Data: Web3 social application Towns has over 400,000 total users, with over 200,000 token holders

South Korea’s five leading crypto centralised exchanges (CEXs) — Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, DigitalX, and GOPAX — posted a total trading volume of around 31.1 trillion won (approximately $23 billion) in the week of August 21–28. This represented an 188.04% week-over-week surge from the prior week’s 10.8 trillion won, hitting the highest level in nearly 10 months since late October 2025. In terms of market share, Upbit retained the top spot with 59.61%, while Bithumb ranked second at 33.11%. The rebranded DigitalX (formerly Korbit) saw its market share rise sharply by 3.477 percentage points to 4.21%, surpassing Coinone (3.05%) to claim third place, notching the platform’s highest market share in nearly 20 weeks.

Hyperliquid HIP-4 permissionless deployments are now live, with the first HIP-4-based outcome DEX, "OUT", fully deployed. Per Hyperliquid’s developer documentation, HIP-4 enables deployers to permissionlessly create YES/NO or multi-outcome markets using templates approved via validator votes.

At the "AI × New Finance – Global Innovation Tour Hong Kong Stop & Yangtze River Star Cluster Plan Launch Conference", Zhang Dayong, co-founder and CEO of Obita, stated that AI is compressing tasks such as contract drafting, coding, and business decision-making to seconds or even less, while traditional cross-border payments still take T+1 to T+7. This efficiency gap will drive a restructuring of payment infrastructure. Zhang noted that blockchain and compliant stablecoins can reduce multiple intermediary banks in traditional cross-border payments, enabling near-real-time fund settlement. On-chain stablecoin transactions reached approximately $33 trillion in 2025, yet the proportion actually utilized for the real economy remains low. The key focus for the next phase is addressing compliance, security, and enterprise adoption to let stablecoins truly enter cross-border trade.

At the "AI × New Finance – Innovation Global Tour Hong Kong Stop & Yangtze Star Cluster Plan Launch Conference", Zhou Chenggang, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of China Taiping Investment Management (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd., stated that there is an essential difference between RWA and on-chain native assets such as Bitcoin. The token of an RWA is not an asset in itself, but merely an on-chain voucher for off-chain real assets. Therefore, RWA will not break away from the traditional financial system just by going on-chain. Zhou pointed out that issues including how asset rights are established and enforced, who bears responsibility for asset losses, and how information is continuously disclosed still require support from the traditional financial and legal systems. Web3 is more likely to transform some segments of finance rather than completely subvert traditional finance.

At the "AI × New Finance – Innovation Global Tour Hong Kong Session & Yangtze Starry Plan Launch Conference", Zhang Kaifu, founder of Little Grebe AI and former vice president of Alibaba, stated that the core change in AI over the past year is that models have evolved from chat tools to Agents capable of completing complex tasks continuously. The next stage worth focusing on is that AI will start participating in its own research, training, and inference optimization. Zhang Kaifu noted that this "recursive self-improvement" has already emerged in some studies. If in the future AI can continuously optimize models and training efficiency like top researchers, the pace of technological progress may see another exponential jump, and the next 1 to 2 years could become a key variable for AI development. He also judged that as model capabilities continue to improve, AI Agents will shift from passive response to always-on, active task execution, thereby driving new infrastructure demands in cloud computing, identity authentication, cybersecurity and other fields.

At the "AI × New Finance – Innovation Global Tour Hong Kong Stop & Yangtze Star Cluster Plan Launch Conference", angel investor and Chairman of CAI Holdings Cai Wensheng stated that AI is essentially a shift in productive forces, while Web3 is more closely aligned with a transformation of production relations. He noted that if only efficiency improvements from AI are achieved without corresponding changes in finance and production relations, the new technological cycle will lack a critical component. Cai further judged that humanity is transitioning from industrial and information societies to a data-driven society, where data will emerge as the most valuable resource in the future. For enterprises, AI should first be deployed to enhance existing business and organizational efficiency, before building new business models on that foundation. As Web3 develops, data will become more fluid and gradually break through platform and geographical boundaries.