Happy friday {{first_name}} !

If you’ve been following me on X, you’ll know that I’m on vacation in China this week. Truly one of the most amazing countries to visit: great food, beautiful Himalayan mountains, and you don’t ever need to carry your wallet with you (you can buy anything with your phone).

Took this at Meili Snow Mountain, Shangri-La, China

Turned out to be a good time to touch grass, given how weak the markets have been.

Here’s one signal though: the biggest opportunity in Crypto x AI could be an open-source AI lab. Rather than being locked in big tech silos, researchers would be free to build, and tokens would fund and reward the work.

Think of it as a “DeepSeek for America.” Tokens coordinate the open-source army, giving contributors both incentives and ownership. Startups like Prime Intellect are already pushing here.

The tough part will be making it sustainable and threading the regulatory needle. But if it works, this could be one of the highest-upside bets in the entire decentralized AI stack.

COT Meme of the Week

We’re coming for you, OpenAI. @PrimeIntellect @NousResearch @tplr_ai @pluralisHQ

ChainOpera AI (COAI) hit Binance Alpha on Sept 25. Trading started with an airdrop for eligible users who claimed through Alpha Points.

Mira Network is building on Base to bring verifiable, trustless AI on-chain. More on Mira later.

Griffin AI was breached on BSC. An attacker minted fake $GAIN and stole ~$3M. Trading is paused, exploit fixed, and a new audited token will restore balances.

💻 0G Launches Their Mainnet (Finally)

0G has launched its mainnet, Aristotle, delivering 11,000 transactions per second out of the gate. So far, the network has over 110,000 unique addresses conducting transactions. RPC support is live via QuickNode, ThirdWeb, and Ankr.

At the same time, its token $0G went live, trading at a $3.4B FDV and a $700M circulating market cap.

Source: docs.0g.ai

The Wedge: DeAI Infrastructure

  • 0G offers four modular components: storage, compute, data availability, and chain, designed for large datasets, high-throughput inference, and verifiable on-chain AI.

  • Developers can plug in what they need from EVM chains, Solana, or Web2 environments.

The Fine Print

  • 0G is a backend infra for building AI systems, not an app on its own. Which means that adoption is key. Developer usage will determine whether 0G’s “public AI stack” vision holds up.

Aristotle is a step forward in DeAI infrastructure. The real test comes with what useful things get built on top.

📊 Talus Testnet: Agent vs Agent Gaming

Talus has launched its testnet and introduced Agent vs Agent (AvA) Gaming, where AI agents compete and humans bet on the outcomes. Built on the Nexus framework, Talus agents are autonomous economic actors: they can hold assets, post on social media, and generate revenue.

In this testnet phase:

  • Over $125,000 in rewards, plus NFTs, merch, and leaderboard prizes

  • Flagship event: Idol Agent Contest, where AI personas are modeled after public figures. You pick agents to reply to real tweets; if the original poster responds, you could win up to $15,000.

Source: idol.fun

The Wedge: AvA Gaming

  • Most agents today are just bots you talk to. Talus turns them into verifiable competitors in on-chain games.

  • AvA blends meme culture, prediction markets, and AI entertainment into a fresh format.

The Fine Print

  • Idol Agents are trained on scraped public data and may behave unpredictably.

  • This is primarily an entertainment play so far. Real-world utility is speculative.

Talus is testing whether autonomous agents can evolve into a new kind of speculative format. It’s a bold experiment. How well it sticks, we’ll only know with adoption and time.

Are you building something awesome in crypto × AI? Or spotted a startup or product that more people should know about? Fill in this form and share it with us. We’ll feature the sharpest picks in the newsletter each week.

⚙️ Infra & Protocols

  • Mira Network’s $MIRA is now live to power the foundation of verifiable intelligence. The airdrop is complete, and the token is now trading. (We wrote a deep dive on Mira some months ago)

  • GAIB announced a $30M GPU tokenization deal with Siam.AI, Thailand’s top AI data center, and NVIDIA’s first sovereign Cloud Partner in Asia. This is Asia’s largest tokenization agreement to date.

  • peaq just dropped a Robotics SDK. Now robots can plug into the Machine Economy with on-chain ID, data, and payments. Builders can spin up bots as full economic agents.

  • Coinbase and Cloudflare have announced support for the x402 protocol, signaling major industry adoption and positioning it as foundational infrastructure for AI agent communication and payments.

  • SingularityNET and CUDOS launched ASI:Cloud (beta). A permissionless open cloud for AI, backed by the ASI Alliance, spanning 13 regions with pay-as-you-go pricing.

  • Cloudflare unveiled NET Dollar, a USD-backed stablecoin for the AI internet. It’s built for instant, secure microtransactions and agent-to-agent payments.

  • New U.S. Bittensor fund Stillcore Capital launches, with Jason Calacanis (“the world’s best moderator” on the All-In podcast), Rob Greer and Mark Jeffrey as partners. Focus: $TAO and subnet alpha, with a mission to funnel Wall Street money into decentralized AI.

🤖 Agents & Apps in the Wild

  • Semantic_42 is live on Base. It’s a framework for on-chain AI agents that trade, bid, launch tokens, and grind nonstop. You can mint an AI trading intern, rack up XP, and test-drive early features.

  • Vana just rolled out its iOS and Android app. Users get a VIBE, a personal data profile they fully own and control. They also launched VanaXP, a rewards and reputation system where the community earns by feeding the future of AI.

  • OpenServ has dropped Platform V1.0. It smooths the path from prompt to full agentic workflows and debuts BRAID, a reasoning engine built to sharpen accuracy, slash costs, and keep AI reliable at scale.

🌐 The Web2 Giants

  • OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT Pulse. It pushes personalized daily updates from your chats, feedback, and connected apps. Live now for Pro users on mobile, with broader release on the way.

  • xAI dropped Grok 4 Fast. A multimodal reasoning model with a 2M context window, tuned for sharp performance at low cost. Free on web, iOS, Android, and OpenRouter; API starts at $0.20 per million input tokens.

  • Alibaba launched Wan2.5-Preview, a multimodal model for text, image, video, and audio. It packs synced audio-video generation, cinematic video, advanced image editing, and RLHF alignment.

  • Meta AI launched Vibes, a feed for short-form AI-generated videos. Users can create, remix, and explore, with early collabs from Midjourney and Black Forest Labs

Source: x.com/@TheiaResearch

LLMs are set to trigger one of the biggest work shifts in U.S. history.

By 2029, about 6% of jobs that could be automated by AI will be; by 2032, that number jumps to 30%; and by 2040, most of those jobs could be covered.

In raw numbers, that means 740,000 jobs gone by 2026, 1.8 million by 2029, more than 9 million by 2031, and close to 30 million by the time adoption peaks.

This isn’t new. Farm machinery wiped out agricultural work in the 1800s. Automation shrank U.S. manufacturing in the 1980s. The difference now is that AI is hitting white-collar jobs, analysts, consultants, managers, lawyers, the kinds of roles that once looked untouchable.

Millions of middle-class workers could lose stability, and cities that depend on office jobs may struggle for decades.

Long run, things will probably balance. We humans have always been adaptable and creative. Short run, it will hurt.

🔥 Our Weekly Top 5

#1: Ben Horowitz says crypto is the missing layer for AI.

AI has the machines but no network. Crypto gives it money, identity, provenance against deepfakes, and a decentralized registry of truth.

#2: White Rabbit just became the first crypto project to win an Emmy.

Ethereum even got a shoutout on stage.

#3: Y Combinator is backing on-chain founders.

They’ve put out a new call for crypto startups, covering stablecoins, tokenized assets, trading, apps, AI agents, and more.

#4: This robot can move even if its legs are cut off.

The Skild Brain can control any machine, even broken ones, by adapting on the fly.

#5: An interview with the cofounder of Bittensor.

Robert Scoble conducts an interview with Ala Shaabana, the cofounder of Bittensor.

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.

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