nct

According to blockchain data analysis company Bitrace, another leading trading guarantee platform "Welfare Guarantee" began to withdraw all money laundering-related public group merchants last night. The withdrawal scope includes illegal entities commonly known as "Card Connection Back to U" and "Cash Car."Bitrace stated that the "Welfare Wallet" operated by Welfare Guarantee is currently experiencing rapid capital outflow. Since the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) officially announced sanctions against Xinbi Guarantee, the wallet has recorded an outflow of 9.3 million USDT. Bitrace previously mentioned that due to the sanctions against Xinbi Guarantee, abnormal capital outflows have occurred in its secretly deployed sub-guarantee platforms, and a large number of guarantee merchants are rapidly exiting the related market.

Circle's blockchain Arc tweeted that the transaction memo feature is now available on the testnet.Developers can attach structured context to a single contract call without modifying the existing contract. Applicable scenarios include invoice numbers, payment reference numbers, customer IDs, and reconciliation tracking.

According to The Block, the Blockchain Association and the Crypto Council for Innovation filed a preliminary injunction motion on September 9 in the Sangamon County Circuit Court in Illinois, requesting to halt the new cryptocurrency tax in the state before it takes effect. This summer, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the Digital Asset Tax Act, which proposes a 0.2% tax on digital asset transactions, set to take effect in January 2027.Previously, the two associations, along with the Digital Chamber, filed a lawsuit against the state in August. In a 34-page motion, the organizations stated that the tax is unprecedented and has caused "irreparable harm" to industry members, and that if the bill takes effect, it will force businesses to comply hastily without clear guidance, facing the risk of criminal penalties. They also pointed out that the law violates the Illinois Constitution by implementing differential taxation on digital assets and contravenes the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibits discriminatory taxes on e-commerce. The Illinois Governor's office has not yet responded to requests for comment.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard stated that any vessels passing through the restricted area of the Strait of Hormuz without coordination from Iran will face sanctions.

According to Crypto Briefing, the Bank of Italy has warned cryptocurrency service providers that every cryptocurrency transfer, regardless of the transaction amount, must undergo sanctions screening, and no minimum transaction threshold may be set to evade automatic screening. This requirement stems from guidelines applicable in Italy from December 30, 2025, issued by the European Banking Authority, and is not a new sanction obligation.The Bank of Italy specifically pointed out that certain instant payment exemptions for payment service providers do not apply to cryptocurrency transfers. Cryptocurrency companies need to review their screening systems, update their sanctions lists, and alert procedures to ensure coverage of all applicable transactions. The MiCA authorization does not replace these independent obligations under the EU restrictive measures rules. This move will increase compliance costs for Italian cryptocurrency companies, requiring more complex systems to handle transaction alerts and potential sanctions matches.

The Ethereum Foundation stated on the X platform that the Trezor hardware wallet now supports the "Clear Signing" feature through the ERC-7730 standard, making transactions more readable and understandable on the hardware device.This progress is the result of the Clear Signing working group promoted under the foundation's "Trillion Dollar Security Initiative," aimed at reducing the risk of users suffering asset losses due to "blind signing" of unclear transactions and encouraging more wallets and decentralized applications to participate.

According to the Phoenix Veritas Foundation, the cultural token themed around Hunter Biden's laptop, LAPTOP, has been issued on the Base chain, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. The initial circulation at TGE is 350 million tokens (35%). In terms of token distribution, the founders (including Hunter Biden) and the prediction mechanism each account for 30%, community airdrops account for 20%, liquidity and the foundation treasury each account for 10%, and charitable distribution accounts for 5%. The founders' tokens have a 6-month lock-up period and a 24-month linear unlock.LAPTOP has no utility and is positioned as a purely cultural digital collectible, with its value entirely driven by community sentiment. The token contract has been audited for security by Hacken in April 2026, with no major vulnerabilities. Regarding market makers, the foundation has signed lending agreements for a total of 20.5 million tokens with G20 and GSR.

Several mainstream overseas AI services encountered issues tonight. Claude has already experienced two rounds of failures this evening. Sonnet 5 started showing errors at 20:37 Beijing time and announced recovery at 20:56; half an hour later, Anthropic reported a larger scope of multi-model error rate increase, affecting Mythos/Fable 5.1, Mythos/Fable 5, as well as Opus 5, 4.8, and 4.6. claude.ai, Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork are still in a partial failure state.Subsequently, Grok also went down. xAI marked Grok Web as "outage" from 21:30 Beijing time, and recovery has not yet been announced.Now OpenAI has also joined the list of failures. At 22:58 Beijing time, the OpenAI status page added an incident for "increased error rates for ChatGPT and Codex," stating that they are investigating the issue.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Becerra stated at a press conference in Washington yesterday that the Trump administration may target digital assets, the aviation industry, and the shipping industry as new sanctions in the process of further pressuring the Iranian economy.

Cryptocurrency exchange Backpack announced that users can now use Micron and SanDisk stocks as collateral to deposit into a unified investment portfolio margin account that covers stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other assets. Stock holdings can be used for USD lending, contract trading, and spot margin.Backpack had previously provided 24/7 trading services for some U.S. stocks to international investors, who have complete ownership of the traded U.S. stocks and can perform 1:1 bridging between traditional securities and tokenized assets on Solana. The newly added collateral is limited to the two stocks mentioned above, and Backpack has also launched perpetual contracts for MU, SNDK, SPY, and QQQ. Backpack stated that more assets will be launched in the future, but did not disclose a specific timeline.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Blinken stated that they are communicating with any parties supporting Iran, warning airlines, shipping companies, and digital asset stakeholders that they may become targets of a new round of sanctions.He mentioned that the U.S. will systematically "remove bad actors" concerning the Iran issue and advise all parties to steer clear of related transactions and cooperation regarding Iran and Russia, emphasizing that support should not be provided to the aforementioned regimes.

According to official news, the Polymarket website is down, and users are unable to place orders. Polymarket has stated that they are working to fix this issue. Trading is expected to resume by 18:00 today (Beijing time) at the latest.

U.S. Federal Judge Rita Lin issued a partial summary judgment in a 59-page ruling regarding Anthropic's lawsuit against the Trump administration, determining that the government's punishment of Anthropic for publicly refusing to allow the military to use its Claude large model for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens and lethal autonomous operations constituted illegal retaliation, violating the First Amendment, due process clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The judge also revoked the related designations and Defense Secretary Hegseth's injunction, issuing a permanent injunction.The controversy arose from the Pentagon's demand that Anthropic remove all usage restrictions and accept terms allowing "all lawful uses," while Anthropic maintained its last two bottom lines. On February 27, 2025, Trump ordered all federal agencies to cease using the company's technology, and Hegseth subsequently prohibited any military contractors from doing business with it. During this process, the government abandoned its core claims, acknowledging that Anthropic had no backdoor access to the deployed models and that the risks of Claude were no greater than those of other "black box" systems. Lin pointed out that the government's punishment under the guise of "national security" was not a blank check, and that the government had been operating under the preliminary injunction since March without indicating any harm.Anthropic did not achieve a complete victory, as its claim that Trump's directive exceeded presidential authority was dismissed. Anthropic informed the court that if the relevant measures continued, its defense-related revenue would decrease by 50% to 100%, resulting in a loss of billions of dollars in overall revenue by 2026.

The cryptocurrency exchange Kraken recently temporarily locked some customer accounts due to nearly 12,000 small transfers sent from wallets marked by Arkham Intelligence as belonging to competitor HTX to Kraken-associated addresses between August 17 and 24. Each transfer ranged from a few cents to several dollars. Kraken stated that this method, known as dusting attacks, exploits the arbitrary transfer characteristics of public blockchains to associate sanctioned funds with unrelated users, thereby triggering sanction screening mechanisms.The Kraken compliance team has restored user access while continuing to freeze the relevant sanctioned funds and cooperating with authorities to ensure the attack does not achieve its intended effect. HTX responded that an internal review found no official accounts involved in the related small transactions and is investigating whether the sending wallets were misidentified or operated by third parties. The UK sanctioned HTX in May, and the EU included it in a trading ban in July, which took effect on August 23, coinciding with the timing of the attack.

AI assistant startup Instinct announced the completion of a $250 million Series B financing round, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. After this round of financing, the company's total funding amount reached $350 million, with a valuation rising to $2.5 billion.Instinct was launched by Spear Street Technology, led by 23-year-old founder Noah Shinn. The product is still in private testing. Users can connect it to personal applications and devices, and interact with the AI assistant via text messages and phone calls for planning trips, purchasing goods, booking events, and managing subscriptions among other daily tasks.

UPBIT will list Polyswarm (NCT) on August 26 at 21:00 and support KRW trading. During the trading support period, the trading fee will be reduced from 0.05% to 0%, and the event will last until August 27 at 20:59.

The Iranian rial fell to a historic low this week, with the open market exchange rate dropping to about 202,000 rials for 1 US dollar, compared to about 1.53 million rials in the first quarter. During the same period, the US government launched the "Economic Outcast Initiative," adding more than 60 entities to the Treasury Department's blacklist and for the first time designating digital assets as a sanctionable area.State-owned farms associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) control about 65% of Iran's Bitcoin mining capacity. Iranian miners have accounted for about 3% to 7% of global Bitcoin hash power since 2019, with the mined Bitcoin valued at approximately $1.35 billion to $3.15 billion at different stages. Iran legalized Bitcoin mining in 2019, allowing licensed operators to use industrial electricity at about $0.004 per kilowatt-hour and sell the mined tokens to the Central Bank of Iran.Chainalysis estimates that by the fourth quarter of 2025, IRGC-associated wallets will receive over $3 billion; Elliptic states that the Central Bank of Iran holds at least $507 million in USDT. In June, the US Treasury sanctioned Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex. Nobitex had previously handled more than half of Iran's digital asset inflows; in April, the US Treasury seized nearly $500 million in crypto assets related to Iran.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced this week that it will include Iran's digital asset industry in the same sanctions framework it has long used to sanction the oil, banking, and financial sectors, further tightening Iran's ability to evade sanctions through cryptocurrency. This action is part of "Operation Economic Outcast," referred to as "Economic D-Day" against Iran, and represents a significant escalation of global risks for cryptocurrency enterprises.According to the new action, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has the authority to impose sanctions on individuals anywhere. OFAC stated that Iran is increasingly using cryptocurrency as a preferred tool to evade sanctions, supporting transactions related to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and insiders of the Iranian regime. Foreign exchanges, over-the-counter desks, payment processors, and infrastructure providers that knowingly support transactions in Iran's digital asset industry will face the risk of being added to the sanctions list and losing access to the U.S. financial system.OFAC also sanctioned members of a group within Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) accused of representing Iran in attacks on critical U.S. infrastructure and published their wallet addresses. The group's co-leader Behzad Mesri and members Keyvan Fayyaz Ghareh Blagh and Arman Kahzadian's Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency addresses have been added to the sanctions list. Previously, Bloomberg reported that Iran had launched Bitcoin-backed insurance services for shipping companies, and the U.S. also froze cryptocurrency assets related to the Iranian regime in July, most of which were Tether stablecoins.

The U.S. Treasury Department has expanded its sanctions framework against Iran to include the digital asset sector, stating that the relevant cryptocurrency payments exceed $100 million, which were used to assist in the sale of Iranian oil. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a division of the U.S. Treasury, has also imposed sanctions on nearly 60 entities, individuals, and vessels involved in nuclear energy, missiles, cyber activities, and the oil network.The sanctions in the digital asset sector allow OFAC to sanction foreign individuals and companies operating in Iran's digital asset sector or providing support services to the relevant field. The U.S. Treasury stated that Iran is increasingly using cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions, including transactions related to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and insiders within the government. The U.S. Treasury noted that Ukrainian broker Ivan Obukhov, a UAE national, has processed over $100 million in cryptocurrency payments since 2023 to assist the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force in oil sales. OFAC has added Ivan Obukhov and his UAE company Foscom FZE to the sanctions list.