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Hyperliquid announced its HIP-4 upgrade to democratize the creation of on-chain prediction markets by allowing permissionless deployment, moving away from validator-only control. Validators will vote on precise outcome templates, which qualified community deployers can then use to create their own event markets. To ensure proper settlement, deployers must stake 500,000 HYPE tokens for six months, with validators slashing these assets for failures or early exits. Despite this significant technical development, the HYPE token price saw a muted market reaction, trading around $60 with slight short-term declines. The initiative aligns with a surge in global prediction market activity, which reached a record $50.7 billion in nominal size in June, driven by major sporting events. Hyperliquid aims to position itself as a key player in this growing derivative sector.

Hyperliquid has proposed the HIP-4 upgrade to expand from perpetual futures into a broader, permissionless infrastructure layer for on-chain applications, requiring deployers to stake 500,000 HYPE to launch new markets. This shift aims to enable developers to build on its platform, a strategy backed by growing long-term investor conviction. Evidence includes a major trader staking millions in HYPE instead of taking profits, with total staked tokens reaching 43.9% of the supply, reducing available tokens and strengthening network security. Market metrics like high open interest and balanced funding rates suggest measured, non-speculative trader positioning. Sustained growth in protocol revenue, TVL, and governance participation further supports the positive outlook, contingent on continued user adoption and successful upgrade execution.

**DeepSeek Founder Liang Wenfeng's Candid Reflections on the Company's Path to AGI** DeepSeek has recently completed its first external funding round, raising over 500 billion RMB (approx. $74B) at a pre-money valuation of 3.675 trillion RMB ($543B). Founder Liang Wenfeng personally invested 200 billion RMB. This marks a strategic shift from its initial "no financing, no IPO, no commercialization" principle. In a recent investor Q&A, Liang articulated DeepSeek's core philosophy and roadmap. The company is driven by a powerful, unwritten vision for beneficial AGI rather than pure commercial maximization. He emphasizes "strategic restraint"—avoiding unnecessary conflicts, prioritizing long-term AGI success over short-term gains, and maintaining an open, cooperative stance even with competitors. Liang outlined the AGI technical roadmap: current focus on Agent capabilities, followed by solving "continual learning," which he sees as the key to unlocking models that can learn and adapt like humans. This could lead to a gradual "singularity" where AI accelerates its own research, and eventually to embodied intelligence. DeepSeek will strictly focus on this "AGI mainline," avoiding distractions like video generation which, while commercially viable, don't directly advance core intelligence. He identifies team stability as the single most critical factor for success, now bolstered by the recent funding. While talent is not a bottleneck, the primary constraint compared to the US is compute resources. Liang is optimistic about domestic AI chips, stating that Nvidia's CUDA moat is eroding and that within a year, the viability of the Chinese chip ecosystem will be proven, with Huawei's offerings being key. The main issue is production capacity. On competition, Liang believes the final differentiators will be cost, time-to-market, and user experience. He foresees Chinese companies playing a major role by offering systematically lower-cost AI services globally. DeepSeek's commercialization strategy involves offering API services at a "reasonable profit" and focusing on coding Agents. He remains committed to open-sourcing even their strongest models, seeing no downside as the barriers to effective deployment remain high. The company operates with a unique dual management structure combining top-down direction with significant bottom-up, unstructured research time for employees. Data quality and post-training are identified as major current challenges, with half of core researchers involved in data labeling efforts. Liang concludes that DeepSeek aims to be one of several trillion-dollar companies in the AI era, achieved through extreme focus on its chosen path.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which custodies $115 trillion in assets and settles quadrillion-dollar securities annually, has executed its first real settlement of tokenized stocks, ETFs, and treasury securities. This marks a fundamental infrastructure shift in global finance, not merely a cryptocurrency experiment. Key insights from a discussion with DTCC's digital asset lead and BCG partners frame this transition. First, this is a multi-decade rebuild of financial rails, akin to telecom's shift to packet-switching, potentially exposing 15-30% of bank profits by 2035. Second, atomic settlement is a misnomer for scale; DTCC's netting eliminates 98% of gross obligations, a liquidity necessity. The first major application will be in collateral and repo markets, enabling near real-time, 24/7 movement and valuation of trillions in assets, reducing capital costs. BCG's projection of $8.8 trillion in tokenized real-world assets by 2035 assumes a 16% penetration rate, but momentum matters more than the precise figure. Winners will be structural orchestrators that abstract blockchain complexity for clients, not proponents of any single chain. Crucially, risk management is becoming code, with compliance logic embedded in smart contracts, though the role of human discretion in crises remains an open question. The core debate is settled: the system's deepest node has moved. The remaining variable is the adoption timeline.

Bitcoin's short-term holder losses have narrowed sharply to around -4.0% from -20.48% in early June, bringing the cohort close to its average cost basis of $68,800. This proximity may incentivize holding, reducing recent supply from entering the market. The asset's structure shows bullish signs, including a sustained golden cross and rising accumulation volume. However, momentum faces headwinds as spot and perpetual market netflows remain negative. Bitcoin currently trades in an undervalued zone, and a shift to positive netflows could support a potential rally, similar to a pattern observed before its 2025 surge.