The Singularity Roundup With Early Riders

News of the Week

• OpenAI said roughly 10,000 concurrent agents resolved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem in 88 hours, burning 130 billion output tokens and 2.7 million messages before Lean verification.

• US consumer prices rose 0.4% in August and 3.4% over the year, unchanged from July, while core inflation eased to 2.4%. Energy was up 2.1% on the month and 16.3% on the year.

• The Treasury bought back $5.19 billion of long-dated debt on Thursday against a $6 billion cap, triple its old $2 billion operation size. The 10-year still closed at 4.91%, its highest since 2023.

• Oracle reported remaining performance obligations of $664 billion, up $209 billion in a year, on quarterly revenue of $19.3 billion and cloud infrastructure growth of 121%.

• Broadcom guided to $115 billion of AI revenue in fiscal 2027 and $230 billion in fiscal 2028, and said both figures are capped by what it can supply. It has allocated Anthropic one gigawatt this year, rising to five in 2027.

• Mistral raised €3 billion at a post-money valuation above €21 billion in a round led by Samsung, which the company calls the largest raise ever completed by a European technology firm.

• DeepSeek engaged CITIC Securities to prepare a Shanghai STAR Market listing while raising a round at 500 billion yuan, about $75 billion.

• Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic after four months, writing that the people building AI believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade.

• Anthropic published a threat report detailing nine influence operations and a breach in which attackers used Claude to pull more than 2,100 Azure tokens across 40 corporate tenants in 34 hours. Roughly 200 downstream customers were compromised as a result.

Digital asset roundup

• Blockstream refused to pay the attacker who drained 3,996 bitcoin from the Liquid Federation, calling the demand for 10% theft rather than responsible disclosure. Every signature on the peg-out was valid, and 598 bitcoin remain outstanding.

• US bitcoin mining is using 18% less compute power than last October as public miners convert sites to AI, with Foundry USA's share down from over a third of the network to 26%.

• Circle agreed to buy Singapore payments firm Tazapay, adding over $25 billion of annualized volume across 100 markets and 60 banking partners, with about 60% of that volume already involving stablecoins.

• Nasdaq's venture arm invested $100 million in Kraken parent Payward to launch tokenized equities in the second quarter of 2027, with Payward adopting Nasdaq's market surveillance technology across its venues. Holders of the tokens will not own the underlying shares.

• Block applied to the OCC for an uninsured national trust bank to custody bitcoin and stablecoins, joining a queue that has taken 40 de novo charter applications since 2025 against 21 approvals and two denials.

• Nubank launched Nu Global, a Swiss account paying 3.50% on digital dollars and 2.20% on digital euros with custody and a bank guarantee from Sygnum. Brazil bars regulated foreign exchange providers from stablecoin settlement on October 1.

Open source

• DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash under an MIT licence, a 763 billion parameter mixture of experts with a one million token context that activates 8 billion parameters per token on prefill. Its KV cache is 890 bytes per token, a quarter of its predecessor.

• Zhipu AI reported first-half revenue of 954 million yuan, up roughly 400%, as its open platform went from 15.2% to 86.5% of sales. Gross margin fell from about 50% to 26.4% and the company is moving to price on task outcomes rather than tokens.

• Cognition post-trained SWE-2 from Moonshot's open-weight Kimi K3, scoring within a point of Claude Fable 5.1 on FrontierCode at 64% lower cost on its own pricing chart. A US lab's flagship coding agent now runs on a Chinese base model.

• Claude produced a 13 million line Lean formalization of Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days, proving 30,300 theorems on roughly 6 billion output tokens.

Regulation

• Senate Republicans released a revised 630-page Clarity Act ahead of Tuesday's cloture vote, adding a registration category for trading protocols that control decentralized finance functionality. Lummis says it carries 114 provisions requested by Democrats, none of whom have committed to it.

• Germany's finance ministry drafted a 25% tax on digital asset gains from January 2027, ending the exemption on assets held over a year and reaching 26.375% with the solidarity surcharge.

Early Riders Media

On this week's Final Settlement, the team unpacked the Liquid Network exploit that pegged out roughly 4,000 bitcoin through a federation whose signing keys were never compromised, the rumored SEC innovation exemption that would let tokenized securities trade through a transfer agent alone, and a run of a16z-backed headlines including OpenReserve's OCC approval and Circle's acquisition of Tazapay.

You can find all our episodes on our podcast website as well as listen on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

What We're Watching

Liquid's fifteen institutions all signed a valid withdrawal on Sunday, and 3,996 bitcoin left anyway.

In December 1968 Wall Street was carrying $4.12 billion of trades it could not deliver. The certificates were fine, but the handling around them was not. The exchange closed every Wednesday for the rest of the year and 160 member firms disappeared. The fix was to stop moving paper and put nearly all of it in one nominee, which now holds more than $100 trillion.

Liquid holds its bitcoin in an eleven of fifteen multisig across fifteen organizations in fifteen jurisdictions. No key was compromised last Sunday. Every functionary signed correctly, and 3,996 bitcoin, 95% of the reserve, left in thirty-six minutes, because all fifteen were running the same April build of Elements and the patch had been sitting merged since September 2.

The same shape held elsewhere. One breached email vendor sent phishing from the legitimate domains of Trezor, BitBox and CoinTracking on one morning. Four people were killed in Mexico over $1.5 million on a hardware wallet. Bitcoin itself has been offline about fifteen hours since 2009, while infrastructure attacks took $1.8 billion from January 2025 to July 2026.

BlackRock cut the minimum on an in-kind conversion from $25 million to $1 million in July, and its head of digital assets says holders are switching because of kidnappings, ransom and custody failures. More than $5 billion has gone that way, compared to $3 billion a year ago. Custody pays as a fee on everything a bank sells next, which is why forty charter applications sit at the OCC.

About Early Riders

Early Riders is investing in digital infrastructure at the frontier. Early Riders is the first bitcoin denominated venture firm. Learn more at earlyriders.com.