Whale Tracking: Amid renewed US-Iran clashes, smart money flipped to go long on 5.5 million barrels of crude oil, while ramping up positions on "invasion of Iran" prediction shares.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: U.S. venture capital firm Dimension spent a week in China, visiting AI labs, investors, and founders, then wrote a 5-page internal letter to its limited partners (LPs). The firm previously conducted research in Shanghai last year; this trip covered Beijing and Shanghai, with the goal of recalibrating its assessment of China’s AI sector. A key finding highlighted is that China’s open-weight models have entered the production pipelines of U.S. AI companies. For example, Cursor’s Composer 2 was further trained on Kimi K2.5, while legal AI firm Harvey’s Tenet model underwent post-training on Kimi K3. Dimension summarized this cross-Pacific value chain as a "two-way trans-Pacific flow": U.S. labs first train cutting-edge models, Chinese labs absorb these capabilities and release open-weight models, then U.S. application companies further train on the Chinese models to build products sold to U.S. enterprises. However, despite surging usage, revenue has not accrued proportionally to Chinese model firms. Dimension summed this up in one sentence: "China is getting Western workloads, not Western revenue." Open-weight models can be deployed across multiple platforms, with U.S. inference firms like Fireworks, Baseten, and Modal capturing the bulk of service fees. Chinese models drive down costs, ultimately benefiting U.S. cloud providers, inference platforms, and AI application companies as well. Dimension’s final assessment is that it is no longer feasible to simply split China and U.S. AI into two separate systems. Hardware like chips is being decoupled: the U.S. faces constraints from power and grid infrastructure, while China lacks advanced chips. Yet models, data, inference services, and software frameworks continue to flow across borders. Debating "which side is winning the China-U.S. AI race" in simplistic terms no longer reflects the real industrial chain.

This morning session of A-shares saw the three major indexes open lower, rebound in volatile trading, then retreat toward the end of the session. By midday close, the Shanghai Composite Index fell 0.2%, the Shenzhen Component Index dropped 1%, and the ChiNext Index declined 1.29%. The AI corpus sector moved higher amid volatility. The combined turnover of Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses in the morning session was approximately 1.31 trillion yuan, a decrease of around 112.1 billion yuan from the same period of the previous trading day.

According to official announcements, Hyperliquid has launched Pons (PONS) perpetual contracts, with a maximum leverage of up to 3x. The current mark price is 0.32999, and the contract open interest stands at $524,866. The current funding rate for the PONS contract is -0.0823%.

According to TASS, Anatoly Popov, deputy chairman of Russia's Sberbank, said Russia's cryptocurrency trading volume is expected to top 4 trillion rubles (around $464.3 billion) in its first year, and could hit 7.5 trillion rubles (about $870.6 billion) by 2029. Popov noted that data from Russia's Ministry of Finance shows as of February this year, Russia's daily cryptocurrency trading volume was roughly 50 billion rubles, translating to an annual volume of about 18 trillion rubles. SberCIB investment research analysts, taking a more conservative stance, project that after cryptocurrency is legalized, roughly 20% of the annual trading volume — equivalent to 3.5 trillion to 4 trillion rubles — will be executed on trading platforms in the first year. This figure is forecast to rise to between 4.75 trillion and 5.25 trillion rubles by 2028, and reach 7.5 trillion rubles by 2029.

According to data from Bank of America, crypto funds recorded $3.2 billion in inflows last week, the largest single-week inflow since October 2025.

Beating AI News: OpenClaw’s last major version launched in mid-July, with no new official major release in the nearly seven weeks since. Previously, the project updated roughly every two days on average, a pace that has now slowed significantly. Today, the OpenClaw development team rolled out a new version dubbed "OpenClaw 2.0", marking the project’s largest update to date. A total of 933 developers participated, merging over 16,000 pull requests (PRs) — accounting for roughly half of all PRs merged in the project’s history. The update focuses on lowering the barrier to entry: during installation, it automatically detects existing ChatGPT, Claude subscriptions, API keys, and local models on the user’s device, reducing manual configuration. The browser-based interface has also been revamped, enabling direct chatting, task resumption, session management, and support for multiple users to join or take over the same task. The update also covers messaging, memory, Skills, models, automation, plugins, security, and native apps. Over the past 230 days, OpenClaw released 106 versions. The team acknowledged that the previous rapid release pace outpaced its underlying architecture and release processes. Moving forward, OpenClaw will continue to reduce its update frequency.