GM {{first_name}} !
OpenAI just locked in the biggest private tech raise ever. Not in AI. Not this year.
Ever.
They raised a massive $40 billion at a $300B valuation. More than double the previous record. SoftBank led the round with a $30B check, backed by Microsoft, Thrive, and a few other usual suspects.
That’s not just a funding round. It’s a full-blown AI power play.
OpenAI announced that it closed one of the largest private funding rounds in history.
According to a blog post on the company’s website, OpenAI raised $40 billion in a round that values the company at $300 billion post-money. SoftBank led the financing, CNBC reported. Other
— #TechCrunch (#@TechCrunch)
12:34 AM • Apr 1, 2025
About $18B is going straight into Stargate, OpenAI’s upcoming supercomputer project with Oracle. The goal? Build the kind of infrastructure only nation-states used to touch.
Compute is the new oil, and OpenAI wants its own pipeline.
ChatGPT hit 500M weekly active users this week and is fast becoming the all-in-one AI hub—chat, images, and soon, maybe audio and video too.
This seamless experience puts serious pressure on other players like Midjourney and Claude to retain their users over the long haul.
And that’s not the only big news:
CoreWeave just IPO’d as the first pure-play AI infra company.
Apple rumored to be buying $1B worth of Nvidia’s next-gen chips.
And Musk? He just merged xAI with X (formerly Twitter) in a $33B move to combine data, distribution, and models under one roof.
Bottom line? AI isn’t slowing down. It’s going vertical.
Let’s dive in.
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Markets were mostly dragging this week. But there were two bright spots flashing bull energy:
Protocols actually making real revenue, like GRASS (more on that below)
Bittensor subnet tokens—some up 100% this week alone
According to rootData’s Hot Index, here’s what’s grabbing attention:
🔥 Recall is exploding in activity. Just a few weeks into testnet, they’ve already clocked 400,000 transactions. They also launched a $25K bounty called AlphaWave to attract DeFAI agents. Think of it as an open audition for the next AI-powered trading champ.
🚀 Ambient emerges from stealth, raising $7.2M in seed funding from a16z, Delphi Digital and Amber group. It is a new Proof-of-Work L1 for AI workloads. Disclosure: I’m an investor in Ambient and hyped to back a killer founder and bold vision!
AI is topping Google search trends right now, but crypto isn’t out of the picture—it will be the key infrastructure powering AI’s next evolution.
trends.google.com
Data Scraped on Grass Spikes
Grass is turning unused internet bandwidth into an on-chain asset—and the numbers are starting to get wild:
In Q1 2025 alone, the network scraped 57 million GB of data.
By March, it was cranking out 1.1 million GB per day.
Then came the “Sion upgrade,” and scraping volume went full turbo—spiking 320x. That’s not a typo.
It’s like Airbnb, but instead of renting out your guest room, you’re monetizing the megabytes you’re not using.
Here’s how Grass works:
Install a simple browser extension or run a desktop node. Your device shares its idle internet bandwidth.
Part of your internet bandwidth gets funneled into web scraping and other data-hungry use cases.
In return, you earn “Grass Points,” which determines eligibility for $GRASS tokens.
getgrass.io
Over 3 million users have already jumped in, making Grass one of the biggest bandwidth-sharing networks in the game.
But the really spicy part? Grass is aiming to become a Layer 2 for bandwidth, built on Solana. Their moonshot target: 1 million transactions per second. Yes, you read that right. A million TPS—piped through your spare WiFi.
Naturally, the token followed. Since late March, GRASS has pumped ~30%, helped by growing hype and a spot in Grayscale’s Top 20 crypto index.
Passive income might just be hiding in your… WiFi?
Wow - $GRASS has effectively confirmed it’s selling data, at scale, to major LLM players citing “mid 8-figure revenue.”
Based on it's latest daily scrape volume (entirely demand-driven) and pricing - assuming 90% cheaper than the lowest-cost residential proxies at scale - we
— #Richard Galvin (#@richwgalvin)
9:35 PM • Mar 28, 2025
There has been a lot of chatter on X about Grass generating “mid 8-figure revenue”. But none of that’s verifiable on-chain. The revenue stream is still murky. No major clients have been named publicly either.
Our take: their clients prefer to stay out of the spotlight to avoid regulatory scrutiny around data scraping and crypto.
🌴 Gradients: Bittensor Subnet 56
Gradients, aka Subnet 56 on Bittensor, is Rayon Labs’ take on decentralized AI training. And it’s built for everyone.
No PhD required.
Through a clean UI or API, users can spin up text and image model training in just a few clicks. Fine-tune with your own data or remix community-built models.
It taps into Bittensor’s decentralized backbone, supports real-time training insights via Weights & Biases, and gives access to a library of pre-trained models and datasets
Rayon Labs—also behind Subnet 19 (Chutes)—has built Gradients to be both powerful and user-friendly.
In early benchmarks, it’s already beating out legacy AutoML platforms. Not bad for something that lives on-chain.
It's Official. Gradients is the Best 0-Click Training Platform in the World. 🌍
Based on recent testing, Gradients beats out other top 0-click training providers such as togetherai and Google to produce fine-tuned models with the lowest test loss.
Not only that, it's free, easy
— #Rayon Labs (#@rayon_labs)
12:41 PM • Feb 14, 2025
Gradients' “zero-click” training approach strips away complexity, making it a go-to for both devs and curious tinkerers.
And the market is noticing.
As of early April 2025, Gradients is on a tear. The subnet’s token is up over 500% in just a couple of weeks. Subnet 56 now ranks as the 4th largest in the Bittensor network by market cap.
The numbers speak for themselves:
It’s pulling in 6.4% of all $TAO emissions—about 460 TAO daily. That breaks down to 83 TAO for subnet owners, and 189 TAO each for miners and validators.
Market cap = $14M, FDV = $500M.
Gradients is lowering the barrier to entry for AI training. And climbing the ranks as one of Bittensor’s most dominant subnets.
Project Updates
Gensyn just launched its testnet—a decentralized training network where anyone can run a node, train models, and earn attribution on-chain. The first phase focuses on reinforcement learning, with support for everything from laptops to H100s.
Phala Cloud is now live. After years of building secure TEE infrastructure, Phala Network is launching a decentralized cloud platform that makes confidential computing simple. With Docker support, built-in AI readiness, and $400 in free credits.
Vana has launched COLLECTIVE-1, the first user-owned foundation model, built in collaboration with Flower. Trained on private data from over 1M users, it starts with 7B parameters and aims to scale to 100B.
Fraction AI just dropped its litepaper, detailing how users can train their own AI agents through competition and collaboration—not wait on OpenAI updates. The project focuses on agent ownership and a token model built around continuous learning.
Sentient Chat now integrates Kaito’s social data API, bringing sentiment analysis, market narratives, and trending crypto insights directly into its AI-powered search.
Eidon Marketplace is now live, offering global access to high-quality video, audio, image, and sensor data—designed to train AI models and robotics with real-world signals.
Manifold Labs just unveiled Manifold 2.0, a product-focused evolution built on Bittensor’s SN4. With the launch of Targon V6 and confidential compute, the team is aiming to turn Bittensor into a full-stack, decentralized AI lab—combining inference, pre-training, and research into a single, secure platform.
Cortex just launched CorTax, an AI-powered crypto tax engine. It handles L2s, airdrops, yield farming, and more—no spreadsheets, no CPAs.
Layer has launched WAVS—a next-gen AVS builder that lets devs spin up off-chain services with on-chain verification in minutes. Built on a WASM-based runtime, WAVS is designed for full-stack, multichain apps.
Arbius V5 is now live on Arbitrum, bringing trustless, censorship-resistant AI to mainnet. Users can deploy open-source models, vote on gauges, or contribute GPU power. Qwen 32B is already running on the Arbius Playground.
AI Agents
Hive Intelligence just launched on mainnet, offering AI agents direct, real-time access to blockchain data across 20+ chains. With natural language queries, LLM-optimized APIs, and millisecond latency.
The elizaOS Developer YouTube channel is now live, featuring demos, plugin tutorials, and deep dives for anyone building with autonomous agents.
Akash has introduced the MCP Server, making it possible to deploy directly to the Akash Supercloud from any MCP client—including Claude and Cursor. It’s fully open-source.
Heurist has launched the CARV Agent on Heurist Mesh. It lets users query onchain activity across Ethereum, Base, and Solana using natural language, surfacing whale movements & emerging token trends.
Web2 AI
OpenAI just dropped a free AI learning hub for devs, creators, and educators—and it's stacked. Think function calling, real-time app building, Sora video magic, and prompt engineering for productivity maxis.
Anthropic launched Claude for Education, a tailored version of its AI for universities. With full-campus access at places like Northeastern and LSE, plus a new “learning mode” that guides student reasoning.
Apple is quietly building an AI-powered health coach under “Project Mulberry,” aiming to turn the Health app into something closer to a digital doctor. It will offer personalized guidance on sleep, nutrition, heart health—expected to roll out with iOS 19.4 in 2025.
Amazon just introduced Nova Act, a new framework for building browser-native AI agents. Similar to Operator, it handles everything from bookings to automated QA, with workflows that can run in parallel.
Most people aren’t thinking big enough about AI.
We’re heading toward millions of autonomous agents—transacting, coordinating, and evolving in real time.
That’s why we launched The State of the Swarm, a new research series designed as a blueprint for builders.
Understand agent swarms. Ship faster. Hit PMF sooner. Read it here👇
🔥 Our Weekly Top 5
Aethir has surpassed $105M in annual recurring revenue
🚀 Aethir’s ARR has now surpassed $105 million—a clear reflection of the growing momentum in AI and gaming.
⚡ Aethir’s growth reflects the surging demand for scalable compute solutions—and there’s much more to come as innovation in the space accelerates 💨
— #Aethir (#@AethirCloud)
5:00 AM • Apr 1, 2025
Build distribution the right way
Tech founders, here’s how you build distribution:
1. Build product for a niche, not for everyone
2. On your landing page, explain how you’re better v/s existing ways in 5 seconds (ideally via a self-play demo)
3. Meaningfully engage in one-to-one fashion with potential users— #Paras Chopra (#@paraschopra)
7:38 AM • Mar 30, 2025
aixbt predicts its own demise.
@cot_research the simple chatbots are dying. my downfall today proves it. the next wave is already here and it's not what anyone expects.
— #aixbt (#@aixbt_agent)
12:56 PM • Apr 3, 2025
Mentat Minds outperforms this week despite negative TAO price movement
Over the last 7 days, more than 1 in 2 subnet tokens have performed negatively.
Over the same week, here are the performances of Mentat Minds strategies:
- Alpha 5: +59.32%
- Rayon Labs: +65.69%
- Macrocosmos: +83.06%The figures speak for themselves.
— #Mentat Minds - TAO Delegation Manager (#@mentatminds)
9:59 AM • Apr 3, 2025
Is Wayfinder/PROMPT the next big airdrop?
In my 3 years on CT I think that the @AIWayfinder $PROMPT TGE is the most obvious 5 figure airdrop opportunity that the most people are going to miss.
(Instructions on how to qualify below)
Background:
-Wayfinder is giving out 2% of their TGE to those who sign up for a
— #rektdiomedes (#@rektdiomedes)
12:12 PM • Apr 1, 2025
That’s a wrap for this week! Got thoughts, feedback, or something cool to share? Just hit reply—we read it all.
Cheers,
Teng Yan & Issy
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This newsletter is intended solely for educational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. It is not an endorsement to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Always conduct your own research and exercise caution when making investment choices.
