Goldman Sachs currently share the view that the flow points to the same mystery buyer.

Anthropic has released test results showing Claude designing protein binders from scratch across 15 targets, with successful binders reported for 14 of them and a top hit rate of 35.1% in a single-target setup. In multi-target mode, Mythos Preview posted a 26.7% hit rate and Claude Opus 4.8 came in at 22.6%, based on runs lasting 48 hours and using as much as 12,500 NVIDIA H100 hours. The company said the outputs were independently checked in the lab by Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience. Anthropic also highlighted specific cases. On RBX1, Mythos Preview reached 40%, while participants in an Adaptyv Bio competition averaged 3.7%, and Claude’s top design outperformed the winning entry among 245 submissions. On TNFα, however, Opus 4.8 succeeded while Mythos Preview failed, with Anthropic saying it does not know why. The company also reported 15 confirmed binders containing beta strands across six targets, a harder class of structural design. A separate chemistry-analysis test using Claude Opus 5 produced results that Anthropic said closely matched lab output, including NMR workups and purity calls. Still, the company acknowledged limitations. It said minibinders are not a standard drug format, and critics including former pharma figure Martin Shkreli argued the binders showed weak affinity and no intracellular targeting. The report also noted that Isomorphic Labs has already advanced AI-designed oncology drugs into human clinical trials.

PANews’ Aug. 18 roundup put a wide range of crypto, regulatory, and AI-linked developments on the tape, led by a proposed U.S. Treasury rulemaking tied to the GENIUS Act. The Treasury said it is seeking public comment on the implementation framework for Section 3 of the law. Under the timeline described in the notice, payment stablecoin issuance in the U.S. would generally require a federal or state license starting Jan. 18, 2027, while digital asset service providers would generally be barred from offering U.S. users payment stablecoins issued by unlicensed issuers starting July 18, 2028. Public comments can be filed within 60 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register. Elsewhere, Bitmine added 9,926 ETH last week, lifting its total holdings to more than 5.81 million ETH. Strategy said it repurchased $132.2 million of STRC and raised its U.S. dollar reserves by $149.1 million to $4.8 billion, while keeping its Bitcoin holdings unchanged at 840,447 BTC. Unitree Robotics said its shares will begin trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Aug. 19, with initially unrestricted float accounting for 7.44% of total post-offering shares. The daily digest also covered the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust probe into Andreessen Horowitz, Ethereum Foundation warnings tied to the coming Glamsterdam upgrade, and a slate of funding, exchange, and tokenization updates.

Binance will remove seven spot trading pairs at 11:00 on Aug. 21, according to a newsflash published by ChainCatcher. The pairs set to be delisted are F/USDC, HIVE/USDC, ILV/USDC, LTC/BNB, NMR/USDC, STEEM/USDC and SUI/BNB. The notice only covers these specific spot pairs and does not indicate that trading in the underlying assets will end across the platform. Users will still be able to trade the related tokens through other available trading pairs on Binance. No additional details were provided in the brief update.

Binance said it will remove and stop trading for seven spot pairs on Aug. 21 at 11:00 UTC+8. The pairs listed in the notice are F/USDC, HIVE/USDC, ILV/USDC, LTC/BNB, NMR/USDC, STEEM/USDC, and SUI/BNB. The exchange also said it will end spot trading bot services tied to those pairs at the same time. The update was reported by BlockBeats on Aug. 18. No other trading pairs or additional service changes were mentioned in the brief notice.

The article outlines how AI is being integrated into crypto, highlights five AI-related tokens by market cap, and reviews the sector’s main use cases, benefits, and risks.

Numerai has raised a $30 million Series C round at a $500 million valuation, with additional support from J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s capacity commitment of up to $500 million for its hedge fund strategies.

Decentralized hedge fund Numerai said it has completed its third strategic buyback of Numeraire (NMR), purchasing $1.2 million worth of the token in the open market and lifting its cumulative buybacks over the past year to $3.2 million. The company said the move is meant to keep supporting its machine-learning competition ecosystem built around NMR staking. In Numerai’s system, data scientists stake NMR when submitting models; stronger performance earns rewards, while weaker performance results in the loss of part of the staked tokens. Numerai said this mechanism helps refine the Stake-Weighted Meta Model that powers its hedge fund. Company data also shows that since the first buyback began in July 2025, the number of active accounts on the platform has more than doubled. Assets under management rose from about $560 million at the end of 2025 to roughly $700 million currently. Before this latest buyback, Numerai’s treasury still held about 3.1 million NMR. The firm added that the transaction had already been completed before the announcement and was executed in batches through Coinbase Institutional to reduce the impact on market prices.