Ethereum Gas Fee Continues to Drop, Now at 0.352 Gwei

Beating AI Express News: The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has stated that restrictions on artificial intelligence company Anthropic remain in effect, contradicting earlier remarks from U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that the two sides had resolved their differences. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael posted on social media that Anthropic is still deemed a "supply chain risk" by the DoD and the defense industrial base. Lutnick had previously said Anthropic had resolved long-standing issues with the Trump administration, adding that the company’s relations with the government had improved. Anthropic earlier faced related restrictions due to government concerns that its models could be misused for capabilities such as cyberattacks.

US Vice President Vance held a press conference at the White House on Thursday local time. When addressing Iran, he stated: "Approximately 15 million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. Gasoline prices are high because Iran is firing on ships. We are taking a range of measures to pressure Iran to halt its attacks on vessels. My advice to Iranians is: stop acting like maniacs, and stop firing on merchant ships. We have a number of additional tools at our disposal regarding the Iran issue, some that Trump would use, others he would not. Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has nearly returned to pre-conflict levels. However, we will not engage in talks with Iran unless it stops attacking ships. We are not currently carrying out major military operations."

U.S. stocks closed on Thursday: The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.18%, the S&P 500 gained 1.06%, and the Nasdaq advanced 1.4%. Tesla (TSLA.O) climbed 5.4%, Nvidia (NVDA.O) rose 1.8%, and SpaceX (SPCX.O) jumped 6.4%. In crypto-themed concept stocks, MSTR surged 17.56%, CRCL gained 16.44%, COIN advanced 10.14%, BMNR climbed 14.66%, SBET rose 10.86%, and PURR jumped 12.81%.

According to HTX market data, Bitcoin briefly rallied past $82,000 this morning before pulling back to $81,100. Its 24-hour gain reached 5.19%, and its market capitalization rose to $1.63 trillion.

Flash News from Insight Beating AI: OpenAI has launched GPT-6 Astra, its new flagship model focused on computer operations and long sequential tasks. The model can independently operate web pages and software, completing tasks including information retrieval, form filling, spreadsheet creation, coding, and test execution in sequence. OpenAI claims this is currently the "world's smartest and most aligned" model. In official evaluations, Astra scored 97.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4. On the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, it achieved 99.9% when paired with OpenAI's context management mechanism, and 62.7% under a unified standard framework. It earned 57.9% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, slightly outperforming Claude Fable 5.1's 55.8%. For computer operations, Astra's score on OSWorld 2.0 rose to 72.6% from GPT-5.6 Sol's 65.7%, while simulated task time dropped from around 75 minutes to 40 minutes. When paired with the new Codex, Mind2Web task speed reached 1.9 times the previous level. OpenAI President Greg Brockman stated that looking back in a few years, people may regard Astra or this time point as the starting point of AGI. However, the "world's smartest" label remains OpenAI's own positioning. In independent testing by Artificial Analysis, Astra max has an Intelligence Index score of 61, ranking 8th currently; Claude Fable 5.1 max scores 66, still leading. Astra is also OpenAI's first model to meet the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold. During testing, it discovered and exploited two previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities. The initial release is limited to a small number of organizations. Access will be gradually extended to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, API, and AWS users in the coming days.

Crypto trader Ansem says the hardest part of transitioning from a bear market to a bull market is that the strategies that helped you survive and profit in a bear market will end up losing you money in a bull market. If you’re still making money from short-term, high-frequency trading right now, that demonstrates strong trading skills. But to capture the largest gains of a bull market, you need to re-learn to "dream"—meaning daring to hold spot assets and embrace long-term positions. Ansem’s advice for those already profitable is to allocate a portion of their positions to long-term holdings, while using the remaining capital to continue short-term trading as usual. Meanwhile, Ansem once again posted to call for buying ZEC, stating that purchasing ZEC at $948 is equivalent to buying Bitcoin at $948. Per HTX market data, ZEC is currently trading at $948, with a 24-hour increase of over 16%.