Artificial intelligence (AI) related crypto tokens posted gains after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday unveiled a new AI company called xAI as an alternative to popular chatbot ChatGPT. SingularityNET (AGIX) rose 11% over the past 24-hours, while Fetch.ai (FET) climbed about 7% over the same time period. The team will be led by Musk and includes members that have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto, according to the company website. The newly formed company will be a separate entity from Musk's X Corp., but xAI said it will work closely with his other companies. xAI will host Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

SingularityNET (AGIX) 7-day price chart (Messari)

Merchants on messaging app Telegram are now able to accept payments in cryptocurrency as services provider Wallet expands beyond its chat-centric payments mechanism. Wallet, which is built on The Open Network (TON) blockchain, already allows crypto transfers between users in chats. Now it's letting merchants integrate cryptocurrency into the bots they use to accept payments, it said in an emailed announcement on Thursday. The system allows for payment for goods and services using tether (USDT), bitcoin (BTC) and toncoin (TON).

A group of Polygon founders and researchers proposed a token upgrade that would replace the network's MATIC token with POL. The move would allow POL to function as a single token for all Polygon-based networks, including the main Polygon blockchain, the Polygon zkEVM network, and various supernets – application-specific blockchains that run atop the main Polygon network. The proposal lifted MATIC as much as 2.6% to $0.747 in the first three minutes after the announcement. If the proposal is accepted, network validators will be able to support the operation of multiple chains using a single token.

A message from Bitget

Bitcoin has failed twice this week to establish a foothold above $31,000. Data from Coinalyze shows futures traders are likely responsible for keeping the gains under check.

The first failed attempt on Monday at 20:05 UTC saw prices clock a high of $31,040 before quickly retreating back to $30,200 by 21:55 UTC. Open interest or the number of active stablecoin-margined (or linear) futures contracts tied to bitcoin rose from roughly 230,000 BTC to 242,000 BTC as prices pulled back from $31,040.

A rise in open interest alongside a decline in price is said to indicate an influx of bearish short positions in the market. Futures short positions are leveraged bets that profit from a decline in the underlying asset's price.

- Omkar Godbole