Crypto World
Retail investors stick with AI trade but appear more cautious
POLAND – 2025/02/24: In this photo illustration, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) logo is displayed on a smartphone with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) symbols on the background. (Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Retail investors aren’t giving up on the artificial intelligence trade. But they are getting selective and adding downside protection as markets head into the fall.
Investors are using put options and inverse ETFs to hedge risk while still positioning for upside in individual technology stocks, according to data from Vanda Research and Charles Schwab. Put options give the holder the right to sell an asset at a stated price by a certain date. Inverse ETFs aim to move in the opposite direction from the index they’re following.
“Retail investors are selectively trading in the classic AI theme but also adding downside protection via options and inverse ETFs,” Vanda’s global equity strategist Kaidi Meng told CNBC in an emailed statement.
Retail flows look very different now compared with prior years, Meng said. “Previously, retail bought any major dips almost without question. However, this year, we are seeing a more selective retail investor that is either switching between stocks quickly or buying underlying stocks while also buying protective puts,” she added.
Since April, Meng said put buying of the top 12 retail-favored stocks in 2026 has almost doubled versus the first quarter, despite an overall reduction in cash purchases of stocks. Put buying went up to 110% from about 26% of net cash buying, even as outright stock purchases have declined. Net cash buying refers to the amount investors spend on purchasing assets versus the amount they sell.
The strategist said growth of ETF strategies, including levered vehicles, has led to a different kind of risk-taking appetite from retail cohorts. “Flows into ETFs signal a trend of reduced outright exposure, rather than just an uptick in downside hedges,” Meng said.
Vanda’s data shows that since mid-April, buying of both bullish and bearish tech ETFs, including leveraged funds, has declined. Bullish activity fell sharply, down about 50%, Meng pointed out, compared with a roughly 35% decline for bearish ETFs.
Overall, Meng said retail investors appear to be adding downside protection through puts on individual stocks and inverse ETFs for broader market exposure, while also cutting their long positions.
“This reduction in long exposure may be a function of broader profit-taking after years of successful buy-the-dip strategies, or this could be a sign of retail investors choosing to take increased risk via more speculative stocks, levered ETFs, and betting sites,” she said.
Some are still bullish underneath
The increased demand for protection, however, doesn’t mean retail investors have broadly turned bearish.
Data from Charles Schwab show that many investors are still buying and positioning for further upside. Schwab investors continued to buy in July despite a choppy market backdrop, lifting the Schwab Trading Activity Index, known as STAX, for a third straight month and bringing it to its highest level since January 2022.
The index rose to 59.80 in July from 59.12 in June. Schwab clients remained net buyers, with the brokerage firm seeing more than two buyers for every seller in July.
A recent report by the firm showed that as many tech stocks pulled back, traders appeared more willing to buy dips in names with sharper moves, while showing less interest in stocks that remained rangebound. Notably, Nvidia, which was regularly among the top five names in STAX, was absent from those rankings in July.
Joe Mazzola, Schwab’s head trading and derivatives strategist, told CNBC the firm saw a modest pickup in put buying on the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) during the week of Aug. 7.
Mazzola said Schwab investors were continuing to sell puts on individual AI-linked stocks such as Nvidia, Micron and Sandisk, taking advantage of elevated option premiums, while buying lower-cost QQQ puts to hedge some of their broader tech exposure.
But he said while the hedging pickup is noticeable, it is not dramatic.
“Put selling and call buying, so they’re trying to position themselves for an additional rally,” he said. A call option gives the investor the right to buy a stock at a specified price by a certain date.
A hedge or directional bet
Inverse and leveraged ETFs can be used to hedge risk, but traders can also use them to make directional bets.
“Many advanced investors continuously evaluate both market opportunities and portfolio risk, adjusting exposures and strategies as market conditions, investment themes, and their own objectives evolve,” Bryan Koplin, head of advanced trading at Fidelity Investments told CNBC in an email.
For example, some may use options or other advanced strategies to help manage portfolio risk or express a market view based on expected price movements.
“Similarly, we’re also seeing continued interest in leveraged and inverse ETFs,” Koplin said. “While these products could be viewed as portfolio hedging, they are frequently used by active traders to make directional bets on expected market movements.”
According to Koplin, their ease of use can make them an attractive alternative to strategies involving margin borrowing or short selling.
But he also warns that investors should carefully consider the objectives, risks and generally short-term nature of these products before trading them.
“As advanced investors evaluate portfolio construction, risk management, and more sophisticated trading strategies,” Koplin said, “access to education, research, and customizable tools can play an important role in helping them make tailored, informed decisions and navigate evolving market opportunities.”
Crypto World
Strategy Just Stopped Bitcoin News: Is the Market’s Biggest Corporate Bid Gone for Good?
In the latest Bitcoin news, Strategy held its bitcoin position flat at 840,447 BTC through the week ended Aug. 16, according to a Form 8-K the company filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, while its dollar reserve climbed to $4.8 billion.
The larger question isn’t whether Strategy still owns bitcoin, it does, at an average cost of $75,385 per coin, it’s whether the market can absorb weakness without the recurring corporate bid that shaped price action for years.
Discover: Everyone’s Got a Take. Get Free $25 from Kalshi to Actually Trade Yours
A Predictable Buyer Goes Quiet
Strategy made no bitcoin purchases or sales between Aug. 10 and Aug. 16, the filing confirmed. That silence follows a stretch in which the company sold 1,690 BTC for $108.6 million the prior week, redirecting proceeds toward its preferred-stock obligations rather than adding to its core position.
Instead of buying bitcoin, Strategy sold 3,458,866 MSTR shares through its at-the-market program for $333.7 million in net proceeds.
It put $149.1 million of that into its USD reserve, spent $132.2 million repurchasing 1,388,720 shares of its STRC preferred stock, and used $52.4 million to fund preferred dividends. Michael Saylor, Strategy’s executive chairman, framed the moves in an Aug. 17 post on X as extending the company’s financial runway rather than expanding its bitcoin exposure.
“Strategy added $150M to its USD Reserve and repurchased $132M of STRC, extending USD Duration to 2.8 yrs (+41 days) … As of 8/16/26: 840,447 BTC Reserve; $4.8B USD Reserve.”
The dollar reserve, launched under Strategy’s Digital Credit Capital Framework on June 29 with $2.55 billion, has now grown to $4.8 billion in roughly seven weeks. It exists to cover preferred dividends and debt interest, functioning as a liquidity buffer separate from, and increasingly prioritized over, the bitcoin balance sheet itself.
Discover: Your Market Calls Are Worth Something. Start with a free $25 on Kalshi
Bitcoin News: What the Pause Actually Proves
The data confirms a shift in marginal capital allocation: Strategy is issuing common stock, defending its STRC price band near $99–$100, and building cash rather than deploying every available dollar into bitcoin.
It does not confirm that Strategy is abandoning its treasury model; 840,447 BTC remains one of the largest corporate holdings anywhere, and the company still holds $653 million of unused STRC repurchase capacity plus a fully intact $1 billion MSTR buyback authorization.

That distinction matters for how traders price risk. Strategy’s leveraged accumulation model trained the market to treat its purchases as a floor during drawdowns, and the disappearance of that bid, even temporarily, removes a source of demand that didn’t depend on retail sentiment or ETF flows. Whether that gap gets filled by other buyers is now an open question rather than an assumption.
The Underwater Position Still Matters
Strategy’s $63.36 billion cost basis works out to $75,385 per bitcoin, a level well above spot prices trading near $64,268 at the time of this report. Saylor has separately disclosed that STRC returned 9% over the trailing year through Aug. 14 even as bitcoin fell 47% over the same span, a gap that explains why capital is flowing toward preferred-stock defense rather than fresh accumulation.
That cost basis also constrains future buying. Adding to the position at current prices while shares trade below net asset value risks diluting existing holders more than it improves per-share bitcoin exposure, a tension that didn’t exist when MSTR traded at a premium, and every new purchase looked accretive.
Where Support Comes From Now
With Strategy’s recurring bid gone for now, bitcoin’s near-term price action depends more heavily on ETF flows, derivatives positioning, and organic spot demand than it has in years.
Traders watching for a floor should track the levels outlined in ongoing bitcoin price analysis, since the absence of a predictable corporate buyer raises the odds that any break below current support extends further than it would have with Strategy still stepping in.
Strategy also faces an unresolved MSCI index-eligibility review, with feedback due Sept. 30 and a decision expected by Oct. 16 ahead of the November index rebalance.
If MSCI moves to exclude MSTR from global equity indexes, passive-fund selling could compound the pressure already building from the pause in bitcoin purchases, a scenario that would test the company’s cash reserve as a genuine buffer rather than a talking point.

If Strategy resumes purchases once its STRC obligations stabilize, the market regains a known source of demand, and the current pause reads as tactical.
If the pause extends through the fall alongside a negative MSCI outcome, expect volatility to widen as the market recalibrates around bitcoin’s organic supply-and-demand balance without its largest corporate buyer at the table.
Trade Bitcoin on ByBit, and Don’t Miss Out on Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop
The post Strategy Just Stopped Bitcoin News: Is the Market’s Biggest Corporate Bid Gone for Good? appeared first on Cryptonews.
Crypto World
Tom Lee Takes On Michael Burry As $3 Trillion Enron Warning Hangs on AI Trade
Fundstrat’s Tom Lee has pushed back on the Enron warning hanging over the AI trade. He says the $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet deals scaring Wall Street tells investors little about the real risk.
The rebuttal answers Michael Burry’s latest attack. The Big Short investor doubled his bet against Nvidia (NVDA). He compared the chipmaker’s $500 billion financing push to the tricks that sank Enron.
Why the Enron Warning Took Over Wall Street
Enron was an energy giant that collapsed in 2001. It hid billions in debt inside side vehicles that never touched its balance sheet. Its $60 billion bankruptcy was the largest in US history at the time.
The Wall Street Journal revived the ghost this week. Its analysis found nine tech giants carrying $3 trillion in AI commitments off their books. That is 50 times the size of Enron’s entire bankruptcy.
The total includes $1.2 trillion in leases that have not started. Another $1.9 trillion sits in chip purchase deals. Meta’s Louisiana data center shows how the structures work. The company owns just 20% of the project, while private credit firms hold the rest.
Burry, who made his fortune shorting subprime mortgages before 2008, smells the same playbook.
He called Nvidia’s $500 billion funding pact with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR a public relations stunt.
In his view, it distracts from the rising cost of insuring Nvidia’s debt.
“Structuring credit is a natural part of the system. Structuring unnatural credits to prolong momentum late in the bull phase is where the worry comes in,” Burry wrote this in his Substack newsletter.
The short extends his bearish streak. Earlier this month, he warned US stocks face a 1987-type crash risk even as indexes set records.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rejects the charge. He says the deal brings independent, long-term capital into AI infrastructure and reflects real demand.
Tom Lee Says the Numbers Misread How Finance Works
Lee took the other side on Monday, appearing on CNBC beside Pence Capital Management investment chief Dryden Pence. His core point is simple. Gross obligations in finance always dwarf the assets underneath them.
“The revelations from the journal article are actually helpful, but they’re giving people an incomplete picture of how financial systems work,” Lee said in the interview.
He pointed to options and swaps, where paper exposure runs far above the cash at stake. Warren Buffett once called credit derivatives financial weapons of mass destruction for that same reason, Lee noted.
The commitments also come with exits. They hit balance sheets only when construction starts. Companies can cut future spending without facing lawsuits.
Lee lived through the era people should actually fear. As a tech analyst in the 1990s, he watched fiber firms invent hundreds of billions in revenue through swap deals. Today’s spenders are different, he argued. The Magnificent Seven, the market’s seven biggest tech stocks, earn some of the highest margins in corporate history.
Crypto readers know Lee as chairman of BitMine, the world’s largest corporate Ethereum (ETH) treasury. The firm held 5.8 million ETH, or 4.8% of supply, per its August 17 release. Lee recently argued markets now see Ethereum pulling ahead of Bitcoin (BTC).
AI Spending Set to Pass the Pentagon’s Budget
Pence sized up the boom with one comparison. Congress set the Pentagon’s 2026 base budget at $866.6 billion, per an AEI breakdown. By 2027, Pence expects the US to spend more on AI than on defense.
The buildout already absorbs 2% to 2.5% of US GDP, he estimated. America spent a similar share on the transcontinental railroad in the 1850s.
The upside case rests on adoption. Only 30% of companies report productivity gains from AI so far, Pence said. Just 7% call their rollout complete. That leaves most of corporate America still at the starting line.
The fight now comes down to one number. If productivity keeps climbing, the $3 trillion looks like railroad track. If it stalls, Burry’s Enron warning gets much harder to dismiss.
The post Tom Lee Takes On Michael Burry As $3 Trillion Enron Warning Hangs on AI Trade appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Crypto World
Hyperliquid targets $60 breakout as policy center urges SEC to allow pre-IPO markets
Key takeaways
- HYPE trades below $59 after recording a second consecutive day of gains.
- The Hyperliquid Policy Center and trade[XYZ] have submitted recommendations on pre-IPO perpetual markets to the SEC.
- The proposed instruments would provide price exposure before a company lists publicly without granting shares or investor rights.
Hyperliquid (HYPE) trades above $58 on Wednesday, extending its recovery for a second consecutive session as buyers target a breakout above the psychological $60 level.
The decentralized exchange’s native token maintains a broadly bullish technical structure above its major moving averages. Momentum indicators are also improving without suggesting that the rally has become excessively stretched.
The advance comes as the Hyperliquid Policy Center and trade[XYZ] urge the US Securities and Exchange Commission to establish rules that would allow American investors to access pre-IPO perpetual markets.
Hyperliquid submits pre-IPO market proposal to SEC
The Hyperliquid Policy Center and trade[XYZ], a prominent deployer of perpetual markets on Hyperliquid, jointly submitted a comment letter responding to the SEC’s request for proposals to modernize the Initial Public Offering process.
Their letter highlighted the pricing history of at least five trade[XYZ] pre-IPO perpetual, or IPOP, markets that completed their full lifecycle on Hyperliquid.
The organizations argued that these markets can provide transparent, continuously updated price signals before a company’s shares begin trading publicly.
They also outlined regulatory questions the SEC would need to address before permitting similar products in the United States.
An IPOP is a financial instrument that allows traders to take a directional position on a company’s expected valuation ahead of a scheduled stock market listing.
The contract provides price exposure during the period before the company’s shares become publicly tradable. Prices update continuously based on market demand, potentially offering investors and issuers an early indication of expected listing value.
However, an IPOP is not equivalent to owning pre-IPO equity.
Contract holders do not receive actual shares, allocation rights or voting power. They also have no direct claim against the company referenced by the instrument. The product is designed solely to provide exposure to anticipated price movements ahead of a public listing.
Hyperliquid’s policy organization said American investors are unable to access price opportunities available to traders in other jurisdictions.
It cited SpaceX as an example, saying its pre-IPO perpetual market was priced at $135 before the company listed at $150.
According to the organization, the market provided a visible pricing signal, but US investors had no regulated way to trade it.
Under a new SEC framework, Hyperliquid argued, both American investors and issuers could benefit from the price discovery offered by pre-IPO markets.
Supporters may view such instruments as a way to broaden market access. However, the products could expose retail traders to substantial risks, including leverage, uncertain valuation, limited disclosure and price manipulation before public-market data becomes available.
HYPE maintains bullish structure above major EMAs
HYPE trades at approximately $58.73, retaining a constructive technical outlook. The token remains above its 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs).
This bullish alignment places all three indicators below the current price and provides several potential layers of support.
The Moving Average Convergence Divergence indicator has moved firmly into positive territory, signaling strengthening upside momentum.
Meanwhile, the Relative Strength Index stands near 56. The reading indicates steady buying pressure but remains well below the conventional overbought threshold of 70, leaving room for additional gains.
Immediate support sits at the 50-day EMA around $58.33. Holding this level would preserve HYPE’s near-term bullish structure and support another attempt to clear $60.
Below it, the 100-day EMA at $56.76 represents the next support area. A deeper decline could bring the 200-day EMA at $51.68 into focus as the more important longer-term bullish threshold.
On the upside, a descending resistance trendline remains the main structural obstacle. A sustained daily close above this trendline and the $60 region could confirm a breakout and allow HYPE to extend its recovery.
Failure to clear the resistance zone could encourage profit-taking and push the token back toward the clustered EMA support levels.
For now, the stacked moving averages and positive momentum indicators favor buyers, but HYPE requires a confirmed trendline breakout to strengthen its broader bullish outlook.
Crypto World
Fake AI ‘Victims’ Are Scam-Baiting 600,000 Fraudsters Every Month
Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.
Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.
“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle.
The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.
”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says.
Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia.
“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”
The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

Apate bots deal with scammers via chat. Source: Apate
Scam baiting at scale with AI victims
Kaafar says he got the idea when he received a scam call while having a picnic with his family in Sydney back in November 2021.
To his wife’s annoyance, but his kids’ delight, he strung the scammer along for 44 minutes by pretending to be a gullible rube falling for the scam.
“What followed was really literally a full comedy show for my kids,” he says, adding that during the call he’d also learned a lot of potentially useful information about the mechanics of the scam and the tactics used.
“As I hung up that call, I remember thinking very clearly: if I could do that just for fun, imagine what technology can do at scale.”
Working as a professor at Macquarie University at the time, he raised the idea with some of his doctoral students working on AI and security.
“I said, ‘Guys, there has to be a much better way of doing this. Let’s build something that is really automating this whole process of engaging scammers at scale, but also, perhaps most importantly, extracting all sorts of intelligence from these conversations.’ And that’s literally how it started.”
Related: AI-powered bot stands in for absent candidate in Virginia debate
Within a few months they’d secured funding from the Office of National Intelligence to research the idea, and the project was spun off from the university into Apate in 2023. The company now works with most of the big banks in Australia, as well as numerous banks in the UK, South Africa and South East Asia.
Apate is far from the only company scam baiting fraudsters using AI bots — though they are doing it on a greater scale than most. United Kingdom telco O2 rolled out an AI Granny campaign last year, which frustrates scammers by taking up hours of their time talking about her 28 cats. It was as much an ad campaign to warn the public about the dangers of scam calls as anything else.

O2’s highly entertaining AI Granny. Source: 02
Creating the perfect AI victims
Apate launched with 120 different personas across different genders, ages and personality types, and now have 197,000 personas with identifiable vocal tics, accents, and they make the same noises people make when they’re trying to think of what to say.
“We spent a lot of time refining and building these AI bots that sound exactly like you and I and our neighbors,” he says.
The AI models were trained on “hundreds and hundreds” of hours of recorded conversations between human scam baiters and scammers, so they can employ counter strategies.
“They know that they’re talking to bad guys, if you like, and they really navigate the conversations so that it sounds really very, very realistic to any scammer out there, even if a scammer is skeptical about things.”
The bots get sent out on WhatsApp and Telegram to act as honeypots for scammers. While the old cliché that you can’t scam an honest man is not true, it’s still very possible to exploit the scammer’s desire for money.
“They are cybercriminals, really. I think we just very often forget that they’re cybercriminals who are trying to get people’s life savings. And so that element of greed is sometimes what our bots also exploit.”
Bots collect valuable intel from each scam call
In the crypto industry, Apate works for “one of the leaders in blockchain analysis,” which may or may not be Chainalysis. They aren’t interested in wasting scammers’ time — they want intelligence on which wallets and methods scammers are using so they can track the flow of funds.
“These bots, as they engage across different conversations, extract new crypto wallet addresses by the hundreds and by the thousands,” he says. “It’s data and intelligence that is coming literally before their damage happens.”
Scamming is big business, and the call centers are “pretty much corporate organizations,” Kaafar explains.
“This data is very, very important because, literally, that’s the new account or the new wallet where you really need to pay extreme attention to. Because this is where these… scammer compounds are collecting their money or their funds with.”
“Think about it literally as being always ahead of the scammer’s tactics. And the more you know before the money gets transferred, the better it is.”
In July, Apate’s bots uncovered a marketplace for brokers soliciting verified bank accounts in India, offering commissions of up to 5% paid in USDT on the proceeds from scams passing through the accounts.

Apate’s human staff in Sydney. Source: Apate
AI arms race between good guys and bad guys
Scammers are increasingly using AI bots themselves, and it won’t be too long before AI scammers are as ubiquitous as spam emails. Scamming people is a $1.24 trillion business, so the industry can afford the compute required to scale up operations.
Apate’s research suggests that about 20% to 30% of scam text conversations employ AI already, but Kaafar isn’t too worried about the outcome of anti-scam bots fighting scam bots.
He says their researchers believe that AI bots playing defense have an advantage, according to game theory, because they’re trying to extract intelligence, while the scam bots are trying to get the other AI to perform an action.
“You can also demonstrate mathematically that that is to the advantage of a defender because it becomes easier to extract intelligence from the attacker’s AI model,” he says.
“We can imagine a world where scammers become a lot more sophisticated and deploy such technology. But that also means that if they do, they’re actually deemed to lose the game, which is great news in the fight against scams.”
Magazine: Agent wastes 14 hours of scammers’ time, LLMs ‘poisoned’ by Iran — AI Eye
Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.
Crypto World
Why TIME Devoted a Special Issue to Young Leaders
The global under-30 population has been rising since 2012 and today accounts for more than half of the more than 7.5 billion people on the planet. What will the world look like when this new generation leads? That’s the central question in TIME’s second annual Davos issue, produced in partnership with the World Economic Forum. As youth the world over force us to confront the perils of our inaction—and show us the possibilities from recognizing that life doesn’t have to be as it is—we are beginning to see some answers.
Thunberg may have been the most visible, but young leaders raising their voices have become a force across the globe, in areas ranging from climate to inequality to corruption to freedom itself. In the past year, they have been at the forefront of movements on every continent, from the campuses of Hong Kong to the streets of Santiago, where protests were triggered in part by a social-media campaign by middle- school students, to Antarctica, where a group of scientists joined the global climate strike brandishing slogans like rise before The sea level does!
They are innovators like 14-year-old Gitanjali Rao, who developed an app to identify and prevent cyberbullying. Or Xóchitl Guadalupe Cruz López, who, when she was 8 years old, created a solar-powered water heater made from recycled materials to provide much needed hot water to residents of her Mexican village. They are entrepreneurs like Flynn McGarry, who recently became old enough to legally drink alcohol in the locavore restaurant he runs in New York City. They are petitioners like Jamie Margolin, who testified before Congress on the urgent need for climate action. When they take power, they seek far-reaching reform; Finland’s Marin, who tells TIME that she got into politics “because I thought the older generation wasn’t doing enough about the big issues of the future,” wants to make Finland one of the first countries to achieve net-zero emissions.
For 1966, the year I was born, TIME named “Americans Under 25” as Person (then called “Man”) of the Year—the baby boomers whom the magazine dubbed “The Inheritors.” Having inherited the bounty of decades of economic growth and relative stability, the youth of the 1960s are now, by and large, the benefactors of the present. What do they—what do we—owe the inheritors of tomorrow? Clearly there is work to do.
Edward Felsenthal is Editor-in-Chief and CEO of TIME.
Crypto World
Shedding New Light On the Silent Crisis
From our partner Kaiser Permanente.
There is a silent epidemic. Globally, in increasing numbers, young people are facing mental-health issues. Depression is a leading cause of illness among young people. Anxiety is on the rise. Suicide ranks third as a cause of death for 15- to 19-year-olds and is increasingly becoming a health equity issue: African-American girls in grades nine to 12 were 70% more likely to attempt suicide in 2017, as compared with non-Hispanic white girls of the same age.
Unless we act, we will face the repercussions of this epidemic for years. Lives will be shortened, and generations will struggle. Our economic outlook will inevitably be impacted as we collectively face a range of long-term health issues for our workforce.
Twenty years ago, Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a landmark study linking childhood trauma to long-term health consequences. This groundbreaking research into adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) continues to inform clinical best practices and approaches that are making a difference.
With the crisis at hand, we recognized a need to go deeper and continue our work in this area. We have recently announced plans to update the ACEs research to identify knowledge gaps, successful programs, emerging best practices and interventions ready to be scaled.
An entire generation is counting on us. We are asking leaders from across health care, business, nongovernmental organizations and academia to make youth mental health and wellness a priority.
Adams is chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente.
Crypto World
Why the S&P 500’s Path to 9,000 Runs Into Trouble in 2027
The boldest S&P 500 forecast on Wall Street sees 9,000 by year-end, roughly 17% above where the index trades now. The fuel is the AI boom and a wall of idle cash.
The warning is that the same AI trade turns into the market’s biggest risk in 2027.
Can the S&P 500 Really Hit 9,000 This Year?
One of the Street’s sharpest bulls thinks so. Evercore ISI’s Julian Emanuel puts 9,000 on the table as his upside case, about 15% above his base call, helped by $8 trillion parked in money-market funds. If that cash starts chasing stocks, it becomes the fuel for a final push higher.
The number sits far above the Street’s average year-end target near 7,555, so it is a stretch call, not the consensus. Its best hope is that idle $8 trillion, because if even part of it rotates into stocks, the run toward 9,000 gets real fuel.
The whole case still rests on one engine, and that engine is AI.
Why Is AI Driving the Forecast Higher?
That engine runs on a handful of names. The AI boom flows to the megacaps that build and sell it, the Magnificent 7, meaning Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla. Their chips, cloud platforms, and models are the record AI earnings carrying the market.
Those same seven make up about 34% of the S&P 500, up from roughly 12% eight years ago.
So when AI lifts them, it lifts the whole index, and that concentration is the crack in the floor.
What Could Break the S&P 500 Forecast in 2027?
The crack shows up first in the spending. Combined hyperscaler capex has jumped from about $226 billion in 2024 to roughly $725 billion in 2026, and analysts see it topping $1 trillion in 2027. Revenue has not kept pace, and free cash flow has turned negative for the first time in decades.
That trillion-dollar mark is why 2027, and not 2028, is the year to watch. It is when the spending crosses a trillion dollars (for the first time), and the pressure to prove the revenue behind it runs highest.
The threat is not only cost, but it is also competition, because chips are the backbone of AI. Chinese chip demand is skyrocketing, with the country’s integrated-circuit revenue jumping 22% in 2025 to a record $245 billion and nearly doubling since 2020. That is a direct challenge to the US chipmakers that the rally leans on.
Still, the shift takes time. China holds only about 6% of the global semiconductor market against North America’s 53%, so it chips away at US dominance slowly rather than all at once.
Even so, European Central Bank economists have already warned the AI rally is setting up a correction.
Is This a Bubble?
That risk raises the obvious question. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett says markets are not in an AI bubble, pointing to the real earnings behind the spending.
Investment firm GMO counters that this could be the largest capital investment bubble on record, with valuations stretched to levels rarely seen.
Both can be right in sequence. The buildout can carry stocks through 2026 and still overshoot, which is exactly what the chart is now testing.
What Are the Key S&P 500 Levels to Watch?
Right now, that test is playing out on the tape. Since June 9, the S&P 500 has climbed inside a rising channel, the steady uptrend the bull case needs, but the price slipped after a high around August 13 as the AI and chip names that carry the index cooled, with the semiconductor index down about 5% into mid-August.
The levels decide the next leg. A reclaim of 7,807 and then 7,881 puts 8,000 back in play, the biggest hurdle on the way up. Clear it and the chart’s own extension points toward 8,506, and a breakout above the channel opens the 9,011 zone that matches Wall Street’s 9,000 call.
Analyst’s View: This is where the two ends of the story meet. The same AI strength that could carry the S&P 500 to 9,000 in 2026 is the force that fades in 2027, so the rally and the warning share one root. The next few quarters settle which wins. Watch whether Nvidia’s guidance and hyperscaler capex hold, whether that $8 trillion in cash rotates into stocks, and whether Chinese chips keep eating US demand.
If spending stays high and demand scales, the bullish S&P 500 forecast holds. If the money sits still and capex slows first, 2027 is where the slowing signs emerge.
The post Why the S&P 500’s Path to 9,000 Runs Into Trouble in 2027 appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Crypto World
Centrifuge Integrates Symbiotic Liquidity, Expands $1.6B Janus/NYLIM
Centrifuge has expanded its tokenized-fund liquidity options by adding Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane to three of its offerings, enabling eligible holders to exchange fund positions for USDC. The upgrade is aimed at making redemptions more immediate for users, while the funds’ standard redemption process can occur separately.
The integration covers Janus Henderson’s JAAA, an AAA-rated collateralized loan obligation (CLO) strategy; Janus Henderson’s JTRSY, a short-duration US Treasury strategy; and New York Life Investment Management’s HYB, a US high-yield corporate bond strategy. Together, these funds represent about $1.6 billion in assets under management, according to the announcement.
Key takeaways
- Centrifuge added Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane to three tokenized funds to provide another path for eligible holders to receive USDC.
- Liquid Lane uses an onchain request-for-quote (RFQ) marketplace, allowing market makers to source liquidity from vaults to meet redemption demand.
- Investors can receive USDC immediately, while the underlying tokenized fund redemption can be processed separately through the issuer or via RFQ.
- Centrifuge already offered instant redemptions through partnerships such as Wintermute and other liquidity arrangements, and Liquid Lane focuses on the transaction capital structure.
- The project’s broader thesis is that aggregating redemption flow across issuers and asset classes could improve liquidity economics as tokenized assets see wider onchain use.
How Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane changes the redemption workflow
Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane is built around an onchain RFQ marketplace. When redemption requests are placed, market makers can access liquidity from Symbiotic vaults to fill those requests. After acquiring the fund tokens through the RFQ interaction, market makers may then redeem the tokens with the issuer or transfer/sell them via another RFQ transaction.
This design matters because it decouples the user’s immediate liquidity outcome from the slower mechanics of traditional redemption cycles. In the Centrifuge setup described, eligible investors are able to receive USDC right away while the funds’ normal redemption process proceeds on its own schedule.
Symbiotic did not position Liquid Lane as the only redemption route; instead, it’s presented as an additional liquidity pathway designed to increase participation and improve execution for tokenized-fund holders.
Why Centrifuge and these specific funds
Centrifuge is an asset tokenization and vault platform where asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds. The three products now integrated with Liquid Lane represent a meaningful slice of Centrifuge’s institutional coverage, spanning structured credit, short-duration Treasuries, and high-yield corporate exposure.
Janus Henderson has been a significant contributor to Centrifuge’s growth, particularly through its JAAA and JTRSY products—an expansion that earlier coverage tied to Centrifuge’s progress in attracting institutional demand, including milestones reported by Cointelegraph (see Centrifuge surpasses $1B TVL in institutional demand).
By December 2025, Token Terminal estimated Centrifuge had attracted around $1.3 billion in new inflows, driven primarily by Janus Henderson’s two funds. Token Terminal also reported that JAAA alone accounted for roughly $1 billion in total value locked and was among the largest tokenized funds in the market.
Liquid Lane alongside existing instant-liquidity routes
Liquid Lane is not the first liquidity solution connected to Centrifuge’s tokenized funds. Felix Lutsch, head of Symbiotic ecosystem, told Cointelegraph that the network is not attempting to replace earlier approaches, emphasizing instead that multiple liquidity routes can coexist.
According to Centrifuge’s own disclosures, a partnership with Wintermute announced in February 2025 supported 24/7 instant redemptions for JTRSY. Separately, HYB launched in June under a different arrangement targeting near-instant redemptions.
Lutsch said the differentiation of Liquid Lane is not primarily about speed, but about the capital structure used to execute redemption demand. In his description, Liquid Lane’s RFQ marketplace can involve multiple market makers and curators without requiring every market maker to pre-fund and carry inventory for specific assets.
That distinction connects to a broader market constraint Lutsch highlighted: while tokenized asset markets can offer settlement benefits, historical low trading volumes have reduced market makers’ incentives to commit capital. He argued that routing and aggregating redemption demand across issuers and asset classes could improve liquidity economics as tokenized funds increasingly function as collateral and financing assets in onchain markets.
From an investor perspective, the practical implication is that users may have more execution options as liquidity providers face less inventory burden and can scale their participation across assets—potentially reducing friction when demand for redemptions rises.
What to watch next
As Centrifuge extends Symbiotic’s Liquid Lane to more fund products and as tokenized-fund liquidity competes across multiple RFQ and instant-redemption mechanisms, investors should watch whether trading and redemption volumes grow enough to attract and sustain market-maker participation—since Liquid Lane’s thesis depends on improving flow-driven liquidity economics.
Crypto World
The Economics of Trustless Lending
For centuries, lending has depended on one fundamental question: Can I trust the borrower to repay me?
Traditional financial institutions answer that question through credit scores, collateral requirements, employment records, legal contracts, identity verification, and centralized intermediaries. These systems can work, but they are expensive, slow, geographically limited, and often exclude people who lack conventional financial histories.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) introduces a different approach: trustless lending.
Instead of relying primarily on a bank or lending company to determine who can borrow, trustless lending uses blockchain infrastructure, smart contracts, collateral, transparent rules, and automated liquidation mechanisms. The goal is not to eliminate trust, but to replace dependence on trusted intermediaries with verifiable rules and economic incentives.
That shift creates a completely different economic model for lending.
What Does “Trustless” Lending Actually Mean?
The term trustless can be misleading.
A DeFi lending protocol still requires users to trust that the underlying smart contracts work as intended, the blockchain remains secure, and external data such as price feeds is accurate.
What changes is where trust is placed.
In traditional lending, participants may trust:
- Banks
- Credit bureaus
- Loan officers
- Legal enforcement
- Centralized databases
- Custodians
In a trustless lending system, much of that trust is moved toward:
- Smart contracts
- Cryptographic verification
- On-chain collateral
- Transparent protocol rules
- Decentralized networks
- Economic incentives
The important innovation is therefore not “zero trust.”
It is minimizing the amount of human discretion required to execute financial agreements.
The Basic Economics of DeFi Lending
A typical decentralized lending market connects two sides:
Lenders provide capital → borrowers provide collateral → smart contracts manage the loan.
Suppose a borrower deposits $150,000 worth of ETH into a lending protocol and borrows $75,000 in stablecoins.
The borrower has a 50% loan-to-value ratio.
If ETH falls substantially and the collateral ratio crosses the protocol’s liquidation threshold, the smart contract can automatically liquidate part or all of the collateral.
No loan officer is deciding whether to call the borrower.
There is no collections department.
There is no negotiation over whether the collateral should be sold.
The protocol follows predetermined rules.
This automation dramatically changes the cost structure of lending.
Collateral Replaces Much of the Traditional Credit Infrastructure
One of the biggest economic differences between traditional finance and DeFi is the role of collateral.
Traditional lending can be credit-based.
A bank may lend because it believes a borrower has sufficient income, assets, credit history, and repayment capacity.
DeFi lending is generally much more collateral-based.
The borrower demonstrates financial credibility by locking assets into a smart contract.
This creates an important trade-off.
The advantage
Collateral can make lending accessible without requiring:
- Credit scores
- Employment verification
- Banking relationships
- Geographic approval
- Extensive paperwork
The disadvantage
Borrowers often need to provide more assets than they receive.
This is known as overcollateralization.
If someone wants to borrow $10,000, they might need to deposit $15,000 or $20,000 worth of crypto.
That may seem inefficient, but economically it serves an important purpose: the collateral absorbs credit risk.
Why Overcollateralization Exists
Imagine a lending protocol that allows users to borrow $1 for every $1 of collateral.
If the collateral suddenly loses 30% of its value, the protocol could become undercollateralized.
That creates losses for lenders.
Overcollateralization provides a buffer.
For example:
$20,000 collateral → $10,000 loan
The protocol begins with a 200% collateralization ratio.
If the collateral falls by 30%, it is still worth approximately $14,000 against a $10,000 loan.
The system therefore has additional room to absorb volatility.
This is one reason DeFi lending is particularly suited to volatile digital assets—but also one reason why crypto lending has not completely replaced traditional unsecured credit.
Interest Rates Become a Market Signal
Another major economic feature of trustless lending is algorithmic or market-driven interest rates.
In traditional finance, banks typically determine lending and deposit rates based on monetary policy, funding costs, risk models, competition, and other factors.
In DeFi, interest rates can respond directly to supply and demand for liquidity.
When demand for borrowing rises:
More borrowers → greater demand for liquidity → borrowing rates tend to increase.
When liquidity becomes abundant:
More lenders → greater available capital → borrowing rates tend to decrease.
This creates a continuously adjusting market.
Interest rates therefore become more than simply a price for borrowing.
They become a real-time signal of capital demand within a specific on-chain market.
The Economics of Liquidity
Liquidity is the engine of lending.
Without available capital, borrowers cannot borrow.
Without attractive returns, lenders have little reason to supply capital.
This creates a feedback loop:
More lenders → deeper liquidity
→ better borrowing conditions → more borrowers → more interest paid → stronger incentives for lenders.
But the opposite can also happen.
Lower liquidity → higher borrowing costs → fewer borrowers → lower lender returns → declining liquidity.
This makes liquidity management one of the most important economic challenges for lending protocols.
A protocol isn’t successful simply because it has billions of dollars deposited.
It needs productive liquidity.
Capital that sits idle provides little economic value.
Capital Efficiency Is the Bigger Challenge
Traditional finance can offer unsecured and undercollateralized loans because institutions have access to extensive information about borrowers.
DeFi has historically struggled with this.
The blockchain can tell a protocol what assets a wallet owns.
It can track transactions.
It can verify collateral.
But determining whether a real-world individual will repay a loan is much harder.
This creates an important economic problem:
How can DeFi move from overcollateralized lending toward more capital-efficient credit?
Several approaches are emerging, including:
-
- On-chain credit scoring
- Reputation systems
- Decentralized identity
- Real-world asset collateral
- Institutional credit markets
- Under-collateralized lending
- Credit delegation
- Zero-knowledge identity and financial credentials
Liquidation Is an Economic Feature, Not Just a Safety Mechanism
Liquidations are one of the most important components of DeFi lending.
When collateral falls below a required threshold, the protocol needs a mechanism to protect lenders.
Liquidators step in by purchasing or taking control of collateral, often at a discount.
This creates an economic incentive:
Protocol needs risk protection → liquidators receive an opportunity → unhealthy loans are removed.
The system effectively creates a decentralized risk-management workforce.
However, liquidations also introduce risks.
During extreme market volatility, collateral prices can fall faster than positions can be liquidated. Blockchain congestion, oracle failures, and sudden liquidity shortages can make the process more difficult.
So while automation reduces dependence on human intervention, it does not eliminate market risk.
Oracles Become Part of the Trust Equation
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about trustless lending:
Smart contracts cannot know the real-world price of an asset by themselves.
They need oracles.
If ETH is trading at $3,000 but a lending protocol receives an incorrect price of $2,000, collateral calculations can become distorted.
A faulty price feed could potentially trigger unnecessary liquidations or allow borrowers to take excessive loans.
This means the economics of DeFi lending depend not only on smart contracts but also on reliable information infrastructure.
In many ways, oracles are the sensory system of decentralized finance.
The Cost Advantage of Automation
One of the strongest economic arguments for trustless lending is reduced operational overhead.
Traditional lending involves high costs:
- Loan processing
- Compliance
- Administration
- Credit analysis
- Custody
- Settlement
- Collections
- Legal enforcement
Smart contracts can automate many of these functions.
Once deployed, the same lending logic can potentially serve thousands or millions of users without requiring a proportional increase in administrative staff.
This creates the possibility of software-driven financial scale.
The marginal cost of executing another transaction can be dramatically lower than the cost of manually processing another traditional loan.
But Smart Contracts Introduce New Costs
Automation doesn’t mean lending becomes free.
The cost structure simply changes.
DeFi participants must account for:
- Smart-contract risk
- Oracle risk
- Blockchain transaction fees
- Governance risk
- Liquidity risk
- Market volatility
- Economic attacks
- Bridge or infrastructure risk
A bank might spend money maintaining compliance teams and branches.
A DeFi protocol may instead spend resources on audits, security infrastructure, oracle systems, bug bounties, governance, and monitoring.
The economic question is therefore not:
“Is DeFi cheaper?”
It is:
“Which costs are removed, and which new risks and costs replace them?”
Governance Has an Economic Value
Many lending protocols are governed by decentralized organizations or token holders.
Governance can influence parameters such as:
- Interest-rate models
- Collateral factors
- Supported assets
- Liquidation thresholds
- Risk parameters
- Treasury allocation
- Protocol upgrades
This creates another economic layer.
A lending protocol is not merely a collection of smart contracts.
It is also a risk-management institution encoded in software and governance mechanisms.
Poor governance can create enormous losses.
Good governance can improve capital efficiency while maintaining system stability.
That makes governance quality an economic asset.
The Network Effect of Lending Markets
Lending protocols can also benefit from powerful network effects.
More assets supported → more borrowing opportunities.
More borrowers → greater demand for liquidity.
More liquidity → better execution.
Better execution → more users.
More users → stronger incentives for developers and liquidity providers.
This can create a reinforcing cycle.
However, network effects can also create concentration risk.
If too much liquidity becomes dependent on one protocol, one blockchain, one stablecoin, or one oracle infrastructure provider, a failure could have consequences across the broader ecosystem.
Decentralization therefore needs to be evaluated at the system level, not simply by looking at the number of smart contracts involved.
Stablecoins Are Critical to Lending Economics
Stablecoins have become especially important to DeFi lending because they provide a relatively stable unit of account.
A borrower can deposit volatile crypto collateral while borrowing a stablecoin.
For example:
ETH collateral → stablecoin loan → stablecoin repayment
This lets users access liquidity without necessarily selling their underlying assets.
Stablecoins also allow lending markets to express interest rates in units that are easier to understand than volatile crypto-denominated returns.
As stablecoin adoption grows, their role in decentralized credit markets could become increasingly important.
Trustless Lending Could Expand Global Access to Credit
Perhaps the most significant long-term economic implication is accessibility.
A person does not necessarily need to live in a major financial center to interact with a blockchain-based lending market.
They may only need:
- An internet connection
- A compatible wallet
- Digital assets
- Access to the relevant blockchain
This does not solve every problem.
People without crypto assets may still struggle to access overcollateralized loans. Regulatory restrictions can also affect availability.
But the architecture creates an important possibility:
Financial infrastructure can become globally accessible rather than geographically dependent.
That is a profound economic shift.
The Future: From Trustless Lending to Programmable Credit
The next evolution of DeFi lending may not simply be about borrowing more money.
It could be about making credit programmable.
Imagine loans that automatically adjust according to:
- Collateral quality
- Market volatility
- Reputation
- Cash-flow data
- On-chain activity
- Real-world assets
- Risk scores
- Liquidity conditions
Instead of one-size-fits-all lending, decentralized credit markets could eventually offer dynamically priced financial products.
That would move DeFi closer to a financial operating system.
Final Thoughts
The economics of trustless lending are built around a simple but powerful idea:
Replace institutional trust with transparent rules, collateral, incentives, and cryptographic verification wherever possible.
This can reduce intermediaries, automate risk management, improve accessibility, and create global markets for capital.
But trustless lending is not riskless lending.
Smart-contract vulnerabilities, oracle failures, volatile collateral, liquidity shocks, governance mistakes, and market manipulation remain serious challenges.
The real breakthrough will come when decentralized lending becomes not only trust-minimized, but also capital-efficient, resilient, secure, and accessible.
If that happens, DeFi could evolve from an alternative financial experiment into a fundamental layer of the global credit economy.
The future of lending may not be about asking, “Who do I trust?”
It may increasingly be about asking:
“What rules can everyone verify?” 🔐
REQUEST AN ARTICLE
Crypto World
Beyond crypto funding rates: Ethena diversifies USDe backing with $1 billion FalconX facility

The warehouse facility gives Ethena another source of returns for the assets backing USDe while channeling onchain capital into overcollateralized institutional loans.
-
Fashion5 days agoWeekend Open Thread: Ann Taylor
-
Sports6 days agoThis U.S. Amateur is a glimpse into golf’s future in more ways than you think
-
Tech5 days ago11 Ways to Rank Your Videos
-
NewsBeat4 days agoMyanmar says over 300,000 Rohingya refugees verified for repatriation as exodus enters ninth year
-
Sports4 days agoBirmingham 2026: Day 6 Timetable for Irish Athletes
-
Politics4 days agoSEQ Code: The Three Letter Boarding Pass Code That Could Give You The Worst Seat
-
Sports7 days agoDeQuan Jones in ‘high spirits’ after successful leg surgery
-
Tech6 days agoDeepSeek Harness launches as open source rival to Claude Code, alongside V4-Pro on API with higher prices
-
Crypto World7 days agoPerplexity AI Predicts an XRP Scenario Few Analysts Are Discussing
-
Crypto World2 days agoOCC Greenlights Trump Family Crypto Firm for Trust Charter
-
Entertainment7 days ago2026’s Most Ambitious Fantasy Movie Officially Scores Sequel Update
-
Entertainment7 days agoAll 10 Hayao Miyazaki Fantasy Movies, Ranked
-
Entertainment7 days agoTravis Kelce Breaks Silence On ‘Crazy’ Taylor Swift Wedding
-
Entertainment5 days ago10 Netflix Shows That Quietly Became Modern Classics
-
Tech1 day agoQwen3.8-27B runs frontier-class coding agents and reasoning locally, no cloud API required
-
Fashion5 days agoWeekly News Update, 8.14.26 – Corporette.com
-
Business7 days agoNebius shares soar 22% as AI demand powers revenue beat
-
Fashion6 days agoThe Details Do the Dressing
-
Business4 days agoFacebook Down Now? Users Report Login And Loading Problems As Outage Trackers Monitor Ongoing Issues
-
Entertainment4 days agoMarvel Studios Reveals New X-Men Cast Including Adam Driver and Sadie Sink

You must be logged in to post a comment Login