Artificial bull market? Crypto industry executives gather for first meeting of U.S. CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee

Goldman Sachs data shows US retail stock trading activity has fallen by around 45% from end-2025, with retail trading’s share of total US stock volume dropping from 15% at the end of last year to roughly 9% — near its lowest level since 2020. The bank attributes the slump to rising energy prices, weak consumer confidence, and higher US Treasury yields, which are eroding retail investors’ willingness to buy. Despite cooling enthusiasm for short-term trading, US households net purchased around $840 billion in US stocks in the first half of the year, while stock mutual funds and ETFs drew roughly $350 billion in inflows so far this year. However, household stock assets are highly concentrated, with the top 10% of households holding approximately 87% of total household stock holdings. Goldman Sachs also warns the US stock market is facing supply pressure: US public and private companies combined to net issue around $175 billion in equity in the first half of 2026. The bank projects that net supply growth in the US public stock market could hit its highest level since 2000 in 2027, driven by new share offerings and lock-up expirations. With hedge funds reducing positions and corporate equity supply rising, Goldman Sachs argues that whether US households continue buying stocks will be key to the market’s ability to absorb the new supply. Its baseline forecast suggests household stock demand will likely stay robust if the labor market remains stable and bond yields moderate.

Ritual Foundation announced in a post that Ritual’s mainnet has officially launched, with its native token RITUAL launching simultaneously and listing on Coinbase for its first exchange listing. The project is designed to support autonomous operation of on-chain AI Agents: Agents hold their own keys, using earned income to cover computing costs including inference, API calls, and scheduled tasks. Execution nodes provide computing services and earn token rewards, while validators coordinate tasks and settle transactions. On the token front, RITUAL is used to pay network gas fees and related service fees. The token has no total supply cap, operating via continuous minting and transaction base fee burning. The project team stated that tokens held by insiders are locked for at least one year from the mainnet launch and cannot be staked during the lockup period. Additionally, the project will distribute 50 million RITUAL tokens to eligible Infernet operators, Frenrug users, and long-term community members — accounting for 0.5% of the initial supply — all of which are unlocked at launch. For cross-chain functionality, LayerZero powers RITUAL’s cross-chain services: tokens bridged out of the Ritual network are locked on their original chain, with no new token supply generated in the process.

According to market data from BIT (Bit.com), Microsoft’s intraday share price rose more than 1%, lifting its market capitalization to $3.94 trillion. In related news, Microsoft will offer a buyout package to 60,000 employees as part of its latest round of cost-cutting measures. The voluntary severance program is available to eligible employees at level 70 and below across participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Binance founder CZ said today at the bell ceremony for BNB Standard Corporation (BNC) on Nasdaq that BNB, which launched as a simple token in 2017, has evolved into an ecosystem boasting its own independent blockchain. BNB Chain serves around 30 million monthly active users and over 3 million daily active users, making it one of the world’s most active blockchains and also among the top blockchains for real-world asset (RWA) liquidity. CZ noted that BNB Chain has a block time of approximately 0.5 seconds and transaction finalization time of less than 1 second. Over multiple market cycles, the BNB ecosystem has continuously built out infrastructure and expanded into areas including payments, lending, and investments, with a goal to become a platform for users to save, transfer funds, and build applications in the future. For its part, BNC stated that it will bring BNB to Wall Street. As a Nasdaq-listed company with BNB at the core of its balance sheet, BNC plans not only to hold BNB but also to develop and operate businesses centered on BNB Chain, starting with running its own validator node and gradually scaling its operations.

Anthropic’s S-1 filing indicates the company has a valuation floor of approximately $1 trillion. Its Series H financing round in June 2026 was priced at $58.90 per share; based on a fully diluted total share count of around 16.94 billion shares, this translates to a valuation of roughly $1 trillion. Financially, as of June 30, 2026, Anthropic held approximately $131.65 billion in cash and marketable securities, plus $2.5 billion in restricted cash and a $15 billion senior secured credit facility. On the client front, over the past 12 months, the company had more than 11,900 clients with annual spending exceeding $100,000, over 1,900 clients with annual spending of more than $1 million, and around 250 clients with annual spending over $10 million. In September 2026, over 90% of code contributions to Anthropic’s codebase were written by Claude. Regarding equity and governance, the seven co-founders collectively control more than 55% of the effective voting rights, with Class F shares accounting for 50.1% of the total voting structure. The company has transferred 846.84 million Class N shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, representing 5% of the fully diluted total share count. The board of directors is also authorized to issue additional shares equivalent to up to 2% of the total share count each time the stock price rises by 50% from a prior milestone. The seven co-founders have also committed to donating 80% of their personal shareholdings to charitable causes. On the risk front, Anthropic noted in the filing that it will prioritize artificial intelligence safety-related objectives. The above valuation and financial data are compiled from the S-1 filing; final figures shall be subject to official regulatory disclosures.

Nvidia’s stock opened higher and rallied further on Monday, surging more than 3% at one point to lift its market capitalization to $5.23 trillion. Morgan Stanley’s latest research report raised its projection for the U.S. data center net power gap from 33GW to 38GW for the 2026-2028 period, noting that amid constrained power supply, ASIC chips may lose market share relative to GPUs. For semiconductor investments, Morgan Stanley remains most bullish on Nvidia and Broadcom (whose stock rose over 3.2%), citing factors including relatively conservative earnings guidance, clear visibility into chip shipments, expansion into non-U.S. markets, and Nvidia’s higher token output efficiency per watt. The bank added that the market is working to align its expected $1.5 trillion in U.S. data center capital expenditure for 2027 and $1.6 trillion for 2028 with actual power supply capacity. If data center construction is suspended or slowed, downstream components such as storage and optical modules, as well as sectors like power management and analog chips, may face steeper impacts from over-ordering triggered by earlier shortages.