costs

According to CoinDesk, Ben Edgington, the coordinator of the Ethereum rapid finality research direction, along with several researchers, submitted a draft proposing to reduce the transaction finality waiting time from about 16 minutes to about 4 minutes, improving it by approximately four times.The current goal is to push this draft into the formal upgrade proposal process. The core idea of the draft is to separate the original "block selection" and "finality confirmation" mechanisms of validators, allowing finality to progress at a faster pace and facilitating future adoption of quantum-resistant signatures.Faster finality is expected to reduce the costs incurred by cross-chain transfer services due to capital occupation. The Ethereum Foundation's research provides an example: if a service advances about 1 million dollars per hour, under a 16-minute delay, approximately 267,000 dollars would be pending recovery, which could be reduced to about 67,000 dollars after shortening to 4 minutes.

MiniMax announced that M3.1 Flash has officially been released, and the earlier version, Space Bunny, which topped global rankings and processed over 200T tokens, is its predecessor.M3.1 Flash achieved scores of 62% on Automation-Bench, 30% on ALE, 74% on DeepSWE, and 91% on BabyVision in tasks such as Cowork, Coding, and Visual Reasoning.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared that the cost of Bitcoin mining is roughly half derived from capital expenditures on computing power equipment and the other half from electricity consumption; in contrast, the cost of AI inference is almost entirely dominated by capital expenditures on computing power. This difference reflects the distinct cost structures of the two computing businesses. Bitcoin miners need to continuously pay for electricity and determine their profit margins based on mining machine efficiency, coin prices, and network difficulty changes; AI inference, on the other hand, relies more on investments in expensive hardware like GPUs, as well as equipment utilization and computing efficiency.The industrial boundaries of both are also changing. As the demand for AI computing power grows, some Bitcoin mining companies are beginning to shift their existing electricity resources and data center facilities towards AI and high-performance computing businesses, hoping to transition from pure mining to computing infrastructure services. Some mining companies are leveraging previously allocated electricity capacity for mining to enter the AI data center market. However, transformation does not mean that cost pressures disappear: mining operations are more directly exposed to fluctuations in electricity prices and Bitcoin prices, while AI computing businesses must bear risks related to GPU procurement, depreciation, and underutilization. Both types of businesses compete for electricity and computing resources, but ultimately, profitability depends on how these resources are converted into revenue.

On October 16, Circle announced that in the first half of 2026, the on-chain settlement amount of USDC exceeded $36 trillion, and Circle minted and redeemed over $315 billion of USDC during the same period, averaging about $1.7 billion per day. The company stated that as of June, USDC accounted for approximately 77% of the global stablecoin trading volume, an increase from 60% a year ago.More attention from the market is focused on the income distribution of USDC. Circle disclosed that the company generated approximately $1.4 billion in revenue in the first half of the year, of which about $819 million was allocated to USDC distribution partners and transaction costs, accounting for about 59% of the revenue; another approximately $473 million was invested in licensing, banking partnerships, settlement liquidity, compliance systems, product development, and multi-chain deployment, accounting for about 34%. According to the announcement, for every $1 of revenue Circle earns, it ultimately retains only about 7 cents in net profit.This announcement may be in response to market concerns regarding "the monopolization of reserve income by stablecoin issuers." Circle stated that partners can share corresponding reserve income by holding and expanding their USDC balances on their platforms; currently, more than 150 trading platforms, wallets, banks, fintech companies, payment platforms, and enterprises have formed economic interests tied to the growth of USDC. Circle also mentioned that Binance signed a five-year commercial agreement with it in September and invested $100 million in Circle.On the product side, Circle announced the expansion of its free redemption mechanism: all Circle customers can still redeem USDC for free through traditional banking channels, with the funds typically arriving within two business days; customers who make payments through the Circle Payments Network or use eligible products such as Arc, Circle Mint, and Circle Wallets will be able to enjoy free, near-real-time redemption capabilities.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that COREWEAVE's strength is increasing every day, and its capital costs are actually decreasing.

Stripe announced a collaboration with Plasma to develop a multi-currency stablecoin card, aimed at allowing individuals and businesses to spend the currencies they already hold in their accounts, reducing unnecessary currency conversion and foreign exchange costs. Plasma will serve as the design partner, integrating with Stripe's stablecoin card infrastructure, enabling customer account balances to be used for payments through the multi-currency card.The expanded infrastructure will support US dollars, Brazilian reais, euros, Mexican pesos, and Colombian pesos; stablecoins include USDC, OUSD, and qualified stablecoins that meet the requirements of the GENIUS Act. The Stripe stablecoin card service currently covers over 30 countries, with plans to expand to over 100 countries by 2027.For example, users holding euros will be able to spend directly in euros in the future, without needing to convert to US dollars first; businesses can issue currency cards that match their spending needs. Stripe also plans to support cardholders in spending from multiple account balances and automatically selecting the appropriate currency at the time of purchase.

Ministers from OPEC and non-OPEC oil-producing countries met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, reaffirming their commitment to maintaining stability in the oil market through a joint mechanism. OPEC+ stated that disruptions in energy transportation have caused shipping and insurance costs to exceed one-third of the value of commodities, hindering the transportation of crude oil and refined products, and increasing inflationary pressures on the global economy. Countries will continue to monitor the situation and cooperate with international organizations to improve shipping conditions.

According to the Miner Weekly briefing published by BlocksBridge Consulting, Bitcoin mining companies expanding into the fields of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing are facing significantly different borrowing costs, with lenders increasingly scrutinizing large data center projects. The briefing points out that securing large AI clients is only part of the challenge; mining companies also need to raise billions of dollars to purchase computing power equipment, build data centers, and ensure the power infrastructure required for contract fulfillment. BlocksBridge indicates that large lending institutions have become more selective about data center loans, with decisions increasingly depending on client qualifications, contract terms, and project completion paths.The transition from Bitcoin mining to AI infrastructure by IREN reflects the differences in financing costs: the company secured $3.65 billion in GPU financing in June at a blended interest rate of 6%; in August, it completed another $2.4 billion financing with a fixed interest rate of 9%. The two agreements correspond to different projects and are not directly comparable, but they show that even within the same company, borrowing costs can vary significantly. Financing arrangements may also incur costs beyond interest; in another transaction involving Cipher Digital, Google guaranteed a $1.4 billion lease obligation in exchange for warrants representing a 5.4% equity stake in Cipher, with exercising the warrants potentially diluting existing shareholder equity.The rise in financing demand highlights the overall challenges mining companies face in entering the AI market. Data from VanEck shows that during the peak of the Bitcoin bull market in October last year, mining company debt surged by approximately 500% compared to the second quarter of 2024.

Fitch Ratings pointed out that global borrowing costs are rising, and bond yields are climbing.

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Wednesday, claiming it to be the company's cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model to date. This model is designed for high-volume tasks such as document summarization and database queries, as well as speed-sensitive scenarios like real-time customer service and browser automation. When developers integrate it into their own products, prompts of up to 100,000 tokens are charged at $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.5 per million output tokens, consistent with the pricing of OpenAI's competing small model GPT-6 Luna released on September 22.The corresponding prices for Haiku 4.5 are $1 and $5, with the new prices being 90% lower, and prompts exceeding 100,000 tokens receiving a 50% discount. Since about 90% of requests for the old model fall below this threshold, and Haiku 5.5 has a slightly higher token count, Anthropic estimates an average savings of about 75%. Benchmark tests show that Haiku 5.5 achieved a success rate of 72.4% on OSWorld 2.1, higher than GPT Luna's 48.9%; on Terminal-Bench 4, it scored 39.2%, surpassing Luna's 16.4% and Haiku 4.5's 0%, but lower than Sonnet 5.5's 70.6%.This is the first Haiku model with adjustable effort settings, allowing users to balance cost and answer quality.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that the EU will take measures to address rising energy prices, including launching a strategic dialogue with European refineries and strengthening joint energy procurement. Since the end of February, European natural gas prices have risen by 140%, diesel prices have doubled, and spending on imported fossil fuels has increased by approximately 100 billion euros.

ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood stated that the cost reductions brought about by innovative platforms such as AI will gradually transmit to broader economic sectors, enhancing productivity and corporate profitability, and driving inflation rates down to levels below most investors' expectations, a phenomenon referred to as "benign deflation."Cathie Wood believes that the current AI inference costs are decreasing by 99.99% annually while maintaining performance levels. Meanwhile, OpenAI's annual revenue run rate has increased from $20 billion to $70 billion, indicating that the decline in costs is driving rapid growth in demand.ARK Invest expects that real GDP growth rates could reach high single digits, although this prediction seems "crazy" to most people; in a stronger real growth environment, interest rates may actually rise.

According to Cryptopolitan, over 100 researchers, using AI coding agents, have reduced the quantum attack resource score for the Bitcoin secp256k1 elliptic curve point addition subroutine by 86.1% (from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion). This optimization only targets a single step in Shor's algorithm and does not break any private keys or transfer funds; a complete attack still requires fault-tolerant quantum hardware that does not yet exist. However, each efficiency improvement compresses the time window for quantum migration after blockchain completion.According to Glassnode data, approximately 6.04 million BTC (30.2% of the circulating supply) face potential quantum risks due to exposed public keys on-chain. Ethereum plans to achieve full quantum resistance by December 2029, while the Bitcoin community faces greater challenges at the governance level, including how to handle approximately 1.7 million suspected dormant P2PK address coins held by Satoshi, which remains unresolved.

Castle Labs released a research report on September 10, comparing the execution costs of the swaps products launched by Variational with traditional perpetual contracts. The report shows that for most trading volumes, Variational is currently the lowest-cost venue among listed assets, with the cost of a $1 million trade in the US100 market being only $47.The report points out that the trading volume of RWA perpetual contracts has grown from less than $1 billion in October 2025 to over $12 billion in August 2026, currently accounting for about 12% to 13% of on-chain perpetual contract trading volume, with a peak in July reaching 20%. As of the report's release, the total open interest of RWA perpetual contracts was $4.9 billion, with TradeXYZ and Variational accounting for nearly 90%.Variational's swaps utilize RFQ execution and the proprietary liquidity provider Omni, with liquidity coming directly from traditional financial partners, and the fees being a holding cost charged once at the daily close, rather than relying on market supply and demand funding rates. Since the launch of the US100, US500, XAU, XAG, and USOIL markets at the beginning of the month, a total trading volume of $3.8 billion has been accumulated, with a peak open interest of $245 million. Currently, swaps have contributed over 50% of Variational's daily trading volume and more than $220 million in open interest.

According to the report "Explosive Growth of Stock Derivatives in 2026: The Landscape of Cryptocurrency Exchanges and Key Trends" released by RootData, the stock derivatives sector has transitioned from "marginal experimentation" to the "explosive growth" phase, with a cumulative trading volume of approximately $17.5 trillion from January to August.In terms of cumulative transaction volume, the concentration effect among the top exchanges remains significant. Among the four exchanges, Binance ranks first with $853.58 billion and a 61.3% market share; Bitget follows in second place with $270.85 billion and a 19.5% market share; OKX comes in third with $234.39 billion and a 16.8% market share; Bybit ranks fourth with $33.41 billion and a 2.4% market share.Regarding liquidity, in the ±2% weighted order book depth indicator, Binance and Bitget together account for over 70% of the stock derivatives order book liquidity. Among them, Binance has an average daily order book depth of approximately $10.1 million, followed closely by Bitget at $4.82 million, with OKX and Bybit at $3.87 million and $1.16 million, respectively.In terms of trading costs, in the recent comparison of weighted spreads for more than a dozen representative popular assets, Bitget ranks first with 0.0144%, followed closely by Binance at 0.0145%, with both essentially at the same level; OKX is at 0.0154%, and Bybit is at 0.0237%.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing the hope to include the recursive STARK memory pool proposal EIP-8288 in the Ethereum I-star upgrade, stating that it can be seen as the next step after Frames.This proposal allows quantum-safe signature data to be placed off-chain, reducing the cost of signatures; the fuel cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is also expected to drop from about 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal relies on frames and recursive STARK aggregated transaction dependencies, with nodes sending a STARK of about 100 to 300KB each time period; the on-chain overhead is one STARK and 96 bytes for each statement to be proven.

According to The Block, the Ink Foundation, an Ethereum L2 network under Kraken, has jointly established the Charter Foundation with crypto market maker GSR, law firms Carey Olsen, Renno & Co, Cooley, Fenwick, and auditing firms ChainSecurity, Zellic, among others. The aim is to provide a standardized shared legal framework for crypto projects to reduce token issuance costs. A spokesperson for the Ink Foundation stated that the organization is unrelated to Kraken.Currently, crypto projects typically need to independently establish a "three-entity structure" that includes a research and development entity (Labs), a Cayman Islands foundation, and a British Virgin Islands (BVI) subsidiary for issuance. The setup and independent director fees before the Token Generation Event (TGE) often exceed $100,000.The Charter Foundation aims to reduce the initial legal framework costs for token issuance by more than half by establishing a dedicated Cayman Islands exempt company as the launch structure for each project, with governance involving professional offshore compliance experts. Once the token is successfully issued, the Cayman entity will convert into an independent foundation and separate from Charter, ensuring the project's long-term independence.