Ida 🆗

First up: General Track. From RWAs to consumer products, the winning teams showcased a range of ideas pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with onchain products. 🥇 1st Place ($60k): @atoma_fi - Market-neutral RWA yield layer for tokenized stock perps on Arbitrum and Robinhood Chain 🥈 2nd Place ($40k): @KurtosisLabs - Layer-by-layer risk ratings for onchain yield positions 🥉 3rd Place ($20k): shared by @okcontract who is building a self-custodial control layer protecting onchain operations from internal and external threats and WageFlow who is building a programmable settlement and liquidity network for wage-linked finance.

U.S. Housing Market sales just hit the lowest level ever in September 2026. The NAR's pending sales index just fell to 66.0. Which is the worst reading ever recorded. 50% lower than the pandemic peak, 35% lower than 2019 levels, and lower than any period during the 2008-09 downturn. Homebuyers are boycotting the housing market due to excessively high prices, and mortgage rates back above 7%. Meaning the U.S. remains mired in the biggest homebuyer recession in history, and it just got worse (sales down 11% YoY). The upside here is it's now a good time to make low ball offers on houses. Especially in markets with high inventory. Track demand and supply metrics for your ZIP at: reventure.app/map/ZUwB6aBmU1

Tokenization could free up tens of billions of dollars in capital tied up in assets used as collateral across the global financial system, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman said. Tokenizing assets such as Treasurys, equities and money market funds, along with the flow of money, could make collateral "very fluid," Friedman told CNBC at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. Find out how tokenization can drive the shift towards fully 24/7 markets: cnb.cx/4hQeCyO

Tokenization could change how people and institutions buy, sell, and use financial assets, but legal, regulatory, and infrastructure barriers remain. As markets grow, policymakers will need to manage new channels of financial risk. Watch the launch event: imf.org/en/publications/gfsr…

The next theater...

$DELL SIGNS MOU WITH JERA, RHAELM FOR $15B+ JAPAN AI INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT Dell, JERA and RHAELM plan to build a standardized model for large-scale AI infrastructure in Japan, starting with a 400 MW project in Chiba. The first site is expected to exceed $15B in total investment across land, power, construction and AI compute. JERA will provide behind-the-meter power from its existing plant, RHAELM will develop and operate the site, and Dell will supply the rack-scale AI infrastructure. Apollo $APO intends to serve as RHAELM’s strategic financing partner. Operations are targeted to begin in phases in 2028 and reach the full 400 MW in 2029. The partners are also exploring additional JERA sites, with a broader goal of building multi-gigawatt AI capacity across Japan. The FT estimates the wider infrastructure push could reach roughly $140B.

🚨 GOLDMAN SACHS DROPS DOOMSDAY STATEMENT: U.S. BONDS HAVE NO BUYERS Goldman Sachs just admitted the long end of U.S. Treasury market is “totally bidless.” Translation: almost nobody wants the 10- to 30-year debt the U.S. is trying to sell. No buyers. None. Zero. While Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tells Congress we’re in an “illiquid period,” doubles then triples long-bond buybacks, taps the General Treasury Account to fund it and openly says “I am the house.” Yields are surging anyway. The 10-year has pushed toward 5.3% and the 30-year is even higher, levels not seen in years while Japan, one of the biggest foreign holders, keeps selling Treasuries and bringing money home. This was exactly warned by Japan’s @yutokanzakireal that the measures being prepared by Bank of Japan will affect the lives of billions of people and apologized to people of the West. Soon after, Scott Bessent intervened and effectively took over BoJ operations which Japanese policymakers heavily criticized. If the same ”bidless” condition hits the short-dated treasuries market, the entire U.S. debt market (and global) collapses. The U.S. debt crisis will turn into a global liquidity crisis.

G20 trade chiefs to denounce food trade coercion but not excess factory capacity reut.rs/4y467GB reut.rs/4y467GB

🚨 SCOTT BESSENT EFFECTIVELY CONFIRMS A BOND CRISIS, SAYS MARKET TOO ILLIQUID TO CONTROL Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC and said the quiet part out loud: He raised the size of U.S. Treasury buybacks because “we are in a very illiquid period. The market is moving quickly… I can’t set the equilibrium price.” This is the same man who weeks earlier told traders “I am the house now. I have asymmetric information. Bet against me if you want.” Here’s what’s actually happening. He doubled bond buybacks, then pushed toward $6 billion, liquidity-support buybacks of 10- to 30-year bonds. He went on to dump Euros and Dollars to save the yen so BoJ doesn’t dump their U.S. Treasury Holdings. Scott Bessent even warned the Fed to expand the FIMA facility to Japan or watch the treasury market bleed. The 10-year has been grinding toward 5.2%+. The 30-year just printed levels last seen in 2004. Global government bond yields are near 4%, highest since 2007. Japan’s 10-year hit highs not seen since 1996. Germany’s 10-year is at 17-year peaks. This isn’t one country. This is a synchronized long-end revolt. Japan still holds about $1.1 trillion of U.S. Treasuries, the largest foreign holder. Those holdings have been sliding for months as Tokyo’s own debt-to-GDP sits above 220% and JGB yields explode. When the world’s biggest overseas buyer starts preferring its own higher-yielding paper (or just needs the cash), the bid for U.S. duration gets thinner. That’s the illiquidity Bessent is now admitting he cannot paper over with a few billion in buybacks against hundreds of billions in new issuance and $40 trillion+ of existing debt. When the official who called himself “the house” starts saying he cannot set the equilibrium price, the market is telling you something simple: we are in a bond crisis. The most dangerous response from @yutokanzakireal: “Japan isn’t just betting against the house, it’s bringing the entire house down.” We’re now seeing that as a global debt crisis which could catastrophically turn into a global liquidity crisis if not stopped. That’s why gold exists. Not as a trade. As the asset that doesn’t require a Treasury Secretary to promise he can still control the price.

This is great. My favourite bit is the subtle dig at Altman for selling chips to China.

Anthropic by the numbers Anthropic brought in $4.6 Billion of revenue in 2025 up 12x YoY Anthropic reported an operating loss of $8.06 Billion in 2025 Anthropic is expected to go public after the November 3rd midterm elections

By now, it's amply clear that the big bosses of US frontier AI labs are really, really scared of China. And, fascinatingly, part of the answer why might be a tiny place in Inner Mongolia that you've probably never heard of: Ulanqab prefecture. Heard of it? Didn't think so. Even myself, who's traveled to Inner Mongolia twice, had never heard of it before researching this story. This is because, at first glance, this place is pretty unremarkable. Check its Wikipedia page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulanqa…) and you’ll see the only thing it’s famous for is being the birthplace of He Pingping, who briefly held the Guinness record for world’s shortest man. That’s it, that’s the list! Otherwise, it's just a sparsely populated - 1.5 million people, minuscule by Chinese standards - stretch of windswept grassland on the Mongolian plateau. Except there is one number that tells you there is more to this place that meets the eye: this tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year. And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce. In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers. So what are the Ulanqabese doing? Are they all running 10 American households' worth of appliances? Here is another number that might clue you in on the answer: over the past few years, this unremarkable prefecture has quietly signed over half a trillion yuan (and, yes, that’s trillion, with a "T") worth of investment deals from all the major Chinese tech giants. What is going on, you'll have guessed by now, is the most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth - and it's really surprising this hasn't been talked about more because the scale is beyond anything else, and by an immense margin. Take Elon Musk's so-called "Colossus" datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee which he pitches as "the world’s largest AI supercomputer." According to their own numbers (x.ai/colossus), Colossus has 200,000 chips, which, let's be clear, is already super impressive. In datacenter lingo, this converts to roughly 5000-6000 "racks": you know, the fridge-sized cabinets full of blinking lights you see in every movie scene set in a server room. How many racks are they building in Ulanqab? Over 5 million. Yes, about one thousand times the scale of "Colossus" 🤯 I tripled-checked the number: it is indeed the official number published by authoritative sources such as "Science and Technology Daily", the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology (stdaily.com/web/gdxw/2026-08…). This is an absurdly large amount of compute. What we see appearing in this Inner Mongolian steppe may be the closest thing to a world brain humanity has ever built - a place where a large share of the world's thinking will physically happen. And - as we'll see - what makes this story so fascinating is not just the scale, but why it's getting built in this particular patch of Inner Mongolian grassland which combines a number of characteristics unlike anywhere else. If you believe, as I do - and as both China and the US obviously do as well - that AI will be the defining technology of the 21st century, this makes Ulanqab one of the single most relevant geopolitical places in the world right now. The full story - the Chinese government plan Ulanqab is part of, energy prices, chips and the strategic questions this raises - is here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…

Ford rehires more than 300 human engineers after AI failed to deliver the same level of expertise.

JUST IN 🚨: Bank of Japan raises interest rate to 1% for the first time in more than 30 years

S&P 500 put volume hit a new all-time high on Friday

More than half the S&P 500's total value is now in stocks priced above 10x sales. This was once considered an outlandish valuation, as it leaves little room for error. The list includes Nvidia, Apple, GOOG, MSFT, Broadcom, Tesla, Micron, Eli Lilly, AMD, Oracle and 57 more.

Reportedly these ETFs ran out of swap capacity for leverage and started using options (hence the market skew). This sort of tracking error snafu is consistent with that, as the vol move drives the option value more than the delta move.