Crypto World
where did the $100M go?
Thirteen months ago, Pi Network announced a Silicon Valley-style venture fund to seed its ecosystem.
Summary
- Pi Network Ventures was announced as a $100 million ecosystem fund, but only one investment has been publicly disclosed.
- The fund’s PI-token component makes its real dollar value unclear after PI’s sharp decline since the announcement.
- OpenMind is a credible robotics and AI infrastructure bet, but it does not solve Pi’s near-term token demand or unlock pressure.
- The biggest issue is disclosure: portfolio, check sizes, denomination, custody, criteria, and governance remain unclear.
One disclosed investment later, the questions have compounded faster than the portfolio. In May 2025, with its token still trading above half a dollar and its open mainnet barely three months old, Pi Network announced the kind of initiative that signals a project graduating into seriousness: Pi Network Ventures, a $100 million fund to back startups that would bring real-world utility to the ecosystem. The fund would be denominated in a mix of PI tokens and U.S. dollars, drawn from the network’s ecosystem reserves, and aimed at AI, fintech, gaming, e-commerce, and robotics. The pitch borrowed Silicon Valley’s vocabulary deliberately, promising portfolio companies capital plus something rarer: access to tens of millions of KYC-verified users.
Thirteen months later, the public record of that fund consists of one disclosed investment, a robotics software startup named OpenMind, announced at the end of October 2025, with the check size never stated.
There is no published portfolio page, no deployment report, no disclosure of how much of the hundred million has moved, in what proportion of tokens to dollars, or at what valuation of a token that has since lost most of its dollar value. For an ecosystem whose community measures hope in announcements, the fund’s first year invites a journalistic accounting. This piece attempts one: what the fund said it would do, what it can be shown to have done, what the OpenMind bet actually involves, and what the gaps in between mean.
What was announced, precisely
The founding claims matter, because accountability starts with the original language. Pi Network Ventures launched in May 2025 as a $100 million initiative of the core team and foundation, with the capital sourced from ecosystem reserves, the pool that exists inside Pi’s 100 billion token allocation for community and ecosystem building. The mandate named its sectors broadly and stated three core objectives, the last of which was bringing Pi into real-world use cases. Coverage at the time noted the fund’s hybrid denomination in PI tokens and USD, and the team framed the distinctive asset as distribution: a startup taking Pi money would gain access to one of the largest verified user bases in crypto.
Three structural facts follow from that design, and each one shapes everything that came after. First, the fund is corporate venture capital in the most concentrated sense: no outside limited partners, no independent governance, capital and decisions both belonging to the team that issues the token. Second, the denomination in PI tokens makes the fund’s headline size a moving target, since the dollar value of the token portion falls with the chart, and the chart has fallen hard. Third, sourcing from ecosystem reserves means the community’s allocation funds the bets, while the choosing of the bets sits entirely with the core team, a structure other ecosystems route through grant DAOs, councils, or at minimum published criteria.
None of these facts is improper. Corporate venture funds are common, token treasuries are volatile by nature, and early-stage discretion has its defenders. But together they make disclosure the only available check, which is why the disclosure record is the right thing to audit. The fund’s problem is not that it exists; the problem is that the public cannot see enough of it to judge whether it is functioning.
What the distribution pitch is really worth
Before the deployment record comes the fund’s most distinctive founding claim, which was never primarily about money. Pi Network Ventures marketed itself as offering startups something venture dollars cannot buy: access to one of the largest KYC-verified user bases in crypto, tens of millions of identity-checked accounts a portfolio company could, in theory, acquire as customers for free. On paper the claim has real weight. Customer acquisition is the dominant cost for most consumer startups, identity verification is its most expensive component in fintech, and a partner who delivers pre-verified users at scale would be worth taking below-market terms to work with.
This is the legitimate version of the pitch, and it is presumably what a robotics company with no consumer product saw value in when it accepted the association. The audited version is less generous. The user base’s headline numbers, 60 million claimed accounts at peak messaging, more than 17 million KYC-verified, nearly 16 million migrated to mainnet, sit beside a harder figure from the same ecosystem reviews: fewer than 100 mainnet-ready applications, despite a generative tool that let more than 51,000 creators spin up apps. A funnel that converts tens of millions of verified accounts into double-digit working applications is telling you something about the difference between an audience and a market.
Users who arrived to tap a mining button are not, on the evidence so far, converting into customers of anything at rates that would make the distribution pitch bankable, and a startup weighing a Pi Ventures term sheet can read the same funnel this piece can. The fund’s unique asset is real, unproven, and shrinking in credibility with every month the application layer stays thin. That makes the fund’s slow public pace partly self-explaining: the easiest capital to deploy is capital whose sweetener works. When the sweetener is still unproven, deployment becomes harder to explain and harder to sell.
What the fund can be shown to have done
Public evidence of the fund in action amounts to the following. OpenMind, announced October 29, 2025, is the fund’s first and only named investment. The Silicon Valley startup, founded by Stanford professor Jan Liphardt, builds OM1, an operating system pitched as Android for robots, and FABRIC, a protocol letting machines identify, verify, and cooperate. OpenMind had closed a $20 million round led by Pantera Capital in August 2025, with Coinbase Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Topology, and Pebblebed participating; Pi’s investment arrived after that round, building on it, with the amount undisclosed.
Before investing, the two teams ran a proof-of-concept using Pi’s node network for distributed AI processing.
Beyond OpenMind, the record thins fast. A partnership with CiDi Games to thread Pi into in-game economies has been described in ecosystem roundups, though whether it involved fund capital or a commercial agreement is not public. Pi App Studio, the generative AI tool that the team credits with letting more than 51,000 creators build apps, is a product launch rather than a fund deployment. Year-end ecosystem reviews cite the fund’s existence as an achievement in itself, which is the kind of citation that confirms the announcement rather than the activity.
Set that record against the fund’s own clock. Thirteen months at a stated $100 million implies, at typical early-stage check sizes, somewhere between a handful and a few dozen investments for a fund intent on deploying. One disclosed deal of unstated size is consistent with several stories: a deliberately patient fund, a fund whose other deals are unannounced, a fund whose capital was always more notional than committed, or a fund constrained by the collapse of its own denomination. The public record cannot distinguish among them, and that inability is itself the finding.
The denomination problem nobody has answered
Hovering over every question about deployment is the arithmetic of what $100 million means when part of it is PI. When the fund launched in May 2025, PI traded in the range of 60 to 70 cents. The token now trades near $0.12, a decline of more than 80% from the announcement window. If, hypothetically, half the fund’s capital was held in PI at launch valuations, that portion’s dollar value has fallen by four fifths, taking the real fund size down with it.
If most of it was PI, the fund’s purchasing power today is a fraction of its name. The team has not published the split, the custody arrangement, or whether the $100 million figure is marked to market, fixed in tokens, or backed by an off-chain dollar commitment. The question is not pedantic, because the answer determines what the fund can actually do for the ecosystem. A fund holding dollars can write dollar checks to startups regardless of the chart, while a fund holding PI faces an ugly choice every time it invests.
It can pay startups in a token they will likely need to sell, adding the fund’s own deployments to the very sell pressure the ecosystem already struggles with, or it can liquidate PI into thin order books itself before writing dollar checks, with the same effect one step removed. Every venture fund denominated in its own ecosystem’s token carries this loop, and the projects that handle it credibly do so by disclosing the mechanics. Pi has disclosed none of them, which leaves community members defending a number that may no longer describe anything. This is why the fund’s headline size cannot be treated as the same thing as available firepower.
What the OpenMind bet actually is
A single named investment merits a closer look, because it is both more interesting and stranger than the headline suggests. OpenMind is a serious company by the standard signals: a Stanford robotics founder, a round led by Pantera with Coinbase Ventures and Ribbit on the sheet, and a thesis, open infrastructure for machine intelligence in the physical world, that sits squarely inside the most funded narrative in technology. For Pi, association with that syndicate is itself a form of validation the project has rarely had. The same venture firms that would never list PI’s chart in a deck were comfortable sharing a cap table with its foundation.
The strategic logic the two teams describe runs through Pi’s node network. The proof-of-concept tested distributed AI processing across Pi’s globally scattered nodes, and the stated vision has Pi’s infrastructure serving as decentralized compute for machine workloads while Pi the token serves as a payment rail for autonomous agents, machine-to-machine transactions in a future where robots buy services from each other. The team has floated compensating node operators for contributing computing power to AI training, which would give the node network its first economic function beyond consensus. The node angle is the part with measurable nearer-term stakes.
Pi’s network of user-run nodes has always been the project’s most underused asset, thousands of machines contributing consensus to a chain with modest transaction demand. Renting that idle capacity to AI workloads would create the first revenue-shaped flow in the ecosystem’s history: external demand paying, in some denomination, for a service Pi infrastructure performs. The economics are unproven, distributed consumer hardware competes badly with data centers on most AI workloads, and the proof-of-concept has not been followed by published throughput or earnings data. But it is at least a testable proposition, and testable propositions are scarce in this ecosystem.
A fair assessment holds two thoughts at once. As a thesis, machine payments and distributed compute give Pi’s idle infrastructure a plausible future job, and betting early on a credible team in that space is what an ecosystem fund exists to do. As a present-day matter, the investment does nothing for the questions Pi holders actually face this year: it adds no token demand, no burn, no user-facing utility, and no revenue. Its payoff horizon is measured against the robotics industry’s adoption curve, which is to say in many years, making the fund’s first bet defensible and almost perfectly orthogonal to the ecosystem’s emergency.
What the ecosystem needed while the fund was quiet
Accountability includes opportunity cost, so place the fund’s quiet year against the year its ecosystem had. Between the May 2025 announcement and this writing, PI fell from the 60-cent range to roughly 12 cents, the community absorbed an unlock schedule running at hundreds of millions of tokens monthly, exchange access stayed frozen at the second tier, and the protocol upgrade ladder consumed the team’s public attention. Through all of it, the single most common community demand was not venture investment at all. It was anything that supported the token’s market structure: liquidity programs, market making, exchange listings, and transparency on supply.
A $100 million pool of ecosystem reserves is one of the few tools that could have addressed any of those, and the team chose, defensibly, to point it at multi-year utility bets instead. That choice should be stated as a choice, not discovered later. Venture deployment and market support draw from the same reserves, and a fund that invests in robotics operating systems is a fund that has decided the token’s 2026 chart is not its problem. There are good arguments for that decision, the same arguments every builder makes for ignoring price, and the team is entitled to them.
What the community is entitled to, in exchange, is knowing the decision was made. That returns, as every thread in this piece does, to the absence of anyone saying anything on the record about what the fund is for now, as opposed to what it was for at announcement. If the fund is a long-horizon utility vehicle, the team can say that. If it is also meant to support token-market structure, the team can say that too, but silence leaves the community to infer strategy from absence.
How other ecosystem funds handle this
Context sharpens the audit, because Pi did not invent the ecosystem fund, and the genre has norms. Major precedents disclose. Solana’s ecosystem investments, the Avalanche Blizzard fund, Near’s enormous ecosystem program, and the Ethereum Foundation’s grant machinery all publish portfolios, recipients, and in most cases amounts, not from regulatory obligation but because the disclosure is the point. An ecosystem fund’s announcements are marketing for builders, signaling where capital flows and inviting the next application.
A fund that does not publish its deals forfeits that flywheel, which is why silence in this genre usually indicates either inactivity or deals too small to flatter the headline number. Cautionary tales run through the genre too, and they rhyme with Pi’s structure. Token-denominated war chests announced at cycle tops have repeatedly shrunk into irrelevance as their treasuries fell, with the announced figure surviving in marketing long after the purchasing power went. Corporate funds without independent governance have a documented tendency to drift into strategic spending that serves the parent, conference sponsorships, ecosystem marketing, insider-adjacent deals, none of which is fraud and all of which is invisible without reporting.
Pi’s fund may be avoiding every one of these failure modes. The point of norms is that observers should not have to guess. If Pi Network Ventures wants to function like an ecosystem institution rather than a one-time headline, it needs the disclosure habits of an ecosystem institution. Until then, its structure invites the same questions that have followed every token-funded war chest through a down market.
The shape of the accountability gap
Assembled in one place, the gap has a precise shape. The community knows the fund’s announced size, its sectors, its stated objectives, and one portfolio company. It does not know the token-dollar split, the custody, the amount deployed, the OpenMind check size, whether other investments exist, who decides, against what criteria, or how the fund’s value has tracked the token’s decline. Every unknown on that list is a routine disclosure elsewhere in the industry.
Fixing it would cost the team a webpage. A portfolio list with amounts, a quarterly deployment note, a sentence on denomination and custody, and named criteria for what the fund backs: this is the disclosure floor for ecosystem funds run by far smaller teams, and publishing it would convert the fund from a recurring question into the credibility asset it was announced as. The choice not to publish, thirteen months in, communicates in the other direction. A community that has spent a brutal year being asked for patience notices what is and is not shared with it.
There is also a harder structural question that disclosure alone does not settle: whether community-allocated reserves spent at core team discretion should acquire governance at all. Pi’s roadmap gestures at decentralized governance through a future PiDAO, and no test of that promise will be cleaner than whether the ecosystem’s checkbook eventually answers to the ecosystem. A fund that spends in the community’s name should eventually show the community more than a headline. That is especially true when the funding pool comes from reserves whose economic burden is ultimately carried by the same holders waiting for utility.
The questions a single webpage would answer
For the record, and for anyone from the project reading, the open questions compiled across this audit fit in one place, and none requires revealing a trade secret. How much of the $100 million has been deployed to date, in how many investments? What was the size of the OpenMind check, and in what denomination was it paid? What proportion of the fund is held in PI versus dollars, and is the headline figure marked to market or fixed at announcement pricing?
Where is the capital custodied, and who controls it? What are the published criteria a startup must meet, and where does one apply? Were the CiDi Games arrangement and similar partnerships fund investments, commercial deals, or neither? Does the fund take equity, tokens, or both, and on what standard terms?
Who, by name or at least by role, makes the investment decisions, with what process for conflicts when a portfolio company’s interests and the core team’s diverge? Every ecosystem fund of comparable ambition answers most of this list as a matter of routine, and several answer all of it. The questions are printed here not as gotchas but as a checklist, because the fastest way for the fund’s second year to differ from its first is for someone to treat the list as a publishing plan. Thirteen months of silence has made the questions sharper, not the answers harder.
What “first investment” timing reveals
One detail of the chronology rewards a second look before the verdict: the gap between the fund’s announcement and its first deal. Pi Network Ventures launched in mid-May 2025. The OpenMind announcement came at the end of October, five and a half months later, and described itself explicitly as the fund’s first investment. That retroactively confirmed that the splashy launch had preceded any committed deal.
In institutional venture, that sequencing is unremarkable; funds raise first and deploy over years. In ecosystem marketing, it reads differently, because the announcement was consumed by the community, and visibly intended, as evidence of present momentum during the token’s first post-listing slide. The fund functioned as a narrative instrument for five months before it functioned as a financial one, and the narrative use arrived precisely when the chart needed it. That observation is not an accusation; announcing initiatives before executing them is how most organizations work.
It does, though, calibrate how much weight future fund announcements should carry on arrival. An ecosystem that has watched the gap between announcement and execution once should price the next announcement at execution value, which in this fund’s case has so far meant one deal, two hundred days, and a number nobody outside the building can verify. That is the same difference between announcement and mechanism that has shaped several token markets this year. The question is not whether Pi can announce utility, but whether it can show utility arriving with numbers attached.
What it means for the token
For PI holders, the fund’s first year teaches a smaller and a larger lesson. Start with the smaller one, about expectations. At any plausible deployment pace, a $100 million fund is not a price mechanism. Spread over years and paid into startups whose products mature slowly, the capital is a rounding error against an unlock schedule adding close to 200 million tokens to circulation every month.
Holders who priced the announcement as a catalyst learned the same lesson XRP holders learned about corporate milestones this year: treasury activity and token demand live on different timelines, when they connect at all.
The larger lesson is about what the fund could still become. An ecosystem fund that published its activity, denominated transparently, deployed into builders who give the token actual jobs, and eventually answered to community governance would be a genuine asset, the institutional spine of the utility era the project keeps promising. The raw materials exist: real capital by any accounting, a first investment whose co-investors are unimpeachable, and a community desperate to fund things. What stands between the current fund and that version of it is not money; it is paperwork, and the will to show it.
A fund that turned ecosystem activity into recurring demand would matter more than a headline fund size. That is why revenue-linked mechanics anchored another token so powerfully elsewhere: they connected usage to standing token demand instead of asking holders to trust a narrative.
For PI, the question is whether the fund can help create real token sinks before the cycle backdrop and unlock pressure do more damage. That matters because the cycle backdrop pressuring small caps has left little room for ecosystem promises without visible execution.
The full Pi coin price outlook still depends on recurring demand, exchange depth, unlock absorption, and whether utility can grow fast enough to offset supply.
Until the paperwork appears, the strictly accurate answer to this piece’s title is the unsatisfying one: one robotics startup, undisclosed millions, and a balance nobody outside the team can see. In venture capital, that answer would be unremarkable for a private firm and disqualifying for a fund that spends a community’s allocation in a community’s name. Pi Network Ventures has spent its first year being judged by the first standard. Its second year should be judged by the other.
As of June 11, 2026. Fund and ecosystem figures reflect public disclosures available at publication; verify current data before trading. This article is information, not investment advice.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup generated $20 billion in blockchain prediction-market volume from January through the tournament’s end, Chainalysis reported on July 30.
Summary
- $20 billion in prediction-market volume accumulated from January through the World Cup’s five-week tournament period.
- 400,000 wallets generated $5.7 billion during the tournament, representing 63% of prediction-market activity by volume.
- $24 million in FIFA Collect trades supported ticket access for more than 100,000 fans worldwide.
The analytics firm said more than 400,000 wallets participated, while $5.7 billion was traded during the five-week event.The report also tracked $24 million in stablecoin-powered trading through FIFA Collect, the football body’s official digital collectibles platform. The data show how betting, collectibles and ticket access converged on public blockchain infrastructure during the tournament.
World Cup prediction markets dominated onchain activity
World Cup-related markets accounted for about 63% of all prediction-market volume during the competition. Daily activity began near $50 million in January, exceeded $100 million during busy pre-tournament periods and moved toward $250 million after matches began on June 11.
Volume topped $300 million on the final, when Spain defeated Argentina, Chainalysis said. The $20 billion total covers trading from January, including qualifying and pre-tournament markets. It should not be read as betting conducted only during the tournament.
The figures fit a broader expansion in event contracts. Binance Research separately reported that monthly prediction-market notional volume rose 86% from January to $51.6 billion in June. It said Kalshi and Polymarket represented 92% of June’s total, although its market-wide measurement differs from Chainalysis’ World Cup-specific dataset.
U.S. and China led globally attributed volume
Chainalysis attributed the most activity to the U.S. and China, followed by Canada, Thailand and the United Kingdom. Participation came from every continent except Antarctica.
However, the firm cautioned that its proprietary geolocation method “may carry uncertainty” when VPNs, mixers or privacy tools obscure wallet locations. The rankings therefore represent Chainalysis’ attribution, not verified residence data for every participant.
However, World Cup demand pushed daily prediction-market volume sharply higher during June. In addition, Kalshi gained tournament exposure through ADI Predictstreet, FIFA’s official prediction-market partner.
Chainalysis identified about 3,700 participating wallets with traceable illicit interaction histories, representing less than 1% of the total. It reported at least $5.4 million flowing from Huobi or HTX into wallets that later used World Cup markets. Scam-linked wallets accounted for about $2 million, while stolen-fund exposure exceeded $800,000.
The U.K. designated Huobi Global on May 26 under its Russia sanctions regime and clarified that HTX falls within those restrictions through ownership. The European Union later added HTX to a transaction-ban list, with the measure scheduled to apply from August 23.
These findings measure earlier wallet interactions and fund flows. They do not prove that each flagged wallet committed an offense through its World Cup trades.
FIFA Collect connected digital assets with tickets
FIFA Collect let users trade digital collectibles and obtain rights connected to match tickets. FIFA says more than 100,000 fans gained stadium access through its Right-to-Ticket products. Chainalysis traced $24 million in payments to a key FIFA Collect smart-contract wallet from May 2025 through the tournament.
The firm estimated that FIFA received at least $6 million from secondary transactions after applying the platform’s 5% share. It found negligible direct illicit exposure among FIFA Collect users, which “may be a result of FIFA’s robust KYC practices,” according to Chainalysis. That explanation is an assessment, not a controlled test.
As crypto.news reported, FIFA moved its collectibles platform to a purpose-built, Avalanche-based blockchain in 2025. The next test is whether ticket-linked collectibles and prediction-market users remain active after the World Cup. Regulators and platforms will also face pressure to strengthen sanctions screening, market surveillance and settlement controls as event-contract volumes expand.
Crypto markets barely registered one of the sharpest equity rallies of the year on Friday, with bitcoin holding near $64,300 while South Korean stocks staged a record rebound from the selloff that dominated the past two weeks.
The majors were close to unchanged. Ether traded at $1,907, XRP at $1.08, solana at $74 and dogecoin at $0.07, with roughly $27 billion changing hands in bitcoin and $7 billion in ether. BNB was the exception, up 3% on the day to $590 and the only major holding a meaningful weekly gain. Bitcoin spiked to $65,300 in early Asian hours before giving it back within an hour.
The weekly picture stays soft. Hyperliquid’s HYPE is down 5% over seven sessions, solana and XRP are each off 3%, and bitcoin has lost 2%. Ether and dogecoin are up 1%.
Equities went the other way, hard. The Kospi surged as much as 17%, rebounding from a three-day rout that had taken the index more than 40% below its June peak. Samsung and SK Hynix both jumped more than 23%, and Taiwan Semiconductor rose 10%, making chipmakers the biggest contributors to a broad Asian advance.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup generated $20 billion in prediction market volume, with the US and China contributing the largest country-level flows, according to new Chainalysis research published Thursday.
More than 400,000 wallets placed on-chain bets on the tournament. World Cup markets accounted for roughly 63% of all prediction market activity during the event.
World Cup Betting Volumes Peaked at the Final
Chainalysis tracked World Cup betting from January 2026. Markets were already producing nearly $50 million in daily volume months before kickoff. Daily activity jumped to around $250 million once the tournament opened on June 11.
The final, in which Spain defeated Argentina, drove over $300 million in wagers. Novelty markets also attracted heavy flows. A single market asked whether Cristiano Ronaldo would cry after his last campaign, generating $49 million.
Bettors fared unusually well. Chainalysis found 55% of participants ended the tournament in profit, and 79% of those winners were experienced prediction market users.
The report mapped tournament betting flows by country between June 11 and July 19. The heatmap shows that the US and China generated the highest attributable volumes worldwide.
Canada, Thailand, and the UK also ranked among the top contributors. Australia, Brazil, Russia, and India also saw heavy activity, while much of Africa showed little or no attributable volume.
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Sanctioned Exchange Funds Reached Betting Wallets
Not all the money was “clean.” Chainalysis identified roughly 3,700 wallets, under 1% of bettors, with illicit transaction histories.
The largest single source was Huobi/HTX, which sent at least $5.4 million into World Cup betting wallets. The UK sanctioned the exchange in May over alleged Russian sanctions evasion, and the EU followed in July. Scam-linked wallets added around $2 million.
Meanwhile, FIFA’s own on-chain experiment stayed largely clean. Chainalysis identified a key FIFA Collect wallet on Avalanche that received $24 million from NFT collectors between May 2025 and the tournament’s end.
The firm said that strict identity checks may explain the negligible level of illicit exposure. On-chain flows indicate FIFA collected at least $6 million from secondary sales.
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CXMT Corp (688825) jumped 8.95% on Friday to close at 57.60 yuan (about $8.51), extending its rally through a fifth trading day on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
The Chinese memory chipmaker has grown continuously in the few days since its record initial public offering (IPO) last week, pushing its market capitalization to roughly 3.54 trillion yuan, or about $523 billion.
Why CXMT Keeps Climbing
CXMT, short for ChangXin Memory Technologies, listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on July 27. Shares surged as much as 466% on opening day. The move briefly pushed CXMT past Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to become mainland China’s most valuable listed company.
The IPO raised 57.92 billion yuan, or about $8.6 billion. CXMT plans to use the funds to expand production and close the technology gap with foreign rivals.
Two forces are driving investor demand. Beijing wants chip self-sufficiency as Washington restricts China’s access to advanced semiconductor equipment.
At the same time, a global shortage of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the chips that let devices and AI models store and process data, has manufacturers redirecting supply toward AI data centers.
What CXMT Actually Makes
CXMT was founded in 2016 and is based in Hefei. The company holds roughly 7.7% of the global DRAM market, making it the world’s fourth-largest producer. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology control the other 90% between them.
CXMT mainly builds mainstream memory chips for phones, laptops, and servers. It still trails rivals in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the advanced chip type that feeds AI data centers directly. Counterpoint Research director MS Hwang said CXMT aims to start supplying HBM within China by 2027.
Dell, HP, and Apple have reportedly started testing CXMT’s chips as they look to diversify away from Korean and American suppliers. Price is the main draw. But the deal carries risk.
The Pentagon has added CXMT to a list of firms it links to the Chinese military, a designation the company denies. Apple is separately lobbying Washington for clearance to use Chinese-made memory.
CXMT’s rise lands amid what industry watchers call “RAMageddon,” a consumer device memory squeeze that has already boosted Apple’s smartphone pricing power and rattled chip stocks from Seoul to Wall Street.
Analysts remain split on how much relief CXMT can deliver. That means any pricing benefit for everyday devices probably won’t arrive soon, even as the AI chip race keeps accelerating.
The post CXMT Stock Jumps Another 9%: What the Chipmaker Means for the AI Race appeared first on BeInCrypto.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act on July 30, proposing a federal agency with authority to investigate and pursue executive-branch corruption.
Summary
- Seven Senate-confirmed members would lead the proposed bureau, with subpoena, enforcement and reporting powers nationwide.
- Trump’s certified disclosure entries totaled over $1.4 billion across crypto-related ventures during calendar year 2025.
- Four Democratic senators sponsor the bill; its launch materials named no Republican cosponsor on Friday.
Senators Andy Kim, Alex Padilla and Jeff Merkley joined Schumer as original cosponsors.The bill cites President Donald Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure and says he received at least $2 billion from investments and business interests, including more than $1.4 billion connected to crypto ventures. The proposal does not itself establish that any disclosed income resulted from illegal conduct.
The crypto figure represents an aggregation of entries in the disclosure, rather than a single total calculated by the Office of Government Ethics. The filing reports income and transaction amounts, not the net profit that would appear on a tax return.
Anti-Corruption Bureau would combine three watchdogs
Schumer’s proposal would place the Federal Election Commission, Office of Government Ethics and Office of Special Counsel inside one independent bureau. A seven-member board confirmed by the Senate would oversee investigations, subpoenas, enforcement actions and public reporting.
The legislation would also allow state attorneys general and private plaintiffs to seek recovery of funds allegedly obtained through corruption. Its official summary describes disgorgement, treble damages and awards for successful plaintiffs. It also proposes a self-financing Freedom From Influence Fund.
A three-judge division of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit could appoint temporary board members when vacancies threaten the bureau’s operation. The provision is intended to prevent a president or Senate from disabling the agency by leaving seats vacant.
Trump’s crypto income came from several ventures
Trump’s certified disclosure lists $635.1 million in royalties from Celebration Coins. It also records hundreds of millions of dollars from World Liberty Financial token sales, equity transactions and crypto wallets, plus $196.9 million tied to a stablecoin-related holding company. Together, the listed crypto-related entries exceed $1.4 billion.
Those figures describe disclosed revenue and proceeds, not necessarily Trump’s personal after-tax earnings. As previously reported, the filing showed that crypto generated more income than Trump’s resorts and other property businesses during 2025.
The bill separately states that Trump’s family held more than $1 billion in a crypto fund connected to foreign governments. It references a reported United Arab Emirates-backed investment in World Liberty Financial. These are legislative findings and allegations, not a court judgment that corruption occurred.
White House rejects conflict-of-interest claims
White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said Trump’s investments were held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions. She maintained there were “no conflicts of interest.” Trump has also said he does not manage his personal finances while serving as president.
Schumer described the existing federal oversight system as a “broken patchwork” and argued that its agencies were not designed to address current executive-branch conduct. The White House disputes the premise that Trump’s business income creates an unlawful conflict.
The bill faces a difficult path through Congress
The publicly released full bill text still displayed a placeholder instead of a Senate bill number on July 31. The launch announcement listed four Democratic sponsors and no Republican cosponsor. The measure must clear both chambers before reaching Trump, who could veto it.
The proposal also enters a wider debate over the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. Senator Cynthia Lummis released updated Senate text on July 22 after the bill passed the Banking Committee by a 15–9 vote. Senator Elizabeth Warren argued that its current ethics provisions would not adequately restrict presidential crypto interests, while supporters continued to seek a bipartisan agreement.
Crypto.news reported that the CLARITY Act still faced disputes over ethics and banking provisions as supporters pressed for a vote. The Senate is scheduled to reconvene on Aug. 3, but no timetable has been announced for Schumer’s anti-corruption bill. Its next steps could include formal numbering, committee referral and hearings before any floor consideration.
Wintermute says the next phase of altcoin momentum may look different from past cycles: fewer tokens could attract sustained inflows as institutional desks concentrate their activity into a narrower basket of assets. In a first-half 2026 OTC flow report, the market maker found that institutional counterparties accounted for the vast majority of spot trading activity on its desk—an outcome that, if mirrored across the broader market, would likely make “altseason” less broad and more selective.
The shift also appears to include a timing mismatch. Wintermute reports that institutional participation tends to fade quickly after a token’s price and volume spike, while retail activity typically stays elevated for longer—suggesting any future rallies could be more short-lived and restricted to the tokens institutions already favor.
Key takeaways
- Wintermute’s first-half 2026 OTC data shows institutional counterparties generated 72% of spot flow across all tokens on its desk—the highest share recorded—up from 61% in H2 2025 and 59% in H1 2025.
- Liquidity and attention are concentrating in the “short list” of assets institutions choose, while activity in the market’s smaller “long tail” weakens.
- The number of unique tokens traded by institutional counterparties rose only 24% from H1 2024 to H1 2026, versus 76% growth for retail clients.
- Institutional activity after a price-and-volume surge typically cools within about one day, while retail activity remains elevated for around three days.
Institutional desks are pulling OTC liquidity toward a smaller set of tokens
Wintermute’s OTC flow report points to a structural change in how capital is deployed across the altcoin market. According to Wintermute, institutional counterparties drove 72% of spot flow across all tokens handled on its OTC desk in the first half of 2026—its highest recorded level. That compares with 61% in the second half of 2025 and 59% in the first half of the previous year.
While institutional participation has been rising, Wintermute’s interpretation matters for traders and investors: when the majority of activity is concentrated among a smaller group of counterparties and assets, rallies can become narrower. The firm said liquidity is increasingly clustering in tokens institutions favor, while the broader “long tail” of smaller tokens sees less consistent engagement.
That concentration effect is reinforced by the growth rates in token participation. Wintermute found that from H1 2024 to H1 2026, the number of unique tokens traded by institutional counterparties increased by 24%, whereas retail clients increased their number of unique traded tokens by 76% over the same span. In practical terms, the data suggests that retail participants explore a wider range of assets, while institutional flow remains comparatively disciplined.
Faster institutional pullbacks after spikes could reshape altcoin rally dynamics
Another detail in Wintermute’s report relates to how quickly activity cools after a token experiences a surge. The firm found that institutional activity following spikes in a token’s price and volume faded after roughly one day. Retail behavior differed: Wintermute says retail activity typically stays elevated for about three days after similar surges.
If these patterns extend beyond Wintermute’s OTC venue, they can influence how traders structure exposure during altcoin moves. Short-lived institutional participation can mean that order flow—and therefore liquidity—does not remain supportive for as long as it may have in earlier cycles when broader rotation into many assets sustained momentum.
For market participants, the implication is straightforward: rallies may require faster decision-making and more asset-selective positioning, because the “institutional bid” may not persist the way it once did across a wide swath of tokens.
Other data points suggest “altseason” rotation is narrowing across venues
Wintermute’s proprietary OTC findings add to a growing set of signals that capital is clustering around fewer altcoins. On June 20, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju said the “traditional rotation of Bitcoin profits” into smaller assets had “basically disappeared.” CryptoQuant data referenced by Young Ju suggested that trading volume in Bitcoin-denominated altcoin pairs was near its weakest level since 2021.
Meanwhile, CryptoQuant’s CEO also pointed to market cap concentration. The 10 largest non-stablecoin altcoins accounted for about 80.5% of the non-Bitcoin, non-stablecoin market’s capitalization—another indicator that the market’s center of gravity is increasingly tilted toward the biggest names in the category.
Exchange-level data has also suggested a similar pattern. In July 2025, Kaiko reported that the ten largest altcoins made up 63% of altcoin trading volume, up from roughly 50% several months earlier as activity in smaller tokens weakened. Together with Wintermute’s OTC numbers, the message across different datasets is consistent: liquidity and trading interest are drifting toward the same smaller group of assets.
Market debate: broad rallies vs. selective sector moves
The question now facing investors is whether this concentration will permanently reduce the breadth of future altcoin runs—or simply change their shape. DWF Labs managing partner Andrei Grachev has argued that broad altcoin rallies are giving way to more selective sector activity. In March 2025, Grachev said too many tokens were competing for limited capital, while institutional investors remained focused on Bitcoin, Ether, and tokenized real-world assets.
This framing aligns with the mechanics Wintermute describes: if institutions are more concentrated, and their participation fades quickly after price and volume spikes, “rotation” may become less of a market-wide wave and more of a series of targeted moves. In such an environment, tokens outside the institutional comfort zone may struggle to attract sustained liquidity, even if retail interest remains visible for a brief period.
It also highlights a potential tension between retail and institutional behavior. Retail participation appears to spread across more tokens and remain elevated longer after bursts. But if institutional desks dominate overall spot flow on major venues and OTC desks, retail-led excitement may not be enough to maintain broad-based momentum without follow-through from larger pools of capital.
For readers, the key watch items are whether institutional concentration continues to increase beyond H1 2026, and whether the “one-day” institutional fade and “three-day” retail persistence become stable patterns across more tokens and more trading conditions. If they do, the definition of “altseason” may shift from a widespread rotation into many names to a narrower, faster-moving set of trades that reflect where liquidity is actually concentrated.
Roughly 594 bitcoin, worth about $38 million, was swept out of around 500 separate wallets between 01:31 and 01:56 UTC on Friday in an attack traced to a flaw in how Coldcard hardware wallets generated their keys.
The theft moved 1,324 chunks of bitcoin across 500 transactions inside a three-block window, with 562 BTC then consolidated into a single address that has not moved.
Every drained wallet was single-signature and each held more than 0.15 BTC. Many had been dormant for years and the coins spanned 2021 to 2026, matching the flaw’s age almost exactly.
Coldcard is a hardware wallet built by Canadian firm Coinkite, a small standalone device that stores bitcoin keys offline, away from internet-connected computers. Mk2, Mk3, Mk4, Q and Mk5 are successive generations of that product, released over several years the way a phone maker ships numbered models.
Exposure depends on the firmware the device was running at the moment the wallet was first created, not on when the hardware was bought.
A wallet’s seed, the secret phrase controlling the funds, is meant to be drawn at random from a pool so vast that guessing is hopeless.
Canary Capital renewed its marketing push for the Canary HBAR ETF on July 30, describing HBR as the first U.S. spot exchange-traded product holding Hedera’s native token.
Summary
- 704.3 million HBAR backed Canary’s fund, with net assets near $47.8 million on July 30.
- 5.18 million HBR shares were outstanding after Canary added fifty thousand shares in latest update.
- HBR’s 0.95% sponsor fee accompanied a 37.32% year-to-date market-price decline recorded through July 29, 2026.
The post was not a new launch announcement. HBR began trading on Nasdaq on Oct. 28, 2025, after its registration became effective with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The latest fund data gives a clearer view of its current scale. HBR held 704.35 million HBAR and reported about $47.8 million in net assets on July 30. The product had 5.18 million shares outstanding and charged a 0.95% sponsor fee.
Canary HBAR ETF now holds 704 million HBAR
Canary’s official fund page shows that HBAR represented effectively all the trust’s assets, apart from about $30 in cash and other items. The 704.35 million-token position was valued at approximately $47.8 million using the administrator’s stated price. HBR provides price exposure through brokerage accounts without requiring investors to manage private keys.
Shares outstanding increased from 5.13 million on July 28 to 5.18 million on July 29. That 50,000-share increase was the latest reported expansion in the fund’s share count. It does not, by itself, establish the identity or strategy of the investors behind the creation.
Additionally, HBR recorded $989,000 in net inflows on July 2, its largest single-day inflow since May 15. The fund then listed roughly $49.14 million in net assets, showing that its asset value can move even when new shares enter because HBAR’s market price also changes.
Latest filing shows losses despite share growth
HBR’s first-quarter SEC filing showed 4.2 million shares outstanding and $50.34 million in net assets on March 31. The trust created 740,000 shares and recorded no redemptions during the quarter. However, HBAR depreciated 17.8% during the period, and the fund reported a $10.58 million decrease in net assets from operations.
More recent performance data remained weak. Canary listed HBR’s market-price return at negative 37.32% for 2026 through July 29 and negative 63.32% since inception. Its net asset value return was negative 36.48% year-to-date.
In the latest market data available early July 31, HBR traded near $9.33, while HBAR changed hands around $0.0727. Those figures show current pricing only and do not prove that Canary’s July 30 post caused any market move.
Enterprise and tokenization claims need context
Canary said HBR gives registered access to a network governed by organizations including Google and IBM. The Hedera Council says its members run network nodes, vote on governance matters and approve technology updates. Its structure uses equal voting rights and term limits.
The asset manager also called HBR “built for the next wave of real-world asset tokenization.” That is a forward-looking marketing claim rather than a verified forecast. One related development has already occurred: Archax tokenized the HBR ETF on Hedera and completed an after-hours transaction on Nov. 27, 2025, according to a Hedera case study.
That blockchain transaction did not change how ordinary Nasdaq investors buy and sell HBR shares. It instead demonstrated a separate tokenized representation handled through regulated market infrastructure.
What investors should watch next
HBR is structured as a single-asset trust, not an investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Canary warns that the product is not diversified and that investors could lose their entire principal. The trust currently lists BitGo Trust Company and Coinbase Custody Trust Company as its digital-asset custodians.
Investors will next look for the quarterly SEC filing covering the period ended June 30. That report will provide fuller figures for share creations, redemptions, expenses and changes in the trust’s HBAR position. Until then, daily holdings, share counts and net assets provide the most current official measures of fund activity.
HBR’s history also matters when assessing Canary’s new promotion. In related coverage, crypto.news reported on the fund’s path to launch in October 2025. The July post therefore renews attention around an existing product rather than introducing a new U.S. HBAR ETF.
Binance Research said on July 30 that the first half of 2026 produced a “broad on-chain contraction, not a rotation.”
Summary
- 38% DeFi TVL decline erased $43.4 billion as six major Layer 1 valuations fell 42%.
- 77% fewer Layer 2 user operations contrasted with Ethereum’s smaller 9% decline through June 2026.
- 207 security incidents caused $972 million in losses, while prediction markets reached $51.6 billion monthly.
Its 52-page report found that DeFi total value locked fell by $43.4 billion, or 38%, while the combined market capitalization of Ethereum, BNB, Solana, Tron, Sui and NEAR declined by $246.5 billion, or 42%.
Crypto market contraction hit DeFi and major L1s
The decline spread across capital, lending and network valuations rather than moving money cleanly from one blockchain sector into another. DeFi TVL dropped 38.7% during the half, nine percentage points more than the broader crypto market. Active loans fell 38%. April brought the steepest deterioration as large exploits reduced confidence in supplying onchain liquidity.
Current data shows a limited rebound rather than a full reversal. DefiLlama listed total DeFi TVL at about $74.9 billion on July 31. Based on Binance Research’s reported decline, the end-June level was roughly $70.8 billion. That calculation suggests some value returned in July, although token prices and differences in measurement can change TVL figures.
Security losses added to the pressure. TRM Labs independently recorded 207 hacks and $972 million stolen during H1, more than double the 83 incidents a year earlier. Smart-contract exploits accounted for 125 incidents. Infrastructure and operational failures represented about 76% of stolen value. As crypto.news previously reported, April attacks erased billions of dollars from DeFi TVL.
Ethereum treasuries overtook ETFs as L2 usage fell
Ethereum’s holder mix changed during the downturn. Binance Research said spot ETF balances declined from more than 6 million ETH to 5.2 million ETH. Digital asset treasury companies moved in the other direction, increasing their holdings from 6 million to 7.7 million ETH. The report sourced those figures from SoSoValue and Blockworks as of July 1.
Higher throughput did not create stronger base-layer revenue. Average gas prices fell 75% from 2025 after Ethereum raised its gas limit to about 60 million, while transaction count rose roughly 50%. Binance Research said chain revenue is “projected to fall 53% by year end if conditions persist.” That figure is a forecast, not a confirmed full-year result.
Layer 2 networks recorded a sharper usage decline than Ethereum mainnet. Total L2 user operations fell about 77% between January and June, compared with 9% on Ethereum. In June, L2s collected around $15 million in fees but paid Ethereum only $66,397 for data availability. In related coverage, crypto.news examined how Ethereum retained deeper TVL while Solana led several activity and revenue measures.
Solana revenue weakened while BNB remained deflationary
Solana’s network real economic value, which includes transaction fees and out-of-protocol tips, fell from $40 million in January to $14 million in June. Binance Research linked much of the 64.5% decline to weaker memecoin trading. Pump.fun volume fell from $30 billion to $17 billion over the same period, although memecoins still represented 25% of Solana DEX volume in June.
BNB moved differently on supply. The report identified BNB as the only deflationary major L1, with a 5.05% annualized burn rate. Its tokenized RWA market value also rose 107% to $3.8 billion in H1. However, that growth did not offset the broader decline across DeFi and major L1 valuations.
Prediction markets and tokenized assets resisted the slump
Tokenized real-world assets were among the clearest growth areas. Their distributed value increased from about $22 billion in January to roughly $34 billion by mid-July. BNB Chain led tokenized equity DEX volume, while tokenized equities reached 4% of Solana DEX activity in June. As crypto.news reported, tokenized stock products recently reached 752,000 holders across several networks.
Prediction markets also expanded during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Monthly notional volume rose 86% from January to $51.6 billion in June. Kalshi recorded about $33 billion and Polymarket about $14.5 billion, giving the pair 92% of the month’s volume. Non-sports activity across both platforms rose 136%, indicating that growth was not limited to football markets.
In addition, the World Cup pushed Polymarket past $5 billion in tournament volume. Binance Research cautioned that H2 “will test” whether tournament-driven users remain active and whether regulation and settlement systems can support continued growth.
Network upgrades now provide measurable milestones. BNB Chain has scheduled its Pasteur hard fork for Aug. 25 at 02:30 UTC. Ethereum lists Glamsterdam for H2 2026 without a firm mainnet date. Meanwhile, Solana’s latest official release information points to Alpenglow activation with Agave 4.3 in October, later than the Binance report’s Q3 target.
The second half will therefore show whether lower fees and added capacity can rebuild durable demand. It will also test whether tokenized assets gain secondary liquidity and whether prediction-market activity survives after the World Cup. Until those trends appear in sustained usage, revenue and capital data, Binance Research’s contraction thesis remains the clearest reading of H1.
Crypto’s next altcoin season may produce fewer winners as institutional investors concentrate their activity in a narrower group of digital assets, according to crypto market maker Wintermute.
In its over-the-counter (OTC) flow report for the first half of 2026, Wintermute said institutional counterparties generated 72% of spot flow across all tokens on its OTC desk, the highest share on record. That was up from 61% in the second half of 2025 and 59% in the first half of last year.
With institutional activity concentrated in fewer tokens and fading faster after price surges, the findings suggest future altcoin rallies could become narrower and more selective. Wintermute said liquidity was concentrating in the assets institutions favored while activity across the market’s “long tail” weakened.
Between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2026, the number of unique tokens traded by Wintermute’s institutional counterparties grew by just 24%, compared with 76% among retail clients. The firm also found that institutional activity following a surge in a token’s price and volume faded after roughly one day. In contrast, retail activity typically remained elevated for about three days.
Percentage of institutional spot OTC flow. Source: Wintermute
Altcoin capital was already becoming more concentrated
Wintermute’s findings add proprietary OTC data to signs that capital has been clustering around a smaller group of altcoins across the wider market.
On June 20, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju said the traditional rotation of Bitcoin profits into smaller crypto assets had “basically disappeared.” CryptoQuant data showed trading volume in Bitcoin-denominated altcoin pairs near its weakest level since 2021.
Meanwhile, the 10 largest non-stablecoin altcoins accounted for about 80.5% of the non-Bitcoin, non-stablecoin market’s capitalization.
Related: Crypto altseason unlikely in 2026 as ‘blue-chip survivors’ to win out: Analyst
Kaiko identified a similar concentration in exchange trading. In July 2025, the data provider said that the ten largest altcoins accounted for 63% of altcoin trading volume, up from about 50% several months earlier, as activity in smaller tokens weakened.
DWF Labs managing partner Andrei Grachev also argued that broad altcoin rallies were giving way to selective sector moves. On March 15, Grachev said too many tokens were competing for limited capital, while institutional investors remained focused on Bitcoin, Ether and tokenized real-world assets.
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