MONDAY, JUN22
1. NVIDIA absorbs Essential AI, 2. The $3.8M "abandoned property" suit, 3. Tesla trademarks MEGAPOD, 4. BitMEX on miner orphan risk
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. nvidia
NVIDIA has hired Ashish Vaswani, founder of the startup Essential AI and a coauthor of the foundational Transformer research paper that underpins modern large language models, along with several members of his team, according to reporting by Sharon Goldman at Ground Level AI. Sources indicate Vaswani will work on NVIDIA’s open-source Nemotron models, though one source cautioned the deal may not be fully finalized even as several researchers have updated their profiles to reflect the move. The acquihire reportedly also served to pull the team away from AMD, an early Essential AI investor and NVIDIA’s main chip rival. The development matters for anyone tracking who controls AI capability, because it shows the dominant chipmaker absorbing not just compute but the scarce research talent that defines the field. As elite AI expertise concentrates inside the company that already supplies most of the world’s training hardware, the sovereignty question deepens: the infrastructure and the minds behind frontier models increasingly answer to the same few firms.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY2. noahdoe
A New York lawsuit seeking to claim legal title to roughly 3.8 million dormant bitcoin, including wallets linked to Satoshi Nakamoto, met fresh resistance as attorney Ian Cohen filed a June 19 rebuttal defending a court-ordered stay, TFTC reported. The plaintiffs, a pseudonymous party called Noah Doe and two Wyoming entities, argue that 39,069 long-inactive addresses qualify as abandoned property under a New York statute written in 1958 for lost physical objects. Cohen’s core argument is that losing a private key is not abandonment, scanning a public blockchain does not make someone a legal finder, and the lost-property law cannot stretch to cover bitcoin held in self-custody. A hearing is set for July 14. The stakes reach beyond these coins: were a court to accept the theory, any future claimant, including a state actor, could inherit the precedent. Several targeted wallets have moved coins recently, undercutting the claim that dormancy equals abandonment.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY3. megapod
Tesla has filed a trademark application for MEGAPOD, described as modular data-center hardware systems for artificial-intelligence computing, comprising servers, networking hardware, power distribution, and cooling sold as a self-contained unit, alongside software to monitor and manage them, as surfaced on X. The June 18 filing points to Tesla packaging AI compute infrastructure as a productized, deployable block, a move that mirrors the broader race among large technology firms to build and sell turnkey data-center capacity. Observers speculate the units may relate to dedicated computing planned for Tesla’s Supercharger sites. For an audience tracking the AI-and-energy intersection, the filing matters because the same competition for power, cooling, and silicon that reshapes bitcoin mining now drives every major player toward modular, rapidly deployable compute. As AI infrastructure consolidates among a handful of vertically integrated giants, the sovereignty question sharpens: who owns the physical layer of intelligence, and on whose terms can others access it.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY4. orphan-risk
BitMEX Research pushed back hard in a mempool-policy debate, arguing that telling miners to mitigate orphan risk by only mining transactions matching a widely-accepted default is a bad idea that would likely accelerate centralization instead. The research desk’s point: if orphan risk is so costly that miners need to exclude transactions over it, bitcoin is already in trouble, and the better scenario to plan for is one where orphan risk stays low enough that inclusion remains competitive. For protocol watchers, this is the unglamorous layer beneath every scaling argument, not what developers want in a release, but what incentives miners actually face when choosing what to include in the next block. Policy debates that sound like technical nuance can become centralization pressure in practice. BitMEX Research is doing the work of making that tradeoff explicit rather than hand-waving it away.
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