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[PRESS RELEASE – San Francisco, CA, July 17th, 2026]

Crowdsourced Hedge Fund Completes Third Open-Market Purchase as Contributor Network and Assets Continue to Grow

Numerai, the decentralized hedge fund powered by crowdsourced machine learning, today announced the completion of a third strategic purchase of Numeraire (NMR), acquiring an additional $1.2 million of the token from the open market. The purchase brings Numerai’s total NMR buybacks to $3.2 million within one year.

The buyback reflects Numerai’s continued investment in the staking system that aligns thousands of independent data scientists toward improving the firm’s Stake-Weighted Meta Model, the machine learning model that powers Numerai’s hedge fund. Contributors stake NMR on their models, earning additional NMR when their predictions perform well on future market data and losing it when they do not. The resulting Stake-Weighted Meta Model continues to outperform Numerai’s internal benchmark models, demonstrating the value of aligning incentives with predictive performance.

Since announcing its first strategic buyback in July 2025, Numerai’s network has expanded significantly. Active accounts have more than doubled over the past year, submissions continue to increase, and the platform has introduced new infrastructure including Numerai Skills, Numerai Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Atomic Blockchain Staking, enabling increasingly autonomous participation by AI systems.

The underlying hedge fund has also continued to grow. According to the company, Numerai now manages approximately $700 million in assets, up from approximately $560 million at the end of 2025.

Numeraire is a fixed-supply Ethereum token capped at 11 million NMR. Because tournament rewards and staking incentives are distributed from Numerai’s treasury, the company is replenishing its holdings through open-market purchases. Before this buyback, approximately 3.1 million NMR remained in Numerai’s treasury.

Unlike the previous two announcements, this buyback had already been completed before today’s announcement. As with prior purchases, the transaction was executed on the open market through Coinbase Institutional at or near the bid price over several weeks to minimize market impact.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. This content does not represent an offer to purchase or sell any security or the interests of any account managed by Numerai GP, LLC or its affiliates. Such an offer may only be made to persons who qualify to invest and in jurisdictions in which such an offer is legal.

About Numerai

Numerai is a San Francisco-based hedge fund and data science platform founded in 2015. Through a global competition and open API, thousands of data scientists submit stock market signals that are aggregated into a single Meta Model used to trade global equities. Numeraire (NMR) is used to stake and reward models that improve the fund. Numerai’s mission is to build the world’s last hedge fund through open, competitive machine intelligence.

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Some of the most popular companies in the cryptoeconomy have banded together to create an organization that will assess and rate top cryptocurrency projects on the likelihood of these projects being securities per U.S. federal securities laws.

That organization, the Crypto Rating Council (CRC), counts exchange operators like Bittrex, Coinbase, Kraken, and Poloniex-backers Circle among its first members, as well as the firms of Anchorage, DRW Cumberland, Genesis, and Grayscale Investments.

So why the need for such a body?

The so-called Howey Test, which is a test devised by the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if a given asset is a security, commonly leads to “judgment calls, inconsistent results, and … disagreement among legal experts,” the CRC said on the Frequently Asked Questions section of its new website.

Accordingly, the organization’s rating system — which runs from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating an asset bears the hallmarks of a security and 1 meaning the opposite — is being hailed by members as a “compliance tool” that will help bring consistency to their respective asset review processes.

Founded by prominent companies across the crypto industry, our mission is to lead crypto financial services firms committed to practical compliance with the U.S. securities laws. We are the Crypto Rating Council, and we launched today: https://t.co/FbdwfSZN9D

— Crypto Rating Council (@CRC_Crypto) September 30, 2019

“The CRC will publish a simple rating for most assets it reviews to indicate the results of its analysis as a reference for operators, developers, and the public,” the organization said.

With that said, the ratings are utterly non-binding and have been made without involvement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). So, while clarity is the professed goal, the only thing the CRC has ultimately made more clear is what its members think about the legal status of top cryptocurrencies in America.

“The score does not reflect a legal conclusion and is no indication of qualitative value of an asset or suitability for investment or any other purpose,” the CRC said of its ratings.

How the First Scores Look Don’t expect any surprises when it comes to bitcoin (BTC). The oldest cryptocurrency, which has long been held up by various stakeholders as a standard for decentralized projects, received a 1 rating from the CRC.

Other projects the body deemed to have “few or no characteristics consistent with treatment as a security” included DeFi’s darling Dai stablecoin, the popular Monero (XMR) privacy cryptocurrency, and Litecoin (LTC).

The 2 rating was given to the next rung of projects that the CRC deemed to seem mostly decentralized according to its framework. These projects included Ethereum (ETH), Zcash (ZEC), Numeraire (NMR), ChainLink (LINK), and the fledgling proof-of-stake project Algorand (ALGO).

Getting on up there according to the group were projects like Augur (3.75), EOS (3.75), Stellar (3.75), Tezos (3.75), and XRP (4). The highest inaugural scores were given to Polymath (4.5) and Maker (4.5).

Notably, the SEC announced just hours after these ratings were released that Block.one, the team behind the EOS launch, had settled charges and would pay a $24 million civil penalty for its year-long ICO being an unregistered security offering.

The Commission said the securities status only applied to the “IOU” ERC20 token that was issued during the sale rather than the current EOS cryptocurrency, which lives on EOS now rather than Ethereum.

Are Exchanges Listing Securities? One question that immediately started buzzing through the ecosystem on the heels of the announcement of the CRC was why would exchanges like Coinbase take chances on assets like XRP that appear to bear considerable resemblances to a security in the U.S.?

One possibility is that the group’s members consider “security status is binary,” according to Jake Chervinsky, the General Counsel of DeFi lending project Compound Finance. In other words, anything less than a 5 rating would be fair game accordingly.

My best guess: they'd say security status is binary and as a matter of law it doesn't make a difference how close a token comes to being a security if it's ultimately not one.

On that logic, though, query the value of publishing the five-point score in the first place.

— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) September 30, 2019

But even if the already rated cryptocurrencies later end up being cleared as “not securities” per the SEC, the CRC rating system can lead to future conflicts of interest, e.g. member exchanges being charitable in their ratings because they stand to gain from trade volume.

In my opinion, this rating system creates a massive conflict of interest. All of the companies that joined this consortium are massively incentivized to rate the vast majority of tokens as non-securities. Coinbase listed some very questionable tokens including XRP, Tezos, EOS

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) September 30, 2019

But there’s a silver lining here, according to Blockchain chief executive officer and president Marco Santori. In a Twitter thread on the CRC announcement, Santori said the effort was suspect in some ways but was also a positive attempt at self-regulation in an industry that needs more regulatory clarity in general.

8/ So why on earth would they publish this? Why on earth should we applaud their effort?

Well, actually we should.

As an industry, this stuff is basically the best we've got.

THAT'S RIGHT ITS A TWIST

wait hear me out.

— Marco Santori (@msantoriESQ) September 30, 2019

William M. Peaster

William M. Peaster is a professional writer and editor who specializes in the Ethereum, Dai, and Bitcoin beats in the cryptoeconomy. He's appeared in Blockonomi, Binance Academy, Bitsonline, and more. He enjoys tracking smart contracts, DAOs, dApps, and the Lightning Network. He's learning Solidity, too! Contact him on Telegram at @wmpeaster

In brief AI tokens climbed nearly 6% in 24 hours, lifting their market value to $29.4 billion. Numerai crowdsources trading signals, rewarding data scientists with NMR tokens. JPMorgan’s potential stake underscores a growing interest in AI-crypto funds. The token for Numerai, a crypto hedge fund that uses artificial intelligence, led a surge in AI-focused digital assets on Wednesday after JP Morgan Asset Management said it was committing $500 million to the project.

NMR was up more than 100% over the past 24 hours to trade near $23, according to crypto markets data provider CoinGecko.

The AI-token sector rose 5.8% in 24 hours, reaching a total market cap of $29.4 billion, according to CoinGecko. The rally came even after Nvidia, whose hardware underpins much of the artificial intelligence boom, reported weaker-than-expected second-quarter earnings.

Among the 24-hour gainers, Near Protocol (NEAR) climbed 1.5%, the token of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (FET) added 1.3%, and Internet Computer (ICP) rose 1%.

Founded in 2015, Numerai crowdsources market forecasts from data scientists, rewarding top models with its NMR token. It began with an encrypted online tournament where participants competed to predict stock prices.

In hedge fund terms, “capacity” means an investor has locked in the option to allocate a set amount of money to a fund, ensuring access even if the fund later limits new investments. It signals a reserved allocation, not an immediate transfer of funds. Numerai has attracted high-profile early backers over the years, including Paul Tudor Jones, Naval Ravikant, and Renaissance Technologies co-founder Howard Morgan.

The Numerai deal marks another pivot for JPMorgan, whose CEO Jamie Dimon has long been a vocal crypto skeptic. Dimon once called Bitcoin a “fraud” and likened digital assets to “decentralized Ponzi schemes.”

But Dimon has softened his stance. At a May investor day, Dimon said that while he still doesn’t support Bitcoin personally, JP Morgan would allow clients to buy it. In June, the bank said it was exploring crypto‑backed lending and offering loans backed by clients’ digital‑asset holdings.

JP Morgan Asset Management did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.

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