加密城市 Crypto City

Better than nothing
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is trying to revive the once-booming initial coin offering (ICO) business. But the bigger challenge is finding someone willing to take over a product that investors have long since abandoned.
This proposal, announced earlier this month, would reopen public token sales to U.S. investors. Crypto startups would not need to complete full SEC registration, and could raise up to $5 million per year, while larger projects could raise up to $75 million annually. Compared with the regulatory crackdown that followed the 2017 ICO boom, the proposal marks a major policy shift.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that a U.S.-led multinational cyber law enforcement operation involving Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania successfully disrupted the long-running Sality botnet. The operation involved the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and was supported by organizations such as Europol, Eurojust, CrowdStrike, and the Shadowserver Foundation.
From file infections to a P2P network
Sality first appeared in 2003. It was initially a type of malware capable of infecting Windows executables, and later gradually evolved into a decentralized peer-to-peer, or P2P, botnet. The virus can attach itself to executable files on a computer and continue spreading through shared folders, USB storage devices, and file-sharing networks.

Everyone says stablecoins are better suited for cross-border payments. Is that really true?
If the recipient you are transferring to already wants stablecoins, then stablecoins are indeed an excellent cross-border solution. You can transfer funds around the clock, at almost zero cost, and settle instantly.
But the trickier question, and the one this article focuses on, is the cross-currency scenario: what happens when one side inputs US dollars and the other side outputs a foreign currency (for example, Mexican pesos). Most crypto industry thought leaders would claim that stablecoins can fundamentally reduce the speed and cost of transfers in this scenario. But supporters of stablecoins deliberately avoid one fact: fintech companies have already achieved low-cost, high-efficiency businesses of this kind, and they do not need stablecoins at all. So what problem do stablecoins actually solve?

The AI computing power arms race continues to heat up, and cooling technology is also facing an upgrade. TSMC (2330) has already included “microchannel” cooling technology in its R&D roadmap. In step with major customer NVIDIA’s technology upgrade pace for its next-generation Feynman platform, this is sparking Taiwan’s cooling supply chain into a “cool revolution.” Taiwanese companies such as Jentech (3653), I-Chiun (2486), Auras (3017), and Twinhead (3324) are actively investing in R&D and moving early to secure sample supplies and position themselves.
Single-chip power consumption skyrockets, exposing the bottleneck of traditional liquid cooling plates
The computing power of AI accelerators is growing exponentially, and along with it, power consumption is surging in tandem. As the number of transistors on chips doubles and computing performance rises sharply, the thermal design power (TDP) of a single chip is expected to break through the 4,000W mark.

NVIDIA announces the acquisition of Hugging Face for more than NT$400 billion
Chip giant NVIDIA announced last night (9/3) that it has agreed to acquire the world’s largest open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion (about NT$413 billion), confirming earlier reports by foreign media. After the news was released, NVIDIA’s stock surged 1.8% at the close last night.
In this deal, NVIDIA will pay about $11.9 billion in cash to Hugging Face investors, and will also provide up to $1 billion in an equity retention plan for key employees who are willing to join NVIDIA.
This is NVIDIA’s second-largest acquisition deal in history, following its acquisition of chip startup Groq assets for $20 billion last December, surpassing the record set in 2019 when it bought Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for nearly $7 billion.

OpenAI Derrick Choi: AI Engineering Enters the “Delegable” Stage
FUTUREMODE 2026 Opening Day: Invitation and Online Talk by OpenAI Head of Applied AI, Codex (APAC) Derrick Choi — delivered a featured presentation titled “AI Engineering with Codex,” sharing how OpenAI uses Codex to change the software development workflow and how AI Agents are gradually evolving from helping write code to becoming engineering partners that can independently take on tasks.
Derrick Choi said that AI is rapidly changing the way people work and create, and one of the major changes brought by Codex is that users can now directly “delegate” tasks to AI.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) parent company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), has officially bet on the tokenization of securities. According to an official press release issued by tZERO on August 31, ICE and the blockchain securities platform tZERO reached a series of agreements to jointly build market infrastructure for tokenized securities. ICE will also invest in tZERO and license its blockchain patent portfolio.
tZERO is appointed as the design partner; ICE licenses its 103 patents
According to the press release, the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for cooperation. tZERO will serve as the lead design partner, developing infrastructure for a “digital transfer agent” and “broker-dealer,” to support the on-chain settlement of the tokenized securities platform that ICE is set to launch and that will be affiliated with the NYSE. ICE will invest in tZERO’s latest funding round and authorize the use of tZERO’s blockchain patent portfolio covering 23 patent families—103 patents in total. The scope spans tools for compliance-aware transfer logic, an upgradable smart contract framework, and capabilities for company action processing and interoperability of broker identities. The two sides will also evaluate whether tokenized assets can serve as collateral for ICE’s clearinghouse, although the investment amount has not been disclosed.

Machi Big Brother, Huang Licheng, recently issued a Taiwan Coin (TAIWAN) on the Robinhood Chain.
The most special part of this token launch isn’t actually a “Taiwan” theme. Instead of having TAIWAN’s main trading pairs be ETH or stablecoins, it’s traded against TSM—a stock token representing the economic exposure of TSM (TSMC) on the Robinhood Chain.
In other words, traders can directly trade meme coins using the TSM stock token, making TAIWAN/TSM the latest experiment in “tokenization that makes markets programmable.”
TAIWAN surged within 5 minutes after launch, then once fell back by nearly 90%
According to on-chain data, Huang Licheng minted TAIWAN via machibigbrother.eth at 1:46 a.m. on September 1 (Taiwan time).

Tesla Cybercab in Austin opens for paid passenger service!
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) held a Cybercab presentation in the early hours of 9/4 Taiwan time, and announced that in the United States—part of Austin, Texas—Cybercab paid ride services are already open.
According to Reuters, this two-seat vehicle with a striking golden exterior has no steering wheel or pedals. Tesla has not explained whether it will charge for the service to the public, nor whether simply logging into the app from the Austin area will allow riders to request a car.
Source: Tesla YouTube
According to information on Tesla’s official website, passengers can enter their destination in the Robotaxi app and confirm the fare. After the vehicle arrives, the red tail light strip will light up. The color of the front light strip will correspond to what’s shown on the app screen. The doors will automatically open after detecting the passenger’s phone, and luggage can be placed in the trunk area in advance. Throughout the entire ride, no human driving intervention is required.

The following content is provided by HOYA BIT.
Taiwan’s cryptocurrency exchange HOYA BIT participated in the Asia FinTech Awards for the first time. It advanced to three finals at once and won the “Best ESG Campaign” award. According to the publicly available list of past winners on the official Asia FinTech Awards website, HOYA BIT became the first Taiwan cryptocurrency exchange to receive recognition for this award.
The Asia FinTech Awards are hosted by FinTech Intel and have been held since 2021. Past award-winning companies include Asia’s representative fintech firms such as Airwallex, FWDl, and Nium. The awards cover a wide range of fintech areas, including payments, banking technology, digital assets, RegTech, Web3, wealth management, and ESG. This year, Holly Fang, Chair of the Singapore FinTech Association, serves as the Chair of the independent judging panel.

Lina Zhichen: AI is driving “reverse specialization,” allowing one person to create more value
On the opening day of FUTUREMODE 2026, a dialogue titled “Facing the Future” was held, hosted by Jenny Ting-yi Chan, Chair of the Taiwan Foundation for Artificial Intelligence and Technology. Invited speakers included Lin Zhichen (Jamie Lin), General Manager of Taiwan Mobile and Chairman and Partner of AppWorks, who shared potential industry and societal changes that may emerge over the next 10 years amid the rapid development of AI, blockchain, and digital assets in Taiwan.
Lin Zhichen pointed out that one of the most important changes brought by AI is that human work patterns may gradually shift from the past, where work was continuously broken down into “specialization,” toward “reverse specialization.” In the past, companies improved efficiency through high levels of specialization, with each person responsible for an ever narrower scope of work—leading to increased costs for communication, understanding, and collaboration between departments. After generative AI took off, one person began to be able to coordinate with multiple AI tools, spanning tasks such as market research, user experience, product development, and data analysis.

Robinhood’s ecosystem has recently sparked a meme coin trading craze, but behind the high trading volume, there have also been controversies over credit card transaction categorization, extreme slippage, and massive unrealized gains—prompting the market to refocus on the compliance arrangements for self-custody wallets and the trading risks associated with low-liquidity tokens.
Buy meme coins with a credit card—checkout did not require additional KYC
External media (The Block) testing found that users can, within the Robinhood Wallet and the social trading app Fomo, use the checkout service provided by Crossmint to buy certain specified meme coins using a credit card together with Apple Pay or Google Pay, with no additional full KYC identity verification forms appearing during the process. The test transactions involved tokens such as WIF, and users also received standard credit card transaction points.

U.S. official economic data is put on-chain—Chainlink connects 10 public chains
The U.S. government continues to expand blockchain applications. Decentralized oracle network Chainlink recently announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce, through Chainlink infrastructure, has brought the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)’s official macroeconomic data onto a public blockchain, enabling smart contracts and on-chain applications to directly access economic data published by the U.S. government.
Image source: X/@chainlink Decentralized oracle network Chainlink announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce, via Chainlink infrastructure, has brought the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official macroeconomic data onto a public blockchain

Taipei Blockchain Week Upgrade FUTUREMODE: 600 Developers Gather at Expo
On September 4, 2026, FUTUREMODE (Taiwan’s Future Festival), which was upgraded from Taipei Blockchain Week (Taipei Blockchain Week), officially kicked off at the Changyanyan Pavilion at the Taipei World Expo. The event will run for three days. This year’s theme further extends beyond Web3, focusing on AI x Brands x Culture x Digital Assets x Emerging Tech, in an effort to bring the tech industry, brands, culture, and everyday experience into a single venue.
In opening remarks, the FUTUREMODE organizing team—Tiffany Lai and Eason Hu—said the event has grown from a small community and ideas from five years ago to what it is today. With rapid advances in technologies such as AI, robotics, and blockchain, this year it also adjusted its focus, aiming to help participants move from learning and hands-on practice to real-world experiences, with more direct exposure to emerging technologies.

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes once again put forward an extremely bullish long-term Bitcoin forecast, saying that as the AI investment bubble ultimately evolves into a credit crisis, governments and central banks may use larger-scale money expansion to stabilize the financial system, driving Bitcoin to reach $1 million by 2030.
However, Hayes said that if there is a new tranche of funds that needs to be allocated to the crypto market at present, his top choice at this stage is not Bitcoin or the HYPE that has been trending in the market recently, but rather Ether. He believes that ETH’s long-term performance has lagged, market attention is relatively low, and, combined with its foundational infrastructure role in decentralized finance and asset tokenization, it offers a more attractive risk-reward profile.

At the 2026 FinTechOn 2026 & AFA Summit, SBI Holdings’ CTO Kefei Lin publicly shared how the SBI Group systematically migrated traditional financial infrastructure to the blockchain. He emphasized that the core isn’t a technological breakthrough, but the sequence: first establish a regulatory framework, then build market infrastructure in layers, and finally make stablecoins and tokenized assets become everyday tools like the internet.
The Zero-Commission Revolution: a replicable “ready first, then execute” logic
Kefei Lin, using SBI Group’s “Zero-Commission Revolution,” which it began driving in 2019, as a methodology: at the time, the company planned to bring online brokerage commissions down to zero and spent four years rebuilding its revenue base, covering margin businesses, proprietary trading, and wholesale finance. Ultimately, in 2023, it officially eliminated fees for domestic stock trading.

The Financial Supervisory Commission added 2 more VASPs; the number of compliant firms in Taiwan increased to 10.
Taiwan’s virtual asset service providers (VASPs) welcomed new members again. On September 3, the Securities and Futures Bureau of the Financial Supervisory Commission updated the list of “businesses or individuals providing virtual asset services,” adding Taiscope Digital Asset Management Co., Ltd. and Youda Taiwan Co., Ltd. The two companies have officially completed anti-money laundering registration, increasing the number of currently registered VASP operators from 8 to 10.
Source of image: Financial Supervisory Commission Securities and Futures Bureau. The Securities and Futures Bureau updated its list of “businesses or individuals providing virtual asset services,” adding two companies, Taiscope and Youda.

The Thai Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is conducting a public consultation on investment rules for overseas digital asset derivatives. It plans to allow locally licensed derivatives firms to provide, to retail investors, high-net-worth investors, and ultra-high-net-worth investors, overseas digital asset futures and other derivatives services that meet specified conditions.
According to the proposal, the relevant services must be provided by operators that have obtained a derivatives agency or trading dealer license, and this does not mean that Thai retail investors can directly use all overseas cryptocurrency exchanges. The underlying digital assets, contract tenors, leverage, and delivery or settlement methods for eligible products must be consistent with the specifications of digital asset derivatives in the Thai market; for contracts with fixed expiration dates, the tenor should generally not be less than one month.

SEC launches the largest reform in nearly half a century, with blockchain officially included in the transfer agent rules
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a Transfer Agent regulatory reform proposal on September 1 to significantly update the regulatory framework that has not seen major changes since the late 1970s. The plan would incorporate emerging technologies such as electronic communications, blockchain, tokenized securities, and artificial intelligence (AI) into the rules.
Transfer agents are a key piece of infrastructure in the U.S. securities market. They primarily maintain shareholder records and ownership records of securities, while also handling corporate actions such as stock transfers, dividend payments, and mergers and acquisitions. They also participate in the securities clearing and settlement process.

Premier League €10 million sponsorship funds frozen; NCA investigates whether the money involves third-party crime
The partnership between cryptocurrency and the football industry is once again facing regulatory scrutiny. The UK National Crime Agency (NCA) has frozen approximately £10.02 million in the bank account of the English Premier League (Premier League), equivalent to about $13.6 million. The funds come from the blockchain fantasy football platform Sorare and were originally the first payment under a long-term cooperation between the two.
According to reports, as early as January 2025, the NCA obtained a freezing order issued by the Westminster Magistrates' Court under the Proceeds of Crime Act, involving funds totaling £10,024,041.33, held in a Barclays bank account opened in the name of The Football Association Premier League Limited.