Oil Wars And Government Shutdowns Ignite The Crypto Breakout The Perfect Macro Storm Is Fueling Bitcoin’s Violent Rise Oil Wars And Government Shutdowns Ignite The Crypto Breakout Sep 4 READ IN APP None of this is financial advice. Do your own research. By reading this newsletter, you acknowledge and accept the terms and conditions outlined in our disclaimer . GM Investors Oil power is moving in the background. US diesel is tight, Venezuela barrels are being redirected, and Chinese shipments from Caracas have fallen to zero. Geopolitical risk now shows up in product markets first. The front of the book is Bitcoin. Price jumped from roughly $77,300 to a $82,179 high, then digested just above $81,000. Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Wintermute, and whales absorbed tens of thousands of coins into the squeeze. Liquidations hit $568 million. That leaves short liquidity sitting right overhead at $82,000–$83,000. Standard Chartered’s new UAE spot desk puts Gulf capital on a regulated rail. Fed policy is easier at the margin. Equities and semiconductor stocks caught some of the same bid. Then the House canceled late-September votes and delayed CLARITY. Our crypto market analysis still treats $80,500 as the line that keeps this squeeze alive. Here’s what our desk is watching. TOKEN2049 Singapore: Find the Next Hyperliquid Before It Lists!!! Every year, one conference produces the startups that dominate the next cycle. This year, it’s TOKEN2049 Singapore. TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon: 36 hours, $100K prize pool, direct demo access to the main stage. This is where the next cycle’s infrastructure gets built live. 500 applicants, 10 finalists, 1 global stage. Past cohorts have gone on to become Web3 unicorns. 25,000 people. 7,000 companies. 60%+ C-suite. 160+ countries. One building: Marina Bay Sands. Newsletter readers get 10% off tickets. We don’t get a kickback. We just want our people in that room. Claim your 10% discount and register il Prices, Geopolitical Risk, And Fiscal Chaos Global energy markets are fracturing under the weight of severe supply crunches. The global diesel market is currently facing a massive, localized supply shortage. This squeeze hits exactly as the peak seasonal demand period begins. Refiners are actively struggling to keep pace with baseline global consumption. Geopolitical risk is violently repricing major commodity benchmarks across the board. The Kobeissi Letter recently highlighted the critical nature of these inventory drains. Washington is aggressively countering this supply shock with new geopolitical maneuvers. The United States just secured a major deal for Venezuelan oil. This physical supply pivot matters heavily for broad macro trading strategies. China is notably missing out on this specific Venezuelan oil deal, shifting regional dominance. Controlling energy output is just as important as printing fiat dollars. Rising oil prices will inevitably dictate the trajectory of the next inflation print. Meanwhile, domestic political chaos is actively brewing in Washington. The US House just unexpectedly canceled the final two weeks of its September session. Lawmakers are fleeing early, drastically accelerating the timeline for a potential government shutdown. Markets absolutely hate sudden fiscal uncertainty when underlying liquidity is thin. Investors are actively pulling capital from speculative equities ahead of this fiscal cliff. We expect this disruption to inject severe volatility into traditional markets. The Bitcoin Squeeze cause Liquidation Bitcoin is currently experiencing a violent recovery, fueled by massive institutional spot bids. Huge whales and corporations are buying millions of dollars in spot BTC. The aggressive accumulation recently pushed the local price structure to $82,000. Our crypto market analysis reveals a highly engineered liquidity hunt underway. The recent short squeeze wiped out leveraged bearish positions across the board. According to Standard Chartered, this move eliminated billions of dollars in trapped short-term interest. Our desk is currently heavily focused on the upside liquidity clusters. The primary short liquidity pool is currently between $82,000 and $83,000. Price action acts as a magnetic force in these leveraged liquidation zones, revealing a clear Fair Value Gap directly below. Here's the raw data that shapes our immediate upside targets: Standard Chartered is closely monitoring the current liquidity dynamics. Major whales stepped in, boosting the price to $82,000. Short liquidity is firmly in the $82,000-$83,000 range. Long-term spot holders are experiencing rapid supply exhaustion. Massive upside option strikes act as a gravitational pull. This strength in digital assets stands in stark contrast to the weakness of the traditional technology sector. We see any short-term dip as a structural buying opportunity. Bitcoin is actively absorbing speculative capital fleeing the larger technology sector. The exit from overvalued technology is directly fueling the cryptocurrency breakout. Fed Policy, Altcoins, And On-Chain Data The US is quietly but aggressively betting on digital dollars. Washington recognizes that dollar hegemony requires technological modernization in order to survive globally. Stablecoins are rapidly emerging as the preferred vehicle for offshore dollar demand. This shift significantly alters Fed policy and future liquidity cycles. Tokenized fiat brings unprecedented transparency to global dollar liquidity flows. Central bankers are effectively using blockchain technology to maintain their monetary monopoly. Traditional markets are also preparing to operate 24 hours per day. Major legacy exchanges are preparing to match cryptocurrency's 24/7 trading models. The seamless integration of traditional finance necessitates a universally accepted digital settlement layer. Paul White Gold Eagle @PaulGoldEagle RIPPLE CEO SAYS #XRP WILL REPLACE SWIFT IN MOVING $1.25 QUADTRILLION DOLLARS ACROSS THE WORLD. CTF TOKEN, THE

Risk Assets Are Under Fire 🚨5 Setups To Watch As BTC Breaks Above 82000 Risk Assets Are Under Fire Sep 4 READ IN APP None of this is financial advice. Do your own research. By reading this newsletter, you acknowledge and accept the terms and conditions outlined in our disclaimer . Hey Traders, Overnight the US and Iran traded fresh strikes near the Strait of Hormuz, with Tehran answering across the Gulf. Traditional markets woke up to that flare-up on top of a deepening global bond sell-off and another weak session for equities after Wall Street closed lower to start September. The story is no longer Fed commentary. It is yields breaking out across the US, Europe and Japan at the same time crude stays bid on supply risk. Stocks are fading into a historically soft month, hike odds are rising, and bitcoin is trading with risk, not against it, as the latest hostilities hit. Sticky inflation plus an energy shock is still the tax on duration and risk assets. When sovereign bonds buckle, capital usually reaches for scarcity; today that bid is pausing while gold and crypto digest the same tape. Here is what we are watching. Poll of the Day ( Presented by Rain Trade ) 🎯 POLL Bond markets across 22 economies are under stress. How do central banks resolve the debt trap? 🖨️ Debt monetization / QE 🛑 Forced austerity 💥 Broader liquidity crunch Today’s Charts: Chart #1 – Ripple(XRPUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #2 – Pump(PUMPUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #3 – Filecoin (FILUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #4 – Cronos(CROUSDT) 4-Hour Chart #5 – Robinhood (HOOD) 4-Hour Stop Trading Headlines. Start Trading Alpha. The desk that moves before the market does • Live community of traders who actually execute, not just talk • Real-time calls dropped while the candle is forming, not after it closes • 4.9/5 rating by 1000+ traders because signal beats noise, every single time Join 247 Research. Get the 24/7 terminal free. 50% off your first month, USE CODE: terminal ($100 off) Chart #1 – Ripple(XRPUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Bitway has concluded its post-spike consolidation range and pushed above the $0.42938 shelf, currently holding gains around $0.44268 on the 4-hour timeframe. Functioning as an enterprise-grade digital asset infrastructure and multi-chain payment custody protocol facilitating high-throughput transactions and settlement integrations, this long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $0.60819 overhead resistance target as long as the $0.37603–$0.42938 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.4293 Stop Loss: $0.3760 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.5134 TP2: $0.9083 Powerful narratives create powerful moves. With 247 Research , you get the insights to be early to the biggest trends in crypto. Chart #2 – Pump(PUMPUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade ) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Pump has printed a lower-high rejection along a descending intraday trendline following a retest of the $0.0450–$0.0460 zone, breaking down to trade around $0.004327 on the 4-hour timeframe. Serving as the native ecosystem asset tied to Solana's prominent token launchpad and meme-coin generation platform pump.fun, this short trade setup targets an extended mean-reversion drop toward the $0.003300–$0.003400 liquidity basin as long as overhead resistance holds below $0.004700–$0.005150. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.00 469 Stop Loss: $0.00517 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.00395 TP2: $0.00329 Chart #3 – Filecoin (FILUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Filecoin has faced rejection after tapping the $0.8400 resistance area, printing consecutive lower-high candles and breaking down below local consolidation to trade around $0.7762 on the 4-hour timeframe. Functioning as a decentralized, peer-to-peer storage network built on IPFS that allows participants to store, retrieve, and compute over digital data with cryptographic proofs of storage. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.7911 Stop Loss: 0.8243 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.7385 TP2: $0.6995 Chart #4 – Cronos(CROUSDT) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) Cronos (CRO) has formed a higher-low reversal following a sweep of its local lows near $0.05300, breaking back above the $0.05574 horizontal pivot to trade around $0.05798 on the 4-hour timeframe. Functioning as the native utility and settlement token of the Cronos blockchain and Crypto.com ecosystem—powering decentralized finance applications, EVM interoperability, and payment integrations—this long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $0.06457 resistance target as long as the $0.05282–$0.05574 support base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $0.0557 Stop Loss: $0.0528 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $0.0595 TP2: $0.0645 Markets go both ways. Get premium short setups delivered every day with 247 Research . Chart #5 – Robinhood (HOOD) 4-Hour( Powered by Rain Trade 📊) Chartist: Kapoor (For the chart screenshot, ) ( HOOD refers to the stock of obinhood Markets, Inc. and not a cryptocurrency.) Robinhood has staged an aggressive breakout above its multi-week resistance shelf, clearing the $112.07 pivot with strong upward momentum to trade around $124.72 on the 4-hour timeframe. Operating as a retail-focused financial services platform facilitating commission-free trading across equities, options, and cryptocurrencies alongside cash management and margin lending solutions, this long trade setup targets an upward expansion toward the $153.59 resistance target as long as the $100.37–$112.07 breakout base holds. Trade Levels: Entry: $112 Stop Loss: $100 Take Profit Levels (TP): TP1: $129 TP2: $153 Banter’s Take Geopolitical instability and a breaking sovereign bond landscape have shifted the narrative from simple Fed commentary to a genuine debasement trade. While traditional yields buckle and gold retraces, Bitcoin is aggressively decoupling, absorbing liquidity on pure spot accumulation to defy hist

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Tesla debuts its long-awaited robotaxi... September 04, 2026 Presented By Happy Friday. Miley Cyrus revealed she is dropping her last name and will henceforth be known professionally as just “Miley.” And so we have decided to do the same. Dibs on all these names: —Molly, Sam, Matty, Dave, Adam, Holly, Neal In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into: Tesla’s Cybercab update Nvidia giving Hugging Face a $13 billion embrace Gen Z’s lack of interest in Burning Man Markets Nasdaq 26,584.06 +1.40% S&P 7,747.71 +1.06% Dow 53,686.11 +1.18% 10-Year 4.762% -3.0 bps Bitcoin $81,605.06 +5.46% Campbell’s $22.13 -6.96% Data is provided by *Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 4:30pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean. Markets: Stocks zoomed to their best day in a month after Federal Reserve Gov. Christopher Waller suggested he could vote to hold interest rates steady at this month’s meeting. Meanwhile, Campbell’s dipped after the struggling soupmaker said it was cutting 13% of its workforce. SHINY NEW THING Tesla debuts the robotaxi of its anti-Waymo dreams Jay Janner/Getty Images Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised nearly a decade ago that his everyday electric vehicles were on the verge of driverless capabilities. So far, no dice, but yesterday in Austin, Texas, his company introduced the vehicle that might mark another step in that direction. Hello, Cybercab: Tesla’s purpose-built robotaxi is a matte gold, steering-wheel-free, pedal-less two-seater with butterfly doors—a design that was initially unveiled two years ago. Musk said at the event that Cybercab’s cost “is probably going to be around 20 cents a mile. And the price, including taxes and everything else, probably ends up being 30 or 40 cents a mile. And you will be able to buy one.” The vehicle isn’t available for purchase yet. Yesterday’s launch event signified the Cybercab’s official addition to Tesla’s robotaxi fleet, which otherwise consists of Model Ys. Growing that bunch of unsupervised (aka fully autonomous) vehicles is “key for the stock to outperform through year-end,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote ahead of the event. It’s also key for Tesla’s long-term future In its broader ambitions to refocus its business around self-driving cars and robotics, Tesla hopes to overtake Waymo as the king of the driverless hill. It’s fighting that battle at a steep incline: Waymo’s ~4,000 driverless vehicles operate in 14 US cities, making it the largest fleet of self-driving cars in the country. Tesla’s robotaxi business , which operates in Florida and Texas (with Arizona and Nevada coming soon), “has been extraordinarily difficult to nail down,” per The Verge. Tallies vary, but one tracker pegs Tesla’s fleet of unsupervised cabs at ~200. “Longer term, the software is the most important piece,” a senior Morningstar analyst wrote about Tesla ahead of the Cybercab launch. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving product relies on cameras, while Waymos use a costlier trio of lidar, radar, and cameras. Some Tesla engineers previously worried that without sensors, Tesla’s self-driving system could get thrown off by camera-obscuring weather. Regardless of Wall Street’s reaction to Cybercab, Tesla still has to win over the public. Its driver-assist systems have been linked to thousands of crashes and dozens of deaths. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently investigating the EV-maker over potential automated driving defects, and said yesterday that it was “in contact with Tesla and is evaluating the situation” with Cybercab, as it’s hit the road in Austin without features the agency typically requires. —ML Sponsored By The Wall Street Journal Know the room before the meeting Somewhere out there, your next client is reading today’s Journal, the same story your team will get asked about in tomorrow’s meeting. A Corporate WSJ + Barron’s + MarketWatch Digital Bundle makes sure everyone walks in already knowing : WSJ for the story, Barron’s for the market angle, and MarketWatch for the numbers. It’s the difference between “let me get back to you” and actually running the room. Finance will like it too. One corporate plan costs 50%+ less than a pile of individual subscriptions, with one invoice and central admin. 3,500+ companies already give their teams the edge. Yours shouldn’t be playing catch-up . World Tour de headlines Thomas Fuller/Getty Images 🤖 OpenAI rolled out its latest model, GPT-6 Astra. “Welcome to the AGI era,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told reporters yesterday, referring to artificial general intelligence, aka AI that can outperform humans at most tasks. According to the company, Astra is its fastest and most accurate model yet—and also its most powerful in cybersecurity. For that reason, OpenAI is initially rolling it out only to users in its Daybreak program, before launching a version with additional safeguards for paid subscribers. The release comes amid growing concern with AI’s cybersecurity capabilities, after two OpenAI models escaped their sandbox to hack Hugging Face servers. —AE 🔌 Several chatbots went down in a major outage. If you’re an office worker using AI to process invoices or a college freshman using it to write your Animal Behavior essay, you may have hit a roadblock yesterday. Most major chatbots—including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and SpaceX’s Grok—were down for many users to varying degrees yesterday. It’s unclear what caused the outages, but Mashable noted that it’s unusual for several AI services to go down at the same time. Service had been restored to all of the chatbots as of yesterday afternoon. —AE 🇳🇵 Two trapped workers rescued alive from hydropower tunnel in Nepal. Two men identified as a mechanical foreman and a mechanical supervisor were rescued Friday morning local time from the Trishuli 3A hydropower project, according to officials, nine days after deadly flooding struck the Himalayan region and left thousands of people dead or missing. A spokesperson for the

Plus: Gold on the move | Friday, September 04, 2026 Axios Markets By Emily Peck and Matt Phillips · Sep 04, 2026 🥳 Happy Friday! And it's not just a Friday — it's Jobs Friday, with the latest report on the U.S. employment situation in August due out at 8:30am in New York. 🫓 Ahead of those numbers, though, things are pretty dull out there, with S&P 500 futures, oil prices and bond yields little changed. Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, is weighing whether to sharply reduce its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, part of a trend that Matt recently noted . Oh, just a reminder: We will be heading out for the long Labor Day weekend and back in your inbox Tuesday morning. We hope you enjoy the last gasp of summer. Tally ho! In 1,065 words, a 4-minute read. 1 big thing: End of an era By Matt Phillips Data: FactSet, Axios It used to be that if yields on U.S. government bonds were rising, you could pretty much assume that stocks would be on the upswing, too. Not anymore. Why it matters: When such longstanding market relationships — known on Wall Street as "correlations" — change, it often mirrors adjustments in investor thinking that can set markets on a new course. The big picture: For much of the last 20 years or so, it made sense that bond yields and stock prices tended to go up and down together. That's because bond yields were essentially being driven by the outlook for the U.S. economy. When yields were rising — such as during the early 2000s — it largely signaled strong economic growth. In such an environment — when corporate profits could be expected to be strong too — owning stocks makes sense. Voilà, stocks rose with bond yields. On the other hand, when bond yields were falling during the financial crisis, the drop reflected panic about the safety of the financial system and what that might mean for the economy. That's a bad environment for stocks. So stocks fell with bond yield s. The latest: Things have been a lot different of late. On days when bond yields have risen — due to the worsening war, rising oil prices, confusion over the direction of the Federal Reserve under Kevin Warsh and any other number of reasons — stocks have been more likely than not to fall. In fact, this negative correlation — Wall Street's term of art for markets that typically move in opposite directions — between changes in the S&P 500 and changes in the yield on the 10-year note has grown increasingly strong, with some readings of negative correlations hitting some of their most extreme levels in decades in recent months. What they're saying: So what's going on? There are a few different interpretations. The correlation breakdown could reflect the new global economic reality of scarcity since the COVID pandemic hit, from the wars in Ukraine and Iran to the relentless demand for AI computing power. All result in higher pressure on prices, regardless of growth. In other words, high yields might not be saying much about whether the economy looks very strong, and therefore might mean it isn't a good time to buy stocks. As BlackRock chief investment strategist Wei Li put it in a recent column for the Financial Times : "What looks like a breakdown in the historical correlation between them may simply reflect a different macroeconomic regime." "When U.S. 10-year yields exceed 5% ... the correlation tends to be negative, meaning that higher bond yields are generally associated with lower stock prices," Scotiabank analysts wrote. "This was broadly the case from the late 1960s through the late 1990s." Growing uncertainty around U.S. government policy, meanwhile, could be playing a role in the breakdown of the relationship, Morgan Stanley analysts recently suggested. They spotlighted the Treasury Department's unusual recent intervention in the Treasury bond market , while doing little to control the growth of the federal debt . The breakdown of the yield-stock correlation was reminiscent of the market reaction to President Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs in April 2025, when both stocks and bonds were rattled, they noted. "Investors began to grapple with whether the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasuries are still safe havens," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote of the 2025 episode. "We think that investor debate is once again on the table." A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Peek inside the forces reshaping health care with Axios Future of Health Care 2. The Dutch are moving gold out of the U.S. By Emily Peck Data: World Gold Council ; Chart: Emily Peck/Axios The Dutch central bank said this week that it was shifting about 86 tonnes of gold bars out of New York and Canada and moving them closer to home. Why it matters: Countries are rethinking where they stash their gold reserves, as relations with the United States have frayed and geopolitical unrest has risen. The move comes at a time when the status of the U.S. at the center of the world financial system is in question. Foreign governments also now hold a much lower share of U.S. Treasury bonds . Zoom in: The Dutch central bank doesn't mention any concerns with the U.S. in its press release . It said the move was meant to strengthen its crisis preparedness. "Improving the tradability of Dutch gold, and thereby how quickly the gold can be deployed in crisis situations, is part of this," the bank said in a statement. "At the same time, a more balanced distribution of the gold stock between North America, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands helps to spread risks." By the numbers: Not all of the gold bars physically move across the ocean. 59 tonnes were sold in New York, and then the central bank repurchased the precious metal in London. More than 27 tonnes were physically moved to the Dutch vault in Zeist. Before the transfer, about 30% of the Dutch gold reserves were held in New York. Now it's about 18%. London's vault now holds about 30%, up from 18%, per the release. Zoom out: Since the U.S. and its European allies froze about $300 billion in Russian central bank as

Plus: Private credit’s redemption reckoning returns. September 4, 2026 Good morning and happy Friday. On Thursday morning, the world partied like it was 2019. Peace and harmony nearly broke out as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and several other artificial intelligence platforms suffered outages around the same time. “For a brief moment, millions of people had to use their brains again,” technology journalist Paris Marx joked in a social media post. While the cause was unclear and may not be uniform, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service also saw a spike in reported outages. Most AI services were restored and operating normally by the afternoon. But, for that fleeting moment, the title of world’s greatest authority on knowledge belonged not to a chatbot, but once again to your unemployed friend from college who edits 700 Wikipedia articles a day. Tomorrow, we can go back to worrying about the singularity. MARKETS S&P 500 7,747.71 ▲ +1.06% DJI 53,686.11 ▲ +1.18% METL $28.69 ▲ +1.32% *Presented by Sprott. Stock data as of market close on September 3, 2026. METL turned one. See what a year of active picks delivered. *Please see important METL disclosures below. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Nvidia Raises Bet on Open-Source AI With $13B Hugging Face Deal Photo via Clement Delangue/X It’s a match made in momentum trade heaven: AI’s biggest infrastructure provider is about to get its hands on AI’s biggest collection of open-source roadmaps. On Thursday, Nvidia confirmed reports that it would acquire Hugging Face, a.k.a. “The GitHub of AI,” in a deal valued at a whopping $13 billion. It’s the latest (and perhaps greatest) expression of Nvidia’s strategy to promote an open-source AI ecosystem. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an X post announcing the deal. An Offer They Can’t Refuse Nothing stays the same for long in the AI world. According to sources who spoke to the Financial Times for a story in January , Hugging Face last year rejected a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia, a cash infusion that would’ve come with a $7 billion valuation and amounted to more than the start-up had raised in its more than 10-year history. But the company told the FT it did not want to exist under the influence of a single “dominant” investor. By this summer, the deal tables had turned, and it was Hugging Face that approached Nvidia, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Thursday. So what changed? First, the company employed open-source AI models to ward off a swarm of rogue (and proprietary) OpenAI agents that were trying to access the vast Hugging Face repository of open-source AI models, applications and datasets. Then, “we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” Delangue said. Nothing pushes an indie developer into the open arms of Big Tech like a cyberattack ripped straight out of Neuromancer . For Nvidia, the deal marks another salvo in a simmering cold war with its biggest clients: By pushing cheaper open-source models, Nvidia can pull value away from expensive proprietary models like Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s and toward its own hardware, analysts told The Daily Upside. That may dent the resources that major models could use to develop their own in-house chips to replace Nvidia. And as its biggest customers increasingly develop their own in-house chip designs, open-source could help Nvidia diversify its customer base. “Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch,” Huang said Thursday. Carolina on My Mind: The Hugging Face acquisition wasn’t Nvidia’s only win this week. Huang also attended a summit at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina, where AI industry leaders successfully lobbied representatives from G20 nations to back a light-touch AI regulatory framework dubbed The Carolina Principles. How’s that for a group hug? Written by Brian Boyle FINANCE Blackstone Private Credit Fund Caps Withdrawals in Fresh Test for Strained Market Investors are once again learning the hard way that when a fund is semi-liquid, the operative part of the term is semi . On Thursday, Blackstone continued to cap withdrawals from its $77.2 billion Blackstone Private Credit Fund (BCRED) as requests to pull money just keep rolling in. In the third quarter, investors requested withdrawals of 10% of the fund’s shares, according to a regulatory filing. That marks the second quarter in a row requests have hit that level. But investors won’t be getting their hands on as much as they’re asking for, which would amount to $4.3 billion in equity. Blackstone said it would limit withdrawals to 5% of the fund’s shares, which is typical for these types of semi-liquid funds. Cash Crunch For years, private credit was primarily available only to institutional investors. But as retail investors grew hungry for investments outside of traditional stocks and bonds, alternative asset managers, seeing a massive new pool of potential investors, were eager to oblige. Wealthy individuals could get exposure to private credit without completely locking up their money via semi-liquid funds. Now, we may be seeing the end of the retail liquidity illusion, in part because of concern that AI disruption could hurt many of the software companies that private credit funds lend to. Tack on the fact that private credit valuations are often opaque and you can see why investors are nervous and eager to get their money back. In the second quarter, BCRED fulfilled roughly half of its redemption requests, leaving a backlog of $2.3 billion in unfulfilled requests, many of which were resubmitted in the third quarter, per the filing. Blackstone isn’t alone: Bloomberg reported th

Here’s what we’re seeing... 🥛 UNI got its 40% week. Is AERO next? 📈 Here’s what we’re seeing... Chevy Cassar GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that reads the terms and conditions of crypto, so you don't have to. Here’s what we’ve got for you today: ✍️ Uniswap got its 40% week. Is Aerodrome next? 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Nexo’s Big U.S. Comeback: Why Crypto Lending Is Booming Again . 🍪 Over the past 24 hours Robinhood Chain collected a record $4.45M in fees. 14,000 traders. 14 pros. One free Discord where every trade gets recapped at the close. Join the Optionality community for free. Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko. UNISWAP GOT ITS 40% WEEK. IS AERODROME NEXT? 📈 We've been talking a lot about tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain, and how all of that Uniswap-hosted trading has been pushing the UNI token up… It's worked out nicely, too. Our PRO analyst John Gillen bought UNI on August 28 at ~$4.45, and it's traded above $6 since (+40%). But Robinhood and Uniswap aren't the only games in town. On August 24, Coinbase launched its own tokenized stocks on Base, with its own DEX of choice: Aerodrome. Before we get to Aerodrome though, we should cover why the UNI trade worked in the first place - because it isn’t JUST about the stock-memecoin pairings we covered yesterday… The U.S. stock market is open 6.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, which leaves over 80% of the week with no market at all (even though news keeps breaking through all of it). Tokenized stocks fill in those hours. About 60% of Robinhood Chain's stock token trading now happens outside regular market hours, when no traditional market maker is quoting a price at all. Source: Token Terminal That's an entirely new trading session, and whoever hosts the liquidity for it collects the fees. Uniswap ended up holding 99% of the stock token liquidity on Robinhood Chain, and the volume running through it has tripled in a fortnight, from $1B cumulative on August 21 to over $3B by September 2. And as we covered yesterday - those fees feed a mechanism that buys UNI on the open market and burns it (hence the +40% week). Then Coinbase turned up. Its version put tokenized Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Alphabet shares on Base, each backed 1:1 by real shares sitting in regulated custody (not a synthetic proxy tracking a price). Aerodrome got day-one liquidity, and roughly $103M flowed through its pools in the first few days, peaking near $27M in a single day. That's off four stocks, in week one. Uniswap has been doing closer to $127M a day, but it's had a two-month head start - plus, a much longer list of stocks and ETFs to trade against. … and Coinbase says more tokenized stocks are landing in the coming weeks. DO YOU TRADE OPTIONS? Most people trade alone. Guessing entries, fumbling exits, nobody checking their work. Optionality is a free Discord (14,000+ members) where 14 pros post big opportunities in real-time - across day trades, swing trades and futures. Check out their track record over the last few days: Don’t miss their next set of trades. Join the Optionality community for free, here! UNISWAP GOT ITS 40% WEEK. IS AERODROME NEXT? (P2) 📈 Aerodrome is already the dominant DEX on Base, typically handling 50%+ of the chain's trading volume. 100% of the revenue it generates goes to holders who lock their tokens up (which converts them into veAERO). That's running at roughly $60M a year against a market cap under $500M, so about 13% of the protocol's entire value reaches lockers annually, with roughly half the supply locked at an average of 3.8 years. The downside being, if you hold AERO without locking it, you're handing your cut of revenue to everyone who staked. There's also this… Source: Blockworks Those new tokens pay liquidity providers to park capital in Aerodrome's pools, which is what keeps trading there cheap. It's the cost of being Base's liquidity hub. Unfortunately, for those of you that hold AERO, it means the protocol has been shrinking your slice of the pie faster than it's been paying you. But this isn’t permanent. Issuance is down ~61% from a year ago, so that cost is falling. The proper fix is Aero, an upgrade that merges Aerodrome with sister protocol Velodrome and ties new issuance to actual revenue instead of a preset schedule (it was slated for Q2, but still hasn't shipped). All told, we've got a pretty clean setup here. AERO sits ~9% lower over the past week while UNI ran 40%: Similar story to UNI (capturing the tokenized stock trade). One-eighth of the market cap. No re-rating yet. The bull case needs Coinbase's next batch of stocks to arrive and trade in size, so revenue grows into the issuance. John's take is that the volume is coming for Aerodrome, and with it, gains (hopefully). In fact, he's already started buying in preparation. 😉 John’s UNI call was six days ago and it's up over 35% since, if you don’t want to miss his next entry on AERO, join Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days . BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪 Want to reach 88,000 crypto and AI investors a day? Milk Road is booking Q4 sponsorships now so book a call now. Woah! Over the past 24 hours Robinhood Chain collected a record $4.45M in fees. That's more than three times Solana, Ethereum, Base and Hyperliquid COMBINED. Alex Cutler: "Market making" is one of the most exclusive clubs in finance. But on Aerodrome, anyone can come onchain and be the market maker. Kyle Reidhead: Crypto equities are better than raw tokens, because when crypto chops sideways, the businesses of these companies keep compounding anyway. Join the Optionality community for free, here! RATE TODAY’S EDITION What'd you think of today's edition? 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛 F**king great 🥛🥛🥛 Meh, do better 🥛 You didn't bring the heat MILKY MEMES 🤣 Source: @ToolySOL Source: @ToolySOL ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛 VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY This content is for educational purposes only. Read full disclaimer Interested in reaching smart readers like you? Sponsor Milk Road Update your email preferences o

Plus: Cybercab's coming-out party | Thursday, September 03, 2026 Axios Closer By Nathan Bomey · Sep 03, 2026 Thursday ✅. Today's newsletter is 842 words, a 3-minute read. 📈 The dashboard: The S&P 500 closed up 1.1%. It was the biggest single-day gain since Aug. 4, as comments from Fed Governor Christopher Waller eased bets for a September rate hike. 🔥 Today's stock spotlight: Coinbase (+10.1%) shares jumped on today's rise in bitcoin, with crypto and gold reacting to shifting interest-rate expectations. 1 big thing: Nvidia gives diversification a hug Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face accelerates the chipmaker's push to dominate the broader AI ecosystem while placing it squarely at the center of the open-source movement. Why it matters: Nvidia wants to be more than a really good chip designer — and it's using its deep pockets to tighten the company's grip on the software and development tools that power the AI supply chain. Nvidia announced today that it will acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. It's a massive validation of open-source AI by a chip design giant known for its work with closed-model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, Axios' Dan Primack and Madison Mills note . The big picture: The deal exemplifies Nvidia's effort "to protect the crown jewels — sales of its GPUs," says Jed Ellerbroek, portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management, in an email. With about 70% of its revenue, Ellerbroek estimates, currently coming from seven companies — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI — Nvidia has a vested interest in establishing a more diverse customer base. Nvidia is also facing looming competition on chips from some of its biggest customers, including Tesla, OpenAI, Google and Amazon. "So what can NVDA do to widen its customer base? The answer is to commoditize other layers of the AI technology stack," Ellerbroek says. "If it can reduce model layer and cloud computing layer pricing by injecting more competition, more value will accrue to the semiconductor layer with NVDA itself being the chief beneficiary." What we're watching: Whether Nvidia uses its ownership of Hugging Face to steer developers toward its product lines. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says it won't. Go deeper 2. Cybercab's coming-out party Photo: Courtesy of Tesla Tesla is holding a Cybercab launch event in downtown Austin this evening, where a small group of guests is expected to get the first commercial rides, Axios Future of Mobility author Joann Muller writes . Why it matters: Tesla's robotaxi ambitions are about to face a pivotal test. 🏁 Catch up quick: The two-seat EV, with no steering wheel or pedals, is designed to be cheaper and easier to build than other robotaxis, potentially allowing Tesla to race ahead of rivals like Waymo and Zoox. What we're watching: How quickly can Tesla go from dozens of Cybercabs to thousands? Expect Tesla to take it slowly at first. CEO Elon Musk has said the company will be guided by safety. 🚧 It's still unclear how Tesla intends to navigate federal rules governing vehicles without steering wheels and pedals. State regulations could also limit Tesla from expanding beyond relatively permissive markets like Texas. 💭 Joann's thought bubble: The Cybercab rollout could be a seminal moment for Tesla, but if the past is prologue, the flashy event will be followed by a more modest reality. 3. Other happenings An Oura smart ring and charging case. Photo: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images 💍 Oura , the maker of the smart wearable Oura Ring, filed the paperwork for its U.S. IPO. ( Reuters ) 🚗 Volkswagen's supervisory board approved a transformation plan that could include cutting 50,000 jobs, including management positions. ( Bloomberg ) 🥫 Campbell's posted an 8% sales decline in its latest quarter and projected another sales decline in its next fiscal year. ( WSJ ) 🤝 Adobe named Anil Chakravarthy as its next CEO, with Shantanu Narayen stepping down Dec. 1. ( CNBC ) A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Sports media's next big opportunity Sports rights are becoming an even more valuable media asset. Rising rights fees, streaming ad demand and growing interest in women's sports are creating new upside well beyond ticket sales. The latest Media Trends Executive analysis examines how sports are reshaping the media business — and where the biggest opportunities are emerging. Read the full analysis. 4. Don't bet on it Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios One market you won't find at Kalshi: whether the Supreme Court will take up the case on how prediction markets should be regulated . A company spokesperson confirms that Kalshi won't be allowing people to make trades on its chances of reaching the highest court. State of play: The likelihood of the Supreme Court deciding the fate of prediction markets escalated after a three-member panel of the Ninth Circuit recently ruled against Kalshi. (Users on rival Polymarket's international platform give the court a 42% chance of taking up the case by Dec. 31, albeit on light volume.) The likelihood jumped after another appeals court decision that went in Kalshi's favor. Any time there are conflicting opinions by different federal appeals courts on major public issues, it bolsters the chances of a Supreme Court case. Context: Kalshi says prediction markets should be federally regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, while a slew of attorneys general say state gaming commissions should govern prediction markets. The bottom line: Kalshi doesn't want to list a market that its own employees could influence, the company tells Barron's . A MESSAGE FROM AXIOS Sports media's next big opportunity Sports rights are becoming an even more valuable media asset. Rising rights fees, streaming ad demand and growing interest in women's sports are creating new upside well beyond ticket sales. The latest Media Trends Executive analysis examines how sports are reshaping the media business — and where the biggest op

Frankentokens, LSU, crypto cash flows, handbag hedge fund Byron Gilliam “ I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. ” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Thursday links: Frankentokens, LSU, crypto cash flows, handbag hedge fund It’s alive! Crypto is suddenly booming again, thanks to a Frankenstein combination of equities and tokens: “stock-paired memecoins.” To take one popular example, people are trading the memecoin Artificial Inu (AI) in a liquidity pool where it’s paired with tokenized shares of Nvidia. To buy AI, you first have to buy NVDA. (In other words, AI is denominated in NVDA instead of the usual ETH or USDC.) It’s difficult to say why exactly anyone would want to do that, but something about pairing thematically-aligned memes and stocks has captured the imagination of traders. Amid frantic trading, Artificial Inu has shot to a $250 million valuation. The phenomenon is happening on Robinhood’s new layer-2 blockchain. Launched just two months ago, Robinhood Chain (RHC) has already hosted over 500 million transactions and $22 billion of DEX volume, according to data from Blockworks Research. Yesterday alone, the chain collected $4.6 million of network REV (the fees users pay to get their transactions included in a block). By comparison, Solana collected only $700,000 of REV yesterday. (Note: Gas fees on RHC have been as much as 128x higher than on Solana, which I'm guessing won’t last long.) As with any good memecoin story, this can be intellectualized. As a trader on X explained, “ Stocks provide what memes lack most — real-world value anchors and narratives; memes provide what stocks lack most — attention, community, virality, and speculative liquidity.” (That’s a translation from the Mandarin, linked above, which I highlight partly because Frankentokens appear to be particularly popular in China.) “The two sides complement each other perfectly,” they added, “memes on Robinhood are turning into something entirely different from the past.” It can also be de -intellectualized. One of the most popular stock-paired memecoins is BONER, which has been paired with tokenized shares of Hims & Hers Health (HIMS), best known as a way for men to receive ED pills like Viagra without having to look a pharmacist in the eye. Some pairings are appealingly amusing: The memecoin Memory Cow Moo (MOO) has been paired with tokenized Micron, whose ticker symbol, MU, is commonly pronounced moo . That kind of wit deserves more than the $22 million market cap it currently commands, in my opinion. (Not financial advice.) Perhaps most appropriately, CINEMA has been paired onchain with AMC — a memecoin paired with a memestock. To the degree all this has some substance — aside from the huge trading fees being generated — it’s this: Stock-paired memecoins may be solving the cold-start problem of tokenizing equities. Every purchase of a stock-paired memecoin requires the purchase of a tokenized stock. Therefore, someone (a market maker, probably) has to provide the tokenized stock — by buying it on the real stock market, tokenizing it, and delivering it onchain. (To be precise, what trades onchain is a credit instrument issued by Robinhood that’s backed by a stock they hold.) It might be that when this latest iteration of memecoin mania inevitably fades, the tokenized stocks will flow back out to the stock market. But maybe they’ll stay! Who knows what kind of Frankenstein creations crypto developers will dream up now that they have some stocks to play with? Some of them might even be useful. LSU bets on its football coach InGame reports that Louisiana State University is using Kalshi to hedge the risk that its football team wins a national championship. Through an intermediary, LSU has executed multiple event-contract bets that pay off according to how far it advances in the college football playoffs. If the Tigers win it all, the bets will pay out $3 million — almost exactly what LSU will owe its football coach, Lane Kiffin, in performance bonuses. LSU made the bets through the sports insurance company Game Point Capital, which bought the event-contracts from an unnamed market maker (my guess would be Susquehanna). (Sports insurance company Game Point Capital would have previously hedged this kind of risk with an insurance broker like Lloyd’s of London.) The trades were negotiated off-exchange and then reported to Kalshi, which now sits between the parties for settlement — eliminating their counterparty risk and reducing capital requirements. The $3 million Kiffin stands to earn would be in addition to the seven-year, $91 million contract he recently signed with LSU. Also included in the contract were some nice perks, like 65 hours of flying time per year on a private jet for his personal use, and $500,000 to cover the cost of moving from Mississippi to Louisiana (two states not generally associated with a high cost of living). Kiffin’s contract is emblematic of the wildly escalating cost of running a top-tier college football program. Several teams, LSU included, are thought to have player payrolls above $40 million this year (college athletes can be paid these days). Coaches and staff might cost another $20 million. It’s not easy to keep up. So, to the extent some of those costs can be hedged on prediction markets, it will be a growing business. In the case of Kiffin, there might be some additional risks to hedge. This week, Vanity Fair published some unflattering excerpts from an upcoming book about Kiffin’s tenure as an assistant coach at Alabama. “Just keep him away from the sorority girls,” Alabama Coach Nick Saban reportedly told his staff. “Make sure they’ve graduated college or are working a job.” The book also quotes a pub owner telling someone from the team, “your boy Lane was in here asking where the hotties are.” Kiffin was 41 at the time. If someone wants to offer an