THE TAPE
One in ten Chime employees. Cut, with AI named in the announcement.
Tokenized real-world asset AUM
On-chain asset value hit $37.87 billion on August 6, up 3.27% in a month. Holder count rose 53.68% in the same month, to 1,604,068, per rwa.xyz.
The holder jump is the tell. Value grew slowly while ownership widened fast.
One line went the other way. Represented asset value fell 6.17% over the month, to $374.64 billion.
BlackRock's BUIDL is still the anchor product at roughly $2.5 billion. Citi projects tokenized securities reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.
AI-managed fund AUM and performance
Rule-based funds were up 10.8% so far this year, per Goldman Sachs on July 9. Goldman's July 28 note put human equity long/short funds at 12.9% for the first half.
The gap opened in late June. Systematic funds fell 3.6% after June 22, their worst run since summer 2025.
That wiped out about a quarter of their gains for the year. They went into June 22 up 14.4%.
Allocators are not flinching. Goldman surveyed 341 of them in July, running more than $1.5 trillion.
Nearly half plan to add in the second half. Only 3% plan to cut.
Gates. Google. The Pentagon.
Bill Gates wrote a $100 million check.
Google signed a 15-year contract.
The Pentagon made it their top energy priority.
All for the same thing.
An energy source 140 times larger than global electricity demand. It runs around the clock. No fuel costs. No foreign supply chain. Zero emissions.
The problem was always access - it sits three miles underground, locked behind solid rock.
Last year a drilling crew solved that problem in 16 days. The government predicted 64.
Now Washington is handing this energy source an edge on August 18th that no competitor gets. Tax credits preserved while solar and wind lost theirs.
One company controls the technology. Sixty years of building. And the smartest money on Earth just showed up at their door.
On-chain settlement volume
Stablecoin float slipped 1.57% over thirty days to $295.94 billion, per rwa.xyz on August 6. Holders moved the other way, up 3.33% to 280.91 million.
Float down, users up. That is the same rotation showing in the tokenized fund line.
Clean weekly settlement figures are still not public. Visa's adjusted measure runs near $10.2 trillion over twelve months.
McKinsey put real payment volume far lower. Work it published with Artemis in February pegged actual stablecoin payments near $390 billion a year.
Legacy fee pool compression
Chime cut 10% of its staff and named AI, per American Banker on July 31. Visa tied its own cuts to AI in the same week.
The standing marker is still Standard Chartered. It set out 7,800 back-office cuts by 2030 on May 19.
India shows the same shape. HDFC Bank's headcount fell 3,343 in the year to March, per its annual report on July 11.
Non-supervisory roles took the hit, down more than 8,000. Risk, compliance, and back-office operations are the repeat targets.
Institutional crossover moves
Three crossovers landed in twelve days: Robinhood, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo. The last two both moved on tokenized cash, on August 3 and August 4.
Wells Fargo is the one to mark. It joins JPMorgan and Citi on tokenized deposits for corporate clients.
A shared bank network sits behind all three. The Clearing House is building it, with a first-half 2027 target.
Fees are also moving between the winners. Morgan Stanley's capital markets fees hit $2.3 billion in the first half.
That is up from $1.4 billion, per LSEG data in the FT on July 26. AI deal financing did most of the work.
Off the Board
Three items that fit no metric but move the same war.
The EU AI Act's high-risk rules took effect on August 2. Fines reach 15 million euros or 3% of global revenue.
ICE agreed on July 29 to buy MarketAxess for about $5.7 billion. That is $167 a share in cash, a 33% premium.
The x402 Foundation went live under the Linux Foundation on July 14. Forty members signed on, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and AWS.
Commentary
Four of the five scoreboard lines moved the machines' way since the July baseline. The exception is stablecoin float, which fell while tokenized fund value climbed. Watch BRSRV's balance next month to see whether BlackRock pulls that float back.
Territory
Territory: +machines.
Reserve and cash-management fees kept migrating on-chain even as stablecoin float shrank.
