sovereign

Malaysia is leaning towards relying on Huawei Technologies' artificial intelligence chips to power its sovereign AI program. The Southeast Asian country is seriously evaluating the use of Huawei AI hardware as the backbone of a 2 billion ringgit (approximately 494 million USD) initiative aimed at giving the country greater control over national data.Insiders say it is currently unclear how many chips Malaysia will purchase, and these individuals requested anonymity due to unauthorized disclosure. This move faces strong opposition from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

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."

NVIDIA (NVDA.O) Chief Financial Officer stated that the company is a neutral partner for all sovereign AI clients and new AI cloud service providers.

NVIDIA (NVDA.O) Chief Financial Officer stated that the company's sovereign AI business has grown more than twice year-on-year and increased by 35% quarter-on-quarter.

The French open-source weight AI laboratory Mistral and the AI company HUMAIN under the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced plans to build "sovereign AI" infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the broader region. According to a joint announcement from both parties, this collaboration is valued at "hundreds of millions of euros" and aims to meet the growing demand for sovereign AI, where data is not controlled by third-party companies, and models can be owned under open weights.Both parties will jointly develop and localize advanced models and deploy AI solutions within Saudi Arabia and the broader region. Mistral is building its computing power layout through its end-to-end infrastructure division, Mistral Compute. This collaboration will allow it to run workloads on local computing power in Saudi Arabia, rather than relying solely on computing power from Europe and the United States. The two sides also plan to conduct joint marketing in regulated industries in Saudi Arabia. The first deliverables will cover cybersecurity and voice fields, involving inference, open models, and cutting-edge Arabic models in the region.HUMAIN has accumulated over a year of construction. In November 2025, it expanded its cooperation with NVIDIA, planning to deploy up to 600,000 of NVIDIA's latest AI systems, including the GB300 platform, within three years; it also reached a data center agreement with xAI, relying on a facility with over 500 MW, and made an agreement with AWS to manage up to 150,000 GPUs in the Riyadh AI Zone. In the same month, HUMAIN, AMD, and Cisco established a joint venture aimed at building up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure by 2030.

According to The Block, K33 research director Vetle Lunde stated that by the end of the first half of 2026, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund's indirect Bitcoin exposure through holdings in companies such as Strategy, Metaplanet, MARA, Coinbase, Block, and Tesla has risen to 11,549 BTC, a record high valued at approximately $725 million. This exposure grew by 21.2% in the first half of the year and by 60.5% over the past year, marking the sixth consecutive reporting period of increase.Among these, Strategy accounts for nearly 86% of the fund's indirect Bitcoin exposure, corresponding to approximately 9,914 BTC. As of June 30, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund held about 1.17% of Strategy's shares, valued at $357.3 million at that time. Metaplanet corresponds to 671 BTC, MARA corresponds to 421 BTC, and Coinbase, Block, and Tesla correspond to 183 BTC, 120 BTC, and 97 BTC, respectively.K33 pointed out that this exposure is likely not the result of the fund actively allocating to Bitcoin, but rather an indirect effect of its broadly diversified investment portfolio. Currently, the related Bitcoin exposure accounts for about 0.03% of the fund's total assets.In addition, the fund has also gained indirect ETH exposure through the Ethereum treasury company BitMine for the first time. As of June 30, it held 6.15 million shares of BitMine, valued at $88.3 million, accounting for about 1.16% of the company's shares; based on BitMine's current ETH holdings, this corresponds to an indirect exposure of approximately 67,340 ETH.

According to The Defiant, the Government Pension Fund Global of Norway disclosed in its quarterly holdings document for the period ending June 30 that it holds 6,151,062 shares of BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), with a market value of approximately $81.87 million.The fund did not list BitMine in its holdings report as of December 31, indicating this is a new disclosure, and the specific purchase time and cost have not been announced. It is reported that the total size of the fund reached 22.683 trillion Norwegian kroner as of June 30, with 72.1% allocated to stocks.

According to CNBC, Norway's sovereign wealth fund, which has a scale of $2.34 trillion, recorded a profit of over $18.2 billion in the first half of the year, setting a historical high for the same period, with an investment return rate of 9.4%. Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), stated that the performance was mainly driven by the strong performance of the stock market, particularly the rise of Asian technology stocks.In the latest semi-annual report, the fund disclosed its holdings in SpaceX for the first time, with a stake of about 0.05%, valued at just over $1.2 billion as of June 30. In comparison, it holds about 1.3% of Nvidia shares, valued at $61.8 billion; and about 1.2% of Apple shares, valued at $52.7 billion. The sovereign wealth fund managed by NBIM was established in the 1990s and primarily invests the country's oil and gas revenues. Currently, the fund invests in over 7,000 companies across more than 50 countries globally, holding about 1.5% of shares in publicly listed companies worldwide. Stock assets account for more than two-thirds of its overall investment portfolio, with U.S. stocks making up about 40% of the total investment portfolio.

As of June 30, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund holds 0.05% of SpaceX shares, valued at $1.22 billion.

According to Bloomberg, the UAE is considering investing up to 1 trillion yen (approximately 6.3 billion USD) in the construction of an artificial intelligence data center, led by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment Co. The project is planned to be located in Akita Prefecture in northern Japan, with a planned installed capacity of 500 megawatts, and may involve other domestic and foreign investors participating together.Currently, this information has not been publicly disclosed, and relevant details are still in the evaluation stage.

According to ChianCatcher, Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, proposed the establishment of a protocol sovereign fund at the governance forum to enhance the long-term sustainability of the network's token economics. This fund will consist of existing and future protocol treasuries and protocol revenues, holding NEAR tokens and generating returns, with part of the returns used to cover the costs of public goods in the ecosystem, such as security, validator support programs, and MPC service providers.Polosukhin stated that using ecological revenue to purchase NEAR and fund public goods with the returns is more aligned for the long term than simply burning tokens. The initial size of the protocol treasury is approximately 30 million NEAR (about 53 million USD), and more revenue and emissions can be injected into the fund through governance, gradually reducing effective inflation and potentially transitioning to a fixed supply. This proposal is currently open for discussion for two weeks and is not mandatory.

According to The Block, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin proposed the establishment of a NEAR sovereign fund, intending to hold the protocol treasury and revenue in the form of NEAR tokens, generate returns, and partially use it to fund security and public goods, with a long-term goal of reducing inflation.

As the Coldcard hardware wallet exposes firmware vulnerabilities, over 80 million USD in BTC is stolen, and the market re-discusses whether to turn to institutional custody or directly buy Bitcoin ETFs, well-known analyst Willy Woo responded in a post stating that he does not oppose ETFs or custody solutions. They have many benefits in gaining recognition and accessing the traditional financial system, but the uniqueness of Bitcoin lies in the fact that it is the only truly sovereign mature digital asset, without nationality, cannot be blocked, diluted, or confiscated by any country, and only by mastering self-custody can one obtain this attribute.Willy Woo stated that since World War II, the West has mostly lived in a bubble of security, but as Ray Dalio pointed out based on 1500 years of historical research, stability itself is a cycle. When the cycle ends, people will need reserves that can protect them when the world briefly collapses, while custodial assets may fail, and governments may confiscate assets both in the past and in the future. He indicated that we are currently in the later stage of this cycle and recommended allocating 15% of assets to sovereign assets such as Bitcoin and gold.

According to Bloomberg, the South Korean government plans to inject 20 trillion won (approximately 13.9 billion USD) into the sovereign wealth fund Korea Investment Corporation (KIC), specifically for strategic investments in artificial intelligence, data centers, and infrastructure.

According to Fortune, Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Capital announced a partnership with Coinbase and infrastructure provider KAIO to tokenize its evergreen private market fund, issuing compliant on-chain tokens to qualified investors. Coinbase will use its Base blockchain as one of the underlying networks and will personally purchase the tokens, incorporating the Mubadala fund into its corporate balance sheet.It is reported that this is the first time a major publicly listed company in the United States has used compliant tokenized assets for native on-chain financial management. Currently, the product has attracted approximately $75 million in funding, with investors including traditional institutions and crypto-native allocators. Mubadala manages assets totaling nearly $400 billion, and this tokenization aims to break through the high barriers of traditional private equity and expand the potential investor base.

The UK plans to issue its first tokenized sovereign bond by early 2027, with the current key prerequisite being the resolution of on-chain cash settlement issues. This problem has limited the use of digital bonds by institutions for years.Industry experts indicate that the plan may have received sufficient support from the UK Treasury, the Bank of England, and regulators to continue advancing after recent political changes, and it could potentially increase the demand for UK debt. Current progress is constrained by the lack of standardized on-chain payment methods, mature pound stablecoins, and regulatory clarity.

According to BBX data, the integration of traditional financial infrastructure and cryptocurrency settlement layers accelerated simultaneously in two distinctly different tracks yesterday, with the following core dynamics:PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: $PYPL) reported by CoinDesk today as the headline news, the world's largest independent payment technology company Stripe (privately held) has teamed up with private equity firm Advent International to propose an acquisition offer of approximately $53 billion to PayPal; PayPal is currently reluctant to engage actively, but the offer has sparked widespread discussion on Wall Street about the "largest payment merger in the world." Stripe acquired the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge.xyz for $1.1 billion in 2024 (which has served cross-border stablecoin settlements for institutions such as Visa and Coinbase), while PayPal has its own stablecoin PYUSD (with a circulation size of about $700 million) and independent cryptocurrency trading capabilities, covering over 400 million active accounts. If the acquisition is completed, the combination of Stripe + PayPal will control the largest single payment network globally, while integrating Stripe's stablecoin settlement (Bridge.xyz) with PayPal's native stablecoin (PYUSD)------the combination will create the largest-scale "traditional payment + stablecoin" dual-track infrastructure to date, directly threatening Visa and Mastercard's positions in cross-border settlement scenarios and posing competitive pressure on Circle's USDC in retail payments.HSBC Holdings plc (NYSE: $HSBC) reported by CoinDesk today, the UK government plans to issue the world's first digital sovereign bond for G7 countries, with the issuance scheduled for early 2027; this bond will be issued and circulated on HSBC's blockchain bond platform Orion, operating within the Digital Securities Sandbox framework of the Bank of England (BoE) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), aimed at testing the feasibility of reducing settlement time (transitioning from T+2 to T+0) and lowering back-office costs. HSBC Orion has completed multiple batches of tokenized gold, green bonds, and Hong Kong government bonds on-chain issuance from 2023 to 2025, and this UK sovereign bond is the first instance of G7 countries introducing blockchain settlement at the sovereign debt issuance level------this milestone will elevate the compliance of tokenized government bonds from "emerging market experiment" to "highest sovereign endorsement," signaling significant implications for institutional adoption of tokenized government bond products like BlackRock BUIDL and Securitize.

Celestia Labs announced that it has acquired the high-performance blockchain framework developer Sovereign Labs. The latter has been deeply engaged in the Celestia ecosystem since 2021, and its framework has provided underlying support for projects such as the cross-chain bridge Relay Protocol and the high-performance perpetual contract trading platform Bullet.After this acquisition, Celestia Labs' technical capabilities will extend from Layer 1 to the execution layer and application layer, becoming a full-stack custom blockchain development partner for enterprises. As projects like Hyperliquid, Polymarket, and Robinhood choose to build their own chains, the demand for full-stack blockchain infrastructure among enterprises is accelerating.

The UK plans to issue its first digital sovereign bond by early 2027, becoming the first G7 country to issue government debt on a distributed ledger.The bond will be listed on HSBC's Orion platform and included in the digital securities sandbox of the Bank of England (BoE) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to test reduced settlement times and lower costs. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey stated that the BoE plans to make the bond eligible as market operation collateral, allowing banks to use the bond in central bank financing transactions.

Tokenized sovereign debt startup M1X Global has completed a $5.5 million seed round financing, led by Paradigm, with participation from Breed VC and others.M1X Global previously collaborated with the Republic of the Marshall Islands to assist in issuing the on-chain sovereign debt instrument USDM1. This product is dollar-denominated, backed 1:1 by U.S. Treasury bonds, and is a tokenized sovereign debt instrument natively issued by sovereign nations on public blockchains. USDM1 was initially issued on Stellar and is now also available on Canton and Solana.Jordan Goldman, President and COO of M1X, stated that sovereign debt is one of the largest asset classes globally, but prior to USDM1, it did not exist in a native on-chain form. The company aims to establish USDM1 as on-chain sovereign collateral and expand its use in regulated financial markets. The initial application scenario for USDM1 is domestic government aid disbursement. Citizens of the Marshall Islands can receive funds through the Lomalo wallet, allowing payments to be completed in seconds without relying on traditional banking networks. M1X also stated that recent integration with the U.S. FDIC-insured Bank of Guam further connects USDM1 to regulated banking infrastructure.