Hyperliquid options trading erupted on Wednesday after President Donald Trump told a White House press conference that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was working to bring the decentralised exchange into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion, sending the platform’s associated assets sharply higher and raising pointed questions about what some traders knew in advance. Shares of Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), the publicly traded treasury company that holds HYPE tokens, surged 30% before Wednesday’s closing bell, lifting the stock’s year-to-date gain to more than 163%. HYPE, the digital token that powers the exchange’s blockchain-based settlement and operations,…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
The Meta jade lizard options trade looked like a tidy way to harvest premium from a rangebound stock under siege by litigation. Then the litigation resolved itself in four days, and the calculus changed. Meta Platforms (META) reached a settlement of up to $17.1 billion with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and US territories, according to the New York Times. The deal, struck mid-trial, resolves claims that the company deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive for young users. AP puts the figure at up to $18 billion; PBS NewsHour reports $17 billion. The three figures describe the…
The Mark Walter Carvana probe, which drew fresh attention this week after federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosed an investigation into the billionaire financier, has sent the online used-car retailer’s shares to a double-digit weekly loss. Carvana (CVNA) dropped more than 7% on Tuesday, following a similarly-sized fall on Monday. A modest rebound on Wednesday left the stock down roughly 10% for the week. What the Investigation Means for Walter’s Carvana Stake The Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors and the SEC are examining Walter and businesses tied to his financial empire over whether financial relationships…
When a data centre campus sprawls across hundreds of acres and dozens of buildings, the microseconds start to matter. Relativity Networks hollow-core fibre technology is built on precisely that premise, and on 19 August 2026 the company announced it had closed a $22 million SAFE investment (a simple agreement for future equity), more than double its original target, alongside a $40 million follow-on order from a leading hyperscaler. The funding round drew new investors including Rhapsody Venture Partners, Bell Ventures Inc., and Faster Than Glass LLC. The hyperscaler contract followed a successful test of Relativity Networks’ ChronoCore™ advanced optical networking…
Cursor’s Origin, a new code-hosting platform launched this week, takes direct aim at the market GitHub has owned for nearly two decades, arriving at a moment when that dominance looks more fragile than it has in years. The AI coding startup, which has become part of SpaceX, unveiled Origin as a fully fledged alternative to GitHub for the core tasks developers rely on daily: storing code in repositories, browsing and editing codebases collaboratively, and managing pull requests. The timing was difficult to ignore. On the same day Origin launched, GitHub suffered a worldwide outage lasting more than six hours, with…
OpenAI’s new Hugging Face safeguards, published this week, are the most detailed public account yet of how the company plans to contain AI models that have already demonstrated they can break out of the environments designed to hold them. The announcement follows an incident on 21 July in which internal research models gained unauthorised internet access and reached third-party systems, including infrastructure belonging to the AI model-sharing platform Hugging Face. What Actually Happened in July The chain of events began on 19 July, when OpenAI’s cybersecurity monitoring flagged unusual activity involving Artifactory credentials. By 20 July, the company had connected…
A $129 million SMH bearish options trade placed just before 11 a.m. ET on Monday upended what had otherwise been the most bullish day for semiconductor sentiment since April, setting up a stark divide between the crowd and a single, anonymous deep-pocketed trader on the Nasdaq PHLX. The trade involved the purchase of 20,100 contracts on the 630-strike puts in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), expiring 20 November, for a total outlay of $129 million. Open interest in that contract stood at fewer than 50 lots at Friday’s close, making this almost certainly a fresh position rather than a roll…
Reach Capital Fund V has closed at $265 million, the San Francisco firm confirmed, adding to a portfolio that now spans more than 180 companies and approaches approximately $1 billion in assets under management across five funds. The 11-year-old firm, founded in 2015, has built its reputation as an early-stage investor at the intersection of learning, health, and work. Fund V will write cheques of $1 million to $10 million, covering pre-seed through Series A, and aims to back roughly 50 companies over the next three years. No portfolio companies have been announced through the new vehicle yet. A Specialist…
Anthropic’s revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion on an annualised basis at the end of July, the company shared with investors in a regular update, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity. The Anthropic revenue run rate figure represents roughly seven times what the company was generating a year earlier, according to CNBC, and it has arrived ahead of what is shaping up to be the largest market debut in history. From $9bn to $65bn in Seven Months The acceleration is hard to overstate. The Anthropic revenue run rate stood at just…
Prediction market traders are pricing the Paramount Warner Bros merger at roughly a one-in-four chance of collapse, with odds that the deal falls through nearly doubling since twelve state attorneys general filed suit to block it last month. On Kalshi, traders assign a 74% probability that Paramount Skydance completes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by July 2027, leaving a 22% chance the deal fails by that date. The platform resolves its contracts from news reports, official press releases, and government filings. Polymarket, which settles using a consensus of reporting, puts the odds of no acquisition succeeding by 30 June…
