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According to the official announcement from Mitsubishi UFJ Trust Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust Bank, in collaboration with Mitsubishi UFJ Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Mizuho Bank, and TISI, completed an empirical experiment on the joint issuance of yen stablecoins and optimization of cross-border payments from July 17 to 23, 2026.This experiment was supported by the Financial Services Agency's "Fintech Empirical Experiment Hub - Payment Enhancement Project," verifying the feasibility of a multi-bank joint issuance stablecoin model and exploring the application potential of blockchain technology in international remittances and inter-company payments. The results of the experiment showed that the issuance and circulation of stablecoins are operationally feasible, providing important references for the future social implementation of digital payment services and blockchain financial assets.

In July 2026, the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare launched a research pilot with OpenAI to test whether Cloudflare's network signals could help ChatGPT users discover new content more efficiently. Both parties reported positive early results, with the pilot incorporating previously unknown pages into OpenAI's search index, providing ChatGPT with more sources to reference.The pilot utilized about 1% of Cloudflare's global participation queue, allowing OpenAI to discover and index hundreds of millions of new web pages. OpenAI independently evaluated and ranked these pages based on relevance and usefulness, while ChatGPT Search enabled users to view original content and publishers through backlinks. Observations indicated that automated traffic might make non-existent pages appear noteworthy, with some sites redirecting arbitrary addresses to their homepage and others pointing to duplicate content. Both parties are also testing signals to identify potentially harmful pages, such as fake login pages embedded on legitimate sites, advocating for the marking of single pages rather than entire domains.Related signals are also used to filter out non-existent or redirecting pages and to assess whether unchanged pages are worth revisiting. Page signals do not constitute access permission; the study utilized web metadata for search and discovery rather than using page content for model training. Site owners can understand and manage how AI systems access their websites through Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control. The next phase will improve page selection and test faster, more reliable change signals.

According to official news from Visa, the stablecoin pre-funding capability of Visa Direct has transitioned from the pilot phase to commercial deployment. Payment infrastructure provider Inyo Global has become the first service provider to put this functionality into production, supporting eligible Visa Direct clients and partners.

Citibank stated in its official insights report "Digital Frontier: Collateral in a Tokenized World" that as financial markets accelerate towards continuous, around-the-clock operations, collateral management is undergoing a structural evolution. Institutional-level tokenization is moving beyond isolated proof of concepts to establish scalable operational tracks on global banking, custody, and market infrastructure, making collateral a continuous liquidity and optimization engine.Citibank mentioned that combining tokenized assets with regulated on-chain settlement currencies can achieve instant atomic cash-to-cash transactions, eliminating multi-day gap risks and expanding the range of eligible collateral to include tools like tokenized money market funds. Global asset managers and asset owners will unify traditional and digital collateral into a single, continuously optimized inventory over many years of hybrid operating models, covering counterparties, custodians, and settlement venues.

According to PR Newswire, NFT Limited (stock code MI, formerly known as Takung Art), a company listed on the NYSE American, announced the proposed technical agreement RWAIX in Hong Kong on October 13 and released an open-source reference implementation on GitHub under the MIT license. The company operates an online trading platform for international artworks and collectibles, stating that the agreement is intended to allow buyers, sellers, AI agents, and robots to verify identities, confirm agreements, and ensure that deliveries actually occur, with the existing digital art platform intended to serve as the first real-world scenario.The company claims that internally managed test records show 50 tests passed with no failures, and it plans to launch a limited live pilot within 90 days after completing an independent security review and other conditions, targeting the first quarter of 2027. The reference implementation includes core protocol logic in Node.js, 50 automated test cases with expected outputs, schema and API documentation, as well as a browser demonstration using synthetic data. The company also stated that RWAIX has not yet been integrated into the production environment, and the related timeline may still be adjusted.The existing digital art trading platform is operated by its wholly-owned Hong Kong subsidiary, Metaverse Digital Payment Co., Limited. The pilot aims to first upgrade the consent purchase, delivery, independent verification, payment, and dispute resolution processes for an existing NFT order, using existing banking channels. CEO Yanying Wang stated that the company already has customers, orders, and payments, and plans to verify within the next 90 days whether the agreement can be used for real customer orders.

Tesla is downplaying the name Full Self-Driving to seek approval for its driver assistance system in Europe. Tesla has used the name "Tesla Assisted Driving" on its European website, while the U.S. website still refers to it as "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)."

ChainCatcher live report, at the OKX NOW Global Products and Ecosystem Conference (Singapore), the OKX AI team elaborated on its core philosophy, which is "AI and finance start with the user": AI needs to understand user intent, respect the boundaries set by users, and return to the user at decision points that require human judgment.Based on this philosophy, the team stated that they have built a complete set of capabilities to help AI entities scale from "intelligence" to "action": the Agent Trade Kit allows users' AI entities to connect directly to OKX exchange data and execute trades; the On-chain OS supports operating on-chain assets using natural language, the Agentic Wallet allows funding to be allocated to the AI within preset guardrails; the OKX AI entity marketplace supports subscribing to signals from professional trading entities and authorizing copy trading; developers can monetize their own models through the AI Builder program.

According to the South China Morning Post, former U.S. officials stated that Chinese semiconductor factories have stockpiled hundreds of immersion lithography machines worth billions of dollars in recent years and urged Washington and its allies to stop further exports. The Centre for Technology & Statecraft, established in August 2026, released a report in late September estimating that by early 2026, Chinese wafer fabs had acquired approximately 343 immersion deep ultraviolet lithography systems. The report was co-authored by former U.S. export control official Nicholas Brown and former White House and Department of Commerce technology policy advisor Saif Khan.The report estimates that about 270 of these are ASML Twinscan NXT:1980i. The authors claim that although these devices lag behind extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, they can be modified for the production of 7-nanometer logic chips and advanced memory required for artificial intelligence processors (including Huawei's Ascend series). Chinese wafer fabs spent over $13 billion in 2024 to purchase about 90 NXT:1980i units, and acquired another 89 units in 2025. ASML disclosed that, by destination, China accounted for 41% of its net system sales in 2024, 33% in 2025, dropping to 19% in the first quarter of 2026 and 14% in the second quarter.Since September 2023, the Netherlands has required export licenses for the NXT:2000i and more advanced immersion deep ultraviolet equipment, effectively banning these models from being shipped to China; a year later, the licensing requirements were extended to the NXT:1980i, but this model can still be approved for shipment on a case-by-case basis.

Lloyds Banking Group and Visa completed their first stablecoin settlement test, settling a total of $750,000 in Visa payment obligations using USDC within 7 days, with funds arriving in as little as one hour.

According to The Defiant, the British banking group Lloyds and payment giant Visa completed a $750,000 USDC transfer in a cross-border settlement pilot. The test lasted seven days, with funds transferred from Jersey to the United States, taking less than an hour in total, and could also be completed over the weekend.During the settlement process, Lloyds used the Canton network, while Visa utilized another independent blockchain. The pilot completed cross-border fund transfers using the stablecoin USDC.

According to CryptoBriefing, the second round of funding for ETHSecurity Initiatives under TheDAO Security Fund has been launched, with a grant of $600,000 allocated for the formal verification of the Vyper compiler. Vyper is the smart contract language for protocols such as Curve, Yearn, and Lido.The fund originates from unclaimed ETH converted from the 2016 DAO incident, with the Ethereum Foundation publicly expressing support.

The artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has officially open-sourced infrastructure components for the Huawei Ascend computing platform, covering the TileLang high-level language compilation tool, computing libraries, and distributed communication libraries, corresponding to the previously open-sourced components for the NVIDIA platform. TileLang aims to provide a general-purpose, simpler programming language that can achieve the hardware performance limits, improving development efficiency and simplifying logic compared to CUDA, while its programming model can also leverage chip features.The TileLang route was first validated on the NVIDIA platform and has already supported the implementation of most operators in the training of the DeepSeek V4 series models. The open-sourced Ascend version encapsulates the underlying instructions of the Ascend C, providing a high-level programming approach without sacrificing hardware performance. Currently, every TileLang operator used in DeepSeek's training has a corresponding high-performance implementation on Ascend.The components open-sourced at the same time also include DeepGEMM, DeepEP, TileKernels, FlashMLA, and DeepSelect, which are used for general matrix operations, large-scale cross-device communication, conventional vector calculations and memory access, long-context sparse attention, and data filtering, respectively. DeepSeek claims that in multiple key tests, the related computing and communication performance has approached hardware limits; during the R&D process, the Huawei team provided support, and both parties collaborated to advance the 128-card supernode solution based on Ascend 950, with deep optimizations made for computing and communication.

According to a report by crypto.news, Chainlink announced the launch of a connectivity framework that allows banks to access the SWIFT blockchain ledger through the Chainlink platform while retaining transaction signing keys.The framework coordinates the interaction between institutional systems and ledgers through the Chainlink runtime environment, allowing banks using a self-signing model to avoid handing over authorization keys to Chainlink. The SWIFT ledger supports 24/7 tokenized deposit payments, with final settlements still completed through existing real-time gross settlement mechanisms. Seventeen banks from six continents, including ANZ, HSBC, Citibank, Standard Chartered, and UBS, are preparing to pilot tokenized deposits on the SWIFT ledger.

Vitalik posted on the X platform that a new Solidity compiler has been released.It is reported that the new version, built using Zig, was created to avoid waiting for the long 10-minute Solidity compilation process. While maintaining consistent bytecode generation, the compilation speed for some contracts has increased by more than 5 times. The build time has been reduced from 10 minutes to 2 minutes, and the incremental compilation time for large projects has decreased from 700 seconds to 99 seconds.

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.

According to The Information, Microsoft (MSFT.O) will increase the discount on Copilot while launching an AI "super app."

The Bank of Korea (BOK) has launched the first 24-hour Korean won settlement network pilot, aimed at allowing foreign investors to settle won transactions outside of normal banking hours in South Korea. The central bank announced on Monday that its international wire transfer network has begun trial operations with four domestic banks: KB Kookmin Bank, Woori Bank, Hana Bank, and Shinhan Bank. Full operations are expected to start in January 2027, at which point participation will expand to other institutions and foreign banks.The network operates 24 hours a day on weekdays, excluding weekends and public holidays. Foreign investors can settle won transactions during their domestic business hours by registering a Foreign Institution (RFI-K) account for won services, without the need to open an account directly with a South Korean financial institution. The Bank of Korea stated that the network is expected to enhance the international status of the won by improving foreign investors' access to won settlement infrastructure.In addition, the Bank of Korea is also experimenting with tokenized settlement infrastructure through the Agorá project led by the Bank for International Settlements, which completed a cross-border payment trial using tokenized central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits, including the won, in July. The Bank of Korea is simultaneously advancing the Hangang project, a blockchain-based pilot that utilizes wholesale central bank digital currency to settle tokenized commercial bank deposits.

The Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Xu Zhengyu, stated at a press conference on financial development measures for the first five-year plan for economic and social development and the Chief Executive's 2026 Policy Address that digital assets and financial technology are new growth engines for Hong Kong, with digital bonds issued in Hong Kong accounting for about 50% of the global share.Before the end of 2026, a pilot program for the tokenization of Exchange Fund Bills will be implemented, and the Central Moneymarkets Unit (CMU) will establish a digital asset platform within 2026 to provide one-stop services for digital bond issuance and settlement. In terms of regulation and market development, this includes improving the licensing system for virtual assets, enhancing the regulatory framework for tokenized investment products, promoting the trading of regulated stablecoins on licensed platforms, and encouraging the expansion of compliant stablecoin application scenarios.