The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong and the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau signed a new memorandum of understanding (MoU), extending their regulatory cooperation to cover financial reporting of licensed institutions and funds.

Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov stated in a post that Aave’s potential market size is measured by “accessible collateral assets”: the broader the range of assets eligible for collateral, the larger Aave’s potential lending market. Initially launching with crypto assets, Aave later expanded into the securities space via Coinbase’s tokenized stocks and Horizon RWA. Looking ahead, Aave will support the global transition to an “abundance economy”, covering sectors including solar energy, batteries, GPUs, robotics, and space infrastructure. This transition is set to continue through 2050, with Aave aiming to accelerate this process by a decade by providing financing for assets that fuel the growth of the “abundance economy”.

Stablecoin issuer Circle is moving to expand its stablecoin ecosystem presence in South Korea. The firm is developing a market entry strategy for the South Korean market and recruiting senior executives tasked with collaborating with financial and digital asset sectors, monitoring regulatory developments, and more, to deepen its ties with the country’s stablecoin market. Per a job posting released by Circle on September 28, the company is hiring a full-time permanent Senior Director of Ecosystem Growth in South Korea. The role requires candidates to have in-depth expertise in stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi), and institutional financial operations, and to research market trends across South Korea’s payments, digital asset capital markets, and institutional use cases. The position will also contribute to shaping Circle’s South Korea market entry strategy—including providing the firm’s sales and business development teams with local market and regulatory insights, and helping define business pipelines and market entry priorities based on that input. Additionally, the role will focus on building connections with South Korea’s financial and digital asset industries, sourcing market participants and ecosystem partners, and relaying South Korean market demands to Circle’s product, solutions, and operations teams.

As investors ramp up bets on further interest rate hikes by the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the yield on Japan’s two-year government bonds is approaching the key 2% threshold. The two-year JGB yield, highly sensitive to monetary policy expectations, climbed 4 basis points to 1.975% on Monday, hitting its highest level since 1995. Other JGB tenors also faced pressure, with the five-year JGB yield rising 3 basis points to 2.43%. Strategists including Nakaji Okumura of SMBC Nikko Securities wrote in a report that as politicians at home and abroad grow more concerned about the weak yen, bets on the BOJ accelerating policy tightening are heating up. They added that fiscal expansion in major economies and rising commodity prices could further reinforce market expectations that Japan will eventually need to tighten monetary policy to curb inflation.

According to official announcements, Binance Wallet now supports paying gas fees with USDT, with support currently available for BNB Chain, Ethereum, Solana, and Tron.

Insight Beating AI Express: NaiveAI, founded by Tsinghua University associate professor Dai Jifeng, has released Naive-N0.5-Flash and made its model weights publicly available. The model is modified from Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5 Base and open-sourced under the MIT license. NaiveAI retains the original MoE architecture, with key adjustments to the attention mechanism: replacing global attention with sliding window attention and DeepSeek sparse attention, followed by further training on 3.25 trillion tokens. The modified model natively supports a 1 million-token context window, reducing computational overhead when processing ultra-long texts. AI was directly involved in R&D: it handled coding, experiment runs, result analysis, and optimization, while researchers set directions and made key decisions. Taking inference system NaiveRT as an example, the team conducted 151 optimization experiments over 6 days, with 63 rounds adopted. The official announced a maximum inference speed of 2122 tok/s, but the test conditions were special: using 8 GPUs, disabling thinking mode, excluding input processing time, and selecting the best-performing second from 41 requests. Under standard conditions, the official provided a speed of approximately 50 tok/s per user.

Crypto trader Ansem said he is quite optimistic about the true recovery of NFTs in this cycle. Art NFTs may see another rally, but what deserves more attention is the innovation around NFT formats, including AI agents, ownership mechanisms, new issuance methods, and various models of integrating NFTs with on-chain products. He believes that as the broader on-chain asset rotation remains in its early stages, the NFT space may witness more new applications and design explorations going forward.