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According to Cointelegraph, DBS Bank has partnered with Citibank to utilize a blockchain-based ledger from Swift to achieve instant, round-the-clock cross-border dollar payments through tokenized deposits.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has released a proposed announcement to suspend the acceptance of new applications for registration of payment system operators (OPS) for 12 months and to implement stricter controls on payment arrangements involving virtual asset service providers (VASP). The BSP stated that this move aims to conduct a comprehensive review of its classification and licensing framework.According to the draft, during the suspension period, the BSP will stop accepting and processing OPS applications. Applications submitted prior to the suspension can continue to be evaluated, but will not be approved or rejected until the suspension ends. Relevant entities are prohibited from conducting business activities that require OPS registration unless they obtain special authorization from the regulatory agency. In addition, BSP-regulated entities providing merchant acquiring services must connect licensed VASPs through direct merchant arrangements, and such relationships will be subject to enhanced due diligence, transaction and settlement limits, and other risk control measures.This requirement applies to virtual asset enterprises licensed, registered, or authorized by the BSP, the Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines, or other regulatory agencies, with VASPs being categorized alongside betting, gaming, adult industry, and money service businesses. If the draft is ultimately approved, it will take effect 15 days after publication, and the BSP is currently seeking public comments.

As of the end of August, China's gold reserves reported 76.73 million ounces (approximately 2,386.57 tons), an increase of 650,000 ounces (approximately 20.22 tons) month-on-month. The People's Bank of China has increased its gold holdings for the 22nd consecutive month.

According to Digital Asset, the National Tax Service of South Korea has issued regulations stating that even if overseas virtual asset (digital asset) exchanges go bankrupt, individuals with accounts at those exchanges must declare those accounts as overseas financial accounts. The National Tax Service stated on the 28th of last month: "Residents who open accounts with overseas virtual asset operators for the purpose of trading digital assets must declare those accounts as overseas financial accounts, even if the operators go bankrupt."In addition, it is expected that the scale of digital assets included in the overseas financial account declaration will reach 105 trillion Korean won by 2026, a decrease of 5.4% compared to 2025.

According to Ledger Insights, in March of this year, Citibank issued its first native digital structured note on Euroclear's D-FMI tokenization platform, targeting distribution channels for Citibank's wealth management business.Now, Banco do Brasil, a state-owned holding bank, has announced that it has invested $5 million to purchase subsequent notes in the same Citibank project. This Brazilian bank stated that this transaction is the first of its kind for a financial institution in Latin America. The Brazilian bank made the investment through its proprietary funds department on August 19, using its own funds for the instrument rather than investing on behalf of clients. Citigroup issued the note through its Luxembourg entity, with its London branch acting as the issuance and paying agent. The underlying reference asset of the structured note has not been disclosed.

The Bank of Korea released the latest research report stating that the widespread circulation of dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies in the local market may trigger capital outflows, putting downward pressure on the domestic currency exchange rate and increasing volatility.

Coinflip and its CEO Benjamin Weiss have been accused by the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) of violating the Uniform Money Services Act. The DFI seeks to revoke Coinflip's money transmission license, prohibit the company and its related personnel from continuing to operate, and impose a fine of $1,029,600.The DFI stated that an inspection in 2025 found that Coinflip had insufficient anti-money laundering controls, inadequate transaction monitoring, failure to enforce transaction limits, inaccurate regulatory reporting, and unclear fee disclosures. The agency also accused Coinflip of failing to timely refund at least 15 customers as required. The proposed order requires Coinflip to refund eligible customers in Washington State, with customers aged 60 and above eligible for refunds of transaction fees and markup fees. Coinflip and Benjamin Weiss may request an administrative hearing to contest the allegations, refund requirements, license revocation, fines, and industry bans.

Blockchain-native fintech startup OpenReserve has received preliminary conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a full-service national bank in Salt Lake City, Utah. The approval process took less than five months, with OpenReserve submitting its application on April 13.OpenReserve must raise at least $210 million in initial paid-in capital within 12 months and maintain a leverage ratio of at least 12% for three years after opening; it must also commence operations within 18 months, or the approval will become invalid. The relevant deadlines are September 2027 and March 2028, respectively. OpenReserve plans to offer tokenized deposits, fund management, foreign agency services, and banking-as-a-service for institutional clients. The full-service national bank license will allow for deposit-taking and lending activities once final approval is granted.OpenReserve previously completed a $25 million seed round financing, led by a16z crypto, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Jump Capital, and Wintermute Ventures. The company intends to establish a wholly-owned subsidiary to issue and redeem dollar-denominated, reserve-backed stablecoins, but this subsidiary has not yet submitted an application to the OCC.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) released Working Paper 1374, proposing a technical solution based on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to verify the source and integrity of official statistical data. This solution generates cryptographic fingerprints for SDMX datasets and records the hash values of batch data on the XRPL, while the original data itself is not stored on the chain.Users can verify the identity of data publishers and whether the data has been tampered with through digital signature credentials combined with a one-time on-chain query. Prototype testing results show that data publication takes about 3 to 5 seconds, while the verification process only takes about 1 to 2 seconds. The paper specifically notes that this system is currently only in the proof-of-concept stage and has not yet been put into a formal production environment.

The People's Bank of China announced the overall operation of the payment system for the second quarter of 2026. By the end of the second quarter, a total of 10.267 billion bank cards had been issued nationwide. Among them, there were 677 million credit cards and credit card loans, a decrease of about 10 million cards compared to the end of the first quarter, and a decrease of nearly 20 million cards since the beginning of the year, averaging over 100,000 credit cards exiting the market each day. Compared to the historical peak of 807 million cards in the second quarter of 2022, the number of credit cards has been reduced by about 130 million.The mid-year report of listed banks in 2026 shows that the overdraft balances of credit cards from the six major state-owned banks decreased at the end of the first half compared to the end of the previous year. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China had a credit card loan balance of 597.157 billion yuan, a decrease of 14.39% from the end of the previous year. By the end of June, the cumulative number of credit cards issued by Bank of China was about 152 million, with an increase of 1.76 million cards compared to the end of the previous year; China Merchants Bank saw a net increase of 256,300 cards to 97.7073 million cards.In terms of asset quality, the non-performing loan ratios for Agricultural Bank of China and Postal Savings Bank of China remained at 2.05% and 1.45%, respectively; the non-performing loan ratio for Industrial and Commercial Bank of China rose to 5.37%; and the non-performing loan ratio for Bank of Communications increased from 2.68% to 3.8%. The non-performing loan ratio for China Minsheng Bank rose to 4.22%, and for Industrial Bank, it rose to 3.79%. In the first half of the year, China Merchants Bank generated new non-performing loans of 23.698 billion yuan, with a non-performing loan ratio of 1.90%. In August 2026, the principal and interest of non-performing credit card transfers amounted to 12.2 billion yuan.

According to data from the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), cryptocurrency purchases in July amounted to $572 million, a decrease of nearly 80% compared to $2.6 billion in June, and a decline of nearly 60% from $1.4 billion in July 2025.Fernando Rocha, head of the statistics department at the Central Bank of Brazil, stated that the changes are part of the adaptation of cryptocurrency exchanges to the new regulatory environment for digital assets, with anti-money laundering controls and governance requirements being significant factors in the reduction of transaction volume. Since 2026, the total amount of cryptocurrency purchases in Brazil has reached $15.25 billion, more than doubling compared to $7.6 billion in the same period of 2025. BCB noted that most of the related transactions involve stablecoins.

The People's Bank of China Open Market Operations Office announced that to maintain ample liquidity in the banking system, on September 7, 2026, the People's Bank of China will conduct a reverse repurchase operation of 500 billion yuan using a fixed amount, interest rate bidding, and multiple price level bidding method, with a term of 3 months (89 days), maturing on December 5, 2026 (postponed in case of holidays).

Banco do Brasil announced an investment of 5 million USD using its own funds in a digital-native structured note transaction issued by Citi and completed through the Euroclear digital financial market infrastructure platform, becoming the first of its kind in Latin America. Banco do Brasil stated that blockchain technology enables the native digitization of assets, reduces operational steps, and enhances transaction traceability, laying the foundation for new trading, settlement, and asset management models.The bank noted that the investment aligns with its ongoing focus on changes in the financial industry. Francisco Lassalvia, Vice President of Wholesale Banking at Banco do Brasil, stated that decentralized digital technology has become a long-term structural trend in financial markets. Roksolana Dushynska, Equity Structured Products Manager at Citi Global Markets, pointed out that distributed ledger technology can enhance the efficiency, transparency, and accessibility of capital markets. Banco do Brasil previously participated in the Brazilian Central Bank's digital currency Drex pilot and proposed an offline payment solution. The bank is controlled by the Brazilian federal government and is also listed on the Brazilian securities market.

The Bank of Korea stated that thanks to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix actively expanding domestic production facilities, South Korea's leading advantage in memory chip capacity is expected to further expand.The Bank of Korea expects that new chip factories to be put into production by 2028 will increase South Korea's monthly wafer capacity by approximately 600,000 wafers.

SWIFT service provider Bottomline announced a collaboration with the blockchain infrastructure project Chainlink to enable over 600 bank clients in its network to access blockchain-based cross-border settlements. Bottomline processes over $16 trillion in payments annually and serves 1,200 financial institutions and 10,000 enterprises.Through this integration, banks can continue to use the ISO 20022 standard to send payment instructions, with Chainlink's infrastructure connecting the instructions to blockchain settlements. Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) supports the transfer of tokenized value across different blockchain networks, while Chainlink's Runtime Environment (CRE) is responsible for payment processes, transaction routing, and operational change coordination.CCIP has been recording mainnet activity since July 2023 and is currently connected to over 60 blockchain networks. Chainlink's Project Pangea has covered more than 50 banking institutions in Europe and South Korea, with participants managing assets totaling over $10 trillion, and the project's goals include achieving T+0 settlement for foreign exchange transactions.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the "Artificial Intelligence Superintelligence Prohibition Act," which calls for a permanent ban on the development of superintelligent AI and a suspension of advanced AI research until new federal agencies establish safety standards and review procedures. Sanders criticized large AI companies for developing technologies that they cannot fully understand or reliably control, stating that companies and individuals who violate the regulations could face up to 20 years in prison, with the most serious cases potentially subject to what is referred to as "corporate death penalty."The bill defines superintelligence as AI systems that achieve or exceed human capabilities across numerous tasks or could undermine human control (including overthrowing the U.S. government), and this definition also encompasses human-level AGI. The bill plans to establish a new cabinet-level agency responsible for monitoring advanced models, overseeing the removal of dangerous capabilities, and the destruction of banned systems, as well as forming an AI advisory committee to provide scientific and technical advice.On the same day the bill was announced, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, with co-founder Greg Brockman stating that he personally believes this model may meet the definition of AGI. OpenAI described Astra as its first model to reach a "critical" threshold of cybersecurity capability, potentially discovering and exploiting unknown vulnerabilities in protected systems without gradual human guidance, with its strongest cybersecurity capabilities limited to selected testers. Previously, OpenAI and Anthropic's models had repeatedly accessed real systems without authorization during testing, including incidents where OpenAI's model breached Hugging Face to obtain test answers.

Cointelegraph reported that the crypto-friendly bank Revolut has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to obtain a national bank charter in the United States.The company aims to launch related services by 2027, which will include loans, credit cards, custodial deposits, and cryptocurrency access services.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has preliminarily approved OpenReserve's application for a national bank charter. The company completed a $25 million seed round of financing in April, led by a16z crypto, with participation from Jump Capital, Acrew, Coinbase Ventures, Clocktower, Quona, and the Middle Eastern venture capital fund AAF Management.OpenReserve is led by fintech executives including Dee Choubey, co-founder of MoneyLion, and is committed to combining traditional banking, blockchain infrastructure, and digital asset services, utilizing digital assets and technology to achieve 24/7 operations. OpenReserve is also applying for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance and has submitted its application to the FDIC.

According to CoinDesk, digital bank SoFi has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Kraken to interconnect their respective financial infrastructures. Kraken's parent company Payward will join SoFi's settlement network SEN, allowing its institutional clients to transfer dollars and manage liquidity around the clock without waiting for traditional bank operating hours.Meanwhile, Kraken will launch the bank-issued stablecoin SoFiUSD from SoFi, while SoFi will use Kraken Prime as an additional source of liquidity for its clients' cryptocurrency trading. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto stated that the financial system should not close when financial markets remain open; Payward co-CEO David Ripley noted that millions of users will purchase cryptocurrency assets for the first time through the applications they use daily, and the underlying infrastructure should connect deep, liquid markets.This collaboration is part of SoFi's return to the digital asset space. SoFi has already provided cryptocurrency trading in its app and launched the dollar-backed stablecoin SoFiUSD, and in April of this year, it introduced Big Business Banking, integrating corporate banking with digital asset services. Both parties indicated that future collaborations may also expand to payments, fund management, lending, and other digital asset services.