Daily Briefing

Anthropic's IPO prospectus discloses annual losses in the tens of billions of dollars alongside rapid growth, and carries a formal warning that its own AI models could pose an existential risk to humanity. Anthropic declined to comment on the filing, which was reported on September 28-29, 2026.

A public prospectus from a frontier AI lab puts audited-scale financials and an explicit existential-risk statement into the public record at the same time. The offering itself could raise tens of billions of dollars for the cash-hungry company.

The Financial Times reported that Anthropic told investors it recorded an operating loss of more than $8bn last year as it increased spending on computing power. Other coverage cited figures of roughly $42bn in losses and more than half a trillion dollars in cloud commitments.

The White House published a presidential executive order titled "Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence" on its Presidential Actions page, dated September 2026. The text released so far contains Section 1 (Purpose), which states that America "stands at the forefront of a new technological revolution in intelligence" and notes that the modern field of artificial intelligence was born in the United States.

As an executive order signed by the President under constitutional and statutory authority, it sets federal policy direction directly without requiring congressional approval. Framing AI development as a "superintelligence" era places frontier AI at the center of the instrument's stated purpose.

Only Section 1 (Purpose), preceded by the standard vesting clause, is included in the released text; the operative sections that would set out specific obligations and agency responsibilities are not part of the published excerpt.

AMD has acquired Fei-Fei Li's world-model startup in a deal reported at about 55 billion yuan (roughly $7.7 billion), described as the largest transaction in the world-model space to date. Li will join AMD as chief scientist.

The transaction would bring a leading spatial-intelligence research lab inside a major chipmaker, with its founder taking a chief scientist role — pointing to closer alignment between world-model research and AI hardware strategy.

The headline figure of 550亿元 yuan is equivalent to roughly $7.7 billion. Li's role after the deal is stated as chief scientist at AMD.

Avalanche said in a post that Goldman Sachs is bringing its roughly $100 billion treasury fund FTIXX onto Lynq, a private permissioned L1 deployed on Avalanche. Trading of the fund will be handled by licensed broker tZERO Securities and is initially open only to eligible US clients, who must complete onboarding with both Lynq and tZERO.

It extends the tokenization of traditional fixed-income products by a top-tier bank onto a permissioned chain that Avalanche says is already connected to more than 30 institutional participants.

Lynq is described as a private permissioned L1 deployed on Avalanche, with B2C2, Wintermute, Galaxy, FalconX and Fireblocks among the more than 30 institutions already onboarded. Access to FTIXX on Lynq is limited to eligible US clients and requires onboarding with both Lynq and tZERO.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said she is "not very optimistic" about freezing or recovering the funds lost in the exchange's $388 million security breach, speaking on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction released Tuesday. She pointed to the February 2025 Bybit hack as a "good reference point," noting that roughly a year later only about 3.5% of Bybit's stolen funds had been frozen.

The on-record assessment signals that most of the $388 million taken from Bitget is unlikely to be frozen or returned to affected users, framing recovery expectations well below the full loss. Chen distinguished freezing from recovery, saying the 3.5% figure for Bybit "is only the freezing. It's not about recovery yet."

Bitget launched a bounty program offering 5% of funds frozen and 5% of funds recovered; NEAR Intents said Monday it blocked more than $50 million in assets tied to the attack and froze about $500,000, while Chen confirmed Tether and Circle blacklisted an exploit-linked wallet, freezing $318,013 in USDT and USDC. Withdrawals have resumed in stages, starting with Bitcoin on Monday and ETH on Tuesday, and Chen said Bitget had not "totally ruled out" an inside job while describing the investigation as preliminary.

Bitwise Asset Management said its Bitwise NEAR ETF (ticker NRR) began trading on NYSE Arca on September 29, 2026, making it the first US spot exchange-traded product for NEAR. The fund holds NEAR directly and charges a 0.75% management fee.

NRR is the first US spot ETP giving brokerage-based exposure to NEAR, and it adds an in-fund staking component through which Bitwise intends to stake the fund's tokens.

Bitwise plans to stake the fund's NEAR holdings to earn roughly 5% average staking rewards, and said it has worked on a US NEAR ETF since launching a European NEAR ETP in June 2025. NRR joins Bitwise's US single-asset lineup tracking Bitcoin (BITB), Ether (ETHW), Solana (BSOL), XRP (XRP) and Hyperliquid (BHYP).

According to a Bloomberg report cited on September 29, the merger between Adam Back-backed bitcoin treasury company BSTR Holdings and a Cantor Fitzgerald-affiliated SPAC was terminated, with BSTR required to pay a $15 million breakup fee. The same report points to multiple lawsuits against Blockstream Mining — the mining business Back helped found and in which he holds a minority stake — filed with partner Exacore over alleged unpaid equipment bills, electricity charges and customer deposits tied to roughly $2 billion in financing.

The setbacks land on Blockstream, described as one of the crypto ecosystem's oldest infrastructure companies, and on a public-market bitcoin treasury vehicle promoted by a figure long treated as a foundational name in Bitcoin. The report frames them as signs of mounting pressure across businesses tied to Back as the industry undergoes another major reshuffle.

The attack on Blockstream's bitcoin sidechain Liquid Network involved roughly 4,000 BTC stolen (about $320 million), of which 3,400 BTC has been returned while the attacker still holds bitcoin worth about $47 million. A separate $6.7 million lawsuit was filed in San Francisco federal court on September 11 against a company still carrying the Blockstream name, according to a report addressing confusion between similarly named entities.

Bloomberg reported Monday that London-based crypto services company Blockchain.com is aiming to go public by the end of 2026, seeking to raise about $500 million at a valuation of $4 billion to $6 billion in discussions with prospective investors. Blockchain.com filed confidentially for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.

The reported listing would follow a quiet year for crypto IPOs, after a weak market in early 2026 prompted some companies to delay their plans.

The confidential filing lets Blockchain.com begin the SEC review process before publicly disclosing financial details of the listing; no terms have been finalized, the report is based on people familiar with the matter, and Blockchain.com did not respond to CoinDesk's request for comment.

BlockTower Capital claims a $25 million hack loss tied to Coinbase, according to a report by The Cryptonomist, which says the claim renews questions about security vulnerabilities at the exchange. Crypto Briefing reported that BlockTower co-founder Ari Paul alleges Coinbase lost $25 million of BlockTower funds and covered it up.

The claim revives scrutiny of Coinbase's security practices and of how the exchange handles institutional client assets, based on the reports' framing of renewed questions about exchange security.

The allegation is attributed to BlockTower co-founder Ari Paul and includes a claim of a cover-up; the reporting is headline-level and does not detail the incident mechanics, and no acknowledgment from Coinbase is cited.

Coinbase said on Sept. 28 that Citi institutional clients can accept stablecoin payments through Spring by Citi, Citi's merchant platform, using Coinbase's payments infrastructure. Coinbase also said its Virtual Accounts can automatically convert incoming fiat into stablecoins, with Citi's Virtual Account Wallet providing the underlying banking infrastructure.

A major global bank enabling institutional clients to receive stablecoin payments, with the exchange handling the crypto leg behind the scenes, extends stablecoin acceptance into regulated banking rails. The two named services give the companies' earlier digital asset payments partnership defined, customer-facing uses.

Coinbase describes the capability as available now, but neither company disclosed customers, transaction volumes, pricing, eligible currencies or supported stablecoins, so the practical scale remains unverified. The two paths serve different customers — Citi institutional payment clients on one side, Coinbase Virtual Account customers on the other — and the announcement does not establish that a single customer can use both.

Bybit announced it will accept Franklin Templeton fund shares, including the asset manager's tokenized money market fund, as collateral on its platform. A separate report described the move as a strategic collaboration between the two firms aimed at expanding access to tokenized investing.

The arrangement broadens the set of institutional-grade collateral available for crypto trading by linking a traditional asset manager's fund products to an exchange's margin system.

The announcement covers Franklin Templeton fund shares, with the tokenized money market fund specifically named as eligible collateral. Bybit is the platform extending the collateral option; no launch date or eligibility criteria were specified in the available material.