The crypto market is rallying sharply despite interest rate hike expectations, with Bitcoin topping $79,000 and DeFi sector tokens leading gains in the altcoin market.

According to CNBC, the hedge fund Situational Awareness, run by self-styled "AI stock guru" Leopold — who nearly faced liquidation this summer — appears to be staging a comeback, resuming its activity in the options market. A source familiar with the development said founder Leopold has been repurchasing options since last weekend through early this week, with underlying assets largely matching its prior "AI infrastructure/storage" investment thesis: SK Hynix, SanDisk, AMD, Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, plus the storage-themed Roundhill Memory (DRAM) ETF. The options position totals hundreds of millions of dollars. It remains unclear whether these new options purchases are backed by newly raised public market capital or leftover funds from the July sell-off. In July, the hedge fund Situational Awareness, managed by Leopold, a former OpenAI researcher nicknamed the "AI stock guru," suffered a severe setback. The fund, which once held over $45 billion in assets under management (AUM) at the start of the month, faced mounting margin pressure as AI-related stocks in storage, power and computing sectors plunged this summer. It was forced to offload nearly all its public market stock positions at a discount to Citadel Securities, cutting its total size to roughly $10 billion, while retaining private positions — particularly its stake in Anthropic.

Well-known trader Bonk Guy stated in his prediction that PON will become the first utility token to reach a $1 billion market cap in this cycle, while USELESS will be the first meme coin to hit that milestone in the same period. GMGN data shows PON currently has a market cap of $650 million, having previously peaked at $990 million. USELESS reached a cycle high of $330 million, and now stands at a $250 million market cap. BlockBeats reminds users that token prices are highly volatile, so investment should be approached with caution.

INDEX and COOPERATIVE have been added to Robinhood’s tradable assets, allowing users to trade them directly via the Robinhood App. INDEX (The Index) is an RWA protocol token built on Robinhood Chain. After users hold a certain amount of INDEX, the protocol uses 3% of generated transaction fees to purchase a basket of tokenized U.S. stocks (including AAPL, NVDA, TSLA, etc.), which are automatically airdropped to holders’ wallets every 15 minutes—no staking or manual claiming required.

According to GMGN data, the Robinhood Chain ecosystem token INDEX has seen a short-term rally, pushing its market capitalization above $45 million, with a 24-hour gain of 17.8% and trading volume of $5.5 million over the same period. INDEX has been added to Robinhood’s tradable assets, allowing users to trade directly via the Robinhood App. INDEX (The Index) is an RWA protocol token on Robinhood Chain. After holding a certain amount, the protocol uses 3% of transaction fees to purchase a basket of tokenized U.S. equities (such as AAPL, NVDA, TSLA, etc.), which are automatically airdropped to holders’ wallets every 15 minutes—no staking or manual claiming is required. BlockBeats reminds users that such tokens are highly volatile, so investment should be approached with caution.

Grayscale Research Director Zach Pandl published an analysis noting that Zcash (ZEC) is a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin but with additional privacy features, with both networks secured via proof-of-work (PoW) mining. Driven by Zcash’s strong token price performance, its mining has become highly profitable. While Bitcoin’s network is far larger—with daily total miner rewards of roughly $35 million versus Zcash’s ~$2 million—Zcash is more favorable for individual miners. Grayscale estimates that Zcash offers around twice the daily reward per mining rig and four times the reward per megawatt-hour (MWh) compared to Bitcoin, though their mining hardware is not interchangeable. Additional data shows Zcash’s current per-MWh mining yield is even higher than that of some AI/high-performance computing cloud services. This higher profitability is spurring more mining activity: measured by standard hashrate metrics, Zcash’s total network mining activity has grown over 2.5 times this year. This forms a virtuous cycle: higher token prices drive more mining, which enhances network security, and stronger security in turn helps sustain elevated prices. Grayscale concludes that at current valuation levels, Zcash mining is very profitable, attracting more hashrate and supporting network security.

According to HTX market data, STORJ has surged 60.3% in the past 24 hours, currently trading at $0.04588. Binance delisted STORJ on September 3, while South Korea’s largest crypto exchange Upbit will delist STORJ on September 14. On July 27, Storj Labs, parent company of decentralized cloud storage project Storj, announced it had filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection under U.S. bankruptcy code to resolve historical debts and sustain operations, with plans for the restructured firm to be jointly owned by management, the community, STORJ token holders and investors. Founded in 2014, Storj is a decentralized storage network where users provide cloud storage services to global clients by sharing unused hard drive space, using STORJ tokens for incentives and payments.