How Hedera Guardian Revolutionizes Environmental Asset Management
Recap, a look back at an earlier Hedera session. Environmental asset management is evolving beyond the limitations of traditional paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles. With the Hedera Guardian, you're equipped to integrate decentralized identities, verifiable credentials, and advanced policy workflow engines to streamline the creation and trade of digital environmental assets. Interested in sustainability tech or building with Hedera? This piece offers valuable insights to shape impactful applications in today's eco-conscious landscape. 🔗 Key Links 📺 Watch the full livestream → Delivering Trust in Environmental Assets and Outcomes with Hedera Guardian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUzQ2CF-I8o) 📄 Explore the Hedera Guardian docs → Hedera Documentation (https://docs.hedera.com) 🛠� Dive into Hedera Token Service → HTS Docs (https://docs.hedera.com) 📌 TL;DR Hedera Guardian enhances environmental asset digitization effortlessly. Version 3.5 supports decentralized identities and credentials. Demonstrated modular architecture offers flexibility. Builders can use Guardian infrastructure for community solutions. A 39% insurance premium reduction was achieved, showcasing real-world benefits. Unpacking the Hedera Guardian’s Key Innovations A Dive into the Modular Architecture The Hedera Guardian employs a flexible, modular architecture, simplifying user experience in digitizing complex environmental asset methodologies. It enhances security and transparency by integrating with decentralized identities and verifiable credentials. This design allows you to tailor your technology stack for specific environmental requirements—be it carbon credits or biodiversity tracking. The APIs within this architecture facilitate smooth data handling, helping you query data tied to issued tokens, assess user permissions, and manage asset statuses effectively. This level of customization opens doors to build applications that uniquely match demands. Key takeaway: The Guardian's modular architecture offers the flexibility and security you're looking for in managing diverse environmental assets. Policy Workflow Engine Excellence Perhaps the most notable feature is the policy configurator—a low-code environment that allows creators like you to define regulatory compliance and construct detailed workflows for managing environmental assets. This system promotes efficiency by letting you focus on optimizing solutions rather than getting tangled in coding complexities. Daniel showcased its utility in a captivating live demo, illustrating real-time data management and user interaction handling with drag-and-drop simplicity for scenarios like carbon offsets. Such functionalities make Guardian a powerhouse for streamlining complex environmental asset management. Key takeaway: The low-code workflow engine simplifies complex environmental asset management, keeping pace with emerging regulatory demands. Real-World Performance Metrics The Guardian's impact isn't just on paper. Featured during a livestream, the Tahoe Donner community realized a 39% lower insurance premium and an 89% lower deductible through smart forest management and the Guardian's data insights. These figures highlight the economic and ecological advantages the platform offers. By tapping into precise data analytics and risk management capabilities, you can predict and mitigate environmental risks like wildfires, expanding Guardian’s utility beyond asset management to a holistic environmental risk analysis tool. Key takeaway: The Guardian’s effectiveness in cutting insurance costs through informed environmental risk management marks its tangible value.
Leveraging Hedera Guardian in Practical Applications Build Next-gen Environmental Applications The Guardian provides practical avenues to construct industry-disrupting solutions. It enables you to craft applications focusing on the digitization and tokenization of environmental assets, like carbon credits or water rights. Supported by the Hedera ecosystem, these applications can meet the demands of eco-friendly consumers and industries aiming for sustainability. By maintaining transparent and verifiable tracking of asset provenance and movement, your applications will help industries transform environmental impact into tradable assets. Develop applications for digitizing environmental credits. Create solutions for managing ecosystem services. Use decentralized identity verification for secure trades. Unlocking Builder Opportunities Given the booming sustainability market, you're in a prime position to redefine environmental finance and management. With the Guardian's infrastructure, complex processes become more approachable, attracting eco-conscious investors and users alike. Here’s what you can explore: Design systems for biodiversity credits. Automate compliance for regulatory standards. Simplify distributed ledger technology solutions for environmental records. Key takeaway: The Guardian’s robust infrastructure presents a playground for innovation in the environmental sector, offering robust opportunities for builders. How It Works Under the Hood API Calls and Data Flow Explained The Guardian's architecture is centered around clear API endpoints, offering efficient interaction capabilities. Important API functionalities provide access to user permissions, asset issuance, and policy definitions, ensuring effective management and secure operations. It’s built to handle high transaction volumes, common in asset trading, assuring scalability. Its modularity allows dynamic process adjustments, aligning with your application's unique requirements. Design Patterns and Technical Decisions Integrating decentralized identities fortifies security while ensuring data integrity and privacy compliance, essential for building trust in environmental asset exchanges. Through verifiable credentials, you lay the groundwork for enhanced stakeholder confidence and standardized environmental reporting. The Guardian’s policy configurations use a microservice architecture. This supports independent scaling and integration of specific modules without overall disruption, providing a resilient system for asset management. Key takeaway: The Guardian’s secure, scalable design patterns build trust, enabling flexible environmental asset management solutions.
What You Can Build Now Harnessing the Hedera Guardian unlocks a spectrum of possibilities to innovate sustainable solutions. Here’s how you can kickstart: Identify a Use Case: Focus on an environmental asset to digitize, whether it’s carbon offsets, biodiversity credits, or water usage rights. Use APIs: use the Guardian’s APIs to secure and manage transactions and data robustly. Integrate Decentralized Security: Strengthen trust and compliance using decentralized identities and verifiable credentials. Develop Policy Workflows: Use the low-code configurator to automate reporting, establish compliance, and adhere to regulations. Test and Scale: Ensure performance and scalability through rigorous testing before scaling to broader markets. Key takeaway: use the Guardian's resources to develop comprehensive, compliant environmental asset management solutions seamlessly. Resources To explore more about building with the Hedera Guardian, consider these resources: Hedera Documentation: Hedera Documentation (https://docs.hedera.com) Join the Conversation on Discord: Hedera Community (https://hedera.com/discord) Explore HTS: HTS Docs (https://docs.hedera.com) Are you already building with the Hedera Guardian? Share your project in the replies, the Hedera community is keen to spotlight novel solutions and breakthroughs! Understanding the Role of Hedera Consensus Service The Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) plays a pivotal role in ensuring transparency and trust in environmental asset management. By acting as a decentralized message layer, HCS allows you to reliably timestamp and order messages, which is crucial for maintaining the integrity of data associated with digital environmental assets. This service can be particularly beneficial for complex environmental projects that require verifiable data transmission and storage. How HCS Facilitates Data Integrity With HCS, every transaction related to environmental assets can be logged in a tamper-proof manner. This ensures that the data remains consistent and accurate over time, a feature that is indispensable for regulatory compliance and stakeholder trust. Builders can appreciate this feature because: It establishes a trusted timeline of events and transactions. It prevents data manipulation or unauthorized alterations. It supports interoperability with other services, enhancing system integration. Implementing HCS in Environmental Projects To effectively implement HCS in your environmental projects, consider the following steps: Define Your Data Needs: Identify what environmental data needs to be tracked and verified. Integrate with Existing Systems: use HCS to complement your current data management tools. Monitor Transactions: Regularly check the logs to ensure data integrity and accuracy. By following these steps, you can enhance the trustworthiness and efficiency of your digital environmental asset management processes. Leveraging Hedera Smart Contract Service for Environmental Solutions The Hedera Smart Contract Service (HSCS) provides a robust framework for creating and executing smart contracts tailored to environmental asset management. The HSCS supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which allows you to deploy contracts that automate complex workflows, ensuring transparency and reducing administrative overhead. Benefits of Using HSCS The use of smart contracts in environmental projects offers several advantages: Automation: Streamline processes such as asset creation, transfer, and verification. Cost Efficiency: Reduce manual intervention and associated costs. Scalability: Manage large volumes of transactions without compromising performance. By harnessing these benefits, builders can create more efficient and scalable solutions for environmental asset management. Creating Smart Contracts with HSCS To deploy effective smart contracts using HSCS, you can follow these guidelines: Define Clear Contract Terms: Ensure that the contract terms are precise and unambiguous to avoid disputes. Test Extensively: Conduct thorough testing in a controlled environment to identify and rectify potential issues. Monitor and Update: Regularly review and update the contracts to adapt to new requirements or regulations. Implementing smart contracts effectively can significantly enhance the functionality and reliability of your environmental management solutions.
Community Collaboration Through Hedera's Ecosystem The Hedera ecosystem thrives on community collaboration, offering builders a variety of opportunities to engage with partners and contribute to collective environmental goals. The Apex Hackathon is one such platform that brings together developers, experts, and organizations to innovate and create impactful solutions. Engaging with Ecosystem Partners During events like the Apex Hackathon, participants can collaborate with ecosystem partners like AWS, Neuron, and Hashgraph Online. These partnerships enable you to: Access a wealth of resources and expertise. Gain insights into best practices for environmental asset management. Build connections with other innovators in the field. Such collaborations can propel your projects forward, providing the support and knowledge needed to tackle complex environmental challenges. Building Community Solutions Hedera encourages the development of community-driven solutions that address local and global environmental issues. By participating in community initiatives, you can: Contribute to sustainable development goals. Innovate with a focus on real-world impact. Share knowledge and experiences with a broader audience. Engagement in community projects not only enhances your technical skills but also enriches your understanding of environmental sustainability. Real-World Applications and Case Studies The practical applications of Hedera's technology in environmental asset management are numerous. By examining real-world case studies, builders can gain valuable insights into how Hedera can be applied to achieve tangible outcomes. Case Study: Wildfire Mitigation One notable application of Hedera technology is in wildfire mitigation. By integrating real-time data streams with the Hedera platform, organizations can monitor and respond to wildfire threats more effectively. This approach offers several advantages: Timely Alerts: Automated alerts allow for quicker response times. Data-Driven Decisions: Access to accurate data supports informed decision-making. Resource Optimization: Efficiently allocate resources to areas of greatest need. Case Study: Reforestation Projects Another example is the use of Hedera in reforestation projects. By tracking the lifecycle of each tree planted, organizations can ensure the success and sustainability of their efforts. Key benefits include: Verification of Impact: Transparent data supports claims of environmental impact. Stakeholder Engagement: Demonstrates commitment to transparency and sustainability. Compliance and Reporting: Simplifies the process of meeting regulatory requirements. These case studies illustrate the potential of Hedera's technology to facilitate effective environmental management and enhance sustainability initiatives.
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reply @JorgeCuban91 lots of work happening on the background if you pay attention on githubs -- some alpha 👇https://github.com/akash-network/AEP/tree/main/spec/aep-79/doc
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The DoubleZero of today, tomorrow, and the years that follow.
$25 billion of Solana stake now reaches the chain through DoubleZero, up from $21.7 billion at the end of Q2 and $18 billion at the end of Q1. With our recently published Q2 results, it’s important going over what they mean for DoubleZero, our wins & why we are expanding past crypto. Watch Our Q2 Breakdown here: https://x.com/doublezero/status/2089744349404041443?s=20 DoubleZero is now the chosen network of 61% of Solana validators. Validators on DZ publish their block data straight into DoubleZero Edge. Across Q2, validators representing roughly 58% of Solana stake published into the Solana feed, and rewards went to 452 distinct validators. Since publishing our results, the validator share across DZ has increased. A subscriber to that feed receives shreds sourced from across the validator set rather than from a single relay. The publisher physically closest to a given subscriber is the one that sets the speed for them, so each validator that connects raises the odds that somebody, somewhere, now has a nearer source than they had last week. The feed is provided to subscribers who use the data in their high frequency trading strategy. How data moves on DoubleZero Solana's native shred propagation sends data through a multi-hop validator tree that has no idea where anyone is. Someone based in SF might be using data that has gone from Toyko to New York before finally being sent to their terminal. Even if data moved at the speed of light, anyone should know that this geographical process could be quicker. DoubleZero moves data over a multicast network to do exactly that. The network switches replicate the data in hardware and send it to every subscriber in the same instant. NYSE, Nasdaq and CME have distributed market data this way for decades. What that changes is the cost of growth. The subscription revenue goes to the publishers Edge ran 115 distinct subscriber seats over the quarter, averaging around $8,500 per epoch. Subscribers paid approximately $330,000 in USDC across 39 subscription epochs, converting to roughly 4.35 million 2Z. The network burns 10% of this, about 435,000 2Z. Of what remained, half went to the network contributors carrying the traffic and half to the validators and validator client teams publishing the data. Validators are paid out of subscriber demand rather than out of emissions. DoubleZero removed the validator access fee entirely during the same stretch, so connecting to the network moved from a cost to a source of earnings. Every validator that connects and publishes makes the feed worth more to the desks buying it, and those desks then pay the validators. The compounding effect on DZ makes the network a more attractive place for the validators that haven’t yet connected. Routes get made when they're requested Fourteen independent contributors supply DoubleZero. Between them they provide 170+ active network contributions running across 97 devices in 63 facilities, spanning 30 metros in 18 countries. Twelve of those contributions were activated during Q2 alone. For example, a trading firm needs Osaka as a hub pays to bring Osaka onto the network, and every party already connected then has Osaka. Across 66 measured corridors the DoubleZero delivered roughly a 21.6% lower round trip latency than comparable public internet paths. The best corridors run much further ahead. As of mid-June, Hong Kong to Tokyo, London to Oslo and Frankfurt to Prague each ran about 57% faster. The program that grew Tokyo from 24 validators to 68 Solana's stake had concentrated in Europe for a reason that is purely physical. A validator far from the cluster sees higher latency, higher latency costs it rewards, and lower rewards make running outside Europe a worse business. In Q2 the DoubleZero Delegation Program entered a second phase aimed at that, redirecting roughly 2.4 million SOL to validators operating in São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, which makes it more viable to run outside the established hubs. Asia-Pacific more than doubled its validator count over the quarter. Tokyo went from 24 validators to 68. Two of the largest validators on the network, together representing over 30 million SOL, relocated. Expanding outside of crypto. DoubleZero's build-out is ahead of where its own team expected it. Our Co-Founder @Austin_Federa put the current state at roughly where he had projected for mid to late 2027, and said making use of what exists is priority now rather than building more of it. The Solana feed established the model. The Kalshi feed, live since 12 August, carries a CFTC-regulated venue running a central matching engine, on the same platform and over the same fiber. The infrastructure that took Wall Street 40 years to build, DoubleZero has established, tested and succeeded in building. In far less time for far newer markets. Not only does the network operate as intended, but it is showing a clear demand from New Finance market participants as firms & experienced traders continue to adopt new financial venues. Signed The 00 team
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The DoubleZero of today, tomorrow, and the years that follow.
$25 billion of Solana stake now reaches the chain through DoubleZero, up from $21.7 billion at the end of Q2 and $18 billion at the end of Q1. With our recently published Q2 results, it’s important going over what they mean for DoubleZero, our wins & why we are expanding past crypto.
Watch Our Q2 Breakdown here:
https://x.com/doublezero/status/2089744349404041443?s=20
DoubleZero is now the chosen network of 61% of Solana validators.
Validators on DZ publish their block data straight into DoubleZero Edge. Across Q2, validators representing roughly 58% of Solana stake published into the Solana feed, and rewards went to 452 distinct validators. Since publishing our results, the validator share across DZ has increased.
A subscriber to that feed receives shreds sourced from across the validator set rather than from a single relay. The publisher physically closest to a given subscriber is the one that sets the speed for them, so each validator that connects raises the odds that somebody, somewhere, now has a nearer source than they had last week.
The feed is provided to subscribers who use the data in their high frequency trading strategy.
How data moves on DoubleZero
Solana's native shred propagation sends data through a multi-hop validator tree that has no idea where anyone is.
Someone based in SF might be using data that has gone from Toyko to New York before finally being sent to their terminal. Even if data moved at the speed of light, anyone should know that this geographical process could be quicker.
DoubleZero moves data over a multicast network to do exactly that. The network switches replicate the data in hardware and send it to every subscriber in the same instant. NYSE, Nasdaq and CME have distributed market data this way for decades.
What that changes is the cost of growth.
The subscription revenue goes to the publishers
Edge ran 115 distinct subscriber seats over the quarter, averaging around $8,500 per epoch. Subscribers paid approximately $330,000 in USDC across 39 subscription epochs, converting to roughly 4.35 million 2Z.
The network burns 10% of this, about 435,000 2Z. Of what remained, half went to the network contributors carrying the traffic and half to the validators and validator client teams publishing the data. Validators are paid out of subscriber demand rather than out of emissions.
DoubleZero removed the validator access fee entirely during the same stretch, so connecting to the network moved from a cost to a source of earnings.
Every validator that connects and publishes makes the feed worth more to the desks buying it, and those desks then pay the validators. The compounding effect on DZ makes the network a more attractive place for the validators that haven’t yet connected.
Routes get made when they're requested
Fourteen independent contributors supply DoubleZero.
Between them they provide 170+ active network contributions running across 97 devices in 63 facilities, spanning 30 metros in 18 countries. Twelve of those contributions were activated during Q2 alone.
For example, a trading firm needs Osaka as a hub pays to bring Osaka onto the network, and every party already connected then has Osaka.
Across 66 measured corridors the DoubleZero delivered roughly a 21.6% lower round trip latency than comparable public internet paths. The best corridors run much further ahead. As of mid-June, Hong Kong to Tokyo, London to Oslo and Frankfurt to Prague each ran about 57% faster.
The program that grew Tokyo from 24 validators to 68
Solana's stake had concentrated in Europe for a reason that is purely physical. A validator far from the cluster sees higher latency, higher latency costs it rewards, and lower rewards make running outside Europe a worse business.
In Q2 the DoubleZero Delegation Program entered a second phase aimed at that, redirecting roughly 2.4 million SOL to validators operating in São Paulo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, which makes it more viable to run outside the established hubs.
Asia-Pacific more than doubled its validator count over the quarter. Tokyo went from 24 validators to 68. Two of the largest validators on the network, together representing over 30 million SOL, relocated.
Expanding outside of crypto.
DoubleZero's build-out is ahead of where its own team expected it. Our Co-Founder @Austin_Federa put the current state at roughly where he had projected for mid to late 2027, and said making use of what exists is priority now rather than building more of it.
The Solana feed established the model. The Kalshi feed, live since 12 August, carries a CFTC-regulated venue running a central matching engine, on the same platform and over the same fiber.
The infrastructure that took Wall Street 40 years to build, DoubleZero has established, tested and succeeded in building. In far less time for far newer markets.
Not only does the network operate as intended, but it is showing a clear demand from New Finance market participants as firms & experienced traders continue to adopt new financial venues.
Signed
The 00 team
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SpaceX Highlights Starbase Ambitions, & More
This week's newsletter covers Starbase Louisiana, OpenAI Jalapeño results, and Figure AI's Index app.
1. SpaceX Highlights Starbase Ambitions By: Brett Winton | Chief Futurist | @wintonARK Last week, SpaceX and Governor Jeff Landry announced Starbase Louisiana, a $100 billion commitment to build one of the largest infrastructure projects in history on roughly 125,000 acres at Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish.[1] The greenfield investment includes five complexes, each with two Starship towers, with ten pads at the outset, and eventually more than a dozen towers supporting ~30 flights per day. The land will include not only a launch site, but also onsite propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping, vehicle processing, employee housing, and likely an airport. Construction will begin in 2027, with first launches no earlier than 2029. Two geographic features were the deciding factors. Launch corridors facing south over the Gulf will give SpaceX efficient access to the polar orbits for its space-based compute constellation, and natural gas in Louisiana will power the methane-fueled rockets. Gwynne Shotwell was clear about the motivation: the company's existing infrastructure—two pads at Starbase in Texas and three soon-to-be in Florida—cannot support the ambitious plans for Starship’s flight cadence.[2] For perspective on the scope of the project, Brazil’s 14 gigawatt (GW) Itaipu hydropower plant, the closest completed contemporary analog, cost ~$90 billion in today’s dollars, and California’s much delayed and uncompleted high-speed rail project is projected to cost ~$125 billion, as shown below.
What Explains The Size Of This SpaceX Investment? SpaceX needs the capacity because the payloads-in-waiting are worth potentially trillions of dollars a year, starting with billions for its Starlink communications constellation and, we believe, trillions for its Starmind constellation. Based on ARK’s projection of SpaceX’s monetization rate per communications satellite, a single reusable rocket filled with Starlink satellites could generate ~$4 billion in lifetime net cashflow relative to the $1 billion in combined launch, satellite manufacture, ground station installation, and customer acquisition costs. Importantly, the towers at Pecan Island should be able to catch Starship. Indeed, if Starship launches its tenth fully reusable commercial rocket successfully in 2027, as we anticipate, the post-tax IRR (Internal Rate of Return) would approach 100% at an annual rate, as shown below.
With that kind of return, the constraint on SpaceX will not be capital but the physical capacity to deploy it. The company should maintain similarly healthy, albeit moderately diminishing, returns even as it scales through hundreds of Starlink-carrying Starship flights. Though the Starlink opportunity will eventually saturate, the galaxy is the limit for SpaceX’s AI opportunity. By its 100th AI satellite launch ARK’s research suggests all-in costs to manufacture and launch its satellites will already run roughly half that of terrestrial datacenter developers. At that time ARK’s research anticipates that SpaceX will still be spending substantially on research and development (R&D) and will mostly monetize its orbital constellation by renting out capacity as an infrastructure-as-a-service provider while it seeks to catch up to the performance frontier currently occupied by Anthropic and OpenAI. Even with those constraints, its early Starmind launches should be able to yield IRRs in the high 20s as can be seen below.
As the buildout expands, datacenter economics on the ground are likely to get worse as developers cope with local opposition and have to find exponentially increasing amounts of power. Meanwhile, SpaceX should become increasingly expert at manufacturing its satellites and packing more satellites into each launch; its economics should get better. Its 1000th launch could enjoy upfront costs at less than 40% those of the terrestrial benchmark. The volume of compute that SpaceX will command simultaneously suggests that it should be able to catch up with the performance frontier, pull back on research and development use of its constellation, and deliver higher-monetizing AI software to end-customers. By its 1000th launch, the prospective IRRs of Starmind could double those of Starlink at its peak, even as SpaceX invests much larger dollar volumes into the AI constellation.
What Will Be The Macroeconomic Impact Of This Investment? Based on Louisiana's ~$344 billion in nominal gross domestic product (GDP),[3] a capital commitment of $100 billion, no matter how phased, will move the needle, especially because it will impact a parish of fewer than 60,000 people. Compared to the state’s GDP per capita of ~$56,000, its fact sheet on this project projects 3,000 direct new jobs and ~8,100 indirect jobs with salaries averaging $92,600 per year over ten years. Landry put the historical contrast in stark relief: for generations, industry has extracted oil, gas, and petrochemicals from Louisiana, taking their share of state GDP down from ~25% in 1999 to less than 20% today.[4] SpaceX is entering Louisiana not to extract, but to build. Chronically underestimated in macro forecasts, disruptive innovation does more than displace the existing capital stock: it increases the expected return on new capital enough to incentivize physical infrastructure that otherwise would not be built. In 2015, no company would have considered investing $100 billion in an industrial complex on Pecan Island to serve the rocket launch business. Rocket reusability changed the expected return on capital on such a project, which summoned the capital. Now, the capital is buying propellant plants, power generation, and port infrastructure in a parish that had none. More important than the initial investment will be the second-order impact. Infrastructure built to accommodate a technology on a steep cost-decline curve should generate a higher return on capital than the legacy stock it displaces, delivering productivity—cheaper access to orbit, always-on connectivity, cheaper compute per watt—that redeploys labor, energy, and land at the margin for more productive uses cases. That supply-side expansion is the reason the growth associated with disruptive technology is much larger than consensus models have incorporated.
2. OpenAI’s Jalapeño Could Accelerate The Shift Toward Custom AI Silicon By: Karim Mattar | Research Associate, AI & Cloud | @MattarARK Last week, OpenAI published the first results for Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip developed with Broadcom. â� Relative to Kimi K2.5, the largest public model tested, OpenAI reported ~1.5 times higher peak performance per watt and 3.4 times lower latency, as shown below.[5] Across Kimi K2.5, DeepSeek R1, and GPT-OSS 120B, Jalapeño achieved the performance-latency frontier despite being OpenAI’s first attempt.
SemiAnalysis independently verified Jalapeño’s InferenceX results at OpenAI’s lab and found that it outperformed Blackwell on performance per watt across nearly all of the workloads tested.[7] Its output-token throughput per megawatt also exceeded NVIDIA’s latest public Rubin results in SemiAnalysis’s testing.[8] Rubin is the more appropriate comparison, given the timing of the two chips. That said, the results are early: Jalapeño remains on engineering silicon and SemiAnalysis has yet to test it on AgentX, its benchmark for longer, multi-turn agentic workloads. Perhaps more interesting than the benchmark results is how quickly OpenAI got there. Using its own AI models during the design and optimization process, OpenAI took Jalapeño from initial Register-Transfer Level (RTL) to tapeout[9] in roughly nine months.[10] SemiAnalysis also noted that OpenAI used Codex to overcome one of the traditional disadvantages associated with custom silicon: developing kernels for Jalapeño and shortening the time necessary to build a mature software stack around new hardware. As power becomes a larger constraint on AI infrastructure, squeezing more inference from each megawatt will become increasingly valuable. â� OpenAI and Broadcom plan to deploy 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed accelerators through 2029,[11] giving OpenAI the volume to spread chip-development costs across an enormous inference workload. Jalapeño does not mean that OpenAI will stop buying NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), particularly for training. Instead, its early performance suggests that frontier AI companies operating at sufficient scale can justify the cost of designing their own inference silicon, particularly if AI itself continues to compress chip-development timeline cycles.
3. Figure AI Unveils Index, The Largest And Most Diverse Robot Dataset In The World By: Daniel Maguire, ACA | Research Analyst, Autonomous Technology & Robotics | @DMaguireARK Last week, Figure AI came out of stealth mode with Index, a consumer app that pays people to record everyday tasks on camera, sourcing real-world physical data to train humanoid robots.[12] Over four months in stealth, the app has surpassed 264,000 downloads across 108 countries, with users uploading more than 16 million videos and earning $15 million and creating the largest and most diverse robot training dataset in the world, according to Figure AI. The company has committed more than $1 billion to data and compute over the next 12 months. Notably, to outsource the tasks, users can book Creators—a human-powered on-ramp to robots-as-a-service. The launch of Index underscores the importance of diverse real-world data, the current bottleneck for humanoid robot deployment at scale. Hardware is advancing rapidly, as demonstrated during last week’s World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, during which Chinese humanoids beat Usain Bolt's 100m world record.[13] Commercial deployments, however, remain few and far between. As a result, companies are beginning to collect data in-house: Tesla flagged its own data efforts on its latest earnings call,[14] and Unitree's CEO is allocating a large portion of proceeds from the company’s initial public offering (IPO) toward software development.[15] ARK's research suggests that humanoid robots are ~200,000X more complex than autonomous vehicles. That complexity is likely to create a ~$26 trillion total addressable market, split roughly evenly between household and manufacturing applications, as shown below.
The development of humanoid robots is still in early innings. We look forward to monitoring the pace of scaling over the coming years.
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[1] Louisiana Economic Development. 2026. “SpaceX Launches New Era of Commercial Spaceflight with $100 Billion Louisiana Campus.� [2] Ibid. See also SpaceX. 2026. “SpaceX Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results.� [3] Bureau of Economic Analysis. 2026. “GDP by State.� [4] Louisiana Economic Development. 2026. “SpaceX Launches New Era of Commercial Spaceflight with $100 Billion Louisiana Campus.� [5] OpenAI. 2026. “Jalapeño’s first results show industry-leading speed and efficiency in AI inference.� [6] Ibid. [7] Shan, B. et al. 2026. “OpenAI Jalapeño: Better Than Nvidia Blackwell.� SemiAnalysis. [8] Ibid. [9] The RTL to Tapeout process transforms a high-level Register-Transfer Level (RTL) hardware description into a final, manufacturable layout file delivered to a foundry. See ChipExpert. 2025. “From RTL to Tapeout : A Complete VLSI Flow Explained.� [10] OpenAI. 2026. “OpenAI and Broadcom unveil LLM-optimized inference chip.� [11] Broadcom. 2025. “OpenAI and Broadcom announce strategic collaboration to deploy 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed AI accelerators.� [12] FigureAI. 2026. “Introducing Index: Building The World’s Largest and Most Diverse Physical Dataset.� [13] Zhuang, Y. “2026. A Chinese Robot Beat Usain Bolt’s 100-Meter Record. Should We Be Impressed?� The New York Times. [14] Yahoo!Finance.2026. “Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Q2 FY2026 earnings call transcript.� [15] Wang, Y. 2026. “Unitree IPO Turns 36-Year-Old Founder Into China’s First Humanoid Robot Billionaire. Forbes. [16] International Federation of Robotics. 2025. “National Robot Density.� Knutsen, R. et al. 2025. “Quadruped State of The Market - Unitree, Boston Dynamics, ANYbotics, DEEP Robotics, and The Rising Application Ecosystem.� SemiAnalysis. 36Kr European Central Station 2025 2025. “Unitree Launches Listing Guidance: Favored by Capital, but Mass Production Yet to Come.�