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CoinDesk cites the opinion of Tom Lee, co-founder and chief investment officer of Fundstrat Global Advisors, stating that the cryptocurrency market will be "very bullish" in the next 12 months.Tom Lee indicated that the excess leverage was cleared out last October, and the four-year cycle will bottom out next month.

According to Token Terminal data, the tokenized U.S. Treasury product USYC (under Circle) has increased its market value by 2 billion dollars in the past year, ranking first among similar assets; iBENJI and USDY follow closely, with increases of 1.7 billion dollars and 1.5 billion dollars, respectively. BlackRock's BUIDL grew by 552.5 million dollars during the same period, ranking fifth.

According to CNBC, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan stated at the YC annual Demo Day that regarding the distillation of OpenAI and Anthropic models by Chinese companies (including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, etc.), he chose to "do nothing" and suggested that regulators focus instead on maintaining a commercial balance between open-weight models and cutting-edge models.Tan also holds a reserved attitude towards the doomsday theory of AI, believing that cybersecurity is currently the most urgent risk, while the employment impact and economic transformation caused by AI will take decades to truly permeate society.

User chris__lu posted that they compiled all 236 companies and 470 founders from the YC Summer 2026 batch, categorizing each company into an AI technology stack layer and comparing it to the Spring batch using the same criteria. This batch still has 91% related to AI. The model companies increased from 8% to 20%, the application layer decreased from 55% to 39%, horizontal applications dropped from 58 to 32, and vertical applications remained at 25%.In the Spring, 45% of companies delivered autonomous agents, while in the Summer, it was 33%, with "agent" in a one-sentence introduction dropping from 27% to 19%. 21 companies are engaged in computational infrastructure, 11 focus on inference costs, and there are also companies for training data and reinforcement learning environments. Scale AI is listed as an alternative target by 8 companies. The industrial category increased from 12% to 24%, with 45 companies delivering physical products, 24 being robots or physical AI, and 21 companies operating their own businesses rather than selling software.This batch is the youngest, with 37% of founders being students or graduates in the last two years, 59 teams are entirely student teams, the dropout rate increased from 3% to 9%, and repeat founders decreased from 32% to 23%, with 84% having a technical background. 39 from Berkeley, 32 from MIT, and 25 from Stanford. Amazon is the largest source of talent. Sales and marketing AI decreased from 18 to 6. Only 19 founders come from AI labs, accounting for 4%. 8 founding teams come from the same previous employer.

The decentralized lending protocol Pencil Finance has announced the completion of a $1 million student loan portfolio on-chain, including fundraising, lending, repayment records, and fund returns, constituting a complete financing and repayment cycle. Animoca Brands, Open Campus, and NewCampus provided funding for this portfolio in July 2025.The education financing company ErudiFi issued most of the funds through Southeast Asian student loans and tuition financing, covering markets such as Indonesia and the Philippines. The portfolio operates for 12 months, supporting over 6,600 students across 118 schools and universities, of which approximately 1,050 students received funding directly attributable to Pencil Finance. Investors are divided into priority and subordinate shares, with the former providing fixed returns and enjoying repayment priority, while the latter has variable returns and bears the first loss from defaults. Pencil Finance claims this is the first fully on-chain student loan cycle, but has not disclosed interest rates, investor yields, default situations, or blockchain transaction records.

Student Loan RWA Agreement Pencil Finance announced the completion of its first fully on-chain student loan cycle, deploying $1 million in funding as a lender, with borrowers having repaid both principal and interest to the funders of the asset package. This loan package was funded in July 2025 by Animoca Brands, Open Campus, and New Campus, and is structurally divided into fixed-income senior shares and floating-income junior shares that bear the risk of priority losses.This $1 million on-chain loan cycle provides financing for approximately 6,600 students across 118 schools and universities in Southeast Asia, with about 1,050 students receiving direct funding. Pencil Finance stated that these loans target student groups underserved by traditional financial institutions, with 50% of borrowing students being female and 93% coming from low-income families, claiming this is the first fully on-chain loan cycle to transparently record student loan financing on the blockchain.In addition, tokenized RWA is increasingly being used to issue loans or as collateral for loans. In July of this year, the Brazilian stock exchange B3 issued a loan of 100,000 Brazilian Reais (approximately $19,600) secured by 10 tokenized cows, each cow possessing a unique digital token linked to a crypto digital identity.

Google's Senior Director of Supply Chain Infrastructure, Nikhil Cherian, revealed that to overcome memory bottlenecks, Google is developing software and hardware solutions and dismantling retired servers to recycle DDR4 components to establish an internal recycling supply chain. Google has designed special hardware adapters to connect the previous generation DDR4 to the new generation of AI servers while importing retired servers to remove their DDR4 modules for recycling.Cherian stated that the AI industry has rapidly shifted from being compute-constrained to memory-constrained, with high-performance memory accounting for about 75% of the bill of materials cost for a given AI server. A Goldman Sachs report indicated that memory prices will continue to rise in the third quarter, with personal computer DRAM prices expected to increase by 18% to 23% and server DRAM prices expected to rise by 13% to 18%. Trendforce data shows that in August, the spot market prices for DDR4 8GB and DDR5 8GB rose to $142 and $133, respectively.The two TPU ASICs launched by Google this year have been optimized for memory design, claiming to reduce memory demand to one-sixth of the original. The TPU8i chip features a dedicated layered memory design that relies on a high-speed DDR5 memory architecture to perform host-level tasks, with each chip equipped with 288GB of HBM3e high-bandwidth memory.

Analyst Willy Woo stated that Bitcoin has been locked in a 4-year cycle gravitational field, dominated by the supply shock brought about by halving. However, the annual new supply has dropped to 0.8% (soon to drop to 0.4%), and internal forces are gradually weakening.Meanwhile, traditional financial markets are in a 6-8 year short-term debt cycle, and Bitcoin may be transitioning to a 6-8 year cycle.

Lily Liu, the chair of the Solana Foundation, stated that funds, assets, and ownership are migrating to an all-weather internet infrastructure, forming a long-term token supercycle.Tokenization is not only about moving assets onto the chain but also about changing the assets themselves, allowing value to be issued, held, financed, and traded in a market that never closes.She believes that stablecoins have proven that funds can flow onto the chain globally, financial institutions are pushing for asset tokenization, and blockchain infrastructure is beginning to meet the demands of real economic activities for speed and cost, while AI economic agents require programmable money.With these factors converging, any value with clear ownership could be tokenized and gain broader distribution, financing, and trading channels.In the past year, the trading volume of RWA on Solana reached hundreds of billions of dollars, covering tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds, stocks, and private credit; during the same period, stablecoin transfer volume exceeded $4.7 trillion.Liu stated that tokenization can also allow more investors to break through geographic, minimum investment, and qualification restrictions, and enable the assets held to be used for collateral or to generate returns. Although the current on-chain market size is still far below that of traditional markets, the relevant infrastructure could potentially reach 5.5 billion internet users globally in the future.

Peach Bitcoin stated that Swiss regulators are seeking to re-examine the compliance framework of its KYC-exempt peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading platform, which has been authorized to operate since 2022. Peach Bitcoin will temporarily exit the custodial process starting from September 1, 2026, and will adopt a non-custodial model during the appeal period.In the temporary model, only users who have completed KYC, been manually whitelisted, or meet transaction record requirements can create sell orders. Sellers who have not completed KYC can only participate in one ongoing transaction at a time. The buying function remains open to all users, with a single transaction limit of 500 Swiss francs and a maximum premium of 6%. The in-app dispute resolution system will still be available, but Peach Bitcoin will no longer sign in custody and will continue to charge a 2% fee from released transactions.Peach Bitcoin founder @proofofsteph stated that the company will not immediately abandon the KYC-exempt model and will communicate with regulators regarding its position; if the final appeal fails, the company will comply with regulatory decisions.

Cryptoquant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju stated that the peak of the current Bitcoin bull market cycle may be driven by institutional funds and ETF demand outside the United States. He pointed out that deeper stablecoin liquidity and tokenized asset infrastructure will expand global market participation. Using South Korea as an example, Ki Young Ju mentioned that the country currently does not have a spot Bitcoin ETF, retail investors cannot purchase overseas-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs, and most companies are unable to open trading accounts to buy BTC. South Korea has phased in corporate participation, with the Financial Services Commission (FSC) roadmap covering about 3,500 listed companies and qualified professional investors, but financial institutions and other companies are still excluded.Strategy's Bitcoin bank evaluated 25 major institutions covering trading, custody, digital asset products, financing, and corporate participation, with an overall adoption rate of 32%. RWA.xyz data shows that the global tokenized asset distributed asset value is $38.63 billion, an increase of 2.65% compared to 30 days ago. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) stated that stablecoins have the potential to enable faster, programmable payments, but current designs may pose risks to financial integrity, liquidity, and currency. Ki Young Ju pointed out that the cumulative net inflow before the launch of the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF was about $57 billion over two years, and the next phase will be global institutionalization, with more institutions adopting BTC as a strategic asset, and countries lacking ETFs will also improve related investment channels.

After the trade negotiations between Canada and the United States broke down, negative sentiment among Canadians towards the U.S. has intensified, and the movement to boycott American goods has resurfaced. The U.S. imposed a 50% tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, and Canada announced that it would impose equivalent retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. starting September 8.Surveys show that 52% of Canadians are unlikely to buy American cars, 60% will not buy American alcohol, and over 70% will not buy American eggs and dairy products.

Zhao Changpeng stated at the "Bitcoin Asia 2026" conference in Hong Kong that both the RWA and AI sectors are currently very strong. Stablecoins, centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, and Meme tokens, which have been growing, will continue to grow, and NFTs may return in some form. It is difficult to predict what the next breakout point will be, just as it was impossible to predict the coin issuance craze at the beginning of 2017 and the NFT craze six months before it exploded; these all require entrepreneurs to create.He also mentioned that the funds used by billions of AI agents for automated buying, selling, negotiating, and trading in the future will definitely be cryptocurrencies, likely starting with stablecoins, and then gradually integrating other public chain assets like Bitcoin. He has discussed the possibility of issuing tokens with several top AI companies, as building data centers requires huge amounts of capital, with the cost of 1 GW of computing power being about $30 billion to $50 billion. Some AI companies plan to build hundreds of GW of computing power in the coming years, so they are considering issuing data center tokens that would allow holders to gain rights to use computing power in the future. Additionally, the payment scenarios for AI agents may be implemented later than trading scenarios; currently, AI companies are more focused on helping agents find optimal trading solutions, while trading scenarios require AI to process information quickly, which can increase trading efficiency by about ten times.

According to the latest MLCC industry research by TrendForce, South Korean giant Samsung Electro-Mechanics has recently taken the lead in raising prices for OEM and ODM customers for the fourth quarter of 2026, indicating that the MLCC industry has officially entered an upward trend. TrendForce estimates that Samsung Electro-Mechanics will raise the prices of consumer-grade X5R products for OEM and ODM customers by an average of 25% to 30%, in order to suppress order willingness and free up capacity to expand high-end production lines.The high-end X6S products used in AI servers will see an average price increase of 10% to 20% depending on customer negotiations. Japanese manufacturers Murata, TDK, and Kyocera are currently taking a wait-and-see approach, maintaining stable prices, and whether they will follow up with price adjustments will be key to observing whether the upward trend can expand.

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller stated that the decision by Besant to spend billions of dollars to buy back U.S. Treasuries is a wrong decision. He believes that the market aggregates information that no committee can possess, and prices are the way information is conveyed to decision-makers. Druckenmiller pointed out that the Treasury's attempt to influence the bond market lacks rationale, and the current financial environment is in a loose state.

Strive CEO Matt Cole stated that the BTC/gold ratio is sending a strong signal, indicating that the next Bitcoin cycle could be the strongest in history.Currently, there are two major structural factors: the long-term structural depreciation of the dollar, and Bitcoin has never experienced a true secular dollar collapse; and in an AI-driven prosperous world, capital will increasingly chase "scarce assets" that cannot be replicated. If Bitcoin can perform stronger relative to gold, it will attract a disproportionate inflow of funds, creating a positive feedback loop.

CoinDesk analyst James Van Straten stated that Bitcoin typically experiences a price increase in the weeks leading up to a "Golden Cross." Currently, both the 50-day moving average (50DMA) and the 200-day moving average (200DMA) for Bitcoin have turned upward, and the market is approaching the Golden Cross formation. In 2022, Bitcoin's price never broke above the 200-day moving average, while the current market is forming a new structure. He stated, "This seems to be a new market phase."The Golden Cross is generally viewed by the market as a technical signal indicating a strengthening of medium to long-term trends, referring to the short-term moving average (50-day moving average) crossing above the long-term moving average (200-day moving average). However, this indicator is a lagging indicator, primarily used to confirm trend changes rather than predict short-term price movements. Glassnode data shows that historically, Bitcoin has often seen price increases before the 50-day moving average crosses above the 200-day moving average. The current BTC price has once again risen to the vicinity of the 200-day moving average, showing a significant difference from the 2022 market cycle.

BitMine Chairman Tom Lee published a post listing 17 large-cap stocks (with a market capitalization of over $2 billion) that have a high correlation with cryptocurrencies, for stock investors seeking crypto exposure.Among them, BMNR has the highest correlation with ETH at 80%, followed by COIN (74%); MSTR has the highest correlation with BTC at 78%, followed by COIN (74%).Tom Lee stated that he expects ETH to outperform BTC in this cycle, driven by tokenization and AI applications, believing that this logic is far more important than the factors that have historically driven ETH's outperformance in cycles.