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According to The Information, fintech company Stripe is in exclusive acquisition talks with AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter, with a deal valuation of approximately $10 billion. Sources reveal that OpenRouter had previously received acquisition interest from several large tech companies, but Stripe has now entered exclusive negotiation stages. The related deal has not yet been finalized, and specific terms may still change.OpenRouter was founded in 2023 and is positioned as an AI infrastructure platform that connects users with various large language models, allowing developers to call AI models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google through a unified interface, and choose different models based on performance, price, and availability. As enterprises accelerate the adoption of generative AI, the importance of AI model calling infrastructure and model routing services continues to rise. OpenRouter has become a key intermediary in the AI application development ecosystem by providing model aggregation, traffic allocation, and cost optimization capabilities.If the deal is completed, it will become one of Stripe's significant moves in the AI field in recent years. Stripe has primarily focused on payment infrastructure, financial services, and enterprise software, and acquiring OpenRouter may further drive its expansion into the AI developer infrastructure space. Market participants believe that as the number of AI models rapidly increases, infrastructure companies that connect different models, optimize calling costs, and manage AI workflows are gaining more attention, and OpenRouter's potential high valuation also reflects investors' optimism about growth opportunities in the AI application layer and infrastructure layer.

According to the Iranian Fars News Agency, informed sources revealed that the northern and southern channels of the Strait of Hormuz will be canceled, and all traffic will subsequently be transferred to the Central Corridor, managed by Iran at the entrance and jointly managed by Iran and Oman at the exit.

According to Jinshi reports, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister stated that Iran demands a change in the current navigation routes in the Strait of Hormuz, as these routes are no longer suitable under the current security situation.

According to Jinshi reports, on August 3 local time, the U.S. Central Command stated that the U.S. military continues to strictly enforce the maritime blockade against Iran. As of that day, the U.S. military has altered the navigation routes of 44 commercial vessels, rendered 2 vessels incapacitated, and boarded and inspected 2 vessels.

According to Jinshi reports, Russia stated on Monday that it is strengthening the protection of vessels in the Sea of Azov - Black Sea region while developing alternative shipping routes.Due to hostile drone attacks on maritime vessels leading to heightened tensions in the Sea of Azov, Russia has established a special working group to study new transportation routes and will shift some cargo to other transportation methods.The Russian Ministry of Transport stated that it will implement additional measures in conjunction with the Ministry of Defense to ensure navigation safety and protect commercial vessels in the Sea of Azov - Black Sea area.

According to Jinshi reports, the spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry stated that the United States is cooperating with certain regional forces to forcibly open a southern route in the Strait of Hormuz, which is not safe.

According to Jinshi reports, the Russian Grain Exporters and Producers Union stated that attacks in the Black Sea region could lead to a complete blockade of export routes in the near future.

According to Jinshi reports, the U.S. Central Command stated that the U.S. military has redirected 20 merchant ships, rendered 2 merchant ships incapacitated, and conducted boarding inspections on 2 merchant ships during the blockade operations against Iran.

According to Jinshi reports, senior Iranian officials stated that the southern route of the Strait of Hormuz may pose a danger to vessels, and Oman’s control over the waterway should correspond to its share in the waterway.

Ondo Finance announced the launch of the new Ondo Network, positioned as a high-performance execution layer, aimed at combining the trading speed of centralized exchanges (CEX) with the non-custodial and secure settlement capabilities of blockchain. Ondo CEO Ian De Bode stated that the Ondo Network is an "evolutionary version" of the previous Ondo Chain plan, and the company will not operate two networks simultaneously, but will adjust its original plan of building a complete blockchain to focus on the execution layer architecture.According to reports, Ondo initially planned to fully bring real-world assets on-chain through Ondo Chain, but after developing the Ondo Perps perpetual contract trading platform and communicating with users, it was found that the current market's core bottleneck is not asset settlement, but trading execution efficiency. The Ondo Network adopts a separated architecture for execution, validation, and settlement, using secure hardware to isolate the execution environment, which enhances trading speed while maintaining user asset self-custody, verifiable transactions, and permissionless blockchain characteristics.Currently, Ondo Perps has become the first application built on this network, supporting 24-hour trading of stock and commodity perpetual contracts, and allowing the use of tokenized real assets as collateral. Ondo stated that in the future, the network will also support applications requiring high performance, privacy protection, and verifiable execution, such as spot trading, lending, and structured products. In addition, the launch of the Ondo Network will not change the positioning of the ONDO token. The CEO stated that ONDO will still serve as the governance and incentive token for the Ondo RWA ecosystem and market infrastructure, and as the network gradually decentralizes, ONDO will be used to coordinate the incentive mechanisms for validation nodes, observers, and ecosystem participants.

According to informed sources, Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter. OpenRouter is a popular startup dedicated to helping developers choose between various artificial intelligence models. The sources indicated that the deal could be announced soon, but there is also a possibility of negotiations breaking down or other bidders emerging. It is currently unclear what the specific negotiation price is, but reports suggest that the company's sale valuation could be around $10 billion. The sources added that several large tech companies had previously shown interest in acquiring OpenRouter. Founded in 2023, OpenRouter sells software that allows customers easy access to AI models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as "open-weight" models that anyone can download and run for free. Acquiring OpenRouter would enable Stripe to capitalize on a hot growth area in the AI market.

Digital asset prime broker FalconX will acquire blockchain infrastructure company bloXroute.By combining bloXroute's network technology with FalconX's institutional trading platform, FalconX will accelerate the development of new trading, financing, and prime brokerage capabilities.

According to a report by Reuters, the latest data released by Citi shows that driven by the demand for companies to cut AI spending, the market adoption rate of low-cost open-source models is rapidly increasing. In June of this year, the proportion of open-source model Tokens processed on the AI aggregation platform OpenRouter surged from 34% in January to 65%.Citi specifically pointed out in the report that the cost difference is a core factor driving this trend. The data shows that some Chinese open-source large models are continuously narrowing the performance gap with leading models in the United States, while their charges are as low as 18 cents per million Tokens, whereas the average charge for leading large models in the industry is about 4 dollars, resulting in a cost difference of over 20 times.

According to security agency CertiK's monitoring, a suspicious transaction was transferred from the Aztec Router contract on Ethereum, involving approximately 2.19 million dollars in assets.The transaction exhibited unusual outflow characteristics, and CertiK reminds the community to remain vigilant.

AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter announced the completion of a $113 million Series B funding round, led by CapitalG, the growth fund of Google's parent company Alphabet. Participants in this round of financing include a16z, Menlo Ventures, NVentures under NVIDIA, as well as ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake, and Databricks, with the company's valuation exceeding $1 billion.

SUN.io announced the completion of the Universal Router contract upgrade, further optimizing system performance and on-chain transaction experience while keeping the contract interface calling method unchanged. After the upgrade, the new Universal Router contract will immediately enjoy a maximum energy subsidy of 99%, while the replaced old contract will gradually stop receiving energy subsidies, and the subsidy policies for other business-related contracts will remain unchanged. This upgrade does not affect users' normal usage, and SUN.io will continue to provide a more stable, secure, and efficient on-chain transaction environment.

WORLD3 today announced the official launch of its decentralized AI routing network RouterLink, enabling the permanent domain routerlink.ai. This official version brings three core upgrades compared to the previous Alpha stage: complete Web2 payment support (Stripe credit card/debit card/Apple Pay/Google Pay), direct connection to over 60 cutting-edge purebred flagship models (without quantization, without distillation), and official production-level endorsements from three major cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.WORLD3 disclosed that the RouterLink network currently supports over 68 models, covering more than 20 providers, with uptime locked at 99.9%, and daily settlement flow exceeding $1.5 million $WAI. The launched purebred flagship models include Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Grok 4.3, Qwen3-Max, Llama 4 Maverick, Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.1, MiniMax M2.7, etc., all provided at full specifications. The cumulative $450K quota from the three major cloud collaborations has been fully utilized — including the public inclusion of the AWS Customer Case Study, Microsoft for Startups Level 4 (highest level) + $300K AI Grants, and direct connection to Google Cloud Vertex AI.WORLD3 stated that this official launch also opens up the enterprise procurement channel: Stripe payments and $WAI on-chain payments run in parallel, allowing developers to access the complete catalog of 68 models within 60 seconds after registering their email and recharging with a credit card. The subsequent roadmap includes the RouterLink mainnet, GPU computing power market, an Agent skill market linked with TapClaw, and an enterprise version SLA service that is already in pilot with some clients.

According to CoinDesk, Coinbase has revealed that it has integrated the trading protocol DFlow as the main trading router for its Solana ecosystem, supporting users in achieving native value exchange for spot and prediction markets on Solana.Coinbase stated that after introducing DFlow, the trading failure rate for its Solana products dropped from about 1/30 to approximately 1/250, an 8-fold decrease. At the same time, this solution has expanded the liquidity coverage, enabling small and mid-cap tokens that were previously unable to trade due to "lack of liquidity" to become tradable, and optimizing user transaction prices.