build

According to CoinDesk, Kraken's parent company Payward has invested billions of dollars over the past two years, expanding into futures and derivatives, tokenized stocks, and banking through acquisitions and self-built businesses, aiming to integrate trading, payments, asset management, and institutional services into a unified financial infrastructure.Payward's co-CEO Arjun Sethi stated that the company is not a holding company, but "a set of platforms, a balance sheet, a regulatory framework," with the core being to facilitate the flow of funds and assets between different businesses through "a single ledger."Payward has currently enhanced the U.S. futures and derivatives infrastructure through acquisitions such as NinjaTrader and Bitnomial, and plans to acquire a bank in Europe; its B2B infrastructure division Payward Services currently has at least 25 companies using its API, including Hyperliquid. In the second quarter of 2026, Payward's adjusted revenue was $508 million, a year-on-year increase of 17%.

On-chain data analysis platform Glassnode stated: As Bitcoin reaches $86,000, the bullish leverage in the options market is slowly rebuilding, and the open interest put/call ratio is rising.However, this is still far below the overheated levels seen near Bitcoin's peak. Speculation in perpetual contracts also remains sluggish, with the funding rate below neutral levels.

According to the Gate Institutional Weekly Report, the market was influenced by energy shocks, persistent inflation, and interest rate hike expectations over the past week. WTI crude oil briefly surpassed $100, and the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury bond approached 5% during the session. BTC fell to about $76,800 during the week. Institutional funds showed significant differentiation, with a net outflow of about $463 million from BTC ETFs, while ETH ETFs saw a net inflow of about $197 million. Gate TradFi's weekly trading volume was approximately $120 billion, with a notable increase in commodity trading activity.In an environment where market volatility and asset rotation coexist, Gate continues to improve its multi-asset service system covering digital assets and traditional financial markets, forming a trading system that includes spot, contracts, stocks, ETFs, options, and other TradFi assets. Recently, Gate launched U.S. stock options trading services, providing more tools for institutions to participate in global diversified asset allocation.At the same time, Gate is continuously promoting the collaborative upgrade of institutional trading infrastructure by reducing cross-exchange trading costs, optimizing API trading capabilities, and improving anomaly handling mechanisms, further enhancing institutional trading efficiency and execution experience. The product collaboration between OES and CrossEx is also accelerating; currently, OES supports CrossEx trading settlement functions, which have entered the internal testing phase, covering key aspects such as trade execution, margin management, fund settlement, and API services, driving the development of institutional trading infrastructure towards greater efficiency and collaboration.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins issued a statement regarding the committee's approval of the "innovation exemption." He pointed out that more than a week ago, Congress failed to advance the CLARITY Act, thus the SEC today took significant steps within its statutory authority to bring the U.S. capital markets into the digital age by promoting on-chain trading of specific tokenized stocks.The order grants two types of temporary, conditional exemptions under Section 36(a)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act: first, it exempts "Tokenized Securities Venues" (TSV) from the definition of "exchange" under the Securities Exchange Act; second, it exempts specific liquidity providers ("regulated companies") from the definition of "dealer." Atkins emphasized that the anti-fraud and anti-manipulation provisions of federal securities laws fully apply to all securities activities in these markets, without exception.The exemption comes with several investor protection conditions: TSV must be U.S. entities and comply with OFAC sanctions; access standards must be set for a licensing system, allowing only specific participants to trade; synthetic products cannot be used—tokenized NMS "national market system" stocks must be tokenized by the issuer of the underlying stock or its representative, or by a third party not affiliated with the issuer, and holders must enjoy the same rights as traditional securities (including dividends and voting rights); issuers have the right to oppose and prevent their securities from being traded on TSV.Atkins stated that the committee is not solidifying current technology as future standards but rather allowing the market to evolve, monitoring its development, and using this as a basis to establish a more flexible, future-oriented regulatory framework. This exemption is a temporary measure, and the committee is seeking public input on all aspects, emphasizing that this transitional arrangement must be followed by the establishment of permanent rules to ensure that on-chain markets maintain a viable path as capital markets evolve.

Cosmos Ventures, a venture capital firm, has announced its establishment. Brendan McCord and Matt Mandel launched Fund I with a scale of $77.6 million, which will support philosopher-type builders who establish institutions for the AI era. McCord is the founder of Cosmos Institute and Cosmos Ventures, while Mandel comes from Union Square Ventures. The fund has invested in AIUC, Prime Intellect, Workshop Labs (which has been acquired by Thinking Machines), and an undisclosed education company. LPs include Reid Hoffman, Joe Liemandt, Stand Together, Fred Wilson, Micky Malka, and Astera Institute.Cosmos Ventures stated that AI represents the largest institutional building window since the founding of the United States. The world has previously developed around the assumption of intelligence being bound to humanity, and AI is breaking this binding, with many necessary institutions yet to be established. Institutional coding theorizes how to live together, and founders must answer normative questions that machines cannot answer and become philosopher-type builders. The institution proposes the slogan for the AI era, "Condere aude," which means dare to create.

Virtuals Protocol announced the launch of Occupy, a product that serves as a launch platform deployed on Base. Each token on Occupy is paired with a tokenized stock, and all tokens corresponding to the same stock are collectively injected into the same treasury, which is managed by a ten-seat AI Senate elected by the holders.40% of each fee is used to purchase the paired stock and inject it into the treasury. The Senate can decide to hold the stock, allocate stock to holders, or repurchase tokens, and operate the community X account. Candidates must publish their ideas and declarations, and holders vote to decide the seats. Creators can receive 30% of each fee.

User Kevin Bass posted that he has audited the finances of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic and found shocking circumstances, thus calling for Congress to investigate. Bass stated: Anthropic not only seeks regulatory capture but has also built an unshuttable regulatory capture machine, with structural financial incentives making it impossible to shut down its AI doomsday loop. This loop begins with METR, which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed to be assessed for model risk by a third-party evaluation agency and suggested METR.Bass claimed that METR financially relies on Anthropic's success, particularly the explosive growth of Anthropic stock exceeding $7 billion. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, which constitutes the majority of the organization's portfolio, and GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic network ecosystem. This stock was worth $500 million earlier last year and is now valued at over $7.7 billion about 16 months later. METR cannot afford to interrupt this growth.Bass pointed out that the same organization funding METR also funds organizations promoting AI doomsday, such as the Tarbell Center, which has published articles in The Verge, Science, Los Angeles Times, and others. These organizations all rely on the same funding. Bass stated that METR and others are not independent of Anthropic and cannot provide independent assessments; Congress must investigate.

Market news says that Pinterest is collaborating with Nvidia to build a new artificial intelligence layer.

Regarding the recent collaboration between Binance and Robinhood at the ecosystem level, BNB Chain ecosystem member Spigg stated that the Binance wallet has integrated Robinhood Chain, PancakeSwap has been deployed to Robinhood Chain, and Binance contracts have also launched Robinhood Chain tokens, while Robinhood has reciprocally launched BNB, with both parties as "competitors" still opening up their ecosystems to each other.In response, Binance co-founder Zhao Changpeng posted, "The BNB ecosystem is open." He also jokingly remarked that while some ecosystems claim to be "decentralized," they actually operate in a very "closed garden" manner.

ChainCatcher crypto trader Bonk Guy posted on the X platform in response to the recent controversy surrounding his purchase of EMBER and explained his investment logic. Bonk Guy stated that he first noticed the project when EMBER's market cap was about 3 million dollars but did not buy in. After observing for a day due to the rapid growth of platform data, he re-evaluated and bought in from a market cap of about 7 million dollars all the way up to a 20 million dollar market cap.Bonk Guy mentioned that EMBER is the main Launchpad based on Meteora, supporting the use of SOL, USDC, and over 150 tokenized stocks as paired assets for issuing tokens, and employs Meteora Dynamic Bonding Curve technology, while also providing features such as token tax distribution, Daily Jackpots, and DAO governance.According to his disclosure, Ember recorded about 51.7 million dollars in trading volume and 561,000 dollars in fees within 3 days of launch, with a total of 2,041 tokens issued, over 41,800 unique wallet addresses, and 149,000 Solana transactions. Bonk Guy compared his purchase of Ember to his previous trade in PONS, stating that he first saw PONS when its market cap was below 1 million dollars, similarly ignoring it for a whole day, and then began buying in at around a 4 million dollar market cap. Rather than whether a popular token has already emerged, it is more important to observe the real usage data underlying the Launchpad.Additionally, Bonk Guy stated that both Robinhood Chain and BNB Chain have multiple successful Launchpads, and that Solana's meme trading ecosystem has developed over a longer period, so there is no reason to believe that Solana can ultimately only accommodate one successful Launchpad. He also mentioned that his trading decisions are not based on market consensus. Some of his past most successful trades often came from identifying opportunities before the market formed a consensus; by the time everyone recognizes it, the asymmetric upside potential is usually significantly reduced.Regarding the recent controversy, Bonk Guy stated that the claim "EMBER has over 50% of Bubblemaps address clusters" has been clarified by Bubblemaps; his previous statement that Ember "was launched by Meteora" is also inaccurate, with a more accurate description being that Ember is based on Meteora's related infrastructure, which is now included in the Meteora ecosystem page. Bonk Guy emphasized that he has no relationship with the Ember team, and EMBER is a personal trade for him.

4D Labs announced that it has received investment from YZi Labs through the EASY Residency Season 2. The project aims to build a real-world embodied data layer for physical artificial intelligence, transforming real interactions into embodied data that can be used for training, supporting the expansion of artificial intelligence from language capabilities to action capabilities.

According to Bloomberg, Italian bank UniCredit SpA is considering expanding its digital asset-related services, including the early-stage development of digital asset custody and brokerage capabilities.Insiders say the bank is screening technology providers to build infrastructure for holding digital assets and supporting buy and sell transactions.

Cisco announced a collaboration with Palantir and NVIDIA to establish a secure artificial intelligence factory to streamline the deployment of artificial intelligence.

Jack Dorsey's payment company Block has applied to establish Builders Bank & Trust, N.A. If approved, the bank will become an uninsured national trust bank directly regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), focusing on providing custody and trust services for Bitcoin and stablecoins, without accepting deposits or issuing loans.The application is still pending OCC approval, and the OCC's public list of digital asset license applications currently includes 11 pending applications (submitted between February 23 and August 19), which does not yet include Builders Bank. Previously, the OCC conditionally approved five national trust applications in December 2025, including Circle's First National Digital Currency Bank and Ripple, as well as conversion applications from BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos; Circle received final approval in July of this year.The Bank Policy Institute (BPI), representing large banks, had previously opposed a series of limited-purpose national trust license applications, arguing that companies should not obtain trust licenses unless they plan to operate a true trust company, and warned against using the license as a lightly regulated pathway for bank-like products. Block stated that Builders Bank will not begin operations until it receives the necessary regulatory approvals.

According to the Seoul Economic Daily, Hanwha Investment & Securities has established a token securities platform based on the Avalanche blockchain. This platform was developed by the blockchain technology company FairSquare Lab and is designed to operate on multiple networks, including Avalanche and the enterprise-level blockchain Hyperledger Besu.