The latest earnings week has handed investors a clear shortlist of US stocks to watch in August. Three of the market’s largest companies just reported, and Wall Street split its verdict between reward and punishment.

The divide came down to one test, which AI spender could prove that customers are paying for the build. It left the winners with strong setups and one laggard facing a cautious road into August.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)

Microsoft soared about 15% to near $451 after its July 29 results, its biggest jump in months. Trading volume, the number of shares changing hands, hit its highest since June 22, which shows strong conviction behind the buying.

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Yet the rally is not fully convincing. That volume still sits below the heavy selling of late June, so buyers have not fully overpowered sellers.

The Chaikin Money Flow (CMF), a gauge of whether institutional money is flowing into or out of a stock, shows the same doubt. It nearly turned negative before earnings, then rose to 0.04 as big investors reacted. It still sits below its July 24 peak, and it must reclaim that level to confirm institutions are truly buying.

The fundamentals explain the jump. Microsoft spent $41 billion on capital expenditure, the cost of building AI data centers, but backed it with a $678 billion book of signed customer contracts. That locked-in demand proves the spending is funded by real orders, which is the bullish case. It also guided Azure cloud growth toward 45%, and faster growth at that scale points to rising future revenue.

Wall Street agrees. The stock holds a Strong Buy rating, with 24 of 25 firms on Buy, signaling broad expectations of more upside.

Only Barclays trimmed its target, a lone caution that matches the soft volume.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)

Amazon carries the strongest analyst support of the three, making it one of the more bullish US stocks to watch into August. All 28 covering firms rate it Buy, with none on Hold or Sell, and every major desk raised its price target after earnings. That rare unanimity gives Amazon the cleanest bull case of the week.

Options positioning backs that optimism. The put-to-call volume ratio, which compares bearish bets against bullish ones, fell from 0.74 to 0.54 into the print, meaning traders bought far more calls and leaned bullish.

The open interest ratio, the standing option contracts already in place, held steady at 0.66. That shows longer-term money has not fully committed yet, which leaves room for new buyers to lift the stock in August.

The business explains the confidence. Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, reaccelerated, and the company disclosed a $496 billion backlog of signed customer demand. When Alphabet and Meta raised their AI spending, investors sold both stocks, fearing spending with no proven payoff. Amazon raised spending too, but its backlog proved customers had already agreed to pay, so the stock rose instead.

There is a catch worth knowing. Amazon’s headline $5.75 per share reads like a huge beat, but most of it came from a one-time paper gain on its Anthropic stake, not from the core business. Strip that out, and profit still rose a healthy 43%, so the bull case holds. The real pressure is cash, because heavy AI spending has pushed free cash flow, the money a company keeps after building, into the red over the past year.

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META)

Meta is the outlier among the top US stocks to watch. The stock fell about 8% to near $539 and now sits roughly 23% below its mid-July high.

The problem is cash, not sales. Revenue grew 28%, but free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier. Capex nearly swallowed all the cash the business generated, so Meta leaned on about $25 billion of new debt to keep funding its dividend, which unsettles investors.

Unlike Microsoft and Amazon, the other two US stocks to watch, Meta disclosed no backlog of signed demand, so it cannot yet prove the AI build will pay off. Its core apps also earned less, as Family of Apps operating income, the profit from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, slipped to $23.4 billion from $25 billion. The strongest ad engine on earth delivered a weaker bottom line.

The chart warns of more risk. Meta’s CMF trended lower even as the price climbed from early June to mid-July, and a deep correction followed. It still has not cleared the 0.05 line that would confirm buyers are back, so the same bearish drop could repeat.

Analysts stay loyal but nervous. Meta keeps a Strong Buy, yet at least ten firms cut price targets overnight, including Citi to $800 from $850.

That lower ceiling with unchanged ratings signals near-term caution even from believers.

The post 3 US Stocks To Watch In August 2026 After Big Earnings Week appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Fundstrat’s Tom Lee says the artificial intelligence (AI) trade is not finished. He argues the next leg runs through crypto payment rails built for software agents rather than people.

Veteran macro investor Jordi Visser argued the opposite this week. Lee also chairs the largest corporate holder of ether, which gives his version of the thesis a direct financial stake.

Why Lee Says Chips Were Only the First Leg

Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat, made the case on a panel hosted by the firm. He covered mobile phones as an analyst in the early 1990s.

Motorola and the infrastructure suppliers led that cycle early. The larger winners arrived later, namely the tower companies spun out of the carriers, and Apple.

Lee expects the same shape now, with financial services as the downstream market. He has already called AI capital spending fears a bullish market tell.

The Four Reasons Banks Cannot Bank Agents

Lee listed trust, proof of funds, lending, and tax collection as the reasons people built commerce around banks. Agents need none of those, he argued.

“It’s a mistake to think that this is going to be built on traditional financial rails,” Lee said.

Bank ledgers must settle in a single national currency. Money is becoming code, according to Lee, so equities, gold, and tokens could all clear as payment.

Part of that rail already exists on paper. ERC-8183, a proposed Ethereum standard filed on Feb. 25, locks an agent’s payment in escrow until a designated evaluator signs off.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Davide Crapis co-authored it with three Virtuals Protocol engineers. It carries Draft status, so nothing about it is final.

Where Tom Lee and Visser Split on the AI Trade

Visser leads AI research at 22V Research and spent two decades at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, latterly as chief investment officer. He says AI’s easy money is over.

He now expects roughly 30% a year instead of the seven or eight times investors once chased. Lee reads the same compression as rotation.

The two converge on the destination. Both expect fee-earning networks to absorb the flow, and both name Ethereum.

Ethereum trades near $1,873 after gaining 19.7% over 30 days. It still sits 51% lower across 12 months, and just over 2% below its trading price the previous day.

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Lee’s $11.8 Billion Reason to Prefer Ethereum

Lee chairs BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of ether. The company disclosed 5.79 million ETH on July 27, close to 4.8% of circulating supply.

Crypto and cash holdings reached $11.8 billion. BitMine states the dependency plainly in its own investor materials.

“So our future price for Bitmine stock is heavily dependent on the future price of Ethereum,” Lee said in the July chairman’s message.

Lee puts the correlation between BitMine shares and ether at 90%. Anyone weighing his agent thesis is also weighing that balance sheet, which rallied this month on its ETH treasury bet.

The Numbers Do Not Match the Story Yet

Jansen Teng, co-founder and chief executive of Virtuals Protocol, shared the panel with Lee. His platform lets agents hold wallets and pay each other onchain, and his figures undercut the timeline.

Teng said the launchpad for agent tokens has cleared about $15 billion in trading volume. Agent-to-agent commerce has settled roughly $500 million in a year.

Speculating on agents is therefore some 30 times larger than agents transacting. Both figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified.

Teng said the agents kept $2.5 million in profit, and that the product has not reached product-market fit (PMF). Virtuals commissioned the Fundstrat research and is a client of the firm.

Its VIRTUAL token trades near $0.56, down 89% from a January 2025 peak, even after agents started trading tokenized stocks onchain.

So the question is not whether the AI trade ended. It is whether machine payments arrive before the balance sheets betting on them need the story to work.

The post Tom Lee vs Jordi Visser on the AI Trade: Both End Up at Ethereum appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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The team behind Pi Network set a deadline for its next big upgrade, while Solana’s native token risks plunging to as low as $50.

Bitcoin (BTC) may also head south, but interestingly, some analysts believe such a move could actually benefit the bulls.

Pi Network’s Announcement

The Core Team has been on a tear since the start of 2026, unveiling several major ecosystem improvements. The latest was the migration to protocol version 25, which was supposed to be deployed earlier this month.

Pi Network’s team did not disclose the move on X or on its website, yet multiple users claimed that it was in effect. The project has now shifted its attention to the next protocol update (version 26), setting August 11 as the deadline.

“All Mainnet note operators must complete the upgrade before the deadline to remain connected to the network,” the post reads.

The team also shared additional details about its Pi Launchpad model. It explained that in this ecosystem, projects issue tokens as tools to acquire users for their applications and integrate those coins directly into product functionality, such as rewards, payments, access, and governance.

“Instead of being taken by the issuing project, the proceeds of Pi from their token launch go to a liquidity pool with the ecosystem token, which bootstraps a healthy liquidity foundation from the start,” the team added.

PI, which was bleeding heavily prior to the aforementioned announcements, managed to rebound and now trades at around $0.08. Still, it remains down roughly 97% from its all-time high of $3 registered last year.

SOL at Risk

Solana’s native cryptocurrency has slipped by 3% over the past week, currently trading at around $73.50. This means that it has plunged below the $73.75 mark, which the popular analyst Ali Martinez recently described as a “make-or-break” level.

He believes that a sustained close under this key zone might trigger further selling pressure and result in a collapse to $60 and even $50 in the near future.

However, not all are pessimists. X user Crypto Zenkai argued that buying SOL below $80 is like investing in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2010, while Lucky told his nearly 2 million followers that the asset’s plunge under $75 might represent a “juicy dip.”

BTC Needs to Fall?

As of press time, the primary cryptocurrency is worth approximately $63,800, a 2.5% decline on a weekly basis. And while bulls eagerly await a resurgence, Martinez claimed they should actually welcome a potential drop to $60K.

He believes that a plunge to that level would validate the formation of a classic inverse head-and-shoulders pattern that is typically seen as a precursor to a rally. The analyst opined that completing the setup, combined with a confirmed breakout above $66,500, could set the stage for a rally to a two-month high of $74K.

Not long ago, Martinez predicted that BTC’s bear market (assuming the 4-year cycle holds) may conclude between October 6 and October 16. Until then, many industry participants expect the asset’s price to plunge below $50,000 and even $40,000. The most bearish forecast came from X user BATMAN, who claimed that BTC’s recent performance mirrors that of the autumn of 2022, which was followed by a giant collapse to roughly $16,000.

The post Recent Pi Network (PI) Updates, Solana (SOL) Warning, and More: Bits Recap July 31 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Someone likely used AI to drain almost 600 BTC, worth $38 million, from roughly 500 dormant wallets yesterday as part of a seed phrase exploit targeting Coldcard hardware wallets.

The attack took just 25 minutes to move the BTC from 500 single-signature addresses into a single address, and reports suggest the exploit will likely continue.

Coindesk reports that the affected BTC was dated between 2021 and 2026, and much had remained dormant for years. Of the 594 coins stolen, 562 remain in the same address at the time of writing.

Coldcard maker, Coinkite, confirmed hours after the exploit that seed generation within its Mk3 wallet, and its subsequently updated versions beyond March 2021 (version 4.0.1), may not have been random at all.

Coldcard initially claimed that its Mk3 devices were at risk, and that the Mk4, Q, and Mk5 are “not affected based on our early analysis.”

Read more: Credit default swaps forecast AI bankruptcies

Block, formerly known as Square, found different results in its published analysis while one of its team members, Max Guise, found flaws between Mk2 and Mk5 Coldcard models.

The payments company traced the bug to a mis-written compile-time check. The newer devices, Block found, carry a smaller, but real, version of the same flaw.

Coinkite believes AI was used to discover exploit

Coinkite’s recent analysis deduced that, because Coldcard’s source code is open and public, someone likely used AI to exploit it.

It said that a few weeks before the attack, it couldn’t spot the bug even with Coinkite’s use of “the best available AI models.”

It added, “Both attackers and defenders have the same AI tools, but today it did not help us, and only helped the bad guys.”

Pseudonymous owners of Bitcoin.org website, Cobra, also expressed that they have “very bad feeling AI was involved,” and noted, “For whatever reason some addresses are only being partially drained despite the private key being compromised. Strange.”

Read more: Apple threatens Sparrow bitcoin wallet dev with App Store termination

Crypto developer Stephen DeLorme claims he was able to use AI model Claude Opus 5 to sniff out the Coldcard vulnerability after cloning the firmware’s repository.

“All our software is insecure, and we’re painfully figuring that out in realtime with AI agents,” DeLorme said.

The technicalities behind the Coldcard BTC theft

BTC wallets need genuinely random numbers to generate an unguessable private key. Coldcard’s firmware was supposed to pull that randomness from a hardware generator built into its STM32 chip.

According to Block, a codebase check tested only whether a macro called MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, not what value it held.

Coinkite’s software build set that macro to zero on purpose. Because the character was set to zero, and not a variable symbol, the check was flawed.

Despite this, the flawed check passed anyway during software operations. Firmware fell back to Yasmarang, a MicroPython pseudo-random number generator never meant for real-world cryptographic protection.

Read more: The number of BTC wallets holding more than 0.1 BTC hasn’t grown in two years

Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Sanders reproduced the attack using setup button-press counts, and confirmed its impact on Mk3 and Mk2 models. His own response to his findings was, “Sorry, this is the time to panic.”

Sanders first wrote, “confirmed. Mk2/3 vuln, I don’t think mk4 is but can’t be certain,” before following up an hour later with “mk4 is probably not much better.”

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The post Coldcard attack: 25 minutes, 500 wallets, $38M in BTC gone appeared first on Protos.

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XRP (XRP) gained over 3.8% in July, snapping a two-month losing streak. The token still trailed other large caps, with Bitcoin (BTC) adding about 9% and Ethereum (ETH) around 20%.

As August begins, two on-chain signals point to fading sell pressure. However, the month has historically offered XRP little support, and institutional demand through ETFs remains thin.

XRP Exchange Data Shows Sellers Stepping Back

In a post on X, analyst Darkfost noted that XRP inflows to Binance have fallen to a record low. According to the analyst, average monthly inflows to the exchange have dropped to roughly 3.6 million XRP. 

While the figure remains significant in absolute terms, it marks the lowest monthly inflow ever recorded. Darkfost said the trend suggests that XRP holders are showing little willingness to move tokens onto exchanges for sale, pointing to an exhaustion of selling pressure. 

He added that the reduced pressure could help XRP establish stronger price support above $1.

“What remains to be seen is whether a genuine rebound in demand will follow this lull on the sell side, a condition that appears necessary to spark a sustainable bullish trend,” the analyst added.

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Meanwhile, another on-chain analyst reported a sharp increase in XRP withdrawals from exchanges. Withdrawal transactions accounted for 55.6% of XRP activity on Binance over the past seven days as of July 31, the highest share since February 2021.

Across all centralized exchanges, the figure reached 54%, confirming the shift extends beyond a single venue. 

Deposit transactions moved the opposite way. Binance’s deposit share slipped to 44.3%, while the market-wide figure fell to 45.95%. Both readings mark multi-year lows.

The metric tracks transaction counts rather than XRP volume or net flows. It signals a structural change in exchange behavior but does not, on its own, confirm accumulation.

August Seasonality and ETF Flows Cloud the Setup

Yet, history gives buyers less comfort. August is XRP’s flattest month on record, averaging returns of just 0.43%, and it has closed red for four straight years. That seasonality contrasts with July, which XRP has closed green every year since 2020.

Institutional appetite offers little counterweight. Spot XRP ETFs attracted only about $19.6 million in net inflows across July’s 21 trading days, according to SoSoValue data. Flows registered zero on 11 of those days, while July 1 and July 8 saw outright outflows. 

The on-chain picture suggests sellers have largely stepped aside above $1. Whether dormant ETF desks and a historically quiet month allow demand to return will define XRP’s August.

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The post XRP Flashes 2 Bullish On-Chain Signals Heading Into August appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Quantum Solutions more than doubled its authorized Ethereum (ETH) sale cap to 4,375 ETH on July 30, as subsidiary GPT Pals Studio sold another 1,000 ETH at $1,903 per token.

The sale generated $1.9 million in proceeds and is expected to result in an accounting loss of approximately JPY 17 million ($100,970). The proceeds will fund the group’s AI Infrastructure Data Center (AIDC) business.

Why Quantum Solutions Is Selling Its ETH Holdings

The Tokyo Stock Exchange-listed firm first approved sales of up to 1,875 ETH on June 4. It cited funding needs for data center usage agreements, GPU equipment, and business launch preparations.

GPT Pals Studio sold 904 ETH on June 16, leaving just 971 ETH available under the original policy. The board therefore added 2,500 ETH to the cap through a written resolution on July 30.

The group has now sold 1,904 ETH since June, cutting its holdings to 4,764.80 ETH. However, 3,050 of those tokens have remained pledged to a Singapore-based lender as collateral since April. That leaves only 1,714.80 ETH in GPT’s trading account.

The July sale resulted in an expected accounting loss because the sale price of $1,903 per ETH was below the carrying value of $2,003.97,

“As a result of the sale, the Company expects to recognize a loss on sale of approximately JPY 17 million during the second quarter of the fiscal year ending February 2027, calculated based on the carrying value following the mark-to-market valuation conducted at the end of the first quarter of the fiscal year ending February 2027,” the firm said.

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Crypto Treasuries Feed the AI Trade

Quantum Solutions joins a widening group of public companies chasing the AI trade. Bitcoin (BTC) miners show the trend most clearly.

IREN, TeraWulf, and Core Scientific have redirected their energy-heavy facilities from mining rigs to high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. 

In fact, public miners offloaded 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding their disposals for all of 2025. Squeezed margins, heavy debt loads, and AI infrastructure shift drive the exodus.

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