Offshore
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AkhenOsiris
$CRWD
CRN EXCLUSIVE:
In an exclusive interview with CRN, Kurtz said he is now confident describing CrowdStrike, in no uncertain terms, as the first-ever “hyperscaler for security.”
“We’re in a unique position in the industry because we do have the single platform to make all this work—as opposed to many things out there that are kind of stitched together,” Kurtz said.
The subscription model, Falcon Flex, aims to enable partners to rapidly package up and deploy the dozens of additional tools CrowdStrike now offers on its platform, while providing improved agility and cost savings for customers. And Flex has been a massive growth driver for CrowdStrike partners in 2025, with expectations that Flex will only ramp up as part of a broader expansion to SMB and midmarket customers, CrowdStrike and solution provider executives told CRN.
Executives from top solution and service provider partners told CRN that CrowdStrike’s approach has increasingly resonated with customers, many of which are seeking to consolidate tools and reduce costs while also improving security outcomes.
“The amount of their functionality that builds off the existing [software] agent footprint—that’s really attractive. It’s not, ‘More agents, more tools,’” said Blackwood’s Ebley.
And the benefits for cyber defense are substantial, as CrowdStrike can harness existing telemetry from endpoints to vastly improve key areas of security such as vulnerability management, he said.
“They can assess, what is all the telemetry visibility we have? And what can we do with that? What use cases can we solve for with that telemetry?” Ebley said.
The advantages of the CrowdStrike architecture have continued to amass as the vendor has moved into new categories, most recently with new security capabilities for AI and agentic AI. Still, the company recognized it needed a similar breakthrough on its sales and procurement model to really accelerate the platform’s adoption, executives said.
That breakthrough, they said, was Falcon Flex.
Traction with Flex has surged past expectations, he said. More than 1,000 customers have utilized the model with the average customer generating more than $1 million in ARR for CrowdStrike, as of the company’s second quarter of fiscal 2026, which closed July 31.
Even the July 2024 IT outage caused by a faulty configuration update from CrowdStrike ended up leading to wider implementation for Flex. CrowdStrike provided free product compensation to customers in the wake of the incident, and the natural move was to do this through a Flex license for easier procurement, according to executives.
As a result, “we accelerated the adoption of Falcon Flex because of the incident,” Kurtz said. “In one fell swoop, we got a lot of customers [onto Flex] very quickly.”
https://t.co/DWgWHi7bFV
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$CRWD
CRN EXCLUSIVE:
In an exclusive interview with CRN, Kurtz said he is now confident describing CrowdStrike, in no uncertain terms, as the first-ever “hyperscaler for security.”
“We’re in a unique position in the industry because we do have the single platform to make all this work—as opposed to many things out there that are kind of stitched together,” Kurtz said.
The subscription model, Falcon Flex, aims to enable partners to rapidly package up and deploy the dozens of additional tools CrowdStrike now offers on its platform, while providing improved agility and cost savings for customers. And Flex has been a massive growth driver for CrowdStrike partners in 2025, with expectations that Flex will only ramp up as part of a broader expansion to SMB and midmarket customers, CrowdStrike and solution provider executives told CRN.
Executives from top solution and service provider partners told CRN that CrowdStrike’s approach has increasingly resonated with customers, many of which are seeking to consolidate tools and reduce costs while also improving security outcomes.
“The amount of their functionality that builds off the existing [software] agent footprint—that’s really attractive. It’s not, ‘More agents, more tools,’” said Blackwood’s Ebley.
And the benefits for cyber defense are substantial, as CrowdStrike can harness existing telemetry from endpoints to vastly improve key areas of security such as vulnerability management, he said.
“They can assess, what is all the telemetry visibility we have? And what can we do with that? What use cases can we solve for with that telemetry?” Ebley said.
The advantages of the CrowdStrike architecture have continued to amass as the vendor has moved into new categories, most recently with new security capabilities for AI and agentic AI. Still, the company recognized it needed a similar breakthrough on its sales and procurement model to really accelerate the platform’s adoption, executives said.
That breakthrough, they said, was Falcon Flex.
Traction with Flex has surged past expectations, he said. More than 1,000 customers have utilized the model with the average customer generating more than $1 million in ARR for CrowdStrike, as of the company’s second quarter of fiscal 2026, which closed July 31.
Even the July 2024 IT outage caused by a faulty configuration update from CrowdStrike ended up leading to wider implementation for Flex. CrowdStrike provided free product compensation to customers in the wake of the incident, and the natural move was to do this through a Flex license for easier procurement, according to executives.
As a result, “we accelerated the adoption of Falcon Flex because of the incident,” Kurtz said. “In one fell swoop, we got a lot of customers [onto Flex] very quickly.”
https://t.co/DWgWHi7bFV
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AkhenOsiris
$NVDA crossing daily avg volume here with 4 hrs left in session and trying to make up for yesterday's bludgeoning off the high
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$NVDA crossing daily avg volume here with 4 hrs left in session and trying to make up for yesterday's bludgeoning off the high
$NVDA over 50% avg volume traded in the 1st hour... after massive reversal yesterday...feeling capitulatory 🫣 tweet
Offshore
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Fiscal.ai
This might be Amazon's most under appreciated segment.
Amazon generates nearly $50 billion per year in subscription revenue.
And that figure has grown by 30% annually for more than 10 years.
$AMZN https://t.co/eUg2QFKEwM
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This might be Amazon's most under appreciated segment.
Amazon generates nearly $50 billion per year in subscription revenue.
And that figure has grown by 30% annually for more than 10 years.
$AMZN https://t.co/eUg2QFKEwM
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Offshore
Video
Quiver Quantitative
NEW: We just released a report on a congressional stock trade that caught our eye.
Watch here: https://t.co/Anvr9NF7KA
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NEW: We just released a report on a congressional stock trade that caught our eye.
Watch here: https://t.co/Anvr9NF7KA
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Offshore
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EndGame Macro
Consumer Sentiment Is Falling for a Reason, Because The Stock Market Isn’t the Real Economy
If you zoom in on this chart and then layer it over what’s happening underneath the surface of the economy, it becomes obvious why people are this discouraged. Sentiment is falling because the lived reality of the average household has gotten heavier in ways that don’t show up cleanly in GDP or stock market levels.
Consumer sentiment is now brushing up against record lows, and views of personal finances have slipped to their weakest point in sixteen years. That’s the accumulated strain of prices that reset higher and never came back down, borrowing costs that climbed and stayed high, and a job market that feels a little less secure each month. When someone’s car insurance, rent, groceries, medical bills, and credit card interest all cost more at the same time, you don’t need an economist to tell you why confidence is sliding. People feel it in their checking accounts long before the data confirms it.
The Strain Is Now Showing Up in Hard Numbers, Not Just Feelings
This isn’t just sentiment drifting around in a vacuum. The delinquency data paints the same story. Credit card delinquency rates are now higher than they were at the peak of the Great Financial Crisis, that’s a stunning thing to be able to say with a straight face. Student loan delinquencies have surged since payments resumed, with about 10% of borrowers 90 days past due. Auto loan delinquencies are at their highest point since 2010. And in the commercial world, office vacancies are sitting at roughly 14.1%, more than six times the 2019 rate and far worse than what we saw heading into 2008. When this many corners of the credit universe start flashing yellow or red, households don’t need a sentiment survey to tell them something is off…they can sense it.
The kicker is that these pressures stack. A household that’s worried about its job prospects, and the University of Michigan data shows rising job loss fears across age groups, is often the same one juggling rising credit card balances, a car loan that costs more than it used to, and higher prices across everything essential. When those pieces move together, confidence slips because they’re paying attention.
A Split Between the Macro Story and the Everyday Story
What makes this moment tricky is that the headline economy still looks okay. GDP isn’t contracting, and the stock market keeps floating higher. But that disconnect is exactly why sentiment looks the way it does. Households see an economy that appears strong on paper while their personal experience is deteriorating. And when the gap between the official story and the lived story gets too wide, people stop believing the headlines and start trusting their own financial stress signals.
That’s what this chart captures. A population that’s not panicking but is quietly acknowledging that the math doesn’t work like it used to. A population that sees the bills rising faster than the paychecks. A population that knows something is tightening even if policymakers don’t want to say it out loud yet.
My Honest Read
This is late cycle behavior. It’s the kind of sentiment you get when households aren’t in freefall but are stretched thin and losing resilience. The fact that so many delinquency metrics are now worse than they were heading into the financial crisis is a signal that the average American balance sheet is more fragile than the macro narrative implies. And fragility has a way of surfacing all at once.
tweet
Consumer Sentiment Is Falling for a Reason, Because The Stock Market Isn’t the Real Economy
If you zoom in on this chart and then layer it over what’s happening underneath the surface of the economy, it becomes obvious why people are this discouraged. Sentiment is falling because the lived reality of the average household has gotten heavier in ways that don’t show up cleanly in GDP or stock market levels.
Consumer sentiment is now brushing up against record lows, and views of personal finances have slipped to their weakest point in sixteen years. That’s the accumulated strain of prices that reset higher and never came back down, borrowing costs that climbed and stayed high, and a job market that feels a little less secure each month. When someone’s car insurance, rent, groceries, medical bills, and credit card interest all cost more at the same time, you don’t need an economist to tell you why confidence is sliding. People feel it in their checking accounts long before the data confirms it.
The Strain Is Now Showing Up in Hard Numbers, Not Just Feelings
This isn’t just sentiment drifting around in a vacuum. The delinquency data paints the same story. Credit card delinquency rates are now higher than they were at the peak of the Great Financial Crisis, that’s a stunning thing to be able to say with a straight face. Student loan delinquencies have surged since payments resumed, with about 10% of borrowers 90 days past due. Auto loan delinquencies are at their highest point since 2010. And in the commercial world, office vacancies are sitting at roughly 14.1%, more than six times the 2019 rate and far worse than what we saw heading into 2008. When this many corners of the credit universe start flashing yellow or red, households don’t need a sentiment survey to tell them something is off…they can sense it.
The kicker is that these pressures stack. A household that’s worried about its job prospects, and the University of Michigan data shows rising job loss fears across age groups, is often the same one juggling rising credit card balances, a car loan that costs more than it used to, and higher prices across everything essential. When those pieces move together, confidence slips because they’re paying attention.
A Split Between the Macro Story and the Everyday Story
What makes this moment tricky is that the headline economy still looks okay. GDP isn’t contracting, and the stock market keeps floating higher. But that disconnect is exactly why sentiment looks the way it does. Households see an economy that appears strong on paper while their personal experience is deteriorating. And when the gap between the official story and the lived story gets too wide, people stop believing the headlines and start trusting their own financial stress signals.
That’s what this chart captures. A population that’s not panicking but is quietly acknowledging that the math doesn’t work like it used to. A population that sees the bills rising faster than the paychecks. A population that knows something is tightening even if policymakers don’t want to say it out loud yet.
My Honest Read
This is late cycle behavior. It’s the kind of sentiment you get when households aren’t in freefall but are stretched thin and losing resilience. The fact that so many delinquency metrics are now worse than they were heading into the financial crisis is a signal that the average American balance sheet is more fragile than the macro narrative implies. And fragility has a way of surfacing all at once.
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Offshore
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EndGame Macro
The Vision Is Big, but Stablecoins Just Aren’t There Yet.
Stablecoins are still moving with the crypto tide, not breaking away into their own independent financial system. The market cap climbed steadily through 2024 and into mid 2025, then hit a ceiling and started to bend lower right alongside Bitcoin. That drop on the right side of the chart, about $303B outstanding and almost $2B gone in a week is the tell. If stablecoins were becoming the next big dollar funding layer, you wouldn’t see them shrink the minute risk comes off. You’d see inflows as people moved out of volatile assets and parked in digital dollars. Instead, you’re seeing people step out of the whole ecosystem.
The growth rate since the GENIUS Act is also part of the story. Roughly $10B a month isn’t trivial, but from a $300B base it’s not the kind of acceleration you’d expect if stablecoins were on track to become a $3T pillar of global liquidity anytime soon. At that pace, the math stretches out over decades. That gap between the hype and the slope of the actual line is important: it tells you stablecoins are still mostly serving traders, exchanges, arbitrage desks, and yield farmers, not yet the broader dollar plumbing that some analysts imagine.
A big part of that is structural. Money market funds are yielding real returns. Banks still dominate payments. Regulation is uneven. And most of the stablecoin market is concentrated in a single opaque issuer that big institutions can’t fully trust. So for now, stablecoins expand when crypto is hot and contract when crypto cools, which is exactly what the chart is capturing. It’s not that the idea lacks potential; it’s that the real world isn’t adopting it at the speed the narratives suggest.
tweet
The Vision Is Big, but Stablecoins Just Aren’t There Yet.
Stablecoins are still moving with the crypto tide, not breaking away into their own independent financial system. The market cap climbed steadily through 2024 and into mid 2025, then hit a ceiling and started to bend lower right alongside Bitcoin. That drop on the right side of the chart, about $303B outstanding and almost $2B gone in a week is the tell. If stablecoins were becoming the next big dollar funding layer, you wouldn’t see them shrink the minute risk comes off. You’d see inflows as people moved out of volatile assets and parked in digital dollars. Instead, you’re seeing people step out of the whole ecosystem.
The growth rate since the GENIUS Act is also part of the story. Roughly $10B a month isn’t trivial, but from a $300B base it’s not the kind of acceleration you’d expect if stablecoins were on track to become a $3T pillar of global liquidity anytime soon. At that pace, the math stretches out over decades. That gap between the hype and the slope of the actual line is important: it tells you stablecoins are still mostly serving traders, exchanges, arbitrage desks, and yield farmers, not yet the broader dollar plumbing that some analysts imagine.
A big part of that is structural. Money market funds are yielding real returns. Banks still dominate payments. Regulation is uneven. And most of the stablecoin market is concentrated in a single opaque issuer that big institutions can’t fully trust. So for now, stablecoins expand when crypto is hot and contract when crypto cools, which is exactly what the chart is capturing. It’s not that the idea lacks potential; it’s that the real world isn’t adopting it at the speed the narratives suggest.
Total stablecoin market cap has begun falling with BTC (far right on chart below.)
Stablecoins have only grown $10B per month since the passage of the GENIUS Act. At this pace, it will take 23 years for stablecoin market cap to hit Bessent's $3T stablecoin market cap goal.🤔 https://t.co/nar9NbxPjq tweet
Offshore
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Quiver Quantitative
BREAKING: The House Ethics Committee is investigating Representative Mike Collins.
Unclear what the investigation is for.
Worth noting that Collins is the most active crypto trader in Congress. https://t.co/zMevmu46Ij
tweet
BREAKING: The House Ethics Committee is investigating Representative Mike Collins.
Unclear what the investigation is for.
Worth noting that Collins is the most active crypto trader in Congress. https://t.co/zMevmu46Ij
tweet
WealthyReadings
RT @ruth_capital: one thing that baffles me a lot is how horrible and bifurcating some of these accounts become once you're in a clear down-trend/retracement
no capital protection/bias swap whatsoever once bridge starts collapsing and spamming daily AI-points fails
be selective whom you follow
tweet
RT @ruth_capital: one thing that baffles me a lot is how horrible and bifurcating some of these accounts become once you're in a clear down-trend/retracement
no capital protection/bias swap whatsoever once bridge starts collapsing and spamming daily AI-points fails
be selective whom you follow
tweet
EndGame Macro
When Geopolitics Tighten, Even Cutting Edge Chips Become Trade Currency.
You’ve got a White House that treats everything as a transaction. H200s into China aren’t just exports, they’re a bargaining chip. Floating the idea right now signals to Beijing that this is something you want, and we can take it away or give it back depending on what we get on trade, ag, or broader geopolitical concessions. You can’t play that card if it’s never on the table, so the leak itself is part of the negotiation.
On top of that, Nvidia has just printed an absurd quarter…$57B in revenue, $51B from data center, 73%+ margins, and guidance to $65B next quarter. They’re not limping; they’re a core pillar of the stock market. Letting them tap China again under strict export controls gives the administration an easy win with more U.S. corporate profits, higher tax receipts, and a happy equity market, without writing a stimulus check. And because there’s already precedent with the H20 deal where the U.S. Treasury took a 15% skim, you can easily imagine them reviving that model “We’ll let you sell, but we take a cut.” It turns national security policy into a revenue sharing agreement.
There’s also a quiet risk management angle. Nvidia’s balance sheet shows inventories nearly doubling this year to just under $20B. They’re ramping supply hard on the assumption that AI demand stays vertical. If that curve bends, you don’t want a strategic U.S. champion stuck with shelves of high end chips and another multi billion write down tied to export rules. Opening a tightly controlled Chinese outlet for last season’s H200s gives Nvidia an extra release valve for that capacity and lowers the odds that Washington’s own restrictions blow back into a big market scare later.
The Deeper Strategic Logic
Finally, there’s the tech race logic some people inside the administration clearly buy…H200 is powerful, but the real bleeding edge is already shifting to Blackwell and then Rubin. Selling H200s under performance caps and quotas can be framed as keeping Chinese labs dependent on U.S. hardware that’s one step behind, while U.S. and allied players move on to the next node. That’s how they reconcile that they’re tough on China with we’re going to let Nvidia book billions.
So when you put it all together, the timing isn’t random. They’re staring at a hugely profitable but inventory heavy U.S. champion, a slowing global backdrop, a need for bargaining chips with Beijing, and an election narrative built on deals and markets. In that mix, floating controlled H200 sales to China becomes less about softening on national security and more about creating optionality…a card they can trade, tax, or pull back depending on how the rest of the game unfolds.
tweet
When Geopolitics Tighten, Even Cutting Edge Chips Become Trade Currency.
You’ve got a White House that treats everything as a transaction. H200s into China aren’t just exports, they’re a bargaining chip. Floating the idea right now signals to Beijing that this is something you want, and we can take it away or give it back depending on what we get on trade, ag, or broader geopolitical concessions. You can’t play that card if it’s never on the table, so the leak itself is part of the negotiation.
On top of that, Nvidia has just printed an absurd quarter…$57B in revenue, $51B from data center, 73%+ margins, and guidance to $65B next quarter. They’re not limping; they’re a core pillar of the stock market. Letting them tap China again under strict export controls gives the administration an easy win with more U.S. corporate profits, higher tax receipts, and a happy equity market, without writing a stimulus check. And because there’s already precedent with the H20 deal where the U.S. Treasury took a 15% skim, you can easily imagine them reviving that model “We’ll let you sell, but we take a cut.” It turns national security policy into a revenue sharing agreement.
There’s also a quiet risk management angle. Nvidia’s balance sheet shows inventories nearly doubling this year to just under $20B. They’re ramping supply hard on the assumption that AI demand stays vertical. If that curve bends, you don’t want a strategic U.S. champion stuck with shelves of high end chips and another multi billion write down tied to export rules. Opening a tightly controlled Chinese outlet for last season’s H200s gives Nvidia an extra release valve for that capacity and lowers the odds that Washington’s own restrictions blow back into a big market scare later.
The Deeper Strategic Logic
Finally, there’s the tech race logic some people inside the administration clearly buy…H200 is powerful, but the real bleeding edge is already shifting to Blackwell and then Rubin. Selling H200s under performance caps and quotas can be framed as keeping Chinese labs dependent on U.S. hardware that’s one step behind, while U.S. and allied players move on to the next node. That’s how they reconcile that they’re tough on China with we’re going to let Nvidia book billions.
So when you put it all together, the timing isn’t random. They’re staring at a hugely profitable but inventory heavy U.S. champion, a slowing global backdrop, a need for bargaining chips with Beijing, and an election narrative built on deals and markets. In that mix, floating controlled H200 sales to China becomes less about softening on national security and more about creating optionality…a card they can trade, tax, or pull back depending on how the rest of the game unfolds.
US officials are having early discussions on whether to let Nvidia sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, a contentious potential move that would mark a major win for the world’s most valuable company https://t.co/j30skXGqT4 tweet
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Bloomberg (@business) on X
US officials are having early discussions on whether to let Nvidia sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, a contentious potential move that would mark a major win for the world’s most valuable company https://t.co/j30skXGqT4