Robinhood Hands the Wheel to an Agent
Robinhood spent Tuesday announcing three things at once, and only one of them is genuinely new territory.
- Robinhood Agents: customers can spin up an in-app AI agent, pick a model from OpenAI or Anthropic, and give it access to a separate trading account. It can analyze markets, build watchlists, and trade stocks, options and crypto — eventually without waiting for a fresh prompt (CoinDesk).
- A feature called Loops lets users give an agent standing instructions to monitor markets and fire a strategy when conditions hit.
- Perps: in-app perpetual futures for eligible U.S. users, backed by Bitstamp, with 10x leverage on BTC and ETH, 3x elsewhere, and 0.01% per trade through year-end (The Block).
- Weekend equities: 24/7 trading for select U.S. stocks and ETFs via Bruce ATS, pending regulatory review.
An AI agent with standing instructions and a funded account is a very polite way of describing a bot that trades while you sleep. Robinhood is selling autonomy; the risk disclosures are the part nobody screenshots.
Bitwise Wraps NEAR in an ETF, Leans on the AI Story
Bitwise began trading the first U.S. spot NEAR fund on NYSE Arca under ticker NRR, with a 0.75% annual fee (Decrypt).
- NEAR traded around $5.09, roughly triple its August lows near $1.60 — but still down about 75% from its all-time high above $20.
- The fund plans to stake its NEAR chasing average rewards of about 5%, which Bitwise says are not guaranteed.
- The AI pitch rests on co-founder Illia Polosukhin, a co-creator of the Transformer architecture behind ChatGPT-style models, and a research lab launched in May 2024.
The ETF wrapper solves distribution. It does not solve the part where the token is still three-quarters off its peak.
Anthropic's Trillion-Dollar Math Meets Indifferent Perps
Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, shows a $42 billion net loss for 2025 on $4.6 billion in revenue — with about $34 billion of that a non-cash convertible-financing charge. Operating loss topped $8 billion (Decrypt).
- Planned cloud and computing spend: about $518 billion in coming years, against $20.28 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of 2025.
- Pre-IPO perpetual futures tracking Anthropic traded at $1,998 on Tuesday, down about 2% over 24 hours and roughly 10% below a Sept. 9 record of $2,211 (CoinDesk).
- Open interest stood above $100 million across twelve exchanges, with Binance over 30% of activity and Hyperliquid's Entropy-run market at $36 million.
These contracts confer no equity, settle in cash, and merely track an implied valuation. The market pricing a company at roughly $2 trillion on synthetic derivatives is the most honest thing in this roundup.
BlackRock Keeps Whispering 'AI Agents' at the Crypto Market
Two separate headlines this week have BlackRock framing AI agents as an overlooked source of crypto demand (investinglive, Yahoo Finance, BeInCrypto). The ECB is separately exploring whether AI agents could spend digital euros (AMBCrypto).
Both are directionally interesting and currently unfalsifiable. "Agents will need to transact" is a thesis, not a flow. Nobody has shown the volume yet.
Elsewhere: Hacks, Shutdowns and Privacy Theater
- Bitget: customers withdrew over 4,000 BTC worth more than $334 million in one hour after withdrawals resumed, per CEO Gracy Chen. The exchange lost $388 million to attackers it says match North Korean patterns (Bitcoin Magazine).
- Near Intents blocked roughly $50 million in Bitget hacker swaps via its SHIELD system — drawing criticism over whether a service that can hold funds should call itself permissionless (CoinDesk).
- Balancer is winding down after BIP-928 passed with over 99% support. Holders rejected a fork. Estimated payout: about $0.1579 per BAL (Unchained).
- Aztec relaunched zk.money with every transfer capped below $2,500 and a shared $50,000 daily deposit ceiling — live before its V6 proving-system fix ships (Unchained, Decrypt).
- Cboe and S&P Dow Jones extended their licensing deal through 2051 and floated tokenized options as exploratory (Decrypt).
- Bitcoin held around $83,000 as ZEC dropped 12% and Brent climbed toward $107 (CoinDesk).
Closing Take
The AI x crypto trade this week is mostly narrative arbitrage: an ETF on a token with a Transformer co-founder, an agent button bolted onto a brokerage app, and a $2 trillion valuation carried by perps that grant nothing. The compute bill is real. The demand story is still a slide deck.
Not financial advice. Do your own research before letting anything — human or otherwise — trade for you.