Bitcoin network difficulty reached 136.04 trillion on Sept. 4, while dollar hashprice slipped to about $52 per petahash per day this week. Per Hashrate Index, the last adjustment set a new high for difficulty, and the forward market now prices an average hashprice near $49.17 per PH per day for the next six months.

The squeeze leaves miners deciding whether to sell inventories, consolidate operations, or pursue high-performance computing revenue tied to artificial intelligence.

The production backdrop is firm. The seven-day average hashrate sits near one zettahash per second, while transaction fees contribute a little over 1% of block rewards on recent averages.

That mix compresses gross margins at the same time retail power prices and wholesale data center rents trend higher. Global colocation pricing averaged $217.30 per kilowatt per month in the first quarter, with tight supply in major hubs, per CBRE’s Global Data Center Trends 2025.

Strategic optionality is widening as compute demand reorders the power stack.

CoreWeave agreed to acquire Core Scientific earlier this year in an all-stock transaction that implies roughly $9 billion of equity value. The acquisition would consolidate about 1.3 gigawatts of installed capacity with more expansion potential.

In its deal materials, the buyer outlined lease efficiency gains and operating synergies by 2027, while the transaction is part of the broader AI buildout competing for grid access across North America. The direction of travel is clear: AI workloads are now a core alternative for power and land that previously skewed toward proof of work.

Public market signaling has also shifted with the debut of American Bitcoin Corp. The company began trading on Nasdaq as ABTC after completing a merger with Gryphon Digital Mining. Corporate filings detail a controlled structure after the combination, with former American Bitcoin holders owning about 98% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis.

The model emphasizes accumulation alongside self-mining, creating another lever for treasury strategies that may dampen or amplify market sales depending on spreads between mining cost, spot price, and financing terms.

Power constraints and policy continue to set near-term supply behavior.

In Texas, miners commonly curtail during the Four Coincident Peak season to manage costs and capture credits, a pattern reflected in Riot Platforms’ June operating update. Curtailments can lift hashprice temporarily and shift revenue timing, but they also illustrate why forward hedging has become standard. Luxor’s market shows an actively traded curve with mid-market quotes published on the Hashrate Forward Curve.

Against this backdrop, break-even math is simple but unforgiving. Using representative efficiency bands and current economics, the ranges below illustrate approximate breakeven power prices, expressed in cents per kilowatt hour, at a $53 per PH per day hashprice and nominal pool fees.

The inputs reference published specifications for the Antminer S21 and WhatsMiner M60S, along with incremental firmware gains evidenced by LuxOS testing.

These thresholds imply that fleets paying above single-digit power rates will feel pressure if hashprice tracks the forward average. That pushes treasurers toward hedges on the hashrate curve, deeper curtailment during high-priced hours, and non-mining revenue.

The last category includes AI colocation and managed GPU services, where contracted rents are quoted per megawatt per year and often load follows compute.

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Recent contracts frame the revenue step change.

TeraWulf disclosed more than $3.7 billion of expected hosting revenue under multi-year agreements, with public reporting estimating an annualized take rate near $1.85 million per megawatt on the initial tranche.

The comparison below uses those public figures and CBRE’s rent benchmarks to show the order of magnitude gap between mature AI colocation and current mining cash generation per power unit at prevailing hashprice.

The delta does not automatically mean every miner should pivot.

Retrofits require capex, liquid cooling, and higher-density racks, which can saturate existing transformers, and contractual take-or-pay obligations can limit near-term flexibility.

Still, the combination of tight colocation supply and announced consolidation, such as CoreWeave’s deal, will likely keep AI rents firm through year-end, which factors into treasury choices whenever bitcoin’s fee share remains low.

Miners able to monetize demand response programs, like the ERCOT 4CP framework, and tune fleets with efficiency firmware can widen their breakeven bands without selling coins.

Case studies illustrate the choice set. Iris Energy continues to expand GPU capacity and cloud revenue alongside self-mining, using a dual track that stabilizes cash flows against hashprice volatility. 

American Bitcoin presents a treasury-led approach combining on-balance sheet accumulation with mining, with control details and share counts in the SEC filing. Those paths sit alongside pure play hosting that captures AI demand and infrastructure premiums.

The near-term market question is whether balance sheets become a supply source by year-end. If hashprice follows the forward curve and fees remain near current prints, miners above the single-digit cost bands are more likely to raise cash by selling coins or locking in forward sales of hashrate.

If AI colocation ramps up on previously announced contracts, some of that selling could be offset by compute reallocation and hedges already layered in at summer premiums.

The balance of those forces will determine how much miner supply reaches exchanges during the fourth quarter.

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Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) has become one of the crypto industry’s darlings, among the fastest-growing sectors in web3. According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Technology Convergence Report, DePIN is set to snowball from its current ~$30 billion valuation to a seismic $3.5 trillion by 2028.

That’s an increase of approximately 11,576% (just ask ChatGPT).

On paper, DePIN is certainly a heavyweight. But is it ready to go round-to-round and actually power the world?

Understanding the DePIN landscape today

The magic of DePIN lies in making physical infrastructure (think bandwidth, cloud storage, smart cars, and microgrids) community-owned and open for anyone to contribute. Regular people can plug in their idle devices, whether it’s a sensor, a car, or a phone, and get rewarded for their part in keeping the network alive.

The DePIN world is buzzing with blockchain-based, community-owned networks that support real-world infrastructure in all kinds of ways, and the use cases keep growing.

The WEF estimates more than 1,500 active DePIN projects out there, opening physical infrastructure to the masses and letting individuals and communities join ecosystems that were once reserved for big corporations and centralized players.

By harnessing blockchain, DePIN boosts transparency, security, and efficiency in how resources get used, and contributors receive tokenized rewards for getting involved.

Why the hype is real

One of the primary drivers for DePIN’s rise is its convergence with AI, especially the emergence of decentralized physical AI (DePAI), enabling machine learning models to harness data and compute from a diverse, distributed, and global network.

Unlike some other areas of web3, like memecoins or perpetuals, DePIN is not just about financial speculation; it’s about blockchain mass adoption and making users active participants in digital economies.

And in a world that’s powered by data, DePIN really shines; not just knowing what the data is, but where it comes from, who validated it, and whether it’s been faked or phished.

As the need for AI training data explodes, the value of high-quality, trustless proof-of-origin data rises in step, making DePIN essential not just for crypto, but for global digital infrastructure as well.

From home internet to IoT

XYO is a company that verifies and moves real-world information on-chain for DePIN, AI, and RWA apps. Launched in 2018, XYO has over 10 million nodes and ranks as the fourth-highest-earning DePIN project to date. Cofounder Marcus Levin explains:

“We act as a trustless oracle, verifying and validating the real-world data that powers AI, web3, and enterprise use cases. 80% of the people in our network are non-crypto users. They can be truckers and Uber drivers, joggers, and people who move a lot. They’re able to earn more. People want to earn money on this side and get crypto for free.”

Althea Network brings blockchain-enabled internet to thousands of homes with dynamic, pay-as-you-go pricing. The team reports four petabytes of traffic routed across 12 states and multiple countries, directly addressing the issue that $100 billion in U.S. government spending has made less than a 1% dent in connectivity. As cofounder and CEO Debora Simpier put it:

“About one in four people in the U.S. don’t have adequate internet.”

Another example of a DePIN network is Sentinel, which offers a decentralized VPN infrastructure, boasting 359,000 users and 7,500 volunteer-operated nodes worldwide. Sentinel also builds custom SDKs to enable VPN features for popular applications, even in highly censored regimes like Turkmenistan.

The DePIN sector isn’t just about location data or supply chain oracles, either. Its reach is far broader, stretching deeper into the physical fabric of the connected world.

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Helium, for example, started in 2019 as a grassroots mesh network for IoT sensors, and has exploded into a community-powered wireless movement, with tens of thousands of hotspots deployed globally.

Instead of relying on telcos and corporate towers, Helium lets everyday people become the network, earning tokens by providing wireless coverage for smart sensors, scooters, and asset trackers, and turning idle hardware into crypto-powered utility.

And when it comes to data storage, Filecoin’s DePIN network enables decentralized storage, which not only circumvents centralized actors but translates to better privacy, lower costs, and a radically reduced risk of censorship or downtime.

These projects span home internet, censorship-resistant communications, mobility, and storage infrastructure, highlighting the diversity and scalability of the DePIN model.

Is DePIN ready for prime time?

Despite the hype and growing adoption, scaling decentralized physical infrastructure remains DePIN’s biggest hurdle. One of the hardest challenges of integrating real-world hardware is economies of scale.

Traditional blockchains struggle to process vast numbers of transactions and data uploads in real time, especially as DePIN networks connect thousands, or even millions, of physical devices across the globe.

Unlike purely financial networks, every new sensor, router, or contributor adds not just another wallet, but a new stream of bandwidth, compute, or storage that must be securely tracked and rewarded.

As network scale grows, congestion and latency can spike, with longer transaction confirmation times, unpredictable fees, and the risk of outages in high-throughput environments.

This challenge is amplified as DePIN seeks to power real-world infrastructure that demands seamless response, reliability, and ultra-low delays. Current infrastructure, while promising, often falls short of these demands.

Mass participation also brings regulatory scrutiny around consumer protections, KYC/AML, and data privacy. DePIN’s physical touchpoints, such as routers, vehicles, and storage, are inherently more exposed to security breaches than purely digital systems, necessitating strong defenses against hacking, Sybil attacks, or hardware vulnerabilities.

And despite 1,500+ live projects and valuations in the tens of billions, only a handful have proven themselves over years of operation.

The path to an open digital economy

DePIN’s projected 70-fold market expansion in three years seems like a tall order. But powered by AI growth and global demand for resilient, community-owned infrastructure, the tailwinds are blowing in DePIN’s favor.

As the WEF points out, DePIN’s convergence with decentralized AI could fundamentally change the global computing landscape and lead to a more open, secure, and accessible digital economy.

And as the number and diversity of DePIN projects continue to rise, so will those that move beyond hype and deliver real infrastructure and inclusion at a truly global scale. So perhaps one day soon, everyone on the planet, from Tennessee to Timbuktu, will be able to plug in, contribute, and own a slice of the new digital infrastructure.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a luxury for businesses and has become the baseline. The real differentiator for achieving success in AI adoption is the ability to communicate with AI systems or prompt engineering. The utility of prompt engineering in everyday work remains behind the curtains as it gradually transforms generic language models into experts in various domains. Prompt engineering is the primary ingredient for unlocking the full potential of AI systems used at the workplace.

Artificial intelligence is gradually becoming an integral part of the everyday lives of millions worldwide. The growing usage of AI has drawn the limelight on prompt engineering, which helps in transforming AI systems into proactive partners for various tasks. The uses of prompt engineering at the workplace not only help in enhancing productivity but also open new avenues for creativity. Let us discover some insights on the utility of prompt engineering in everyday tasks at the workplace.

Prompt Engineering and the Art of Conversational AI

The term ‘prompt engineering’ might have had you thinking about complex code and extremely technical tasks. However, it represents the subtle art of communicating effectively with artificial intelligence and has wide ranging implications in our everyday lives and work. The best answers to “What is practical prompt engineering for daily work?” can reflect on the difference between a vague question and detailed set of instructions for a new employee.

For instance, if you ask the employee to write an email, they will create a generic email. On the other hand, asking the employee to write an email to the project team seeking details about the project status will get you a perfectly structured email. You can think of prompt engineering as communication with a highly capable AI assistant. If you provide refined input prompts to the AI models, then you will achieve the desired outcomes.    

The clarity, specificity and quality of input prompts determine the efficiency of your conversations with AI. Prompt engineering plays a major role in enhancing conversational AI as well-crafted prompts help in obtaining more creative, precise and actionable results. The best thing about prompt engineering is that you don’t need advanced technical or coding expertise to communicate with AI. 

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Significance of Prompt Engineering in Everyday Work

Artificial intelligence tools have become an integral aspect of many workplaces, serving different functionalities. You can find many prompt engineering examples in real life where clear instructions get the job done. At the workplace, prompt engineering can help in providing clear instructions to AI tools and language models for obtaining desired results.

With organizations adopting AI systems for content creation, customer support and data analysis, prompt engineering has become an indispensable requirement at the workplace. Prompt engineering can help you achieve the following benefits in everyday work with artificial intelligence.

The most common assumption about AI models is that they can accomplish the tasks they were designed for without flaws. However, AI models cannot read what’s on your mind when they receive instructions for specific tasks. The importance of practical prompt engineering for daily work is evident in scenarios where AI models don’t understand your requirements and offer generic responses. Prompt engineering can help in reducing the need for follow-up queries by including relevant information in the instructions in a structured manner.

• Maximizing Workplace Productivity

AI tools and systems have been created to make redundant tasks easier and save time of employees at the workplace. The lack of effective prompts can cause the AI tools to take a lot of time to deliver the desired results. Prompt engineering can help in automation of repetitive tasks, brainstorming ideas and generating reports by using precise prompts. You can complete these tasks a lot faster with prompt engineering than with traditional methods, thereby improving productivity at work. 

Another general perception about prompt engineering is that it is all about technical efficiency. On the other hand, it is also important to know that prompt engineering can help in enabling creativity in AI systems. For instance, writers and designers can use prompts to obtain inspiration for their work or refine their completed work. One of the best scenarios to prove this is evident in the creative block experienced by designers. Precisely crafted prompts can help them start the creative process with new ideas. 

The significance of prompt engineering for everyone is also visible in the way it makes AI accessible to everyone. Prompt engineering can help a non-technical professional tap into the power of advanced AI tools for different tasks. It empowers everyone to make the most of AI tools across different roles, including sales and HR, by framing questions and instructions for diverse tasks.

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Examples of Using Prompt Engineering at the Workplace

The benefits of prompt engineering in the workplace showcase how it is a crucial differentiator for achieving success with AI tools. You can find a better impression of how to use prompt engineering for different tasks in everyday work with the following examples.

• Data Analysis and Reporting

Working with data is obviously a tough challenge with the complexity of tasks involved in data analysis, visualization and reporting. However, prompt engineering can help you simplify the complex tasks in data analysis with precisely crafted prompts. Employees can get actionable reports and charts by uploading the dataset or describing it in detail and using the right prompts. 

• Marketing Content Creation

Marketers depend on compelling content to enhance audience engagement. However, creating marketing content, such as blog posts, ad copy and social media captions can be a creatively challenging task. You can use prompt engineering in everyday work to streamline this process and generate marketing content with prompts. For instance, a social media manager can use prompts to create social media posts that align with the brand voice of their employer. It will not only help in saving time but also enhance the possibility of achieving desired outcomes from marketing content.

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How to Make the Most of Prompt Engineering at Work?

Prompt engineering is undoubtedly one of the powerful catalysts that help in enhancing productivity at workplaces that embrace AI. If you work with AI models at your workplace, then you must learn the best practices of prompt engineering. The most common suggestions to improve prompt engineering include maintaining specificity and contextual relevance in prompts. In addition, you should also try breaking down prompts for complex tasks into smaller and simpler prompts.

The best practices for prompt engineering also point at using examples to guide the AI model in generating desired responses. On top of it, providing the ideal format for the answer will also ensure that AI systems deliver actionable responses. Most important of all, you should practice patience with prompt engineering and tweak your prompts continuously until you obtain perfect output.

Final Thoughts

Prompt engineering is not only the driver of conversational AI but also productivity at the workplace. The growing adoption of AI has drawn attention towards the utility of practical prompt engineering for daily work, especially for automation of repetitive tasks. Prompt engineering not only helps in maximizing the efficiency of AI models and systems but also promotes creativity and productivity. The most notable use cases of prompt engineering at the workplace include content generation, data analysis and summarization. Learn more about the other ways to embrace prompt engineering for everyday tasks at your workplace with the Prompt Engineering Certification.

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As the bull market cycle continues, Bitcoin and Ethereum adoption are sharply heating up among prominent figures and large corporations in the ever-evolving financial landscape. In the last few days, institutions have gone on a significant buying spree, one of which is the asset management firm BlackRock.

A Two-Day Bitcoin And Ethereum Shopping Spree

Bitcoin’s price has steadily faced notable price fluctuations, while Ethereum’s price has experienced a pullback from its recent all-time high. Despite this bearish performance from BTC and ETH, BlackRock is purchasing the two crypto leaders on a massive scale.

According to the reports, the world’s largest asset manager has acquired a staggering $750 million worth of BTC and ETH. It is worth noting that this massive accumulation by the leading firm was made within two days.

The report reveals that BlackRock bought about 413 BTC valued at $46 million, along with 73,864 ETH for a staggering $342 million on August 27. Prior to this huge purchase, the asset manager made another acquisition of 568 BTC for approximately $62.6 million, and 65,901 ETH valued at $292.6 million.

This rapid accumulation underscores the firm’s growing conviction in crypto as an institutional-grade asset class. While signaling rising demand among institutional investors, the huge purchase in such a short span reinforces the idea that traditional finance is sharply intertwining with the crypto sector.

Combining these acquisitions, the asset manager invested close to $750 million in its cryptocurrency Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) products within a two-day window. In 2025, these purchases rank among the biggest single-day purchases made by a conventional financial institution.

Big BTC Investors Are Making Their Presence Known

Large Bitcoin and Ethereum holders, often regarded as whales, have been gradually returning to the market. Santiment, a leading market intelligence and on-chain platform, has reported an uptick in BTC and ETH whales even as bearish pressure intensifies. This growth is observed among wallet addresses holding 1,000 BTC and wallet addresses holding at least 10,000 ETH.

Such a trend from high-net-worth investors signals a possible change in market dynamics for the two assets. Their comeback coincides with a critical juncture for the cryptocurrency industry as investors balance the long-term growth trajectory of the assets against macroeconomic uncertainty.

Data from the leading on-chain platform shows that there are now 13 more wallets holding 1,000 BTC, bringing the total to 2,087 wallets. Meanwhile, for Ethereum, there is now a total of 1,275 wallets holding 10,000 ETH following an additional 48 new wallets.

At the time of writing, BTC and ETH were trading at $113,182 and $4,573, respectively, in the last 24 hours. While ETH’s trading volume has declined by over 13% in the past day, BTC’s trading volume is experiencing a slight upswing of nearly 5%.

Featured image from iStock, chart from Tradingview.com

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Good Morning, Asia. Here’s what’s making news in the markets:

Welcome to Asia Morning Briefing, a daily summary of top stories during U.S. hours and an overview of market moves and analysis. For a detailed overview of U.S. markets, see CoinDesk’s Crypto Daybook Americas.

Bitcoin staged a sharp recovery over the past week, rebounding from a dip below $114,000 to trade near $121,000, in what Glassnode described in a recent report as a shift from “seller exhaustion to a strong rebound near recent ATHs.”

The rally, however, came without a surge in spot market participation.

Glassnode data shows spot trading volumes fell 22% to $5.7 billion, close to their statistical low band, suggesting the rebound has been driven more by positioning shifts than deep conviction buying. The Spot Cumulative Volume Delta flipped 94% toward buy pressure, a sign that aggressive selling has been replaced by renewed demand, but not yet across a broad base of traders.

On the derivatives side, leveraged traders re-engaged aggressively, Glassnode detailed in its report.

Perpetual Cumulative Volume Delta, a measure of the buy-sell pressure in perps, jumped 88%, funding rates remained elevated, and options open interest climbed 6.7% to $42.4 billion. Yet, volatility pricing collapsed by almost a third, indicating a degree of complacency that has historically preceded large market moves.

ETF flows offered some relief, with U.S.-listed spot bitcoin ETF outflows halving to $311 million from $686 million the prior week. Even so, ETF trade volume fell 27.7% to $13.7 billion, keeping activity near its low band.

QCP Capital framed the weekend surge, which briefly pushed BTC above $122,000, as a function of thin order books and a broader risk-on shift in global markets.

“Crypto staged an impressive comeback over the weekend during thin, low-liquidity trading hours,” the Singapore-based trading firm wrote, noting that the bounce aligned with a rebound in U.S. equities and growing expectations for a September Fed rate cut.

While on-chain activity improved, active addresses jumped 8.4% to 793,000, and fee volume rose 10%. Glassnode cautioned that elevated profitability levels could quickly turn into selling pressure if sentiment shifts. With 94.1% of supply in profit and the realized profit-to-loss ratio climbing to 1.9, the market may be nearing a point where profit-taking accelerates.

The combination of thin liquidity, bullish derivatives positioning, and macro-driven optimism leaves Bitcoin primed for volatile moves as it approaches all-time highs, with the next test likely coming from Tuesday’s U.S. CPI release.

Polymarket traders lean toward a modest uptick in line with consensus that would likely keep BTC consolidating, with hotter prints posing a short-term headwind by delaying Fed cuts and softer readings offering a potential breakout catalyst if ETF flows and spot activity strengthen.

Market Movers

BTC: Bitcoin is trading at $118k as traders pull back and position themselves for the possibility that Tuesday’s CPI report might break BTC’s momentum.

ETH: Ethereum is trading at $4200. Analysts say that ETH’s rally is partially due to increased capacity on-chain and lower DeFi costs.

Gold: Gold slid to $3,355.13 as upbeat risk sentiment and Trump’s pledge to exclude gold from tariffs weighed on safe-haven demand, though losses were cushioned by rising Fed rate cut bets ahead of this week’s U.S. inflation data.

Nikkei 225: Asia-Pacific markets rose Tuesday, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 hitting a record high after the U.S.-China trade truce was extended, while investors awaited the Reserve Bank of Australia’s expected rate cut.

S&P 500: U.S. stocks eased, with the S&P 500 down 0.2% and just under its record, as investors await new inflation data .Meanwhile, Citigroup and UBS lifted their year-end S&P 500 targets, citing easing policy risks and solid earnings, with Citi raising its forecast to 6,600 and UBS to 6,100.

Elsewhere in Crypto

• Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Now Accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana for Spaceflights (Decrypt)
• Rumble Gains on Plans to Acquire Tether-Affiliated Northern Data (CoinDesk)
• Senate Banking Committee Democratic staff slam GOP crypto draft bill as ‘superhighway’ for dodging regulation (The Block)