Business & Technology
Business and technology in crypto means the companies, infrastructure, and product moves that aren't pure protocol news. LeoDex News covers exchange business (earnings, executive moves, IPOs, geographic expansion), mining stocks (RIOT, MARA, IREN, CleanSpark), Layer-1 infrastructure providers, partnerships and acquisitions, gaming and NFT platforms with real users, and the wider Web3 product landscape.
We track the strategic moves: which exchange is winning institutional flow, which custodian is taking share, which infra provider quietly powers a category, which product launches are real and which are vapor. Skip the press-release noise — read what's actually shipping and who's actually using it.
Latest in Business & Technology
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MicroStrategy halts Bitcoin buying, deploys $176M to stock buybacks
Strategy halted Bitcoin purchases in the week to September 7 and spent $176.3 million repurchasing its own preferred stock instead, while doubling the authorization for its buyback program to $2 billion.
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Hyper Foundation controls 49% of staked HYPE, raising centralization concerns
The Hyper Foundation's validators control roughly 49% of all staked HYPE tokens, concentrating governance power and creating security risks on Hyperliquid's Layer 1 blockchain. No announced plan exists to diversify validator control.
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Data center construction hits record $75B pace as markets weaken
Private data center construction spending reached $75 billion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in July 2026, up 57% year-over-year, while overall private construction declined 0.5% and residential and office sectors continued to soften.
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Bitcoin Miners Halt Sales After $30B AI Infrastructure Pivot
Major Bitcoin miners have stopped selling mined coins and shifted to holding mode after redirecting over $30 billion toward AI infrastructure, creating a supply squeeze on exchanges and signaling a structural shift in miner behavior.
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Liquid Bitcoin sidechain halted after $320M withdrawal; Citi, DBS tokenize payment
Bitcoin sidechain Liquid halted operations after actors claiming to be white-hat hackers withdrew $320 million in Bitcoin, while Citi and DBS completed a tokenized cross-border payment in minutes—and Chilean exchange Orionx shut down after losing $7 million in customer funds.
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Harmony Sunsetting Layer-1 Blockchain, Migrating ONE Token to Ethereum
Harmony proposed shutting down its layer-1 blockchain and migrating its ONE token to Ethereum as ERC-20, less than four weeks after an exploit minted nearly 4 billion unauthorized tokens representing 26% of total supply.
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Injective Announces Native Privacy Features for Institutional Transactions
Injective announced plans to build native privacy capabilities into its finance-focused layer-1 blockchain, targeting institutional-grade transactions and real-world asset functionality. The protocol has not yet disclosed technical specifications or a deployment timeline.
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Standard Chartered launches Bitcoin, Ether trading in UAE
Standard Chartered became the first Global Systemically Important Bank to offer institutional digital asset trading in the UAE, while Hyperscale Data ended Bitcoin mining to make room for an AI data center customer worth up to $3 billion over 20 years. New Jersey challenged federal authority over prediction market sports betting.
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Coldcard hacker swaps 10% of stolen Bitcoin for Ether via THORChain
A hacker tied to the third wave of Coldcard wallet thefts moved roughly 10% of stolen funds through THORChain to swap Bitcoin for Ether, marking the first time stolen assets from any Coldcard wave moved onchain from the original attacker addresses.
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Coinbase stock tokens drive $125M DEX volume on Base, fuel token launch speculation
Coinbase-issued stock tokens generated $124.8 million in decentralized exchange volume on the Base platform, primarily through NVIDIA and Alphabet tokens. The surge has lifted market odds for a Base token launch by end-2026 to 13% YES.
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Shein prices Hong Kong IPO at $26.5 billion valuation
Shein priced its Hong Kong IPO at HK$48.56 per share, valuing the fast-fashion retailer at approximately $26.5 billion and raising about $1.7 billion, though the valuation marks a sharp decline from its $100 billion peak in 2022.
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Anthropic plans shareholder sales at IPO with extended lockup periods
Anthropic is considering a hybrid IPO structure that permits existing shareholders to sell stock during the offering while imposing longer-than-usual post-listing restrictions on additional sales, a strategy that differs from comparable tech debuts.
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OpenAI Acquires InstantDB Team to Strengthen AI Infrastructure
OpenAI has acquired the team behind InstantDB, a real-time database platform that served over 17,000 users and powered 400,000 applications. The move signals OpenAI's focus on developer tooling for AI agents. Instant Cloud is being phased out, though the open-source codebase will remain available.
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Alibaba Cloud Revenue Surges 45%, AI Gains Offset by 75% CapEx Jump
Alibaba reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of 268.95 billion yuan (roughly $40 billion), up 9% year-over-year—the fastest growth in three years—driven by 45% acceleration in cloud and triple-digit AI product gains. Yet a 75% jump in capital expenditure and a cash flow reversal sent net income down sharply, extending a run of profit misses.
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MicroStrategy Bitcoin Holdings Swing to $1.4B Gain as BTC Rallies Above $77,000
Strategy's 840,447 BTC holdings have reversed from a $13 billion loss in July to a $1.4 billion unrealized gain, as Bitcoin surged nearly 23% over five consecutive days following regulatory clarity signals from the Trump administration.
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Binance delists seven spot pairs including Litecoin and Sui on August 21
Binance announced the delisting of seven spot trading pairs, including LTC/BNB and SUI/BNB, effective August 21 at 03:00 UTC. The exchange cited periodic assessment and the need to protect users and maintain market quality.
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Zhibao Closes $154.7M Raise Entirely in Bitcoin
Nasdaq-listed Zhibao Technology, a Shanghai-based insurance-tech firm, closed a $154.7 million private placement funded entirely in cryptocurrency, with non-U.S. investors contributing 2,380 Bitcoin directly to the company wallet rather than cash.
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Compute Exchange launches AI inference token forward contracts
Compute Exchange rolled out forward contracts allowing enterprises to fix AI inference token prices for up to six months, using competitive bidding among providers to set rates and mitigate operational cost volatility.
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Bitcoin miner rejects BIP-110 despite Ocean pool backing
Simple Mining, operating through Ocean pool, used the DATUM protocol to independently reject BIP-110, a proposal to block non-financial data storage in Bitcoin transactions. The miner's block 961,634 continued the main chain while BIP-110 supporters' minority fork stalled after just two blocks.
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Microsoft reveals GitHub Copilot infrastructure gaps in 13.5M sessions
Microsoft Azure Research and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign analyzed 13.5 million Copilot sessions spanning one week in June 2026, identifying critical inefficiencies in KV-cache reuse, retry cascades, and idle time that challenge current AI infrastructure assumptions.
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Formlabs explores IPO with advisers as 3D printing company eyes public markets
Formlabs, a Somerville-based 3D printing company valued at $2 billion, is in discussions with potential advisers to prepare for an initial public offering. The company reported over $250 million in annual revenue and positive free cash flow in 2025.
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Trump convenes mining CEOs to secure critical minerals for defense
President Trump is hosting a roundtable with top mining executives on August 7 to advance a $12 billion national mineral stockpile initiative and restrict defense contractors' reliance on foreign suppliers, targeting China's dominance in rare earth processing.
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Feds charge Few and Far founder Taj Tarsha with $10M investor fraud
Federal prosecutors charged Taj Tarsha, founder of NFT marketplace Few and Far, with securities and wire fraud after he allegedly raised more than $10 million from investors and diverted the funds to gambling, cryptocurrency trades, and personal expenses including a DJ hobby.
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Circle Arc blockchain launches September 16 with BlackRock, Visa validators
Circle announced that BlackRock, SBI Group, Visa, Mastercard, and nine other major financial institutions will serve as founding validators for Arc, its blockchain network launching September 16.