News linked to both this project and an event.
prediction market platform Polymarket has disclosed the completion of its first institutional on-chain block trade. The six-figure USD transaction was executed on the Polygon blockchain by digital asset broker FalconX and AI risk settlement infrastructure startup Anera Labs, targeting contracts related to the Ornn Compute Price Index, which tracks the rental price of NVIDIA H100 GPU chips. Polymarket stated that this is the first institutional on-chain block trade in the prediction market field. Going forward, FalconX will also serve as the exclusive market maker for block trades on the Polymarket platform to support institutional clients' liquidity needs and price discovery. (CNBC)
Odaily reports: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at the GTC conference in Taipei that the company has selected China's Unitree as its first humanoid robot AI platform partner for universities and research institutions. Together, they will launch the Isaac GR00T reference design, accelerating the arrival of the "Physical AI" era.The platform deeply integrates Unitree's H2 humanoid robot (approximately 1.8 meters tall, weighing 68 kg) with Nvidia's Jetson Thor computing platform, Blackwell GPU, Isaac GR00T model, and simulation software. It is also equipped with Singapore-based Sharpa's dexterous hand. The platform is open to top global research institutions, with the first batch including Stanford, ETH Zurich, UCSD, and Ai2. Jensen Huang emphasized that this initiative aims to lower the barrier to entry for humanoid robot development by providing an out-of-the-box, full-stack development environment. He believes that "Physical AI" will be the next wave following generative AI, with a long-term market size potentially reaching tens of trillions of dollars.The upgraded version, the H2 Plus, is expected to be available and open for general sale in October 2026. Notably, Unitree is planning an IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market), aiming to raise 4.2 billion yuan. Over 40% of its revenue comes from overseas, highlighting its significant global presence. (Techstartups)
Bitcoin mining company IREN announced the completion of a $3.65 billion investment-grade GPU financing to support its AI cloud contract signed with Microsoft. The financing includes $2.1 billion in US private placement bonds and $1.55 billion in delayed-draw term loans, with a blended debt cost of 6.00%. It is reported that this financing has been assigned ratings of A and A (low) by Fitch and DBRS, respectively, making it the highest-rated investment-grade GPU financing project publicly disclosed to date, as well as the first GPU financing case in the US private market. IREN stated that the financing is secured by GPU assets and related contract cash flows, which helps optimize its capital structure and supports the company's plan to expand its AI Cloud capacity to 480MW by the end of 2026.
: Axe Compute (NASDAQ: AGPU) has announced that the underlying infrastructure provider for its $260 million enterprise-level contract is Aethir, a globally distributed GPU infrastructure network. It is reported that Axe Compute has confirmed receipt of the first payment of $43 million under this contract. Aethir has officially initiated the compute delivery process for the corresponding cluster of 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs, with a target go-live date set for the third quarter of 2026.The contract adopts a 36-month take-or-pay structure, and is expected to generate approximately $21 million in revenue per quarter after going live.
Bitcoin mining company HIVE Digital Technologies has acquired land in the Toronto area for $58 million, planning to build an industrial-scale AI computing center through its subsidiary BUZZ High Performance Computing. Once fully operational, the facility is expected to support approximately 320 MW of capacity and over 100,000 GPUs—potentially making it one of Canada’s largest computing “super-factories.” Following the announcement, HIVE’s stock surged nearly 45%. Just two weeks earlier, HIVE had raised $115 million to expand its global data center footprint and GPU capacity.
: Datavault AI has released its first-quarter 2026 business update, disclosing that the company has signed tokenization contracts worth over $800 million. Of this, approximately $100 million in fees are expected to be recognized in 2026, achieving about $75 million in new contract value in the first quarter, further validating institutional demand for its Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization platform.In terms of assets and financing, the company has strengthened its balance sheet through a $60 million private placement and an additional $120 million in non-dilutive financing. It is also advancing the expansion of the SanQtum AI infrastructure platform across the United States, with plans to expand its quantum-safe GPU edge network by the end of 2026 and deploy approximately 48,000 GPUs. (Businesswire)
Aethir Claw has officially launched its Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) layer, integrating API credits for cutting-edge large models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others directly into a single platform subscription. Users no longer need to individually register with external LLM providers or manage API keys; one payment covers the entire stack from VPS hosting to model inference.Going forward, Aethir Claw plans to deploy mainstream models on Aethir’s own GPU network, achieving true data sovereignty at the inference layer.Aethir is a leading platform in decentralized GPU cloud computing infrastructure. To date, the network has deployed over 430,000 GPU containers across more than 200 nodes in 94 countries globally, accumulated nearly 1.8 billion hours of computing time, and served over 150 partners and enterprise clients. Its GPU hardware spans the NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell generations, including the H100, H200, B200, and B300.
According to official announcements, Brevis—a ZK-powered intelligent verifiable computation platform—has launched Pico Prism 2.0, now live on Ethereum’s mainnet under the current 60-million-Gas block limit. Benchmarking results show that, under Ethereum’s current 60-million-Gas block limit, Pico Prism 2.0 achieves an average proof time of 6.1 seconds per block, with 99.9% of blocks completing final proofs within 12 seconds. The entire system runs on just two machines equipped with a total of 16 RTX 5090 GPUs, at an aggregate hardware cost of approximately $100,000. Compared to Pico Prism 1.0, Pico Prism 2.0 delivers roughly a 5.3× improvement in per-block proof efficiency—even while using only one-quarter of the hardware configuration—further fulfilling the Ethereum Foundation’s two primary objectives for real-time proving: “average proof latency under 10 seconds” and “on-premises hardware cost under $100,000.” Previously, Brevis was selected for the Ethereum Foundation’s “On-Prem Proving Initiative,” a program launched in May 2026 to test whether ZK proofs can scale as decentralized infrastructure without reliance on a handful of cloud service providers—the most L1 zkEVM-integration-ready rehearsal to date. Moving forward, Brevis will continue focusing on robustness.
According to GlobeNewswire, IREN, a Nasdaq-listed company, released its latest financial results and disclosed that it has signed a $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with NVIDIA. Under the agreement, IREN will deploy air-cooled Blackwell GPU infrastructure for NVIDIA over a five-year term. The financial report also indicates that IREN is accelerating its transition from Bitcoin mining to AI cloud services. Construction of the data center related to its $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft is underway. As of April 30, IREN held $2.6 billion in cash. Revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 totaled $144.8 million, down from $184.7 million in the prior quarter. The company reported a net loss of $247.8 million, primarily driven by non-cash impairments related to the retirement of mining equipment.
According to an official announcement, OpenAI has partnered with AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to launch Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC), a new open networking protocol designed to help large AI training clusters operate at higher speeds and with greater reliability, while reducing GPU time waste.
K Wave Media, a Nasdaq-listed bitcoin treasury company, announced a series of strategic transformation initiatives, including securing up to $485 million in capital support to build an AI infrastructure platform, with a focus on data center investment, GPU computing power leasing, and mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships in critical AI infrastructure. Additionally, the company has approved the sale of its wholly-owned subsidiary, Play Co., Ltd., to its original shareholders. The transaction is expected to reduce debt by approximately $48 million and is subject to shareholder approval at the annual meeting in July 2026. (Globenewswire)
AethirClaw has officially launched CARA (Pre-configured Crypto AI Agent), running on Aethir's decentralized GPU infrastructure. Equipped with over 50 skills, it covers core crypto scenarios such as real-time market monitoring, whale wallet tracking, on-chain analysis, social media sentiment monitoring, and project due diligence, and users can use it out-of-the-box without any technical configuration.The platform supports payments via credit card as well as USDT, USDC, and ATH tokens. Aethir also disclosed that it will soon launch a Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) layer, running mainstream open-source large models on Aethir's decentralized GPU infrastructure, and expand multimodal capabilities including text-to-image and video generation.
According to the Ethereum Foundation’s official website, its Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) allocated a total of $9.856 million in Q1 2026, with funding concentrated on core infrastructure areas including cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, security audits, and protocol research. Key funded projects this quarter include: - In the ZK domain: formal verification of zkVMs, GPU-accelerated R1CS witness generation, and intermediate representation optimization for LLZK; - In security: cryptanalysis of Poseidon, cross-platform canonical signing libraries for ERC-7730, and specification-compliance testing for ePBS; - In node and client development: Erigon zkEVM extensions, Besu HSM compliance integration, and the multi-node validator Vero; - Additionally, privacy tools (Kohaku SDK, Tor bridge extensions), continued operations of the Layer 2 transparency platform L2BEAT, and R&D for the Lighthouse client’s transition to the Fusaka fork. On ecosystem development, ESP simultaneously supported Ethereum developer events in Seoul, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Buenos Aires, advanced updates to the Ethereum climate impact assessment, and backed policy research initiatives by the European Decentralization Institute (EDI).
The DeepSeek-V4, a new model series from DeepSeek, is officially launched today in preview form and simultaneously open-sourced. The series comprises two variants: - **DeepSeek-V4-Pro**, whose performance rivals top-tier closed-source models and leads the open-source domain in agent capabilities, world knowledge, and mathematical/coding reasoning; - **DeepSeek-V4-Flash**, which features a smaller parameter count and delivers faster, more cost-efficient API services. Both models support a 1M (million-token) ultra-long context window and operate in both non-thinking and thinking modes. Technically, DeepSeek-V4 introduces a novel attention mechanism—combining DSA (Dynamic Sparse Attention)—to achieve globally leading long-context capability while significantly reducing computational and GPU memory requirements. For API usage, the `model` parameter accepts `deepseek-v4-pro` and `deepseek-v4-flash`. The legacy model names `deepseek-chat` and `deepseek-reasoner` will be deprecated on July 24, 2026.
Nasdaq-listed Axe Compute Inc. (NASDAQ: AGPU) announced today that it has signed a 36-month AI infrastructure contract valued at approximately $260 million with an enterprise client. The deployment includes a dedicated cluster of 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs and a high-speed AI storage system, scheduled to go live in Q3 2026 at a Tier 3 data center in the United States. This is Axe Compute’s largest single enterprise contract since its founding. Axe Compute’s underlying compute infrastructure is powered by Aethir’s decentralized GPU cloud. Daniel Wang, Co-Founder and CEO of Aethir, stated: “Enterprise workloads supported by 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs represent precisely the scale we targeted when designing Aethir’s compute infrastructure. Today’s announcement demonstrates that decentralized GPU infrastructure is now capable of supporting the world’s top-tier enterprise AI workloads. I am proud of the dedication shown by both the Aethir and Axe Compute teams.” The contract includes dedicated 4.8-megawatt N+1 redundant power, with the client specifying the deployment location and service standards, and features a structured payment schedule. Following the announcement, A
Odaily News: HIVE Digital Technologies, a technology company specializing in crypto mining and high-performance computing hosting, announced that its subsidiary has completed a private placement of $115 million in 0% interest exchangeable senior notes (maturing in 2031). The offering included an over-allotment option of $15 million, indicating strong institutional demand.HIVE Digital stated that the net proceeds from this financing are approximately $109.5 million. The funds will be primarily used for capital expenditures (including GPU procurement), data center construction, general corporate purposes, and to support its AI infrastructure expansion strategy. The initial conversion price for the notes is approximately $2.57 per share, representing a premium of about 17.5% over the pre-issuance stock price, with a capped hedge price premium reaching 125%. This zero-interest financing introduces a new group of institutional investors while helping achieve its 2026 growth targets under reduced capital costs.
According to an announcement by HTX, HTX has enabled CHIP deposits as of 20:30 (GMT+8) on April 21. CHIP/USDT spot trading will go live at 21:30 (GMT+8) on April 21. CHIP withdrawals will be enabled at 21:30 (GMT+8) on April 22. Meanwhile, HTX Margin Trading will introduce new isolated-margin leveraged trading for CHIP/USDT (10x) at 21:30 (GMT+8) on April 21. CHIP is a recently trending stablecoin project. USD.ai is a yield-bearing synthetic stablecoin backed by computing resources, AI hardware, and network nodes. It funds decentralized infrastructure assets—such as GPUs and cellular towers—to address liquidity gaps.
According to an official announcement, BitMart will list USD.AI (CHIP) at 21:00 (UTC+8) on April 21. The trading pair CHIP/USDT will be available.USD.AI is a permissionless lending protocol providing financing for the AI infrastructure industry. The protocol allows GPU operators to tokenize and collateralize their hardware equipment for quick access to capital. It employs a dual-token model: USDai (a stablecoin over-collateralized by PayPal's PYUSD) and sUSDai (an interest-bearing token with a target annual yield of 10-15%, with returns sourced from GPU-backed loans). CHIP is the governance token, allowing holders to vote on protocol parameters, administrator approvals, and USD.AI Improvement Proposals (UIPs).
According to an official announcement, Bybit will list CHIP in its spot trading section. CHIP is the “Dollar Protocol for AI Interest Rates,” a DeFi lending platform collateralized by real GPUs, and $CHIP is used for governance and determining the financing rules for AI infrastructure.
Decentralized GPU cloud computing infrastructure platform Aethir confirmed that its Ethereum-related bridge contract was attacked. The team promptly disconnected the affected contract and, in collaboration with major exchanges, blacklisted the hacker’s wallet, limiting losses to under $90,000. Earlier, blockchain security firm PeckShield estimated losses at $400,000. The attacker exploited Aethir’s cross-chain smart contract, AethirOFTAdapter, to transfer stolen funds from BNB Chain to Tron. Aethir stated that its Ethereum mainnet ATH token supply remains unaffected. It plans to release a detailed compensation plan and incident analysis next week and will collaborate with exchanges including Binance, Upbit, and Bithumb to freeze funds. Web3 security platform ZeroShadow is assisting with the investigation. In 2025, Aethir achieved $127.8 million in revenue and deployed over 440,000 GPU containers globally.