Binance Sues RedotPay for $470M, Alleges User Poaching

Binance has filed a $470M lawsuit accusing crypto payment-card startup RedotPay of poaching its own users.

RedotPay, a Hong Kong card issuer, had integrated Binance Pay as a funding option. Binance's suit says it then improperly diverted those users to itself.

It is a rare public clash between Binance and a partner that plugged straight into its payment rails, turning on who really owns the customer in crypto payments.

👉 bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-05/binance-claims-redotpay-diverted-users-in-470-million-lawsuit

ElizaOS founder Shaw Walters declared project's token dead

The move follows an April 2026 Burwick Law lawsuit that alleged the AI-agent project was falsely marketed as autonomous and independent while actually controlled by insiders.

Walters says the team spent its remaining treasury to settle: 'Their claim was ridiculous, but we didn't have the capital to legally fight it.' There will be no buybacks or foundation support, and Walters vowed never to tie another token to Eliza.

👉 x.com/shawmakesmagic/status/2084766991932612911

Proof of Play Shuts Down, Calls Play-to-Earn 'Broken'

Proof of Play, the a16z-backed studio behind onchain RPG Pirate Nation, is shutting down after failing to build a sustainable business around its Web3 gaming thesis.

CEO Amitt Mahajan says 'Play-to-Earn is fundamentally broken.' At its peak the studio was paying up to $4,000 a day to subsidize players' gas fees on Polygon. Proof of Play raised $33M in 2023 in a round led by a16z, and has now open-sourced the Pirate Nation Unity client under an MIT license as it winds down.

👉 x.com/proofofplay/status/2084699843868733615

$10B+ in clients assets left LayerZero in the last 3 months

The trigger wasn't price. It was the $292M Kelp bridge exploit back in April. Since then, issuer after issuer has quietly re-routed their cross-chain rails to Chainlink's CCIP, capped by BitGo moving WBTC ($7.3B).

When the bridge breaks, everything built on top starts hunting for safer rails. One exploit is redrawing entire cross-chain trust map.

AIVM Launches Brain Beta for Governed Enterprise AI Knowledge

AIVM has launched the beta of Brain, a governed AI knowledge platform that enables companies to unify internal knowledge for both employees and AI agents while preserving existing access permissions.

Brain connects enterprise tools such as Google Drive and Notion, with Slack, Telegram, GitHub, Confluence, Salesforce, and Gmail integrations planned. Rather than copying data, it queries information directly from connected sources, ensuring every response respects user permissions and every access is logged through a tamper-evident audit trail.

The platform supports multiple AI models, including OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and self-hosted models, allowing organizations to switch providers without vendor lock-in. AIVM says Brain is designed to help enterprises deploy AI securely while preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information.

The beta is now available to waitlist users, with eligible participants receiving $10 in free credits to test the platform.

👉 x.com/AIVMBrain/status/2084625485292519796?s=20

Plume Rebrands RWA Platform Under New Plume Vaults Identity

Plume has introduced Plume Vaults, a unified platform for its tokenized real-world asset (RWA) yield products, consolidating the ecosystem under a single brand while maintaining support for existing Nest Credit users.

The platform currently secures $178 million in TVL, has processed over $706 million in transaction volume, and has facilitated the minting of more than 195,000 RWAs.

Plume Vaults offers institutional-grade yield strategies across private credit, U.S. Treasuries, ETFs, and structured products, with support from partners including Apollo, Centrifuge, Superstate, FalconX, Binance Wallet, Bybit, EtherFi, and Pendle.

Plume also highlighted its compliance-focused infrastructure, including an SEC-registered transfer agent and conditional approval for a Class M Digital Asset Business Licence from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, positioning the platform for broader institutional adoption.

👉 x.com/plumenetwork/status/2085003496882131358?s=20

EON Raises $10.75M to Move Data via Space Lasers

EON (Endeavor Optical Networks) has raised $10.75M in seed funding co-led by a16z and General Catalyst, with XYZ Venture Capital, Upfront Ventures and Main Object also joining.

Founded by CEO Charlie Horowitz and ex-NASA astronautical engineer Tyler Presser, EON plans a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to route data between data centers from Medium-Earth Orbit. It is pitched as a faster-to-deploy, harder-to-disrupt rival to the undersea cables that carry most intercontinental internet traffic, targeting CDNs, hyperscalers, telecoms and AI labs.

👉 x.com/presser_tyler/status/2084625057310216669

Nikita Bier Steps Down as X Head of Product

Nikita Bier is out as X's Head of Product after ~400 days, a run as productive as it was controversial. He shipped ~30 products and stays on as adviser. But it was turbulent from the start: days in, Grok began calling itself "MechaHitler."

The heat never dropped, his creator-monetization overhaul split the base, and X caught a €120M EU fine and a California probe along the way. Fitting end: traders had been betting on Polymarket over when he'd quit. This week they cashed out.

👉 x.com/nikitabier/status/2085105586966827343?s=20

Sapiom Raises $35M Series A Led by Dragonfly

Sapiom, an AI-agent infrastructure startup founded by ex-Shopify engineering director Ilan Zerbib, has closed a $35M Series A led by crypto VC Dragonfly, lifting its total funding past $50M.

The round funds three new products, Router, Agent Studio and Runtime, built to make AI agents reliable, economical and safe enough to run in production. Sapiom builds the payment and infrastructure rails that let AI agents buy software, APIs, data and compute on their own.

👉 x.com/i_zerbib/status/2085064722060398872

Aschenbrenner's Fund Returns With a $400M Bet

Days after his AI hedge fund Situational Awareness nearly collapsed, ex-OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner has put $400M into a private company, his first move to rebuild.

Last week the fund imploded from about $45B to $10B in assets as margin calls, driven by leverage reported up to 400%, forced it to dump public bets like SK Hynix and CoreWeave to Ken Griffin's Citadel at a discount. The $400M private investment, completed Tuesday, is the first sign of how the 20-something manager plans to pick up the pieces.

👉 bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-05/situational-awareness-returns-to-investing-with-400-million-bet

Prime Intellect has Introduced Prime Agent

Prime Agent is a fully open-source, self-improving coding and research harness built to handle general, long-horizon autonomous tasks rather than one-off prompts.

It rests on two abstractions. The Recursive Language Model treats context as a variable and sub-agent delegation as function calls inside a live REPL, so the agent can program over its own history and run very long sessions without losing information. The Continual Harness lets it edit its own prompts, skills, memory and sub-agents on the fly, while a '/refine' pipeline reads each run and applies the smallest change that improves future outcomes, making its self-improvement evidence-backed rather than random.

Prime Intellect points to early results: on the ARC-AGI 3 reasoning benchmark, Prime Agent hit 95.5% with Opus 5, edging past the reported human-expert baseline of 95.4%. The code is on GitHub, extending the lab's open, decentralized-AI push into agent tooling.

👉 x.com/PrimeIntellect/status/2085086999267144083?s=20

JPYC has closed a $38M extended Series B Round

JPYC, the issuer of Japan's first registered stablecoin, has raised $38M (about 6 billion yen) in an extended Series B to accelerate adoption of its yen-pegged token.

Backers include logistics group AZ-COM Maruwa, which plans to pay roughly 2,300 business partners in JPYC, and Metaplanet Ventures. JPYC launched Japan's first registered stablecoin in October 2025, is piloting payments at Lawson convenience stores, and is competing with SBI Group's JPYSC as megabanks weigh their own stablecoins.

👉 theblock.co/post/410959

Physical AI isn't coming, it's already on factory floors, in homes

We mapped 29 private startups building the machines: humanoids (Figure, 1X), warehouse & construction robots (Bedrock, ANYbotics), self-driving vehicles (Waymo, Waabi) and autonomous defense systems (Anduril, Shield AI).

More details 👉 cryptodiffer.com/feed/other/robots-are-already-here-physical-ai-mapped-part-1

DeFi Saver Launches a Tool to Find Lost Tokens

DeFi Saver has launched Token Saver, a free tool that scans any wallet for unclaimed tokens, after finding more than $67M sitting idle across roughly 87,000 DeFi smart wallets.

The forgotten balances span major assets including ETH, USDT, sUSDS and WBTC, the kind of leftover dust and unclaimed rewards that piles up as users move between protocols and forget old positions. Token Saver lets anyone paste a wallet address at tokensaver.fyi and see exactly what is recoverable.

For DeFi Saver, a long-running dashboard for building and managing positions across lending and yield protocols, a free wallet scanner is a natural hook: the idle value it surfaces is capital users may route back through its app.

👉 x.com/DeFiSaver/status/2085030216666378279

World's biggest humanoid robot maker is going public, and unlike almost every rival, it's actually profitable

China's Unitree opens its IPO subscription Aug 10 on Shanghai's STAR Market at a ~$6.2B valuation. Last year it shipped ~5,500 humanoids, more than anyone, on $237M revenue and 60% margins.

For contrast: US rival Figure is valued at $39B, 6× more, with almost no revenue.

A-shares are closed to foreign retail, so the way in is crypto — a pre-IPO perp is already live on MEXC (~$72, +8% today).

Maple Finance Selects Ethena's GENIUS Act-Compliant USDtb as Core Liquidity Buffer Asset

Maple Finance has selected Ethena's GENIUS Act-compliant stablecoin, USDtb, as a core holding in the USD liquidity buffer backing syrupUSDC and syrupUSDT, which currently secure approximately $400 million in liquid USD assets.

The integration also makes Maple Finance the first protocol to adopt Ethena Whitelabel Liquidity, enabling access to institutional-grade onchain stablecoin liquidity with 24/7/365 availability.

👉 https://x.com/ethena/status/2085367777163194586?s=20

Optimism Projects 343M OP to Enter Circulation Over the Next Year

The Optimism Foundation has released its Year 5 budget outlook, projecting that approximately 343 million OP will enter circulation between May 2026 and April 2027, bringing the circulating supply to 2.504 billion OP, or 58.3% of the total supply.

The projected increase includes 200 million OP allocated to the Ecosystem Fund, 47.6 million OP for Early Core Contributors, 15.3 million OP for investors, and additional scheduled distributions under the original token allocation framework. The Foundation noted that no new token allocation has been requested.

Optimism also confirmed that no airdrops or Retro Funding distributions are currently planned for Year 5, while OP buybacks have surpassed 9 million tokens under the protocol's ongoing revenue-backed buyback program.

The Foundation emphasized that the projections are directional estimates and may change based on governance decisions and ecosystem performance.

​​Cryptomarket Check-In
Major Events & Headlines

Stablecoins, payments and RWA infrastructure generated most of the week's momentum. Much of the activity came from banks, payment providers and infrastructure companies expanding products that had already been in development.

🔎 Recent Updates & Developments

- Mastercard completed its BVNK acquisition
- Wells Fargo launched tokenized deposits
- Cloudflare rolled out stablecoin wallets for AI
- Western Union launched Stablecard remittances
- Ethereum proposed burning validator rewards
- Base introduced the Cobalt upgrade
- Binance sued RedotPay for $470M
- Plume rebranded its RWA platform as Plume Vaults

Wintermute Registers as an SEC Broker-Dealer

Crypto market maker Wintermute has registered its US arm, Wintermute USA, as a broker-dealer with the SEC and FINRA, a move that lets it trade equities and options and step directly into regulated US securities markets.

The registration lets Wintermute USA provide liquidity on US securities exchanges and to OTC counterparties, trade stocks and options from its own account, self-clear digital-asset securities, and act as an Authorized Participant for ETFs, including those tied to digital assets. It is a clear bet on the tokenization of traditional markets, and on the SEC's stance that onchain securities activity needs proper licensing.

Wintermute already clears more than $10B in average daily volume across 60-plus centralized and decentralized venues, and earlier this year added tokenized-gold market-making and prediction-market liquidity.

👉 x.com/wintermute_t/status/2085472059828715749?s=20

Plume Joins DTCC's Digital Assets Working Group

The group provides industry input on the DTCC Tokenization Service and works to foster digital-asset adoption, and Plume says it will contribute its compliance expertise as a modular chain purpose-built for real-world assets, from art to green energy.

DTCC sits at the center of US securities clearing and settlement, so a permissioned crypto chain in the room is a meaningful signal for where tokenization is heading.

For Plume, it is validation from the plumbing of TradFi rather than another crypto-native partnership, the kind of institutional credibility RWA projects have chased as tokenized treasuries, funds and commodities move onchain.

👉 x.com/plumenetwork/status/2085336469678506347