costs

IMF President Georgieva stated at the Jackson Hole annual meeting that stablecoins and tokenization could enhance global financial liquidity, making large cross-border payments cheaper and faster; however, stablecoins could also exacerbate currency substitution, capital flows, and exchange rate volatility, while undermining capital controls and monetary sovereignty. Dollar stablecoins may expand the global network effect of the dollar and marginally reduce U.S. financing costs, but they cannot replace fiscal discipline.This year's Jackson Hole Global Central Bank Annual Meeting has revealed three clear institutional divergences: BIS leans towards "marginalization of stablecoins, centralization of tokenized deposits"; ECB leans towards "central bank currencies on-chain"; while IMF acknowledges the real efficiency of stablecoins in cross-border payments but emphasizes the risks of currency substitution and capital flows in emerging markets. This has more policy implications than simply "supporting or opposing stablecoins."

The core development team of Solana, Anza, announced that the Solana testnet has enabled the first phase of the SIMD-0437 proposal, and the account rent reduction mechanism has begun testing. This proposal includes a total of 5 functional gates, with only the first functional gate currently activated, and all adjustments have not yet been completed and deployed to the mainnet.Once all 5 phases are completed, the storage cost parameter lamports_per_byte for Solana will be reduced from 6960 to 696, resulting in an overall reduction of 90%. For example, in the case of token accounts, the deposit required to maintain an account in a rent-exempt state is expected to decrease from approximately $0.16 to $0.016, thereby lowering the costs of account creation and application deployment.

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.

Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich stated that the core logic behind their bullish outlook on Bitcoin is that AI is significantly reducing the production costs of software, content, and analytics, and value will shift towards scarce assets that cannot be infinitely increased.The supply cap of 21 million Bitcoins is guaranteed by network rules, cannot be copied or diluted, and can be settled globally 24 hours a day. The long-term experience of Japanese households regarding changes in currency purchasing power has also reinforced this judgment.

OKX CEO Star stated that OKX is collaborating with Anthropic to address issues related to its corporate accounts. Earlier, Bloomberg reported that OKX was suspended due to Hong Kong employees violating Anthropic's geographical restrictions to access Claude, and has prohibited employees residing in Hong Kong or passing through China from using Anthropic's Claude AI model.Additionally, Star posted that the monthly cost for AI usage is between 6 million to 8 million dollars, and has built an internal AI development platform called Oli, which integrates multiple cutting-edge models to provide advanced AI capabilities and development tools for product managers and engineers.

Design software company Canva has lowered its annual revenue growth forecast by one-third to 20% due to AI feature delivery costs far exceeding expectations. CEO Melanie Perkins stated that user demand for AI features "significantly exceeded expectations," but the company has decided to postpone the large-scale launch of related products until it optimizes its architecture, reduces unit costs, and improves its business model. Since the release of Canva AI 2.0 in April, the cost per task has decreased by nearly 90%, but the volume of designs generated by AI users is three times that of previous versions, and economic pressures remain.This case reflects a common dilemma in the software industry: the cost of AI inference is breaking the traditional software "zero marginal cost" profit logic. Pitchbook analysts pointed out that Canva and Figma are the "most obvious signals" of this trend. Figma's free cash flow profit margin in the second quarter has dropped from 27% in the first quarter to 14%, and revenue growth in the third quarter is expected to slow from 48% to 36%. Canva previously sold employee shares at a valuation of $42 billion, and the market had anticipated its IPO in 2026, but analysts now believe the IPO may be delayed until next year.

According to Ai Yi's disclosure, the on-chain Changxin Storage TOP1 Air Force holds approximately $21.12 million in 1x leveraged CXMT short positions, with an entry price of around $6.5. The current price has risen to $7.28, resulting in an unrealized loss of about $2.255 million. Meanwhile, the total funding fees paid by this short position have reached $3.078 million.This position previously invested over $40 million in margin, and there is still a significant gap to the liquidation price of $15.466. However, the continuously accumulating funding costs are eroding profits, and the market speculates that this trader may still be betting on a significant correction in CXMT's price to cover current losses and achieve profitability.

According to the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily," based on its pioneering fully modular design architecture, Alibaba Cloud has shortened the delivery time of large AIDC data centers to 100 days, while the traditional delivery cycle in China is 6 to 12 months, and in the United States, it is 12 to 18 months. While shortening the construction period, the overall construction cost has been reduced by more than 10%. Alibaba Cloud plans to double the global capacity of modular data centers this year.This modular design refers to parallel production in various stages, with factory manufacturing pre-adjusted to containers, which are then transported to the site for hoisting and assembly, achieving a "building blocks" style of construction. Alibaba Cloud stated that this model will effectively support the rapid expansion demand for AI computing infrastructure.

Robinhood announced on the X platform that it has lowered the gas fee subsidy threshold for Robinhood Wallet on the Robinhood Chain from $5 to $0.50, a reduction of 90%.Robinhood stated that after the adjustment, more users will be able to enjoy gas fee subsidies when conducting swap transactions, and this subsidy policy will last until September 29.Previously, Robinhood Wallet had already covered part of the on-chain transaction fees for users through the gas sponsorship mechanism. This reduction in the subsidy threshold aims to further lower the entry costs for users into the Robinhood Chain ecosystem and enhance the activity of on-chain transactions.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas posted on X platform that BlackRock announced a 1-for-3 reverse split for ETHA, with the price rising from $14 to $42 in October.This move will reduce trading costs from 7 basis points to about 2 basis points. The ETF issuer believes that a 7 basis point spread is an issue and is adjusting it to about 2 basis points, while cryptocurrency exchanges charge about 140 basis points.

According to Jinshi News, Amazon employees have discovered that due to errors in the company's deployment of AI and a lack of expenditure control measures, some projects have experienced "catastrophically high" cost overruns. A senior engineer stated at an employee meeting that attempts to shift tasks from traditional programming to using AI models have resulted in "unplanned" expenditures.Amazon expects its capital expenditures to reach $200 billion this year, primarily invested in AI and data center infrastructure construction.

According to SolanaFloor, the Solana ecosystem perpetual contract platform Bulk has launched BIP-1, allowing anyone to deploy their own perpetual market on the mainnet with almost zero upfront costs before going live.Successful markets can subsequently join BULK's portfolio margin system, allowing traders to use up to 70% less collateral.

Fireworks AI released an evaluation report comparing the open-source model Kimi K3 and the closed-source model Fable 5 across approximately 1030 agent tasks (covering scenarios such as SWE, terminal operations, algorithms, multilingual coding, and legal matters). The results showed that the accuracy rates for the two models on the SWE benchmark were 92.4% and 92.6%, respectively, indicating similar overall performance, but each model has its strengths in specific areas: K3 leads in symbolic mathematics and development tools, while Fable excels in web and data visualization; in long-cycle terminal tasks, K3 independently tackled 11 tasks that Fable could not solve.The report pointed out that adopting a task-level routing strategy can dynamically allocate between the two, achieving an accuracy rate of 93%, surpassing either single model. Additionally, due to K3's significant cost advantage on the Fireworks platform, costs for long-cycle agent tasks can be up to 50 times lower than Fable. The report recommends using the open-source model as the default option and continuously learning the optimal match between tasks and models through routers to balance quality and cost.

According to Jinshi reports, the Federal Reserve's Beige Book shows that respondents generally expect the U.S. economy to continue expanding in the coming months, but several districts pointed out that there remains a high level of uncertainty regarding fuel cost prospects.

According to the Industrial and Commercial Times, due to the soaring prices of key components such as memory and SSDs, the cost pressure for configuring high-capacity storage in mainstream laptops has greatly increased. Cost-effective mainland Chinese memory and storage components are gradually penetrating the PC supply chain, with brands such as Lenovo, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Acer, and even the American brand Apple accelerating the certification, introduction, or platform tuning of related products.The report pointed out that Lenovo has expanded its use of mainland components this year, and recently flagship laptop models equipped with Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) SSDs have appeared on North American cross-border e-commerce platforms. The American brand Apple is also reported to be negotiating with the U.S. government to procure Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) memory to cope with the rising prices. In terms of Taiwanese board manufacturers, MSI recently announced that it is the first to complete the verification and tuning of Changxin Memory DDR5 chips on the AMD platform at DDR5-8000+, while Gigabyte has also adopted Changxin Memory chips in some motherboard models. ASUS and Acer have introduced memory modules from mainland manufacturers such as BIWIN through their own brand memory certification or OEM models.Industry analysts believe that although the short-term imbalance in supply and demand for storage has prompted non-mainland brands to accelerate related certifications, due to the limited production capacity of mainland manufacturers, brand Taiwanese manufacturers still emphasize that Korean original manufacturers with long-term contracts remain the main supply partners at present.

According to a report by Sing Tao Daily, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Professionals Association stated that after a meeting with representatives from the regulatory authorities, including Deputy Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Chen Haolian and Executive Director of the Securities and Futures Commission's Intermediaries Division Ye Zhiheng, the Securities and Futures Commission has committed to advancing measures such as the separation of the "Virtual Asset Platform Practitioners Examination" (CVAP) exam and curriculum, optimizing review materials, and reducing assessment fees.The association will follow up on the relevant timeline and continue to communicate with the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau and the Securities and Futures Commission on practical issues such as self-custody operation guidelines for private equity funds, the boundaries of technology services and regulated activities, and the VA Payment regulatory framework.

According to The Block, Bitcoin miner revenue continues to decline, with the 7-day moving average dropping to about $30,000,000 per day, down from over $50,000,000 last summer. The contribution from transaction fees has become negligible, at less than $250,000 per day. The current trading price of BTC is about $62,500, significantly lower than JPMorgan's estimated production cost of around $78,000, a gap that has persisted for five months, the longest in this cycle. Production costs have historically been seen as a soft price floor, and currently, about 20% of miners are operating at a loss.Network-level pressure is becoming evident. Over the past six months, the beta value of mining difficulty relative to BTC price has risen to 0.62, with high-cost miners switching off their machines based on price fluctuations rather than continuing to operate at a loss. In the second week of June, difficulty decreased by 10%, marking the second similar adjustment this year. Publicly listed mining companies have sold over 32,000 BTC in the first quarter to cover operating costs, rather than further reducing production capacity.

Bitcoin miner revenue has continued to decline over the past year, with the current 7-day moving average daily income at approximately $30 million, significantly lower than last summer's level of over $50 million. Among this, transaction fees have dropped to less than $250,000 per day, almost negligible compared to block subsidies.Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin is around $62,500, below JPMorgan's estimated production cost of about $78,000. This state of being below production costs has persisted for five months, the longest duration in this cycle. Historically, production costs are often seen as a soft bottom area for Bitcoin prices. Currently, it is estimated that about 20% of miners are in a loss position at the current price, and the pressure is beginning to reflect at the network level.Over the past six months, the sensitivity of mining difficulty to Bitcoin prices has risen to 0.62, indicating that high-cost miners are increasingly inclined to turn off their mining machines based on price fluctuations rather than continue mining at a loss. In the second week of June, Bitcoin mining difficulty decreased by 10%, marking the second occurrence of a similar magnitude adjustment this year. A comparable adjustment also occurred in the previous quarter, with both instances happening during periods when prices remained below production costs, indicating that pressure on the miner side is deepening.