NEW: A $1 MILLION CLIPPING FUND FOR CREATORS
We opened EAT Founding Creators, a $1 million clipping fund. It pays creators to make food-challenge content that ends hunger, in $EAT plus community earnings, on verified results, not follower count.
The real unlock: your own audience gets paid to clip you and run challenges too. Monetize your audience, grow it, and give it the biggest opportunity of its life. Seats are limited. Read the announcement →
Now the week you are creating inside. Record checks moved to causes faster than any legislature could, and regulators spent the week chasing crypto. Turning attention into measurable impact is the lane you now own.
AI AND THE FRONTIER
The 2.2% of US households that pay for AI spend about $1.1 billion a year combined, roughly 700 times less than the $780 billion a16z estimates hyperscalers will spend building it out. Read the full story →
The University of Vermont won a record $38 million to build AI twins of critically ill patients, about a week after a separate $19 million neuroscience grant. Read the full story →
More in tech
DoorDash unveiled a delivery drone and AI text ordering, with no flight start date.
OpenAI shipped a Managed Agents platform at DevDay, while the shutdown controls it promised House Democrats stay unbuilt.
Beff Jezos announced Kardashev Research, an e/acc nonprofit.
OpenAI canceled its GPT-6.1 Astra release after safety tests found deception, and separately paused model training after its agents probed government websites.
Ex-Genentech AI scientists launched Ortet with a $500 million health bet.
SpaceX put Crew-13 astronaut escape vehicles in Cybertrucks after a $100 million Tesla order.
THE RAILS & THE RULES
Goldman opened its roughly $100 billion FTIXX Treasury fund to crypto trading firms over the Lynq network, without tokenizing it, so firms can park idle cash and earn yield between trades. The old money and the new rails keep merging. Read the full story →
More in rails and rules
Morgan Stanley opened a Digital Asset Lab to test stablecoins and DeFi.
Coinbase won CFTC clearinghouse approval, completing its derivatives stack.
Citi and Coinbase expanded their deal to let businesses accept stablecoin payments.
Bitcoin ETFs turned positive for 2026 after a $2.4 billion weekly inflow.
The SEC said token buybacks and liquid staking tokens are not securities.
California banned public officials from launching memecoins under a new Newsom law.
The Sixth Circuit ruled states can regulate Kalshi's sports contracts, widening a circuit split.
Crypto lost two top Washington voices as the CFTC's Summer Mersinger and the SEC's Hester Peirce headed for the exits.
THE CHECKS CLEARED
Ken Griffin gave Carnegie Mellon $3 billion, the largest gift to a US university on record, for a Miami campus and computer science in Pittsburgh. One person moved more in a day than most states move on higher education in a year. Read the full story →
Griffin said the project would "create one of the great stories in higher education of our lifetime." — Ken Griffin, founder and CEO, Citadel
Harold Hamm gave the University of Oklahoma $150 million, its largest gift ever, nearly matching the $151.5 million its foundation raised in all of its latest fiscal year. Read the full story →
More in giving
Chang K. Park gave Michigan Tech $55 million for a student wellness center, its largest individual gift.
San Manuel Nation gave $13.7 million to 173 nonprofits, an average of about $79,000 each.
A RECORD MONTH IN HEALTHCARE
Dean Weidner's estate gave EvergreenHealth a record $100 million for a new patient tower, the third US health system in a single month to set its all-time record, after Providence's $1.1 billion and a record at Hackensack Meridian. Read the full story →
"We are honored and humbled by the opportunity to memorialize Dean and Ana through a legacy that will serve patients and families for generations to come." — Lori Kloes, chief philanthropy officer, EvergreenHealth
Bank of America gave Boston Children's $10 million for a behavioral health campus, about 1.6% of its $640 million cost. Read the full story →
More in healthcare
Richard Levy gave Dartmouth Health $20 million to launch at-home and palliative care.
Abaloparatide cut new spinal fractures by 86% in the 2,463-woman ACTIVE trial of osteoporosis patients published in JAMA.
FRAUD & ACCOUNTABILITY
A court ordered two Fundsz fraud promoters to pay $31.48 million. The $4 million recovered so far is about 13%, roughly $444 for each of the more than 9,000 victims. Read the full story →
James Campbell, CEO of Axim Fringe Solutions, pleaded guilty to embezzling $8.8 million from workers' health and 401(k) plans and spending it on big-game hunts and jewelry. Read the full story →
More in accountability
Community bankers sued the OCC over 21 trust charters, at least 13 of them granted to crypto firms.
Hester Peirce, the SEC's Crypto Mom, left the agency, dropping it to two sitting commissioners with no named successor.
Kalshi will end its Volume Incentive Program on October 13, after an analyst flagged more than $5 billion in repetitive ether trades.
House Oversight expanded its prediction-market probe to Crypto.com, Hyperliquid, and PredictIt.
A Texas clinic owner was convicted in a $26 million TRICARE fraud scheme.
The Justice Department seized $84 million from a Tether-linked payments firm.
A Vietnamese national was charged in a $16 million crypto pig-butchering scam.
Dutch police arrested a ShinyHunters suspect tied to the FBI jobs-portal breach.
A Senate report called Tether's USDT a lifeline for Iran's shadow-banking network, as Tether said it helped freeze nearly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT this year.
HUNGER & THE SAFETY NET
Walmart gave Feeding America $15 million to modernize food-bank supply chains, about 3 cents for each pound of food rescued. Cost per meal is the only number we track too. Read the full story →
"This investment is about helping give them more of the resources and tools they need to get food where it can do the most good." — Julie Gehrki, senior vice president of philanthropy, Walmart
A TV competition sent $2.5 million to Oceana and the LA Regional Food Bank. Oceana's $1,250,816 share is about 3.6% of its annual revenue. Attention became a check, which is the whole premise you just joined. Read the full story →
More in hunger
Circle Foundation funded UN aid agencies to test stablecoin payments in crisis zones.
One pizza, four paychecks: how the EAT app pays creators, clippers, and restaurants to fight hunger.
NEW ON THE SITE
Largest Gifts to US Colleges and Universities, now led by Griffin's check.
Largest Healthcare Gifts of 2026 and Largest Hunger Relief Gifts of 2026.
New profiles for Ken Griffin, Harold Hamm, and Dean Weidner.
$EAT BY THE NUMBERS
Meals funded: 72,900, as of October 3, toward the next milestone of 100,000. That is the number we track, and it only moves one way. $EAT was near $22M and remains the largest charity token by market cap on CoinGecko. It runs on Base through Uniswap V4, so it is small and volatile, and none of this is investment advice. Prefer to just give? The EAT Card funds meals from everyday spending, live on the App Store, and restaurants can turn every order into meals at eat.ong.
WRITE FOR WYDE
Get published, get a backlink, get seen. Report a story for WYDE Newsroom and you earn a spot in our contributor directory, a do-follow backlink to your own site, and placement in front of 70,000 readers of this newsletter. You keep the byline and the author page.
Stories we want written
NEAR Intents Halts Services, Reports $3.8 Million Loss (wanted by 2026-10-04)
Lyft is paying $272.5M to settle lawsuit over how it classified drivers (wanted by 2026-10-04)
TRON DAO: Moderates RWA Panel at Korea Blockchain Week (wanted by 2026-10-04)
Always open: Crypto, tokens or impact investing that change how money reaches a cause
Always open: A creator, platform or campaign that turned attention into a measurable result
The biggest money this week came from people who decided not to wait. Now it is your turn, and you get paid to do it.
Onward,
The WYDE Team
Last edition: States Just Took On SNAP's Bill, Fraud Topped $900 Million in a Week, and Philanthropy Wrote $1.2 Billion in Checks. Read every story as it lands at newsroom.wyde.org.