PANews’ weekly funding roundup showed that the blockchain sector recorded nine financing deals worldwide between Sept. 14 and Sept. 20, with disclosed funding topping $223 million. Stablecoin payments stood out as the busiest crypto segment of the week, with Velocity, dtcpay and Fin.com each securing fresh capital to build settlement, fiat on-and-off-ramp and banking backend infrastructure. Investors in those rounds included Visa, Circle, Ripple, Coinbase Ventures and SBI, pointing to continued capital flows beyond stablecoin issuance and into payment rails and compliance-heavy infrastructure. The largest checks, however, were written in AI infrastructure. Crypto data provider Kaiko expanded its latest round to $110 million with S&P Global leading, while AI compute infrastructure company Crusoe completed a $3.9 billion Series F at a post-money valuation of about $30.9 billion. Nvidia also committed $2 billion to Brookfield Asset Management’s global AI infrastructure fund. Elsewhere, the report covered funding across tokenized securities, RWA-backed finance, DePIN, AI chips, enterprise AI software, robotics and venture funds, showing how capital remained concentrated in infrastructure layers rather than consumer-facing narratives.

Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, partner Josh Elman said product management is fundamentally about telling a story rather than producing specification documents. In a post cited by ChainCatcher, Elman looked back on his early career at RealNetworks, where he started as an engineer and worked on the product and engineering teams for RealPlayer, a product that had hundreds of millions of users at the time. He also recalled interviewing for LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman, who asked what the output of a product manager was. Elman said he answered "specifications" at the time, but later came to see that as the wrong answer. In his view, the real output is a story that other people can repeat even when the product manager is not in the room. Elman added that he once wrote a 120-page specification document during his time at LinkedIn. He also argued that AI is collapsing production costs and reversing the development loop, making it possible to build prototypes first, test how they feel, and then move into design and release.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman called SpaceX a "pricier version of CoreWeave" and said xAI's 11 co-founders have all left. He also criticized US export controls on Anthropic as political, and argued OpenAI and Anthropic aren't zero-sum competitors.

Crypto market dipped on Feb 27: BTC at $67K, ETH near $2K, Fear & Greed Index at 13. Key news: Morgan Stanley plans in-house BTC custody, Telegram Wallet launches yield vaults, Upbit to delist Dent, Indiana passes crypto bill.

PayPal's stock fell from $307 to $41.49, wiping out 86% of market cap. Its alumni—Musk, Thiel, Hoffman—created over $2 trillion in value. New CEO from HP faces a painful restructuring.

At Consensus Miami, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said AI agents outnumbering humans will force a digital identity reboot, reviving NFTs. He called crypto the obvious answer for open internet trust and urged bipartisan policy engagement.

Dialog, an invitation-only organization co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2006, had its 2026 closed-door retreat registration list leaked — 222 names including Elon Musk, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Jared Kushner, and Eric Schmidt, plus political leanings and biometric data.

The tokenmaxxing debate escalates as Reid Hoffman supports tracking AI token usage for corporate adaptation, warning against quantitative worship. Meta's internal dashboard shutdown reveals the tension between encouraging AI use and avoiding perverse incentives.