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Eurozone government bond yields remain high ahead of the European Central Bank's policy decision, with analysts expecting the central bank to raise interest rates by 25 basis points. The yield on Germany's 10-year government bonds rose to 3.44%, having previously reached 3.4514%, the highest since 2011. The market expects the European Central Bank's deposit rate to be 2.74% by December, up from the current 2.25%.

The second episode of the Gate Stocks series is now online. Lucas Sum, the head of stock market development at Gate, shared insights on why cryptocurrency exchanges are starting to venture into the stock market and analyzed the differences between Gate and traditional brokers in terms of trading experience and asset allocation methods. Lucas Sum stated that more and more digital asset users are beginning to pay attention to stock opportunities from global companies such as NVIDIA, Apple, and Tencent. Gate integrates stocks and crypto assets into the same account, allowing users to manage different types of investment assets using the same USDT balance.In terms of trading experience, Gate Stocks supports fund transfers using USDT, enabling users to participate in stock trading without waiting for traditional bank fund settlements. In addition to regular trading hours for U.S. stocks (9:30 AM - 4:00 PM ET), it also supports pre-market and after-hours trading, with fractional shares supported down to 0.01 shares. Besides stocks and ETFs, Gate also covers investment opportunities such as stock perpetual contracts, tokenized assets, Pre-IPOs, and direct IPOs. Lucas Sum emphasized that Gate is not trying to replace traditional brokers but rather to expand the possibilities of investment platforms, bringing the global stock market directly to digital asset users.

According to Sifted, the head of the robotics division of the French AI unicorn Mistral is seeking to raise 200 million euros for its new startup, planning to develop robotic AI models based on more comprehensive data training to surpass competitors in data quality.Mistral officially established its robotics division last year.

The head of government affairs at Paradigm stated that the external view that the Clarity Act is almost hopeless to pass is not credible. The related pessimistic rhetoric mostly comes from anonymous staff members who did not participate in the core negotiations (intending to guide public opinion), or from legislators using the media to voice their demands, pressuring the White House and Senate leadership to meet their own requests.Major banks plan to invest heavily in lobbying and advertising next week; if the bill is doomed to fail, the banks would not invest such resources. The time window is indeed tight: the Senate reconvenes on Monday, and the House will recess on Friday in five days. However, the bill is far from dead. Those who assert that the bill has no chance are either seeking attention or trying to create a predetermined narrative of "bill failure."

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced the appointment of Sean Ballard as the Head of Derivatives and Institutional Business. Ballard will play a key role in strengthening trading infrastructure, risk frameworks, and institutional capabilities, with responsibilities covering trading risk and exchange technology.Ballard has over 25 years of experience in global financial markets, encompassing derivatives, high-frequency trading, trading risk, market structure, and exchange technology. Before joining Bybit, he worked at Jump Trading, where he led the company's high-frequency futures trading operations in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, managing portfolios and collaborating with global exchanges and regulators on market structure, trading performance, and infrastructure. During his time at Jump Trading, he also served as a senior trader on the Jump Crypto team, managing centralized exchange trading and driving strategic partnerships related to ecosystem growth.At Bybit, Ballard will enhance the institutional trading experience through market infrastructure, risk management, and product development. Bybit Institutional has introduced professional services such as bank tripartite arrangements over the past year, allowing institutions to manage counterparty risk through regulated custody while retaining full trading authority; the market maker gateway has reduced latency for high-frequency and quantitative clients from 4 milliseconds to 1.5 milliseconds. Starting July 2026, Finloop's AAA-rated USD money market fund FUIDL will be available as trading collateral on Bybit.

According to Nikkei News, the rise in Bitcoin prices lacks momentum, as it was bought due to "dollar depreciation trading," but this is only a fleeting moment. Now, the expectation of interest rate hikes in the United States has become a heavy burden for Bitcoin. The market generally expects Bitcoin prices to peak in the fall.A factor to watch is the U.S. midterm elections in November. In years when midterm elections were held, the market tends to decline from September to the end of the year, with a drop of 45% in 2018 and an 18% decline in 2022.

The venture capital firm a16z's crypto division, a16z crypto, is hiring a Head of Social Media, with a salary range of $199,000 to $232,000.This position is aimed at candidates who are extremely active online, understand crypto and internet culture, can create and deliver content, and can showcase intelligence in a non-corporate or non-awkward manner. Responsibilities cover podcasts, investments, events, editing, memes, short video editing, and social media strategy. This is a remote position, requiring some travel or attendance at offline events.

The crypto market has always been rife with rumors. Today, an HTX spokesperson responded to recent rumors regarding Sun Yuchen and the platform, emphasizing that this is part of the "expected game" and that the platform's operations are normal. In the Web3 industry, there are very few trading platforms that can survive and cross a 13-year cycle; time and data are often the most objective measures to test market FUD.

Tibo, the product head of OpenAI Codex, stated that the number of active users has reached 25 million. To celebrate this milestone, the usage limits for all paid subscriptions of ChatGPT Work and Codex have now been reset.

Robert Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, stated that the macro investment logic for Bitcoin is continuously strengthening. Even though regulatory issues have temporarily taken a backseat, fiscal concerns continue to drive demand for Bitcoin in the market.Mitchnick pointed out that the fiscal pressures in the current macro environment have become an important factor supporting Bitcoin's appeal, further reinforcing its narrative as a hedging tool. This perspective reflects institutions' ongoing focus on Bitcoin's long-term macro positioning.

Chris Marlon, a key executive responsible for data center construction at OpenAI, left the company last week. The "Stargate" project that Marlon was in charge of has faced initial setbacks, leading OpenAI to shift towards collaborating with cloud service providers. Currently, the company is advancing its infrastructure development by leasing complete data center facilities.OpenAI is undergoing executive adjustments in preparation for its IPO in 2027, with several executives having left recently. It is expected that by 2030, spending on computing infrastructure will reach $750 billion.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, Hyperliquid's largest long position closed out for profit early this morning, liquidating 60,000 ETH and 1,200 BTC, realizing a profit of 45.3 million USD.Its long position decreased from 537 million USD to 143 million USD: all 120,000 ETH long positions were closed for profit, yielding 32.77 million USD; 1,200 out of 3,000 BTC long positions were closed for profit, yielding 12.53 million USD. Currently, there are still 1,800 BTC long positions held, with an unrealized profit of 21.08 million USD, bringing the total profit to 66.38 million USD.

Przemysław Kral, the head of the Polish cryptocurrency exchange Zondacrypto, is reportedly facing criminal charges for involvement in a large-scale fraud and has begun cooperating with Polish prosecutors. According to Polish media Onet, Kral is seeking a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony, which may involve Zondacrypto's funding of right-wing political figures.Prosecutors estimate that Zondacrypto customers have lost at least 2.4 billion Polish złoty (approximately 650 million USD). Investigators claim that the exchange only used a portion of customer funds to purchase cryptocurrencies, while the remaining funds were transferred to private accounts controlled by Zondacrypto's management. Kral has remained silent on X since mid-April when he publicly disclosed that Zondacrypto could not access a cold wallet holding approximately 4,500 bitcoins. He denies misappropriating funds, stating that the private keys for the wallet were supposed to be handed over by Zonda's founder and former CEO Sylwester Suszek, who has been missing since 2022.Reports also state that Zondacrypto was a major sponsor of the Polish CPAC conference, which took place before the second round of the presidential election, ultimately won by Karol Nawrocki. The exchange spent 37 million złoty on advertising with the broadcasting station Telewizja Republika in the last year, while Kral's company also made payments to foundations associated with politicians Zbigniew Ziobro and Przemysław Wipler.

On August 21, the GATE ZONE fireside chat event took place in the Summer Bay area of Coinfest Asia, where Gate Head of Global Partnerships Jason Fung shared insights on the theme "Predicting the Biggest Market Opportunities." He discussed the competitive landscape of prediction markets, user-created markets, the Builder ecosystem, and future market opportunities. Jason Fung stated that as on-chain prediction markets continue to develop, industry competition will no longer focus solely on liquidity and trading volume. Instead, lowering the barriers to market creation, diversifying market types, and enabling more users to participate in market building will become important directions for the future development of prediction markets.Regarding the recent launch of the event contract Builder by Gate DexBuilder, Jason Fung mentioned that enabling users to create markets independently is an important step towards the openness of prediction markets. By lowering the barriers to creating and launching event markets, users can quickly build markets around popular events and explore more niche themes and potential demands, thereby driving the evolution of prediction markets from a product form dominated by a few platforms to a more open market ecosystem.Jason Fung believes that there are still many opportunities in prediction markets that have not been fully explored, and their application scope is expected to continue extending from popular fields such as politics, sports, crypto, AI, and entertainment. As more developers and entrepreneurs enter this space, the Builder ecosystem, market diversity, and user experience will become important driving forces for industry development, and on-chain event markets are expected to further expand from early user groups to a broader user market.

According to Bloomberg, citing informed sources, China's Ministry of State Security recently requested some government-related agencies to uninstall the Windows 10 Shenzhou Internet Security Government Edition operating system, advancing the planned end of support originally set for February 2027 by several months. This operating system was developed by a joint venture between Microsoft and China Electronics Technology Group, established in 2016, aimed at ensuring Windows 10 meets the security requirements of the Chinese government.The report states that the new directive comes just weeks before a planned summit between Chinese and U.S. leaders, catching some government agency staff by surprise. As China gradually removes overseas technology products from its government procurement whitelist, this early discontinuation will further reduce reliance on U.S. technology. Shenzhou Internet Security has not publicly responded to this matter.

The head of Robinhood's crypto department, Johann Kerbrat, recently accepted an interview on threadguy's podcast.In the interview, Kerbrat stated: "Compared to other blockchains, one of our key differences is that we only launched the chain, not a token. For us, the blockchain is a pure technology, the infrastructure that supports all our new businesses. We do not need to constantly adjust our strategic priorities to maintain the rise or stability of token prices. This avoids significant disruptions and is a huge advantage for us."

World Liberty Financial (WLFI) announced that the company has appointed Ryan Ballantyne as Chief Business Officer.Ryan Ballantyne has over thirty years of experience in capital markets, derivatives, asset management, and digital assets. Previously, he served as the Head of Institutional Client Strategy at Coinbase Institutional, where he was responsible for assisting public companies and institutions in adopting digital asset fund management, trading, and custody solutions. Earlier, he held senior positions at Osprey Funds and Blackforce Capital, and worked at institutions such as Susquehanna, Deutsche Bank, and Smith Barney.

The Shanghai headquarters of the People's Bank of China held a work meeting for the second half of 2026, during which it emphasized the need to firmly uphold the bottom line of preventing systemic financial risks. It will continue to strengthen the assessment and verification of bank institution ratings. Monitoring and analysis of systemically important financial institutions will be enhanced.There will be ongoing prevention and handling of risks related to speculative virtual currency trading. Efforts will be made to actively promote the standardization of financial product online marketing behaviors by local institutions. The mechanism for preventing and resolving systemic risks will be continuously improved. There will be a strengthened crackdown on illegal financial activities. The framework for macro-prudential management will be continuously refined. The level of cross-border financial risk monitoring will be comprehensively enhanced.

DeepSeek has just participated in a strategic placement of YuTree Technology with approximately 141 million yuan. The head of the Harness team, Cui Tianyi, subsequently publicly criticized the description of DeepSeek in the related IPO materials.The materials claim that DeepSeek V4 "ranks among the top tier globally in performance, with programming capability only 0.3% weaker than Claude flagship." Cui Tianyi pointed out that in the V4 paper, only one SWE Verified score is close to Opus 4.6, with scores of 80.6 and 80.8 respectively, which cannot be directly generalized to mean that the overall programming capability is only 0.3% weaker.He sarcastically stated that such writing is hard not to be considered "pure fabrication." However, the criticism was aimed at the exaggerated statements in the intermediary materials.