dance

The Bitcoin Treasury Company Strategy officially announced that it will hold a live investor Q&A on August 17 at 12:00 PM Eastern Time. The company's founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor and CEO Phong Le will be present.It is reported that this investor Q&A is expected to focus on market topics of interest, including the company's Bitcoin strategy, capital operations, financing plans, and future business directions.

In response to rumors on social media about "Doubao recommending hotels for a fee," Liu Xing, the head of public affairs for Doubao at ByteDance, stated on the evening of August 10 that the related statements are inaccurate. He indicated that Doubao's life service business currently does not have paid promotions, and Doubao does not charge advertising fees for hotel recommendations; merchants cannot influence recommendations or rankings through payment, and only pay channel service fees after an order is completed.Liu Xing pointed out that some platforms adopt a "commission + advertising" charging model, while Doubao primarily charges based on completed transactions at this stage, making direct comparisons inappropriate. For merchants, the actual channel costs and the effects of new orders are more meaningful references. He also mentioned that Doubao's life service business is still in a very early exploratory stage.

The cryptocurrency hardware wallet manufacturer Coldcard has released an update on its customer data retention policy. Due to legal compliance requirements arising from the security incident disclosed on July 30, the company has temporarily suspended its original automatic customer data deletion mechanism.Previously, Coldcard's standard practice was to automatically clear customer records after 120 days, retaining only the user's email address and country information, while allowing customers to request early deletion of data at any time after product delivery. Coldcard stated that due to the security incident involving ongoing and potential legal proceedings, the company is obligated to retain records that may be relevant to litigation. Therefore, customer data that was originally scheduled for deletion will be temporarily retained until the law permits the resumption of normal processes.However, users can still request Coldcard to handle their personal information according to the original data retention policy. If users wish for their data not to be included in this legal retention scope, they can contact official customer service to make a request. Coldcard emphasizes that the retained data will be strictly protected, accessible only to authorized personnel, and will not be used for any purposes other than fulfilling legal obligations. The company will restore the previous automatic data deletion mechanism once legally permissible.

The Volcano Engine officially launched the Seedance 2.5 API. Compared to Seedance 2, the new version has significantly improved in areas such as instruction adherence, long narratives, character consistency, realism, lighting and shadow quality, and sound effects. It natively supports 30-second video output, a maximum of 50 multimodal material references, and is compatible with more than a dozen languages.

According to the Financial Times, as Chinese companies continue to narrow the gap with the top AI labs in the United States, ByteDance is training an AI model that may be close in scale to Anthropic's advanced Mythos system. According to three insiders, this Chinese tech giant is currently in the early stages of training a large-scale model, which may have a parameter count reaching the trillions, approximately three times that of the largest model released in China, the Kimi K3 model under the Moonlight brand.One insider stated that ByteDance's model is currently undergoing pre-training, a phase that typically takes three to six months. If all goes well, it will then undergo fine-tuning and be released. The specific scale of the model will be determined later. Anthropic has not publicly disclosed the parameter scale of its models, but industry estimates suggest that its advanced Mythos 5 model has a parameter count of about 8 trillion, while Fable 5 has around 5 trillion.It is important to note that the number of parameters determines the model's basic capacity for storing information or memory limit, but the actual capabilities of the model also depend on other factors, including data quality and training methods.

According to a report by LatePost, ByteDance is discussing training a model with a parameter scale exceeding 50 trillion, surpassing Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max (24 trillion parameters) and the K3 from Dark Moon (28 trillion parameters), making it currently the largest known model in terms of parameter scale in the country. Generally speaking, the larger the model scale, the higher the level of intelligence.However, this plan is still in the early stages and does not guarantee that the model will ultimately be released. The new model will be led by Xiang Liang, head of SeedFoundation, in collaboration with Shen Ke, who is responsible for the pre-training data of large language models. To this end, Seed is reorganizing, defining responsibilities, and allocating resources.

According to the Financial Times, even after deciding not to disclose too many details about interest rate strategies, which led to a significant sell-off of government bonds, Federal Reserve Chairman Waller still insists on his usual concise communication style.People close to Waller have stated that he acknowledges making some mistakes in the first 10 weeks of leading the world's most important central bank, including failing to reinforce his key messages about price stability and causing confusion about whether his long-term plans to reform the Federal Reserve would affect recent policy decisions. However, they insist that these mistakes are not enough to overturn Waller's plans for Federal Reserve reform.Informed sources also revealed that if strong inflation data is released in the coming weeks and market expectations for rising borrowing costs increase, Waller is prepared to raise interest rates at the September meeting. The sources added that although the Federal Reserve Chairman has suggested the possibility of reducing the central bank's $6.7 trillion balance sheet to tighten monetary policy, interest rates remain the primary tool and will be used if necessary at the upcoming meeting.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming clearly stated at the Seed team all-hands meeting last month that the company will not use model distillation as a shortcut to catch up with large models, even if it temporarily falls behind domestic competitors. He urged the team to be willing to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term goals.Distillation refers to allowing a new model to learn from the outputs of a stronger model, which can save training time and computational power. Internally, ByteDance believes that this choice will make it more difficult for Seed's language model to catch up with domestic peers like DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qianwen in the short term. However, ByteDance is more concerned about political risks: the company has long faced scrutiny from the U.S. government due to TikTok, and if it is accused of massively extracting the capabilities of cutting-edge U.S. models, Washington may apply pressure on TikTok again. Previously, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Dark Side of the Moon, MiniMax, Zhiyu, and Alibaba of massively extracting Claude's capabilities, but did not name ByteDance.

According to The Information, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told employees at a meeting last month that the company would not use distillation technology to advance its artificial intelligence model capabilities, even if it means the company temporarily falls behind domestic competitors.

Websea, in collaboration with the Hong Kong Causeway Bay Group, the Asia Blockchain Association, the Central Asia (Kazakhstan) Zhejiang Federation, the Natural Coal Mine Group, Orenance, and the World Kazakh Association, will hold the Global RWA Summit in Almaty on August 18, with confirmation of attendance from the Kazakhstan government and the Deputy Prime Minister.As the core joint unit, Websea is the only digital asset trading platform included in the national strategic level of Central Asia for this summit, coordinating global resource connections and agenda setting. This summit is the first RWA special summit in the Central Asia region supported by high-level government officials, spanning multiple industries including energy, finance, and blockchain.From the landing of innovative products to the layout of TradFi asset chain integration, Websea's positioning is no longer limited to a single product level but is building an RWA asset trading hub with intergovernmental dialogue capabilities.

According to Jinshi reports, BlueBay Chief Investment Officer Mark Dowding pointed out in a report that if Federal Reserve Chairman Waller abandons forward guidance, it may increase the market's risk of losing confidence in the Federal Reserve. He stated that during the periods when previous Federal Reserve chairmen implemented forward guidance, the institution enjoyed a high level of trust and credibility. However, if it falls into a state of information vacuum, market doubts may intensify, and trust in the Federal Reserve may begin to waver.Dowding also noted that the current level of U.S. debt has reached a historic high, and if a laissez-faire attitude is taken towards market trends, it could lay the groundwork for significant risk hazards.

According to a report by the South China Morning Post citing informed sources, ByteDance's AI business has achieved an annual revenue of $4 billion, the highest known level in the domestic market, but still far behind leading AI companies in the United States. Previously, ByteDance announced through an internal email the integration of the Feishu and Doubao product teams and GTM system, with Doubao head Zhao Qi leading the product line and Volcano Engine head Tan Dai responsible for the new ToB GTM organization "Creativity Service Platform," aimed at building "stronger AI product competitiveness and customer service capabilities."This integration is the largest adjustment to the ToB business since ByteDance's business segmentation in 2021. The Doubao enterprise version, developed with the participation of the Feishu team, has already entered internal testing with some clients. The report pointed out that ByteDance's AI revenue mainly comes from enterprise API calls of the Doubao large model, AI cloud services, and enterprise-level AI solutions.

According to exclusive reports from Titanium Media, ByteDance released an internal email on July 30, announcing the integration of the Feishu product team and the Doubao product team to form a new Doubao product team, which will be unified under the leadership of Doubao head Zhao Qi, while Feishu head Xie Xin will report to Zhao Qi. In terms of the GTM system, the Feishu GTM team will integrate with the Volcano Engine team to establish a new ToB GTM organization called the "Creativity Service Platform," which will be responsible for the marketing, sales, and customer service of ByteDance's MaaS and SaaS cloud services, led by Volcano Engine head Tan Dai, with Feishu sales head Lin Chan and Feishu strategy and marketing head Shi Zhijun reporting to Tan Dai.This integration is the largest adjustment to ByteDance's ToB business since it implemented business segmentation in 2021. After the reorganization, Feishu's products and services will remain unchanged, and Feishu will collaborate more deeply with Doubao on productivity scenarios. The Doubao enterprise version, developed with deep involvement from the Feishu product team, has already begun internal testing among some Feishu clients. Feishu currently covers over 10 million enterprise users, and this integration will further enhance the integrated collaborative capabilities of the ToB business.

Robinhood released its Q2 2026 financial report, with net revenue of $1.31 billion, a year-on-year increase of 32%, exceeding analysts' expectations of $1.28 billion; net profit of $573 million, a year-on-year increase of 48%; diluted earnings per share of $0.62, a year-on-year increase of 48%. Adjusted EBITDA was $741 million, a year-on-year increase of 35%, exceeding the expected $629 million. Net deposits reached a record high of $21.7 billion, with Gold subscription users reaching 4.8 million, a year-on-year increase of 39%. Cryptocurrency revenue was $100 million, exceeding the expected $86.6 million; options revenue was $342 million, a year-on-year increase of 29%. ARPU reached $187, a year-on-year increase of 24%.The company expects adjusted operating expenses and equity incentives for the full year to be $2.675 to $2.775 billion, lower than previous guidance and market expectations. During the period, Trump account registrations exceeded 7 million, with deposits nearing $1.5 billion; Robinhood Chain mainnet launched; Singapore obtained a capital markets services license; completed the acquisition of WonderFi. After the financial report was released, Robinhood rose about 4% in after-hours trading.

Meta released its Q2 2026 financial report, with revenue of $60.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of 28%, slightly above the market expectation of $60.3 billion; net profit of $15.85 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 14%; earnings per share of $6.18, a year-on-year decrease of 13%. Advertising revenue was $59.36 billion, a year-on-year increase of 27%, with ad impressions increasing by 14% and average price rising by 12%. Operating profit decreased by 8% year-on-year to $18.78 billion, and the operating profit margin fell from 43% to 31%. Total costs and expenses surged by 55% year-on-year to $42 billion, which includes $2.4 billion in legal litigation expenses and $1.18 billion in layoff costs.The revenue guidance for Q3 is $61 billion to $64 billion, with a midpoint of $62.5 billion, below the market expectation of $63.2 billion. The full-year capital expenditure guidance has been adjusted from $125 billion to $145 billion to $130 billion to $145 billion. Free cash flow was only $784 million, significantly shrinking year-on-year, reaching a nearly four-year low. Meta also narrowed its full-year expense guidance for 2026 to $165 billion to $169 billion, maintaining the expectation of "operating profit above 2025." Zuckerberg stated, "AI is accelerating our core business, and the results are beginning to show." After the financial report was released, Meta's after-hours stock price briefly fell over 10%.

According to Jinshi reports, Microsoft announced a series of financial guidance, causing the after-hours increase in US stocks to expand to 8%.

According to Gate market data, Seagate Technology's stock rose over 8% in after-hours trading, with its revenue guidance exceeding market expectations.

According to IT Home, ByteDance announced today the official launch of the Seed STEM Scientist Program, inviting 100 outstanding scholars from the forefront of scientific fields to collaborate on real research problems and promote AI-accelerated scientific discovery.This program is initiated by the Seed Edge research team, providing ample computing resources and competitive salaries. Participation is divided into two categories: scientific advisors and doctoral interns. The first phase of the program is expected to last about 6 months, with the work location in Haidian District, Beijing. The application deadline is September 30, 2026.