Miners Catch AI Brainworms, DAOs Host Governance Gong Shows, and Everyone Stares at the Geopolitical Slot Machine

Earnings season rolls on, and this week the spotlight turns to a couple of bitcoin miners who seem to have caught a severe case of AI brainworms. Riot Platforms, holding down the fourth-largest market cap spot, and Core Scientific, sitting at number six, are up to bat with their quarterly reports.

These mining behemoths, like many in their cohort, are now trying to repurpose their skills in running power-hungry data centers and securing sketchy electricity deals to chase the shiny new object: artificial intelligence. Core Scientific, whose $9 billion buyout by CoreWeave spectacularly face-planted last October, has practically scrubbed "crypto mining" from its homepage's vocabulary. The real degen question is what percentage of their revenue is still coming from the old, reliable business of printing sats.

Over in macro-land, traders are glued to their screens for the U.S. February jobs report. The crowd is whispering about 60,000 new nonfarm positions, but the true chaos generator is the Middle East, where U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran have predictably led to "find out" phase retaliation against American bases. Former President Trump, never one for subtlety, has dubbed it "major combat operations" and is betting on a four-to-five week timeline, hinting that a surprise early truce could send risk appetite into a euphoric, leverage-fueled frenzy.

Your weekly guide to navigating the crypto and macro circus (All times ET):

Crypto Events:

• March 2: SuperRare drops 'Delirium,' a new collection from artist Xer0x, for your digital wall.
• March 2: Mantra’s OM token undergoes a metamorphosis into MANTRA via a 1:4 coin split as its chain upgrades from v6 to v7.
• March 3: SolCex mobile app launches on Google Play and Apple’s App Store, for trading on the go.
• March 4: Qubic starts testing the wild idea of parallel dogecoin mining alongside AI training, because why choose one meme when you can have two?

Macro Data: A data dump so heavy it needs its own forklift, featuring U.S. ISM PMIs, Eurozone inflation flash data, Australia's GDP, China's PMI, the U.S. ADP jobs report, the Fed's Beige Book, and the main event: the U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls report on March 6.

Earnings (Estimates):

• March 2: Riot Platforms (RIOT), est. -$0.32; Core Scientific (CORZ), est. -$0.18. The cost of chasing AI dreams.
• March 6: Metalpha (MATH).
• March 9: Sharplink (SBET), est. $0.31.
• March 11: Exodus Movement (EXOD), est. $0.14.

Governance Theater: It's another week of DAOs playing high-stakes, slow-motion bureaucracy bingo. The proposals are flying.

• PoolTogether DAO is voting to manually fix a previous execution error for a governance shutdown (Voting ends March 2). Whoopsie daisy.
• Angle DAO is voting to wind down its EURA and USDA stablecoins with a one-year redemption plan (Voting ends March 2). The slow rug pull.
• GMX DAO is voting to hire a CEO and form a leadership committee, proving that sometimes decentralization just means you get to vote for your new boss (Voting ends March 2).
• ShapeShift DAO is voting to appoint a Tokenomics Workstream Leader paid entirely in FOX tokens (Voting ends March 3). Compensation in bags, as is tradition.
• Decentraland DAO is voting on automatic proposal execution and term limits (Voting ends March 3). Meta-governance for your meta-life.
• Uniswap DAO has two linked votes to expand protocol fees to eight L2s and implement a new fee tier system (Voting ends March 4 & 5). The fee machine demands more lanes.
• ENS DAO is voting to patch a critical security vulnerability in its DNSSEC oracles (Voting ends March 4). A rare instance of actually important governance.
• Gnosis DAO is voting to fund the Revoke.cash security platform (Voting ends