A long-form report from Blockworks Research argues that PUMP is one of the most mispriced assets in crypto, tying that view to PumpFun’s revenue profile, buyback structure, and expansion beyond launch infrastructure into consumer-facing trading products. The report says PumpFun has built one of the most profitable and durable infrastructure businesses in the sector, with annualized revenue at $677 million and the lowest weekly revenue volatility among the top 10 revenue-generating protocols. The core argument has two parts. First, the market may be over-penalizing the token-holder alignment risk in the near term even after PumpFun committed 50% of protocol revenue to programmatic PUMP buybacks and burns through April 2027. Second, the market may be misreading PumpFun’s business by focusing on the decline in meme coin market capitalization rather than on the company’s actual monetization point, which is concentrated in newly issued and very small-cap tokens. The report notes that 96% of revenue comes from tokens valued below $1 million. Using bear, base, and bull activity scenarios, the analysts model a valuation range of $0.0108 to $0.0205 for PUMP, equal to 2.3x to 4.4x the Sept. 9 price of $0.0047. In a stronger upside case tied to a return to prior peak activity, the report puts PUMP at $0.0299 to $0.0598. In a bearish case, it sees downside to $0.0011 to $0.0019.

Pantera Capital partner Jay Yu argues that GPU compute is still in the early stages of financialization, but its market structure may develop in ways that resemble electricity and other physical commodities. In his view, compute is constrained by chip type, time, and geography, which makes it heterogeneous rather than perfectly fungible, yet still capable of evolving into a globally traded asset class over the next five to 10 years. The article maps the sector through layers including hardware providers, compute service operators, clusters, inference platforms, application companies, brokers, OTC desks, index builders, and derivatives venues. Yu draws repeated comparisons with U.S. power markets, where physical delivery, benchmark formation, and risk transfer tools emerged over time. He suggests compute markets may follow a similar path, with physical GPU delivery venues anchoring index construction and futures trading. The piece also describes Nvidia as a possible “central bank” for the compute economy because of its control over chip release cycles, utilization dynamics, and residual-value support policies. It identifies four broad product categories already taking shape: physical delivery, index products, derivatives exchanges, and financing tools such as lending, treasury structures, synthetic stablecoins, insurance, and other risk-transfer products. At the same time, it says the sector still faces major issues around transparency, basis risk, standardization, and quality verification.

Hyperliquid’s oil perpetuals saw deeply negative funding rates on September 10, leaving short sellers effectively paying longs at an annualized rate of 500%, according to Protos. The exchange’s Brent and WTI contracts settle funding hourly, so traders on the crowded short side were sending payments directly to longs rather than receiving or paying a discretionary exchange subsidy. The setup came as oil prices surged, with crude back above $100 per barrel, up 6% on the day, 24% over 30 days, and 75% year to date in the report. Protos said Hyperliquid offers leverage of up to 20x on Brent oil, adding liquidation risk on top of funding costs. The report also noted that Hyperliquid News linked the unusually high funding rates to a monthly futures roll schedule between September 8 and September 14, while Protos argued such roll periods do not usually produce spikes of this magnitude. Earlier this year, ICE and CME had already asked Washington to police Hyperliquid’s anonymous oil books, warning that the venue could distort global pricing.

a16z Crypto said financial institutions can use and participate in permissionless blockchain networks under existing legal frameworks, arguing that compliance obligations do not force banks, broker-dealers, or asset managers onto institution-controlled permissioned chains. The firm said some traditional finance players favor permissioned systems because they worry about anonymous participants, validators, and exposure to sanctions or illicit finance risk on public networks. In its view, U.S. Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions rules require risk-based controls rather than the elimination of all risk. That means firms can place KYC, wallet and transaction monitoring, and sanctions screening at the application layer they directly control. a16z also pointed to prior guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which confirmed that banks may pay network fees on blockchain networks and hold crypto assets used for those fees. It added that technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs, private transactions, and proof of provenance can help institutions meet regulatory requirements without exposing client positions, counterparties, or trading strategies. The firm said institutions should build risk-based compliance systems for permissionless networks instead of walking away from the infrastructure because of a misreading of current law.

Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian said the company’s investment in AI infrastructure is backed by commercial demand rather than speculative buildout, arguing that the overall payback period for AI servers is less than two years. Speaking at the 2026 Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, Kurian said the figure is cut in half when Google uses its own Tensor Processing Units, implying a payback period of under one year for TPU-based systems. He also said most infrastructure contract value comes from five-year commitments, which improves revenue visibility and lowers recovery risk on heavy compute spending. Kurian described Google Cloud’s AI stack as spanning in-house chips, Gemini models, data platforms, security products and enterprise applications. He said the company’s annualized revenue is approaching $100 billion, new customer acquisition has more than doubled from a year earlier, and deals above $100 million have more than doubled on both a sequential and annual basis. Google Cloud now has more than 17 product lines generating over $1 billion in annual revenue, while Gemini Enterprise has been adopted by 90% of the Fortune 100, according to Kurian.

A working paper examining Venus, a DeFi lending protocol on BNB Smart Chain, argues that borrowers who use appreciated crypto as collateral to borrow dollar-pegged stablecoins may be shifting tax-motivated risk into shared lending pools. The authors — Lisa De Simone of the University of Texas at Austin, Peiyi Jin of the National University of Singapore, and Daniel Rabetti of the National University of Singapore — studied activity from Nov. 12, 2020 to July 31, 2022 across 15 major tokens on Venus. Their dataset covered about 13 million transactions and produced 1.36 million borrower-day observations, with roughly 3% of traders meeting the paper’s definition of default. The study uses the U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, effective Nov. 15, 2021, as an external shock tied to expectations that future digital-asset activity could be reported to the Internal Revenue Service. According to the paper’s main estimates, borrowers inferred to be connected to the U.S. became 24.5% less likely to trade assets after the law took effect than international users, while borrowers with stablecoin debt showed an additional 23% drop in trading activity. The authors also estimate that a 1% rise in tax-driven illiquidity is associated with an 11.2% increase in defaulting accounts and a 39.6% increase in defaulted loan balances, while stressing that tax is only one source of risk alongside collateral volatility and liquidation design.

A 2021 case involving a client calling himself Rusty has become a sharp example of the limits and risks of crypto wallet recovery. Rusty told wallet recovery specialist Chris Brooks that he and two others had won a lawsuit and gained access to 5,000 BTC, then worth about $53 million, along with $1 billion in ETH. Brooks and his father flew overnight to Georgia and spent a full day working on the wallets in a back office at a shopping mall. They ultimately found only about $10. The case sits at the center of a broader point made by recovery professionals: people often believe they have lost access to large crypto holdings, but in many situations the money was never in the wallet they are trying to open, or the issue stems from missing information rather than missing onchain funds. The report examines what can and cannot be recovered across mnemonic phrases, passwords, passphrases, and hardware wallets. Industry figures cited in the piece, including Bruno Krauss of ReWallet, Bitcoin educator Bennet, and Trezor analyst Lucien Bourdon, say some wallets can be recovered when users retain partial information or when software, password generation, or hardware defects create an opening. But if a truly random seed phrase is completely lost, there is usually no practical path back. They also warn that handing wallet backups to a recovery service creates a separate security problem, since anyone with the necessary seed data may be able to control the funds.

Global markets repriced stagflation risk on Sept. 1 after renewed U.S. strikes on Iranian targets pushed oil sharply higher and added to an existing selloff in sovereign bonds. U.S. crude futures briefly moved above $90 a barrel, while Japan’s 10-year government bond yield touched 3% for the first time since 1996. U.S. stocks, gold and bitcoin fell on the day, while the dollar and Treasury yields moved higher. The article argues that the bigger shift is not the headline move in crude alone, but the way energy prices, rates markets and risk assets are now trading together. Weak U.S. data on job openings, construction spending, manufacturing PMI and Dallas Fed services pointed to slower growth, yet higher prices for oil, diesel and natural gas kept inflation concerns alive. That combination has made the Federal Reserve’s policy path harder to read. Citing market participants including Goldman Sachs Delta One desk head Rich Privorotsky, J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Priya Misra, Natixis strategist John Briggs and Nomura’s Charlie McElligott, the report says pressure is building from refined products, long-end bond supply and hedging demand in options markets. At the same time, it notes the outlook remains uncertain: higher energy prices may not necessarily feed through to core inflation, and rising tail-risk hedges do not by themselves mean rates are set to surge in a straight line.