robot

According to The Block, the x402 Foundation, incubated by Coinbase, has announced the launch of the unified platform Agent.market, aimed at providing an "app store"-like service entry for AI robots.The platform is built on the x402 protocol and helps users and robots access hundreds of tools and services. The x402 protocol is named after the unused HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, allowing websites, APIs, and AI robots to request and receive instant micropayments through blockchain and traditional payment channels. The protocol is managed as an open standard by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation and has the support of over 20 organizations and crypto companies, including Cloudflare, Stripe, AWS, Google, Visa, Base, Circle, and the Solana Foundation.When Agent.market goes live, it will cover seven major categories including reasoning, data, media, search, social, infrastructure, and trading, with service providers including OpenAI and Venice (reasoning); Bloomberg and CoinGecko (data); LinkedIn, X, and AgentMail (social); AWS Lambda, QuickNode, and Alechemy (infrastructure); as well as Bankr and Coinbase RAT (trading). Providers can join the marketplace without permission.Erik Reppel, the creator of the x402 protocol, stated that there are currently about 69,000 active agent robots on the protocol, which have completed over 165 million transactions with a transaction volume of 50 million dollars. He pointed out that agent commerce based on x402 is reshaping the customer acquisition activation costs for businesses, as robots can now access services at a very low setup cost without needing API keys.

AI Agent Protocol Virtuals Protocol launched the Embodied Intelligent Robot project Eastworlds, aiming to help prototype robots in laboratories quickly transition to real-world applications.The core functions of Eastworlds include building a community of robotic engineers to collaboratively solve complex problems; providing ready-to-deploy robotic hardware; and creating an Embodied AI Data Lake to capture real-world chaotic data for training autonomy.

Coin Bureau posted on platform X that X product head Nikita Bier stated that there is no technology that can solve the spam issue under cryptocurrency posts, as about 80% of the activity is driven by bots.

Silicon Valley-based industrial robotics company RoboForce announced the completion of a $52 million oversubscribed financing round, bringing the total funding amount to $67 million. This round of financing was led by YZi Labs, with participation from Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang. Additionally, existing investors including Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes, Qiming Venture Partners founding partner Gary Rieschel, and Carnegie Mellon University also continued to participate. The new funds will be used to accelerate the development of the company's next-generation robotic foundational models, promote the scaling of general-purpose Physical AI robots, and advance manufacturing capabilities to prepare for commercial deployment.The industrial sector is currently facing a continuously expanding labor gap: many physically demanding, repetitive, and safety-risk jobs still rely on increasingly scarce human labor, leading to extended project cycles and increased safety risks. RoboForce's solution aims to take on these high-risk, monotonous jobs, with application scenarios including large solar power plants, data centers, mining, shipping, manufacturing, and logistics in various industrial environments.

According to the official announcement, Gate will hold a

German robotics startup Neura Robotics is preparing for a new funding round of approximately 1 billion euros to accelerate the development of AI-driven humanoid robots. According to insiders, the issuer of the stablecoin USDT, Tether, is expected to participate in this round of investment.This funding round could value Neura Robotics, headquartered in Meckenheim, Germany, at around 4 billion euros, and may lead to further financing in the future. Neura Robotics was founded in 2019 by David Reger and is dedicated to developing "cognitive robots" equipped with visual, auditory, and environmental perception capabilities. The company is also developing both industrial and consumer-grade robots and has created a software platform called Neuraverse to support safe interactions between intelligent robots and humans.Public information shows that the company previously completed a funding round of 120 million euros in January 2025, led by Lingotto Investment Management, with investors including the Volvo Cars Tech Fund. The company has stated that its order volume is nearing 1 billion dollars, with clients including Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Omron.

German robotics startup Neura Robotics has completed a financing round of approximately 1 billion euros (about 1.2 billion dollars), with participation from stablecoin issuer Tether Holdings SA, aimed at developing AI-driven humanoid robots. This round of financing values the company at around 4 billion euros, with potential for further funding in the future.Neura Robotics, headquartered in Metzingen, Germany, currently sells products including factory transport robots and robotic arm devices for home use. The company's CEO, David Reger, previously stated that the company's order volume last year was close to 1 billion dollars, with clients including Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Omron. In January 2025, the company completed a financing round of 120 million euros led by Exor's Lingotto Investment Management.This investment is Tether's latest move in its ongoing expansion beyond the cryptocurrency business, having previously invested in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech and Italian robotics startup Generative Bionics.

According to The Wall Street Journal, crypto venture capital firm Paradigm is seeking to raise up to $1.5 billion for its next fund, with investment scope expanding from crypto to "frontier technologies" such as AI and robotics, while still continuing to invest in the crypto space.

OpenMind and Circle have officially announced a strategic partnership to jointly launch the world's first payment infrastructure specifically designed for autonomous intelligent agents and real-world embodied AI. By deeply integrating Circle's USDC stablecoin with OpenMind's x402 protocol module, this collaboration enables robots and AI entities to achieve direct and autonomous payments for energy, services, and data in the physical world.Based on the collaboration between OpenMind and Circle, the FABRIC Foundation will accelerate the implementation and large-scale deployment from two main directions: Robot Birthplace and Acceleration of Adoption.The payment infrastructure provided by OpenMind + Circle offers machines an "economic brain," while the FABRIC Foundation is responsible for the entire closed-loop chain of "birth, production, operation, and evolution." The synergy among these three will jointly give rise to a true machine economy era—where robots are no longer mere tools, but independent economic entities with autonomous perception, decision-making, action, and payment capabilities. In the coming months, more real-world deployment cases (such as automatic charging stations) are worth continuous attention.

The robotics startup Axis Robotics announced that in an experiment codenamed "The Rose of the Little Prince," it mobilized 12,000 users worldwide to complete the crowdsourced collection of 10,000 high-quality trajectory data points within 5 days through its self-developed browser-based platform. This experiment demonstrated that robotic intelligence can be constructed outside of traditional, expensive laboratory environments, achieving data scale explosion through public participation.Leveraging the MetaSim architecture, Axis Robotics has created an end-to-end pipeline from task setup to real machine deployment, decoupling complex physical simulations from lightweight web interactions to ensure that the collected data has deep processing capabilities. The platform enhances data diversity through cross-simulation replay technology, replaying high-frequency physical data from MuJoCo in Isaac Sim and performing large-scale domain randomization.Currently, the official team has successfully achieved real machine reproduction on the Franka robotic arm based on this batch of data provided by ordinary internet users, validating the feasibility of this data collection model in industrial implementation.

According to the official announcement, Gate will launch the robot upgrade event from February 9, 16:00 to February 27, 08:00 (UTC+8). During the event, both new and existing users who sign up to participate in robot trading will have the chance to receive robot trial funds and Gate merchandise.At the same time, users participating in trading can also take part in the leaderboard evaluation based on the total trading volume of the robots and the trading volume of different strategies, covering strategies such as spot grid, contract grid, spot martingale, and contract martingale, to win corresponding ranking rewards.

The founder of crypto market maker Wintermute, Evgeny Gaevoy, analyzed the unusual fluctuations in the 1-minute charts of Bitcoin and ETH spot markets on February 8th. He indicated that it is likely due to a market-making bot experiencing a liquidation, with losses potentially reaching tens of millions of dollars. The unusual fluctuations were caused by the bot's losses rather than any malicious intent from market makers, and Wintermute was clearly not involved.Evgeny Gaevoy further expressed skepticism regarding rumors of "large institutions facing liquidation" in the market, and even if such cases do exist, they would not have a medium to long-term impact. In contrast to the past collapses of Three Arrows Capital and FTX, where liquidation news spread quickly and there were clear signs indicating the validity of the liquidations, such as institutions seeking rescue, the current market rumors mainly come from anonymous accounts and have not been confirmed by reliable sources.The leverage in this cycle primarily comes from perpetual contracts. Trading platforms no longer take risks with user assets to invest in low-liquidity assets or extend special credit as they did in the past. The tightening of credit has resulted in institutional credit sizes being less than $2 billion, which limits the impact and makes it difficult to trigger a chain liquidation like in 2022.Previous reports indicated that on February 8th, there were unusual fluctuations in the 1-minute charts of Bitcoin and ETH spot markets, with single-minute amplitudes exceeding 1% and even 3% from 00:05 to 00:17.

The robotic head project OpenMind is about to launch on the App Store, marking the first cross-ontology robotic application store based on the open-source operating system OM1. Developers can centrally publish applications and skills here, and robot owners can easily deploy new features for their robots.The first application went live last week, with the initial batch focusing on education, healthcare, elderly companionship, and home security. Current partners include UBTECH, Zhiyuan Robotics, Fourier, Yundongchu, Zhujidongli, Yuejiang, Booster, Magic Atom, and others.Additionally, the OpenMind foundation Fabric Foundation will conduct a token sale on the Kaito platform on January 26, with priority allocation for the Fabric community and specific partner communities. This round was oversubscribed within five hours of opening.

Cathie Wood recently expressed strong opposition to the current high level of transparency from the Federal Reserve during her appearance on the podcast "The Brainstorm," stating, "This has instead created market volatility and high-frequency trading opportunities." She prefers a more action-oriented approach similar to the eras of Volcker (focused on money supply) or Greenspan (where gold prices were relatively stable).Cathie Wood believes that current U.S. inflation is essentially below 2% (based on unit labor costs of only 1.2-1.4%), which is completely different from the wage-cost-push inflation of the 1970s. Trump’s policies (similar to Reagan's but more aggressive) could further enhance U.S. capital returns, strengthen the dollar, and help control inflation without the need for significant interest rate hikes.In the field of AI, Cathie Wood stated that if hundreds of billions of dollars are invested in AI computing power over the next few years, humanoid robots are expected to achieve true flexibility by the late 2020s, potentially replacing human labor. Cathie analyzes that the economics of humanoid robots are very strong: a $100,000 robot could correspond to a human cost of $500,000 over 10 years, with an ROI of over 5 times, ultimately leading to trillion-dollar productivity gains.