Singapore's largest money laundering case suspect Wang Shuiming may be extradited to China, with his accomplice being the mastermind behind the Hong Kong crypto platform scam AAX.

Illinois rolled out a tax policy in June this year that no other U.S. state has attempted before. The state levies a 0.2% tax on anyone who buys cryptocurrency, sells crypto, or even transfers crypto assets between wallets—regardless of whether the trader makes a profit or loss. This means simply using cryptocurrency can trigger a taxable event. On Thursday, Illinois agreed to pause implementation of the new policy. Per a court filing, state officials and crypto industry groups jointly asked a Sangamon County judge to push back the tax’s effective date from January 1, 2027 to July 1, 2027. The request remains pending the judge’s approval.

According to Axios, two U.S. officials and a regional source said that in recent weeks, the U.S. military has deployed two additional Patriot missile defense systems to the Middle East to protect oil and gas facilities in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The U.S. aims to reassure its allies in both countries that it will safeguard their critical energy facilities should President Trump decide to resume large-scale military operations against Iran. Trump said Thursday he is considering resuming bombing operations in the coming weeks, stating: "I have to make a decision now: either Iran signs the deal, or it ceases to exist." If large-scale military operations resume, the U.S. will need Saudi Arabia to grant it access to its airspace. However, if Saudi Arabia believes its oil facilities cannot be protected, it is unlikely to approve the U.S. request for airspace access.

According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, Hyperliquid yesterday repurchased and burned 20,210 HYPE tokens at a volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of $89.05, totaling roughly $1.8 million. As of press time, Hyperliquid has cumulatively burned 49.09 million HYPE tokens, valued at approximately $4.29 billion, accounting for 4.91% of its maximum supply. The protocol’s revenue over the past 30 days stood at $55.89 million.

Beating AI News Flash: AI video firm Tavus has launched Griffin, billed as the first Human Interaction Model focused on real-time face-to-face communication. Griffin can see and listen while speaking, reacting in real time to the other party’s expressions, movements, and pauses, and pauses immediately if a user interrupts mid-sentence. Tavus recruited 54 participants from the U.S. and Europe to hold 1-minute video calls with Griffin-Lite, without disclosing in advance that the counterpart was an AI. The result: 26 participants, or 48%, believed they had chatted with a real person. By comparison, Tavus’ prior generation model Phoenix-4.5 saw only 1 out of 41 participants (2.4%) make the same judgment error in a similar test. Tavus thus claims Griffin is the first model to pass the "real-time video Turing Test". However, the test was self-organized by Tavus with a sample size of just 54, and no larger independent replication has been conducted to date. Griffin-Lite also topped NVIDIA’s VideoFDB full-duplex audio-video evaluation, scoring 3.83/5, close to the human benchmark of 3.92. The previous highest public baseline, Gemini 2.5 + Anam, scored 2.80. Griffin-Lite is currently only available to a small group of testers and has not yet been officially offered to regular customers.

According to official announcements, the Osmosis community has proposed burning approximately 17.4 million OSMO tokens, a sum equivalent to 65% of the total cumulative amount burned in prior periods. The two related proposals aim to withdraw liquidity from inactive community pools and destroy all recovered OSMO tokens.

U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of the primary drafters of the CLARITY Act, announced in a post that Wyoming has chartered the United States' first digital asset banks and established a corresponding legal framework. The Wyoming Banking Department has collaborated with the New York State Department of Financial Services to implement simplified chartering procedures and joint supervision for entities engaged in digital asset-related businesses.