Crypto and Payments Company Faces 'Layoff Wave' Due to AI, Market Questions True Motive

According to monitoring by EmberCN, a trader liquidated their entire position of meme coin "LAPTOP"—launched by Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden—at a loss last night at $0.6. The trader had invested a total of $249,000, leaving only $15,000, representing an approximate 94% loss. They chased the token’s price during its launch the night before last at $217.5, then added to their position at $2 in the early hours of yesterday morning, before finally cutting their losses.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), following the release of CPI data, the three major U.S. stock indexes opened higher across the board: the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.02%, the S&P 500 gained 0.84%, and the Nasdaq Composite increased 0.77%. U.S. optical communication and storage chip stocks also rallied at the open, with Coherent and Marvell Technology surging over 3%, SK Hynix and Intel climbing more than 2%, and Micron Technology, Seagate Technology, and SanDisk advancing over 1%. Oracle jumped more than 7% after its first-quarter adjusted revenue exceeded expectations.

Solana core development team Anza announced that the second phase of Solana’s SIMD-0437 rent reduction proposal will take effect on the mainnet at around 21:15 UTC on September 11, corresponding to epoch 1033. Per-byte lamports will drop from 6333 to 5080, marking an overall reduction of roughly 27% from the initial level, making on-chain storage deposits such as creating token accounts more affordable. The official also stressed there is no fixed timeline for subsequent steps: the third phase will only launch after confirming on-chain state growth is safe, and SIMD-0438 can serve as a fallback to revert rent parameters if anomalies arise. Three steps remain in the five-step plan.

Polymarket, a prediction market platform, has issued goodwill compensation to users affected by its earlier CLOB outage, per Suhail Kakar, head of DeFi integration at the firm. Approximately 3,000 wallets automatically received the compensation. Users who believe they were impacted but have not received it can contact the team via email to provide details by September 18 for manual review. Polymarket’s status page on August 31 showed that its trading API (CLOB) experienced a major outage, causing response delays when users accessed unfilled orders.

Pre-market key news for US stocks: US August CPI accelerated, boosting rate hike expectations; markets now price in a ~90% chance of a Fed rate hike next week, with two more hikes fully expected by year-end. Global markets remained strong post-CPI release, with all three major US stock index futures extending gains of over 1% each. Spot gold rebounded more than $70 from its post-CPI low, breaking above $4,360/oz after hitting a trough near $4,290/oz earlier. Bitcoin dipped briefly before recovering to $78,000, while Ethereum surged past $2,500. SpaceX’s CFO revealed the firm recently secured a large AI computing power hosting deal, set to bring ~$1.1 billion in monthly incremental revenue; the company is “fully confident” of hitting its $100 billion annual recurring revenue (ARR) target by year-end. Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics’ new foundry talks hit a stalemate over price disagreements. Industry sources said Qualcomm’s application processor (AP) project using Samsung Foundry’s 2nm process is likely delayed until next year. Microsoft is turning down some AI and cloud service orders due to computing power shortages, and plans to expand its global data center capacity from ~12 gigawatts (GW) now to over 38 GW by 2032. “Big Short” protagonist Michael Burry closed out his December-expiring put options on Nvidia and Palantir, citing a desire to hold more cash to assess evolving market conditions in the fall. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said cybersecurity could be AI’s next major application area, as AI models accelerating automatic programming are disrupting the cybersecurity industry.

Goldman Sachs economist Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo said: "Today’s CPI came largely in line with expectations, a result that on the surface is what investors wanted, but it has significantly raised uncertainty around next week’s interest rate decision. The challenge is that the data does not fully reflect some of the recent inflation pressures that have emerged, and there is almost no evidence that inflation is returning to target levels in the short term. This report’s survey period predates the latest round of energy price increases, as well as the spread in commodity gains from energy to sectors like metals and agriculture. Today’s inflation data does not eliminate the possibility of stronger price pressures emerging in the future. All in all, today’s in-line data will keep the Federal Reserve’s option to raise interest rates open, without forcing it to act. So markets may now pay more attention to Waller’s communications, energy prices, labor market data, and upcoming developments rather than what was released today."