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U.S. Democratic Senator Warren asked Treasury Secretary Basent to explain the basis for the Trump administration's intervention in the yen. In a letter dated August 13, Warren pointed out that the government has not provided detailed justification and has not disclosed how much money was used to purchase yen.Basent confirmed that the U.S. and Japan jointly intervened in the foreign exchange market for the first time since 1998 to support the yen, but did not specify the amount of funds.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Becerra stated that sanctions on the Iranian economy will continue, and a persistent blockade will be maintained in the Strait of Hormuz, prohibiting any goods from entering or leaving Iranian ports.

The founder of Strategy, Michael Saylor, proposed the concept of the "Digital Assets Monetary Spectrum," categorizing different types of digital assets based on volatility, potential returns, and trading functions.Saylor stated that the digital asset system can be divided into four levels: Bitcoin (BTC): Digital Capital (Digital Capital) STRC: Digital Credit (Digital Credit) SR-strcUSX: Digital Money (Digital Money) USDT: Digital Currency (Digital Currency).He believes that from left to right, asset volatility and potential returns gradually decrease, while stability and trading utility continuously increase. Saylor stated that Bitcoin is the "ultimate value storage asset," possessing high volatility, high potential returns, and the attributes of a digital asset that does not require third-party credit endorsement; whereas stablecoins are the "ultimate medium of exchange," emphasizing stability and payment functionality. In between the two, digital credit and digital currency serve as a bridge connecting capital and currency. Among them, STRC is defined by Saylor as "digital credit," characterized by relative stability, high fixed returns, and certain value storage attributes.He further stated that digital currency combines digital currency technology with digital capital economic attributes, possessing stability, earning capacity, trading convenience, and value storage functions. Saylor noted that digital capital belongs to bearer assets, while assets such as digital credit, digital currency, and digital cash are created and managed by digital financial companies, with their ownership layer corresponding to "Digital Equity." These components together form the future "Digital Finance Stack."

A man in Anshun, Guizhou, used the name of a virtual currency airdrop project as a pretext to lure friends into investing with the bait of guaranteed high returns, ultimately crossing the legal red line. The People's Procuratorate of Pingba District, Anshun City, Guizhou Province, filed a public prosecution, and the court sentenced Zhao to seven months in prison for fraud, along with a fine of 5,000 yuan.Zhao had been paying attention to the field of virtual currency investment for many years and had long been posting investment insights and financial management tips on social media platforms. Zhang was also a virtual currency enthusiast, and the two met on a social platform due to their common interests, gradually becoming friends and frequently discussing investment strategies online. Through long-term communication, Zhao gained Zhang's trust with seemingly professional investment analysis. Subsequently, Zhao proposed a joint investment, to which Zhang agreed. However, after a period of investment, Zhang experienced significant losses and expressed his intention to stop further investments.On August 23, 2025, Zhao claimed that a certain app had launched an airdrop project (to promote a new project, encourage user participation, or reward loyal users, distributing native tokens of the project for free to eligible users), persuading Zhang to invest the remaining funds in his account into this project, promising a return of 100 to 200 U coins (virtual currency) within two days. Zhao also guaranteed that if there were any losses during this period, he would bear the responsibility. To further alleviate Zhang's concerns, Zhao claimed that all investment funds would be transferred to a public chain (the public address of the virtual currency). Believing Zhao, Zhang exchanged 1,757 dollars in his account for Ethereum and completed the transfer according to the wallet link provided by Zhao. In reality, the wallet corresponding to that link was a personal account registered using his girlfriend's identity information, not a public chain. The agreed time for the return of funds had passed, but Zhao had not fulfilled his promise. Zhang urged for repayment multiple times, but Zhao evaded responsibility with excuses such as sending the wrong link and needing time to track it down. On September 7 of the same year, Zhang reported the situation to the police after noticing something was wrong.On April 2 of this year, the Pingba District Procuratorate filed a public prosecution against Zhao for suspected fraud. The procuratorial agency believed that Zhao deceived others out of property by concealing the truth, with a significant amount involved, constituting the crime of fraud. Given that Zhao truthfully confessed to the criminal facts after being apprehended, showed signs of remorse, and had fully compensated the victim for their losses while voluntarily admitting guilt, he could be punished leniently according to the law.

According to Digital Asset, a South Korean court has made a first-instance ruling regarding Delio CEO Jeong Sang-ho involved in a cryptocurrency fraud case amounting to approximately 250 billion won (about 180 million USD), sentencing him to 15 years in prison.The 11th Criminal Division of the Southern District Court of Seoul stated that Jeong's criminal conduct was serious, and he continued to shift responsibility to other companies while attempting to evade accountability. This ruling comes about three years and two months after Delio suspended withdrawals in June 2023.

According to The Block, BlackRock's head of digital assets, Robert Mitchnick, stated that there has been a noticeable but subtle improvement in Bitcoin market sentiment over the past month, and the correlation between Bitcoin and U.S. stocks is weakening, which is healthy for the argument of Bitcoin as a portfolio diversification tool and tail risk hedge.He pointed out that Bitcoin significantly outperformed during the major pullback in the AI sector in July, which is a manifestation of this decoupling. Although Bitcoin has fallen nearly 30% this year and about 50% from a year ago, ETF investors continue to buy—last week, the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF recorded an inflow of $853.5 million, marking the best weekly performance since mid-April, with BlackRock's IBIT contributing $693.7 million (over 80%) and Fidelity's FBTC contributing $116.4 million. Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas noted that after the Coldcard vulnerability was exposed, multiple funds recorded net inflows daily, "it's hard not to see it as a causal relationship."

With the easing of the situation in the Middle East, weakening oil prices, and strong corporate earnings, the U.S. stock market continues to strengthen. The S&P 500 index rose 5.8% in the first four trading days before August 4, and the options market simultaneously released the strongest bullish signals in recent years.Data shows that the average daily ratio of bullish to bearish options for the S&P 500 index has risen to 0.9, the highest level in at least four years; the skew indicator for short-term bullish options has also reached a two-year high, indicating that investors are paying higher premiums betting on a rapid market rise.Analysts believe that the current "fear of missing out" sentiment is heating up, with some institutional investors more worried about missing out on the upward trend rather than the risk of a downturn. However, there are also views that the extreme optimism in the options market may amplify short-term volatility, and caution is needed regarding the risk misjudgment driven by technical factors.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market Polymarket for the event "LoL: Sentinels vs Shopify Rebellion - LCS Regular Season," the "Yes" option for the sub-market "Both teams kill a dragon" has experienced a dramatic fluctuation in win rate, soaring from 50% an hour ago to the current 90% (a fluctuation of 40%). Please note the impact of relevant breaking news.

Glassnode released a market outlook stating that the sentiment in the Bitcoin options market is improving, with the short-term downside skew significantly retreating. The 1-week 25 Delta Skew has dropped to about 7%, indicating that recent panic has eased. However, the longer-term skew remains around 10%--12%, and the demand for downside protection still exists.Currently, the open interest for BTC call options is about $15 billion, higher than the approximately $10 billion for put options; recent funds are mainly concentrated in the $61,000 to $67,000 range, with a noticeable buying of $65,000 call options. Glassnode believes that the market is shifting towards more aggressive positions but has not yet abandoned risk hedging.

Bank of America strategists indicate that investor bullish sentiment has reached extreme levels, suggesting a reduction in exposure to risk assets. The Bull-Bear Index rose from 9.4 to 9.7, marking the highest level since 2021. The rise in the stock market, inflows into high-yield bond funds, and narrowing credit spreads are the reasons for the optimistic sentiment.Hartnett stated that we are still in the summer "withdrawal/rotation" phase, advising investors to reduce allocations to risk assets and shift towards defensive assets and the dollar.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit officially issued a directive, upholding the seven felony convictions and 25-year sentence of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and rejecting his appeal claiming that investors could be fully compensated.

Ahmed Shihab, Chief Product Officer of Western Digital, stated that the key to AI storage competition is not simply pursuing the fastest medium, but whether it can continuously scale capacity at an affordable cost. He believes that many architectures run well in the early stages, but when the data scale grows from several PB to hundreds of PB or even EB levels, issues may arise due to uncontrolled costs.Flash storage is suitable for high-performance, low-latency scenarios such as model weights, GPU overflow, KV caches, and session contexts; HDDs are more suitable for large-scale, long-term storage, and cost-sensitive data such as training corpora, logs, checkpoints, compliance records, synthetic data, and inference outputs. He summarized: "Flash handles the present, HDD handles the entire lifecycle."At the scale of AI, storage costs themselves will become an architectural issue. Long-term storage of large volumes of data on high-performance media will crowd out budgets for computing, networking, power, and personnel. For many bulk storage workloads, the issue is not whether flash can store, but whether customers can afford the total cost of using flash in the long term.In the future, AI storage will not be dominated by a single technology, but should be designed in layers based on performance, cost, power consumption, density, reliability, and data lifecycle. He emphasized that this is not a competition between flash and HDD, but rather a need to match the appropriate medium for different workloads from the very beginning; otherwise, the architecture may impact business sustainability as it scales.

According to the Procuratorial Daily, an employee of a company in Shenzhen, under the pressure of over 400,000 yuan in online loans, stole the company's core research and development materials and disguised himself as an overseas hacker, demanding a ransom of 0.88 bitcoins and 90,000 USDT from the company. He was ultimately sentenced to three years and three months in prison for attempted extortion and fined 10,000 yuan.

According to The Block, former Los Angeles police officer Eric Halem was sentenced to life in prison plus 15 years for his involvement in a cryptocurrency-related robbery case.

According to Jinshi, U.S. Treasury Secretary Basant stated that it is reasonable for the Federal Reserve to consider expanding the repurchase tool for foreign and international monetary authorities.He pointed out that this tool is no different from foreign exchange swap limits.

OpenAI issued a public statement on August 3 in response to the lawsuit filed by Apple. OpenAI described Apple's lawsuit as "careless, aggressive, and personal," and pointed out several factual inaccuracies: an external lawyer from Apple mistakenly sent an email intended for someone else to OpenAI's legal head, falsely claiming that the two parties had spoken over the phone; Apple later admitted it was due to "confusing two Asian surnames." OpenAI also revealed that after contacting Apple in February, Apple stated it was "working to resolve any issues," but then did not communicate for 5 months until filing the lawsuit.Regarding the allegations against former Apple employee Chang Liu for taking confidential information, OpenAI presented iMessage records from after his departure showing that Apple colleagues had proactively contacted him to request assistance in locating documents, and acknowledged that this was a common issue caused by Apple's "poor management of exit access." Another named executive, Tang Tan, had worked at Apple for over 24 years, and OpenAI stated that he had consistently required his team "not to use any confidential information from other companies." OpenAI indicated that it had proactively offered to cooperate in resolving the matter, but Apple chose to file a lawsuit, claiming that its request for a preliminary injunction was "based on false information and completely unnecessary." Previously, Apple sued OpenAI in July, accusing it of poaching Apple employees and using confidential information to develop AI products.

According to Jinshi reports, S&P Global Market Intelligence Chief Business Economist Chris Williamson stated that although the PMI index in the U.S. remained stable in July, the survey data behind it shows some warning signs for future growth trajectories. The production growth rate significantly slowed in July, and new business growth has been weak for the third consecutive month, reflecting a reduction in inventory backlog.Increased supply chain delays, declining exports, and customer resistance to high prices have also brought pressure. Although inflation in raw material costs has slightly eased, inflationary pressures remain high, and corporate optimism about the economic growth outlook has fallen to its lowest level since October of last year.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market Polymarket for the event "Valorant: G2 Esports vs. Sentinels - VCT Americas Stage 2 Omega Group," the option "G2 Esports" in the sub-market "Match Winner" has experienced significant fluctuations in win probability, soaring from 56.5% an hour ago to the current 89.5% (a fluctuation of 33%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

According to monitoring by Catcher Predict, in the predicted market Polymarket for the event "LoL: Team Liquid vs. Sentinels - LCS Regular Season," the "Odd" option in the sub-market "Odd/Even Total Kills" has experienced significant fluctuations in win rate, soaring from 50.05% an hour ago to the current 90.05% (a fluctuation of 40%). Please note the impact of relevant breaking news.

Michael Saylor posted on the X platform stating that BIP-110 signaling was voluntary before block 961,632. From block 961,632 to 963,647, its software will reject every block that does not signal.Any "100% signaling" displayed during this window reflects this rule, rather than voluntary support from miners or Bitcoin consensus.