Elfa AI has launched Iris, a real-time intelligence stack that turns live news, markets and social signals into structured, actionable context for AI agents and traders.

Beyond the data layer, Iris is also a runtime for autonomous finance agents, handling sandboxing, persistent memory, triggers, guardrails and hosting, so teams can go from an API key to a production agent quickly. It pairs with the Elfa app's "Ask Elfa" chat and in-app trading.

Elfa says Iris covers 300K+ sources and 100K+ markets at sub-two-minute latency. Access is metered per request in USDC via the x402 standard on Base, Arbitrum, Polygon or Avalanche, and Elfa AI has no token.

The startup is pulling real-world e-commerce financing onchain. Rather than trading yield, it packages the repayment cash flows of online merchants — think Amazon sellers waiting on payouts — into tokenized, yield-bearing vaults, with credit underwriting handled by cross-border e-commerce lender Dowsure.

That financing is already live through partner vaults on BNB Chain (via Lista DAO) and Sui (via Volo), where the yield comes from real merchant repayments rather than token emissions.

Crypto venture capital participation has dropped to its lowest level in nearly six years, with only 150 unique VC firms joining funding rounds in July 2026 (as of July 28).

The figure marks a sharp decline from the May 2022 peak of 1,177 active investors, highlighting a market where capital is becoming increasingly concentrated among a smaller group of highly selective funds.

Despite the drop in investor participation, crypto startups are still expected to raise around $1.2 billion in July, suggesting that fewer firms are deploying larger amounts of capital into high-conviction opportunities.

Funding continues to favor sectors such as crypto exchanges, trading infrastructure, AI-powered blockchain projects, and lending protocols, while DeFi investment has declined for the third consecutive quarter, reaching its lowest level since late 2023.

The latest data suggests the crypto VC market is shifting from broad participation toward fewer deals backed by larger checks and stronger conviction.

1inch has launched Aqua, which it calls the first "shared liquidity protocol" — a design that effectively turns a user's own wallet into a self-custodial AMM.

Instead of locking funds into pool contracts, a single wallet balance can back many DeFi strategies at once. Liquidity is pulled atomically only at the moment a trade executes, so the same capital can be reused across strategies simultaneously.

"Aqua solves liquidity fragmentation for market makers by multiplying effective capital. From now on, the only limit to your capital efficiency is your strategy," said 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov. Built on the SwapVM protocol, Aqua aims to do for makers what 1inch's 2019 aggregator did for takers.

Aqua is a separate protocol from the 1inch aggregator, and no 1INCH token mechanic has been tied to it.

A chipmaker just became China's most valuable public company overnight. CXMT raised $8.6B, popped 466% on debut, and now trades above Intel by market cap.

It is China's answer to Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, and it is coming for the memory market fast. Everything you need to know.

Securitize's asset-management subsidiary, Securitize Capital, has registered with the SEC as an investment adviser, stepping up from an exempt reporting adviser to full regulatory oversight — public disclosure, compliance and periodic exams.

The status lets it work directly with asset managers and institutions on tokenized investment strategies. It becomes a fourth regulated pillar alongside Securitize's broker-dealer/ATS, transfer-agent and fund-administration arms.

"Asset managers and institutional investors want to work with partners that understand both the opportunity of tokenization and the obligations that come with operating in regulated markets," said Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo.

Securitize tokenizes more than $5B in assets — including BlackRock's ~$2.6B BUIDL fund — and works with Apollo, KKR and VanEck. Its recently listed stock (NYSE: SECZ) slipped on the day.

On Monday, July 27, 2026, a company most crypto traders had never heard of became the most valuable listed firm in mainland China. ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, priced its Shanghai IPO at 8.66 yuan and closed its first day up about 466%, briefly worth more than Intel. It raised $8.6 billion, the biggest mainland listing since Agricultural Bank of China in 2010 and Asia's largest IPO of the year. And here is the part that matters for this audience: crypto markets had already priced it, on pre-IPO futures, before a single share traded on the exchange.

Here is the full breakdown.

What is CXMT?

CXMT is a memory chipmaker founded in 2016 in Hefei, Anhui Province, to reduce China's reliance on imported memory. It is now the country's largest maker of DRAM, the memory inside phones, PCs, servers and AI systems, and the fourth-largest DRAM producer in the world behind Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Its global DRAM share has climbed from under 4% to roughly 8% in a year, and it is the only Chinese company producing modern DDR5, LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X at scale.

The IPO that broke records

CXMT listed on Shanghai's tech-focused STAR Market under ticker 688825. It priced shares at 8.66 yuan and raised 57.92 billion yuan, about $8.6 billion, the largest semiconductor offering in mainland China on record. Demand was staggering: retail investors oversubscribed their tranche 212 times, submitting 9.4 million orders and freezing more than 800 billion yuan of cash. The institutional tranche was oversubscribed more than 500 times.

The debut: 466% and a new number one

Shares opened at 49.50 yuan against the 8.66 yuan offer price and closed the day up around 466%. That gave CXMT a market capitalization of about 3.28 trillion yuan, roughly $485 billion, making it the most valuable company listed on China's mainland exchanges, ahead of ICBC and above Intel by market value.

The financials behind the frenzy

This was not a story stock with no revenue. In the first quarter of 2026, CXMT reported revenue of about $7.1 billion (50.8 billion yuan), up a remarkable 719% year over year, with net profit of roughly $3.5 billion. For the first half of 2026, the company guided to revenue of 110 to 120 billion yuan and net profit of 50 to 57 billion yuan. The AI memory boom, which has pushed DDR5 and HBM prices sharply higher, is landing directly on CXMT's income statement.

A decade of state money, and Hefei's giant bet

CXMT did not appear overnight. It raised capital across nine rounds over ten years, and state-owned shareholders held 36.29% before the IPO, including China's flagship National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (the "Big Fund"), plus Hefei and Anhui government vehicles. Hefei alone poured more than 30 billion yuan into the project over a decade and kept investing through 36.65 billion yuan of accumulated losses, never exiting. Monday's debut turned that patient, counter-cyclical bet into trillions of yuan of paper value. Chairman Zhu Yiming, who earlier founded flash-memory firm GigaDevice, has led CXMT since 2018.

Who actually buys CXMT memory

According to its IPO prospectus, CXMT's customers include Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Lenovo and Xiaomi. Tencent alone signed a server-DRAM supply deal worth around $3 billion. CXMT memory already ships inside Lenovo ThinkPad and Huawei MateBook devices, and Western brands including HP, Dell, Acer and Asus have evaluated or adopted modules built on its chips as it entered global PC supply chains.

Built on a homegrown tool chain

Part of what makes CXMT strategically important is its supply chain. Domestic equipment now accounts for roughly 40% to 50% of the tools on its production lines, supplied by Chinese vendors such as NAURA, AMEC, Piotech, Hwatsing, ACM Research and Kingsemi. The one hard ceiling remains lithography, still dominated by ASML and Nikon, where China's domestic alternative has only a sliver of the market. That equipment gap, reinforced by US export controls, is the single biggest constraint on how fast CXMT can scale.

Chasing the big three

CXMT sits fourth in DRAM, but research suggests its capacity is closing in on Micron, which would put China on track to become the world's second-largest DRAM producer by capacity. It currently runs about 300,000 wafers per month across three fabs, with two new plants targeting 600,000 wafers per month. It is also moving into high-bandwidth memory, targeting 55,000 HBM wafer starts per month by 2027 and 100,000 by 2028, aiming directly at the AI accelerator supply chain that Samsung and SK Hynix dominate today.

The crypto angle: priced before it listed

For crypto traders, the most interesting detail is timing. CXMT traded on pre-IPO futures for weeks before it listed, making it the first major Asian company stress-tested by crypto-native pre-IPO markets. It now trades as a perpetual, CXMTUSDT, letting anyone take a position on China's memory champion without a Chinese brokerage account. It is a clean example of the same convergence we have covered elsewhere: tokenized stocks, 24/7 trading, and crypto rails pricing traditional assets faster than the traditional market can.

The risks

None of this is a one-way bet. US export controls cap CXMT's access to the most advanced chipmaking equipment, a hard limit on scaling. Its valuation, about $485 billion on roughly 8% market share, prices in years of flawless execution. And a debut that runs 466% in a day tends to give some of it back. This is a strategically vital company and a volatile stock at the same time.

The takeaway: CXMT is the clearest sign yet that China's push for memory self-sufficiency has produced a genuine global contender, and that crypto markets are increasingly where price discovery starts. Whether the stock holds its trillion-yuan valuation is a separate question from whether the company matters. It clearly does.

CXMT IPO: quick FAQ

What is CXMT's ticker? 688825 on the Shanghai STAR Market. It also trades as the CXMTUSDT perpetual in crypto.

How much did CXMT raise? About $8.6 billion (57.92 billion yuan), the biggest mainland Chinese IPO since 2010.

How much did CXMT stock rise on debut? Around 466% on July 27, 2026, reaching a market cap near $485 billion.

What does CXMT make? DRAM memory chips, including DDR5, LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X, and it is developing HBM for AI systems.

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Nothing here is financial advice. Do your own research.

Chinese AI lab Moonshot has published the model weights and technical report for Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, under a permissive open-weight license.

K3 activates about 104B parameters per token and adds native vision, a 1M-token context window and roughly 2.5x better compute efficiency than its predecessor Kimi K2, driven by a new attention design.

Moonshot also released supporting infrastructure, including its attention kernels and inference recipes. K3 is billed as the largest open-weight model to date and rivals top frontier US systems, though early coverage notes it still trails the strongest closed models. The weights are open, but training data and code are not.

Axis Robotics has raised $12M in a seed round led by Hack VC, with Nomad Capital, Pi Network Ventures and 10K Ventures also taking part.

The startup is building a compounding "data engine" for physical AI — a closed-loop pipeline of simulation, real-world capture and human-in-the-loop training meant to solve the data-scarcity problem holding robotics back. It says 100,000+ contributors already feed the system.

Axis runs its contributor network on Base, recording wallet-linked proof-of-work on-chain, and ties into the BitRobot Network. There is no live token yet — supply and allocation remain undecided — so contributor rewards are currently points-based.

Most leveraged positions are closed not because of the funding, charged every few hours with no ceiling, quietly erodes the trade. Stable Funding Perps publish the annual rate up front, a target of ~4% to high single digits, and charge it once a day.

Mark the date: GRVT lists on July 30, with both products built so that capital never has to choose between earning yield and standing ready to trade.

Grvt Earn adds three curated tiers from $1 with no lock-ups: Savings, Balanced (target ~4.5% p.a.) and Opportunistic (target ~11% p.a.). Targets, not guarantees. An Earn balance can also back trades as collateral while it earns.