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Sam Dare, founder of Covenant AI, announced that Covenant AI has officially exited the Bittensor network. Previously, Covenant AI completed the largest decentralized LLM pretraining project in history—Covenant-72B (a 72-billion-parameter model developed by over 70 independent contributors)—which drew attention from NVIDIA’s CEO and was cited by an Anthropic co-founder. In its statement, Covenant AI accused the Bittensor network of long concentrating actual control in the hands of co-founder Jacob Steeves (“Const”), rendering the so-called “three-signature multisig governance” merely a theatrical performance of decentralization, with real power never truly distributed. Recently, Jacob Steeves unilaterally imposed punitive measures against Covenant AI, including: suspending its subnet earnings, revoking its community channel moderation privileges, unilaterally deprecating its subnet infrastructure, and exerting economic pressure via large-scale token dumping during the ongoing conflict between the two parties. Covenant AI stated it cannot continue fundraising, recruiting talent, or soliciting community resources on a network where the promise of “decentralization” can be unilaterally revoked by a single individual. Its research outcomes, team, and models will depart alongside the team, and a new project—including related progress—will be publicly announced shortly.
According to The Block, AlphaTON Capital has announced plans to raise $43 million through a strategic partnership with Vertical Data Inc. to expand its AI compute infrastructure; the transaction is expected to close in Q2 2026. AlphaTON CEO Brittany Kaiser stated that the funding will be used to deploy additional NVIDIA B300 GPUs, with the core objective of advancing the convergence of AI, digital assets, and confidential computing—and scaling up the platform’s overall compute capacity. On the business front, AlphaTON not only holds a substantial amount of TON tokens as corporate treasury assets but also actively participates in building infrastructure for the Telegram and TON ecosystems, with key investment focus areas including Cocoon, Telegram’s decentralized AI platform. Background-wise, AlphaTON was formed through the restructuring and transformation of former biotech public company Portage Biotech Inc., which had previously focused on cancer therapy research; the company completed the spin-off of its cancer therapy subsidiary in February this year.
According to Decrypt, Enhanced Labs Inc., an on-chain structured yield protocol, has announced the completion of a $1 million strategic pre-seed funding round, led by Maximum Frequency Ventures, with participation from GSR, Selini, Flowdesk, and several angel investors. The funds raised will be used for product development and operational infrastructure. Enhanced’s product strategy centers on three key directions: optimizing auction mechanisms to enhance yield competitiveness; extending options-based yield strategies to a broader range of on-chain assets—including tokenized real-world assets (RWAs); and simplifying complex strategies into goal-oriented user experiences that allow users to directly define desired outcomes such as yield targets, hedging objectives, or structured exposures. Enhanced positions itself at the intersection of the on-chain yield and options narratives—a sector currently experiencing an unusually active cycle in DeFi options since 2024.
According to Bloomberg, chip startup SiFive has raised $400 million in funding, led by Atreides Management, with participation from Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, and Point72. Following this round, SiFive’s valuation stands at $3.65 billion. SiFive stated that the funds will be used to expand its market share in the AI data center sector. This round was oversubscribed, with investment commitments exceeding the final amount raised.
AlphaTON Capital (NASDAQ: ATON) announced a strategic AI hardware and financing agreement with Vertical Data Inc., with a total transaction value of approximately $43 million, expected to close in Q2 2026. The agreement centers on deploying high-performance GPU clusters powered by NVIDIA’s B300 architecture. Financing will be provided through Vertical Data’s GPUfinancing.com platform via an asset-backed, non-recourse structure and includes managed infrastructure services. This expansion will support AlphaTON’s business initiatives with partners including Telegram, Gamee, Animoca Brands, and Midnight Blockchain.
DeFi protocol Splyce Finance has completed a strategic funding round, with investors including the Sui Foundation, Stellar Foundation, Solana Foundation, Lucid Drakes, Sarson Funds, and Kin Capital. The specific funding amount has not yet been disclosed.
According to Cointelegraph, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar confirmed that the company will reserve a portion of shares for retail investors in its IPO, citing “very strong demand” from individual investors in its latest funding round. OpenAI is currently valued at approximately $300 billion, yet it remains unprofitable. There is significant market debate over the risks associated with retail investor participation in this IPO.
According to Bloomberg, Anthropic recently completed a secondary stock sale, in which some employees sold small stakes to investors. Due to limited employee willingness to sell, several investors failed to acquire their targeted number of shares. The offer price aligns with the valuation from the company’s most recent funding round in February this year; Anthropic’s current valuation stands at $350 billion (excluding the $30 billion raised in this round).