News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily reports: Artificial intelligence inference company Baseten has announced the launch of a new $2 billion funding round at a valuation of up to $30 billion, with existing investor Sands Capital expected to lead the round. Founded in 2019, Baseten primarily provides enterprises with an AI model deployment and inference platform to help businesses run various AI models. In June of this year, it completed a $1.5 billion funding round at a valuation of $13 billion at the time. Its competitor Fireworks AI completed a $1.5 billion funding round in July of this year at a valuation of $17.5 billion. It is reported that Nvidia invested $150 million in Baseten in January of this year, stepping up its active positioning in the AI inference sector. (Bloomberg)
Odaily reports: According to Bitfinex analysis, Strategy shareholders voted on October 28 to approve a proposal for daily dividend payments on STRC preferred stock, with preliminary results showing 99.3% of votes in favor. STRC is expected to shift from semi-monthly dividend payments to daily dividend payments starting November 1, with the first cash dividend payment arriving on November 2; Strategy's other three preferred stocks, STRF, STRK, and STRD, are expected to follow suit in January 2027.Strategy's move aims to reduce price volatility around ex-dividend dates. Company CEO Phong Le stated that previously, when STRC paid dividends monthly, prices fell by an average of about 49 basis points around the ex-dividend date, which dropped to about 36 basis points after switching to semi-monthly payments. The company expects that daily dividend payments will further disperse selling pressure and improve price stability.This model was not pioneered by Strategy. Bitcoin treasury company Strive converted its SATA preferred stock to daily dividend payments in June of this year and launched a subordinated preferred stock, SATS, with a fixed annual dividend rate of 15%. In October, Strive issued 7 million shares of SATS at $90 per share, raising approximately $630 million, and used about $511 million of that to purchase 6,182 BTC.
Odaily Report: After a publicly listed company under Japan's GMO Internet Group suffered a cyberattack, related risks are spreading to Japan's credit market. Data shows that the spread on a GMO Internet Group yen bond maturing in June 2031 widened to approximately 174 basis points on October 28, up from about 122 basis points on October 20—before the company disclosed the unauthorized access incident—reflecting investor concerns over damaged earnings and rising compensation costs.The GMO subsidiary that provides cloud services disclosed on October 21 that it had suffered unauthorized access and received a ransom demand of approximately 8 billion yen (about $50.7 million). The attackers subsequently published data they claimed contained customer information. GMO refused to pay the ransom and plans to compensate customers for their losses. Analysts noted that as AI-powered cyberattacks increase, such incidents could affect corporate financing and bond issuance arrangements.GMO Internet operates the cryptocurrency exchange "Z.com EX," which has obtained licenses from the Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission and the Thai Ministry of Finance. The exchange disclosed that it has been acquired, with the acquisition involving all shares of the target company held by shareholders including GMO Internet and its related subsidiaries. It remains unclear whether customer information data involves the related cryptocurrency exchange. (Bloomberg)
Odaily reports: Bitcoin mining company IREN has announced the completion of a $363 million financing facility arranged by Wingspire Equipment Finance, secured by AI computing equipment that is already operational and generating revenue, to refinance recently purchased GPU servers and networking equipment. The facility was provided by six lenders, with Eldridge Capital Management and Silver Point Capital making major funding commitments. The financing is primarily secured by the relevant equipment and supported by multi-year customer contracts, with specific interest rates and terms not yet disclosed.This refinancing will help IREN recover capital already invested in operational infrastructure for further expansion. IREN is transitioning from Bitcoin mining to AI cloud services. Its AI cloud business revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026, reached $128.8 million, up from $16.4 million in the previous fiscal year; Bitcoin mining revenue still reached $578.2 million. The company reported a net loss of $702.6 million for the same period, including $638.8 million in non-cash asset impairments primarily related to retired Bitcoin mining machines. (theenergymag)
Cancore, a cross-chain trading platform built on the Canton network, has completed a $7.2 million seed round. The round was conducted through Simple Agreements for Future Tokens (SAFT), corresponding to a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $60 million for its planned CNRX token.The round was participated in by Paper Ventures, dao5, ArkStream Capital, X Ventures, MH Ventures, and Proof of Talk, with Paper Ventures and dao5 receiving the largest allocations. Wasif Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Cancore, said the company began engaging with investors in June this year, officially launched fundraising in July, and closed the round in mid-September. (The Block)
According to Wintermute's weekly market report, Bitcoin fell 2.43% last week, marking its third consecutive weekly decline, breaking below $82,500 and retesting $80,000 before closing at approximately $80,500. ETH dropped 3.40%, closing at around $2,330. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a net outflow of $636 million on Thursday, the largest single-day outflow since June, coinciding with a 2.6% drop in the Nasdaq on the same day. On the macro front, following Houthi attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure, Brent crude surged 5.66% to $116.72, with oil prices displacing AI financing as the primary market concern. Wintermute noted that as of October 18, markets price in roughly an 86% probability that the Federal Reserve will hold rates steady this Wednesday, alongside expectations for a December rate hike. The Fed's forward guidance regarding December represents the key risk. Technically, BTC must reclaim the $82,000–$82,500 zone. Should the $80,000 level fail, the next support sits at $76,000, with a breakdown likely pushing prices to just over $70,000. The firm stated it is temporarily not taking a bearish view but will remain cautious until the FOMC meeting concludes and BTC reclaims $82,500. Key upcoming events include the October 28 FOMC meeting, October 29 reports for Q3 GDP and September PCE data, and the October 30 monthly options expiration.
According to Bloomberg, the valuation of Anthropic shares held by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Australia's largest lender, has increased approximately tenfold over a year. CBA participated in Anthropic's Series E financing round in March 2025, with the value of its stake rising from AU$153 million at the end of June 2025 to AU$1.53 billion at the end of June 2026. This valuation is calculated based on the post-financing valuation following a funding round completed by Anthropic in May 2026, a round in which CBA did not participate.
According to CNBC, OpenAI is nearing the completion of a financing round of up to $30 billion, with a pre-money valuation of $1.25 trillion, excluding funds raised in this round. Insiders said this round is led by investors from the UAE and Coatue, and has been positioned as an "opportunistic" transitional financing ahead of an IPO. On Thursday, OpenAI told investors that it aims to secure executed documents before next weekend, although the final financing amount is still being finalized. Meanwhile, OpenAI is negotiating a commercial agreement to obtain more compute capacity from the UAE. In February, the company told investors that its goal is to invest approximately $600 billion cumulatively in compute infrastructure by 2030. OpenAI filed a draft prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on a confidential basis in June, but has not yet disclosed a listing date. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar stated in August that the company "will become a publicly traded company in 2027," while CEO Sam Altman remarked in September that it would not be wise to go public at this time.
According to Bloomberg, likely amid rising financing costs and investor concerns over the sustainability of large-scale artificial intelligence investments, SoftBank's stock has declined approximately 50% from its all-time high on June 2, reducing its market capitalization to around $157 billion. Just four months ago, SoftBank had briefly surpassed Toyota to become Japan's most valuable company by market cap. Additionally, growing anxiety over funding risks in the AI sector is being compounded by SoftBank's heavy reliance on debt financing to build out AI infrastructure. With its credit default swap (CDS) prices hitting a nearly four-year high this week, market concerns regarding its financial health have further intensified.
Odaily report: As the financing models of Bitcoin treasury companies Strategy and Strive come under pressure, related companies are attracting investors by offering higher-yield preferred stock to sustain their crypto asset accumulation strategies. Strategy's STRC preferred stock, which carries a 12% annualized dividend rate, has not been issued again since its price decline in June. The company is now seeking to promote daily dividend payments and continues to raise funds by issuing additional common stock to buy Bitcoin, resulting in equity dilution for existing shareholders.Bitcoin treasury company Strive disclosed that it has completed a $630 million preferred stock offering, with the fundraising scale about 25% higher than initially planned. The preferred stock carries a nominal annualized yield of 15% and was issued at a discount, with an effective yield of nearly 17%, far exceeding the yield on one-year high-grade U.S. Treasury bonds and approaching the returns on distressed debt. (Bloomberg)
Odaily reports: Optimum has announced that its block propagation software mump2p has officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. ether.fi previously offered the software as an optional feature, but has now mandated its adoption across all 12 of its node operators. Currently, a total of 16 node operators are running mump2p in production environments, collectively managing approximately 22,000 validator keys and over 1.4 million staked ETH, accounting for more than 3% of Ethereum's total staked supply. Partners include Blockdaemon, Everstake, P2P.org, Stakefish, and Bitcoin Suisse.mump2p operates as a sidecar gateway, rather than replacing Ethereum's default GossipSub, it layers on top of libp2p and uses random linear network coding technology. Optimum claims that mump2p achieves block arrival speeds 2.42 times faster than GossipSub, with arrival time variance reduced by approximately 7.88 times. Optimum is led by MIT professor Muriel Médard and launched its private testnet in June 2025. The company previously completed an $11 million seed round led by 1kx and plans to expand to other high-throughput blockchains beyond Ethereum.
Odaily reports: U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein on October 15, 2026, declined to vacate the $5 million settlement agreement between crypto exchange Gemini and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), leaving the paid fine and permanent injunction in effect. Previously, the CFTC had stated that the original lawsuit should never have been brought.The dispute stemmed from Gemini's involvement in proposed Bitcoin futures contracts. The CFTC filed suit in June 2022, alleging that Gemini misled regulators regarding trading safeguards, customer financing, special fee arrangements, and activities that could potentially affect contract pricing; the two parties settled in January 2025, with Gemini neither admitting nor denying the allegations.In May 2026, following an internal review, the CFTC and Gemini jointly sought to vacate the settlement, citing issues with whistleblower credibility, evidence, and enforcement practices. The judge found that the relevant circumstances had existed prior to the settlement and that a change in enforcement priorities was insufficient to vacate a binding court order; the CFTC retains its enforcement discretion. (Bitcoin.com News)
Odaily News: Publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies are expected to need approximately $50 billion to complete their planned AI infrastructure projects, with IREN, Riot Platforms, and HIVE Digital facing funding gaps of approximately $21.1 billion, $7.2 billion, and $4.6 billion, respectively.As Bitcoin mining companies expand into AI and high-performance computing, borrowing costs vary depending on clients, contracts, and project completion pathways. IREN secured $3.65 billion in GPU financing in June at a blended interest rate of 6%; in August, it obtained an additional $2.4 billion in fixed-rate financing at a 9% interest rate.Financing arrangements may also include costs beyond interest. In one Cipher Digital deal, Google agreed to backstop $1.4 billion in lease obligations and received warrants representing 5.4% equity in Cipher; if the warrants are exercised, existing shareholders' ownership stakes could be diluted.According to VanEck data, at the Bitcoin bull market peak last October, mining companies' debt had grown by approximately 500% compared to the second quarter of 2024. Despite a weakening Bitcoin market, capital demand continues to rise as mining companies pivot to AI businesses. (Cointelegraph)
According to The Wall Street Journal, Bitcoin mining company Genesis Digital Assets will transition to an AI data center. In June, SWI Group invested $500 million to acquire a large stake in the company, subsequently becoming the controlling shareholder, and announced on October 12 a funding raise of 8 billion euros (approximately $9 billion) for data center upgrades and expansion.
According to research, J.P. Morgan's report dated October 8, 2026 states that the Software Index ETF (IGV) has gained 21% since late June, infrastructure software is up 78% year-to-date, average revenue for infrastructure software beat estimates by 3.6% last quarter, and application software beat estimates by 1.4%. J.P. Morgan concludes that infrastructure software strength is driven by earnings upgrades, while application software strength comes from valuation re-rating. The bank recommends Microsoft, ServiceNow, Cloudflare, and Snowflake; expects Microsoft Copilot new seat additions to reach or exceed approximately 10 million, matching last quarter; notes ServiceNow's current remaining performance obligations exceeded expectations by roughly 200 basis points; downgrades HubSpot to Neutral with a lowered target price from $268 to $240; and raises Twilio's target price from $260 to $335.
According to Forbes, Cloudflare announced the acquisition of Deno, a JavaScript/TypeScript runtime company. Deno founders Ryan Dahl (the inventor of Node.js) and co-founder Bert Belder will join Cloudflare alongside their entire team. The core asset of this acquisition is the open-source project celld—a distributed deployment tool that runs Workers and Durable Objects from a single Rust binary, enabling enterprises to deploy Cloudflare's serverless programming model on their own infrastructure and fundamentally resolving the long-criticized "lock-in" issue of the Workers platform. Cloudflare plans to merge celld into the open-source runtime workerd to provide complete self-hosting support. Deno has previously raised a total of $26 million in funding, with financial terms remaining undisclosed. Deno Deploy will be shut down in six months, and the Deno runtime will cease development after maintaining security updates for one year. This marks Cloudflare's second acquisition of a developer tool within four months, following its purchase of VoidZero, the company behind the Vite build tool, earlier this June.
Odaily News: First Digital is a Hong Kong-based digital asset company and the issuer of FDUSD. The company has entered into a definitive merger agreement with Nasdaq-listed CSLM Digital Asset Acquisition Corp III, with a pre-transaction valuation of $250 million. Upon completion of the transaction, the two parties are expected to form a new holding company and list on Nasdaq, with completion anticipated in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. As of June 30, 2026, FDUSD's cumulative trading volume has exceeded $4.7 trillion. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, First Digital generated approximately $87 million in revenue. First Digital stated that FDUSD's reserve assets consist of cash and cash equivalents held in segregated accounts, with monthly attestations conducted by independent firms. The company's Finance District platform has launched 4 products to date but has not yet generated significant revenue.
According to Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs earned hundreds of millions of dollars in incentive fees by helping clients make early investments in SpaceX ahead of its listing this June at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Insiders revealed that more than five years ago, Goldman Sachs had already assisted select high-net-worth clients in investing in SpaceX, when the company's valuation was only tens of billions of dollars. Following SpaceX's listing, Goldman Sachs clients who sold their shares realized massive gains, while simultaneously generating hundreds of millions of dollars in incentive fees for Goldman Sachs.
Odaily News: Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas stated that based on market valuations disclosed by mutual funds holding Anthropic, Anthropic's valuation has grown 22x since June 2024, roughly 10 times the increase of the Nasdaq 100 Index and Nvidia. Fidelity has the largest exposure to Anthropic, followed by CapGrp and BLK; due to the relatively low weighting of these holdings, mutual funds have only benefited marginally from Anthropic's valuation growth.
According to Trend Research, a JPMorgan research report dated September 28, 2026 notes that the technology and AI ecosystem stagnated for three months from June through last week, though valuation downgrades have already become highly pronounced across most sectors. Forward earnings for semiconductors continue to climb by approximately 30%, while software has seen almost no earnings upgrades. Valuations for the Tech Seven Giants have fallen to ten-year lows, trading at nearly one standard deviation below the broader market. Capital expenditures by hyperscalers are projected to grow at a 28% compound annual growth rate through 2030. JPMorgan argues that with cleaner positioning, persistent earnings momentum, and an intact capital expenditure upcycle, it advises re-entering the technology sector and reopening a semiconductor-over-software pair trade. Agentic AI is pushing the CPU-to-GPU ratio from 1:4 to 1:8 toward 1:1, providing tailwinds for CPU-related names.