GM, frens! ☕️

There's an old Zen saying that goes: "no mud, no lotus" i.e the lotus only grows because it starts in the mud, not in spite of it.

The conditions we wish had never existed often become the reason we're stronger later. Remove every failure, every disappointment and every difficult chapter and you rarely end up with a better story.

The lotus doesn't bloom despite the mud. The mud is part of the recipe.

And here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• 🤖 AI vs crypto, or AI + crypto?

• 📱 Ambire mobile app: full live demo

• 🪶 Robinhood Chain tops RWA holder rankings in its first month

• 🤪 Someone sent $5,000 to Satoshi’s untouched wallets

• 🔫 Myanmar adds the death penalty to its new crypto scam law

Bring your own take to our Discord 🤠 

AI vs crypto, or AI + crypto?

Crypto companies used to add “blockchain” to whatever they were doing. Now some of the same companies are deleting it and adding “AI” which is a lovely demonstration of conviction surviving exactly until the next big thing 🙄 

And it’s true that for some those moves make economic sense.

• If you take crypto miners, the guys that already control large power connections and data centers with powerful hardware, all of which the AI industry is currently trying to inhale.

• One good example is Core Scientific, that has agreed to provide AMD with 500 megawatts of AI capacity from 2027, with the deal able to expand as far as 2.5 gigawatts ⚡️ 

• At that physical level, AI and crypto genuinely compete. A megawatt used for model training cannot mine crypto at the same time, and suitable power connections are limited 🤷‍♂️ 

But the argument becomes much weaker when applied to the technologies themselves. AI can analyze information, make decisions and carry out tasks, but increasingly capable agents will also need ways to hold money, pay for services and prove what they did.

Cards and regular payment systems can be adapted for agents, and they will remain useful where refunds and consumer protections matter.

• Payments between machines create a different problem. An agent buying an API call, paying for data or settling thousands of tiny transactions needs something programmable, global and available around the clock. And preferably something that you could spin up quickly and start using right away

• Crypto stablecoins already fit much of that description. They can move between wallets without requiring every agent to establish a banking relationship or sign any papers in each country where it operates, while smart contracts can control what an agent may spend and under which conditions 🧠 

The supporting technology is also moving beyond conference slides.

A good example is Coinbase’s x402 protocol that lets a website or API request payment directly through HTTP: an agent receives a payment request, sends stablecoins and retries.

Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol supports automated transactions through cards, regular currencies and stablecoins, while Google has also connected its agent payment work with x402. And that’s just a couple of protocols that come to mind that integrate with crypto and have real volume. More are constantly being implemented 💰️ 

+ A lot (if not most) of useful dApps have an implementation of an MCP server running to support that to some degree, from simple API calls by AI to direct control of users operations 🤖 

So plenty of companies are preparing for AI and crypto to work together, while parts of the market remain determined to stage a fight between them.

• Brian Armstrong recently also pushed back on crypto firms abandoning their original work to chase AI, calling that mentality “zero sum, scarcity thinking” 🤔 

• Coinbase CEO has argued that crypto can sit underneath AI as financial infrastructure. In his version, AI supplies the intelligence while programmable money lets agents trade, pay for services and transact with one another 🤖 

Armstrong calls the resulting category Agentic Finance, or AiFi. Coinbase is backing the idea with Base, USDC and x402, hoping to provide the network, currency and payment standard used by autonomous software.

Yeah many could say, “the man selling the payment infrastructure has concluded that the next generation of software desperately needs his payment infrastructure” - it’s convenient for the guy, but the underlying case is still solid 🧠 

Coinbase has hardly rejected AI itself. The company cut 14% of its staff as part of becoming more “AI native” and has pushed AI deeper into its internal work. Armstrong’s argument is less about protecting crypto from automation and more about keeping crypto as the financial layer underneath it. AI can change how Coinbase operates without requiring Coinbase to pretend blockchains were a youthful misunderstanding 😐️ 

There are other useful combinations. AI can inspect contracts, detect suspicious transactions, explain complicated wallet actions and help users manage positions, etc. Crypto can give software agents open payments, verifiable ownership and a public record of what they executed. Agents could also buy data, computing power and digital services from one another without every transaction passing through the same platform company.

As always with new tech, a lot of things can go wrong, but the upside is infinitely bigger and better 🤔 

Ambire mobile app full live demo

Ambire demoed the complete wallet mobile app in front of an audience for the first time rather than presenting a few polished screens.

Users can expect the same feature set already available in the Ambire extension, carried over to mobile instead of being reduced to a skinny companion that sends everyone back to desktop whenever they try to do something interesting 📱 

Testing is already underway, and some community members have access to the app now. Anyone interested in joining the early group can head to Ambire’s community channels, where testing access can be requested 🔓️ 

A wider beta program is also coming. It will bring more users into the app, collect feedback across more devices and help catch the irritating little problems that only appear once software leaves the hands of the people who built it.

The app is still being tested, but it is past the stage of promises and static previews. It has been used in public, its core features are in place and the next step is getting it into more hands before the full release 👀 

Robinhood Chain tops RWA holder rankings in its first month

Less than a month after the launch, Robinhood Chain already has a record to wave around, although the leaderboard is considerably more flattering than the dollar figures (- more about that later).

• Robinhood Chain has reached 328,039 RWA holders within four weeks of its July 1 mainnet launch.

• That pushed it past Solana, which had a little over 312,000, as well as Plume, Ethereum and BNB Chain. By holder count, Robinhood now sits at the top of the RWA market 💵 

If the story ended there, you’d think Robinhood had swallowed the entire RWA industry before anyone finished writing the launch recap. The amount of money involved provides the necessary window back to reality 👇️ 

TVL

Robinhood Chain held about $24.1 million in distributed RWA value when the ranking was recorded. Ethereum has more than $17 billion. So while Robinhood has the most holders, Ethereum still holds several hundred times more capital 💰️ 

The holder count measures how widely assets have been distributed, while big TVL shows where the “serious” money lives. A chain can win the first category by placing small positions into hundreds of thousands of wallets, even while another chain holds billions across fewer addresses. Both numbers are important in their own right, but Robinhood’s one is impressive - this being just the first month, especially in a current market.

Robinhood’s real achievement is distribution, which crypto projects routinely underestimate. Because our industry is an echo chamber more or less, recycling the same users through points programs, incentives, some occasional animal mascots, etc, so in this case it helps that Robinhood began with millions of brokerage customers (and alot of those who wanted to try crypto but needed a company they trusted) already logged in 🤷‍♂️ 

Those people understands Apple, Nvidia and the S&P 500 and Robinhood doesn’t really need to convince them that these companies exist or that stock exposure might be useful. It only needs to sell the different format and the ability to move those products through an onchain environment 💻️ 

And another thing worthy of note - the stock tokens on Robinhood still need a large asterisk of their own:

• Holders receive economic exposure to the shares and ETFs being tracked, but they do not directly own the underlying securities. The products are tokenized debt instruments issued by a Robinhood entity, meaning the user still depends on the issuer behind the token.

• That distinction affects shareholder protections and what happens if something goes wrong at the company level. It’s not decentralized. Putting an asset onchain makes it transferable and easier to connect with crypto apps but it does not always translate an onchain IOU from a company into a share certificate through the healing power of a blockchain 🙃 

The first month has not been devoted exclusively to respectable finance, naturally. Memecoins have generated most of the chain’s DEX volume, while stablecoins have grown to several hundred million dollars 🐸 

That contrast does not erase the RWA numbers. Robinhood has shown how quickly an established financial app can distribute tokenized assets when it brings an existing audience along. The next test is whether those hundreds of thousands of holders turn into meaningful capital and regular activity ⌚️ 

Someone sent $5,000 to Satoshi’s untouched wallets

Bitcoin gives everyone complete control over their money, including the freedom to send it into the world’s most closely watched unanswered inbox 🥶 

Over two days, an unknown Revolut user, or possibly several users, transferred more than $5,000 in BTC to addresses linked to Satoshi Nakamoto. The payments began with tiny test transactions worth only a few cents before a larger transfer of 0.033 BTC, valued at roughly $2,170 at the time, completed the sequence 🤔 

The BTC came from Revolut’s shared hot wallet. Onchain trackers can identify the service that processed the withdrawals, but not the customer behind them. The blockchain remains transparent right up to the point where Revolut’s internal accounting begins.

• The receiving addresses are associated with the Patoshi pattern, a group of early mining addresses widely believed to belong to Bitcoin’s creator. Researchers identified the cluster by studying the way blocks were mined during Bitcoin’s first years.

• The connection is widely accepted, although Satoshi never signed a message confirming ownership and has been unavailable for comment for roughly the entire history of crypto media.

• Those addresses are estimated to hold around 1.1 million BTC. At Bitcoin’s recent price of roughly $64,000, the fortune is worth about $71 billion. During stronger periods it has crossed $100 billion, making the unknown creator one of the richest people on the planet despite having no confirmed identity, address or LinkedIn page explaining how humbled he is by the journey 😶 

None of the original fortune has moved in well over a decade. That inactivity has turned Satoshi’s wallets into some of the most closely watched addresses in crypto. Automated trackers follow every transaction because any outgoing movement would raise immediate questions about whether Satoshi had returned, whether someone else had obtained the keys or whether a mountain of early BTC was about to enter the market 🤷‍♂️ 

Incoming payments matter much less, but people keep making them. Some treat the addresses as a donation box for Bitcoin’s creator, which is a strange way to show gratitude to someone sitting on a theoretical $71 billion.

Others use the wallets as an expensive publicity button, knowing that any transaction involving Satoshi will be picked up by trackers and spread across crypto media.

Similar transfers have happened before. Someone sent roughly $1.2 million in BTC to Satoshi’s address in 2024. Satoshi’s wallets have accumulated a steady layer of unsolicited donations on top of the coins mined when BTC was worth almost nothing 🪙 

Myanmar adds the death penalty to its new crypto scam law

Myanmar’s famous scam compounds have managed to industrialize two kinds of misery at once. People around the world are drained through fake relationships, investment platforms and crypto schemes, while many of the workers sending those messages were themselves trafficked into guarded compounds and forced to scam others 🤯 

One victim loses savings to a friendly stranger with a miraculous investment opportunity. The other accepted what looked like a normal job and arrived somewhere that did not intend to let them leave. Sitting comfortably above both is the compound operator collecting the money.

After allowing this industry to grow into a regional monster, Myanmar’s military backed parliament has discovered that online fraud is bad and approved an Anti Online Scam Bill. The law introduces sentences ranging from 10 years in prison to life and, in the most severe cases, capital punishment 🔫 

It is the first law passed under the new government led by Min Aung Hlaing, the general behind the 2021 coup who became civilian president in April.

The law separates the underlying fraud from the violence and coercion used inside scam compounds 🥷 

• Operating a scam center or committing what the bill calls a “digital currency scam” can carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Recruiting workers, trafficking people into scam operations and other connected offenses can bring sentences ranging from 10 years to life 🤏 

• Capital punishment applies to severe cases involving violence or unlawful detention used to force people into online scam work. Under the draft text, the death penalty becomes mandatory when that abuse causes a victim’s death.

• The law also gives authorities faster control over suspected scam money. Banks can be ordered to freeze an account within 15 minutes after a complaint is verified, while suspicious accounts can remain suspended for up to 72 hours. Victims are expected to report cases within 24 hours so police can begin the formal process.

The scale of the fraud is enormous 😢 

Online scams across East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania caused an estimated $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion in losses during 2025. People from at least 80 countries have been found inside scam compounds, many after being recruited through fake job offers.

Crypto appears at several stages of the operation. Victims are shown fake balances on investment platforms and persuaded to deposit more, while the stolen funds move through wallets, exchanges and stablecoins across several countries 💰️ 

Authorities are getting better at identifying parts of this activity, but finding a wallet does not automatically reveal the people behind it or return the money. US prosecutors seized $25 million in crypto connected to scams routed through the region this month alone. That sounds impressive until it is placed beside annual losses approaching $114 billion, at which point it becomes the financial equivalent of finding a stolen hubcap 🤥 

Myanmar also has a serious credibility problem when presenting itself as the force that will finally dismantle the compounds. Many grew in border territories controlled by armed groups with political and military connections. An industry requiring guarded land, electricity, internet access, financial services and thousands of trafficked workers does not operate for years because every local authority somehow forgot to look out the window 🤪 

The US sanctioned the Karen National Army in 2025 over its alleged involvement in the scam economy and accused it of benefiting from connections to Myanmar’s military. The KNA denied involvement 🤷‍♂️ 

That makes enforcement considerably harder than arresting individual scammers. The compounds survive through protection, business relationships and officials willing to ignore them. Threatening the workers and lower-level operators with severe sentences will achieve little if the people renting out the land and providing protection remain useful to the state.

The political setting makes the law harder to take at face value. Myanmar’s parliament remains dominated by forces close to the military, while a quarter of the seats in both houses are reserved for military representatives. Min Aung Hlaing commuted existing death sentences to life imprisonment shortly after becoming president in April. Three months later, his government created new offenses carrying the same punishment. That period of mercy had a shorter run than most crypto tokens 😐️ 

Other worthy reads

“The Agentic Economy Thesis in 6 Minutes” - Jeremy Allaire:

“AI Agent Wallet Infrastructure: The Layer Behind a 700% Revenue Scale-Up” - Tiger Research

“What Happened to Fake World Assets?” - blocmates:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!