Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ, said around midday on Sept. 15 that it would be "too cool" if someone built an "immortal fruit fly" on BNB Chain. The remark quickly sparked speculative trading in related BSC-based tokens. According to GMGN market data cited by BlockBeats, on-chain AI agent protocol BORT surged more than 4x in a short period, with its market cap quoted at $3.67 million. NECTAR was quoted at a $1.61 million market cap, while its gain over the past hour reached 367x. The project’s developer said NECTAR uses a Flap buyback-and-burn model driven by real decision-making from a fruit fly brain. The "immortal fruit fly" idea traces back to a recent fruit fly brain model experiment involving about 166,700 neurons. Siyuan, a member affiliated with YZi Labs, wrote earlier in the day that BNB Chain could serve as a permanent layer to store brain states, memories, and interaction history, supporting post-death revival or shared evolution across multiple brains. BlockBeats warned that the tokens involved have small market caps and high volatility, and said investors should stay cautious.

Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, said on Sept. 15 that it would be "super cool" to see someone build an "immortal fruit fly" on BNB Chain. The idea traces back to a recent fruit fly brain model experiment involving about 166,700 neurons. Earlier the same morning, Siyuan, a member affiliated with YZi Labs, wrote that BNB Chain could serve as a permanent layer for storing brain states, memories, and interaction history. In that framing, the chain could support forms of post-death revival or shared evolution across multiple brains. The comments were reported by BlockBeats as part of a 7x24 news update.

In a nearly two-hour conversation hosted by 168X, investor and researcher Lao Bai laid out a broad thesis on where crypto stands in 2026 and where it may be headed next. His core view is blunt: the crypto industry has matured, token issuance works more like debt than financing, and the label "crypto VC" is likely to disappear over time as blockchain becomes part of the broader commercial stack rather than a standalone sector. Lao Bai, whose past roles include Amber, ABCDE and OKX Ventures, said his focus inside crypto has narrowed to a handful of sectors he still sees as having product-market fit: perpetuals, prediction markets, real-world assets and stablecoins. Even there, he drew sharp distinctions. Stablecoins and perpetual contracts, he argued, are crypto’s two strongest native inventions. Prediction markets, by contrast, do have real PMF but a much lower ceiling than perpetual trading. He also discussed Hyperliquid’s lead in Perp DEXs, the competitive setup around HIP-3 deployers such as TradeXYZ and Paragon, why security issues often stem from lending rather than pure perpetual products, and why exchanges are increasingly competing not just with Binance or OKX but with Robinhood, Interactive Brokers and even banks. His conclusion was equally direct: the endgame for exchanges is to become a single global gateway for risk assets.

Walden Robotics, a startup spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January, emerged from stealth on July 15 with a $300 million seed round and an $1.1 billion valuation. The financing was co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, Prologis Ventures and CoreWeave Ventures. The company reached unicorn status in about six months. Led by co-founder and CEO Russ Tedrake, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who previously led TRI’s robotics and machine learning team for nearly a decade, Walden is built on research that includes Diffusion Policy, Universal Manipulation Interface, Large Behavior Models, OpenVLA and the open-source simulator Drake. Its founding team also includes CTO Ben Burchfiel, COO Kerri Fetzer-Borelli, Chief Product Officer Dave Johnson, Chief Strategy Officer Adrien Gaidon, Chief Architect Siyuan Feng and AI lead Rares Ambrus. Walden’s pitch centers on commercializing TRI’s robotics work inside real production environments, starting with Toyota’s manufacturing system. The company says its Large Behavior Models are designed to let robots learn and transfer skills across tasks instead of being programmed one workflow at a time. TRI’s prior research used nearly 1,700 hours of robot data, 1,800 real-world tests and more than 47,000 simulation tests. Walden is combining autonomous operation with remote human assistance as it pushes those systems into factories and warehouses.