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Following the attack on the Liquid Network, Blockstream rejected the hacker's demand for a 10% ransom on the remaining approximately 598.5 bitcoins and requested the hacker to return the bitcoins. "Unauthorized acquisition of assets and refusal to return them is a criminal act, not responsible disclosure; this is by no means white hat hacking, but outright theft."Previously, after Blockstream confirmed that the vulnerability in the bridging node had been fixed, the Liquid Network attacker returned 3,400 BTC and retained approximately 598.5 BTC (worth about 47.3 million USD).

The International Energy Agency (IEA) monthly report states that this year the global oil supply-demand gap will be larger than previously expected, as the war in Iran has not ended, and the normalization of oil flows in the Middle East has been delayed until 2027, leading to a surge in fuel prices. Inventory plays a key role in market balance, but the buffer is decreasing, and the global refining system is being stretched to its limits.

Morgan Stanley stated that although market expectations indicate that data center investment will slow down, the growth of AI semiconductor suppliers may continue to exceed the broader growth of cloud spending by 2028 due to strong demand for advanced chip packaging.It is expected that the total capacity of advanced packaging will grow by about 50% by 2028, while the capital expenditure growth of cloud service providers will be 12%.

According to Bloomberg, Dell Technologies is seeking to raise approximately $4 billion through the issuance of investment-grade bonds for refinancing existing debt. Insiders say the final issuance size has not yet been determined and will be adjusted based on market demand.This bond issuance comes at a time when demand for AI-driven servers continues to grow, and Dell is benefiting from the surge in investment in AI infrastructure, boosting its performance.

According to Bitcoin News monitoring, the white hat hacker group behind the Liquid vulnerability exploitation incident accused Blockstream of spending only $1.5 million, or possibly not spending any funds at all, to secure assets worth $5 billion.In a new on-chain message, the group demanded that Blockstream pay a bug bounty equivalent to 10% of the related assets using its own funds, warning that refusal to pay would result in a 15% loss for holders.The group also stated that it would publish the private key used to decrypt previous conversations with Blockstream. Previously, the group had returned 3,400 BTC to the Liquid Federation, with approximately 600 BTC still not returned.

Indonesian AI infrastructure platform Zankore has received support from NVIDIA, signing a $3.1 billion loan agreement to purchase advanced chips, highlighting the surge in demand for computing power in Asia.Citigroup, Dutch International Bank, and others are underwriting this loan, with Citigroup as the sole debt advisor. This is one of the largest AI infrastructure financings in Asia.

According to DIGITIMES, the IC design and semiconductor industry generally believes that the duration of the current tight supply and demand for mature process chips will be longer. Most industry opinions suggest that the industry will need to actively compete for capacity at least until 2028, and price increases may become the norm in the industry. Some even believe that by 2030, the supply and demand relationship for mature process chips may not be able to stabilize.Industry insiders in IC design admit that the overall market situation for end products is not particularly hot; it is just that the demand related to cloud AI is excessively large and continues to expand.

South Korea plans to integrate five public power companies in October 2027 to accelerate investment and meet the energy demands brought about by the growth of the country's artificial intelligence and chip manufacturing industries.Seoul also plans to streamline public enterprises in the oil, gas, and port sectors.

Serenity posted a reminder that the fundamentals of storage shortages have not changed and may even become more acute. The market will shift from one bottleneck sector to another, but the companies themselves remain unchanged; what changes are the valuations and narratives. Serenity added several pieces of evidence suggesting that the storage supply-demand gap may be worse than the market expects: Nikkei reported that Japanese distributors claim the storage demand gap has reached 40% to 60%, and prices may rise by about 50% by the end of the year; SpaceX has not accounted for the approximately $1.3 trillion capital expenditure from ultra-large cloud providers, and total spending may exceed expectations; SanDisk's expected gross margin of 80% is expected to be maintained until 2030; and order visibility for companies like Samsung has extended to 2031.Serenity emphasized that storage stocks are highly volatile, with some of its positions showing unrealized gains of over 270%, making them easier to hold. However, the company's operational fundamentals and short-term stock prices often do not align. The same logic applies to other bottleneck areas such as optical modules, CW lasers, and substrates; after a rebound in stock prices, there is no need to assume that shortages have ended. Storage prices and supply-demand structures remain tight, and market sentiment and valuation narratives are rapidly rotating.

CryptoQuant analyst Zizcrypto stated that the Stablecoin Supply Ratio Oscillator (SSR Oscillator) 90-day reading quickly rose to the "strong stablecoin buying demand" zone, reaching 3.74 on August 21, close to the peak of about 4 expected in November 2024. Since then, the indicator has started to decline, while BTC is currently trading around $77,000.The rapid rebound of the stablecoin demand indicator coincided with a strong liquidity pulse that occurred earlier in the market. However, what is more concerning now is not the short-term spike itself, but whether this demand signal can be sustained. If the 90-day SSR Oscillator continues to decline and falls back below the "high" zone, the confirmation strength of this indicator regarding the sustained increase in stablecoin buying demand will weaken. Currently, this change appears more like a liquidity pulse rather than a formed persistent demand expansion cycle.The demand signals from the stablecoin side have indeed strengthened significantly recently, but the 90-day oscillation indicator has already started to cool down from its peak of 3.74. If it cannot maintain itself in the "high" zone, then whether this liquidity improvement can evolve into more lasting demand growth remains in question.

On September 2, TSMC Senior Vice President and Co-COO Dr. Wei-Chung Hou stated that the speed of change in AI demand far exceeds past industry experiences. Taking TSMC's equipment demand as an example, the estimated equipment needed for this year at the end of last year was calculated to be 1 times, but just one quarter later it increased to 1.5 times, and by July of this year, it had reached 1.9 times, with demand nearly doubling in just six months.Dr. Hou pointed out that the semiconductor industry has never faced such rapid changes in demand in the past 30 years. The entire industry needs to provide nearly double the original equipment, capacity, and resources in an extremely short time. TSMC is currently constructing 13 fabs in Taiwan and about 5 to 6 overseas, totaling nearly 20 fabs globally, with the scale of construction expanded to about 3 to 4 times that of the past, yet still unable to fully meet customer demand.He emphasized that in the AI era, the entire system or module needs to be optimized, and traditional collaborative models can no longer meet the demand. The supply chain must be restructured into a new cooperation model that is more closely integrated. The entire ecosystem is not yet prepared for such rapid growth, with equipment demand nearly doubling in six months, and almost no suppliers can completely avoid capacity constraints.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost stated that the demand for Bitcoin in the market has declined again. Although short-term holders are still taking profits, and selling pressure remains stable, apparent demand has turned negative again, indicating that demand has significantly weakened in the past few days.He believes that this change is also reflected in the price structure of Bitcoin, with the current trend tending to weaken. If demand does not recover in the short term, Bitcoin may face further downside risks.

According to ZEIT, the Berlin city government suffered a cyber attack two weeks ago, and the hacker group is suspected of implementing ransomware using the stolen data. According to Der Spiegel, the attackers are believed to be the long-active Rhysida hacker group, demanding a payment of 30 bitcoins (approximately 2 million euros) and threatening to release the data.The sensitive information involved may include records of violations and passwords. The Berlin state government has not yet confirmed the extent of the data breach and has not responded to the ransom amount or the identity of the attackers, stating that it will not comment "for reasons of investigative strategy." Berlin's mayor, Kai Wegner, has made it clear that Berlin will not yield to extortion. The main departments affected are transportation and construction management, which were temporarily isolated from the state government's network after the incident.

Cryptoquant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju stated that the peak of the current Bitcoin bull market cycle may be driven by institutional funds and ETF demand outside the United States. He pointed out that deeper stablecoin liquidity and tokenized asset infrastructure will expand global market participation. Using South Korea as an example, Ki Young Ju mentioned that the country currently does not have a spot Bitcoin ETF, retail investors cannot purchase overseas-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs, and most companies are unable to open trading accounts to buy BTC. South Korea has phased in corporate participation, with the Financial Services Commission (FSC) roadmap covering about 3,500 listed companies and qualified professional investors, but financial institutions and other companies are still excluded.Strategy's Bitcoin bank evaluated 25 major institutions covering trading, custody, digital asset products, financing, and corporate participation, with an overall adoption rate of 32%. RWA.xyz data shows that the global tokenized asset distributed asset value is $38.63 billion, an increase of 2.65% compared to 30 days ago. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) stated that stablecoins have the potential to enable faster, programmable payments, but current designs may pose risks to financial integrity, liquidity, and currency. Ki Young Ju pointed out that the cumulative net inflow before the launch of the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF was about $57 billion over two years, and the next phase will be global institutionalization, with more institutions adopting BTC as a strategic asset, and countries lacking ETFs will also improve related investment channels.

Market expectations for the Bank of Japan tightening monetary policy are heating up, with weak demand for Japan's two-year government bond auction, the bid-to-cover ratio at 2.97, lower than last time's 3.63 and the past 12 months' average of 3.74. The tail difference is 0.034, higher than last month's 0.007, marking the weakest since 2016. The government led by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi supports an interest rate hike as early as September, with overnight index swaps indicating a probability of about 84% for a rate hike in September.

Analysis of the AI semiconductor and infrastructure cycle indicates that the demand for AI infrastructure will continue to exceed that of the internet era, as user penetration and per capita token are multiplied and converted into tokens, significantly raising the ceiling. User penetration has surpassed 50%, with growth primarily coming from the still-early per capita token; the median monthly AI spending per employee in U.S. companies is about $12, which could long-term approach around 10% of white-collar salaries, approximately $1,000 per month, leaving nearly two orders of magnitude of space in between. Unlike the flat subscriptions and extremely low marginal hardware consumption of the internet, the high costs of inference make the marginal cost of a single access higher, requiring greater infrastructure intensity.After developers program, the next ARR growth will still mainly come from broad programming: non-programmers use programming infrastructure to complete non-programming tasks across industries, with programming becoming the default execution kernel for agents. Tasks related to broad programming account for about 60% to 70% of ARR. As of June 2026, Codex accounted for 64% of the total output tokens from Codex and ChatGPT among OpenAI's enterprise clients; since February, Codex has seen a much higher weekly growth in verticals such as law, sales recruitment, and marketing compared to engineering. In Anthropic's revenue, narrow development/software accounts for about 40%, while finance and insurance exceed 20%, with law, life sciences, retail, and others also having considerable shares.The demand-side token growth logic remains, with a high overlap between funders and beneficiaries.

According to CNBC, Goldman Sachs analyst Jim Schneider stated in an interview with CNBC that Nvidia's latest announcement of its second-quarter performance for fiscal year 2027 exceeded market expectations, and the revenue guidance for the next quarter is also higher than analysts' estimates. Driven by the company's optimistic outlook for revenue growth in the next fiscal year, Nvidia's stock price rose about 4% in after-hours trading.Schneider pointed out that Nvidia expects revenue for fiscal year 2028 to still achieve about 70% growth, indicating that the demand for AI infrastructure remains strong. The current focus of the market has shifted from short-term performance to whether the AI computing investment cycle can be sustained, and whether Nvidia's high growth expectations for the next few years can be realized.

Apple's first 2-nanometer M6 chip officially debuts, equipped with a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, and dual 16-core neural network engines, with unified memory bandwidth reaching up to 170GB per second, initially featured in the new Mac mini. This chip is manufactured by TSMC using a 2-nanometer process and is the first to adopt gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors, making it the world's first consumer-grade 2-nanometer chip.The supply chain is focused on the subsequent high-end M series packaging architecture. Based on the Fusion Architecture of the previous generation M5 Pro, M5 Max, and the four-die design of M5 Ultra, Apple chips have transitioned from a single large die to a modular design. Future M6 Pro, Max, or Ultra are expected to enhance advanced packaging requirements such as SoIC-MH and WMCM, increasing interconnect density with SoIC-MH and integrating logic, LPDDR memory, and high-speed I/O with WMCM.TSMC is actively preparing for expansion, with Zhunan AP6 as the main mass production base for SoIC, Longtan AP3 upgrading to WMCM, and Chiayi AP7 taking on related capacity. Analysts estimate that WMCM's monthly production capacity will reach about 60,000 units by the end of 2026 and over 120,000 units in 2027. Equipment manufacturers such as Hongshuo, Junhua, Yinneng, and material manufacturers Changxing, Xinying Materials, and Yongguang are expected to benefit.

NVIDIA (NVDA.O) Chief Financial Officer expects that next year, demand from AI labs will contribute about a quarter of the company's overall business.