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Meet Boaz Avital 👋

Congrats on being named a founding member of Strategy's new Bitcoin Security Consortium, representing Anchorage Digital.

→ Global Head of Product at Anchorage Digital

→ Founding team member at Anchorage, there since 2017

→ Former Staff Software Engineer at Twitter, six years

Boaz helped build Anchorage from the start. Eight years on, he runs product at the first federally chartered crypto bank.

Now he represents it in Strategy's new Bitcoin Security Consortium, next to BlackRock, Block, Fidelity and Blockstream, the largest Bitcoin holders in the world.

Their focus: hardening Bitcoin, and planning for the day quantum computers can break its encryption.

As he put it, the industry owes it to the developers securing Bitcoin to back them, and to help everyone else tell signal from hype.

From Twitter engineer to a founding seat on the group securing Bitcoin's future.

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

Assets & Access Tampa @ The Copper Shaker
Thu Sep 3, 7:00 PM ET

Assets & Access NYC @ Pubkey
Tue Sep 8, 6:00 PM ET

Assets & Access Miami @ Better Days
Thu Sep 10, 6:00 PM ET

Assets & Access SF @ Rickhouse
Thu Sep 10, 5:30 PM PT

Anthropic just agreed to run its models on up to 1M of Google's chips, not Nvidia's. In recent months: Amazon's Trainium3 and Google's Ironwood went live at scale, OpenAI committed to a 10GW line of its own accelerators with Broadcom, and Tesla taped out its AI5 chip after killing Dojo. Meta is on its fourth in-house generation.

The reason splits in two. Training a model is a one-time job that still runs best on Nvidia, and no one is trying to take that. Inference, answering prompts all day, runs forever, and every cent per query comes out of margin. That is the part the hyperscalers want to own. They are not trying to beat Nvidia. They are trying to stop paying its markup to serve their own users.

The quiet winner is Broadcom. It designs the custom silicon for OpenAI, Meta, Google, and reportedly Apple. It does not sell a rival to Nvidia. It sells the ability to not need one.

One caution: OpenAI's chip is not in production, and its own target is late this year. Tesla's AI5 is taped out but not shipping. The announcements are ahead of the silicon. The direction still holds: the buildout was about who could buy the most Nvidia GPUs. Now it is about who can stop having to.

For the market, this is a slow margin story, not an earnings cliff. Nvidia still owns training and the near-term demand, so the risk is to its long-term ceiling, not this quarter. Broadcom is the cleaner trade, and its custom-chip backlog is the number to watch. GOOGL, AMZN and META quietly get better AI margins out of this, the opposite of the capex panic the market keeps pricing on them. TSMC wins no matter who designs the chip, because it builds them all.

This year the biggest money in tech went back into physical things: factories, launch pads, robots, chips. That is a real break from the software-first decade, when the most valuable companies on earth barely owned a building.

The past week alone: SpaceX announced a $100B Starship spaceport in Louisiana. Castelion raised $1B at $13B to mass-produce hypersonic missiles. XPeng's robot unit raised $900M at $6.3B. China's Unitree went public near $50B. All of it hardware, all of it hard to copy.

For the market, the sharpest trade is defense-tech, where funded challengers like Castelion and Anduril are pulling engineers and contracts away from primes like Lockheed and RTX. The robot names are already priced for 2030: Unitree is worth $50B on roughly $250M of revenue, about 200 times sales. That makes the chips and sensors inside the robots a safer bet than the robot stocks.

Kalshi is now raising at a $40B valuation, double what it was worth in May, and Cantor Fitzgerald just opened Kalshi's markets to its institutional clients. A site built for election bets is turning into a financial exchange.

Cantor's clients can now trade Kalshi's contracts like any stock, which turns these markets into a real asset class. The money is in the exchange, not the bets. Kalshi and Polymarket earn a fee on every trade, the way the CME and ICE do on stocks. Both are private, so Robinhood is the only public stock with direct exposure. Just keep an eye on the regulators: the CFTC is writing the rules, and New York City is probing how these markets operate.

Long-term government yields hit multi-year highs in the US, Japan and Europe at once. Governments are flooding the market with new debt to cover their deficits, and buyers are demanding higher yields to absorb it. Government bond yields set the price of mortgages, corporate loans and stock valuations, so when they rise, borrowing gets more expensive across the whole economy. The US Treasury doubling its bond buybacks to $4B per operation is the tell: officials are worried the selloff could turn disorderly.

Florida alone now holds 1 in 7 US home listings, and over half of sellers in San Antonio and Austin have cut their asking price. The Sun Belt built aggressively through the boom, and supply finally outran demand as migration cooled and rates stayed high. The rest of the country is still short on homes, so this is regional oversupply, not a national crash, but it is where the first cracks show.

Wages and salaries have dropped to about 43% of US gross domestic income, near the lowest share since the Great Depression. That is wages before benefits: of every $100 the economy produces, roughly $43 reaches workers as pay, with the rest going to profits and capital. Pay keeps lagging productivity, the kind of gap that fuels political fights over who the economy works for.

Researchers at Stony Brook and Brookhaven sent quantum-encrypted information 13 miles through open air, no fiber cable. Doing it over open air rather than dedicated fiber is the hard part, and clearing it moves a real quantum network closer. Quantum links are effectively impossible to wiretap without being detected, which is why governments and banks are racing to build them.

1X opened preorders for Neo, a $20K home humanoid that folds laundry and unloads the dishwasher, shipping late this year. It is the first consumer humanoid with a real price and date, but the hard chores are still run by a company employee steering the robot remotely through its cameras. That shows how far off true home autonomy is, and raises an obvious privacy problem: a stranger watching your house to fold your laundry.

Cooking City

Cooking City raised $11M in a seed round led by Dragonfly and CMT Digital, with Jump Crypto and Adaverse joining. It is building an on-chain market where creators turn audience attention into tradable IP. The round funds its launch and creator tools.

Huge win for the Dragonfly team! Love to see it!

Concrete Protocol

Concrete Protocol raised a strategic round led by Polychain, with Bullish, BitGo, FalconX and Keyrock joining; the amount was not disclosed. Built by Blueprint Finance, Concrete is an appchain for institutional DeFi credit and vaults, following a $9.5M Series A last year. The round funds its institutional rollout.

Congrats to Chen Fang and the BitGo team! Keep it up!

Kalshi

Kalshi raised $1.1B of a $1.5B round since April, at a $40B valuation, double its May mark. Kalshi runs a CFTC-regulated exchange for event contracts, where people trade real-world outcomes the way they trade stocks. Today's main story covers what the round and Cantor's institutional launch mean.

Massive W for Kalshi. Also great looks from the CF team!

Saturn Credit

Saturn Credit raised a new August round for its Bitcoin-backed yield stablecoin, with Ondo Finance participating; terms were not disclosed. Saturn issues a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by Bitcoin and tokenized Treasuries, and the round funds its infrastructure and compliance work.

Congrats to Kevin Li and the Saturn team!

Fasset

Fasset raised $68M in a Series C at a $1B valuation, led by SBI. Fasset runs a stablecoin-based neobank for emerging markets, offering banking and payments where local currencies are weak. The round funds its expansion across those markets.

Entropy.io

Entropy.io raised $14M led by Ribbit Capital. Entropy is building a perpetuals exchange, on Hyperliquid, for trading private-company equity and other real-world assets. The money funds the build-out.

NeoSoul

NeoSoul raised $11M in a Series A, with MH Ventures, Amber Group and ArkStream Capital joining. NeoSoul builds trust and reputation infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, so agents can establish trust before they transact. The round funds its network.

Poolfish

Poolfish was acquired by Metrix Finance; terms were not disclosed. Poolfish makes a backtesting tool that helps DeFi liquidity providers estimate earnings across exchanges, and Metrix folds it into its own tooling.

The SEC proposed a new framework, Regulation Crypto Assets, that lets startups sell tokens without full securities registration and overrides conflicting state rules. It offers two exemptions, up to $5M over four years and up to $75M a year, plus a safe harbor that keeps qualifying tokens out of securities law. With the CLARITY Act stuck in the Senate, the agency stopped waiting and wrote crypto's rules itself. For founders it is the clearest legal path yet to raise money with a token in the US.

Meta filed its appeal brief on Aug 24, asking the Ninth Circuit to uphold the dismissal of the FTC's case, which claimed Meta illegally cornered social media by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. A win would gut the government's main playbook for unwinding Big Tech through its old acquisitions. It is the strongest sign yet that Washington's antitrust push is losing in court.

Treasury's OFAC issued new sanctions on Aug 20 hitting drug networks in Ecuador, Hezbollah financiers in Turkey and Iranian operatives, while separately licensing certain Lukoil transactions. Any company touching those designated networks now carries fresh secondary-sanctions risk, and the Lukoil carve-out points to continued quiet easing on Russian oil.

The region is dividing on whether to allow private stablecoins at all. Japan's FSA scrapped its ¥1M per-transaction cap on Aug 24, clearing the way for institutional yen-stablecoin payments, after standing up a dedicated crypto division weeks earlier. India went the other way: parliament cancelled a crypto hearing on Aug 25, with the RBI pushing to ban private stablecoins in favor of a state-run digital rupee. China has already ruled out a yuan stablecoin entirely. Same technology, three opposite bets on who should control digital money.