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Meet Mathias Lundoe Nielsen 👋

Huge congrats to Mathias on closing a $7.5M round for Entravel Group.

→ Founder & Group CEO at Entravel Group

→ Co-Founder at Swiss Venture Studio, with Saxo Bank's Lars Seier Christensen

→ Former Senior AI Advisor at 2021.AI

→ Former Founder & CEO at Nustay

A few years ago, crypto platforms had enormous audiences and no real way to sell them travel. Mathias built the missing piece himself, one partnership at a time.

Entravel now runs hotel booking for Kraken, MetaMask, KuCoin, and more than 40 other platforms. That is 300 million users.

This isn't his first run at travel. He took Nustay public in 2019 and built it to take on Booking and Expedia directly. The new round carries that infrastructure out of crypto and into the rest of the industry, a $1.2 trillion market still stuck on tech that barely connects.

An OTA. A crypto travel layer. 300 million users. Now the rest of travel.

This is what our network is all about.
Keep building.

Show Mathias some love 👇

We are proud to introduce the newest innovators and leaders joining our community; please take a moment to connect with them and welcome them to the inner circle 👇

The US 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.31% last week, its highest since 2007. Japan's long bonds sold off to multi-decade highs at the same time. This was not one country's story. Long-term borrowing costs rose almost everywhere at once, because investors are demanding more to lend to governments that keep spending.

The US sets the price of money for the world, so when American yields rise, every other market has to reprice against them, and the weaker ones get hit hardest. That is why Korea's Kospi swung all week on US yields rather than its own news, while the S&P 500 held just under its record and closed a third straight week higher. Money is leaving the weak markets and parking in US assets.

The rest of the world is genuinely weaker. China's July retail sales rose just 0.6%, far below forecasts. Japan is hiking rates only to defend a falling yen, not because growth is strong.

Higher long-term yields raise borrowing costs for everyone, from governments to companies to homebuyers, and that pressure normally drags stocks down. US stocks are holding anyway, because the country is soaking up the money fleeing everywhere else. America's strength right now is partly borrowed from the rest of the world's weakness.

The US is not immune, though. That same 5.31% means Washington pays more to borrow too, and the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, with the prior two months revised down by 103,000.

The US is the least-bad option, and the money keeps arriving to prove it. But that only holds while American yields stay bearable. Watch the 30-year. If it keeps climbing, the safe haven itself starts to crack, and it will show there before the stock market admits it.

A 32GB kit of DDR5 RAM that cost about $90 a year ago now runs around $459. Retail memory prices have roughly quintupled in twelve months.

AI data centers run on a special, expensive kind of memory called HBM, and making it eats about four times the factory space per gigabyte that normal RAM does. As chipmakers pour capacity into AI memory, they starve the supply of the ordinary memory in laptops, phones, and game consoles. AI will eat about 20% of the world's memory-chip manufacturing capacity this year. SK Hynix says its AI memory is sold out for three years and expects the shortage to last until 2030, calling it a structural change, not a passing spike.

Someone pays for that, and it is not the hyperscalers driving the demand. Dell has already raised PC prices 15 to 20%, and memory now makes up 15 to 18% of what a computer costs to build. SSD storage is climbing too. The AI boom is quietly taxing every device with a chip in it, a real inflation that never shows up in the argument over whether AI spending is a bubble.

This is not a glitch that clears next quarter. If you buy hardware, build anything, or sell a product with memory in it, plan for higher costs into 2030. The buildout is now showing up in your shopping cart.

Neoclouds like CoreWeave rent out Nvidia chips to companies running AI. Demand is enormous: revenue grew 112% last quarter, and it holds about $104 billion in signed future contracts, mostly from Microsoft and OpenAI. But it still loses money, a $626 million loss last quarter, because filling those contracts means constantly buying expensive hardware. The revenue is real. The profit is not, and it leans on a few giant customers.

To buy that hardware, these companies borrow heavily, much of it secured by the chips themselves, which lose value every year. CoreWeave owes roughly $35 billion. That works only while AI demand stays insatiable and money stays cheap, and last week both were tested: borrowing costs hit a 19-year high and Anthropic reported slower growth than investors expected, so CoreWeave fell about 7% days after posting record revenue. It is the most leveraged bet on AI there is, and the numbers holding it up just got questioned.

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund bought 154 million shares of SpaceX last quarter, worth about $26 billion. That one position is now nearly 70% of the fund's entire disclosed US stock portfolio and its largest holding by far, a bet it could only make after SpaceX's June IPO. The stock had been heavily shorted into earnings, with about 95% of borrowable shares out on loan, but it has since rallied off its August low and trades back above its $135 IPO price.

Google won a bankruptcy auction to buy Spirit Airlines' internal business data for $10 million, beating an AI startup that bid $7.5 million. The data includes roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, and billions of flight-pricing and passenger-transaction records, all stripped of personal customer information first. Spirit, now in Chapter 11 for the second time, is selling that data to Google to help train its AI models.

The cost to insure Oracle's debt against default just hit the highest level in its history, an 18-year record. Oracle has committed to spend roughly $300 billion building data centers for OpenAI, funded largely by borrowing, which has pushed its credit toward the bottom of investment grade. A Wall Street Journal review of filings found about $3 trillion in similar AI commitments sitting off the balance sheets of the major tech companies.

2026 looks like a record year for going public: US companies have raised about $251 billion, more than five times all of last year. But one listing, SpaceX, is roughly a third of that. Strip it out and the year is ordinary. The deeper shift is that the most valuable companies no longer need public markets: Anthropic reached a $65 billion revenue run-rate on private funding alone and is only now reportedly preparing to list this fall, while Databricks, profitable and sought-after, is skipping the IPO to raise privately instead.

Gold and silver keep climbing even as bond yields rise, which is unusual, since higher yields normally pull money out of metals that pay no interest. They are moving together because the driver is the same fear behind the bond selloff: that governments are borrowing more than they can sustain. Silver is leading, up more than 70% in a year to its highest level in over a decade. The biggest buyers are not traders but central banks, which bought a record 289 tonnes in the second quarter, led by Poland and China. Oil, with no such story, has barely moved.

Saturn Credit

Saturn Credit raised $2M in a seed round led by The Spartan Group, with Anchorage Digital and Susquehanna Crypto participating. Saturn is a Bitcoin-backed credit protocol issuing a yield-bearing stablecoin, and the round funds its tokenized-Treasury infrastructure and compliance work.

Congrats to Boaz Avital and the Anchorage team! Love to see the participation!

Entravel Group

Entravel Group raised $7.5M in a seed round co-led by Ethereal Ventures and Finality Capital, with GSR, Varrock and Funfair Ventures joining. Entravel builds white-label travel booking for crypto exchanges and fintechs, already powering 40+ brands and clients like Kraken and KuCoin. The money funds supplier credit, a move into mainstream travel, and stablecoin settlement.

Congrats to Mathias Lundoe Nielsen and the Entravel team!

River Markets

River Markets raised $8.5M in a seed round led by Haun Ventures, with Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures and QRT joining. River is building a prime brokerage for prediction markets, one place for pros to execute and manage risk across every venue. Proceeds go to execution algorithms and capital-efficiency tools.

Great to see Jonathan King and the Coinbase crew get after it. The King is back!

RWA.xyz

RWA.xyz raised a seed round led by Neoclassic Capital; the amount was not disclosed. RWA.xyz is the leading data platform for tokenized real-world assets, tracking Treasuries, private credit and stablecoins onchain. The raise funds its market-intelligence infrastructure as tokenization scales.

eToro + TradeZero

eToro acquired TradeZero for up to $231M in cash and stock. TradeZero is a US broker-dealer known for commission-free trading and advanced short-locating tools, with about $80M in revenue at 81% gross margin over the past year. The deal hands eToro a ready-made US broker-dealer license and active-trader base as it accelerates its US push.

Treasury's proposed GENIUS Act rules require a federal or state license to issue a payment stablecoin starting January 2027, and bar platforms from selling unlicensed stablecoins to US users from July 2028. That second clause pushes enforcement onto exchanges and wallets, not just issuers. It also effectively blocks foreign stablecoins like Tether unless the issuer can honor US legal orders.

The SEC again delayed the innovation exemption that would let firms issue tokenized stocks and trade them around the clock without full registration. SIFMA demanded a full notice-and-comment process citing best-execution rules, and the White House worried it would inflame markets mid-CLARITY. The exemption meant to help builders skip legacy plumbing got stalled by the firms it threatens.

The crypto market-structure bill is still short of the 60 Senate votes it needs, with the ethics language meant to limit officials profiting from crypto unresolved. Days into recess, the OCC granted the Trump family's World Liberty Financial a conditional trust-bank charter, the exact conduct that language is meant to restrain. Senate Democrats have already written to the OCC to protest.

A new 50% duty on about $20 billion of Canadian goods was set to take effect August 20, and late on August 19 Trump announced a three-day pause, saying a deal is done subject to finalization. Canada agreed to address US complaints on alcohol, dairy quotas, and its duty on non-USMCA vehicles. The deal is unsigned, so the risk to autos and cross-border supply chains stays live.

EU officials signaled that MiCA will be revised to address non-EU stablecoin issuers like Tether, which the current rules lock out of the market. They conceded that reopening the framework is unavoidable given how fast the industry has moved since MiCA passed in 2023. It would be the first major walk-back of Europe's hardest stablecoin line.

The RBI sold dollars through state banks as the rupee traded near a record low around 95.5, pressured by equity outflows, high oil, and Trump's threat of higher tariffs if India keeps buying Russian crude. It is managing the pace of the slide, not defending a fixed line. The rupee has become a direct pressure valve for US-India trade tension.