AI kept attracting massive capital, stablecoin regulation moved closer to reality, major crypto companies expanded globally, while security breaches and industry shakeups continued across the market.

🔎 Recent Updates & Developments

— AMD commits up to $5B to Anthropic

— Telegram to launch a native Gram wallet

— BitMEX to shut down operations

— Movement Labs files for Chapter 11

— Tether faces GENIUS Act deadline

— Databricks reaches a $188B valuation

— Bybit expands into Indonesia with NOBI acquisition

— Samsung creates a dedicated robotics division

Etched Raises $300M Series C at $10.3B Valuation

Etched has closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, with investment from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix, as the company works toward its mission to "run the world's inference."

The fresh capital will accelerate production of Etched's inference clusters, with the company opening an 80,000-square-foot, 10-MW facility just 15 minutes from its office to speed up prototyping and manufacturing.

The raise follows Etched's emergence from stealth with over $1 billion in customer contracts already secured and its first inference racks slated to ship this summer, building on the company's Low-Voltage Inference and Cluster-Scale Memory architecture breakthroughs unveiled alongside the funding news.

Travis Kalanick has announced a $1.7 billion equity investment into Atoms, his industrial AI venture, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with a16z partner Ben Horowitz joining the board. As part of the round, Kalanick's various businesses have been merged into a single Atoms equity structure.

Atoms targets heavy industries like food, mining, construction, and transport with specialized robotics and automation, framing manufacturing as the "CPU," real estate as "storage," and transportation as the "network" — extending the same bits-to-atoms thesis Kalanick pursued at Uber and later at CloudKitchens.

Kalanick frames the round as unfinished business, having nearly partnered with Andreessen Horowitz back in 2011 during his Uber days.

The round also brought in equity partners including Bain Capital, Uber, Fifth Wall, and SV Angel, alongside debt partners Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Barclays, positioning Atoms as a major bet on Industrial AI powering the next wave of automation across trillion-dollar physical economy sectors.

Uniswap has released DualPool, an audited, open-source hook for Uniswap v4 that lets liquidity providers earn yield on idle capital while still collecting swap fees, built in collaboration with Spark and developed by Uniswap Labs.

The hook works by parking pool capital in ERC-4626 yield vaults between trades, then pulling exactly what's needed into concentrated liquidity positions the moment a swap arrives, executing atomically, and re-depositing the remainder back into the vaults — all within the same block and without any keeper infrastructure.

Spark will operate the largest DualPool deployment, migrating $150 million in stablecoin liquidity to it, with a livestream today at 2 p.m. ET featuring Uniswap founder Hayden Adams.

The hook has been audited by OpenZeppelin with no critical or high severity findings, and any team can now deploy their own DualPool to start earning on both active and idle assets.

The Sentient Foundation has unveiled a $42 million funding initiative to support developers building open-source AI, with grants and investments available for projects ranging from AI models and agents to infrastructure, datasets, evaluations, and consumer applications.

The program is open to both individual developers and established teams, encouraging builders at every stage to develop AI that is transparent, locally deployable, and accessible without relying on centralized providers.

The initiative aims to accelerate the open AI ecosystem by funding projects that expand the Sentient Stack and advance privacy-preserving, open-source AGI development.

Plume has gone live on Avalanche with nOPAL, a tokenized vault that brings institutional-grade Brazilian credit-card receivables onchain as composable RWA yield.

Issued by BlackOpal, nOPAL turns real credit-card receivables — settled via Visa and Mastercard and registered with Brazil’s Central Bank — into an onchain asset whose returns come from real economic activity, not token incentives.

The vault reports a 0% default rate since inception, audits by 0xMacro and Spearbit, and BlackOpal’s 25+ years and $200M+ in institutional backing. Avalanche is fast becoming a hub for tokenized private credit.

Kalshi has launched the Midterms Hub — what it calls the first election hub built on the wisdom of the crowd, where real people put real money on what they think will happen.

Its markets trade 24/7, so the odds move the second news breaks, a debate lands, or results roll in. The hub pulls polling, fundraising, historical results and live market odds into one place — no spin, just skin in the game and prices that update in real time.

The pitch is a real-time read on where each race actually stands — built for voters, political junkies and anyone who follows the midterms closely.

AFX Trade lost $24M on Arbitrum after its bridge validator keys were compromised. Verus lost $7.5M in a repeat of a bug it never fully fixed. B² Network lost $3.9M when an attacker seized its staking contract.

None of it was broken cryptography. It was keys and permissions, again. That's how most of crypto gets stolen in 2026.

BitMEX, the exchange that pioneered the crypto perpetual swap, will cease all operations on September 23, 2026, following a strategic review by parent HDR Global Trading.

New sign-ups are already closed. From August 26, users can only reduce positions, and anything still open at shutdown will be force-liquidated. KYC-verified users must withdraw beforehand or face a monthly account fee of $50 or 1% of the balance.

Launched in 2014 and built around Bitcoin, BitMEX defined an era of crypto leverage before a 2021 US settlement and years of fading volume. Its shutdown closes one of the industry’s original venues for good.

AMD and Anthropic have signed a strategic deal that pairs a huge chip-supply commitment with an equity investment — AMD will put up to $5B into Anthropic, tied to milestones.

Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450-series GPUs in AMD’s “Helios” rackscale systems, with the first gigawatt live in H1 2027, and has committed to buy tens of billions of dollars of AMD AI chips. Anthropic will own some chips outright and rent the rest via clouds. For AMD, landing a marquee AI lab is a major push against Nvidia’s grip on AI compute.