Tag: Business – Decrypt

For the first time, traders on Hyperliquid moved more money through stocks and commodities than through crypto. Lorenzo Valente, director of digital assets research at ARK Invest, announced the milestone Thursday on X: “We are entering a new era for DeFi.” Hyperliquid, he said, had for the first time generated more trading volume from so-called real-world assets, or RWAs, than from crypto in a single week.

RWAs—meaning tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments like company shares, crude oil, or the S&P 500, converted into blockchain-based contracts that traders can buy and sell around the clock—totaled $25.1 billion during July 13–19, or 52% of Hyperliquid’s $48.2 billion in weekly volume, per Blockworks data. Valente put the latest running figure at $26 billion and 54%.

The context makes that number land harder. Total perpetual DEX volume across the industry last week was $79 billion. Hyperliquid processed $50 billion of it. The $26 billion in RWA trading alone—just the stock bets, the oil contracts, the index plays—was larger than the combined crypto perpetual volume of every other decentralized exchange on the market.

How stocks ended up on a crypto exchange

The mechanism behind this is HIP-3, a framework Hyperliquid launched in October 2025 that lets outside teams build their own perpetual markets—contracts that track an asset’s price with no expiry date, letting traders bet on it going up or down with borrowed money—using Hyperliquid’s existing infrastructure. Builders stake 500,000 HYPE tokens, currently worth roughly $30 million, to access the system.

Since June, individual stocks have overtaken indices and commodities inside HIP-3, with single-stock perpetuals now making up 61% of all RWA trading. The HIP-3 platform has already hosted pre-IPO markets for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. “RWAs accounted for 54% of total trading volume,” Valente noted.

The most-traded stock is SK Hynix, the South Korean memory chipmaker that competes with Samsung in supplying DRAM and high-bandwidth memory for AI systems.

ARK’s interest in Hyperliquid goes back further. In September 2025, CEO Cathie Wood told the Master Investor podcast that the platform “reminds me of Solana in the earlier days,” adding that Solana had proven its worth and earned its place with the biggest names in crypto. She called Hyperliquid “the new kid on the block,” and ARK has not confirmed any position since.

Now one of ARK’s own analysts is raising a harder question for the whole industry. “I’m no longer convinced RWA trading will naturally aggregate on the same venue as crypto,” Valente wrote, predicting that dedicated category leaders may emerge within RWA—and that a platform’s grip on Bitcoin and Ethereum flow may prove “far less important than many people assume.”

Traders still focused only on crypto tokens, he added, “are focusing on the wrong market.”

Poolin Technology Pte. Ltd., the Singapore-based company that once ran one of Bitcoin’s largest mining pools, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 22—the U.S. legal process that lets a company operate under court supervision while it reorganizes or, in this case, sells off its remaining assets and shuts down.

The filing, in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, covers Poolin alongside two U.S. affiliates, Lonestar Dream Inc. and Lonestar Taproot LLC. Court documents list roughly prepetition obligations of more than $100 million against less than $10 million in assets.

A mining pool lets individual Bitcoin miners combine their hashrate—the raw computing power machines burn through to solve the cryptographic puzzles that add new blocks to the blockchain—so the group wins rewards more often than any single miner could alone.

Poolin was founded in Beijing in 2017 by Zhibiao “Kevin” Pan, along with Fa Zhu and Tianzhao Li, all veterans of mining-hardware maker Bitmain, and it grew into one of the world’s biggest pools. At its peak, the company controlled nearly a fifth of the network’s global hashrate, before expanding into crypto lending and interest-bearing accounts through a product called Poolin Wallet.

The trouble started in September 2022, when Poolin froze withdrawals for Poolin Wallet and Pool Account users. The company said at the time it was “facing some liquidity issues,” tied to a wave of withdrawal demand during that year’s broader crypto crash. Rather than making customers whole, Poolin issued IOU tokens as placeholders for real Bitcoin, and those debts never got repaid.

Those unpaid IOUs are now the largest liability in the bankruptcy case. About 11,700 wallet holders are owed $163.7 million, according to a court declaration from Chief Restructuring Officer Michael DuFrayne. Poolin’s Texas mining and hosting operations, run through Lonestar Dream, shut down entirely on July 10, and the company says it does not intend to resume.

To repay what it can, Poolin is auctioning its two West Texas sites, with Thor CALAP LLC offering a $52 million stalking-horse bid—an opening offer that sets the floor price other bidders must beat in a court-supervised sale. That amount covers only the physical mining infrastructure, not the frozen wallet balances, and falls well short of what users are owed. The Texas units had already piled up roughly $45.9 million in losses since they opened, plus another $8.8 million from selling equipment at discounted prices between fiscal 2023 and 2025.

Recovery for the 11,700 IOU holders now depends largely on what the Texas auction brings in, more than three years after their withdrawals were first frozen.

Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 on Thursday, and for the first time, the company’s flagship model generates video instead of just still images. The German AI lab, known for the FLUX line of image generators, trained the new system on images, video, and audio at once, inside one shared system.

That’s what is known as multimodality: one model learning several types of information together instead of separate tools bolted side by side.

The video side is the headline feature. FLUX 3 produces clips up to 20 seconds long, with audio generated alongside the picture and synced to what’s happening on screen—dialogue, sound effects, ambient noise. In early evaluations, human reviewers preferred FLUX 3’s output over Runway Gen-4.5 in 77% of head-to-head comparisons and over Luma Ray 3.2 in 93%. It seems to be slightly better than Gemini Omni and Seedance, beating those models in 52% of the evaluations.

Of course, that’s a preference test, not a fixed scoring rubric: evaluators simply watch two clips and pick the one that looks and sounds more convincing, and BFL counts how often FLUX 3 wins.

Other than that, the model seems to be very competent on still images too, following its legacy. BFL shared a few images, and FLUX 3 seems to be very versatile and capable of generating a broad variety of styles beyond photorealism.

BFL frames this as more than a content tool. “A model that only learns images can only generate images,” said co-founder and CEO Robin Rombach. The company’s bet is that learning to predict video also means learning the physics underneath it—weight, contact, timing—which is exactly what a machine needs to move through the physical world.

That bet has a name: FLUX-mimic. Built with Zurich-based mimic robotics, it takes FLUX 3’s video-prediction engine and adds a lightweight “decoder”—a small add-on component that translates the model’s internal sense of how things move into actual robot motions. Car maker Audi is already testing it on tasks like fitting flexible door seals, work that conventional automation has struggled to handle.

“Audi represents the kind of manufacturing partner we built FLUX-mimic for,” said mimic co-founder Stephan-Daniel Gravert. Audi’s Christoph Schneider said the robots now “solve complex soft-body manipulation work” that older machines couldn’t touch. BFL says the full system reacts in about 101 milliseconds, in the neighborhood of human visual reflexes.

FLUX’s rise didn’t happen in a vacuum. Founded in August 2024 by veteran researchers who’d helped build the original Stable Diffusion models at Stability AI, Black Forest Labs launched Flux models that beat MidJourney and outclassed Stability’s own underwhelming Stable Diffusion 3.

The open-source Flux Dev and Schnell models grabbed the “best open source image generator” title that AI artists had expected Stable Diffusion 3.5, Stability’s do-over, to eventually reclaim.

It never did. FLUX 1.1 Pro went on to top the Artificial Analysis image arena that October. That one wasn’t open source, though.

BFL released FLUX.2 in November 2025 but it wasn’t as popular. The open-source crown held by the original Flux lasted until Alibaba’s Z-Image Turbo dethroned it in late 2025, matching its quality on lower end consumer graphics cards. “This is what SD3 was supposed to be,” one CivitAI user wrote at the time.

FLUX 3 is BFL’s comeback, and it isn’t fully open yet. Video and Action are in early access now through APIs and select partners, mimic robotics among them, with image generation following “in the coming weeks,” per BFL. The open-weight Dev version, the only tier BFL plans to release for local use, isn’t due until later in 2026.

Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon has come out in favor of the Clarity Act, positioning one of Wall Street’s biggest banks apart from much of the industry as the crypto market-structure bill approaches a possible Senate floor vote.

“I’m very supportive of moving the Clarity Act forward, so we can get some market structure in place and start to move the innovation process along,” Solomon said in an interview with Politico.

The Clarity Act, if passed and signed into law, formally legalize most cryptocurrency activity in the United States, classifying most crypto assets as non-securities and outside the purview of the SEC. The bill also carries provisions that would protect decentralized software developers and addresses the practice of offering rewards on stablecoin balances.

Solomon acknowledged the legislation is far from flawless, telling Politico that, “like all legislation,” the bill “is not perfect” and leaves plenty to debate. Its central value, he argued, lies in creating “a level playing field to enhance market stability and allow these markets to develop appropriately.” According to Politico, Solomon also suggested the framework could draw more institutional players into crypto markets—a stated priority for Goldman.

That stance sets him apart from the broader banking sector, which has spent months fighting one provision in particular: language governing yield on stablecoins.

Stablecoins are blockchain-based tokens that are designed to hold a steady value and are typically pegged one-to-one with the U.S. dollar. Traders use them to enter and exit positions without the need to access dollars directly, while market participants use them to make payments or send remittances overseas.

Crypto companies such as Coinbase have for years offered rewards on certain stablecoin balances, like the Circle-issued USDC. Those rewards can range between 3-5% APY, which is significantly greater than what banks typically offer on a traditional savings account. This practice, now commonly referred to as stablecoin yield, was—in a roundabout way—essentially codified into law with the passage of the GENIUS Act last year.

The banks and their lobbyists in Washington have been fighting to change it ever since, pouncing on the Clarity Act as their opportunity to close what they view as a loophole in the law.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been the loudest critic of stablecoin yield, arguing in a May appearance on Fox Business that letting crypto firms pay rewards on dollar-pegged tokens without bank-equivalent oversight would hand them an unfair edge. “The banks will not accept it that way,” he said at the time.

The industry’s objections run deep. In May, a coalition of the nation’s top banking trade groups warned senators that a proposed compromise on stablecoin yield contained loopholes that would enable “evasion” of the intended limits, cautioning that such rewards could pull deposits away from traditional lenders. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has countered that banks are lobbying to kneecap stablecoin rewards precisely because they threaten deposit-based business models.

Solomon’s endorsement of the Clarity Act lands at a pivotal moment. Republican senators this week circulated updated bill text that preserves the core market framework while adding new ethics provisions restricting officials—language Democrats have already blasted as insufficient to address President Donald Trump’s crypto dealings.

With unresolved fights over stablecoins and ethics still in play, the bill’s path through the Senate remains uncertain ahead of a vote lawmakers hope to hold before the August recess.

Southeast Asia’s scam industry has hardened into a single, interconnected criminal economy whose losses now rival the output of entire countries, the United Nations said in a report published Tuesday.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) described a “fundamental” restructuring of the region’s underworld. Locally rooted syndicates that once stuck to one territory and one specialty have fused into a transnational network in which groups sell services—money laundering, fraud, human trafficking, data harvesting—to one another over shared infrastructure, the report said.

Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional Representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific, likened the model to “corporate franchising,” in a statement, pointing to specialized departments for money laundering, human trafficking and data harvesting that plug into the same service-based network.

Combined losses from scam offences across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand reached an estimated $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion in 2025 alone—a figure that UNODC noted “outstrips the GDP of several countries in the region.” Much of that money moves through crypto: the compounds run investment- and romance-scam operations, often called “pig butchering,” whose proceeds are laundered on-chain. UNODC warned that police in the region still lack the training to follow the money in “the new crypto context,” with Schantz adding that seizing proceeds is now essential because “disruption alone does not work.”

Rather than smuggling physical contraband, groups increasingly sell cyber-enabled fraud, criminal infrastructure, and platform-based financial settlements that leave little trace and are hard to attribute. Feeding the machine is forced labor on a global scale, with people from at least 80 countries identified inside scam compounds. Scam networks are now attempting to widen their recruitment pool, the report added, with advertisements targeting individuals with European and North American language skills.

The report flags generative AI, deepfakes, and near-automated fraud, alongside “malvertising”—the hijacking of legitimate ad networks to spread malware—which it said rose 42% year-on-year in 2025. Criminal operations have been “decoupled” from local telecommunications infrastructure by satellite internet such as Elon Musk’s Starlink, the report said, enabling them to operate in remote locations.

Beyond scams, the report breaks ground on other fast-growing markets. It identifies the Sulu and Celebes Seas—the maritime triangle between Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines—as a rising smuggling corridor, and it warns that criminals are gamifying online gambling to draw in younger users.

UNODC Executive Director Monica Juma said the networks are “flexible, persistent and adaptable,” able to shift across borders and resume operations after law-enforcement crackdowns, making international cooperation essential to dismantling them.

Law enforcement bodies around the world are escalating their response to the threat. U.S. prosecutors last week seized more than $25 million in crypto tied to investment and romance scams routed through the region, and Interpol has labeled the compound networks a global threat. The human toll is also coming into focus, with Amnesty International documenting a humanitarian crisis as workers flee Cambodia’s compounds—the same country where alleged Prince Group boss Chen Zhi was arrested pending extradition to China, in a case that included one of the largest-ever Bitcoin seizures.

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors mostly flat despite falling stocks & rising oil; BTC at $65.5k
• Senate Republicans publish new Clarity Act draft, Dem Leaders still oppose
• SEC Commissioner Pierce warns some DeFi vaults and onchain lending fall under securities law
• BTC ETFs see 7 straight days of inflows; ETH validator exit queue goes to 0
• Rhynotic’s new FWA protocol token runs to $11M, pumps multiple NFT sets

🏦 Bitwise’s CIO Says Wall Street Moving Onchain Will Drive the Next Bull Market

The next crypto bull market won’t look like the last ones.

That’s the argument from Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan, who laid out in a new memo that the coming cycle will be driven by the convergence of traditional and onchain finance, stablecoins, tokenization, 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and institutional DeFi, rather than the speculative demand that powered previous rallies. His key claim is that because this cycle would be built on real financial activity and revenue, it could be bigger than what came before, even if it arrives slower and with less volatility.

Hougan framed the opportunity as two “lanes.”

• The first is the “Hyperliquid Lane”—crypto-native protocols that generate serious revenue and route it back to their tokens. For those unfamiliar, Hyperliquid crossed $1 billion in cumulative revenue in June, is on pace for roughly $800 million this year, and directs 99% of that revenue into buying HYPE on the open market.
• The second is the “Robinhood Lane”—established companies building real financial services on blockchain rails instead of running pilots. Robinhood Chain went live July 1 and has already passed $3 billion in volume.

The Hyperliquid Lane fixes crypto’s chronic flaw, where applications rack up fees and volume without creating any demand for their token. He named Uniswap, Aave, and Morpho as protocols moving the same direction, along with onchain darlings like Pump.fun. The TradFi stampede, Citadel into Crypto.com, Morgan Stanley onto E*TRADE, the DTCC going live on tokenization, is his Robinhood Lane.

So here we have a credible institutional voice arguing that revenue and crypto rails will drive the next cycle, not speculation. This is not necessarily a new opinion, as many on CT (Crypto Twitter) have made Hyperliquid their shining star for months now. And as for the institutional driver, that’s not really a new concept either. But it is important when the CIO of Bitwise writes the thesis up formally covering these two factors.

It’s no longer “the institutions are coming.” It’s “the institutions are here—and they’re going to drive the next bull cycle.” We’ll find out soon if he’s right…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are mostly flat despite red stocks and rising oil; BTC -0.3% at $65.5k; ETH even at $1,925; SOL even at $78; HYPE even at $59.30
• Stable (+16%), WLFI (+13%) and ENA (+4%) led top movers
• Oil +4.5% at $90; Gold -1.5% at $4,090
• Stock futures are red after rough earnings calls from TSLA and Google; DOW -0.4%, Nasdaq -0.5%
• Senate Republicans published a new CLARITY draft that would impose limits on Trump’s crypto empire along with other updates
• Seven key Senate Democrats said the draft “falls short” on ethics, consumer protection, illicit finance, and market integrity
• SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce warned that some DeFi vaults and onchain lending products may fall under securities laws, a notable caution from the agency’s most crypto-friendly commissioner
• Franklin Templeton’s Sandy Kaul called blockchain the next AI trade, arguing that as autonomous agents transact in fractions of a cent, card networks become uneconomical and blockchains win the machine-to-machine payment layer
• BitMEX (co-founded by Arthur Hayes) announced it will permanently close on Sept 23, 2026, and has stopped accepting new users
• Ethereum’s validator exit queue has fallen from a peak of 2.6M ETH to 0, while its staking queue now has 2.48M ETH and a 43-day waiting period

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mostly flat; DOGE -1%, SHIB -1%, PEPE even, PENGU -1%, TRUMP +3%, BONK -3%
• Robinhood chain was led by GME (+425x), AI (+80%), and SWOGE (+190%); Cashcat -25% to $48M and PONS -18% to $26M as prior winners sell off hard
• Solana leaders included Jimothy (+5%), KET (+110%) and BOP (+170%); ANSEM -10% to $175M

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Kalshi launched a US Midterms Hub with live odds on Senate and House races alongside polling and FEC data
• An Arbitrum USDC bridge lost about $24.15M after attackers compromised its hot-validator signing path, clearing quorum to authorize a withdrawal the contract treated as legitimate
• The Verus-Ethereum bridge was exploited for the 2nd time in 2 months with $7.54M drained, after attackers abused the bridge’s import path

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were flat while multiple other sets climbed; Punks even at 32 ETH, BAYC even at 8.65 ETH, Pudgy even at 4.18 ETH; Hypurr’s even at 185 HYPE
• Cyberkongz (+53%), Memeland MVPs (+29%), TTT (+38%), Creepz (+77%), mfers (+16%) and CrypToadz (+16%) led top movers
• Robinhood NFTs were led by Hood Mundo (+39%) and Pepe Hood Town (+9%)
• Rhynotic’s new Fake World Assets (FWA) NFT gacha platform saw its token soar to $11M overnight before retracing
• An FWA user won a Cryptopunk off a 0.06 ETH gacha spin (550x return), before selling it back for FWA tokens

BitMEX, one of crypto’s oldest derivatives venues, is shutting down.

The platform will cease operations on September 23 at 04:00 UTC, its operator, HDR Global Trading, said Thursday, pinning the decision on a “strategic review of the business and the broader industry.” New account sign-ups have already been halted. The move, BitMEX said, “comes with a heavy heart.”

Users have two months to get out. Trading continues as normal until August 26, when BitMEX will bar new positions and let traders only reduce existing ones. From there it will force-close open positions to wind the market down in an orderly fashion, and any left open at the deadline will be closed automatically. Even after the shutdown, the company said, users can still log in to withdraw balances—though those who leave funds parked will eventually be charged a monthly account fee.

Founded in 2014 by Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed, BitMEX built a template much of the industry still runs on. In May 2016 it launched the perpetual swap—a no-expiry futures contract offering up to 100x leverage. Crypto perps have since gone on to reach volumes of $61.7 trillion in 2025, per CryptoQuant, up $13.8 trillion on the previous year. BitMEX noted it had gone more than 11 years without losing user funds to a hack—a pointed claim in a year defined by nine-figure exploits.

Its later history was rockier. BitMEX pleaded guilty in 2024 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act over lax anti-money-laundering controls, and paid $100 million in penalties. In March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned Hayes and his co-founders, wiping out the criminal case that had shadowed the exchange for years. BitMEX told users to trade on “the many excellent platforms that have followed in our footsteps.”

Coinbase has a new pitch for Canada: stop thinking of the company as just a crypto exchange, and start seeing it as the only financial app the country needs.

Eric Richmond, CEO of Coinbase Canada, told BNN Bloomberg this week that the company is pushing its “Everything Exchange” north of the border—a single platform where crypto, stocks, ETFs (funds that track a basket of assets like the S&P 500), and prediction markets (platforms where users bet real money on the outcome of real-world events, like elections or sports results) all trade from one account.

“I think chapter one of Coinbase in Canada was really about being a crypto exchange,” Richmond said. “But now phase two of that is the Everything Exchange. How do we create that one place for Canadians to have their entire financial experience in one app that’s underpinned by this technology that makes things frictionless, seamless, and 24/7?”

No hard launch date has been set for Canada. Coinbase says it is working closely with local regulators to get there—a relationship it has cultivated since becoming the first international crypto exchange registered in Canada in April 2024.

In the U.S., the build-out is already well underway. Coinbase opened stock and ETF trading to eligible American users in February 2026 and launched prediction markets in January through Kalshi, a federally regulated prediction market operator now valued at $22 billion. As Decrypt covered in June, the company’s roadmap for the Everything Exchange now includes nearly 10,000 stocks and ETFs on one platform.

Tokenized stocks—shares in real companies recorded on a blockchain instead of a traditional brokerage system, meaning trades settle instantly and the market never closes—are supposed to be coming to non-U.S. customers this month, according to a previous official blog. Richmond framed it as a matter of access.

On competition from Robinhood and traditional Canadian brokerages, Richmond wasn’t particularly worried. “I think people are starting to realize the fact that banks close at 4 p.m., or the markets close at 4 p.m., or that wires can take days to settle, or that access for high-net-worth individuals to certain products are gated for just those high-net-worth individuals,” he told BNN Bloomberg.

His five-word summary: “Rising tide lifts all boats.”

The Bank of Canada is expected to finalize stablecoin implementing regulations in 2027—the last major regulatory piece Coinbase needs before it can list a Canadian dollar stablecoin and fully roll out the Everything Exchange in the country.

Alibaba’s Qwen team launched Qwen Image 3.0 on Tuesday, and the pitch has nothing to do with how beautiful the output looks. It’s about whether the output can actually be used at work.

Most AI image tools—Reve, Nano Banana, Seedream—are designed to excel at specific areas: creativity, realism, editing capabilities, and so on. Qwen Image 3.0 is going in a different direction. “Qwen-Image-3.0 is not just pursuing ‘good-looking’—it is pursuing ‘useful,’ making image generation a truly deployable productivity tool,” the Qwen team wrote in the official announcement.

The centerpiece is what the Chinese behemoth Alibaba calls rich content. The model accepts up to 4,500 tokens, which is 4.5 times what the previous generation could process. Tokens are the units of text an AI reads; picture a token as roughly one word or part of a word, so 4,500 of them are several pages of detailed instructions

That’s enough to describe nine separate infographic panels in a single prompt and get them back as one complete image.

“The entire image above was generated by Qwen-Image-3.0 in a single pass, rather than being stitched together from multiple images,” Alibaba wrote in its blog. Each panel in the demo contains its own diagrams, formulas, captions, and fine-print text—rendered in one shot, not assembled in post.

This is the only model capable of achieving this without major errors.

The second part is what the company calls authentic details. Per Alibaba, the model “supports precise rendering of text as small as 10px, vividly reproducing details like pores and hair strands with lifelike, micro-level depiction.” Ten pixels is fine print—the kind you’ll see on pharmaceutical disclaimers. The model also handles LaTeX—the notation system researchers use to write complex mathematical equations—accurately across full academic paper mockups.

In our usual tests we give models a few sentences and evaluate how they process them. Qwen Image 3.0 was able to generate the image below, per Alibaba’s official blog.

We tried this feature using the model’s fastest configuration. Qwen Image 3.0 was able to reproduce one full article from Decrypt. The execution was genuinely impressive, but the result was not flawless.

The third pillar of Qwen Image 3.0 is deep knowledge. Per the Qwen team, the model “supports native rendering of 12 languages, simulates mainstream interfaces such as web pages, games, and livestreams, and draws on rich world knowledge.” It also connects to the internet to fetch live data, meaning prompting for a weather forecast visual for a specific city and date returns an accurate graphic, not a guess.

For example, Alibaba shared a photo of an insect on a leaf. The model was able to generate relevant text based on its understanding of the image.

Alibaba is pitching design studios, content teams, e-commerce operations, and educators who need production-ready visual assets in bulk.

It’s worth noting, though, that in Alibaba’s own Qwen-Image-Bench evaluation—a benchmark that scores image quality, aesthetics, and real-world fidelity across 18 models—Qwen Image 2.0 Pro, the previous flagship, placed fifth. OpenAI’s GPT Image 2 led the ranking. The new model may perform better, but the launch offers no measured way to confirm it, because it arrived without a benchmark table, downloadable weights, or technical report.

Qwen Image 1.0 launched with open weights under an Apache 2.0 license and a same-day technical report. This one didn’t. As part of Alibaba’s recent AI push, the evidence here is entirely the hand-picked example images the company chose to publish. API trials are open at chat.qwen.ai. Pricing hasn’t been announced.

The shareholders of Satsuma Technology, a U.K.-based Bitcoin treasury company, have voted to liquidate the company’s entire Bitcoin position and shut down the business, overruling four of its six board members.

More than 90% of votes cast backed the dual resolutions to sell 668 BTC—worth roughly $43.5 million—and cancel the company’s London Stock Exchange listing, per a Monday filing. The move unwinds the digital asset treasury, or DAT for short—the latest such company to call it a day after the DAT trend picked up steam in 2025.

Satsuma started life as TAO Alpha, a small AI firm, before rebranding and hiring Mark Moss in August 2025 as its Chief Bitcoin Strategist. Moss is an American Bitcoin commentator with over 700,000 YouTube subscribers known for advising institutions on how to buy and hold Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset—essentially, a company’s rainy-day fund, but in crypto.

The same month, Satsuma raised £163.6 million ($218 million) through convertible notes—debt instruments investors can either reclaim as cash or convert into company shares—led by ParaFi Capital, with Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, and Kraken joining in. Investors contributed 1,097 BTC directly in place of roughly $97 million in cash.

The stock peaked around £14 per share, roughly £66 million in market cap, in June 2025. Bitcoin then hit its $126,000 all-time high in October before entering a months-long slide in what became the current crypto winter, dragging the rest of the market—including Satsuma’s stock—with it.

By December, Satsuma was already selling assets to stay solvent: 579 BTC went for £40 million to ensure it had enough cash to repay noteholders who chose not to convert their debt into shares by year-end.

The unraveling

The company’s CFO departed in February 2026; the CEO followed in March. By April, shares had lost more than 99% of their June 2025 value—trading at fractions of a penny—and Pantera Capital, holding about 6.7% of Satsuma’s stock, began pushing publicly for full liquidation.

The logic was direct: Satsuma’s market cap—the total combined dollar value of all its shares—had fallen well below the value of the Bitcoin sitting on its own balance sheet, the point where owning the stock is strictly worse than owning the coin directly. A group of shareholders representing more than 20% of issued capital formally put the resolution to a vote.

The board split hard. Four of six directors opposed the liquidation, arguing Satsuma was still a viable listed Bitcoin vehicle. Two sided with shareholders pushing to wind down. Shareholders overruled the board majority by a wide margin.

The wind-down runs through a “B Share Scheme,” a U.K. legal mechanism for distributing cash assets back to shareholders. Satsuma expects to return between £26.8 million and £30 million after estimated termination costs of £2.7 million—legal fees, severance, delisting charges, and run-off insurance.

Combined with the £40 million from the December BTC sale, total capital recovered lands around £66–£70 million against the £163.6 million originally raised. And because convertible note holders rank above common equity in any payout structure—meaning they get paid first—ordinary shareholders could walk away with considerably less than even those numbers suggest.

Satsuma is currently the second-largest U.K.-listed Bitcoin treasury company by holdings. The first is The Smarter Web Company, which holds 2,878 BTC and has not suggested it’s winding down.

U.K. High Court hearings to approve the capital return are set for August and September 2026. The delisting is expected mid-September, with shareholder payments due by late September.