U.S. CPI: +2.9% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +2.9%); U.S. CORE CPI: +3.2% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +3.3%)

According to official announcements, on-chain compliance platform Predicate has closed an $8 million Series A funding round, led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Paxos, 1kx, and Tribe Capital. Predicate is a programmable strategy infrastructure for on-chain financial products serving regulated markets, enabling developers to enforce custom compliance rules at the smart contract layer. The relevant strategies can be updated at any time to flexibly adapt to evolving regulatory requirements and business needs.

On-chain analyst Ai Yi monitors that a crypto whale deposited 3,084 ETH to Binance five minutes ago, suspected of liquidating its holdings. The ETH is valued at $7.17 million, with an estimated profit of $928,000. The whale accumulated the ETH in batches over the past four years, and had been staked on Lido for yield prior to this transaction.

Blockchain solutions provider Ripple and global financial services platform Robinhood today announced a strategic partnership, to provide Robinhood — a leading retail and institutional trading platform — with a unified, reliable gateway to Ripple’s infrastructure in stablecoins, institutional markets, and treasury management. Ripple’s U.S. dollar stablecoin RLUSD will become a core component of Robinhood’s digital asset ecosystem, expanding access to this enterprise-grade stablecoin for both retail and institutional users. Currently, RLUSD is already live on Robinhood Chain and Bitstamp, a Robinhood subsidiary, and is expected to roll out on the Robinhood app later this year. Robinhood will also leverage RLUSD built on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) for institutional settlement operations, further expanding the stablecoin’s use in Bitstamp’s institutional business. The partnership will also extend to Robinhood’s internal financial operations: Robinhood will integrate Ripple Treasury to modernize and automate its global treasury operations, covering areas including cash and liquidity management, cash flow forecasting, payments, risk management, and intra-group net settlement.

According to data from the BIT stock platform, share prices of emerging cloud service companies have strengthened further: Nebius (NIBS.O) rose 11%, Coreweave (CRWV.O) gained 6.7%, and IREN (IREN.O) increased 7.7%.

Meta Platforms (META.O) said it plans to raise funds through stock issuance to support investments in artificial intelligence, with the financing size slightly increased from $95 billion to $97.5 billion. On Tuesday, when announcing the pricing terms for the stock offering, Meta stated it will raise its common stock issuance amount from $22.5 billion to $25 billion. Per the plan first released on Monday, Meta also intends to issue approximately $12.5 billion in Series A depositary shares, and raise up to $60 billion via its "at-the-market" (ATM) offering program. The Tuesday filing also shows that Meta has granted underwriters for the common stock and depositary share offerings an overallotment option to purchase an additional ~$5.5 billion worth of shares, meaning its total final financing could reach up to around $103 billion.

General Compute has closed a $100 million Series A funding round, led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures. Following its seed round in May this year, the company was valued at $60 million; its post-money valuation has now climbed to $800 million. The firm specializes in building cloud computing operations using specialized inference chips manufactured by Nvidia’s rivals, and has entered into a new $400 million chip purchase agreement with SambaNova. This transaction also marks the first debt financing deal focused on inference chips. (TechCrunch)