*as of 8/13; Sources: S&P, BTC, FTSE, DJRE, GOLD

It was a big day for crypto, as Bitcoin jumped more than 8%, nearing the $70,000 mark for the first time since early June. Ethereum rose 19%, topping the $2,000 mark, Hyperliquid shot up 23%, and the market as a whole was up around 8%. One major catalyst for the price movement was the Treasury department’s announcement that it is doubling its bond buyback cap, causing yields to decrease. Additionally, the SEC proposed new rules for digital assets relating to token issuances, allowing a one-time exemption for companies to issue up to $5 million in tokens and $75 million in tokens every year with ongoing financial disclosures.

➨ TAKEAWAY: The crypto market had been oddly quiet and relatively stable the past couple of months, but yesterday’s price movement is a reminder that it can pop at any time. The Treasury’s policy should also boost other asset classes, such as gold, which itself rose by 3.6%, though crypto tends to react more strongly to market catalysts. It has been a tough 2026 for the crypto market, but rallies like this can become self-sustaining as investors look for any bit of good news to latch onto in hopes of a bull market restarting.

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In the newest episode of Smart Humans, Slava Rubin talks with Corner Ventures and Aurite AI’s John Cadeddu about his 25-year VC journey, incubating AI startups, and investing into farmland.

🤖 Anthropic surpasses OpenAI: While Anthropic more than doubled its revenue in Q2, from $4.73 billion to $11.6 billion, OpenAI grew only 18%, from $5.7 billion to $6.7 billion. Beyond the growth numbers, Anthropic recorded an operating profit, while OpenAI’s operating loss of $12.3 billion grew at a faster pace than its revenue. Taken together, it is clear that Anthropic has passed OpenAI as the top AI company in the world, but as it has shown, that can change quickly.

📈 Etched doubles valuation: Just a month after its last fundraise, the AI chip startup raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, double its $10.3 billion valuation from merely weeks ago. Even by the standards that the AI sector has set, this is an abnormally fast step-up in valuation.

🚀 Shein IPO on the way: The fast fashion retailer is reportedly on track to launch its Hong Kong IPO in the next week at a valuation of around $25 billion, a quarter of its $100 billion valuation four years ago. Falling sales and profits have hurt the company’s prospects alongside tariffs and laws targeting cheap Chinese-made goods.

🏡 Pending sales fall: U.S. pending home sales fell 2.3% in July, and are down 2.2% year-over-year, as mortgage rates rose and buying demand dropped. Prices are starting to fall as sellers adjust, but they haven’t fallen enough yet to entice enough buyers to step off the sidelines.

🏢 Multifamily rent grows: Average U.S. multifamily rent rose by 1.8% year-over-year in July, the fastest pace of growth since May 2025. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. metros recorded monthly rent gains and 89% have posted annual rent gains, with San Francisco ranking #1 in both metrics.

⚾ Ohtani shoes sale: A game-worn pair of Shohei Ohtani’s shoes sold for $440,055 at auction, setting a new record for any baseball footwear, more than quadrupling Michael Jordan’s old mark. The shoes came from Ohtani’s first MLB appearance in his native Japan in March 2025.

While AI-generated writing still has some clearly recognizable tics, it is only going to get harder to distinguish from human writing. There are a number of tools that purport to be able to tell the difference, but there are far too many false positives to rely on them. As a result, the publishing industry is having a very difficult time making sure that the manuscripts they are buying were actually written by people. Already, short-story prizes are going to work that looks suspiciously AI-created, and a multi-million dollar book deal was just scrapped at the last minute due to AI concerns. The hope is that there will be better AI detectors in the future or more companies will follow Anthropic’s watermarking lead, but what if an author takes AI-generated content and edits it just enough to beat those systems? AI has opened up a can of worms that is likely to continue to cause headaches for the publishing world, and create opportunities for any company that can solve those problems.

(The preceding was written by a human, and Pangram agrees.)