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Crypto KOL Qwerty (@Quanterty) stated today on platform X: "Bull is so special. This is the first truly community-driven Meme on BSC that has swept the globe."It is worth noting that Binance co-founder He Yi has just followed the @Quanterty account on platform X.According to market data, possibly influenced by this, the Meme coin Bull has seen a significant rebound, with its market value returning to 120 million dollars, rising over 42% in 24 hours.

The latest report from the market intelligence platform Tracxn shows that since 2026, the Southeast Asian blockchain industry has accumulated $680 million in equity financing, more than double the $319 million for the entire year of 2025. However, this round of recovery is mainly driven by a few mature companies: only 25 rounds of financing were completed this year, compared to 46 rounds in 2025 and a peak of 206 rounds in 2022; the $400 million Series D financing of the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com accounted for nearly 60% of the total.From a segmented perspective, crypto financial services are the biggest beneficiaries, receiving a total of $498 million in financing this year (19 rounds), a year-on-year increase of 48.4%; tokenization platforms received $114 million, and decentralized application development platforms received $77 million. Among the 3,957 blockchain companies tracked by Tracxn, 1,323 have received equity financing, but only 167 have entered Series A and beyond, 50 have entered Series B, 14 have entered Series C, and only 4 have entered Series D and beyond.In terms of geography, Singapore dominates the Southeast Asian crypto investment market, accounting for 82.5% of the region's cumulative blockchain financing amount of $6.2 billion, and has 2,285 tracked companies, while Jakarta, ranked second, accounts for only 3%. In terms of exits, there have been 43 acquisitions and 4 IPOs in the region, including SBI Group's acquisition of the Singapore exchange CoinHako and Bybit's acquisition of NOBI. Southeast Asia has produced 6 blockchain unicorns to date, including Sygnum, Bitkub, Sky Mavis, and Amber Group.

The rebound in the cryptocurrency market has prompted companies to increase their allocation of crypto assets. As the price of Bitcoin rises, Bitcoin mining companies that had actively shifted towards AI businesses have once again become high-beta targets in the BTC market, and the strategy of directly holding Bitcoin on corporate balance sheets has regained market attention. Data shows that Bitcoin rose by about 23% by the end of August, with some mining companies' stock prices increasing by 41% to 67%, outperforming several AI infrastructure companies. The market believes that the U.S. Treasury's expansion of bond repurchases, the White House's positive signals on crypto regulation, and the liquidation of over $1.6 billion in short positions have collectively driven the rise of related assets.In terms of corporate accumulation, Strive purchased 1,800 BTC in the last week of August, costing about $143 million, increasing its total holdings to 23,156 BTC, making it the fifth largest publicly traded company holder of Bitcoin; Strategy simultaneously increased its holdings by 4,603 BTC, with total holdings exceeding 845,000 BTC. Meanwhile, 21 large financial institutions, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, plan to establish a new company and intend to launch a U.S. dollar stablecoin in the first half of 2027, subsequently expanding to other G7 currencies for cross-border payments and digital asset settlements.Regarding Ethereum, Bitmine has continuously increased its ETH holdings for 65 weeks, with the latest holdings exceeding 5.9 million ETH, accounting for 4.9% of Ethereum's circulating supply of about 120.7 million ETH, just one step away from its 5% holding target. Despite the continuous accumulation, the company's current ETH holdings still face an unrealized loss of about $5.1 billion.

Base Labs has announced its establishment as an independent research organization focused on advancing open-source AI. It believes in a healthy and open frontier model ecosystem and will conduct scientific research in an open manner.Base Labs will carry out blue-sky research on continuous learning, reinforcement learning science, and model lifecycle learning mechanisms, and will publicly share all experiments and recipes; it will build the BaseHub Data Foundry to provide an open reinforcement learning environment, training data, and real-world benchmarks; it will enhance the capabilities, safety, and alignment of open-source models through continuous post-training and deploy cutting-edge safety stacks; at the same time, it will conduct model performance research to reduce costs and improve performance.The organization emphasizes that this is mission-driven research work rather than a commercial product and is currently recruiting engineers, researchers, and research scholars.

According to YNetNews, the first Israeli star to enter the NBA, Omri Casspi, announced that his venture capital firm Swish Ventures has completed a $250 million fundraising for its third fund, increasing the firm's assets under management to approximately $800 million.The new fund is expected to invest in about 12 startups, with an average single investment of around $20 million, focusing on areas such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure, primarily targeting seed and Series A financing. Swish Ventures has currently invested in 20 companies, including Cognition AI, Applied Compute, EON, Wonderful, Upwind, etc., of which 8 have reached unicorn valuations, with a total valuation of its portfolio companies exceeding $60 billion.

Morpho co-founder and CEO Paul Frambot stated in a post on X that over the past six months, the team has received many opportunities to acquire cryptocurrency companies.He mentioned that Morpho rarely acquires companies for intellectual property or technology. If they want to build a certain capability, they prefer to hire the right talent and develop it end-to-end themselves, following their own engineering, auditing, and formal verification processes. Talent acquisition may be attractive, but the valuation will be purely based on a comparison of the cost of the talent acquired versus hiring an equivalent team.

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki stated that he hopes to avoid a race towards "unmonitorability" of models due to misleading reports. He mentioned that current cutting-edge models, including Astra, have a computational graph depth that differs from GPT-4 by no more than a factor of two. Since the launch of the first inference models, OpenAI has been committed to preserving and utilizing chain-of-thought monitoring, believing that this technology helps observe how the model's alignment capabilities generalize from the training distribution.Pachocki also pointed out that chain-of-thought monitoring is relatively fragile, and the trend is not optimistic, but it can still be strengthened through research and has become a core objective of OpenAI's current research agenda. Previously, The Information reported that Astra uses recurrent depth, allowing the same set of Transformer layers to compute repeatedly. As a result, some inferences can occur internally within the model, without needing to be entirely expressed as a chain of thought, raising concerns about whether the model will become increasingly difficult to monitor.

Manus announced the resumption of independent operations and entered a new development stage. Founding team member Red Xiao and others will continue to be responsible for the company's operations, focusing on promoting product innovation and the development of general AI Agents.Manus stated that as an independent Agent laboratory, the company will continue to expand the capability boundaries of general AI Agents in the future and transform new capabilities into products to help users handle complex tasks. In the future, Manus will further integrate into users' daily workflows, interact more directly with the real world, and more proactively represent users in executing tasks. Manus also thanked users who recently helped with data backup and recovery and stated that more innovative products will be launched in the future.

According to IT Home, the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) has announced the results of the new anti-fraud operation "Jackal IV." This operation will last from November 2025 to June 2026 and involves 22 countries and regions worldwide, focusing on combating online financial crimes such as romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment fraud, email scams, and money laundering. A total of 58 people were arrested in this round of operations, and the identities of 263 individuals involved have been confirmed.Among them, the Argentine police seized a "Crime-as-a-Service" (CaaS) network that provided website domain and money laundering services, arresting 17 people and confirming the identities of 196 individuals involved. The South African police raided 7 locations in Johannesburg, arresting 39 suspects accused of romance scams and investment fraud targeting retirees from English-speaking countries, while seizing $2.67 million and freezing 257 bank accounts.In addition, the Italian police confirmed one suspect involved in a cross-European money laundering network, discovering that a single bank account was linked to money laundering transactions amounting to €845,000; the Romanian police dismantled an investment fraud gang, arresting 11 people and seizing illegal assets such as cash, cryptocurrency, and real estate.

Federal Reserve Chairman Waller stated on Friday that if policymakers cannot be confident that inflation is "declining at a clear and sufficiently rapid pace" back to 2%, the Fed "has work to do." This suggests that if price pressures do not improve, the Fed may raise interest rates next.Waller made it clear that he still adheres to the Fed's long-standing policy path of managing inflation through interest rate adjustments. This significantly increases the likelihood of the Fed's next step being a rate hike, which could create a divergence between him and President Trump, who has long sought rate cuts. This statement essentially eliminated the ambiguity that had been left previously. At the press conference at the end of July, Waller declined to respond extensively to whether a rate hike was needed to address the inflation issue, which has significantly risen this year and has been above the Fed's target for more than five consecutive years.

Federal Reserve Chairman Waller stated, "Although the PCE and CPI data released this summer were better than expected, they did not convince me that there has been a meaningful improvement in the underlying trend of inflation." "Market prices reflect that the market believes we will achieve price stability. I can assure you that the market's judgment is correct."Waller then stated that with inflation rates above 2%, the Federal Reserve's "current top priority should be prices." This highly anticipated speech by Waller comes at a time when there is criticism of its streamlined communication strategy. Economists and market participants believe that this strategy lacks clear articulation regarding the recent economic and monetary policy outlook.Waller's speech seems to address these concerns, as he elaborated more deeply than before on his views regarding the economic situation and the focus of Federal Reserve policy under his leadership. He said, "Let us also clarify another aspect of our goals: price stability will not be achieved automatically, and inflation will not necessarily return on its own. Achieving price stability is the responsibility of the Federal Reserve." It is expected that Waller will not answer questions posed by on-site central bank officials and economists.

Silicon Valley's renowned venture capital firm a16z has announced that it has raised $1.1 billion for its latest fund, the Machine Age Fund, which will focus on investing in the full suite of computing infrastructure that supports AI operations, including chips, memory, networking, storage, as well as complete systems such as data centers, robots, and home AI devices.a16z stated that over the past year, there has been a significant turning point in the growth of AI in terms of application capabilities and types of work. As AI expands from chat and reasoning further into programming and other knowledge work, the demand for computing power and tokens is experiencing exponential growth, and machine intelligence is accelerating its deep development.a16z indicated that its team possesses extensive experience in hardware, data centers, chips, networking, and large-scale computing systems. They have also established a resource network covering market expansion, talent recruitment, marketing, customers, suppliers, and American manufacturing, which will further support the next generation of AI hardware entrepreneurs. a16z mentioned that we are currently at an important juncture in the transformation of computing paradigms and look forward to collaborating with entrepreneurs dedicated to reconstructing AI hardware and advancing the arrival of the "Machine Age."

Upbit's parent company Dunamu has signed a strategic partnership with Visa, and the two parties will collaborate on stablecoins and AI-based financial services. At the same time, the two companies are also exploring the integration of Open Standard's OUSD into future business models.This collaboration was announced just two days after Visa reached a partnership with South Korea's Shinhan Bank, also focusing on stablecoins and AI-related fields. Dunamu, as the operator of South Korea's major digital asset trading platform Upbit, aims to promote the application of stablecoins and the layout of intelligent financial products by partnering with the global payment giant.

According to CoinDesk, Bitcoin is currently stable around $80,000, with traders focusing on Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Walsh's keynote speech at the Jackson Hole annual meeting. The annual seminar hosted by the Kansas City Fed opened on Wednesday, and Walsh will speak on Friday morning. Current inflation remains well above the Fed's 2% target, and long-term borrowing costs are near multi-year highs, with the Fed maintaining the benchmark interest rate range at 3.5%-3.75% in recent months.Mark Connors, Chief Investment Officer of Risk Dimensions, expects Walsh to keep the option of raising interest rates but not to raise rates before the midterm elections. The July PCE inflation rate reached 3.7%, partly driven by rising energy prices following the Iran war. Samir Kerbage, Chief Investment Officer of Hashdex, stated that Bitcoin does not directly respond to the September interest rate decision but follows global liquidity and long-end yield curve trends, similar to the drivers of gold. Last week, the U.S. Treasury announced an increase in long-term Treasury bond purchases after the 30-year Treasury yield hit a 19-year high, which pushed Bitcoin higher; Kerbage described this surge as "primarily a liquidity event."This year's Jackson Hole meeting focuses on financial innovation, payments, and policy, with stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and faster settlement systems becoming the discussion highlights. Kerbage believes that if Walsh views these technologies as part of the financial system rather than risks to be curtailed, the impact could extend beyond Bitcoin, with smart contract networks and protocols handling tokenized payments and settlements benefiting more directly from this shift.

The Hyperliquid Policy Center stated on platform X that perpetual contracts should be at the core of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) innovation agenda. The agency submitted a statement regarding the first meeting of the CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee on August 20, pointing out that perpetual contracts are gradually expanding beyond the digital asset market to traditional asset classes such as stocks and commodities, and that demand for this product among U.S. market participants is rising.Perpetual contracts can meet the risk management needs of different market participants, making them particularly suitable for airlines hedging fuel costs, investment funds managing portfolio exposure, and AI developers addressing ongoing risks related to computing costs that do not have a clear expiration date. Compared to futures with fixed expiration dates, perpetual contracts do not require rolling over, and there are no expiration and delivery issues; they anchor contract prices to the underlying assets through periodic funding rates. Currently, on Hyperliquid, perpetual contracts deployed by third-party developers cover over 80 traditional commodity and stock markets, with a cumulative notional trading volume exceeding $500 billion.This year, the CFTC has taken several measures to promote the establishment of the perpetual contract market in the U.S. In May, the CFTC approved the first perpetual futures contract listed in the U.S. and issued a policy statement and continuous trading guidance regarding the listing of perpetual contracts; in June, the CFTC sought public opinion on extending perpetual contracts to energy commodities and further consulted on computing power derivatives.In addition, the Hyperliquid Policy Center believes that on-chain infrastructure can also promote the modernization of the U.S. derivatives market within the existing regulatory framework. Public blockchains can openly record markets, orders, and positions, continuously conduct margin assessments programmatically, and enable real-time collateral transfers, thereby reducing counterparty credit risk and settlement risk. The agency will continue to provide relevant research and technical documents to the CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee and committee staff, and promote the establishment of a pathway for U.S. market participants to compliantly access on-chain markets. The agency believes that perpetual contracts are one of the most representative financial innovations of the past decade and should be further developed in the U.S. market.

Bitget CFD Chief Analyst Lewis Huang stated in a live broadcast that this week’s U.S. PCE data and the Jackson Hole Global Central Bank Annual Meeting will become the market focus. The market is not only concerned about whether the Federal Reserve will adjust interest rates but will also pay close attention to how it responds to inflation remaining above the 2% target, high long-term Treasury yields, and fiscal pressures.Lewis Huang pointed out that if the core PCE is higher than expected and the Federal Reserve signals a continuation of tightening or emphasizes anti-inflation measures, U.S. Treasury yields and the dollar may receive support, while interest rate-sensitive assets like gold and the Nasdaq 100 may come under pressure. Conversely, if inflation data cools and officials express a tendency to retain policy flexibility, the market may re-evaluate future easing space, benefiting gold, non-U.S. currencies, and growth-oriented stock indices. This PCE data is generally in line with expectations, and the market focus has shifted to the Jackson Hole Global Central Bank Annual Meeting.In addition, the situation in the Middle East and risks in the Strait of Hormuz may still push up oil prices and inflation expectations. Traders should closely observe the U.S. dollar index, U.S. 2-year and 10-year Treasury yields, and the correlation between gold and oil; after major data releases, it is advisable to wait for further market confirmation of direction to avoid using high leverage to chase the initial wave of trends.

Gold prices rose slightly on Thursday due to the depreciation of the dollar and ongoing concerns about the U.S. budget deficit. OANDA analyst Kelvin Wong stated that these factors support gold prices in the medium term. The market is paying attention to the speech of Federal Reserve Chairman Waller to understand the direction of monetary policy.The U.S. Treasury has expanded the scale of long-term bond purchases, raising concerns about the depreciation of the dollar, and gold prices rose more than 5% last week. In addition, the Prime Minister of Qatar will visit Tehran to restart diplomatic mediation.