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On October 23, a16z General Partner Chris Dixon announced that a16z crypto would be renamed a16z Frontier. The investment scope has expanded from crypto startups to a broader category of frontier technology startups, which are companies that create new technologies, open new markets, and may take years to mature. Dixon emphasized that this adjustment is an expansion of scope rather than a shift in direction, and the team will continue to invest in crypto and related businesses while advocating for reasonable crypto regulation.Dixon stated that as blockchain becomes more widely adopted, Wall Street and fintech companies have normalized the launch of on-chain products, and the importance of the "crypto company" label has diminished; companies should be defined by their business rather than the technology they use. His explanation also pointed to the AI wave, which not only focuses on using AI to perform existing tasks faster and better but also emphasizes the emergence of new native use cases, full-stack entrepreneurship that integrates software and hardware with services, and new networks that connect people with intelligent agents.Dixon believes that blockchain will continue to play an important role, providing the internet with a fast, cheap, global, and programmable funding track. Stablecoins are becoming standard tools for fintech and institutions, and they can also support machine-to-machine transactions and the cold start of new networks. The fund will be co-led by Dixon along with a16z founders Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and General Partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet, while the operating team will continue to serve existing and future portfolio companies in areas such as regulation, market entry, talent, marketing, and technology development.

Domain infrastructure company D3 announced the launch of the Frontier Hyperliquid Vault, a membership program that provides participants with priority access to a new round of top-level internet domains. Nasdaq-listed Hyperion DeFi (NASDAQ: HYPD) is listed as the launch partner for the vault. D3 is a core contributor to the Doma Protocol and one of the few ICANN-accredited Web3 registrars, with investors including Paradigm.At the launch of the program, ICANN opened the second round of new top-level domain applications in internet history in August 2026, receiving over 1,600 applications covering suffixes such as .agent, .crypto, .wallet, .sol, .robot, and .hype is also included in this round of applications. The last expansion occurred in 2012, resulting in approximately 1,200 new top-level domains, which are now used by tens of millions of websites.The participation process is as follows: users deposit qualified assets with supported custodians on Solana and Hyperliquid to earn Frontier Points, and then gain priority in registering domain names by committing points before formal registration. As part of the initial commitment, Hyperion DeFi will receive a distribution of DOMA tokens in future potential token generation events based on incentive arrangements with the Doma Foundation. The Doma Protocol is a DNS-compatible blockchain aimed at tokenizing the domain market, which is valued at approximately $36 billion.

Anthropic recently submitted a draft AI safety bill to U.S. lawmakers, which has been questioned by U.S. AI safety advocates. The draft sets a high threshold for the government to urgently halt dangerous models, requiring that risks involve scenarios such as biological weapons, cyberattacks, or AI going out of control, and potentially causing more than 50 deaths or serious injuries, or losses exceeding $1 billion; some provisions may also limit state government regulatory authority.Nathan Calvin, the strategic head of the AI safety organization Encode, subsequently compiled Anthropic's decisions over the past year. In February of this year, the company modified its previously strict safety policy: it had previously committed to pausing training or releases if safety measures did not keep pace with model capabilities, but the new policy no longer requires the company to independently halt R&D at higher risk stages, citing that competitors might take advantage of the opportunity. During the same period, the company invested heavily in computing power, formed a chip team, and allowed Claude to take on more AI R&D tasks.On October 21, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted a lengthy rebuttal on X. He acknowledged that the company had made some mistakes but insisted that competing for cutting-edge AI capabilities did not violate its safety mission, stating that the company adheres to a race-to-the-top approach, believing that only by staying at the forefront of technology can it drive the industry to raise safety standards. He listed nine safety decisions that had cost the company commercially, including restricting the Mythos-level model's open access for months and strictly limiting biology-related requests. The safety roadmap updated by the company on October 19 states that existing policies mainly target the deployment of dangerous models, and in the future, it may be necessary to directly limit the speed of R&D, with plans to propose relevant policy options by January 15, 2027, or explain why none were proposed.

The NFT trading market Blur announced on X that its frontend will be deprecated on November 12, 2026, and this arrangement only applies to the frontend.Blur stated that the Blur market protocol will continue to operate on-chain, and BLUR will continue to control its fee switch.

According to the Financial Times, Mark Zuckerberg stated that Meta Platforms (META.O) has reached the "cutting edge" of artificial intelligence and rejected calls to slow down development.

According to Wu's Blockchain report, the /coins/perps interface of the Pump.fun front-end API has displayed data related to Hyperliquid perpetual contracts, covering cryptocurrency assets such as BTC, ETH, SOL, as well as stock and commodity contracts like Nvidia, Tesla, gold, and crude oil.The interface returns information including contract prices, funding rates, open interest, 24-hour trading volume, and maximum leverage, with some assets coming from the Hyperliquid HIP-3 market. Wu stated that it is currently unclear whether Pump.fun plans to launch perpetual contract trading features, and the official has not yet announced related product plans.

The Asian bond market is expected to follow the decline of U.S. Treasuries, as the U.S.-Iran standoff keeps oil prices high, exacerbating inflation concerns and increasing market bets on further interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.New Zealand government bonds opened lower, and Australian government bond futures may decline. The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield briefly rose by 11 basis points to 5.27%, reaching a new high in 19 years; the 30-year yield rose to 5.55%. Morgan Stanley analyst Chris Larkin stated that the market's focus may still be on interest rates and energy prices.

Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, commented on the "slow down the frontier" proposal put forward by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Nic Carter stated that if the goal is to widen the gap between the public and the true frontier internally, and requires cooperation from competitors, then the proposal is reasonable. The main commercial risk for Anthropic is the commoditization of models due to distillation, rather than safety issues.Nic Carter mentioned that safety and profit incentives tend to align in limiting public access to truly frontier models. The highest return use of frontier tokens is for internal research and capturing downstream intellectual property, rather than public API sales. Anthropic has made models like Mythos Preview available only to a few partners.Nic Carter expressed that unilateral slowing down cannot solve the prisoner's dilemma, and coordinated restraint requires antitrust exemptions or regulation. Dario called for the U.S. government to provide limited exemptions for safety discussions so that companies can voluntarily set standards.

Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya released an in-depth research report stating that open-source weight models are about four months away from matching the best closed-source frontier models in public evaluations, with increasing fluctuations in the gap. If open-source models allow companies more control over data, infrastructure, and customization while approaching frontier performance, the value corresponding to companies still paying for frontier laboratories becomes a business issue. Openness exists on a spectrum, from fully open-source models that can be downloaded and freely modified to open-source weight models with various restrictions, while closed-source models keep weights proprietary.Palantir CEO Alex Karp warned that companies might hand over differentiated proprietary knowledge and processes to frontier model providers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that companies are effectively paying for intelligence twice: once in money and again in the more valuable proprietary knowledge that must be disclosed to make the intelligence useful. Despite concerns, companies are still willing to pay for frontier performance, even if the best open-source weight models are only months behind, with frontier laboratory revenues continuing to accelerate.Leading companies use both types of models, leveraging open-source models for control and customization while utilizing closed-source frontier models for maximum capability, with some cases reporting up to 12 times engineering efficiency and over 20 times cost savings. Some vendors adopt a dual-track approach, with Google offering both Gemini and Gemma, and Meta providing both Muse Spark and Llama. The 99-page report also discusses the costs of maintaining a lead for frontier laboratories, five factors of model competition, model operating locations, and investments in open-source weights by NVIDIA and Samsung.

ESS Frontier LLC filed a lawsuit on September 4, 2026, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, case number 1:26-cv-07645, against Ostium Foundation, Ostium Labs Co., Deltax LTD., DX Group Limited, Ostium co-founder and CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, and John Doe Transferees 1-10. The nature of the case is arbitration matters under other statutes, with the cause of action being a petition for a mandatory arbitration order and the appointment of an arbitrator pursuant to 09 U.S.C. § 206.The plaintiff also submitted a complaint, a motion for a temporary restraining order, a motion to seal limited materials, and related declarations. Public reports indicate that the lawsuit involves approximately $15 million in crypto loans, with ESS Frontier LLC suing as the assignee of the debt owed by Hong Kong lender Minghui Zheng. On September 14, the plaintiff submitted the first amended complaint, adding Minghui Zheng as a co-plaintiff. The court is scheduled to hold a hearing on September 17. Ostium is an on-chain perpetual contract protocol deployed on Arbitrum, providing leveraged trading for stocks, commodities, foreign exchange, and crypto assets.

An MEV bot named Yoink on Ethereum front-ran an exploit attack targeting the Safe wallet, which PeckShield referred to as an approximately $7.81 million rsETH attack. On-chain records show that the Yoink transaction received 2,900 rsETH and sent 2,882.37 rsETH to the address 0xC70f00CD7E461686b04B0E912E309becA8b80ea0, which currently has a balance of 2,882.36740883 rsETH.The same transaction also sent 17.63 rsETH to the Uniswap v4 Pool Manager, which sent 18.95 ETH to the Yoink contract, which then transferred 18.93 ETH to the block builder. The Yoink transaction and the original attack transaction both occurred in Ethereum block 25980525, with the Yoink transaction at the top of the block, and the original transaction executed a rollback, consistent with the front-running judgment of security researchers.BlockSec attributed the vulnerability to a flaw in the authorization checks of the executor contract associated with the enabled Safe module, allowing calls controlled by the attacker to be executed through a trusted executor. Blockaid stated that the attacker exploited a public keeper multi-call to direct a custom Uniswap v4 liquidity module to a hook pool created by the attacker, which subsequently unpacked aEthrsETH into rsETH.

Stubborn high inflation has led Trump to confront Federal Reserve Chairman Waller this week, as the market prepares for the Fed to raise interest rates despite the president's demands.Economists warn that if the Fed does not support a rate hike on Wednesday, its "credibility" will be at risk. Trump reiterated that the U.S. should have the "lowest interest rates in the world" and may be dissatisfied with a rate increase.

Micron Technology announced on Friday that its direct labor employees in Taiwan will receive a total bonus for the fiscal year 2026 equivalent to 35 to 68 months of salary, with a minimum cash compensation of 1.7 million New Taiwan Dollars (approximately 53,809.39 USD).Employees in Taiwan who joined before August 29, 2025, will receive a cash bonus of 1 million New Taiwan Dollars (approximately 31,652.58 USD) for the fiscal year 2026. This announcement comes after union members representing about two-thirds of Micron's employees in Taiwan generally supported a strike.

According to Yahoo Finance, Zhihu announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary has entered into a subscription agreement with general partners and fund managers to subscribe for 1.5 billion RMB of limited partnership interests using its own funds.Following the completion of the subscription, Zhihu expects to hold no more than 30% of the fund's interests. The fund has a duration of 7 years (extendable for up to two additional years), with an investment period of 4 years, and will primarily invest in early to mid-stage non-listed companies in the fields of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology in mainland China, covering areas such as foundational models, AI infrastructure, robotics, and AI applications.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, a "news trader" paid a bribe of 40.8 BNB (31,000 USD) in node bribes and Gas fees to front-run the purchase of Hakimi at the first second of the announcement of the Hakimi contract going live on Binance, subsequently selling for a profit of 378,000 USD.Analysis shows that the announcement of the Hakimi contract going live on Binance was made at 13:55:12. Within the first second, he paid a bribe of 35.3 BNB (26,800 USD) to the node BNB48 Club and used a smuggled RPC channel to front-run and buy 9.89 million Hakimi with 264.7 BNB (200,000 USD) at a price of 0.02 USD. He also paid a high Gas fee of 5.5 BNB (4,200 USD). Of course, the high bribe and Gas fees allowed him to buy at the very front, and then other traders bought after him, pushing up the price.

According to Caijing, regarding the investment shares of DeepSeek, some intermediaries in the market have proposed a fee structure of "18% upfront and 35% backend," meaning that investors contributing 100 million yuan must first pay an upfront fee of 18 million yuan, and after receiving returns in the future, they must also share 35%. The report states that even if investors accept the high fees, they cannot guarantee that they will ultimately receive shares.DeepSeek will conduct a thorough identity verification of the investors participating in the financing and the limited partners behind the funds. The relevant investments have a five-year lock-up period during which transfers are not allowed. Except for the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, most external investors do not have voting rights and do not hold board seats, sharing financial returns only according to their investment proportion.At the same time, there are false shares and intermediary chaos surrounding DeepSeek's financing in the market. Some institutions claim to hold large investment shares but ultimately did not make it onto the investment list, and some investors have paid a "meeting fee" of 5 million yuan in an attempt to contact Liang Wenfeng but were unsuccessful.