Japan Megabanks Eye Joint Stablecoin, AI Exploits Drain $36.7M, SMCI Falls 10%

Crypto News

Tata Consultancy Services expects to run as many artificial-intelligence agents as human staff within three years, Chairman N Chandrasekaran told the firm's annual general meeting on Tuesday. The company will not cut jobs but will slow new hiring as automated systems absorb tasks once handled by people. India's $315 billion technology-services industry, long built on vast, people-heavy teams, has already trimmed headcount: TCS shed more than 12,000 roles last July, and net staffing fell by over 23,000 in the fiscal year ended March 2026. The same logic is spreading into finance, where the $18 billion hedge fund Magnetar plans to deploy AI bots to scan markets and recommend trades.

Attackers stole at least $36.7 million from protocols running unverified smart contracts over the past six months, according to blockchain-analytics findings, with the surge tied to AI-assisted exploit development. Large language models can now decompile closed-source bytecode at a speed no human reviewer can match, turning obscurity into a liability rather than a shield. The largest single incident drained $26.2 million from Truebit on January 8, exploiting a contract that had sat unverified on Ethereum since 2021. The flaw, an integer overflow in a bonding curve, let the attacker mint tokens cheaply and burn them for real ETH, underscoring rising structural risk across DeFi protocols that keep their code private.

Super Micro Computer shares fell roughly 10% in after-hours trading on Tuesday after the server maker filed to raise about $7 billion in fresh capital. The plan opens with a $5 billion underwritten public offering, followed by $1.25 billion in common stock and $3.75 billion of depositary shares tied to mandatory convertible preferred stock. A separate $2 billion at-the-market equity program, run by major Wall Street banks, is set to begin by the third quarter of 2026. The proceeds will fund components for roughly $39 billion in advanced AI-server orders from more than 20 customers. For a company valued near $34 billion before the announcement, the raise implies heavy dilution, explaining the sharp sell-off.

US efforts to overhaul cryptocurrency tax rules ran into bipartisan resistance as the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing on six separate bills. Republican lawmakers pressed for faster modernization and clearer guidance for investors and firms, while several Democrats argued the proposals are rushed and could introduce new financial-market risks without adequate study. Representative John Larson warned that legislators may not fully grasp the economic impact, and ranking Democrat Richard Neal said he sees little chance of agreement before the midterm elections. Treatment of mining and staking income emerged as a particular sticking point, with members on both sides describing the talks as deadlocked ahead of a busy campaign season.

Prediction-market platform Kalshi will require certain traders to disclose their employers when speculating on outcomes tied to corporate earnings, product launches, and national-security topics. The compliance layer follows recommendations from an independent oversight committee that flagged gaps in detecting insider trading before it occurs. Kalshi already collects addresses, birth dates, and partial identifiers, but employment data was previously absent from verification. The exchange said it filed more than 20 referrals to regulators and law enforcement in the first quarter of 2026, including one involving former Representative George Santos, who denied wrongdoing. New whistleblower tools will let users report suspicious activity directly on market pages, mirroring tightening integrity rules at rival venue Polymarket.

Three of Japan's largest banks are forming a consortium to issue a jointly operated stablecoin by the end of fiscal year 2026, extending a regulatory pilot supervised by the Financial Services Agency since November 2025. The plan brings together MUFG, Sumitomo Mitsui, and Mizuho, with the token launching pegged to the yen and a US dollar version following later in the year on the MUFG-developed Progmat ledger. The banks' combined enterprise base spans more than 300,000 companies, granting instant settlement scale. The move parallels global bank-token efforts, including JPMorgan's JPMD on Coinbase's Base network and SoFi's SoFiUSD, which reached roughly 15 million members and bypasses third-party issuers via a on-chain rail.

These threads converge on one arc: AI and regulated balance sheets are quietly rebuilding the rails beneath both legacy finance and digital assets, even as sentiment stays fragile. COINOTAG's aggregate market data captures that tension, with the Fear and Greed Index pinned at 9 of 100, deep in Extreme Fear, while total crypto market capitalization sits near $1.76 trillion. Bitcoin dominance has climbed to 70.1%, a flight-to-quality signal that historically pressures altcoins during a bear market. As bank-issued tokens scale and AI sharpens both productivity and attack surfaces, capital is concentrating in the most established assets and the most regulated infrastructure.