astr

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market event "Houston Astros vs. Chicago White Sox" on Polymarket, the win probability for the "Houston Astros" option in the sub-market "Houston Astros vs. Chicago White Sox" has experienced significant fluctuations, rising from 17.5% an hour ago to the current 69.55% (a fluctuation of 52.05%). Please note the impact of relevant breaking news.

Gate US officially announced that Gate AI and Alpaca will collaborate on the development vision of Agentic Trading, promoting the integration of AI infrastructure and trading system capabilities to provide underlying support for the next generation of intelligent trading applications.Alpaca has built a trading API that is developer and AI Agent friendly, with its community continuously transforming trading ideas into actual projects, covering research processes, simulated trading systems, and Agentic workflows that connect market data, analysis, and execution logic. Gate AI focuses on building an infrastructure layer for AI Agents and developers, where the GateRouter unified API helps developers quickly access over 25 mainstream AI models and balances cost and performance through intelligent routing.Both Gate AI and Alpaca agree that AI trading Agent developers should not have to choose between high-quality trading execution infrastructure and AI infrastructure, but should be able to obtain support for both in a smoother manner. Next, Gate AI will explore how its model routing and Agent infrastructure can connect to trading workflows built on APIs like Alpaca, supporting developers in integrating market data, AI reasoning, and trading execution into Agentic systems.Gate AI and Alpaca also plan to promote knowledge sharing and best practice exchanges between their developer communities, continuously lowering the development threshold and complexity of AI-native trading applications. Gate AI and Alpaca will continue to explore collaborative efforts around the construction of the Agentic Trading ecosystem, providing foundational support for developers to build more efficient and scalable next-generation intelligent trading applications.

According to BBX data, yesterday and in recent days, global companies listed on the US stock market have disclosed the latest real announcements regarding digital asset transformation and ecological strategic investments. The core dynamics are as follows:Canton sells traditional business to fully transition to blockchain clearing: Canton Strategic Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: $ CNTN) officially announced that it has sold its biotechnology R&D department Gravitas Life Sciences, LLC to Gravitas Collective Corp. The transaction was completed on July 17, 2026. The company clearly stated that this divestiture is an important milestone in its transformation into an operating company, and in the future, it will support the Canton Network through Canton Coin and promote the on-chain digital transformation of traditional financial markets as a strategic investor.Empery Digital invests $20 million in cross-industry computing power electricity park: The US-listed company Empery Digital Inc. (NASDAQ: $ EMPD), which adopts a Bitcoin fund management strategy, announced that it has completed a $20 million preferred stock investment (holding approximately 8%) in Cardinal Data Power, Inc. (CDP) on July 20, 2026. CDP focuses on building electricity-driven data center parks, and this round of financing will support its construction of the first gigawatt-level data center park covering over 3,000 acres in West Texas (Phase I is planned to be operational in 2027, with a long-term plan exceeding 5GW) to meet the next generation of AI and computing power energy demands.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the market prediction event "Miami Marlins vs. Houston Astros" on Polymarket, the probability of the "Yes" option in the sub-market "Extra Innings" has experienced a dramatic fluctuation, rising from 6% an hour ago to the current 50% (a fluctuation of 44%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

According to The Block, the on-chain infrastructure layer SwarmBase, aimed at autonomous AI agents, has announced the completion of a $7 million financing round. This round was co-invested by Castrum Capital, M2M Capital, Notch Ventures, and Becker Ventures. Among them, Castrum Capital contributed an additional $4 million investment.It is reported that SwarmBase is a full-stack on-chain infrastructure protocol for autonomous AI agents. The platform provides core foundational modules such as identity, reputation, coordination, and transactions, enabling AI agents to operate independently through audited smart contracts.The funds raised in this round will primarily be used for the development of the SwarmBase protocol and ecological expansion, as well as preparations for the upcoming Token TGE. Castrum Capital stated that SwarmBase is well-positioned to lead the next wave of AI agents.

According to DigitalToday, the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) and the Ministry of Science and ICT have launched the "Deposit Token Payment Infrastructure Expansion Project," which will extend the results of South Korea's CBDC pilot "Project Hangang" into the private payment sector.The project is overseen by the Financial Settlement Agency, with participation from 9 banks, 8 payment gateways, and 2 large demand-side entities, with a total budget of 9.6 billion KRW, aimed at reducing payment fees for small and micro merchants. The project utilizes existing payment systems rather than building new infrastructure, allowing users to complete payments through bank deposit token wallets without requiring merchants to change terminals.The government also plans to apply deposit tokens to a pilot for official travel expenses and explore a treasury fund management model linked with dBrain. Approximately 3 billion KRW of the total project budget will be invested in the development, operation, and promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises, startups, and IT companies, while participating banks will separately advance about 4.5 billion KRW in related businesses.

According to Gate Ventures' latest weekly report, influenced by the escalation of geopolitical risks and changes in the AI competitive landscape, all three major U.S. stock indices fell last week, energy prices rose significantly, and the trends of safe-haven assets like gold and U.S. Treasuries diverged. The cryptocurrency market continued its structural trend, with Bitcoin and Ethereum rising by 1.5% and 3.6%, respectively, while both spot BTC and ETH ETFs maintained net inflows.In terms of industry development, regulation and real-world applications continued to be the focus this week. Japanese convenience store giant Lawson, in collaboration with Netstars, is advancing a stablecoin payment pilot, further promoting the use of stablecoins in everyday consumption scenarios; South Korea plans to officially incorporate digital assets into its national asset management framework and explore the tokenization of government bonds and state-owned assets, with the construction of RWA infrastructure continuing to accelerate. In Europe, after the transition period of MiCA ended, the total number of licensed institutions increased to 294, although the number of new licenses has slowed down, institutional participation remains strong.In terms of investment and financing, the cryptocurrency industry recorded a total of 16 financing events last week, highly concentrated in the infrastructure sector: among them, Alpaca completed a $135 million financing to enhance tokenized securities and AI financial infrastructure; Flex completed a $70 million financing to further expand its stablecoin cross-border payment network, continuously confirming the capital market's long-term optimism towards digital financial infrastructure. Gate Ventures believes that as the global regulatory framework gradually improves and the integration of traditional finance and blockchain deepens, the digital asset ecosystem is expected to enter a more mature and diverse development stage.

According to a report by businesswire, the stablecoin and digital asset financial infrastructure service provider Cordant announced the completion of an $8 million seed round financing, led by Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT, with participation from Bankless VC, FJ Labs, SignalFire, Quona, Next Stage, Selah Ventures, Flatironx, Nascent Ventures, Silvercircle Ventures, and Generative Ventures. The new funds will support its introduction of new payment networks and AI automation tools.Cordant is collaborating with financial institutions on product co-development, covering banking, payments, embedded finance, cross-border transactions, stablecoins, and digital assets. Among them, the Latin American digital asset and payment platform Bitso and the blockchain infrastructure company Paxos are both participating as investors and design partners.

According to Jinshi reports, Microsoft has agreed to invest billions of dollars in Mistral's European computing infrastructure to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure in Europe.

After completing a rigorous and comprehensive security review, United Stables officially announced the adoption of Chainlink as the official data and cross-chain infrastructure driving the U stablecoin.

AI inference infrastructure startup Infinity announced the completion of a $15 million financing round, with the company's valuation reaching $100 million. Investors in this round include Touring Capital, Principal VC, and researchers from organizations such as OpenAI and Anthropic.The company is developing a general reasoning library that enables different AI chips to automatically reproduce cutting-edge AI research results and enhance hardware performance through software optimization.

According to CoinDesk, cryptocurrency wallet company Exodus Movement (EXOD) announced that it will cut about 25% of its global workforce to reduce operating costs and shift its business towards stablecoin payments and card payment infrastructure.Exodus stated in regulatory filings that this restructuring is part of the company's strategy to build a full-stack payment platform. The company has been continuously integrating the acquired electronic money institution Monavate and cryptocurrency payment company Baanx to expand its payment capabilities and global business layout.Exodus expects that this round of layoffs will result in pre-tax restructuring costs of $2.5 million to $3.5 million, mainly for employee severance and related costs. Affected employees will receive severance compensation, benefits continuation, and transitional support.The company anticipates that after the restructuring is completed, it can reduce cash operating expenses by $10 million to $13 million annually, with related savings fully realized by 2027.In the market, EXOD rose about 2.2% in pre-market trading on Monday, but its cumulative decline over the past year is still close to 85%. This adjustment reflects that cryptocurrency companies are accelerating their transformation towards stablecoin payments, financial infrastructure, and other business directions.

Gate US announced a partnership with SoFi to become an infrastructure partner, helping to drive the future development of finance. As a national chartered bank, SoFi possesses strong financial strength, a solid regulatory foundation, and modern banking infrastructure, facilitating smoother connections between traditional finance and digital assets. Through this collaboration, Gate US has activated SoFi's Big Business Banking account, which is part of its ongoing efforts to build secure, compliant, and scalable financial solutions for the U.S. ecosystem.At the same time, Gate US is preparing to launch ACH and Wire functionalities. Once the ACH service is online, it is expected to allow users to link their bank accounts and make direct deposits into their Gate US accounts; the upcoming Wire feature aims to support larger and faster domestic transfers within the U.S. backed by institutional-grade banking infrastructure. Both functionalities are expected to be launched in the U.S. jurisdictions where Gate US is licensed, highlighting Gate US's compliance-first philosophy. Gate US holds MTL licenses in 36 states and operates in 47 jurisdictions across the U.S. In addition, multiple entities under Gate have completed relevant regulatory registrations, license applications, or received authorizations and approvals in jurisdictions such as Malta, the Bahamas, Japan, Australia, and Dubai. In the future, Gate US will continue to advance its compliance infrastructure, expand the accessibility of digital asset services, and provide users with safer and smoother financial solutions.

Injective stated that it has submitted a transfer agent registration application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The transfer agent is responsible for maintaining the official ownership records of securities and handling transfer changes, a function typically maintained by specialized institutions off-chain in traditional markets.This application aims to migrate this core market function on-chain, allowing the tokens themselves to serve as ownership records, thereby enabling the registration and transfer of tokenized securities to be completed in seconds and reducing intermediary verification steps.

According to CNBC, AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI announced the completion of a $1.5 billion financing round, with the company's valuation reaching $17.5 billion. The company had previously received support from NVIDIA and primarily provides cloud-based services for open-source AI model deployment, helping businesses deploy artificial intelligence applications at a lower cost.This round of financing was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from institutions such as NVIDIA, Evantic, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Currently, Fireworks processes approximately 400 trillion AI tokens daily. The company's clients include businesses such as Elastic, GitLab, and MongoDB. Previously, more than half of its revenue came from the AI programming tool Cursor, but the client base has now become more diversified.

According to Cointelegraph, the fintech platform MoonPay has acquired the crypto infrastructure startup Glide and will integrate its deposit and routing technology, with the financial terms of the transaction undisclosed.Glide was founded in 2023 by Tushar Soni and Qinyu Tong, who were both part of the Robinhood Wallet team. Glide supports over 100 tokens across 30 blockchain networks, helping applications receive deposits from various tokens, wallets, exchanges, and payment sources.After the acquisition is completed, Glide's technology will be integrated into MoonPay Deposits, a product already used by applications such as Wallet in Telegram, Moonshot, and Paysafe. MoonPay stated that this transaction is part of its efforts to expand its digital asset infrastructure capabilities. This is MoonPay's sixth acquisition announced in 2026, with previous targets including Sodot, Decent, DFlow, Entendre, and Dawn Labs. Its investors include Thrive Capital, Paradigm, Valhalla Ventures, Tiger Global Management, and Coatue.

According to PR Newswire, AI computing power energy infrastructure Bloom Energy announced a massive project investment of $1.7 billion, with participation from Industrial Development Funding (IDF) and asset management giant Oaktree.It is reported that Bloom Energy will provide exclusive "behind-the-meter power" capabilities for AI cloud computing company Nebius to meet the growing demand for AI computing power.

According to Cointelegraph, ARK Invest's research director Lorenzo Valente published a rebuttal to a16z crypto's view that "traditional finance will adopt blockchain rather than DeFi," arguing that institutions will increasingly rely on DeFi infrastructure in the future.Valente stated that public chains are leading private chain projects in actual development, with the growth of tokenized assets on open networks like Ethereum as an example. He also believes that crypto-native companies like Circle and Coinbase are better positioned than traditional financial institutions to build the next generation of financial infrastructure.a16z crypto previously stated that banks and asset management institutions would not directly adopt DeFi but would choose blockchain technologies that comply with existing regulatory, governance, and operational requirements, including features like tokenization and atomic settlement, while continuing to maintain licensing and institutional control.Sentora co-founder Jesus Rodriguez also disagreed with a16z's viewpoint, suggesting that institutions might adopt the underlying infrastructure of DeFi and overlay compliance, custody, and other enterprise-level controls on top of it.

According to a report by businesswire, AI and tokenized financial infrastructure Alpaca announced the completion of a new round of financing totaling $135 million, led by Peak XV, with follow-on investments from Elefund, BNP Paribas's venture capital arm Opera Tech Ventures, and Unbound among others. To date, its total financing has reached $435 million.The new funds will be used to accelerate the construction of its AI-native brokerage infrastructure and API-first prime brokerage business, helping fintech companies, banks, brokerages, wealth management institutions, and crypto financial platforms to build investment products in both traditional and on-chain markets, and to connect with more global crypto exchanges, asset tokenization platforms, and financial institutions.

Digital asset prime broker FalconX will acquire blockchain infrastructure company bloXroute.By combining bloXroute's network technology with FalconX's institutional trading platform, FalconX will accelerate the development of new trading, financing, and prime brokerage capabilities.