US Stock Futures Dive Further

AI developer Mantic announced Friday it has closed a $25 million seed funding round. The firm recently defeated human contestants in a prediction competition. Results from the 2026 Summer Cup, a London-based online prediction platform Metaculus that wrapped up this month, show Mantic’s probability forecasts for political, economic and cultural events outperformed human participants. The strong scores posted by Mantic and other AI entrants also mark the first time AI has dominated the competition. The funding round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Microsoft’s venture fund M12, AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, Balderton Capital and others; specific valuation was not disclosed. Mantic CEO Toby Shevlane said the company is focused on advancing humanity’s ability to understand the future. Founded in 2024 by Shevlane and Ben Day, Mantic enhances its forecasting capabilities by optimizing cutting-edge models developed by other AI labs specifically for prediction tasks, testing its systems against historical data, evaluating performance and iterating to improve accuracy. (Reuters)

According to HTX market data, Gravity’s token G has surged past $0.0085, currently trading at $0.00856, with a 100.24% gain over the past 24 hours. In related news, Gravity officially announced on September 17 that its testnet has integrated Chainlink CCIP cross-chain functionality.

According to official announcements, Flap has officially launched its Perpetual Contract Vault, powered by MYX Finance. This mechanism allows projects to open perpetual contract markets simultaneously after issuing meme tokens. Transaction taxes will flow into the vault and be automatically used to repurchase tokens, with the repurchased tokens then allocated as liquidity. Flap stated that token holders can earn two layers of returns: transaction tax rewards, and revenue from the perpetual markets, which includes trading fees and funding rate-related gains. The mechanism supports permissionless creation of perpetual markets for any asset from its launch day, eliminating the need for project audits or listing approval waits.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced he will convene a G7 energy meeting and is weighing the option of releasing strategic energy reserves.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the Zcash ETF (ticker: ZCSH) launched by Grayscale announced today that it plans to implement a 3-for-1 forward share split for the fund. The split will not alter the total value of shareholders' investments.

On September 14, a16z submitted a comment letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), proposing that a more flexible, market-adaptable regulatory framework for crypto trading platforms (CTPs) be established by drawing on the existing Alternative Trading System (ATS) regulatory framework. a16z argues that the U.S. crypto market remains in its early stages with high retail participation, so the regulatory framework should clarify regulatory boundaries while leaving room for market deepening and innovation. The firm recommends that crypto trading platforms register with the SEC via a notice-based registration process, and allow platforms to trade both non-securities asset pairs (such as bitcoin and stablecoins) and securities-non-securities asset pairs simultaneously to prevent further fragmentation of the crypto market. Additionally, for CTPs trading NMS (National Market System) stocks like tokenized equities, Form ATS-N public disclosure requirements should only apply once they meet the trading volume thresholds set under existing Regulation ATS; information below the threshold should be kept confidential from both the SEC and platform users. a16z also suggests that crypto trading platforms should be subject to record-keeping requirements similar to those for ATS, and allow relevant records to be stored on the blockchain under specific conditions. It further proposes that platforms be permitted to set differentiated access permissions, rights, and obligations for different user groups. The firm states that the SEC should leverage the flexibility and innovative nature of ATS to set clear regulatory parameters for crypto trading platforms, while allowing operators to innovate and experiment within this framework.