costs

According to Cryptopolitan, over 100 researchers, using AI coding agents, have reduced the quantum attack resource score for the Bitcoin secp256k1 elliptic curve point addition subroutine by 86.1% (from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion). This optimization only targets a single step in Shor's algorithm and does not break any private keys or transfer funds; a complete attack still requires fault-tolerant quantum hardware that does not yet exist. However, each efficiency improvement compresses the time window for quantum migration after blockchain completion.According to Glassnode data, approximately 6.04 million BTC (30.2% of the circulating supply) face potential quantum risks due to exposed public keys on-chain. Ethereum plans to achieve full quantum resistance by December 2029, while the Bitcoin community faces greater challenges at the governance level, including how to handle approximately 1.7 million suspected dormant P2PK address coins held by Satoshi, which remains unresolved.

Castle Labs released a research report on September 10, comparing the execution costs of the swaps products launched by Variational with traditional perpetual contracts. The report shows that for most trading volumes, Variational is currently the lowest-cost venue among listed assets, with the cost of a $1 million trade in the US100 market being only $47.The report points out that the trading volume of RWA perpetual contracts has grown from less than $1 billion in October 2025 to over $12 billion in August 2026, currently accounting for about 12% to 13% of on-chain perpetual contract trading volume, with a peak in July reaching 20%. As of the report's release, the total open interest of RWA perpetual contracts was $4.9 billion, with TradeXYZ and Variational accounting for nearly 90%.Variational's swaps utilize RFQ execution and the proprietary liquidity provider Omni, with liquidity coming directly from traditional financial partners, and the fees being a holding cost charged once at the daily close, rather than relying on market supply and demand funding rates. Since the launch of the US100, US500, XAU, XAG, and USOIL markets at the beginning of the month, a total trading volume of $3.8 billion has been accumulated, with a peak open interest of $245 million. Currently, swaps have contributed over 50% of Variational's daily trading volume and more than $220 million in open interest.

According to the report "Explosive Growth of Stock Derivatives in 2026: The Landscape of Cryptocurrency Exchanges and Key Trends" released by RootData, the stock derivatives sector has transitioned from "marginal experimentation" to the "explosive growth" phase, with a cumulative trading volume of approximately $17.5 trillion from January to August.In terms of cumulative transaction volume, the concentration effect among the top exchanges remains significant. Among the four exchanges, Binance ranks first with $853.58 billion and a 61.3% market share; Bitget follows in second place with $270.85 billion and a 19.5% market share; OKX comes in third with $234.39 billion and a 16.8% market share; Bybit ranks fourth with $33.41 billion and a 2.4% market share.Regarding liquidity, in the ±2% weighted order book depth indicator, Binance and Bitget together account for over 70% of the stock derivatives order book liquidity. Among them, Binance has an average daily order book depth of approximately $10.1 million, followed closely by Bitget at $4.82 million, with OKX and Bybit at $3.87 million and $1.16 million, respectively.In terms of trading costs, in the recent comparison of weighted spreads for more than a dozen representative popular assets, Bitget ranks first with 0.0144%, followed closely by Binance at 0.0145%, with both essentially at the same level; OKX is at 0.0154%, and Bybit is at 0.0237%.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing the hope to include the recursive STARK memory pool proposal EIP-8288 in the Ethereum I-star upgrade, stating that it can be seen as the next step after Frames.This proposal allows quantum-safe signature data to be placed off-chain, reducing the cost of signatures; the fuel cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is also expected to drop from about 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal relies on frames and recursive STARK aggregated transaction dependencies, with nodes sending a STARK of about 100 to 300KB each time period; the on-chain overhead is one STARK and 96 bytes for each statement to be proven.

According to The Block, the Ink Foundation, an Ethereum L2 network under Kraken, has jointly established the Charter Foundation with crypto market maker GSR, law firms Carey Olsen, Renno & Co, Cooley, Fenwick, and auditing firms ChainSecurity, Zellic, among others. The aim is to provide a standardized shared legal framework for crypto projects to reduce token issuance costs. A spokesperson for the Ink Foundation stated that the organization is unrelated to Kraken.Currently, crypto projects typically need to independently establish a "three-entity structure" that includes a research and development entity (Labs), a Cayman Islands foundation, and a British Virgin Islands (BVI) subsidiary for issuance. The setup and independent director fees before the Token Generation Event (TGE) often exceed $100,000.The Charter Foundation aims to reduce the initial legal framework costs for token issuance by more than half by establishing a dedicated Cayman Islands exempt company as the launch structure for each project, with governance involving professional offshore compliance experts. Once the token is successfully issued, the Cayman entity will convert into an independent foundation and separate from Charter, ensuring the project's long-term independence.

Co-founder of Arbitrum Steven Goldfeder and co-founder of Solana Toly engaged in a debate over on-chain transaction fees, MEV protection, and the single sequencer model.Steven stated that one cannot simply compare surface-level fees. Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain actively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV, while some chains that claim lower fees have higher MEV costs, including front-running against retail investors. He expressed a preference for paying clear fees upfront rather than incurring hidden losses from front-running, sandwich attacks, and other issues for the sake of lower fees.Toly countered that Arbitrum currently has a less favorable bid-ask spread and higher fees. The 10% cut taken from transaction fees alone translates to a cost in basis points that exceeds the loss rate from sandwich attacks, which he estimates to be about 10 times that of the latter, not accounting for the impact of the spread. He emphasized, "A single sequencer that pursues shareholder value maximization can never outperform permissionless competition."

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the Poseidon hash function series, developed over many years, has generated significant practical value in Ethereum and other fields, and will continue to play a role in the coming years.Modern privacy protocols can quickly generate SNARK proofs on the client side, and Poseidon is one of the important reasons for this. Vitalik pointed out that today's general-purpose STARK has achieved extremely high performance, with the proof overhead for almost any batch computation reduced to three-digit levels, and it is expected to further drop to two-digit levels or even lower in the future, a development that has even exceeded expectations from the early 2020s.

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."

The core development team of Solana, Anza, announced that the Solana testnet has enabled the first phase of the SIMD-0437 proposal, and the account rent reduction mechanism has begun testing. This proposal includes a total of 5 functional gates, with only the first functional gate currently activated, and all adjustments have not yet been completed and deployed to the mainnet.Once all 5 phases are completed, the storage cost parameter lamports_per_byte for Solana will be reduced from 6960 to 696, resulting in an overall reduction of 90%. For example, in the case of token accounts, the deposit required to maintain an account in a rent-exempt state is expected to decrease from approximately $0.16 to $0.016, thereby lowering the costs of account creation and application deployment.

Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz pointed out that the narrative of AI infrastructure resembles a slow relay race, with bottlenecks sequentially transmitting from GPUs to memory, CPUs, and storage, each link freezing the supply chain of the next for years and locking in higher baseline costs. At the beginning of 2023, the GPU shock caused H100 rental prices to exceed $9 per hour, and server shipments fell by 22%; subsequently, manufacturers shifted capacity to HBM, leading to an 80% quarterly increase in enterprise SSD prices and over a 60% rise in DRAM.By the end of 2025, the workload of intelligent agents will push the CPU to GPU ratio to about 1:1, with the average price of server CPUs rising by 27% year-on-year; in 2026, nearline HDD annual capacity will be sold out. The construction cost of data centers has risen to about $20 billion per gigawatt, with orders for long-cycle equipment such as transformers and turbines scheduled as far out as 2029 to 2031.Tunguz referred to this as the long whip effect in the hardware sector: years of manufacturing delays amplify downstream demand shocks upstream, and when pressure is relieved at a certain bottleneck, it will be delayed in transmitting to the next link, with transformers scheduled for delivery in 2027 to 2028, NAND wafer fabs, and turbine production lines potentially facing the risk of overcapacity.

Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich stated that the core logic behind their bullish outlook on Bitcoin is that AI is significantly reducing the production costs of software, content, and analytics, and value will shift towards scarce assets that cannot be infinitely increased.The supply cap of 21 million Bitcoins is guaranteed by network rules, cannot be copied or diluted, and can be settled globally 24 hours a day. The long-term experience of Japanese households regarding changes in currency purchasing power has also reinforced this judgment.

OKX CEO Star stated that OKX is collaborating with Anthropic to address issues related to its corporate accounts. Earlier, Bloomberg reported that OKX was suspended due to Hong Kong employees violating Anthropic's geographical restrictions to access Claude, and has prohibited employees residing in Hong Kong or passing through China from using Anthropic's Claude AI model.Additionally, Star posted that the monthly cost for AI usage is between 6 million to 8 million dollars, and has built an internal AI development platform called Oli, which integrates multiple cutting-edge models to provide advanced AI capabilities and development tools for product managers and engineers.

Design software company Canva has lowered its annual revenue growth forecast by one-third to 20% due to AI feature delivery costs far exceeding expectations. CEO Melanie Perkins stated that user demand for AI features "significantly exceeded expectations," but the company has decided to postpone the large-scale launch of related products until it optimizes its architecture, reduces unit costs, and improves its business model. Since the release of Canva AI 2.0 in April, the cost per task has decreased by nearly 90%, but the volume of designs generated by AI users is three times that of previous versions, and economic pressures remain.This case reflects a common dilemma in the software industry: the cost of AI inference is breaking the traditional software "zero marginal cost" profit logic. Pitchbook analysts pointed out that Canva and Figma are the "most obvious signals" of this trend. Figma's free cash flow profit margin in the second quarter has dropped from 27% in the first quarter to 14%, and revenue growth in the third quarter is expected to slow from 48% to 36%. Canva previously sold employee shares at a valuation of $42 billion, and the market had anticipated its IPO in 2026, but analysts now believe the IPO may be delayed until next year.

According to Ai Yi's disclosure, the on-chain Changxin Storage TOP1 Air Force holds approximately $21.12 million in 1x leveraged CXMT short positions, with an entry price of around $6.5. The current price has risen to $7.28, resulting in an unrealized loss of about $2.255 million. Meanwhile, the total funding fees paid by this short position have reached $3.078 million.This position previously invested over $40 million in margin, and there is still a significant gap to the liquidation price of $15.466. However, the continuously accumulating funding costs are eroding profits, and the market speculates that this trader may still be betting on a significant correction in CXMT's price to cover current losses and achieve profitability.

According to the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily," based on its pioneering fully modular design architecture, Alibaba Cloud has shortened the delivery time of large AIDC data centers to 100 days, while the traditional delivery cycle in China is 6 to 12 months, and in the United States, it is 12 to 18 months. While shortening the construction period, the overall construction cost has been reduced by more than 10%. Alibaba Cloud plans to double the global capacity of modular data centers this year.This modular design refers to parallel production in various stages, with factory manufacturing pre-adjusted to containers, which are then transported to the site for hoisting and assembly, achieving a "building blocks" style of construction. Alibaba Cloud stated that this model will effectively support the rapid expansion demand for AI computing infrastructure.

Robinhood announced on the X platform that it has lowered the gas fee subsidy threshold for Robinhood Wallet on the Robinhood Chain from $5 to $0.50, a reduction of 90%.Robinhood stated that after the adjustment, more users will be able to enjoy gas fee subsidies when conducting swap transactions, and this subsidy policy will last until September 29.Previously, Robinhood Wallet had already covered part of the on-chain transaction fees for users through the gas sponsorship mechanism. This reduction in the subsidy threshold aims to further lower the entry costs for users into the Robinhood Chain ecosystem and enhance the activity of on-chain transactions.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas posted on X platform that BlackRock announced a 1-for-3 reverse split for ETHA, with the price rising from $14 to $42 in October.This move will reduce trading costs from 7 basis points to about 2 basis points. The ETF issuer believes that a 7 basis point spread is an issue and is adjusting it to about 2 basis points, while cryptocurrency exchanges charge about 140 basis points.

According to Jinshi News, Amazon employees have discovered that due to errors in the company's deployment of AI and a lack of expenditure control measures, some projects have experienced "catastrophically high" cost overruns. A senior engineer stated at an employee meeting that attempts to shift tasks from traditional programming to using AI models have resulted in "unplanned" expenditures.Amazon expects its capital expenditures to reach $200 billion this year, primarily invested in AI and data center infrastructure construction.