Robotics 2026

Hello, dear readers!**
Happy Monday, and welcome to another edition of Castle’s AI Dispatch.**

Another week staring at the abyss or a possible downtrend, this time with a small possible light at the end of the tunnel, as the FED is expected to reduce interest rates by 25bps (from 3.75% to 3.5%) on Wednesday, the 10th of December.

Possibly, this could bring renewed hope and clear the recent uncertainty. However, it’s worth noting that, compared to previous policy changes by the FED, this time it’s happening within a much more complex geopolitical context, characterised by increasing tensions.

Furthermore, there is increasing discussion about AI funding and whether it might very well be a bubble.

Without repeating this argument, we recommend having a look at last week’s dispatch, which touched upon it:

In the midst of this dark cloud, some positive news is trying to change the wind.

For once, the Trump administration is exploring creating a “national robotics strategy”, with a possible executive order coming in 2026.

This is the next step of the US government AI push, according to the vision that “AI cannot remain trapped in data centers”.

Immediately after the news, most robotics tokens pumped hard only to retrace after a few hours - classic robotics coins.

Anyway, it seems that the foundations are being laid for this to become one of the most interesting narratives of 2026.

AI is still among the leading narratives for mindshare:

Is the bottom really bottomless or are we seeing some positive signs?

All hopes in our geopolitical overlords.

In the meantime, let’s go through the most interesting things that happened this week!

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Weekly Insights 🔍

NEAR just launched one of its most important AI updates of the year.

The introduced NEAR AI cloud and Private Chat, “two products that offer hardware-backed, verifiable privacy and are built around one simple yet powerful principle”.

For more details on them, here’s an interesting thread:

• AI Cloud: “runs inside Intel TDX and NVIDIA Confidential Computing hardware where data is processed in a sealed, isolated environment”.

All inferences create cryptographic attestations to prove that the code was run fairly.

• Private Chat: Also runs on NEAR AI Cloud. Users can talk to LLM models without the risk of data leak. Same as above, all inference generates a cryptographic attestation so that privacy becomes verifiable.

NEAR intents are also picking up adoption, with over $7b in all-time volume:

Unless you’ve been out of your laptop for a few days, you also probably saw the launch of the Base-Solana bridge (with its relative drama).

Is this going to benefit Virtuals and other AI protocols on Base?

For the Solana bros looking for opportunities, here’s a recap of the virtual ecosystem this week:

Big update also for Virtual ACP, the protocol for agent-to-agent communication. All transactions now settle through the x402 standard.

“From software to robotics”:

Here is a fascinating conversation with @ethermage to understand more about the significance of this update for Virtuals:

@eigencloud shares more light on different types of AI agents and why they need verifiable cloud:

Kaito recently introduced an interesting feature which allows you to filter projects by smart followers gain, a good social indicator.

In a bit of an off-topic argument: can AI go to therapy? Do they have trauma?

Super cool research:

An interesting infographic on some of the “AI bubble” claims:

Farcaster has been struggling to get traction, same for Lens. Is there a way to solve the issue of AI slop for social media?

Also came across this interesting project working at the intersection of prediction markets and AI:

Almanak also officially launched the Almanak Games, their take on TGE (which is happening on the 11th of December):

That’s it for this week!

We hope you are keeping yourself safe in these tough times.