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- Leopold's AI Fund Meets the Margin Call
Leopold's AI Fund Meets the Margin Call
PLUS: New York Comes for Kalshi With a $36B Claim
Welcome back to The Warmup.
Happy Friday. Grab your popcorn. This market is absolute cinema.
Here’s what we’re watching:
Market Snapshot
Leopold's AI Fund Meets the Margin Call
BTC August Key Levels
New York Comes for Kalshi With a $36B Claim
Market: Crypto is pulling back while equities remain resilient ahead of key macro catalysts.
Leopold's AI Fund Meets the Margin Call
What’s going on:
Situational Awareness, the AI fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, sold its entire public equity book to Citadel this week after a brutal July.
The fund returned roughly 439% net through the first half of 2026 and scaled to as much as $45 billion at its peak.
Its largest Q1 positions included Nebius, SanDisk, Micron and CoreWeave, each down more than 35% this month.
Prime brokers wanted cash. Aschenbrenner approached investors and lenders for fresh capital, then liquidated in a single block trade.
What it means:
Leverage sets the timing, and conviction has to survive the schedule. The compute buildout thesis held through the drawdown while the financing behind it snapped.
Lenders price today's collateral, so a book of chip, memory and energy names trades as one correlated position the moment margin gets called.
Crypto has run this exact tape before. Forced selling is where patient capital gets paid.
BTC August Key Levels
What’s going on:
BTC is trading between major support and resistance. The focus is on reacting to these levels after confirmation, rather than predicting the move.
Key levels we’re watching:
Resistance: $67K → potential swing short zone
Support: $61K → first swing long area
Support: $57K → stronger long opportunity if price flushes lower
Directional Bias: Neutral
BTC is range-bound for now. Patience is key. Wait for confirmation at these levels instead of chasing price.
What we’re waiting for:
Rejection around $67K for potential shorts
Confirmation of support at $61K or $57K for longs
Strong volume and price reaction before entering any trade
New York Comes for Kalshi With a $36B Claim
What’s going on:
New York sued Kalshi on Friday, calling its prediction market an unlicensed gambling operation.
The state wants the platform barred from operating locally, full restitution to users, all proceeds disgorged, penalties at three times Kalshi's gains, and $100,000 for every unauthorized wager offered.
Court filings put compensatory damages at $36 billion or more pending a full accounting. The CFTC moved hours earlier, asking a federal judge to restrain New York on the grounds that event contracts sit under exclusive federal jurisdiction.
What it means:
The federal-versus-state question now runs through Kalshi as the test case. Kalshi targeted a $40 billion valuation in its June round, so the damages figure sits close to the entire company.
New York filed parallel petitions against Coinbase and Gemini back in April, which puts every crypto-adjacent event venue in the same line of fire.
Watch the federal ruling. It decides whether prediction markets scale nationally or get carved up state by state.
 | SUI: |
 | HOOD: |
 | COIN: |
Are prediction markets gambling? |
Two of crypto's biggest listed companies reported this week, and the same line stood out on both pages. Robinhood booked $156 million from event contracts against $100 million from crypto trading. Coinbase more than doubled its prediction market revenue quarter over quarter and crossed a $100 million annualized run rate.
Zoom out and the contrast sharpens. Bitcoin spent July grinding in the low $60,000s while spot ETFs took in roughly $205 million for the month, the weakest monthly total on record. The rails found their strongest product fit in a corner most people were ignoring two years ago.
Attention rotates faster than infrastructure gets built. Speculation ran through exchanges, then ETFs, and now event contracts, with each wave leaving behind more usable plumbing than the last. Stay close to where usage compounds and let price arrive on its own schedule.
— The Warmup Team
Always do your own research. This newsletter is supplemental material to help educate readers as they make their own decisions. Projects mentioned here are provided to give a potential early-mover advantage.