Riot Platforms has signed a 20 year data center agreement worth an expected $9.1 billion for 191 megawatts of computing capacity at its Rockdale campus in Texas, marking another major step away from relying solely on Bitcoin mining. 

Riot described the customer in its Aug. 10 SEC filing only as a leading frontier AI lab.

Bloomberg subsequently identified the tenant as Anthropic, developer of the Claude artificial intelligence models, citing people familiar with the transaction. Neither company publicly confirmed Anthropic’s identity when Bloomberg contacted them. Riot declined to comment, while Anthropic did not respond. The distinction means the contract itself is confirmed, but the customer’s identity currently rests on Bloomberg’s reporting.

Riot Platforms turns Rockdale power toward AI

Riot’s official release says the agreement covers 191 MW of critical IT capacity at Rockdale. The first 96 MW is scheduled for December 2027, followed by another 95 MW by June 2028. The initial contract runs through June 2048.

The company says the agreement is “expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion” over its initial term. That figure is a company forecast rather than revenue already earned. Two optional five year extensions, exercisable by the tenant, could raise potential contract revenue to about $16.1 billion. Riot estimates cumulative net operating income of $7.3 billion to $8.2 billion during the base term, another forward looking projection dependent on construction and operating performance.

Rockdale was built around large scale Bitcoin mining. The Texas campus has 700 MW of developed, energized power capacity, along with existing fiber and electrical infrastructure that Riot says can be repurposed for high density computing. The company has said it intends to convert the site’s full gross capacity toward data center tenants over time.

The shift builds on a trend covered in earlier Riot coverage, when activist investor Starboard Value pushed the miner to accelerate its AI data center strategy. Starboard argued that Riot’s large U.S. power portfolio could command greater value when leased to computing customers.

Anthropic deal follows Riot’s AMD expansion

Riot already has another major technology tenant at Rockdale. AMD initially signed for 25 MW in January and exercised an additional 25 MW option in April. Riot completed delivery of the first 25 MW during the second quarter and expects another 10 MW in November 2026 and 15 MW in May 2027.

Combined with the newly announced 191 MW contract, Riot now has 241 MW of critical IT capacity under signed leases at Rockdale. Its earnings deck puts total expected contracted revenue from the two tenants at about $9.8 billion. AMD retains options that could expand its footprint further.

As crypto.news reported in previous earnings coverage, Riot began generating meaningful data center revenue this year as its AMD deployment moved online. Q2 data center revenue reached $23.2 million, including $4.9 million from operating leases and $18.3 million from tenant fit out services.

The broader strategy reflects how Bitcoin miners are monetizing access to scarce U.S. power infrastructure. In related industry coverage, Riot and several other miners were identified as potential beneficiaries because their existing grid connections can shorten development timelines compared with entirely new data center projects.

Bitcoin remains important as Riot funds the buildout

Riot has not exited Bitcoin mining. It produced 1,587 BTC during Q2, up from 1,426 BTC a year earlier. However, mining revenue fell to $113.7 million from $140.9 million as average Bitcoin prices declined and global network hash rate increased. Riot’s cost to mine one Bitcoin, excluding depreciation, was $49,912.

The company’s Bitcoin holdings are also helping finance its AI expansion. Riot ended June with 11,380 BTC valued at about $666 million, including 5,821 BTC held as collateral, alongside $548.9 million in cash. Its investor presentation explicitly says continued Bitcoin inventory sales are being used as a primary funding source for the equity portion of its data center spending.

That strategy follows earlier sales and transfers documented in recent Bitcoin reserve coverage. The company has increasingly treated its Bitcoin balance as a source of capital while maintaining an active mining operation.

Morgan Stanley backs construction as Riot targets 2028

Building the 191 MW project will require far more capital than Riot’s earlier AMD deployment. Management estimates construction spending of about $2.1 billion to $2.3 billion. Morgan Stanley has provided a $573 million interim financing facility to cover early development costs while an investment grade credit backstop is finalized.

Riot expects debt to fund 80% to 90% of the project’s costs, leaving an estimated equity requirement of $210 million to $460 million before capital recycled from its AMD financing. Those estimates remain subject to financing terms and construction costs.

Investors initially reacted strongly to Bloomberg’s identification of Anthropic. Riot shares jumped about 25% to $24.40 in late trading following the report. The move came after Riot reported Q2 revenue of $174.2 million, up 14% year over year, although the company also posted a $237.2 million quarterly net loss.

The next fixed milestones are the planned 96 MW delivery in December 2027 and full 191 MW deployment in June 2028. Riot must also finish the longer term financing package. Separately, its SEC filing says the company has a nonbinding letter of intent involving its Corsicana, Texas campus, giving Riot another potential route for converting former Bitcoin focused power infrastructure into U.S. AI capacity.

South Korea will expand its crypto Travel Rule to all transfers between registered virtual asset service providers (VASPs), removing the current 1 million won (about $700) threshold.

The country’s Cabinet approved amendments to the Enforcement Decree of the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information on Tuesday.

Under the changes, the Travel Rule will apply to all transfers between registered crypto service providers regardless of value. Receiving platforms will also be required to obtain sender and recipient information and may request missing information or reject transactions when required data is unavailable.

Removing the threshold is intended to prevent users from circumventing the rule by splitting transfers into smaller amounts, according to the Financial Intelligence Unit. 

It cited one case in which a user bought Tether USDt (USDT) after depositing about 200 million won into a crypto exchange and then made 216 withdrawals, each worth less than 1 million won.

Related: South Korea plans stablecoin rules as opposition pushes crypto tax repeal

South Korea tightens rules for overseas exchanges, personal wallets

The amendments also introduce new Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements for transfers involving overseas crypto exchanges and personal wallets.

Registered local VASPs will be required to determine which transfers they allow based on the risk posed by the counterparty. Transfers to low-risk overseas exchanges will be permitted, while transfers involving other foreign exchanges and personal wallets will generally be allowed when the sender and recipient are the same person.

However, transactions involving counterparties deemed high risk will be prohibited.

Crypto platforms will also have to establish their own suspicious transaction monitoring systems for transfers worth at least 10 million won involving foreign exchanges or personal wallets.

South Korean authorities said suspected money laundering involving overseas exchanges and personal wallets has increased as gaps in existing AML rules governing such transfers have been exploited.

The decree also strengthens registration requirements for crypto service providers, including financial health, internal controls, staffing and infrastructure standards, while expanding scrutiny of major shareholders.

The VASP registration provisions will take effect on Aug. 20, although existing providers will have an additional year to comply with some financial, staffing, infrastructure and internal control requirements. The expanded Travel Rule and other transfer-related AML requirements will take effect six months after the decree is promulgated.

Asia Express: Thailand’s 0% crypto tax. Bitcoin Red Team forced to use Chinese AI

Payments platform Decta will use USDC to settle its own funds internationally, bringing stablecoins into its back-end treasury operations.

Decta said Tuesday that it will use OpenPayd, a financial infrastructure company, to convert company funds into USDC for international settlement, according to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph.

“This is a proprietary treasury use case rather than a customer-facing payments flow,” Lux Thiagarajah, chief commercial officer at OpenPayd, told Cointelegraph.

“Decta transfers its own funds into OpenPayd’s regulated infrastructure, where they are converted into USDC via OpenPayd’s over-the-counter capabilities to support international operational settlements,” he added.

The integration shows how stablecoins are moving into traditional payments infrastructure as a tool for internal treasury and liquidity management, without making stablecoins part of its customer-facing payment services.

Stablecoins move into payments firms’ treasury operations

Decta said the integration will help it move funds between its entities internationally, manage liquidity and streamline treasury operations.

Scott Dawson, CEO of Decta UK, said the company wants technology to make its financial operations faster, simpler and more resilient while maintaining its existing controls and regulatory discipline.

Founded in 2015 in London, Decta is a payments platform that provides payment processing, acquiring, card issuing, banking and other financial infrastructure to businesses. The company operates across 32 countries and serves hundreds of companies, according to its announcement.

Related: Circle Q2 revenue falls short of Wall Street estimates

Decta has also explored stablecoin issuance in the past. In August 2024, Decta Limited and France-based Next Generation said they were exploring a potential euro-pegged stablecoin that Decta could issue under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), subject to regulatory approval.

OpenPayd, founded in London in 2018, provides financial infrastructure connecting fiat and digital assets. The company secured authorization under MiCA in June, allowing it to provide crypto services across the European Economic Area, including fiat-to-stablecoin on- and off-ramps. It counts Kraken, eToro, OKX and B2C2 among its clients.

Magazine: BIP-110 ends with a whimper, CLARITY vote punted: Hodler’s Digest, Aug. 9

Node provider BTCPay Server said Tuesday it is funding a bounty for the return of bitcoin stolen from merchants last week, offering 10% of whatever is recovered up to a maximum of 3 BTC, worth roughly $190,000 at current prices.

The offer is open to anyone with useful information, including the attacker. The project asked people to write to its security address and said secure channels are available on request.

If several reports lead to a recovery, the bounty will be split with the victims according to how much each lost and how useful the information proved.

The project is also paying the researchers who found the flaw, donating 0.21 BTC each to developer Craig Raw and to the Bitcoin Red Team fund.

Attackers exploited the vulnerability last week to obtain credentials for LND, the most widely used software for running a Lightning node, and to drain the wallets associated with it.

Hardware-wallet maker Foundation and the bitcoin publication Citadel21 both reported losing funds. Neither BTCPay nor the victims have published a total so far.

Polymarket odds have collapsed from 82% to 16%. The Senate returns on September 14 with 14 working days, eight missing Democratic votes, and an ethics fight over a president who made $1.4 billion from crypto. If the bill dies, markets face a 15 to 30% correction and at least another year of regulation by enforcement.

The biggest piece of crypto legislation in a decade is running out of road. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act passed the House in July 2025 by a comfortable 294 to 134 vote, promising to draw the line between which tokens the SEC oversees and which fall to the CFTC. Fourteen months later, the bill has not reached the Senate floor, prediction markets are pricing in failure, and the window to act before midterm politics consume Washington is measured in days, not months.

The Senate adjourned on August 7, 2026 without voting on the CLARITY Act. Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed just before recess, a procedural move that starts the clock but guarantees nothing. Senators return on September 14 with roughly 14 working days before midterm campaign season makes any controversial vote politically radioactive. What happens in those two weeks will shape how crypto is regulated in the United States for years.

What the CLARITY Act actually does

The bill creates a classification framework for digital assets. Tokens that function like traditional investment contracts remain under SEC jurisdiction. Sufficiently decentralized digital commodities move to the CFTC. Stablecoins get their own category. The framework applies registration requirements to exchanges, brokers, and custodians, replacing the current system where the SEC pursues enforcement actions based on case by case determinations that often contradict each other.

Two provisions deserve more attention than they receive. Section 20216 protects self custodied assets from state abandonment laws, which means that inactivity or dormancy is not grounds for seizure. This is federal preemption, meaning it overrides any state law. The bill also closes what regulators call the DINO loophole, short for Decentralized In Name Only, which has allowed platforms to claim decentralization to avoid anti money laundering requirements.

Bitcoin’s ledger is a chain of blocks, each one a batch of transactions added by miners, firms running warehouses of specialised computers that compete to produce the next one. They are paid in newly issued bitcoin plus the fees attached to those transactions, and a block arrives roughly every ten minutes.

That ten-minute pace is not automatic. The network sets a difficulty level, which is how much computing work a miner must do to produce a valid block, and recalculates it every 2,016 blocks. If blocks have been arriving too fast, the work gets harder. Too slow, and it gets easier.

At normal speed, 2,016 blocks takes about two weeks.

Two blocks were produced on that chain. Then it stopped, because mining it costs exactly what mining bitcoin costs — as both chains having inherited the same difficulty when they parted, while paying in a coin that has no market, no exchange listing and no buyers.

It also cannot make mining easier on itself without first completing 2,016 blocks at its current pace. A live monitor now estimates that adjustment at 6.3 years away, up from 350 days on Sunday.

The number is calculated from recent block times, so every idle hour pushes it further out. Bitcoin’s next adjustment is due in 12 days.

TRON processed $2.1 trillion in USDT transfers during the second quarter of 2026 as its stablecoin market reached a record $89.2 billion, according to Messari’s Aug. 10 report. 

USDT accounted for $87.9 billion, or 98.5% of stablecoins on the network, putting TRON ahead of Ethereum’s $78.7 billion USDT balance at quarter end.

The quarter also brought a broader U.S. route into TRX. Binance.US restored spot trading, Bitnomial added TRX to its regulated U.S. markets and Canary Capital continued work on a proposed staked TRX exchange traded product. After the quarter, Bitnomial added TRX futures and Anchorage Digital opened institutional staking access.

TRON USDT supply moved above $90 billion after Q2

Average daily USDT transfer volume rose 4.3% from the previous quarter to $22.8 billion, reversing the decline recorded in Q1. Total stablecoin capitalization increased 4.1%, while TRON accounted for 47.6% of tracked USDT supply at the end of June, Messari found.

Growth continued after the quarter closed. TRON’s official milestone page records USDT circulation on the network surpassing $90 billion on July 9. That extends the trend discussed inearlier stablecoin coverage, when TRON was already widening its USDT lead over Ethereum.

Network usage has also remained elevated. TRONSCAN currently reports an average of about 12.07 million daily transactions over the latest 30 days. As crypto.news reported in arecent network milestone, lifetime transactions crossed 15 billion in early August while circulating USDT remained above $90 billion.

Higher activity lifted fees while TRX supply kept growing

TRON generated $699.4 million in network fees during Q2, up 15.9% in dollar terms. Fees measured in TRX increased 2.1% to 2.10 billion TRX. Messari said it was the first quarterly fee increase since an August 2025 governance change cut the network’s energy unit price. Average transaction cost increased 5.4% to $0.65.

Higher fees did not return TRX to net deflation during the quarter. Circulating supply increased by about 87 million TRX to 94.85 billion as token creation continued to exceed burns. Total staked TRX also fell 0.9% to 45.7 billion, while the staking rate declined to 48.2%.

The inflationary pattern has continued into August. TRONSCAN data shows total supply at roughly 94.898 billion TRX on Aug. 10. About 3.92 million TRX were generated that day against 3.32 million burned, producing a net increase of roughly 598,000 TRX. Daily figures can vary, but supply remains above its Q2 closing level.

U.S. access widens for TRX through exchanges and staking

Binance.US restored TRX on April 16 with TRX/USD and TRX/USDT trading pairs and native deposits and withdrawals, according to its notice. The listing reversed the exchange’s 2023 removal of the asset, covered in past Binance.US coverage.

Bitnomial then added spot TRX during Q2 before launching exchange traded TRX futures on July 27. Its release says eligible U.S. traders and institutions can use the CFTC regulated contracts to hedge or take exposure to TRX. Bitnomial president Michael Dunn said six months of regulated futures history “meets a key milestone” for potential spot ETF eligibility, although that statement does not amount to SEC approval of any TRX product.

Institutional custody access expanded as well. Anchorage Digital said in a July 14 announcement that clients can now stake TRX while keeping assets within its regulated custody framework.

Canary ETF filing and U.S. compliance remain next tests

Canary Capital’s proposed staked TRX product provides another U.S. development to watch. A July 24 amended SEC filing identifies Cboe BZX as the planned exchange and TRXS as the ticker. Canary anticipates staking at least 90% of the trust’s TRX under normal circumstances. However, the prospectus remains preliminary and says the shares are “expected to be listed” subject to the required conditions. The registration statement must become effective before securities can be sold under the offering.

The network’s growing stablecoin footprint also keeps U.S. compliance scrutiny in view. On July 1, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added 131 TRON addresses to its ISIS K designation in an official update.

Chainalysis separately said in its analysis that Tether froze balances across all 131 addresses. The wallets had received more than $1.4 million since 2023, according to the blockchain analytics firm. The episode was detailed in earlier sanctions coverage.

TRON has also continued upgrading its infrastructure. The mandatory GreatVoyage v4.8.2 Pyrrho release arrived July 15, followed by the nonmandatory v4.8.2.1 Heraclitus update on July 31. For the second half of 2026, the main measurable developments are whether USDT circulation and transaction activity hold their recent levels, whether TRX supply returns to net deflation, and how the proposed U.S. ETF process develops.