Bankless·
The Gen Z AI savant’s multibillion-dollar fund made a rash of short positions against chipmakers while expanding its bullish bets on compute and memory stocks.
Read full articleEx-OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund has doubled to $13.67b, with Bitcoin miners as its top long positions. Aschenbrenner, who was fired from OpenAI in 2024 over an alleged information leak, filed the fund’s Q1 2026 13F with the…
The post AI and Web3: How the Two Narratives Are Converging appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Artificial intelligence and Web3 used to feel like separate technology stories. AI was about models, automation, data, and productivity. Web3 was about ownership, crypto assets, open networks, wallets, and programmable money. Today, that separation is becoming harder to maintain. The reason is simple: AI systems are becoming more agentic, while blockchains are becoming better at handling identity, settlement, coordination, and programmable financial activity. If AI agents can search, compare, negotiate, and act on behalf of users, they may also need wallets, permissions, spending limits, reputation systems, data access, and audit trails. For crypto investors and Web3 users, the convergence of AI and Web3 is both an opportunity and a risk zone. It could create demand for decentralized compute, smart wallets, stablecoin payments, oracle infrastructure, data networks, and agent marketplaces. B
Explore how AI and Web3 are converging through agents, wallets, data, compute, payments and crypto infrastructure - plus key risks to watch.
Explore Web3 infrastructure coins to watch in 2026, including oracles, data layers, storage, compute, restaking and cross-chain tools.
Public Bitcoin miners spent years racing to add more hashrate to the network. In the first quarter of 2026, many of them did the opposite. This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, a weekly newsletter by Blocksbridge Consulting curating the latest news in energy, compute, infrastructure, and data analysis from The Energy Mag. The original […]
The post Coinbase Launches x402 Batch Settlement to Advance AI Payments appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Coinbase-backed x402 has added batch settlement, a feature designed to reduce the cost of high-frequency AI agent payments by allowing many small transactions to settle later in bulk. Base creator Jesse Pollak said Wednesday that x402 now supports batched settlement, enabling very small payments below $0.0001 for on-demand resources such as compute and inference. The feature lets buyers deposit ERC-20 funds into onchain escrow and sign offchain vouchers for each paid request. Sellers can verify those vouchers quickly, serve the request and later redeem many payments together in batched onchain transactions, according to x402’s documentation. The development adds another layer to the emerging market for agent payments. It comes a week after Amazon Web Services (AWS) integrated Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol and wallet infrastructure to allow AI agents to make USDC (USDC) paymen
The post Base x402 protocol adds batched settlement to enable sub-fraction-of-a-cent AI payments appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Base creator Jesse Pollak announced on May 13 that the x402 payment protocol now supports batched settlement, in an X post. x402 now supports batched settlement this unlocks many many tiny tiny payments (<$0.0001) which is perfect for paying for just in time resources like compute and inference https://t.co/V6Kjz9jqHQ — jesse.base.eth (@jessepollak) May 13, 2026 The update bundles many transactions together before settling them on-chain, spreading the blockchain fee across multiple payments. Per-transaction settlement on Base already costs fractions of a cent, but batching makes sub-fraction-of-a-cent pricing economically rational for high-frequency AI workloads. As Cryptopolitan reported last week, Amazon Web Services launched AgentCore Payments using x402, with USDC settling in roughly 200 milliseconds on Base. Batched settlement layers on top of that
Increased retail investment in chipmakers heightens market volatility risk, as high exposure could lead to significant losses if growth expectations falter. The post Retail traders boost chipmaker purchases as rally concerns rise appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
