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The Alibaba Qwen team will release Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next on Wednesday, which is a mixture of experts (MoE) model with a total of 125 billion parameters, but only 6 billion parameters are activated for each token. The team positions it as a preview version of the next-generation Qwen 4 architecture, rather than the final flagship model.The model is described as multimodal and is built on the upcoming Qwen 4 architecture. The team stated that the early release of this version is to prepare developers for the subsequent complete Qwen series. The model weights will be hosted on the Hugging Face and ModelScope platforms.As of now, Qwen has not disclosed the benchmark results for this model, nor has it released comparative data with its own Qwen 3 series or overseas competitors. The specific figures of 125 billion and 6 billion parameters have not been officially confirmed. As an open-weight model, developers can download, fine-tune, and run it for free without sending data to a closed API, which helps reduce the cost of hosting the model.

World Liberty Financial announced that its USD stablecoin USD1 has been natively issued on the Canton Network, allowing institutions to use the stablecoin for settling transactions involving tokenized real-world assets (RWA). According to the announcement, USD1 can serve as the cash leg for transactions such as derivatives collateral, institutional lending, and asset issuance and redemption. The native issuance enables it to settle in sync with tokenized assets within the same transaction, while maintaining Canton’s privacy and permission control mechanisms.According to DeFiLlama data, USD1 has a market capitalization of approximately $4.05 billion, making it the sixth-largest stablecoin, issued and managed by BitGo Bank & Trust for its reserves and minting redemption processes. USD1 was launched in March 2025, with reserves including short-term U.S. Treasury bills, government money market funds, and dollar deposits. World Liberty Financial is a crypto project supported by the Trump family, founded in 2024.Canton is a public blockchain aimed at institutional finance, issuing or processing over $90 trillion in tokenized assets monthly, with over $350 billion in on-chain U.S. Treasuries flowing through its network daily. Zak Folkman, co-founder and COO of World Liberty Financial, stated that institutions have put trillions of dollars in U.S. Treasuries and government debt on-chain, but the dollar settlement still relies on outdated infrastructure. The combination of Canton and the native USD1 allows real-world assets to complete dollar settlements with greater speed and privacy.

Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Gharibabadi stated that no warships are allowed to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

According to Bloomberg, Kraken stated that some customers were temporarily unable to access their accounts after receiving tiny amounts of cryptocurrency from wallets associated with the sanctioned competitor HTX. Kraken referred to these transfers as "dust attacks," believing their purpose may be to trigger compliance reviews on the platform by spreading sanctioned funds.Data from Etherscan and Arkham Intelligence shows that from August 17 to 24, the wallet sent nearly 12,000 small transfers to addresses related to Kraken, most of which were worth only a few cents or a few dollars.Kraken stated that it has restored account access for affected customers while continuing to withhold the relevant sanctioned funds as required and is cooperating with authorities to limit the impact. HTX denied initiating these transfers and stated that it is investigating, with possible reasons including source identification errors or malicious activities by third parties.

BitcoinTreasuries.NET posted on platform X that BritishHodl will participate in the Bitcoin Treasuries Conference held in New York on September 28, and facilitate BlackRock's reduction of the minimum amount for converting Bitcoin to IBIT from $50 million to $2 million.BitcoinTreasuries.NET stated that this is a resource brought by top independent Bitcoin media figures participating in the live custody discussion.

According to sources, as Alibaba initiated a placement financing, Alibaba founder Jack Ma has been increasing his holdings in Alibaba's Hong Kong stocks for several consecutive days, with a total exceeding 600 million Hong Kong dollars.The related increase in holdings is said to express a strong optimism about Alibaba's AI prospects.

"Whale" Jason stated, "Set 10 major goals." He indicated that he will look for opportunities to re-enter long positions. He believes that the strength of this trend exceeds previous expectations, and the subsequent space can be further adjusted upwards; even re-entering at $80,000 or higher would not be too late, as BTC still has upward potential.He anticipates that $100,000 is likely to arrive earlier than originally expected, at which point the further height of this trend will be reassessed.

On August 25, according to Hong Kong Stock Exchange documents, Alibaba Group Chairman Cai Chongxin purchased another 720,000 shares of Alibaba on Tuesday, costing 82 million Hong Kong dollars, following his initial purchase of 720,000 shares.After Alibaba announced a new share placement plan of 80 billion Hong Kong dollars, Group Chairman Cai Chongxin and CEO Wu Yongming increased their holdings by a total of approximately 120 million Hong Kong dollars in Alibaba shares. Among them, CEO Wu Yongming bought 350,000 shares of Alibaba's Hong Kong stock at an average price of about 111.6 Hong Kong dollars, costing approximately 40 million Hong Kong dollars. Together, the two increased their holdings by 1.07 million shares, totaling about 120 million Hong Kong dollars.The proceeds from Alibaba's 80 billion Hong Kong dollar new share placement will be fully invested in full-stack AI capabilities and AI infrastructure construction. The placement received active subscriptions from long-term investors such as global sovereign wealth funds, ultimately achieving nearly 3 times oversubscription.

The TRON network super representatives (SR) have initiated a proposal vote for the mainnet Committee No. 107, which is expected to conclude on August 28 at 14:00 (Singapore time).The proposal aims to enable features related to the TVM compatibility with Ethereum Prague and Osaka upgrades in GreatVoyage-v4.8.2, including support for historical block hash queries, the addition of the CLZ instruction, support for Passkey verification with the secp256r1 precompiled contract, and optimization of MODEXP energy consumption. If the proposal vote passes, it will further enhance the compatibility of TVM with the latest upgrade features of Ethereum, strengthening smart contract development and cross-ecosystem adaptation capabilities.

According to Business Insider, Thomson Reuters launched its first self-developed AI model, Thomson-1, on Monday. This model is based on Snowdon and constructed through "re-alignment" of Alibaba's open-source Qwen model. Open-source means anyone can download and modify the model for free. Thomson-1 will take over some tasks previously handled by Anthropic's Claude, but it is not intended to completely replace collaboration with Anthropic and other labs, initially focusing on the company's areas of expertise, starting with document review.This move aims to address the high AI costs brought by models like Claude and OpenAI Codex, and reflects the use of cheaper Chinese open-source AI. CTO Joel Hron stated that the main reason is to better leverage Thomson Reuters' own expertise and control costs. The company expanded its collaboration with Anthropic in May this year for the AI legal assistant CoCounsel, which still primarily relies on Claude. Hron said, "Our main goal is to gradually make Thomson the model that drives more and more capabilities for CoCounsel."Thomson Reuters, in collaboration with a team from Imperial College London, spent months transforming Qwen to build Snowdon and ensured it is "ethically and politically bias-processed and safe to use." Hron pointed out that having a proprietary model allows for development based on its own intellectual property rather than continuously paying external AI companies, comparing it to renting versus buying a house: renting provides shelter but does not accumulate long-term equity.

According to a report by the Financial Associated Press, sources reveal that Apple is accelerating preparations to launch the next-generation Mac mini desktop computer, marking the first significant update for this product in nearly two years. The relevant insiders stated that this brand new desktop is expected to officially debut in the coming days, with the release likely occurring before the iPhone new product launch event in September.This updated Mac mini is part of Apple's new product lineup for the second half of this year, which will also include new Apple Watch, AirPods, and a smart home device with a screen that can recognize users through facial recognition.

Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz pointed out that the narrative of AI infrastructure resembles a slow relay race, with bottlenecks sequentially transmitting from GPUs to memory, CPUs, and storage, each link freezing the supply chain of the next for years and locking in higher baseline costs. At the beginning of 2023, the GPU shock caused H100 rental prices to exceed $9 per hour, and server shipments fell by 22%; subsequently, manufacturers shifted capacity to HBM, leading to an 80% quarterly increase in enterprise SSD prices and over a 60% rise in DRAM.By the end of 2025, the workload of intelligent agents will push the CPU to GPU ratio to about 1:1, with the average price of server CPUs rising by 27% year-on-year; in 2026, nearline HDD annual capacity will be sold out. The construction cost of data centers has risen to about $20 billion per gigawatt, with orders for long-cycle equipment such as transformers and turbines scheduled as far out as 2029 to 2031.Tunguz referred to this as the long whip effect in the hardware sector: years of manufacturing delays amplify downstream demand shocks upstream, and when pressure is relieved at a certain bottleneck, it will be delayed in transmitting to the next link, with transformers scheduled for delivery in 2027 to 2028, NAND wafer fabs, and turbine production lines potentially facing the risk of overcapacity.

Alibaba's video large model Wan 3 is officially launched, and Nvidia is negotiating an investment in Perplexity, which is valued at over $30 billion.Xiaomi releases the Xuan Ring O3 processor using 3 nm technology, and smart ring manufacturer Oura plans to raise up to $3 billion in an IPO.

According to The Kobeissi Letter, the call options volume for the Bitcoin ETF IBIT reached 1.58 million on Wednesday, setting a new single-day historical high; the volume exceeded 1 million for three consecutive trading days from Wednesday to Friday, as investors chased the crypto rebound.As a result, the call skew increased by 0.05 points over the past three days, marking the largest three-day increase in at least two years, more than three times the average three-day change since January 2025. This indicator measures the relative cost of upside versus downside options, and a significant increase in this metric indicates that investors are more willing to pay a premium for upside exposure.

According to CoinDesk, Standard Chartered Bank, headquartered in London with assets of $850 billion, announced that it will become the first bank to distribute Hong Kong-regulated stablecoins. The institution stated in an email announcement released on Monday that it will first assist its eligible institutional clients and partners in integrating the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HKDAP issued by Anchorpoint Financial, of which Standard Chartered is the majority shareholder.Standard Chartered also indicated plans to launch several new HKDAP commercial applications within the next month, with use cases including market fund subscriptions, settlements with asset management managers, inter-departmental settlements within the bank's global network, and cross-border payments. Anchorpoint Financial began a limited rollout of HKDAP on August 12, having just obtained one of the first two issuance licenses in Hong Kong four months prior. The initial rollout will focus on institutional payments and settlements, with more access channels and cross-border applications to be added later.Another licensed institution, HSBC, is preparing to launch its stablecoin in the second half of 2026 and may distribute it through PayMe, which has 3.3 million users. Additionally, Kraken's parent company Payward has expanded its stablecoin business in Hong Kong through a $600 million acquisition of Reap Technologies.

According to CoinDesk, the cryptocurrency platform Gemini, founded by the Winklevoss twins, announced that it has signed a letter of intent with Apex Fintech Solutions to distribute regulated crypto prediction market contracts to brokerage clients through Apex's futures commission merchant (FCM). Under the arrangement, the subsidiary Gemini Titan will become the exclusive regulated trading venue for distributing crypto event contracts via Apex FCM, with Gemini responsible for execution and clearing, allowing brokers using Apex to offer related products without having to build their own connections to the prediction market exchange.This collaboration builds on Gemini's efforts to advance regulated prediction market layouts. Gemini Titan received a CFTC-designated contract market license in December 2025, and Gemini Olympus obtained a derivatives clearing organization license in April 2025. The two parties already have a foundation for cooperation, as Gemini launched commission-free stock trading for some U.S. clients in July, with Apex Clearing Corporation serving as the custodian and clearing broker. The company expects to finalize details in the coming weeks.Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss stated that he believes prediction is the future of the market. The report also mentioned the overall growth in trading volume in prediction markets, as well as the prediction market-related Command Center AI feature previously launched by Gemini.

On August 24, a portfolio manager at Fidelity International stated that the gold holdings of the fund he manages have doubled in the past three weeks, attributing this move to increased uncertainty surrounding Federal Reserve policy. After raising the gold allocation in the fund to his self-imposed limit of 5%, George Efstathopoulos mentioned that he would consider increasing this limit if the dollar's status as a safe-haven asset continues to decline. Following the Federal Reserve's July meeting, investors have been selling long-term government bonds, and it is against this backdrop that George began to increase his gold holdings."My understanding is that this is due to the Federal Reserve's lack of credibility and the intensification of policy uncertainty," George stated. He also noted that the U.S. Treasury unexpectedly increased its repurchase of long-term bonds, which seems more like "manipulating yields rather than addressing the fundamental reasons for why yields are rising." "Today, the focus on gold is no longer on the rise in yields themselves, but rather on why yields are rising."

According to the latest documents from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, after Alibaba announced a new share placement plan of HKD 80 billion, the group's chairman Cai Chongxin and CEO Wu Yongming each increased their holdings of Alibaba shares by a total of approximately HKD 120 million.Cai Chongxin purchased 720,000 shares of Alibaba's Hong Kong stock at an average price of approximately HKD 112, costing about HKD 80 million; Wu Yongming bought 350,000 shares of Alibaba's Hong Kong stock at an average price of approximately HKD 111.6, costing about HKD 40 million. The two together increased their holdings by 1.07 million shares, with a total amount of approximately HKD 120 million.

According to Bloomberg, the cryptocurrency project World Liberty Financial, supported by the Trump family, has received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national trust bank charter, intending to establish World Liberty Trust Company. After final approval, the institution will be able to issue and redeem the stablecoin USD1 directly, manage its reserve assets, and provide digital asset custody services.This application comes at a time when the approval process for new bank charters in the United States has significantly accelerated. OCC data shows that 22 bank charter applications have been approved in the 19 months prior to Trump's second term, exceeding the total from the previous five years, with several being fintech and digital asset companies. World Liberty Trust Company is not a traditional commercial bank and cannot accept deposits insured by the FDIC or issue traditional loans.

On August 24, according to the Shanghai Securities Journal, Alibaba announced the completion of the pricing for a new share placement of HKD 80 billion (approximately USD 10.2 billion), with 100% of the net proceeds from the placement to be used for investing in full-stack AI capabilities and strengthening AI infrastructure construction.According to sources close to the transaction, this placement was nearly 3 times oversubscribed, exceeding HKD 200 billion. Sovereign and long-term funds ultimately accounted for over 40% of the subscription, with high order quality. Major sovereign funds from regions such as the Middle East, Europe, and Asia actively participated in this subscription.