At Sun Moon Lake in Taichung, I once encountered a grandma selling something, talking nonstop for more than ten minutes. She said she went up the mountain before dawn to find this kind of fruit, then it went through more than ten manual processes to make it. She claimed you can't find it anywhere else but Sun Moon Lake, so I spent a lot of money to buy one of the last few. Then just now at a street stall on Haikou Qilou Road, I saw a whole bunch of them, thirty-one strings 🤡 in various colors and models 🤡. The key thing is, the owner saw me taking photos and inexplicably said this thing originally comes from Africa, and I 🤔

DefiLlama and Forgd jointly launched the Universal Token Ratings (UTR) system, which rates tokens based on disclosure, performance, and related operational metrics. $UNI is currently the only token to receive an AAA rating, with a score of 60.80. Meanwhile, Uniswap's active addresses on Robinhood Chain have reached 1.2M. Although DeFi usage growth does not necessarily equate to token value capture, it certainly makes one look forward to a new Defi summer.

Router Protocol, which has been online for over four years, just announced it will gradually cease operations and complete shutdown by September 30. It plans to simultaneously burn about 303.3M $ROUTE, delist related trading pairs, and open source some components. How to put it, it's quite bittersweet. Cross-chain was one of the hottest crypto infrastructures a few years ago, with everyone talking about connecting all chains. But now the focus has shifted more to where the real revenue lies. So project closure doesn't necessarily mean the technology lacks value; it's just that the market size, liquidity, and business model didn't cover operating costs. Also, burning tokens doesn't necessarily make the remaining tokens valuable. Reducing supply only changes quantity; it doesn't automatically create demand. Therefore, it's not recommended for friends to massively build positions when a project announces burns, shutdowns, or delisting. First confirm asset migration, exchange delisting times, and official withdrawal windows—those are the priorities.

Pineapple Financial has migrated over $1B worth of collateral records, totaling 2,079 entries, to Injective, and plans to add records worth more than $10B in the future. It's important to understand that the real challenge with RWA has never been minting, but rather data authenticity, privacy, debt ownership, default handling, and legal enforcement. So this migration by Pineapple only involves collateral records; it does not mean the debt has been tokenized, nor does it mean users own the rights to the mortgage income. Regardless, this is another major move in RWA. It’s not about turning a stock into a token, but about attempting to put real mortgage data and financial asset processes on-chain. From records (data on-chain) to tokens (tradable assets on-chain), there is still an intermediate step of claims (debt or income rights on-chain).

NVIDIA $NVDA just made another big move, spending about $12.9 billion to acquire Hugging Face, an open-source AI community and model hosting platform. For a long time, NVIDIA's core identity was selling GPUs, but now it is expanding into the model ecosystem, developers, AI infrastructure, and the entire software layer. The ultimate goal is likely to keep the AI development ecosystem running around its own infrastructure. This aligns with what Ajian previously proposed as the new stage of AI competition: shifting from whose model is the strongest to who controls more infrastructure, including but not limited to chips, models, developers, cloud, data centers, ecosystems, and so on.

The net assets of the US spot $BTC ETF have exceeded $103 billion, with BlackRock's IBIT accounting for more than half. The day before yesterday, there was an inflow of about $730.9 million, setting a new high for the month. Interestingly, this inflow occurred before the employment data was released, after which macro expectations hardened and BTC dropped accordingly. This indicates that ETFs are no longer just a short-term buying tool; they are becoming the main vehicle for traditional funds to hold BTC. This will change trading times, liquidity, and participant structure, but it will not eliminate macro shocks like the one yesterday. It can only be considered one side of supply and demand, not a substitute for price direction. Another more subtle issue is that the high proportion of IBIT brings concentration risk, because concentrated entry does not mean holders have completely aligned views. The same ETF can simultaneously include long-term allocation, arbitrage, and short-term trading.

Solana has launched rent reduction, and after the full rollout, about 3.08M $SOL may become reclaimable. This does not mean an airdrop; a more accurate understanding is that SOL previously occupied by account rent might return to users or protocols. Although this does not equate to creating wealth out of thin air, it will indeed affect supply, liquidity, and account management. So even though about $5.21M flowed out of the SOL ETF yesterday, Ajian also believes this optimization will redistribute costs and benefits. Solana's experience optimizations have always been aggressive. My advice is to separate short-term and long-term views: short-term focus on ETFs, open interest, and funding; long-term focus on non-voting transactions, fees, and real users. Also, be sure to operate only through official wallets and protocol pages, do not sign unfamiliar authorizations, do not enter mnemonic phrases, and do not click on links claiming to "claim 3.08M SOL".

Last night's US non-farm payroll data looks quite intimidating at first glance, with 162,000 new jobs added, while the market had previously expected only about 56,000, and the unemployment rate remained basically unchanged at 4.1%; But, the year-on-year wage growth dropped from 3.2% in July to 3.1%, and the number of long-term unemployed continues to rise. So this data reveals that employment hasn't collapsed, but inflation risks have not disappeared, which is why the market has raised the probability of a rate hike in September again, and $BTC immediately fell below $80,000. Ajian believes that more worth studying than the better-than-expected numbers themselves is that under these circumstances, the US stock market did not experience a particularly sharp crash, and the semiconductor sector like $SNDK performed surprisingly well. It seems prices have already priced in some of the bad news in advance, and capital is still willing to give AI and semiconductors high valuations. It remains to be seen whether high interest rates can still accommodate such high AI valuations. What really matters next is not to keep debating whether the non-farm data is bullish or bearish, but just to focus on these three things: employment, inflation, and oil prices. If employment is strong and inflation is weak, the market may reprice a soft landing; If employment is strong and inflation is also strong, the Fed faces the greatest pressure; If employment suddenly weakens and inflation also declines, rate cut trades may return; If employment is weak but inflation rises due to energy prices, that is the most troublesome scenario, because then the Fed faces a worsening economy but prices are not cooperating. A single data point can only tell you what happened at the moment; only by looking at it together with other variables can you truly see the market direction.

$SOL has bounced back above $100, with the current open interest around $6.5B and the funding rate about 0.0002%, which has clearly cooled down compared to the past few days. If SOL can hold $100, the structure looks pretty good; if it breaks below $98.44, first watch to see if it's a bull trap.

On September 3rd, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller stated that if subsequent data confirms a weakening of inflationary pressures, he tends to maintain interest rates unchanged in September. This statement caused the probability of a rate hike in September to drop directly from 63.2% the previous day to 50.4%. The S&P 500 rose 1.06%, the Nasdaq rose 1.40%, and the Dow Jones rose 1.18%. This is a typical risk appetite recovery, but I do not believe this signals a rate cut or a dovish shift. The market has simply moved from a higher likelihood of a rate hike back to an even split between hiking or not hiking. This is a marginal change in macro trading, not a real policy change, but a shift in probability distribution. Additionally, yesterday's significant gains in various crypto stocks such as $MSTR, $COIN, and $HOOD, besides being driven by a rebound in $BTC, are also related to this improvement in risk appetite. These stocks inherently have higher beta, so amplified gains are not surprising and are not the same as on-chain real income, stablecoin settlements, or regulatory certainty. Friends, please do not confuse these.