DA Davidson sharply lifted Micron Technology’s (MU) price target to $3,000, with Micron shares rebounding 8% from their recent low.

Lending protocol Loopscale has disclosed details of its merger with Solana ecosystem DEX Orca in official documentation. According to the docs: - Post-merger, Loopscale and Orca will continue to operate as products under Formation. - Loopscale’s point conversion will take place later this year, with specific details to be announced soon. - Points will continue to accrue until the redemption event starts. - Loopscale will not issue its own token; ORCA is the only token in the Formation ecosystem. BlockBeats previously reported that Solana ecosystem DEX Orca and lending protocol Loopscale announced their merger, with the new entity renamed Formation. Luke Truitt, co-founder of Loopscale, will serve as CEO, while Christopher Montagano of Orca will hold the positions of Chief Strategy and Legal Officer.

Beating AI Express (Dongcha) News: a16z-backed local AI assistant Underdog has launched Saluki 27B, a model built on Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B. The model uses approximately 2-bit quantization, cutting its size from ~54GB (full-precision version) to 7.89GB. According to officials, it can run on laptops with 16GB of RAM and supports deployment via existing tools like llama.cpp. The model weights are open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. Saluki leverages quantization work from ISTA-DASLab (Austrian Institute of Science and Technology). The lab previously compressed Qwen3.8-27B to ~8.4GB; Underdog further reduced the model size while focusing on optimizing tool call performance. In 120 tool call tasks selected from BFCL, Saluki answered 88 correctly, the ISTA-quantized version got 76 right, and the 54GB original version scored 84. In 50 real GitHub issue-fixing tasks, Saluki resolved 30, while the original version fixed 33. Officials noted that Saluki retains an average of 96% of the original model's performance across 9 benchmarks, though performance varies significantly across different tasks. Its scores on math competitions and complex reasoning tasks only reach ~83% and 85% of the original, respectively.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost wrote that while the market’s focus is on Bitcoin’s price trends, analysts are keeping a close eye on shifts in demand. Bitcoin’s demand has improved notably recently, particularly spot demand. Total demand has now returned to positive territory, exceeding 14,000 BTC. Futures demand has remained relatively stable in recent days, averaging around 32,000 BTC. Spot demand continues to rebound, currently standing at -17,000 BTC. Although it is still slightly negative, it is far higher than the -207,000 BTC recorded on September 20. The analysis points out that falling prices paired with emerging demand constitute a positive signal.

According to TradingBeats, cross-market whale rjgrant.eth (Geminae.Columbae) holds approximately $38.1251 million in long crypto positions, generating an unrealized profit of around $2.4902 million. The whale also holds a "Fed holds rates steady in October" Yes position in prediction markets, which has turned profitable as expected amid rising odds of this outcome. The unrealized gains on its Hyperliquid long positions have narrowed recently, broken down as follows: - BTC: ~$27.3165 million, unrealized loss of $626,800; - LINK: ~$5.7988 million, unrealized gain of $1.5721 million; - ZEC: ~$4.5276 million, unrealized gain of $1.5678 million; - Combined HYPE and NIL: ~$482,200, unrealized loss of ~$23,000. On Polymarket, the account holds 1,600 "Fed holds rates steady in October" Yes contracts. Its average cost corresponds to an implied probability of 54%; the current implied probability is 83.5%, giving the position a value of $1,336 and an unrealized profit of $472. Macroeconomic backdrop: The U.S. September non-farm payrolls report, released October 2, showed just 29,000 new jobs added, an unemployment rate of 4.2%, and a total downward revision of 60,000 jobs for July and August. Weak employment growth has reinforced expectations that the Federal Reserve will pause further interest rate hikes. Hyperliquid address: 0xdd7a372377fc633f74ab6e20963803d52f448830

According to Bitget market data, South Korea’s KOSPI index closed down 159.63 points on Thursday, October 8, with a 2.35% decline to 6644.27 points. SK Hynix fell 2.4% and Samsung Electronics dropped 1.4%.

Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson criticized the current tokenized fund market at the TOKEN2049 conference. She pointed out that many of her peers’ tokenized funds are merely “digital copies” or “digital twins” of traditional financial products, failing to truly leverage blockchain’s potential in efficiency and settlement. Johnson drew a distinction between “native” and “replicated” when comparing Franklin Templeton’s tokenized products to others in the market. She explained that Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund adopts a native on-chain recording model, where fund ownership records are directly based on public blockchains—with the blockchain itself acting as the single source of truth, rather than a mapping of traditional ledgers. According to Johnson, this design brings two practical advantages: first, BENJI supports second-by-second return accrual, enabling real-time yield calculation; second, it significantly cuts costs. She provided data showing that BENJI’s per-transaction cost is approximately $1.13, compared to roughly $150 per transaction under traditional methods.