Arthur Hayes: The AI bubble lies in the valuation of indebted and loss-making companies, not AI itself.

ZK infrastructure firm Aligned on Tuesday revealed details for its ALIGN airdrop, 20 months after the airdrop registration deadline passed. The company has not announced a Token Generation Event (TGE) date. The genesis airdrop accounts for 8.74% of the total 10 billion ALIGN supply, with 44.36% of that amount unlocking at TGE (equal to ~3.88% of total supply). The airdrop is divided into two main segments: Community allocations make up ~6.54% of total supply. Users holding no more than 10,000 ALIGN in their wallets will receive their full allocation at TGE; those holding more will only get 10,000 at TGE, with the remainder vesting linearly over 12 months. Small allocations are claimable on the Base network, while large allocations are available on Ethereum Mainnet. The ZK Arcade game campaign accounts for 0.10% of total supply, unlocking fully at TGE. Additionally, outstanding contributors receive 2.10% of total supply: Protocol Guild was allocated 1.5%, while L2BEAT, ZachXBT, and Zero Knowledge Podcast each got 0.2%. 2.08% of this contributor pool unlocks at TGE, with the remaining portion vesting linearly over 47 months. Aligned finalized airdrop eligibility in December 2024, at which point 986,843 users qualified and over 160,000 wallets completed registration. The Proof Verification Layer underlying the airdrop was deprecated in July, replaced by the Proof Aggregation Service which supports the SP1 zkVM. Users can now look up their airdrop allocations.

Serenity has released a report evaluating the listing of Unitree Robotics, pointing out that the Chinese humanoid robot startup reached a market capitalization of approximately $53.3 billion on its first day of trading, becoming the first major public market benchmark for the humanoid robot sector. The next notable humanoid robot company to watch is Agility Robotics, which is backed by Nvidia and Amazon and is expected to go public in the fourth quarter at a valuation of $2.5 billion. Serenity believes pure-play humanoid robot firms are seeing public market demand that far outpaces expectations.

According to monitoring data from TradingBeats (formerly Hyperinsight), the total liquidation volume of Yushu Technology contracts across the entire network reached $6.31 million in the past four hours, ranking first. Short positions were the primary target of liquidations, with a single largest short liquidation exceeding $570,000. Additionally, the 24-hour trading volume of Yushu Technology contracts on trade.xyz hit $42.24 million, with open interest standing at $32.02 million. Currently, 486 users hold long positions on the platform, while 728 hold short positions.

Bank of America’s August Global Fund Manager Survey, released Tuesday, shows that among 180 surveyed representatives of asset management firms (with combined assets under management exceeding $500 billion), optimism has hit its third-highest level since 2022. This marks the most bullish sentiment in financial markets in nearly four years. This extreme bullishness is clearly reflected in institutional positioning. The survey found that fund managers’ current cash allocation has dropped to 3.5%, the lowest level since the survey’s launch in 1998. Bank of America chief stock strategist Michael Hartnett noted that per BofA’s “Cash Rule”, a “contrarian sell signal” is typically triggered when cash allocations fall to or below 4%. This means current market positioning is overly crowded; without sustained inflows of fresh capital, any negative shocks to growth, inflation or policy could trigger sharp market volatility. Against this backdrop of extreme optimism, BofA also proposed contrarian investment strategies in the survey. Given that global institutions are generally underweight bonds and gold, contrarian long positions in bonds, undervalued gold or UK stocks could deliver stronger defensive returns if market sentiment reverses.

According to Bitget market data, following yesterday’s declines in the U.S. market, South Korean stocks plunged sharply today. Weighted stocks suffered steep losses: SK Hynix fell over 8%, and Samsung dropped more than 7%. Correspondingly, the Southern 2x Long SK Hynix ETF slid 14.63%, while the Southern 2x Long Samsung ETF declined 13.43%.

Unitree Technology debuted on the STAR Market today, with its opening price surging 629.44%. Based on the issue price of 150.80 yuan per share, investors who subscribed for one lot via the online new share offering could pocket a profit of 474,600 yuan upon selling. Meituan-related entities are the largest external shareholders of Unitree, holding a total of around 35.1236 million shares through Hanhai Information, Chengdu Longzhu, and Galaxy Z, generating an unrealized profit of over 33.3 billion yuan. (Source: Jinshi)