AI agents need “food,” and that food is not physical food; it is tokens, said Jordi Visser. Macro investor and former hedge fund manager Jordi Visser said he recently bought Ether as he sees the “tokenization reality” starting this year, with tokenized assets powering agentic AI payments. “I don't think enough people are talking about tokenization and what’s happening,” Visser told Anthony Pompliano on a podcast on Saturday, predicting that tokenization and AI will be intertwined. AI agents cannot access banking services or credit, so their primary method of transacting online autonomously will be digital assets such as Ether or stablecoins, which do not require bank accounts, logins or human approval. Read more
The Albanese government’s budget plans to replace the 50% capital gains tax discount on assets held over 12 months with a model taxing full real gains adjusted for inflation. The Australian government is reportedly seeking to replace capital gains tax discounts on crypto and other assets with an inflation indexation tax, which could increase the taxes on long-term crypto gains. The Albanese government’s fiscal year 2027 budget, set to be released on Tuesday, would cut the current 50% capital gains tax discount alongside changes to housing investment taxes, the Australian Financial Review reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the budget. Australian investors can currently claim a 50% capital gains tax discount on assets held for more than 12 months. The proposed indexation model would instead tax full real gains, adjusted for inflation, over the time the asset is held. Read more
The new tools let AI agents hold wallets, discover services and make programmable USDC payments across blockchain networks. Circle launched a suite of tools designed to let AI agents hold wallets, discover services and make programmable payments using USDC, as companies race to build financial infrastructure for autonomous software systems. The products, released under Circle’s new “Agent Stack,” include agent-focused wallets, a command-line developer interface, a marketplace for agentic services and a nanopayments protocol for machine-to-machine transactions. Circle said the nanopayments infrastructure supports gas-free USDC (USDC) transfers as small as $0.000001 and is designed for high-frequency autonomous payment flows between software systems. Read more
The white hat hacker said the decision to exploit Renegade’s dark pool was made to protect the funds and safety of DeFi users. The team behind the Renegade.fi protocol said a whitehat hacker returned about $190,000 after exploiting one of its Arbitrum-based decentralized dark pools and later complying with instructions in an onchain message to return 90% of the funds. Renegade confirmed the return of funds on Sunday after blockchain analytics platform Blockaid flagged the $209,000 exploit at 8:27 am UTC. The hacker injected malicious logic into a faulty function tied to its V1 Arbitrum dark pool to steal 27 ERC-20 tokens. Data from Arbitrum block explorer Arbiscan shows that the whitehat returned about $190,000 to the Arbitrum wallet address “0xE4A…5CFBE,” which includes $84,370 worth of USDC (USDC), $27,885 in wrapped Bitcoin and $23,950 in wrapped Ether. Read more
Global regulators will have to confront US policy on dollar-backed stablecoins as they seek international standards for payment tokens, Andrew Bailey said. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said international regulators will have to “wrestle” with the US over global rules for stablecoins, which are largely denominated in and backed by US dollars. “If we want stablecoins to be part of the architecture of payments globally [...] they're only going to work if we have international standards,” Bailey said at a conference on Friday, according to Reuters. “Frankly, that, I think, is going to be a coming wrestle with the [US] administration," he added. Read more