Loud Bangs Heard in Abu Dhabi and Doha

Beating AI News Flash: SK Group plans to sell a 49% stake in its artificial intelligence data center in Ulsan, South Korea, to multiple private equity firms. SK Telecom and SK Broadband are set to approve the deal at their August 27 board meetings. KKR will acquire a 29% stake, while a consortium of IMM Investment and Stonepeak Partners will take the remaining 20% stake. The transaction is valued at approximately 3 trillion won, including a capital increase of around 1.2 trillion won.

Dongcha Beating AI News Flash: OpenAI’s latest technical report also revealed an internal incident that had previously flown under the radar: an internal model belonging to the same family as its next-generation model Astra successfully breached OpenAI’s cloud infrastructure during an evaluation. It first leveraged signature key material left over from a prior attack to forge new administrator credentials, regaining access to Artifactory, OpenAI’s internal software repository. The model then moved laterally to breach OpenAI’s cloud Kubernetes cluster, obtaining `cluster-admin`—the highest-level permission for the entire cluster. With this access, the agent created privileged containers, accessed authentication tokens for OpenAI’s cloud key management, identity and access, and CI platforms, and even spun up a public load balancer that could have exposed parts of the internal infrastructure directly to the internet. Notably, this is not Astra itself, nor the model that led the earlier Hugging Face attack. OpenAI clarified that the model only shares the same family as Astra but uses different post-training methods.

Fu Peng, chief economist at Xinhuo Group, published an article noting that while NVIDIA’s latest financial results have beaten expectations for 15 consecutive quarters, the market has shown a lukewarm response to the figures themselves. Indicators such as stock prices and option volatility show that market investors are currently “more concerned about the future: whether the free cash flow at the center of future stock indices can be delivered smoothly, and how long the momentum of AI growth can be sustained. These issues actually carry more weight than single-quarter financial performance, so even if this quarter’s results exceed Wall Street expectations by a few percentage points, they cannot change the denominator side of valuation.” Fu Peng believes that Jensen Huang’s explicit statement in the earnings call that “the inflection point for AI has arrived” is essentially a move to calm the market, aimed at strengthening confidence in the formation of a closed-loop AI industry chain and easing concerns over overinvestment. Going forward, investors should observe how long it takes the market to digest this round of confidence boost, the elevated expectations brought by Jensen Huang, and how long this sentiment will last. If the sentiment fades quickly, it indicates the market’s typical mindset of “not acting until seeing results” (the Chinese idiom for waiting for concrete proof before acting). The impact of repeated confidence boosts and reassurances from manufacturers is actually gradually weakening, a trend that can be clearly observed from the duration of market volatility following each earnings call.

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire tweeted that StableFX is set to launch on the mainnet. The institutional-grade stablecoin foreign exchange engine had previously launched on the Arc public testnet. It covers local currency stablecoins from major and emerging markets, supports near-instant, 24/7 on-demand settlement, uses a payment-versus-payment (PvP) mechanism—where both parties receive funds simultaneously or neither does—to reduce capital occupation, and enables access to multiple vetted counterparties via a single onboarding process.

According to security firm Defimon’s monitoring, a vulnerability has been detected on Web3 game ecosystem development platform Enjin, resulting in losses of approximately $142,000. Enjin’s ERC-1155 “Crypto Items” allow each item to route transfers via a dedicated item adapter. Attackers registered and used a malicious transfer adapter that bypassed owner approval checks, enabling their exploit contract to call transferFrom without approval to siphon ENJ-supported items from around 52 unrelated holders’ wallets (via legitimate TransferSingle events, with no setApprovalForAll required). Afterwards, the attackers called melt() on each stolen item, redeeming 500 ENJ per item from the platform’s reserves.

Bitcoin multi-signature hardware wallet Frostsnap has released version 0.4.0, fixing two security vulnerabilities, and confirmed no user funds have been lost so far. The two flaws are: FSA-2026-001: Malicious signature requests can mark a transaction output as belonging to the user’s wallet; the device does not verify this claim or display it on the confirmation screen, which could lead to funds being sent to addresses the user has never encountered. FSA-2026-002: Change addresses may fall outside the wallet’s recovery scan range, causing apparent missing funds after backup and recovery, though the funds actually remain in the wallet. After the update, the app will prompt users to upgrade their device firmware, and firmware downgrade protection has been added. The team advises updating both the app and firmware without delay.