Alex Falcon

AI could turn out to be both the greatest technological revolution of the past few decades and one of the biggest investment bubbles in history.

Yesterday, Anthropic reported a net loss of $80.7 billion in just the first half of the year. To be fair, there’s no need to panic over the headline number itself. Around $72 billion of that loss came from an accounting revaluation of the company’s liabilities, not from Anthropic actually burning through that much cash. But something else is far more interesting.

The company has already committed hundreds of billions of dollars to computing capacity, chips, and data centers. And Anthropic is far from alone. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are set to invest more than $700 billion in AI infrastructure this year. The scale has become so enormous that these investments are now supporting the U.S. stock market and accounting for a significant share of investment activity across the economy.

And this is where the U.S. is gradually falling into a very interesting trap. If tech companies keep spending at this pace, they’ll have to borrow more and more money and somehow prove that these massive investments will actually pay off. If they start cutting spending, the fallout will hit chipmakers, data centers, the energy sector, the tech companies themselves, and ultimately the stock market.

In other words, the AI boom is becoming too big to simply bring to a halt without serious consequences. The IMF already estimates that a sharp pullback in AI investment could leave the U.S. economy around 1.8% smaller by 2028 than it would be under the current baseline scenario.

Anthropic’s IPO in November could become the first serious test of this whole setup. Not long ago, the market was discussing a valuation of around $2 trillion for the company. Following the latest figures, some investors are now talking about roughly $1.5 trillion. At the same time, the business itself continues to grow at an extraordinary pace.

From a capital markets perspective, I see the main risk here as something other than AI itself. I have little doubt that it will fundamentally reshape the economy and the world. But the gap between the hundreds of billions being invested today and the point at which those investments start generating comparable returns could be much longer than the market currently expects. That’s precisely where the risk of today’s euphoria lies. Major technological shifts almost never happen quickly or without friction.

AI could crack Bitcoin in just a few months

That’s the claim making the rounds right now following a statement by an Ethereum Foundation researcher. It sounds scary, but there’s still a huge gap between this kind of threat and an actual hack.

For that to happen, AI would need to learn how to derive a private key from publicly available wallet information and gain access to someone else’s coins. No one has demonstrated a way to do that yet. AI can already solve some incredibly difficult mathematical problems, but solving a problem that humans couldn’t crack before is one thing, and discovering a new mathematical method that breaks the foundation of modern data security is something entirely different.

And this is where the main point often gets lost. If such a method actually emerges, Bitcoin won’t be the only thing at risk. The security of banking apps, payment systems, websites, mobile networks, messaging apps, and a huge part of our digital infrastructure would all be called into question. In other words, it wouldn’t just be a crypto crisis, but a crisis for the entire modern digital security system.

At the same time, even within Bitcoin, things aren’t so straightforward. Different types of wallets work differently, and some are better protected against this kind of scenario. Bitcoin itself could also be upgraded to adopt new security methods if the threat becomes real. That’s exactly why developers discuss these scenarios in advance, rather than waiting until something actually happens.

So the claim that AI will simply crack Bitcoin in a few months looks more like a bet on an extraordinarily rapid technological breakthrough than a realistic forecast. It makes sense to prepare for such a scenario. But it’s definitely too early to conclude that Bitcoin is about to stop working.

And the situation can be viewed from a completely different angle. Today, crypto doesn’t just carry technological risks; it also protects against a wide range of risks associated with the traditional system. Banking, political, geopolitical, and currency risks. It allows people to store and move capital without being entirely dependent on a particular bank or government.

That’s why yet another Bitcoin scare story doesn’t change the bigger picture. No asset is risk-free. The question is always which specific risks each instrument helps protect against. And in a world where problems with banks, governments, and currencies keep piling up, the role of an asset independent of them looks more important than ever.

Funds started buying up 10–20% stakes in crypto projects

It was 2026, but most people still knew only Bitcoin when it came to crypto. Maybe Ethereum, too.

Meanwhile, big money was quietly buying stakes in different coins and getting ready for something. Even though hardly anyone was talking about it.

But here are a few examples:

🔘 Apollo, a fund managing more than $900 billion, is looking to acquire up to a 9% stake in MORPHO. It’s a project where people and companies lend money to each other through crypto.

🔘 StablecoinX, backed by Pantera and other major funds, acquired nearly 20% of ENA. The project is behind the digital dollar USDe.

🔘 SDC has accumulated around 10% of SKY. The project is building a lending and digital-dollar system without a traditional bank.

🔘 Hyperliquid Strategies acquired roughly $2.2 billion worth of HYPE – the token of one of the largest decentralized crypto exchanges. The company now controls around 12.5% of all HYPE.

There are plenty of other examples like these. But all of these purchases point to the same broader trend: money is flowing into lending, exchanges, digital dollars, and payment infrastructure.

The logic is this: if some financial services really do move onto the blockchain, you won’t only be able to make money from Bitcoin going up, but also from the services through which lending, trading, and payments will flow.

Investors rushed to buy both AI and gold

Something unique started happening in August. Investors simultaneously started aggressively buying AI companies, gold, and even Bitcoin.

What’s the connection here?

It’s actually a very unusual one. To build AI data centers, the biggest tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

They need money for that. A lot of money. Which they keep borrowing in the market. In 2026 alone, their spending could approach $700 billion.

And the problem is that the U.S. government is borrowing money in exactly the same way. And the more they borrow, the higher the interest rate they have to offer on that debt.

But in August, the Treasury stepped in. And increased its buybacks of its own bonds to bring that very rate down.

Investors immediately understood:
Debt is becoming too expensive, and now the government will be looking for ways to make it cheaper.

And the more interventions like this we see, the stronger the fear that the dollar will lose value. That’s why some of the money is moving into gold and Bitcoin.

Which, as a result, saw inflows of $7 billion in just 5 days.

At the same time, no one is giving up on AI either. Nvidia keeps climbing, and money is still flowing into tech funds.

The market is now simultaneously buying AI as a bet that technology will make the world richer, while also buying gold and Bitcoin as insurance in case the bill for this party turns out to be too big and the system can’t handle it.

Has the crypto market’s bull run begun? 👀

Bitcoin has soared from around $63,000 to above $80,000 in just a couple of weeks. And for the first time in a long while, this move doesn’t look like just another bounce.

I already wrote about the main catalyst behind this rally a few days ago. It all comes down to the U.S., which has started buying back its own bonds on a large scale.

But now, new details have emerged. The U.S. is also considering using part of its reserve — where nearly $1 trillion currently sits — for these buybacks.

In terms of the impact on the markets, this could look somewhat similar to 2021: there will be more money in the system, bond yields will move lower, and stocks and crypto will get even more fuel for further growth.
So the market’s fate depends on this.

But it’s still too early to celebrate the start of a new bull run. BTC has hit resistance around $81,000 — several key levels converge there at once. If the market manages to establish itself above that level, the next area of interest could very well be $95,000–$100,000.

But if it fails to break through and the inflow of big money starts to fade, the current +30% could turn out to be just a very strong bounce followed by a natural correction.

But for the first time in a long while, Bitcoin’s growth is being driven not only by expectations, but by real money and macroeconomic factors.

The AI Illusion

One of the most interesting things in the AI industry today, and something that remains outside the attention of 99.9% of people, is the real impact of artificial intelligence on the economy.

Hyperscalers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure. Corporations are spending billions on tokens and on attempts to integrate AI into their operations. And the entire market is being accelerated by everyone buying from each other in a loop, valuations rising, more capital flowing in, and the market continuing to expand.

But the question that I think is actually worth asking is this: how much is artificial intelligence really affecting the economy and GDP today?

I think you may be surprised, but if you try to estimate it and look at the actual data rather than the perception created by society and social media, the impact of AI on GDP today is approximately zero percent.

In simple terms, the hundreds of billions of dollars invested so far have not yet produced any noticeable additional economic growth.

Does this mean AI is useless? Of course not.

Over the next several years, there is a very high probability that this number will change and AI will genuinely create enormous additional value.

But the data we see today tells us something different. The speed at which artificial intelligence is being integrated into society, the economy, and the world has been significantly overestimated.

And at some point, these expectations will be corrected, and the entire industry will correct along with them.