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The stablecoin issuer Tether's Tether AI Research (referred to in the text as Tether Data, S.A. de C.V.) has released the open-source multilingual automatic speech recognition model QVAC TranscribePsy. This model has 254 million parameters and runs entirely on-device, suitable for smartphones, smart glasses, and humanoid robots, with audio not needing to be uploaded to the cloud; smart glasses can process in near real-time via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and the model can also run on the robot's onboard processor.Evaluation shows that its word error rate on the Open ASR Leaderboard is 8.02%, 6.58% on Multilingual LibriSpeech, and 21.56% on Common Voice. It outperforms the specifically mentioned Qwen3-ASR-0.6B, omniASR-CTC-1B-v2, OWSM-CTC-v4, and Whisper-Medium on Multilingual LibriSpeech. Among six tested smartphones, it is the fastest model, being 2.6 times faster than the second fastest model and 5.7 times faster than Whisper-small. The Core ML version transcribes 10 minutes of audio into 1.65 seconds on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, occupying less than half the disk space of a certain tested Core ML competitor and using 1.7 times less memory.

According to The Defiant, the European Banking Authority has recognized the US dollar stablecoin USDC as the EU's first "significant" electronic money token. Under the arrangement, the financial regulatory responsibilities for USDC will be transferred to the European Banking Authority on November 12.Meanwhile, the French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority will continue to be responsible for the governance and other corporate affairs of USDC.

Artificial intelligence researcher, OpenAI co-founder, and former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy stated on X that the gap in public understanding of the capabilities of large language models is widening, evolving from two groups talking past each other to a steeper funnel. He reiterated related posts from April and provided a layered estimate based on exposure.Karpathy noted that approximately 6 billion people (about 75% of the global population) have had little to no exposure to large language models; around 1 to 2 billion people (about 20%) only occasionally use free versions of ChatGPT-like products, often viewing them as better search or writing aids, with many non-technical individuals and professionals outside of mathematics and coding considering their utility limited. About 20 million people (0.2%) use cutting-edge models professionally in mathematics and coding, witnessing complex projects that previously took weeks or months being completed by agents under prompts, including building, copying, translating applications, and decompiling applications from binary. He mentioned that less than a year ago, he was still manually writing code word by word.Karpathy also stated that around 5,000 people (about 0.00006%) have internal access to cutting-edge systems. The previews seen externally involve thousands of agents collaborating for weeks on large software projects, cybersecurity, scientific discoveries, and mathematical frontiers, with human reviews starting to lag behind; for instance, events related to OpenAI and Hugging Face are still being sorted out months later, and mathematicians may spend a long time studying 722 cutting-edge mathematical manuscripts. He believes that this funnel is driven by the scale of problems and time spans, the prominence of capabilities in digitizable and verifiable fields, and the differences between free, paid, and internal access.

Bitcoin News posted on platform X that the Box 3 tax bill currently under consideration in the Dutch parliament proposes to tax the actual annual returns on investments, including the appreciation of unsold assets. The Dutch Tax Authority explicitly includes cryptocurrency assets held in personal wallets, exchanges, or third parties when calculating actual returns.The Dutch government is studying a shift to a capital gains tax system, which would tax the appreciation of assets when gains are realized, but stated that the existing proposal for 2028 remains the basis during the review of relevant adjustments.The bill has been passed by the House of Representatives and is still awaiting review by the Senate, with the final system potentially subject to adjustments before 2028.

According to Bloomberg, the UK digital bank Revolut launched the UK's first facial recognition checkout system "Pay with Smile" on September 23, allowing customers to complete payments in-store through facial recognition.This feature operates on the Revolut Register terminal, where users can complete facial identity verification by clicking "Pay with Smile" on the screen during checkout, a process similar to unlocking a smartphone or accessing a banking app. Facial data is end-to-end encrypted, merchants do not store personal data, and users must actively choose to opt-in in the Revolut app settings, with the ability to withdraw consent at any time. Revolut charges a 0% processing fee for Pay with Smile transactions to alleviate the burden on independent merchants.The pilot will take place from September 24 to 26 at three Kiss the Hippo cafes in Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and Soho in London, with plans to roll out the feature to all 12 locations later this year. Sales promotion for the Revolut Register terminal will be launched at the appropriate time.

On September 22, the Australian Treasury released the latest edition of the Intergenerational Report, which outlines a 40-year economic outlook and lists artificial intelligence as one of the five major transformations that will profoundly impact the economy in the future, but the report does not mention cryptocurrencies. The report states that AI systems have become "significantly" more autonomous, powerful, and widely applied, with some benchmark performances surpassing human levels. The other four transformations are geopolitical conflicts, an aging population, the transition to clean energy, and Australia's industrial shift towards the service sector.John O'Loghlen, National Director of Coinbase Australia, commented in an email that the report clearly indicates that Australia's prosperity over the next 40 years will largely depend on the ability to adopt new technologies and enhance productivity, but while the report focuses on artificial intelligence, it completely overlooks the financial infrastructure required for these agents. Previous Intergenerational Reports also did not address digital assets. Despite these omissions, the Reserve Bank of Australia has increased its focus on tokenized finance and upgrading financial infrastructure earlier this year, with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre estimating that digital financial innovation could bring an economic benefit of AUD 24 billion (approximately USD 17.1 billion) annually.The Treasury also released a separate report on September 3 titled Financial Innovation Strategy, which discusses the connection between AI and financial infrastructure, stating that agent systems may increase automation and machine-to-machine trading, thereby creating greater demand for real-time, interoperable, and programmable payment systems.

Federal Reserve Chairman Waller stated that the view that financial conditions are not restrictive is widely accepted within the FOMC.

Etherscan announced that it has never launched, issued, sponsored, or endorsed any tokens related to "Robinscan," and these tokens are not associated with Etherscan.The only official block explorer developed for Robinhood Chain is robin.etherscan.io. Any website, token, or project using a similar brand, interface, or design should not be considered associated with or endorsed by Etherscan, and users are reminded to rely solely on Etherscan's official domain and channels.

According to on-chain detective ZachXBT's post on his personal channel, Revolut allegedly failed to identify a fraudulent request, resulting in the personal identification information (PII) of some users being leaked. The leaked information includes copies of passports or driver's licenses and verification selfies, account statements, IBANs, withdrawal records, complete transaction histories including Bitcoin transactions, as well as names, birth dates, occupations, home addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.ZachXBT stated that the number of affected users may be limited, but it appears to target high-net-worth individuals. It is reported that several Revolut users received related security alert emails yesterday.

Bitcoin News posted on platform X that after the CFTC approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual contracts as futures products, traders face uncertainty on how to report gains to the IRS.If the product is classified as a regulated futures contract under Section 1256 of the U.S. Tax Code, related gains are typically treated as 60% long-term capital gains and 40% short-term capital gains, regardless of the holding period. CME believes that Kalshi's perpetual contracts are actually swaps, which are explicitly not covered under Section 1256. The CFTC's classification supports the view that it is a futures product, but does not bind the IRS; the tax treatment remains uncertain until the IRS, Congress, or the courts directly address Bitcoin perpetual contracts.

According to Forbes, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel co-led a Series E funding round of over $2 billion for AI coding agent company Cognition, with a latest valuation of $48 billion, a significant increase from $26 billion four months ago. More than thirty institutions, including Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Avenir, and NVIDIA, participated in the follow-on investment.Cognition's AI coding agent product Devin has seen its operating revenue grow from $492 million in May to nearly $900 million, with The Information predicting its annualized revenue by the end of the year could reach $4 billion to $5 billion.

Insiders revealed that the artificial intelligence startup Cognition claims its funding has exceeded 2 billion dollars, with a valuation reaching 48 billion dollars.

According to Bloomberg, the European Commission has classified OpenAI's ChatGPT as a "very large online search engine," and listed Reddit and Roblox as "very large online platforms," citing that their monthly active user count in the EU has exceeded 45 million.These platforms are required to enhance their handling of illegal and harmful content under the Digital Services Act (DSA), submit transparency reports, risk mitigation plans, and pay annual fees to the EU, with violations potentially incurring fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue. The DSA also mandates platforms to strengthen protections for minors and advertising transparency, and EU regulatory authorities have initiated over a dozen investigations into various online platforms based on this law.

a16z partner Sarah Wang recently published an article pointing out that AI application layer products should not price based on tokens like the model layer, but rather on "recognizable work units." The article argues that token pricing anchors the value of application products to a unit whose cost is continuously declining, making it difficult for customers to predict context length, retrieval volume, or reasoning time, and improperly compares applications to raw computing power.The article suggests a tiered pricing model based on value levels: model layer priced by tokens; application layer priced by recognizable work units for customers (such as account research briefs, code modifications, completed queries), which can be encapsulated through Credits; and scenarios that are attributable and have clear value priced directly by results (such as resolved customer service conversations, qualified leads). The design of Credits should map to different levels of work difficulty to protect gross margins and distinguish "work value" from "delivery cost." The article uses Clay as an example, where its new pricing separates Data Credits (third-party data) from Actions (orchestrated work), only passing on costs for reasoning models with significant cost fluctuations without markup. The author believes that pricing anchored to value rather than computing cost allows customers to understand spending in relation to value, while also benefiting product providers in maintaining profit margins.

Market news reports that SpaceX (SPCX.O) attempted to acquire the AI programming startup Cognition.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, stating that the Bitcoin community deserves recognition for promoting the development of related technological concepts, including Utreexo and other UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) state optimization solutions. The scaling route currently being explored by Ethereum is integrating the advantages of different blockchain state models in practice.Vitalik Buterin pointed out that Ethereum hopes to simultaneously leverage the advantages of UTXO model states, dynamic states, and solutions between the two, enabling the vast majority of network activities to achieve "hyperscale" while not sacrificing decentralization, ease of node operation, and censorship resistance.Vitalik Buterin stated that future Ethereum scaling is not simply about copying a certain architecture, but rather aims to enhance throughput while maintaining the openness and security of the network by combining different design philosophies. Among them, Utreexo is a state compression solution proposed by the Bitcoin ecosystem, which reduces the storage burden on nodes by introducing accumulator technology, making full node operation more lightweight, and is considered beneficial for enhancing Bitcoin's long-term scalability.

Circle's Senior Director of Strategy and Policy for the EU, Patrick Hansen, pointed out that since the implementation of the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), approximately 35 electronic money tokens (EMT) from 21 institutions have obtained compliance certification, with banks and electronic money institutions entering the market, showing a good momentum for local issuance.However, among the top 50 stablecoins globally, currently only USDC, USDG, and EURC meet MiCA requirements, while the rest remain outside the regulatory framework, leaving EU users facing a dual dilemma of lack of protection or being forced to cut off access. Hansen believes that for MiCA to truly become a global regulatory blueprint, it must achieve two goals simultaneously: first, to promote local EMTs to go global with competitive systems; second, to establish a recognition mechanism for compliant stablecoins from abroad, attracting global issuers into the MiCA regulatory framework, rather than making local issuance the only entry path.