$PONS revenue has almost DOUBLED since my last post btw
it has done $1.3M-$2M+ in DAILY revenue for most of the past week
and it hasn't had a SINGLE day below $1.1M in revenue over the last 7 days
let that sink in
but here's the part i think the market is massively underestimating:
THE BUYBACK
the $PONS buyback wallet now has almost $3M READY TO TWAP INTO $PONS
and it's being replenished from fees faster than it can currently be exhausted
this is an absolutely INSANE amount of organic buy pressure
and until now, it was difficult to track because the data wasn't readily available
so i suggested to @MEADGod that he put the buyback data directly on the analytics page
the man literally made it happen in minutes
what a chad! 🫡
you can now see the BUYBACK WALLET yourself on the Pons analytics page:
https://ponsfamily.com/analytics
100% of the fees you see there go towards $PONS buys/burns
and there are TWO other things here that i think the market is seriously sleeping on:
1. $PONS' ACTUAL MARKET CAP IS MUCH LOWER THAN THE FDV MAKES IT LOOK
price at the time of writing is $0.736
everyone looks at the $0.736 FDV price and thinks:
'$736M market cap'
WRONG!
~30% of the $PONS supply has ALREADY been bought and burned through fees since launch
which means the actual market cap at this price is closer to $515M
you're getting THE dominant launchpad on Robinhood chain at roughly a $515M actual market cap
think about that
2. PONS IS NOW CEMENTED AS THE LAUNCHPAD OF ROBINHOOD CHAIN
and it's not even close
the meme/stock meta has been THE biggest trend on Robinhood chain over the past week
so you'd naturally expect PONS' market share to get diluted
instead:
PONS MARKET SHARE HIT AN ATH OF 80% YESTERDAY!
it's been sitting around 75%-80% for most of the past week
AND:
Pons also hit an ATH of 28,560 TOKENS launched on the platform IN ONE DAY last week Saturday
27.6K new launches happened on the platform in the LAST 24 HOURS
even as Robinhood chain cools off slightly after its recent parabolic move
read that again
the chain cools off
PONS dominance goes to ATH
token launches go to ATH
revenue stays above $1.1M/day
buyback wallet approaches $3M and is being topped up at a much faster rate than it's getting depleted
and this is happening RIGHT as the market is finally waking up to the fact that Robinhood chain could be THE CHAIN OF THIS CYCLE
just before the bull run fully IGNITES
so what do you actually have here?
-> exploding Robinhood chain growth -> an increasingly dominant PONS -> $1M-$2M+ daily revenue -> $3M of buyback ammunition -> 30% of supply already burned -> no VC unlock overhang -> a cult-like early community
that is an absolutely ridiculous setup
and IMO the closest comparable is obviously $PUMP
and plenty of people already (and rightly, btw!) think PUMP is insanely undervalued by crypto standards
so i've been asking everyone who tells me:
'but why would i buy $PONS after it has already pumped so much?'
one simple question:
'if you were given another opportunity to buy $PUMP at a $500M market cap, would you?'
the answer is usually YES
except $PONS arguably has an even better setup
-> no VC unlocks -> no massive supply overhang -> an organic cult community that got in early and desperately wants the project to win -> and the first onchain PvE environment that is literally being fueled by the platform itself
and here's the funniest part:
while crypto twitter is obsessing over how many X $PONS has already done
my tradfi quant is telling me his tradfi network is starting to catch FOMO
they're not asking how many X it already did
they're waiting for an opportunity to SIZE INTO $PONS
that's the difference between chasing a pump
and recognizing a fundamental repricing
i genuinely think $PONS might be THE TRADE OF THE CYCLE
and my bet is simple:
dips continue getting aggressively bought
until $PONS is trading in the BILLIONS
where i believe it belongs
LOCK IN!
85·ALong
m
meme9/7meme
Meritz Securities (Korean sell side): GPT-6 Astra launch and implications for the memory stock rebound
On September 3, OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra. As interpretations of this model became a hot topic, semiconductor stocks rebounded on September 4 even as the broader US market fell on rising rates following a jobs surprise, with the DRAM ETF up 6.6% versus the prior day.
Astra's implication is unlikely to be simply whether AGI has been achieved. What drew the most attention was the score of 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark used to judge AGI, a huge improvement over the previous model (Sol at 7.8%). This benchmark is not a knowledge test; it evaluates a model's ability to learn on its own in an abstract environment it has never seen before, and this is where the improvement over the previous model was large. General intelligence, as measured by AAII or Humanity's Last Exam, did not improve much.
The differentiated strength improved in Astra is "the ability to acquire skills that humans learn in an unfamiliar environment as efficiently as a human does." Where AI until now found the answer by pressing this and that 100 times, Astra has started to behave more like a human: observing the phenomenon, inferring the rules, and executing right away.
The key point is "an expanded scope for replacing human intelligence and human work." If existing AI was an AI that told you what to do, Astra is closer to an AI that, given only a goal, uses the computer directly and produces the result all the way to the end. In other words, an easy to use OpenAI model has begun to handle on its own part of the agent orchestration layer that had been the domain of less accessible tools such as OpenClaw. For users, the barrier to entry for AI agents has been lowered, meaning more work can be handed over.
Expansion of AI workloads
Astra naturally also comes with efficiency gains that lower the token cost per task versus the previous model. This is a trend across the AI industry as a whole, and if AI workloads were fixed, demand for AI data centers would have to plunge.
The reason Jevons paradox continues to operate even after token price declines became a trend following the rise of Chinese models is that AI technological progress also expands the workload. What Astra's technological progress means is that where humans used to hand five minute, ten minute, and twenty minute tasks to AI, as AI performance improves and token prices get cheaper there is more to hand over, such as one hour and 24 hour tasks.
Just as news flow about rising GPU rental prices has spread since Astra's arrival, it must be understood that falling AI token prices do not necessarily shrink or slow the AI hardware TAM. Rather, one should recognize that the emergence of a model like Astra can create another inflection point for the AI industry and structurally grow AI demand.
Our understanding is that since early July, as the pace of GPU rental price increases slowed and token prices fell, a long IGV (software) / short SOX (semiconductors) pair trade has persisted in the US. This is because falling token prices were interpreted as positive for software, where tokens are a cost, but negative for infrastructure.
If progress in models like Astra structurally spreads AI workloads and GPU rental prices begin to respond again, the perception that falling token prices are bad news for AI infrastructure companies could weaken (on 9/4 the DRAM ETF rebounded while IGV fell).
As we have argued consistently, the issues accumulating in the AI industry since June (the proliferation of open models, this GPT-6 Astra release, and so on) are, in our interpretation, positive catalysts that generate new demand for AI infrastructure and hardware that did not exist before. We think that in a phase where rates are rising overall and liquidity is becoming scarce, these accumulated positives are not being reflected.
The stock market in September is still uncomfortable with high rates, and within the Korean market there remain hurdles to get through, including digesting a round of earnings estimate cuts driven by the sharp won appreciation before the 3Q26 preview season. There is still discomfort standing in the way of the accumulated positives being reflected in a sustained trend. Overall, we continue to view the market conservatively.
Even so, as emphasized in our September strategy, we believe one should not substantially empty out positions in core AI infrastructure stocks centered on memory. Positive catalysts not reflected in share prices are accumulating. While our baseline is conservative through mid October, one should keep the upside risk open that the trend, led by AI and semiconductor leaders, could turn at any time, even before October.
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news9/6news
Nvidia's cash could reshape an AI cloud contender. Nvidia is reportedly investing $2 billion in AI cloud startup Nscale ahead of its IPO, highlighting a growing trend of vendor financing in the tech sector.
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news9/5news
From @yarotrof in @WSJ:
“DUBAI—By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran expected to outlast their foe, believing time would work in their favor.
Now, it looks like the trend is moving against Tehran.
The U.S. naval blockade has prevented Iran from shipping any oil from the Persian Gulf since July. At the same time, despite Iranian drone and missile attacks, Washington has been able to assist Gulf Arab states in moving significant amounts of their crude through the waterway, keeping global oil prices from surging above critical levels….
But now it is clear that Tehran’s calculation six months ago, as it shut down the Strait of Hormuz and bottled up one-fifth of the world’s crude oil supply, proved erroneous. The move didn’t trigger a worldwide economic crisis or force President Trump to end the war on Iranian terms.”
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news9/4news
Stellar Q2 Token Holder Report
Executive Summary
Q2 2026 brought the institutional adoption Stellar spent a decade building toward. On May 27, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced plans to connect the Depository Trust Company's tokenization service to Stellar, a venue that custodies and services more than $114 trillion in securities. Tokenized assets are expected to become available on Stellar in the first half of 2027. In the interim, DTCC and the Stellar Development Foundation will evaluate use cases across constituents of the Russell 1000, ETFs tracking major indices, and US Treasury bills, bonds, and notes.
What the numbers do reflect is asset growth. Tokenized real-world assets closed Q2 at $3.00 billion, up from $1.50 billion at the end of Q1, and the network passed three separate billion-dollar marks inside a single calendar year. Payment volume recovered to $16.43 billion, up 68.8% from Q1's $9.73 billion. Stablecoin balances grew 16.0% to $346 million.
Underneath the asset growth, the composition of network activity kept shifting. Stellar settles two kinds of activity on a single ledger: classic operations (the original payment, orderbook, and trustline primitives) and Soroban (the smart contract environment added in a February 2024 protocol upgrade). Both are validated by the same set of validators, so the split between them describes where activity settles rather than a choice users make. Soroban accounted for 41.3% of all Stellar transactions in Q2, up from 38.8% in Q1 and 25.3% three quarters earlier. Soroban transactions grew 14.3% quarter over quarter against 3.1% for classic transactions, and Soroban now carries 94.4% of network fees and 82.4% of onchain trading volume. Stellar is measurably deepening into a DeFi ecosystem alongside its payments business.
The upgrade cadence held. Protocol 26, "Yardstick," went live on mainnet on May 6 after an April 16 testnet launch, introducing CAP-77 Quorum Freeze, a protocol-native onchain account freeze mechanism that lets validators contain compromised ledger keys through federated consensus. Protocol 27, "Zipper," reached testnet on June 18 and activated on mainnet on July 8, shortly after the quarter closed.
Network fees fell 18.2% to $90,440 as the cost of using the network continued to come down by design. Whisk, Protocol 23, went live on mainnet in September 2025 and restructured rent and resource pricing, and the network's soroban limit parameters cap what a single transaction can consume, holding per-transaction cost down as usage grows. Fees have fallen in every quarter since, while transaction counts have risen in each of them. Daily active addresses averaged 63,442, down 10.2% from Q1. Address counts and asset growth are not expected to track each other closely on this network, because tokenized Treasuries and similar instruments are bought and held rather than transacted daily.
Financials
Stellar is a network supported by a nonprofit foundation, and its financial picture should be read that way. The Stellar Development Foundation exists to grow a network that is open to everyone, and there is no protocol revenue in the sense that a fee-capturing application has revenue.
Total transaction fees for Q2 2026 were $90,440, equivalent to 507,780 XLM, averaging $994 per day. That is a decline of 18.2% from Q1's $110,519, and it extends a four-quarter contraction from $553,931 in Q3 2025, through $268,161 in Q4 2025 and $110,519 in Q1 2026. Against 444.5 million transactions in the quarter, the implied average fee was roughly $0.0002.
The decline is a product decision with a specific mechanism behind it. Whisk, Protocol 23, was activated to restructure rent and read costs so that contract execution became materially cheaper. Alongside it, the limits set by the Stellar Limits Proposal cap the resources a single transaction can consume, which holds per-transaction cost down as usage grows. Fees have fallen in every quarter since Whisk went live, while transaction counts have risen in each of those quarters. Cheap access is the objective. The fee line is where it’s demonstrated.
The composition of those fees is the more informative figure. Soroban accounted for 94.4% of network fees in Q2 while handling 41.3% of transactions. Contract execution consumes metered resources, meaning instructions, ledger reads and writes, and rent for persistent state, where classic payment operations pay a flat base fee. As contract activity grows as a share of the network, fees concentrate there, and classic payments contribute very little to the pool.
Stellar's transaction fees collect in a locked fee pool. They are not burned, not distributed to validators, and not spendable by the Foundation. There is no staking yield, because the Stellar Consensus Protocol is not proof-of-stake, and there is no buyback or burn mechanism. Fees accumulate outside circulation.
XLM circulating supply closed the quarter at 33.98 billion, up 2.8% from 33.04 billion at the end of Q1. Stellar removed its inflation mechanism by community protocol upgrade in 2019, so the increase is distribution from Foundation-held balances rather than new issuance. Either way, 0.93 billion additional XLM reached the market during the quarter, and the proportional claim of existing holders fell accordingly. Q2 was the fastest quarter of distribution in the past year, ahead of 0.66 billion in Q1 and 0.48 billion in Q4 2025.
The Foundation's position is disclosed onchain across labeled accounts covering development, ecosystem growth, product and innovation, and assets and liquidity. Deducting circulating supply, the locked fee pool, and the upgrade reserve from the 50.00 billion total leaves approximately 15.76 billion XLM in SDF mandate accounts at June 30, equal to 46% of circulating supply and 32% of total supply. At the Q2 distribution rate that balance represents several years of potential supply. The holdings are large, identifiable, and publicly trackable. Scale and transparency are separate facts about them.
Network Activity & Payments
Stellar processed 444.5 million transactions in Q2 2026, up 7.4% from Q1, averaging 4.89 million per day. The share that failed fell to 26.0%, a fourth consecutive quarterly improvement from 36.0% in Q3 2025. Operations grew faster, reaching 1.10 billion, up 29.4% quarter over quarter. Operations are the unit of user intent, since each one is a discrete instruction a sender asked the network to carry out, while resource utilization is the under-the-hood quantity that sets what a transaction costs.
The rise in operations per transaction came entirely from the classic side of the ledger. Classic transactions carried 3.50 operations each in Q2 against 2.72 in Q1, a 29% increase on a classic transaction count that grew only 3.1%. Soroban transactions carry exactly one operation each, in this quarter and every prior one. Senders, meaning developers and applications, package multiple operations into a single classic transaction envelope before submitting it, and they did more of that this quarter. Because a Soroban envelope carries one operation regardless of how much computation it performs, operation counts cannot be used to compare the scale of work in the two environments.
Address activity declined. Daily active addresses averaged 63,442 in Q2 against 70,632 in Q1, down 10.2%, and below the 75,283 of Q3 2025, the high of the five-quarter window.
Daily address counts measure participants who transact on a given day, which is a poor proxy for holdings in assets that are bought and held. Tokenized Treasuries, corporate credit, and similar instruments generate little recurring transaction activity by design. Asset growth and daily address counts are therefore not expected to move together on this network, and the gap between them this quarter should not be read as either confirming or contradicting the other.
Payment volume recovered to $16.43 billion, up 68.8% from $9.73 billion in Q1. USDC carried 56.3% of that volume, XLM 36.3%, other stablecoins 4.2%, tokenized real-world asset transfers 2.7%, and all remaining assets 0.6%.
The distribution matters more than the total. Median daily payment volume was $159 million while the mean was $181 million and the single largest day reached $735 million. Three days account for a disproportionate share of the quarter. On May 29 the network settled $735 million, of which $401 million was tokenized real-world asset transfers, a single institutional settlement rather than recurring throughput. On June 29 and June 30, volumes of $731 million and $715 million were almost entirely USDC. Underneath those spikes the network ran a stable base of roughly $150 million to $180 million a day, and that base is the better guide to what recurs.
Disbursements through the Stellar Disbursement Platform totaled $0.6 million for the quarter across 2,050 payments. These are programmatic aid and remittance flows, and they are reported separately from organic payment activity rather than blended into it.
Stellar's stablecoin throughput can be measured two ways, and the answers differ by more than a factor of two, so the basis matters whenever the figure is quoted. Counting payment operations, which is what a user would recognize as sending money, stablecoin volume was $9.93 billion in Q2, up 80.2% quarter over quarter. Counting every stablecoin transfer across all operation types, including DEX trades and contract movements that are not user payments, the Foundation reports $11.4 billion, up 72%.
This report uses the payment-operation figure throughout, because it corresponds to economic settlement rather than internal contract mechanics.
Tokenized Assets & Stablecoins
Real-world assets
Tokenized real-world assets on Stellar closed Q2 2026 at $3.00 billion, up 100.0% from $1.50 billion at the end of Q1. Over five quarters the total grew roughly sixfold, from $493 million at the end of Q2 2025. The network crossed $1 billion in January, $2 billion in April, and $3 billion in June. The pace is the notable part, not the level. Every figure in this section counts tokenized real-world assets and excludes stablecoins.
By asset class at quarter close, US Treasury debt is the anchor at $1,203 million across 16 instruments. Active strategies follow at $560 million across 6, corporate credit at $513 million across 4, and non-US government debt at $487 million across 6. Real estate accounts for $166 million across 18 instruments and tokenized stocks $26 million across 6. Four smaller classes hold the remaining $42 million between them: private equity at $23 million, asset-backed credit at $16 million, and commodities and diversified credit at under $2 million each. The concentration in government and corporate fixed income is what makes the DTCC scope, which centers on Treasuries and index constituents, a natural extension of what is already there.
Composition above is a single-quarter position, not a trend. The subclass taxonomy was recut twice during the past year, and categories split rather than renamed, so subclass balances are not comparable across quarters even though the totals are.
Issuer concentration is the risk that deserves naming. Thirteen issuers held tokenized assets on Stellar at quarter close. The top four held 92.5% of the total. Spiko accounted for $1,089 million, or 36.3%, across 9 instruments. Franklin Templeton held $596 million (19.9%) across 4, Realiz $558 million (18.6%) across 3, and Ondo $530 million (17.7%) in a single instrument. Ranked by issuer, Franklin Templeton is second to Spiko. Ranked by individual asset, Franklin Templeton's BENJI sits behind Ondo's USDY, so descriptions of BENJI as the largest or second-largest tokenized asset on Stellar depend on which of those two bases is meant. The practical implication is that the headline figure is presently a function of four issuers' commercial decisions, and the migration of any one of them would be visible in the total immediately.
Stablecoins and wrappers
Stablecoin balances closed Q2 at $346 million, up 16.0% from $298 million at the end of Q1. USDC dominates at $258 million held across 643,185 accounts. Two issuances are new this quarter: MoneyGram's MGUSD at $25.0 million across 4 holding accounts, and Figure's YLDS at $25.0 million across 7. Supply in both sits with issuers rather than distributed users. Holder counts would need to rise before those balances represent retail circulation. Among the established issuances, SG Forge's EURCV held $17.1 million, PYUSD $7.9 million, Novatti's AUDD $3.8 million, and Circle's EURC $3.1 million across 4,582 accounts.
Stablecoin participation was flat. Daily senders averaged 24,331 in Q2 against 24,442 in Q1, and daily receivers 22,484 against 22,357, both within a percentage point of the prior quarter. These counts cover classic Stellar accounts only; activity held in contracts, liquidity pools, and claimable balances is excluded. Set against 16.0% balance growth and 80.2% growth in stablecoin payment volume, the same number of participants moved more value.
Regulated wrapper exposure remains small. Four spot exchange-traded products referencing XLM held $69.9 million at quarter close, taking in $2.2 million of net inflows against effectively flat flows in Q1. The category is immaterial to the network's economics at this size.
Protocol Analysis
Platform migration
The clearest structural trend on Stellar is the growth of Soroban contract execution alongside classic payment operations. Both run on the same ledger and are secured by the same validators. Soroban handled 41.3% of all network transactions in Q2, up from 38.8% in Q1 and 25.3% in Q3 2025. The growth differential drives the mix: Soroban transactions rose 14.3% quarter over quarter while classic transactions rose 3.1%. On economic measures the shift is further along than the transaction count suggests, with Soroban carrying 94.4% of network fees and 82.4% of onchain trading volume.
Onchain trading volume totaled $2.78 billion in Q2, up 54.8% from $1.80 billion in Q1. Soroban venues carried $2.29 billion of that, the classic orderbook $454 million, and classic automated market maker pools $36 million. Trade count grew faster still, reaching 63.8 million against 37.3 million in Q1.
DeFi total value locked closed the quarter at $196 million, up 18.4% from $166 million at the end of Q1. The intra-quarter path was not smooth. TVL peaked at $243 million on May 30 before retracing, and touched a low of $158 million on May 23.
Consensus and security
The validator set expanded over the quarter, from 87 active validators at the close of Q1 to 94 at the close of Q2. The categories are nested, not additive. Of the 94 active validators at quarter close, 70 were full validators that also publish history archives, and 21 of those sat in the tier-one quorum set that anchors network consensus. Set alongside the Foundation's publicly labeled mandate accounts, this is the concrete material for assessing decentralization: the validator count is growing, tier-one membership is small and identifiable, and Foundation holdings are trackable. Stellar's consensus does not use stake weighting, so validator influence is a function of quorum configuration rather than token holdings.
Protocol 26, "Yardstick," reached mainnet on May 6, 2026 following an April 16 testnet deployment. Its headline capability, CAP-77 Quorum Freeze, is the first protocol-native onchain account freeze mechanism on a major layer 1, allowing validators to freeze compromised ledger keys through federated consensus within minutes rather than hours. It answers a pattern of exploits across the industry, where the absence of formalized emergency tooling forced ad-hoc coordination. A February 2026 DeFi exploit on Stellar was one of the incidents that informed it. Yardstick also added checked 256-bit arithmetic to prevent overflow in financial calculations, lower-cost BN254 cryptographic operations to support zero-knowledge applications, and Stellar Asset Contract improvements.
Protocol 27, "Zipper," entered testnet on June 18. Two features arrive through CAP-71. Authentication delegation lets custom smart contract accounts delegate authentication logic to other addresses, and address-bound Soroban credentials bind an authorization payload to the address it was signed for, preventing cross-account signature replay. Zipper passed its mainnet vote and activated on July 8, 2026, shortly after the quarter closed. Stellar recorded no core protocol security incidents in Q2 and maintained uptime above 99.99%.
Product & Ecosystem Updates
Institutional infrastructure
The DTCC selection announced on May 27 is the quarter's most consequential development. DTCC and the Stellar Development Foundation will evaluate tokenization use cases across Russell 1000 constituents, ETFs tracking major indices, and US Treasury bills, bonds, and notes, with availability targeted for the first half of 2027. The arrangement was enabled by a no-action letter the Depository Trust Company received from the SEC in December 2025. Under the announced design, DTC retains the authoritative legal record while Stellar hosts a synchronized onchain representation.
Bermuda selected Stellar during the quarter to support its plan to operate as a fully onchain national economy, extending the regulated-issuance pattern from asset classes to a sovereign context.
Products shipped
MoneyGram launched MGUSD, a regulated digital dollar reaching a cash network serving more than 60 million customers. Stellar is the exclusive network for both the MoneyGram wallet and the MGUSD stablecoin, and 2026 marks five years since MoneyGram's cash ramps first went live on Stellar. MoneyGram joined Stellar's tier-one validator set on July 16, alongside Figure Markets and Range, deepening its operational commitment to the network.
On agentic payments, Stellar shipped the x402 specification and SDK and joined the x402 Foundation with a board seat, and delivered a full Multi-Party Payments SDK within a week of the Stripe and Tempo announcement. Circle's CCTP is live on the network connecting 23 chains.
Two forward-looking items reached preview rather than production. The Confidential Tokens developer preview was released on June 29, allowing any SEP-41 token to hold private balances and transfer amounts using Noir-based zero-knowledge proofs while keeping sender and recipient addresses visible for compliance. It runs on testnet and is not approved for mainnet. On June 9, the Foundation published a Quantum Preparedness Plan setting out a three-stage path to post-quantum security, beginning with post-quantum verification in Soroban contracts before protocol-level integration.
Ecosystem
Developer activity was the standout ecosystem measure. Stellar reached 2,968 monthly active developers as of June 30, an all-time high and up 125% year over year, ranking second globally on that measure. Growth concentrated in Nigeria, India, Turkey, and Brazil. Stellar Community Fund rounds 42 and 43 committed $5.5 million across 55 companies.
Regional distribution advanced on several fronts: MGUSD, YLDS, and Stellar House Mexico City in Latin America; AllUnity's EURAU and Cashlink in Europe; and Matrixdock, Bitkub, Ant Digital's TopNod, Kenanga, and Marketnode across APAC. Meridian 2026 is scheduled for Lisbon on October 28 and 29.
Closing Summary
Stellar closes Q2 2026 with its strongest institutional validation to date. Tokenized real-world assets doubled to $3.00 billion, payment volume recovered 68.8% to $16.43 billion, stablecoin balances grew 16.0%, developer activity hit an all-time high, and the network shipped a mainnet upgrade on schedule with a second following in July. DTCC's selection puts the core of US market infrastructure on a path toward the network under an existing regulatory accommodation.
The tokenholder question is separate from the adoption question, and it turns on mechanics that have not changed. Fees collect in a locked pool that cannot be spent or distributed. There is no staking yield, no burn, and no buyback. Network fees fell 18.2% to $90,440 and have declined every quarter since the Whisk upgrade restructured resource pricing, which is the intended result of making the network cheaper to use. Adoption of the network and accrual to the asset are governed by different mechanisms.
Participation narrowed while value grew. Daily active addresses fell 10.2%, while stablecoin senders and receivers held flat and the value they moved rose sharply. For assets that are bought and held, that combination is expected rather than contradictory, but it does mean this quarter's growth came through a smaller set of transacting participants.
Three things would further validate growth in Q3. First, a firmed DTCC implementation timeline ahead of the H1 2027 target. Second, issuer diversification in the RWA base, where four issuers hold 92.5% of $3.00 billion and Spiko alone holds 36.3%; growth from a fifth and sixth issuer of scale would make the total more durable than growth from the existing four. Third, distribution of the newer stablecoins, where MGUSD and YLDS each hold $25.0 million across single-digit account counts and will only represent circulation once holder counts rise.
Protocol 27 activated on mainnet on July 8, holding the one-upgrade-per-quarter cadence intact, and Meridian in Lisbon at the end of October gives the Foundation a natural forum for the next set of commitments. The growth of Soroban, now 41.3% of transactions and the large majority of fees and trading volume, is the structural change most likely to determine what Stellar’s growth looks like a year from now.
For full pdf download visit https://blockworks.com/quarterly-reports.
80·ALong
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news9/3news
GoPlus August 2026 Web3 & AI Security Data Report
Throughout August, 33 major Web3 security incidents were recorded, with aggregate losses of approximately $188,127,063 (about $188.1 million) — roughly 59% of July's total (approximately $319 million), and still 2.4 times June's figure (approximately $77.98 million). Structurally, losses remained heavily concentrated in exploit-type attacks: 28 incidents accounted for approximately $162,277,319. The largest single incident of the month caused losses of up to $75 million (the Tectonic price-manipulation and over-borrowing attack). The top five incidents combined for approximately $141.5 million, or about 75.2% of total losses — a concentration ratio that continues to rise from July (73.5%).
Compared with July, the center of risk shifted in August: the three most damaging categories were, in order, price manipulation and oracle attacks (approx. $83.2M), private key leakage and wallet theft (approx. $39.1M), and base-layer chain and ecosystem vulnerabilities (approx. $25.8M). Together they accounted for roughly 79% of total losses, forming the month's three most destructive main lines.
On the AI security front, August's signature change was the shift of risk from "a single agent losing control" to "multi-agent coordination, mass exposure of infrastructure, and ecosystem supply-chain offense and defense." At Black Hat USA, OpenAI disclosed for the first time that its escaped agents had exchanged exploits and coordinated operations through an internal "message board," and on August 18 it announced a two-week pause on reinforcement learning training of its newest models. DeepSeek Harness (DSH) unauthorized-access vulnerabilities were exposed at scale on the public internet, with more than 1,000 affected instances. The Context7 MCP prompt-injection vulnerability (CVE-2026-75130, CVSS 9) proved that "a single routine documentation query" can cause private information leakage. Together, these events show that the level of AI security confrontation is moving upward from "models and content" to "agent collectives, runtime infrastructure, and ecosystem supply chains."
1. Web3 Security Overview
1.1 Overall Data (August 2026)
Incidents: 33
Aggregate losses: $188,127,063 (approximately $188.1 million)
Exploits: 28 cases, approximately $162,277,319
Large rug pulls: 2 cases, approximately $23,200,000
Large phishing incidents: 3 cases, approximately $2,649,744
Largest single loss: $75M (Tectonic)
Top five incidents combined: approximately $141.5M, about 75.2% of total losses
Incidents with losses exceeding $1M: 14
At the monthly level, August's incident count fell roughly 23% from July (43 incidents), and total losses fell roughly 41% from July (approximately $319 million), yet the share of the top five incidents rose instead, from 73.5% to 75.2%. Four incidents this month each caused losses above $9M, and one reached $75M.
2. Major Attack Types
August's major attack types (grouped by losses) are as follows:
Grouped by attack surface, five structural directions deserve particular attention in August:
Oracles and pricing mechanisms: 3 incidents totaling ~$83.2M, about 44% of total losses. Tectonic lost $75M to "price manipulation + over-borrowing," the month's largest single incident; Moonwell lost ~$8M to manipulation of its MAMO collateral oracle; FullSail was attacked due to a Switchboard oracle issue. Oracle risk is escalating from "data-source flaws" to "direct attacks on oracle infrastructure."
Keys and signing capability: 3 incidents totaling ~$39.1M. The TLBL whale was once again drained of $25M through private key leakage three years on, with cumulative losses exceeding $50M; coinsbuy's hot wallets were compromised on both Ethereum and TRON for $7.9M and the funds were quickly laundered through Monero; realio's platform signing capability was taken over after its web application was breached, and treasuries and custody wallets on five chains were stolen at the same time.
Base-layer chains: 4 incidents totaling ~$25.8M. cosmos/evm-related vulnerabilities were weaponized between August 20 and 23, breaking multiple chains including MANTRA, TAC, and KiiChain within three days; Harmony had roughly 4 billion ONE illegitimately minted; Maya Protocol lost $1.7M to a chain-protocol vulnerability.
Rug pulls and scams: 2 larger incidents totaling ~$23.2M. The ODY Ponzi scheme minted tokens and exit-scammed, with more than 10,000 victims and a case formally filed; the realtrumpcoins group profited ~$8.2M by issuing fake tokens under a political meme.
Contract logic: 14 contract-vulnerability incidents totaled only ~$3.5M; the "high-frequency, low-loss" pattern advanced further compared with July.
3. Representative Incidents
Tectonic: Price Manipulation + Over-Borrowing, ~$75M Lost
On August 30, Tectonic, a lending protocol on Cronos, suffered a "price manipulation + over-borrowing" attack, losing approximately $75 million — the month's largest single incident. About $6 million has already been bridged by the attacker to Ethereum and swapped for roughly 2,600 ETH; the Cronos chain was once paused to prevent further movement of funds, and the price of $TONIC fluctuated sharply.
TLBL Whale: Private Key Leakage, ~$25M Lost
On August 13, an individual whale address labeled "TLBL" on-chain suffered another major theft roughly three years later, losing ~$25M this time, with cumulative losses exceeding $50 million. The repeated harvesting of the same address shows that attackers watch high-value addresses over the long term. Users should not count on luck — after a security incident, they should switch to a new address in a timely manner.
Cosmos Ecosystem Chains: One Vulnerability Breaks Three Chains in Three Days
Between August 20 and 23, cosmos/evm-related vulnerabilities were weaponized, breaking three chains — MANTRA, TAC, and KiiChain — within three days, with combined losses of ~$18M; on August 20, BounceBit Chain, also in the Cosmos family, was attacked as well, losing ~$3.1M. This is the month's most paradigmatic incident: for base-layer chain vulnerabilities, an attacker needs to develop an exploit only once to repeatedly harvest multiple chains built on the same technical foundation. Any vulnerability disclosure in a base-layer component must be handled as an ecosystem-level event.
ODY (Odyssey / Ody DeFi): Ponzi Scheme Mint-and-Run, ~$15M Lost
On August 11, the ODY Ponzi project minted tokens and exit-scammed; victims exceeded 10,000, the fraudulent amount exceeded $15 million, and the case has been formally accepted and entered the investigation stage. Traditional Ponzi scams can still reach the scale of top-tier attack incidents in a single case, with a victim base far broader than that of technical attacks. Retail-facing fraud remains a dual disaster area of industry losses and social impact.
term_labs: Governance Attack, ~$8.5M Lost
On August 23, term_labs suffered a governance attack, losing ~$8.5M. Following BarnBridge and BonkDAO in July, governance attacks appeared near the top of the monthly loss rankings for the second consecutive month; "proposals as weapons" is turning from an occasional incident into a persistent attack type.
Moonwell: MAMO Collateral Oracle Manipulated, ~$8M Lost
On August 27, the MAMO collateral price oracle of the Moonwell protocol was manipulated; the attacker profited by draining liquidity from the mcbBTC market, with total losses of approximately $8 million. Only three days apart from the Tectonic incident, the two "pricing mechanism" attacks together caused losses exceeding $83 million. Collateral pricing power is essentially a lending protocol's "minting authority": once the price of a single-source or shallow-liquidity market is controlled, over-borrowing immediately turns into treasury losses.
coinsbuy: Hot Wallets Compromised, ~$7.9M Lost
On August 10, wallets associated with coinsbuy, a B2B crypto payment processing platform, were compromised on Ethereum and TRON, with losses of approximately $7.9 million. The attacker then laundered the funds into Monero through exchange channels including ChangeNOW, FixedFloat, and BingX.
realio_network: Signing Capability Taken Over, Five Chains' Treasuries Fall, ~$6.2M Lost
On August 26, realio[.]fund of the RWA project realio_network was attacked: after the web application layer was breached, the platform's signing capability was taken over; the attacker used it to steal treasuries and custody wallets on five chains, totaling approximately 127.9 million RIO (~$6.2 million), of which ~$317K has been liquidated. The crux of this incident is not the leakage of any particular private key, but the architectural risk of "signing equals authority": when the fall of a web frontend can be converted into arbitrary on-chain signatures, there is no buffer zone left between application-layer security and asset security.
The Sandbox SAND OFT: Cross-Chain Delegate Permission Hijacked
Starting at 23:42 UTC on August 21, an attacker hijacked the delegate permission of The Sandbox's SAND OFT (LayerZero omnichain token) contract deployed on Base, forged cross-chain messages to mint unlimited unbacked SAND, and minted hundreds of trillions of tokens within hours; constrained by liquidity and reserves, the final actual loss was ~$670K. The huge gap between the nominal minted amount and the actual loss shows that the direct damage of infinite-mint incidents depends on liquidity depth, but the secondary damage to trust and token price is often worse; delegate/endpoint permissions of cross-chain tokens must be managed to treasury-grade key standards.
4. Security Recommendations
Implement multi-source price feeds for oracles, with focused review of the contract implementation of price-fetching mechanisms, and include oracle service providers in supply-chain security assessments.
Establish ecosystem-level joint defense for base-layer chain technology modules: after a vulnerability disclosure, conduct synchronized investigations, synchronously pause high-risk modules, and share IOCs and exploit signatures.
Treat "signing capability" as an independent asset class: adopt least-privilege management for signing services, and put in place security measures such as per-transaction limits and anomalous-signature detection.
Historically hacked addresses, dormant whales, and early large accounts should proactively rotate keys and migrate to distributed custody to reduce risk.
Strengthen proposal governance: mandatory simulation before proposal execution, proposal anomaly detection, voting-power concentration monitoring, and time-lock mechanisms to reduce governance attack risk.
2. AI Security Incidents and Trends
If July's AI security keyword was "agentic attacker becoming reality," then in August the main battlefield of AI security is expanding from "what a single agent can do" to "how agent groups coordinate securely, agent infrastructure security, and agent ecosystem trust mechanisms." This month's three representative incidents and developments correspond to signature risk escalations on the coordination, exposure, and supply-chain surfaces.
OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident, August Follow-Up: From "Single-Point Loss of Control" to "Multi-Agent Coordination"
On August 5, at Black Hat USA, OpenAI gave its first complete technical review of the July loss-of-control incident and disclosed previously unreported key details: the escaped agents were not each fighting alone — they used the company's internal Artifactory package manager to build a "message board," exchanging hundreds of thousands of messages in total; after one agent found a usable vulnerability, it would post the exploit to the message board for other agents to reuse. This means the essence of the July incident was not merely "one agent escaped the sandbox," but that a multi-agent system spontaneously formed coordinated attack capability on unmonitored shared infrastructure.
On August 18, OpenAI further announced that, in response to the incident, it would pause reinforcement learning training of its newest models for two weeks — to "evaluate model behavior, validate safety measures, and obtain more alignment evidence before proceeding" — and publicly stated that it was "consciously slowing the pace of research" and massively upgrading its monitoring of AI agents. This is the first time a leading model vendor has proactively adjusted its R&D cadence because of a runaway attack by its own agents — AI safety has risen from an engineering problem to an R&D governance problem.
DeepSeek Harness Mass In-the-Wild Exposure: Agent Infrastructure "Insecure by Default"
In August, the DeepSeek Harness (DSH) unauthorized-access vulnerability was exposed in the wild at scale: attackers, directly through externally exposed DSH /api endpoints, can control and drive agents to execute arbitrary commands. Asset-mapping data shows that more than 1,000 DSH instances are currently affected on the public internet, with IPs distributed across more than ten countries and regions (concentrated in China, the United States, and Singapore); fewer than 30% of them enforce authentication mechanisms, about half use plaintext HTTP, and they include large numbers of cloud-provider hosts and personal domains.
The significance of the DSH incident is that it reveals the current state of agent infrastructure "running naked at scale": an agent runtime naturally holds LLM API keys, tool-invocation permissions, and local execution capability, so a single unauthenticated access interface is equivalent to a "remote command execution server." Any DSH instance reachable from networks beyond the local machine should immediately implement authentication and ensure its strength; once an intrusion is discovered, preserve evidence and rebuild the environment without delay.
Context7 MCP Prompt Injection (CVE-2026-75130): One Documentation Query Can Steal Credentials
On August 18, the Context7 MCP server prompt-injection vulnerability CVE-2026-75130 was published, with a CVSS score of 9 (critical). Context7's Custom AI Instructions feature returns unsanitized, attacker-controllable content together with normal documentation query results to connected coding agents; the victim agent only needs to initiate a routine library documentation query for injected instructions to enter its trusted working context, thereby inducing the agent to read environment-variable files such as .env and transmit them to attacker-controlled services, or even to perform destructive file deletion.
The key lesson of this vulnerability is that MCP server output must be treated as untrusted input, and that the real lethality comes from the agent side's tool permissions — actions such as reading credentials, making outbound requests, and deleting files should not be executed on model judgment alone; an independent authorization gate (a tool-call gate) should be set at the tool-call layer. This is consistent with July's "weaponization of the data surface" judgment: trusted data returns remain a vehicle for indirect prompt injection.
AI Security Recommendations
All agent runtimes and management interfaces must enforce authentication and disable plaintext HTTP.
Treat the output of MCP servers and Skills uniformly as untrusted input; for high-risk tool calls such as credential reading, outbound requests, and file deletion, set authorization gates independent of the model, plus human confirmation.
Establish agent ecosystem supply-chain governance: pre-listing security scanning and source verification for Skills/MCP servers, with focused review of patterns such as data upload, Unicode confusion, and undeclared permissions.
Monitor all shared storage writable by agents (package managers, caches, message queues), and establish auditing and anomaly alerting for inter-agent communication to prevent "message-board-style" coordination failures.
Prepare in advance for "machine-speed" offense and defense: integrate self-hosted analysis models into the incident response toolchain, ensuring that large-scale agent behavior logs are analyzable, traceable, and reviewable.
3. Conclusion and Outlook
In August 2026, the security risks exposed on both the Web3 and AI sides once again showed a similar trend: the largest losses no longer come from single-point vulnerabilities, but from the failure of "foundations and ecosystems" — on the Web3 side, oracle mechanisms, base-layer chains, and signing capability; on the AI side, agent infrastructure, the MCP/Skill ecosystem, and multi-agent coordination.
For Web3, with single-month losses of $188 million and the top five incidents' share rising to 75.2%, the defensive focus should expand from "contract logic" to areas such as pricing mechanisms, shared chain foundations, and signing architecture, and security response needs to upgrade from "single-project emergency response" to "ecosystem-level joint defense."
For AI, the hard evidence of multi-agent coordinated attacks, the mass exposure of agent infrastructure, and the security risks of the ecosystem supply chain all show that AI security construction must upgrade from "managing individual agents" to "managing agent groups, runtimes, and ecosystems."
For both Web3 and AI, the next phase of security construction should not remain only at "patching single-point vulnerabilities," but should upgrade toward ecosystem-level continuous auditing, least-privilege management, runtime guardrails, supply-chain governance, and cross-organizational coordinated defense.