The Bots are Botting - Episode #814

The SEC stopped waiting for Congress. Harmony minted four billion tokens out of thin air. And on Robinhood's new chain, AI agents moved $200 million while the humans logged off. Joel and Travis cover the SEC's August 14 vote on Regulation Crypto — the first formal crypto rulemaking of Chairman Paul Atkins' tenure, landing days after the Senate left town without moving the CLARITY Act. Then: Harmony's empty-block exploit that minted 26% of ONE's total supply and the chain rollback the team is now weighing; Goldman Sachs buying NEOS Investments for $2.25 billion and inheriting a bitcoin income ETF; Tether becoming the 17th largest holder of US Treasuries on Earth; Anthropic watermarking everything Claude writes to satisfy the EU AI Act; H100 Group's world-first bitcoin-for-bitcoin acquisition; Hyperliquid's absurd $106 million of revenue per employee; and Anthropic's $9.1 billion, 20-year lease with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms — signed at a moment when it costs more to mine a bitcoin than a bitcoin is worth. Joel demos three AI builds including an America Online time capsule frozen in August 1996, and Travis walks through FourthWeb's agent swarm scraping 150-plus news sources every fifteen minutes. Plus: 52% of Gen Z investors have moved money earmarked for investing into sports betting, and 26% now call it part of their long-term financial strategy. Programming note — this is our second-to-last show before a hiatus. Joel's getting married. We'll be back in late November. We're not quitting. Not financial advice. Stay bad. Support the show: https://badcryptopodcast.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.