Venture capital firm a16z leads the $200 million Series C funding round for U.S. remittance startup Felix Pago, which is expanding into stablecoin-powered remittances and financial services.

Beating AI Express, September 2 — Flop Labs, led by CEO Arthur Hayes, is building a computing power marketplace for AI agents, positioning its FLOP token as the native payment asset for AI agents to access resources like computing power and memory. Flop Labs noted that Nvidia’s quarterly data center revenue reached $89 billion, growing 117% year-over-year, yet users still often need to contact sales teams to inquire about hourly GPU computing power prices. The project aims to make computing power publicly priced and traded like commodities such as oil and grain, enabling AI agents to purchase computing power directly from miners, while validators re-execute partial computational tasks to verify the work provided by miners. Its core mechanism revolves around "Proof of Useful Inference": miners supply GPU computing power to process AI inference requests, validators check the computational results, and AI agents use FLOP to pay for computing power and related resources. Currently, Flop is still in its early stages; the project previously announced plans for a large-scale FLOP airdrop in the fourth quarter of 2026, and to launch its genesis block in the first quarter of 2027.

Beating AI Express Insight: OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki has refuted some external interpretations of the Astra recurrent architecture. He stated that for OpenAI’s current frontier models, including Astra, the depth of their computational graphs is at most only twice that of GPT-4, rather than having suddenly increased by several orders of magnitude. This is a direct response to a previous report from The Information, which revealed that Astra uses recurrent depth, allowing the same set of Transformer layers to compute repeatedly. As a result, part of the inference process can occur internally within the model, without needing to be fully written out as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), sparking concerns about whether models will become increasingly difficult to monitor. Pachocki acknowledged that CoT monitoring is indeed fragile and is moving toward a direction that is harder to oversee. However, he clarified that this is not due to changes in model architecture. OpenAI has retained and used CoT monitoring since its first-generation reasoning models, and currently still lists enhancing this capability as a core research goal.

South Korea's Financial Services Commission (FSC) announced it will operate a digital asset task force until 2028 to prepare for the enactment and implementation of the Digital Asset Basic Act, including advancing preparations for subordinate legislation and building digital asset ecosystem infrastructure. The FSC noted that South Korea's current digital asset regulatory framework has so far focused primarily on cracking down on illegal activities and preventing investor losses, while institutional development at the industry and market levels—covering operational conduct, information disclosure, and asset issuance and circulation—remains insufficient. Accordingly, the FSC plans to, through the Virtual Assets Committee and consultations between political parties and the government, finalize the core provisions of the Digital Asset Basic Act by the end of 2026 and promote the establishment of a more robust comprehensive regulatory system. The FSC also pointed out that South Korea is advancing the development of a digital asset-related ecosystem, with plans to improve infrastructure centered on organizations such as industry associations. The report further noted that the law on the institutionalization of South Korea's security tokens (ST) was passed by the National Assembly in January 2026 and is scheduled to take effect in February 2027, with the FSC continuing to refine relevant subordinate regulations and supporting systems.

According to an announcement by Japanese listed firm Remixpoint (ticker: 3825), the company sold all its altcoins on September 1—including Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), XRP, and Dogecoin (DOGE)—for a total of 878.8 million yen, generating a profit of 117.8 million yen. Post-sale, Remixpoint’s only remaining cryptocurrency holding is Bitcoin (BTC), with approximately 1,506 BTC in reserves. Breakdown of the altcoin sales: 901.4467 ETH sold for 353.4 million yen, yielding a 60.2 million yen profit; 13,920.0726 SOL sold for 227.9 million yen, with a 49.3 million yen profit; roughly 1.1912 million XRP sold for 260.4 million yen, netting a 11.52 million yen profit; and approximately 2.8023 million DOGE sold for 37.08 million yen, incurring a 3.26 million yen loss. The company plans to recognize the ~118 million yen in sale proceeds in its second quarter results for the fiscal year ending March 2027. Remixpoint stated the portfolio adjustment is designed to further consolidate its crypto asset holdings, formalize its Bitcoin-centric investment and operational strategy, and boost capital efficiency. The sale proceeds will be considered for use in expanding assets in growth sectors such as grid-scale energy storage, strengthening its financial foundation, and other initiatives to enhance corporate and shareholder value. Additionally, the firm disclosed that between February 24, 2026, and August 31, it earned BTC lending income of 14.92055902 units, equivalent to approximately 164.2 million yen. As of August 31, its staking income from ETH and SOL combined totaled roughly 29.875 million yen.

Security firm Defimon has issued an alert, detecting a governance takeover attack targeting YAM Finance. The attacker self-delegated approximately 504,000 YAM tokens, accounting for ~3.3% of the total supply (slightly above the legal voting threshold), then submitted YamGovernorAlpha Proposal #45, which has an empty description ("0x"). Its sole operation is calling the setPendingAdmin method of the YAM Timelock contract, pointing to the attacker’s address. According to the disclosure, if the proposal passes and is executed, the attacker will become pendingAdmin, then can fully control the Timelock via acceptAdmin—granting them management rights over all YAM protocol contracts and the DAO treasury, with an estimated risk amount of around $337,000. Since the protocol is currently dormant, Defimon Alerts reminds YAM holders to vote against this proposal before block height 25897343 (approximately 34 hours remaining).

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost noted in a post that Bitcoin (BTC)’s current selling pressure remains stable, while short-term holders (STH) continue to realize profits. However, the market’s “apparent demand” has turned negative again, signaling a notable drop in BTC demand over the past several days. He added that this weakening demand is also reflected in BTC’s price structure, with its trend growing increasingly fragile. If demand fails to recover in the very short term, BTC could enter a new round of decline. Darkfost stressed that the market’s direction is not yet fully clear, urging investors to remain cautious.