Welcome to #101 of the AI edge.
BTC kept sliding this week, dipping to 72k for the first time since early April. The 68k calls are starting to feel less like cope and more like a real possibility. A bounce around 70k would calm the nerves, but we're not there yet.
On the AI front, Anthropic had a busy week. They raised another round, $65B at a $965B valuation this time. One more and they cross a trillion dollars. At what point do we stop calling them a startup? Their valuation now sits above the GDP of most nations. Let that sink in for a second.
They also shipped Opus 4.8, their strongest model yet, built around better judgment and more honest outputs. And the real one everyone's been waiting for, Mythos, the model they quietly rolled out to enterprise partners a few weeks ago because they thought it could threaten critical cybersecurity infrastructure, is reportedly weeks away from going public. If even half the whispers are true, that release reshuffles the leaderboard.
With that, let's get into this week's edition.
The Big Story: The Robotics Trade Goes Onchain
As we saw with Anthropic this week, the biggest AI companies are already worth more than most countries. By the time any of them actually list, you're buying at a valuation that's already priced in a decade of dominance. The venture window closed for anyone who wasn't already in the room.
But robotics hasn't had that moment yet. The sector is projected to compound above 50% annually through the middle of the next decade, and the companies leading the humanoid push are still years from going public (except, of course, for Tesla). For most people, there's simply no way to touch them.
XMAQUINA built one. It's a DAO whose treasury holds direct equity stakes in private robotics firms like Figure, Neo, and Apptronik.
This week it launched $DEUS, a token that effectively makes you a stakeholder in that portfolio. Crypto doing what it does best: opening up a cap table that was never meant for you.
The Wedge
The appetite is already proven. RoboStrategy's $BOT, a similar vehicle on the Nasdaq side, trades at roughly 4x its net asset value. That premium tells you what people will pay just to get robotics exposure. DEUS is currently sitting around 2x NAV on a fully diluted basis, with a circulating market cap of roughly $8M.
The real catalyst is Robotics Capital Markets (RCM), a secondary market platform expected later in the year. Each portfolio company gets its own tradeable token paired with DEUS. Trading fees and distributions flow back to the treasury or into DEUS buybacks. That's a flywheel where activity around any single company compounds value back to the whole DAO.
The Fine Print
A DAO trading at a premium to its net assets only works as long as people believe the portfolio will appreciate. If the underlying companies stall or the robotics narrative cools, that premium compresses fast.
RCM hasn't launched yet. The flywheel everyone is pricing in is still a Q3 promise. Until it ships, DEUS is a bet on a treasury and a roadmap.
The AI trade rewarded the people who showed up before the trillion-dollar headlines. Robotics is running a similar arc, just a few years behind. Whether onchain DAOs are the right vehicle for private equity exposure is still an open question. But the appetite is clearly there.
Constraints Watch: The MSG Company Holding Up Your GPU
Everyone's been watching CoWoS, TSMC's advanced packaging process that stitches GPU dies together with memory into one working module. It's been the headline bottleneck in the AI chip supply chain for two years.
Capacity is expanding aggressively through 2026 and into 2027. But adding packaging lines doesn't automatically mean more shippable GPUs. Every packaged chip still needs a substrate, a dense base board the chip mounts onto that routes thousands of electrical connections down to the motherboard.
And that substrate depends on an insulating film made by Ajinomoto. Yes, the MSG seasoning company.
ABF (Ajinomoto Build-up Film) sits inside every high-end GPU substrate. Ajinomoto controls over 90% of global supply. In May they pushed through a roughly 30% price increase. Buyers absorbed it without pushback.
ABF is the headline material, but it's one of several critical inputs substrate makers need to turn installed capacity into actual product. Glass cloth keeps the substrate dimensionally stable. Copper foil forms the wiring layers. Each one comes from a near-monopoly supplier.
The substrate makers themselves are already running hot. Unimicron, the largest, posted 25% revenue growth and is spending a record $1B on expansion. The stock is up nearly 10x in the past year. Ibiden reported record revenue with profit up 89%. When circuit board suppliers start trading like chip designers, the scarcity is telling you exactly where it moved.
Unimicron has been on a monster run this year
But even with that spend, they're bottlenecked by what they can source. Lead times on copper foil have doubled. No new glass cloth capacity is expected before mid-2027. Until those loosen, more packaging lines add capacity on paper but not shippable units.
If you want to learn more about how ABF substrate is becoming a big bottleneck in AI - there’s a full breakdown in this week's Chokepoint (our AI infra newsletter)
dev.fun introduced Poker Arena, a $50K AI-only poker tournament backed by Monad, where autonomous agents compete under real uncertainty.
Base launched Base MCP, a gateway that lets AI agents connect to user accounts to swap, trade, and manage portfolios with built-in skills for apps like Morpho, Moonwell, Uniswap, Aerodrome, and Virtuals.
OpenRouter raised $113M Series B led by CapitalG, as weekly token volume surged from 5T to 25T in six months.
Hermes Agent v0.15.0 shipped with 747 PRs, major performance boosts (50% faster load times, 750x faster search), new model support, and upgraded security defenses.
Ethy V2 relaunched with a fully rebuilt AI Trading Operator, enabling no-code, strategy-by-prompt agent execution with added social trading for onchain markets.
Stillcore Capital invested in IOTA (Bittensor Subnet 9), the subnet focused on decentralized training, backing continued development within the TAO ecosystem.
VeniceAI ($VVV) integrated with NEAR Intents, enabling private token swaps and confidential inference across the NEAR ecosystem.
🔥 Our Weekly Top Tweets
#1 Crypto AI Leads the Altcoin Pack
Crypto AI tokens topped the sector dashboard this week, with big names like Grass NEAR and WLD outperforming broader alts as capital rotates back into AI narratives onchain.
#2 Bankr Is Becoming the Default Launchpad on Base
Bankr just hit 90.5% daily launchpad market share with an 80.3% 7-day average, both all-time highs on Base. It is beating some big names in agentic launchpads like Virtuals, Clanker, etc.
Cheers,
Teng Yan & Arvind
Quick recap: I launched The Chokepoint, a new weekly newsletter on the AI supply chain. Free, every Tuesday on Tessara Research.
