Aave tokenholders have been watching for signs that the protocol might restart AAVE buybacks, but DeFi researcher Chado argues the path is far less straightforward than the market may hope. The overhang traces back to the April 18 rsETH incident tied to Kelp DAO’s LayerZero bridge route, which left Aave dealing with a large hole after undercollateralized rsETH was used to borrow WETH on the protocol. While asset freezes, recoveries and expected liquidations reduced the shortfall, Aave still ended up committing 25,000 ETH from its treasury and taking on a long-term financing facility from Mantle of up to 30,000 ETH. Chado’s analysis focuses on what that means for cash flow. Over the 144 days after the incident, Aave generated about $181.2 million in protocol fees, but only around $24 million was retained by Aave DAO, or roughly $167,000 per day. That was down about 41% from the prior 144-day period. Using ETH at about $2,639 and assuming the full 30,000 ETH Mantle facility, the loan would equal roughly $79 million. At the recent retained-income pace, repaying that amount would theoretically take about 473 days. Chado frames that as a static stress test rather than a fixed repayment plan, but the conclusion is clear: until Aave’s balance sheet is repaired, protocol income may struggle to flow back to AAVE holders.

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.

Crypto commentator @TheDeFiInvestor has outlined a packed week of protocol and product catalysts, with Balancer and Aave drawing the most attention. Balancer is set to hold a Snapshot vote from Sept. 25 to Sept. 29 on a proposal to wind down the protocol, halt new business development, and distribute at least $9 million in treasury assets pro rata to BAL holders who burn their tokens. The proposal follows a 2025 exploit that drained more than $128 million from v2 stable pools across multiple chains and a prolonged collapse in protocol revenue. If approved, liquidity providers would need to exit by Oct. 30, with the first redemption window opening in late May 2027. Aave, meanwhile, is preparing what founder Stani Kulechov called Aavenomics 3.0. According to The Defiant, the plan would replace the current committee-run buyback model with an automated, non-discretionary onchain mechanism funded by protocol revenue and income from the GHO stablecoin. Elsewhere, Avalanche’s Helicon upgrade will go live on Sept. 22, Binance Wallet and PancakeSwap have launched a Pre-Access subscription channel for tokenized exposure to private companies, and Injective’s Meridian upgrade is scheduled for Sept. 24 with a focus on regulated real-world asset issuance.

A statement signed by 25 Fields Medalists, including Terence Tao and Yu Deng, has sharpened a growing dispute between the mathematics community and major artificial intelligence companies. Released on Sept. 11 local time, the statement argues that using the solution of headline mathematical problems as a benchmark for model capability is harming mathematics itself and pulling research away from the field’s core aim: conceptual understanding. The immediate backdrop was OpenAI’s Sept. 8 claim that an undisclosed internal model solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem in 88 hours. That announcement landed just after New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpoge disclosed related progress on Sept. 7. Buckmaster later accused OpenAI of ramping up effort after hearing of his team’s advance and said he suspected unpublished drafts he had entered into OpenAI’s coding tools may have been exposed to its models. OpenAI denied that claim, while saying it could not fully rule out indirect effects from user data in training. In an interview with China Newsweek on Sept. 12, 2010 Fields Medalist Stanislav Smirnov said AI should not be rejected outright, but argued that mathematicians, researchers and AI firms need rules quickly to address authorship, ethics and the limits of machine-led research.

PANews’ latest funding roundup shows capital in crypto continued to cluster around stablecoin payments, compliance tooling, and the convergence of traditional finance with digital assets, while AI dealmaking stayed centered on infrastructure. In crypto, Nasdaq invested $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken, valuing the company at $21 billion. Latitude raised a $35 million Series A for cross-border stablecoin payment infrastructure, and TRM Labs’ valuation doubled to $2 billion after another follow-on investment from existing backers. Circle also said it plans to acquire cross-border payments platform Tazapay in an all-stock deal valued at about $400 million, pending regulatory approval and expected to close in 2027. PANews said that from Sept. 7 to Sept. 13, the global blockchain sector recorded eight disclosed financing events with total funding of more than $158 million. Elsewhere, Antarctic Exchange, Agentum, RealGo, and TINA all announced fresh raises, while Sei Labs acquired Bilinear Labs. In AI, infrastructure remained the dominant theme. French startup Mistral AI closed a €3 billion Series D at a post-money valuation above €21 billion. Positron raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation, Celero Communications secured $275 million at a valuation above $3 billion, and Cognition raised $2 billion, lifting its valuation to $48 billion. Additional rounds went to Clay, Savvy Wealth, Lightfield, and Herdr, while Meta acquired Sweden-based Stilla.ai.

Twenty-five Fields Medalists have signed a declaration titled "Mathematics and AI" on mathandai.org, arguing that the way AI companies measure progress in mathematics does not match what the field actually values. The signatories include Terence Tao, Peter Scholze, Maryna Viazovska, June Huh, Pierre Deligne, and 2026 winner Yu Deng, spanning award years from 1978 to 2026. The statement says large language models have improved sharply in recent months and are now capable of solving major open problems across many areas, but it draws a line between producing answers and building conceptual understanding. According to the declaration, famous open problems matter because they mark progress, not because they are the final objective. The document also warns that AI-generated solutions are often announced too quickly, without enough time for proper writing, distilling new ideas and methods, or citing earlier related work. That, the signatories say, can blur credit and make results harder to absorb into the mathematical canon. The declaration does not name any company or case. Still, the debate echoes a controversy reported by Chain News on Sept. 9, after OpenAI said GPT-6 Astra had made a breakthrough on the Navier-Stokes equations and some mathematicians questioned whether the company published ahead of researchers using Codex.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov said on Sept. 10 that he had submitted comments to HM Revenue & Customs, proposing changes to the tax treatment of crypto-backed lending and stablecoins in the UK. He also said stablecoins should be included in Individual Savings Accounts, or ISAs. According to Kulechov, that change could allow millions of UK ISA users to receive tax benefits in the future when lending out stablecoins. The statement was made in a post cited by BlockBeats.

AI-native CRM company Lightfield has raised $47 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, with participation from Maverick Capital, Coatue, Greylock, Lightspeed, Audacious Ventures and Alumni Ventures. The round also included founders and individual investors such as Guillermo Rauch, Immad Akhund, Mati Staniszewski, Jeff Wang, Scott Belsky, Avichal Garg, Nick Talken and Zack Kisner. The company said it will use the new capital to speed up growth and expand its AI agent capabilities. Lightfield’s product focuses on automatically consolidating customer interaction data and building a company “world model,” allowing agents to source opportunities, move deals forward and manage customer relationships. Since launching in November 2025, the company has registered more than 5,000 businesses.