💸 One Blockchain, Off Switch Included

Cronos is Crypto.com's blockchain; Tectonic was its largest lending protocol, holding nearly half of all DeFi capital on the network. Someone took that as an invitation.

Classic 2022 playbook: pump TONIC 100x in 20 minutes, borrow against the inflated price, exit with ~$75 million. It worked because Tectonic gave its own governance token a 20% collateral factor against just $1.34 million in liquidity — essentially lending against a valuation it invented.

Cronos killed the entire chain to contain the damage. Only ~$6 million escaped to Ethereum; the rest sits frozen — along with positions of users who never touched Tectonic. No restart timeline, no word on depositor recovery, per Decrypt.

The Crypto.com exchange is fine. It's just the blockchain underneath it that's on indefinite leave.

🧱 Wallace & Gromit finally get their LEGO moment

Britain's most beloved cheese enthusiast and his unflappable dog have landed in LEGO Ideas — and it looks exactly right.

The set recreates the iconic motorbike and sidecar from *A Close Shave*: 1038 pieces, out October 1, $99.99 on preorder. It began as a fan submission by Sébastien Esnault, who won a LEGO Ideas challenge — the company then refined the faces and made it official.

Hidden inside the motorcycle's hatch: crackers and a diamond, a quiet nod to *The Wrong Trousers*. Gromit gets wearable goggles. The 18+ rating makes the target audience clear — this is a shelf piece, not a toy box one, per IGN.

Twenty years of plasticine patience. Gromit has clearly been practicing.

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 03

💸 Chelsea sells Fernandez to City for £125m
🔓 Lenovo SSO loophole quietly unlocked Dropbox accounts
🎮 GTA 6 trailer beat Netflix charts in 87 countries
💸 Classic DeFi exploit drained Cronos's biggest lending protocol
🧱 Wallace and Gromit's iconic sidecar gets a LEGO set

Someone out there had back-to-back meetings all day — this is exactly what they missed.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $80,931 📈 +3.7% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,515 📈 +4.3% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 74 — Greed

🤖 South Korea is nationalising AI access

Seoul has made AI a public utility: the "AI for All" programme gives every citizen free, unlimited generative AI — the first move of its kind by any national government, per the Wall Street Journal.

Three consortia splitting up to 512 Nvidia B200 chips will deliver the service by year-end. Operators must route 80% of queries through domestic models; foreign ones get no subsidy.

The EU is building infrastructure. India is handing out GPUs. Korea just opened the shop. What the programme costs, the ministry hasn't said — some invoices are easier to sign quietly.

Decrypt

📺 Sony is turning the PS5 into a free TV

Sony Pictures Television is launching a free, ad-supported streaming service on PS5: over 100 channels of live and on-demand content — series, anime, sports, news — no subscription, no hidden fees. Just a PlayStation Network account and the Media tab.

It's a direct move into the FAST space, where Pluto TV and Tubi already operate. Sony arrives with real assets: the Crunchyroll library, Sony Pictures' catalogue, and exclusive channels around titles like Naruto and Black Clover that rivals can't match.

The PS5 already sits in the living room with a verified account attached — a legible, engaged audience for advertisers, generating ad revenue while the console sits between gaming sessions. U.S.-only for now; Canada and further regions to follow, per IGN.

🎬 Hogwarts is back — with John Lithgow as Dumbledore

HBO released the second teaser for Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone — eight episodes, Christmas 2026 on HBO Max.

The trailer delivers: Sorting Hat, Snape (Paapa Essiedu) radiating trademark disdain, the bathroom troll, Quidditch — and a quick flash of what looks like Voldemort's first appearance.

The adult cast is unconventional: Lithgow as Dumbledore, Janet McTeer as McGonagall, Nick Frost as Hagrid. Which is precisely what makes it interesting.

Season 2 is already heading into production this autumn with Kit Harington as Lockhart. HBO isn't just remaking the films — it's quietly reassembling the cast of Westeros.

IGN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dIoOzgYFlM

🔓 When "ID scan" became a product category

Nexus is not a data breach — it's a storefront. Over 153 million driver's licenses listed for sale, each bundled with infrared and ultraviolet captures: exactly the formats needed to clone an ID that passes hologram checks.

The entry point, in at least one documented case, was a car rental counter — scan at check-in, listed within hours. KrebsOnSecurity found journalist Brian Krebs, his mother, an FBI assistant director and several security researchers in the database. The inventory also includes government building-access cards (CAC), medical cards and employment authorizations. The FBI is investigating; the service keeps growing.

The risk model has shifted: a stolen physical document used to give one person one copy — here any buyer gets a full cloning package. Every business that scans an ID is a potential link in that chain.

Ars Technica

🦄 AfterQuery is now Y Combinator's fastest-ever unicorn

The company hit a $3.2 billion valuation — up from $300 million just five months ago — at 18 months old. Founders Spencer Mateega, 23, and Carlos Georgescu, 22, sell AI labs something the open web can't provide: step-by-step expert reasoning from doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Forbes reports the company is already profitable.

Decrypt

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 04

🤖 South Korea just made AI a free public utility
📺 Sony drops 100+ free TV channels inside your PS5
🎬 John Lithgow is Dumbledore and HBO looks serious
🔓 153 million driver's licenses sold like grocery items
🦄 Two 20-somethings built a unicorn in 18 months

Someone you know definitely had a meeting-heavy day — pass this along

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $79,694 📉 -1.5% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,454 📉 -2.5% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 73 — Greed

🤖 Nvidia Acquires Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face — the leading platform for sharing and deploying open-source AI models — for $12.93 billion. CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the deal on Thursday.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016. The platform currently serves 18 million developers and hosts more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications. Over 200,000 companies use it to evaluate and deploy AI.

Huang said the platform will remain open: support for third-party clouds, accelerators, and models from other developers will continue, and Nvidia hardware will not be required to build or deploy through Hugging Face.

The deal was initiated by Hugging Face. CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC that talks began a few weeks ago, after the company concluded that open-source AI needed more resources and greater scale.

Variety

🎮 Lego just made a PlayStation

So Lego already did the NES, the Sega Genesis — it felt like a PS1 was only a matter of time, right? And yeah, here it is. Announced today during State of Play.

1,911 pieces, near 1:1 scale of the original 1995 console — 10.5 inches wide, a controller with buttons that actually click. And hidden inside there are two little dioramas: an Ape Escape island with a monkey in a helmet (red or blue light, your call) and a Gran Turismo scene with a tiny track and tiny cars.

Drops October 1 for $180, per The Verge.

Engadget

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FB8SIlnd6c

🎮 Xbox Cloud Gaming is getting a hard cap

Starting in November, Xbox Cloud Gaming will no longer be unlimited. Ultimate subscribers get 15 hours per month, Premium gets 10, and Essential gets 5. Additional hours can be purchased in bundles through the Xbox Store — pricing hasn't been announced yet — and unused hours will carry over to the next month.

Unlimited cloud access was introduced across all Game Pass tiers less than a year ago. Microsoft says the change is driven by the rising cost of cloud infrastructure as usage grows, and expects it to affect roughly 4% of subscribers.

At the same time, the company is extending cloud gaming access to users without a Game Pass subscription, who will be able to buy hour bundles and stream games they already own, according to The Verge.

🦷 Dyson is turning toothbrushing into a diagnostic procedure

The CameraJet toothbrush puts a 100,000-pixel camera inside your mouth at 28 frames per second. An AI system called Gap Optical Targeting detects gaps between teeth and fires a conical mouthrinse jet into them within 100 milliseconds — developed with the dental faculty at the National University of Singapore.

The companion app streams the feed live but stores nothing. That's a deliberate choice for now — a camera embedded in a daily-use device is already infrastructure for tracking gum health and plaque over time. How far Dyson intends to go with that remains open.

Uncrate

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 05

🤖 Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
🎮 Lego built a PlayStation and it slaps hard
☁️ Xbox Cloud Gaming is capping your hours now
🦷 Dyson's toothbrush has a camera and AI aim

Pass this along to whoever spent today in back-to-back meetings — they clearly missed a lot.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $79,691 📉 -0.0% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,501 📈 +1.9% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 73 — Greed

🎮 Final Fantasy 7: Revelation launches April 8, 2027

Square Enix has confirmed the release date for the third and final chapter of its Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy, announced during Sony's PlayStation State of Play.

April 8, 2027 — simultaneous launch on PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Two story DLCs will follow within 12 months of release: *Story DLC 1: Sephiroth* and *Story DLC 2: Vincent & the Turks*, both listed under a Story Expansion Pass already visible on Steam. No pricing has been announced.

Confirmed features include expanded battle customization, character-dependent sidequest variations, and a double-speed dialogue skip option. The new region of Wutai will be accessible by parachuting from the Highwind airship. Per IGN, no further story details on the DLC content have been disclosed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9BTbjtXJWM