Swiss gold exports rose 65% in August to 156.5 tons, driven mainly by shipments of more than 100 tons to the United Kingdom. According to Sina Finance, the United Kingdom imported 102.1 tons of gold from Switzerland in the month, up from 39.5 tons in July. Exports to India fell from 8.3 tons to 3.5 tons, while exports to the United States rose from 3.4 tons in July to 10.2 tons. Swiss gold imports increased from 154.8 tons to 205 tons.

Rice Robotics has announced a partnership with NFT project Pudgy Penguins to launch the Pengu Minibot companion robot. According to Foresight News, the robot supports movement and interaction and is designed to bring the Pudgy Penguins IP experience into real-world settings. The specific launch date has not yet been announced.

Decentralized perpetual futures trading platform Velocity, formerly Drift Protocol, said it has completed an audit by OtterSec and opened the protocol's source code. According to Foresight News, the platform's beta version will be open to everyone in the next few days. The protocol is also undergoing STRIDE security review by the Solana Foundation. OtterSec reviewed all work on the code fork after the April security incident and recorded 154 findings, with no critical vulnerabilities. Velocity fixed high-severity findings in the deployed code. The protocol has been simplified to focus on perpetual contracts, while the spot market will be used as a collateral and lending platform. Fees from all perpetual products will be split among protocol liquidity, the insurance fund, and the Velocity protocol itself. Foresight News previously reported that Drift Protocol was hacked in early April, resulting in a loss of $295 million.

South African consumer confidence improved in the third quarter, but it is expected to stay weak as household finances come under pressure from soaring oil prices triggered by the Iran war and higher interest rates, according to Bloomberg. The report said the rebound may be limited by those strains on consumers.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said local AI is close to handling a large share of everyday tasks after testing Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on his laptop. According to BeInCrypto, he posted speed results from the model running on AMD’s Strix Halo chip, which keeps inference on-device rather than sending requests to a cloud server. Buterin also argued local models could strip sensitive details before passing prompts to larger hosted systems, though he said this would not guarantee full privacy.

Marine Le Pen, France's far-right leader and a presidential candidate, has not ruled out a no-confidence motion against the government over the 2027 budget. According to Sina Finance, she said in a LCI television interview aired Wednesday evening that she would not take any action that could worsen France's already strained fiscal position. Le Pen said she was ruling nothing out, including a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu's government, because she disagrees with several of its budget policies. Polls show she is currently the leading candidate in next spring's presidential election. France's economic outlook has deteriorated sharply in recent months. The Iran war has driven energy prices higher, a deadly heat wave has hit agricultural production, and political uncertainty has weighed on investment.

Samsung Electronics has introduced zHBM, a memory technology that can be stacked directly on top of AI chips in 3D. According to Sina Finance, Samsung said the breakthrough is aimed at boosting the response speed of existing AI systems by more than 10 times. On September 16, Kim Indong, head of memory product planning at Samsung America Semiconductor Division (DSA), delivered a keynote at the AI Infrastructure Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, outlining a paradigm shift in AI storage chips. Kim said current conversational AI systems have a per-user response ceiling of about 100 tokens per second, and Samsung aims to raise that to 1,000 tokens per second for the coming AI agent era. Samsung also released a technology roadmap for zNAND-O, a NAND flash-based 3D storage solution for the edge AI market. Kim said that by 2030, local deployment of trillion-parameter large models on devices such as AI workstations will become common, and that using zNAND-O instead of DRAM to build memory for trillion-parameter models would cost only one-sixth as much. Samsung plans to begin supplying zNAND-O samples to customers on a large scale from 2028.

European Central Bank Governing Council member Gabriel Makhlouf said each policy meeting is "live," including October, and declined to rule out an interest-rate increase if circumstances require it, according to Bloomberg.

Singapore’s electronics exports rose at an unprecedented pace in August as the artificial-intelligence boom showed no signs of waning, according to Bloomberg. Analysts said the surge is unlikely to prompt the Monetary Authority of Singapore to change policy.

Francis Fukuyama revisits his 1989 essay “The End of History?” in a new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, according to Bloomberg. He discusses how his argument has evolved in a world shaped by rapid AI development and recent electoral defeats for liberal democracy, and says the internet and social media are fueling the listlessness he linked to “The End of History.”

South Korean police have referred 18 of 26 Polymarket users to prosecutors over alleged illegal gambling after they placed a combined 17.6 billion won ($12.7 million) on prediction markets. The users argue Polymarket contracts are closer to crypto derivatives because they can be traded before expiry, but authorities say the wagers fall under South Korea’s gambling laws.

Bitcoin miners in Ethiopia are receiving just 23% of their contracted electricity supplies, as worsening drought conditions force the country to ration dwindling hydropower and prioritize households and manufacturers.

A fake Cloudflare verification scam is targeting meme coin traders by tricking them into running malicious commands on their computers, with one trader reportedly losing around $600,000.

Interest rate hikes are no longer important; the key is the expectation of the subsequent policy pace and interest rate trends.

Faces are not fundamental, but they are the only signal that the community can quickly read when there is information asymmetry—which is precisely the cruelest part of the crypto market.

Justin Sun is putting up as much as $1 million for mathematical breakthroughs — and betting that the next generation of scientific discovery will be judged less by who makes a discovery and more by whether a machine can verify it.

It seems that while the U.S. Department of Justice can't control the president's attempts to profit from the system, it can certainly control employees of compliance agencies who want to profit from the system.

UBS believes that the Warsh policy response function has undergone a substantial shift compared to its predecessor, becoming more sensitive to inflation and supply shocks, significantly less concerned about the labor market, and setting higher thresholds for restrictive policies.

This does not mean that the Federal Reserve's influence on Bitcoin has decreased. The current price performance only indicates that short-term selling pressure has been controlled. What will truly determine the subsequent market trend is still the change in liquidity and market risk appetite.

Whether the stock market can withstand future interest rate hikes largely depends on oil prices. If the situation in Iran and oil prices ease, there will still be a large amount of capital waiting to enter the market, and interest rate hikes will be more of a precautionary measure. However, if oil prices remain high, market sentiment will inevitably be affected.