Business activity picked up in April, but Americans are paying more for almost everything, and most say things are only getting worse.
The U.S. composite PMI is at 52.0 this month, a three-month high that suggests a slight recovery following a sluggish March, according to new data from S&P Global.
However, the average price of goods and services increased at its quickest rate since July 2022, a signal that should concern both consumers and legislators.
However, economists advise being cautious. Much of that growth came not from people actually buying more, but from companies rushing to stock up before prices climb further or supply chains buckle.
Surveys were filled with phrases like “panic buying” and “emergency buying,” language that points to fear, not confidence.
Services told a quieter story. The services PMI edged up to 51.3, but that is still the second-lowest reading of the past year. New orders barely grew.
Businesses and households across tourism, financial services, and other sectors are holding back spending. People are waiting to see what happens next, weighed down by geopolitical tensions and stretched budgets.
Supply chains under pressure
Supply chains are showing real strain. Delays from factory suppliers in April were the worst since August 2022.
Shipping difficulties related to continuing hostilities overseas account for a portion of that.
A portion of it stems from businesses purchasing excess inventory just to be safe, which further restricts supply and drives up costs.
The report’s pricing information is uncomfortable to read. Inflation in manufacturing products reached a ten-month high. The service sector’s price rises hit a 45-month high.
Input costs rose at their fastest rate in 11 months. Taken together, the inflation picture is getting harder to dismiss.
Regular Americans are feeling it. A new Fox poll found that 70% of respondents believe the economy is getting worse, up sharply from 55% a year ago.
Only 26% said conditions have improved. The pessimism cuts across party lines. Even among Republicans, 56% described the state of the economy as bad.
The consumer price index rose 3.3% in March, slightly above the level when he took office.
Roughly one in four Americans approves of how he is handling the cost of living. One major driver of that frustration is energy costs, pushed higher by the ongoing conflict with Iran.
That conflict is also shaping what comes next for the broader economy.
The prospect of gasoline hitting $5 a gallon is now a real concern for both the White House and the Federal Reserve.
For the Fed, the situation is getting harder to navigate.
Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global, said that if inflation keeps moving in the direction the PMI data suggests, it becomes much harder for the central bank to make a case for cutting interest rates.
The gap between what the numbers show and what people feel is hard to ignore. A manufacturing PMI of 54.0 normally signals solid growth.
However, rather than being motivated by actual customer demand, this reading is being driven by defensive actions taken by businesses to create buffers against uncertainty.
There might not be enough actual demand to sustain the trend when stockpiling eventually decreases.
For the time being, the Fed is torn between an economy that appears to be doing well and inflation that is being driven up more by fear than by growth.
Any discussion of rate cuts will remain firmly on hold until that changes.
ApeCoin (APE) price surged more than 80% on Friday to roughly $0.18, breaking out of a tight range around $0.10, drawing optimism from Yuga Labs confirmation of Michael Figge as chief executive earlier this week.
On-chain analytics firm Lookonchain flagged a newly created wallet that rotated out of ether and into a 5x leveraged long on 9.19 million APE, sitting on a $713,000 unrealized gain at the time of reporting.
Leadership Shift Reignites ApeCoin Price Rally
Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and the Otherside metaverse, promoted longtime chief product officer Figge to the top role around April 16. Co-founder Greg Solano moved to chairman of the board.
Some news to share:
After serving as CEO the past couple years, I’m moving into the role of Chairman of the Board, and @mfigge will become Yuga’s next CEO.
Figge is the absolute best person for the job. There’s no one I trust more to lead Yuga through this next chapter.
Figge has been with Yuga since 2021 and joined from a background in film, animation, and digital art. His appointment coincides with fresh ecosystem plans, including a proposed Yuga Grails over-the-counter desk for high-end NFT liquidity.
The @mfigge new @BoredApeYC playbook is one of the best I have seen in the history of the entire space. Now @apecoin up 80 % today ! Proud to see one of my best, most trusted friends literally crushing it 💪.
Data from Lookonchain shows the anonymous trader sold 75 ether worth $174,000 on Hyperliquid before opening the 5x APE position valued at $1.03 million.
The wallet has no prior transaction history, which fueled speculation about informed trading ahead of the move.
“We spotted this insider before $APE surged 80%! He is now up $713K,” Lookonchain reported.
APE had traded near $0.10 for months before Friday’s breakout, leaving it still roughly 99% below its 2022 peak. In it’s latest surge, the altcoin topped out at $0.1965, up 70% in the last hour.
It may be the beginning of the end for the global legions of C-drama fans.
iQIYI, the Chinese streaming service known for its massive library of Asian films and TV shows, is anticipating that AI will create the majority of its content in just five years, Bloomberg reports.
In an interview at iQIYI’s annual content showcase, CEO Gong Yu presented a sweeping AI vision so divorced from the company’s roots as a Netflix-style service that it has shades of Mark Zuckerberg’s aborted pivot to building an entire “Metaverse.” Per Bloomberg‘s paraphrasing of Yu’s remarks, the Beijing-based streamer plans to convert its website and video app into a “social media destination that hosts mainly AI-generated content” — content it hopes will be made using its own model.
On Monday, the service launched its Nadou Pro suite, an all-in-one AI toolkit designed to handle every aspect of filmmaking, from screenwriting to storyboards and video generation. The company says Nadou Pro has already been used to make films during internal testing, but that’s not the extent of its vision. iQIYI is also planning to release an AI-generated film this summer, one it hopes will be a genuine box office success rather than an overlooked experiment.
A version of the facelifted iQIYI app was unveiled on Monday. Striking when the iron is hot, executives hope to capture the mass appeal of OpenAI’s video generator app Sora, which unexpectedly shut down last month.
“It’s once in a decade,” Gong said of the opportunity to an audience of producers and directors at the content showcase, per Bloomberg. “We have to take the tide as it comes.”
In the meantime, iQIYI will release 16 Nadou-produced films on the platform — the opening salvo before its anticipated onslaught of AI content. iIQIYI will even pay filmmakers that use its AI tool an additional 20 percent cut of advertising and membership fees, Gong said.
iQIYI’s expansive AI vision comes amid a swell of unrest in Hollywood over how the tech could disrupt the industry, sparked by the impressive capabilities of the latest video generating models like Google’s Veo 3 and ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0. Some insiders say AI is already pervasive in the industry and others fatalistically claim that an AI takeover is inevitable, though many examples of movie-like AI footage have turned out to be misleadingly presented. There’re also nagging questions about the economic feasibility of AI video generation. Sora, OpenAI’s app that iQIYI is hoping to eat the lunch of, was reportedly losing over $1 million per day before being shut down.
It also comes during a less-than-outstanding year at the Chinese box office, with the runaway success of “Ne Zha 2,” which released on the first day of the Chinese New Year holiday in 2025, proving a tough act to follow. Domestic sales during this year’s Chinese New Year week plunged by nearly 40 percent, with one report suggesting it was the lowest figure since 2018. iQiyi’s own revenue is estimated to have fallen by 13 percent in the first quarter of this year, Bloomberg reported.
Despite a new chip challenge from Google and a billion-dollar contract loss hitting one of its key suppliers, Nvidia remains the dominant force in artificial intelligence hardware, with fresh deals in the UK, China, and the automotive sector reinforcing that position.
Wall Street research firm TD Cowen reaffirmed its buy rating on Nvidia this Thursday, brushing aside concerns raised by Google’s Wednesday announcement of new AI training and inference chips.
The firm said it continues to see Nvidia as “the market leader in terms of performance and breadth of software ecosystem.”
The endorsement came as Nvidia announced a string of new partnerships across multiple industries on the same day.
BT will provide the connectivity needed to handle rising compute demand. The project extends BT’s business platform to offer new AI services to both the private and public sectors.
Use cases include AI-powered analysis of sensitive healthcare data, as well as applications in energy, finance, and security.
On the automotive front, Nvidia and Chinese company Desay SV are set to jointly unveil a new intelligent driving solution at the Beijing Auto Show.
The system is built on Nvidia’s DRIVE AGX Thor computing platform and uses NVLink interconnect technology, which links two AGX Thor chips together.
The combined setup delivers a maximum computing power of 4,000 FP4 TFLOPS and is designed to tackle the technical challenges of building Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous vehicles, cars that can largely or fully drive themselves under specific conditions.
The system runs entirely on edge-side computing, meaning it does not rely on the cloud to function.
According to the companies, this approach improves real-time performance, data security, and overall reliability, making it suitable for both highway and urban driving.
Supply chain troubles mount
While Nvidia’s partnerships continue to grow, trouble is brewing in its supply chain. Shares of Super Micro Computer fell 10% on Thursday after reports surfaced that the company lost a major contract with Oracle for Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 server racks.
A report from research firm Bluefin said Oracle canceled an order for between 300 and 400 racks, wiping out a contract worth between $1.1 billion and $1.4 billion for Super Micro.
Bluefin, citing industry sources, said the cancellation is believed to be connected to a lawsuit against Super Micro’s co-founder over the alleged smuggling of AI graphics processors to China.
Bluefin also reported that Wistron NeWeb is believed to have taken over the racking business that Super Micro lost.
At the same time, sources within the supply chain flagged concerns about a build-up of unsold B200 GPU inventory, describing the levels as “considerable.”
The accumulation is being linked to a shift in demand.
Buyers have moved away from B200 hardware toward the newer GB200 NVL72 racks, and the contracts for those were awarded to Dell and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, not Super Micro.
As Nvidia pushes further into sovereign infrastructure, self-driving technology, and financial services, keeping its hardware moving through the right hands is becoming just as important as building it.
So Wall Street is betting on Nvidia’s software strength, but overlooking real cracks in its supply chain.
The buy rating assumes these problems will sort themselves out. That is not guaranteed. Unsold chips and contract shuffles signal growing pains.
The real test is whether Nvidia can get its own operations under control before rivals move in.
The Trump administration says China is trying to raid American AI labs to move faster. A Financial Times report on Thursday said the White House accused China of carrying out industrial-scale theft of US AI intellectual property and warned it would crack down.
The report cited a memo by Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Kratsios wrote that the US government has information showing foreign entities based in China are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems.
He said the operations are using tens of thousands of proxy accounts to avoid detection and jailbreaking methods to expose proprietary information. He also said Washington will alert American AI companies to unauthorized attempts at distillation and will consider steps to hold the actors accountable.
White House accuses China of stripping US AI systems while H200 chip sales remain stalled
The fight over stolen AI work is unfolding beside another dispute over advanced chips. Nvidia’s H200 chips are in heavy demand, and supply for the Chinese tech sector had been expected, but US officials say those chips still have not been sold to Chinese companies.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips have not yet been sent to Chinese firms, citing difficulties obtaining permission from the Chinese government.
The Trump administration formally approved China-bound sales of H200 chips in January, though with conditions. That decision stirred concern among China hawks in Washington, who fear Beijing could use the technology to strengthen its military.
Even so, shipments have been blocked by disagreements over sale terms in both the United States and China. Asked at a Senate hearing about the delayed sales, Howard said:
“The Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they’re trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry.”
Howard added, “We have not sold them chips as of yet.” The continued delay is likely to please US hardliners who reject the administration’s argument that such sales could discourage Chinese rivals, including heavily sanctioned Huawei, from pushing harder to catch up with American AI chip designers.
But Howard also appeared to step back from a prior pledge to restore in November a rule that would restrict US tech exports to Chinese companies.
China offers massive embodied AI pay packages as export curbs and trade talks stay tangled
The affiliates rule was delayed for one year last November as part of a trade negotiation with China. Howard said, “I agree that the affiliates rule is a smart thing for the United States of America to consider, but it is part of the balance of that full trade agreement.”
He also said the US trade relationship with China is led by President Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Howard added, “I focus on the rest of the world.”
China’s embodied AI sector is in a fierce talent war. Some companies are failing to attract qualified workers even after offering CNY1 million (about $138,000) a year. Job listings show entry-level algorithm engineers in embodied intelligence can earn around CNY30,000 a month, or $4,140.
Expert-level engineers are offered about CNY50,000 per month, while world-class engineers can get around CNY60,000. Other roles in demand include motion-control algorithm engineers and embedded software engineers, and most technical jobs require at least a master’s degree.
The pay rises. Ubtech Robotics, the world’s first humanoid robot maker to go public, launched a search this month for a chief scientist focused on humanoid robots and embodied intelligence.
The annual pay range is CNY15 million to CNY124 million, or about $2.2 million to $18 million. Last year, Volcano Engine, the cloud unit of ByteDance, began hiring a senior expert in algorithm manipulation for embodied robotics research, with a monthly pay of CNY95,000 to CNY120,000, or about $13,110 to $16,560.
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The cryptocurrency industry has been suppressed by a bear market over the past several months, with numerous leading digital assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), slipping far below their 2025 record highs.
And while some have panicked, others view the current conditions as perfect for increasing their exposure at lower prices before the next bull run begins. It remains uncertain which cryptocurrencies will be the biggest winners when the market starts booming again, but we poked the AI brains of some of the most popular chatbots to check their opinion on the matter.
ETH and Which Ones?
ChatGPT’s top pick is Ethereum, describing the project as the backbone of DeFi, NFTs, and RWAs and claiming that institutional money will flow there.
“Ethereum will explode next cycle because it’s booming the default layer for institutional capital, especially as ETFs evolve and potentially include staking, turning ETH into a yield-generating asset,” it stated.
Moreover, the chatbot noted that, unlike many cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has real demand drivers and doesn’t rely entirely on hype and speculation.
ChatGPT’s second top candidate is Solana (SOL), predicting that its price may skyrocket during the next bull run because it has become “the go-to chain for retail activity, combining speed, low fees, and a smooth user experience that attracts massive liquidity.” It added that the project has become the center of meme coin and high-frequency trading, which tends to drive explosive price moves during peak hype phases.
The chatbot placed Bittensor (TAO) in third place, saying “it sits at the intersection of AI and crypto, the strongest emerging narrative in global markets.” It estimated that this unique positioning gives the asset the opportunity to chart impressive gains when the conditions improve.
What Else?
Google’s Gemini generated a very similar answer to ChatGPT. It named SOL as its best candidate, placed TAO in second position, and rounded up the top 3 with Ondo Finance (ONDO).
“Ondo is the primary bridge for tokenizing Wall Street, allowing trillions in traditional assets like US Treasuries to move onto the blockchain with full regulatory compliance. As institutional giants like BlackRock deepen their on-chain presence in 2026, Ondo captures the lion’s share of this massive capital inflow,” it claimed.
We also sought Perplexity’s take on the matter. The chatbot agreed with ChatGPT that ETH and SOL have the most upside potential, naming Chainlink (LINK) as its third-best candidate.
“LINK could pump because it’s the main oracle for crypto, so more DeFi and tokenization activity can mean more demand for LINK. It also has strong adoption signals, which makes it look like infrastructure, not just a trade,” it concluded.
Defiance ETFs has filed a preliminary prospectus with the SEC for the Defiance US AI Resilience ETF. The passively managed fund is designed to hold companies least likely to be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI).
The filing, submitted on Thursday, marks Defiance’s latest thematic bet. Rather than chasing AI upside, this fund takes the opposite approach by targeting old-economy businesses that AI is unlikely to replace.
What the AI Resilience ETF Holds
The ETF will track the VettaFi US AI Resilience Index. The index selects roughly 50 US large-cap companies from VettaFi’s broader equity universe. It focuses on what the industry has labeled “HALO” firms, short for Heavy Asset, Low Obsolescence.
These are businesses with inelastic demand, long-life physical infrastructure, and revenue profiles insulated from labor automation.
Under normal conditions, the fund will invest at least 80% of net assets in companies that meet these AI-resilience criteria. It may use either full replication or representative sampling to track the index.
The HALO Thesis Behind the Fund
The ETF arrives as Wall Street’s appetite for HALO stocks continues to grow. Goldman Sachs introduced the framework in early 2026.
The firm found that capital-intensive companies relying on physical assets have outperformed capital-light, digital-first peers by about 35% since the start of 2025.
The reasoning is straightforward. Transmission grids, pipelines, industrial capacity, and transport infrastructure are costly to replicate and sit outside the reach of generative AI.
Software companies, by contrast, face growing displacement risk as AI systems automate more of their functions.
Defiance, which manages over $8 billion in assets, already operates thematic funds covering quantum computing, AI power infrastructure, and drone automation.
Its Quantum Computing ETF (QTUM) recently passed $4 billion in AUM with a 5-star Morningstar rating. The AI Resilience ETF extends that lineup into contrarian territory.
Congratulations to @Defiance_ETFs on their Quantum Computing #ETF – $QTUM – Surpassing $4 Billion in Assets and Earning a 5-Star @MorningstarInc Rating!@MarketVector is proud to be the administrator of $QTUM‘s benchmark, the #BlueStar Machine Learning and Quantum Computing…
The prospectus is still preliminary. The ticker has not been assigned, and management fees are listed as placeholders. The fund will trade on Nasdaq once the filing becomes effective, which typically takes about 75 days.
Principal risks highlighted in the filing include interest-rate sensitivity for capital-intensive holdings and sector concentration in staples and industrials.
Penserra Capital Management will handle day-to-day portfolio management through a sub-advisory arrangement.
The actual portfolio managers are Dustin Lewellyn, Ernesto Tong, and Christine Johanson, all from Penserra.
The filing is available on SEC EDGAR under ETF Series Solutions. With AI hype dominating markets in 2026, Defiance is betting that investors will also pay for protection against the other side of that trade.
Top prediction market platforms, including Kalshi and Polymarket, are rushing to offer highly leveraged crypto derivatives at the exact moment state and federal authorities are clashing in court over whether the industry’s core products constitute illegal betting or legitimate financial instruments.
Over the past year, these companies have gained national prominence by facilitating wagers on discrete, real-world occurrences, ranging from political races to macroeconomic data releases.
Now, by preparing to list perpetual futures, which are complex contracts that never expire and allow traders to multiply their market exposure using borrowed funds, these platforms are blurring the line between niche forecasting hubs and full-service digital asset exchanges.
Against this backdrop, this shift drastically expands their potential customer base, but it also amplifies the legal risks associated with the platforms.
Historically, platforms like Kalshi operated on a cyclical, event-driven basis, with traffic and trading volume spiking around major catalysts such as a presidential debate or a championship sporting event and then plummeting once the outcome was settled.
In this kind of market, a user purchased a binary “Yes” or “No” share, and the contract expired upon the event’s resolution.
Perpetual futures fundamentally alter that business model. Because these derivatives lack an expiration date, participants can maintain their market positions indefinitely, provided they meet ongoing margin requirements.
The instruments frequently allow users to leverage their bets up to 50 times their initial capital, attracting aggressive speculators seeking rapid returns from minute price fluctuations.
By rolling out these derivatives, Polymarket and Kalshi are abandoning their siloed event-contract operations to compete directly with centralized exchanges and retail brokerages. The underlying strategy for both platforms is to convert occasional political bettors into daily, high-frequency traders.
While Kalshi has explicitly stated its intention to enter the perpetuals arena, Polymarket’s exact roadmap remains guarded, including which specific assets it will cover and whether it will restrict access for US customers.
Why prediction markets are moving into perpetual futures
Why perps, why now?
The motivation to embrace this new feature comes down to basic market structure.
Traditional crypto spot trading, which is the simple buying and holding of digital assets, has decelerated from the frenzied peaks of previous market cycles, logging $18.6 trillion in volume last year.
Meanwhile, perpetual futures generated more than three times that amount. Data from CryptoQuant show that the global trading volume for crypto perpetual futures hit $61.7 trillion last year.
That volume disparity dictates corporate strategy. Platforms recognize that to maintain engagement during periods of low volatility, they must offer instruments that allow users to short the market, hedge portfolios, and employ leverage.
While prediction markets currently command significant capital, with all-time notional volume surpassing $150 billion, the episodic nature of event contracts cannot match the continuous, around-the-clock fee generation of a highly active derivatives order book.
Moreover, the broader financial technology sector is experiencing a rapid collapse of operational boundaries, with centralized platforms like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Gemini all embracing event-based offerings.
Mo Shaikh, co-founder of the Aptos blockchain network, noted that financial applications have historically trended toward consolidation, citing the expansions of legacy platforms like PayPal. However, he warned that forcing disparate user bases into a single application rarely succeeds seamlessly.
“The trader, the bettor, the long-term investor, the payments user, they show up for different reasons,” Shaikh said, adding that true value lies in controlling the underlying infrastructure. “Clearing, liquidity, identity, settlement, data, those layers can unify even if the frontends remain fragmented.”
Meanwhile, the shift among prediction market players is partially defensive.
Offshore decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, a dominant force in perpetual futures, recently encroached on the prediction sector by revealing plans to list its own event contracts.
As a result, the market is split on who holds the strategic advantage in the ensuing turf war.
Jiani Chen, a growth officer with the Solana Foundation, noted the technical disparities, arguing that decentralized derivatives exchanges have a much easier time adding prediction markets to their backend than prediction platforms do spinning up complex futures trading engines.
However, Kyle Samani, chairman of Forward Industries, dismissed the technical hurdles, arguing that customer acquisition is the true bottleneck for digital asset platforms. He said:
“It’s way harder to bootstrap liquidity and acquire normie users for prediction markets. Kalshi perps are going to crush.”
The legal fight is still about who gets to call it gambling
Legal battle over prediction markets
The aggressive product expansion coincides with an existential legal threat as state regulators are launching coordinated efforts to classify the prediction platforms as unlicensed casinos, rejecting the premise that event contracts are sophisticated financial tools.
On April 21, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed sweeping lawsuits against digital asset firms Coinbase and Gemini, demanding $3.4 billion in combined penalties and restitution.
James alleged the companies bypass state taxes and consumer protection laws by offering prediction markets to retail users, including minors.
State officials pointed to research by the National Institutes of Health linking early exposure to mobile betting with heightened risks of anxiety and financial distress, while noting American Psychological Association data showing severe mental health risks associated with gambling disorders.
James said:
“Gambling by another name is still gambling, and it is not exempt from regulation under our state laws and Constitution.”
The industry firmly rejects the gambling label, countering that the contracts are vital instruments for hedging geopolitical and economic risks.
The judiciary is already untangling the overlapping claims. A federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled against New Jersey gaming regulators earlier this year, determining the CFTC held sole regulatory authority over Kalshi’s election and sports-related contracts.
This sequence of litigation reflects a deeply fractured regulatory perimeter that companies must navigate as they deploy new derivative products.
A bigger market, and a bigger regulatory target
The move into perpetual futures would further position prediction markets as part of mainstream financial infrastructure rather than a niche corner of online speculation.
That shift is already drawing attention from traditional finance. The Intercontinental Exchange, parent of the New York Stock Exchange, recently invested $2 billion in Polymarket, a sign that major market operators see commercial value in platforms built around event-driven pricing.
Supporters of the model argue that prediction markets are proving useful as both forecasting tools and trading venues.
In high-liquidity markets, Brier scores, a standard measure of probabilistic accuracy, have fallen as low as 0.0247 shortly before resolution, suggesting pricing errors narrow sharply as capital and participation deepen. Industry estimates also show that about 10% of proprietary trading firms are already active in event contracts, using them in part to hedge macro and policy risk.
That combination of data value and trading activity helps explain why platforms are racing to broaden their product mix.
Rob Hadick, managing partner at Dragonfly, framed the commercial logic bluntly:
“Owning your customer will be the only way to have longevity in this new world of broad financialization.”
However, not everyone sees perpetual futures as the natural next step.
Alex Momot, chief executive and co-founder of Peanut Trade, told CryptoSlate that the current push looks more like a response to tightening legal pressure than a durable product strategy.
He noted that regulators and some jurisdictions are moving against prediction markets, and as a result, these operators appear to be shifting closer to the crypto-exchange model, where the rules are clearer, and the risk of being classified as gambling is lower.
Momot argued that strategy may offer only limited relief. In his view, the deeper problem is liquidity. Without more depth, many of the sector’s most promising use cases, including hedging and insurance against real-world event risk, remain too small to scale.
He said the stronger long-term path may lie in index-style products, market aggregation, and pooled liquidity across events, structures that could make prediction markets look more like traditional derivatives or synthetic exposures.
That viewpoint points to a broader tension now shaping the industry. One camp sees perpetual futures as the fastest way to capture more trading volume and keep users active between headline-driven events. Another sees them as a tactical detour from the harder task of building deeper, more resilient liquidity.
Either way, the legal risk is rising. Dyma Budorin, founder and chief executive of CORE3, said the merging of prediction and derivatives markets is likely to draw closer scrutiny from regulators already struggling to define the sector.
He said:
“What we’re really seeing is a convergence toward perp-like behavior without the corresponding risk controls. If this trend continues, regulators won’t treat prediction markets as harmless forecasting tools, they’ll treat them as derivatives platforms operating outside the rules. And historically, that doesn’t end quietly.”
The New York litigation has already ensured that the fight over jurisdiction will remain central to the industry’s future. That battle could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court or force Congress to step in with a clearer statutory framework.
Until then, prediction-market operators appear willing to keep expanding through the uncertainty, betting that the commercial upside of perpetual futures is worth the legal exposure.
DeepSeek is now chasing a valuation above $20 billion as Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group discuss possible investments in the Chinese AI startup.
The Information reported that on Wednesday, citing four people who knew about the talks. DeepSeek, which is owned by hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, had only just started talking to outside investors for the first time.
By Friday, the reported target was at least $300 million at a valuation of at least $10 billion. Now the asking price has climbed fast as interest builds around DeepSeek.
The talks are still going on, so the final number could still change. The amount DeepSeek wants to raise could also change. Some U.S. venture capital companies may be cautious because DeepSeek is a Chinese startup.
Earlier this year, Cryptopolitan reported that DeepSeek did not show U.S. chipmakers its flagship model for performance tuning. We also reported that one of DeepSeek’s newer models was trained on Nvidia’s most advanced banned chip.
Back in January 2025, the first big DeepSeek release helped trigger a global tech selloff and pushed Chinese rivals to upgrade their own models.
Tencent and Alibaba push DeepSeek into a bigger money race
Meanwhile, on the Dwarkesh Podcast on Wednesday, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said it would be “a horrible outcome” for the United States if DeepSeek optimized its new AI models to run on Huawei chips instead of American hardware.
Jensen said, “If future AI models are optimised in a very different way than the American tech stack,” and as “AI diffuses out into the rest of the world” with Chinese standards and technology, China “will become superior to” the United States.
On chip performance alone, Huawei still trails Nvidia. The Ascend 910C, which came before the 950PR, delivers about 60% of the inference performance of Nvidia’s H100. That H100 is already two generations behind Nvidia’s current best chip.
American chips are about five times more powerful than Chinese rivals today, and that gap is expected to widen to 17 times by 2027. Huawei is targeting 750,000 AI chip shipments in 2026, but its total production amounts to only about 3% to 5% of Nvidia’s combined computing power.
“A lot of work has to go into it to change. But go to the global south, go to the Middle East. Coming out of the box, if all of the AI models run best on somebody else’s tech stack, you’ve got to be arguing some ridiculous claim right now that that’s a good thing for the United States,” said Jensen.
AI funding surges as DeepSeek and Vast Data chase bigger checks
Jensen said his real concern is not just the gap in chip strength. He said China could still catch up in AI because it has “abundant energy” and a “large pool of AI researchers.”
If DeepSeek V4 runs well on Ascend chips, that would give China another route in AI development that does not depend on Nvidia across the supply chain.
That same funding rush showed up elsewhere on Wednesday. Vast Data announced a $1 billion funding round at a $30 billion valuation, and Nvidia was one of the backers.
The company says it supports projects that power millions of GPUs. Its customers include CoreWeave, Mistral, the U.S. Air Force, and Cursor. The new round more than tripled Vast’s $9.1 billion valuation from 2023. Drive Capital and Access Industries led the Series F. Fidelity Management and Research Co., NEA, and Nvidia also joined.
The financing included both primary and secondary capital. Dealroom said AI companies globally have already raised $280.5 billion this year, with more than $170 billion going to OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.
Chris Olsen of Drive Capital said, “The scale and speed of AI adoption are creating a new class of infrastructure company.” Chris added, “VAST is emerging as the clear leader in this category, with the architecture and momentum to support the world’s most demanding AI environments.”
Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his command is running a Bitcoin (BTC) node and conducting operational tests with the protocol.
The April 21 testimony marked the first time a sitting US combatant commander publicly framed Bitcoin as a national security asset during congressional proceedings.
Bitcoin as a ‘Power Projection’ Tool
Responding to questions from Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Paparo described Bitcoin as “a peer-to-peer, zero-trust transfer of value” and said that anything supporting all instruments of national power “is to the good.”
He characterized the research as focused on computer science rather than monetary policy.
Proof-of-work, he said, “has got really important computer science applications for cybersecurity,” including protecting data and raising the real-world cost for adversaries conducting cyber operations.
“We have a node on the Bitcoin network right now. We’re doing a number of operational tests to secure and protect networks using the Bitcoin protocol,” he said.
The admiral offered to provide classified details on the tests if requested.
Meanwhile, Major Jason Lowery’s “Softwar” thesis previously proposed proof-of-work as a form of cyber power projection.
Tuberville framed the exchange around competition with China, noting that Beijing’s top monetary think tank has published its own strategic Bitcoin research.
INDOPACOM oversees approximately 380,000 personnel across the Asia-Pacific theater, the primary front for US-China strategic competition.
No official follow-up from the Department of Defense has clarified the scope of the tests as of April 22.
