South Korea has positioned AI as the core direction for its economic development in the second half of the year, and is accelerating pilot programs for central bank digital currencies (CBDC) and tokenization of government bonds.

According to official announcements, Coinbase has announced a full-scale push into the "Agentic Economy", covering three groups: users who utilize AI agents, enterprises that provide services to AI agents, and developers building products and infrastructure for AI agents. Coinbase says it is constructing a comprehensive financial service system for AI agents: AI agents can conduct research, planning, decision-making, and trading on its "Everything Exchange", covering assets including cryptocurrencies, stocks, derivatives, and more. The company is also launching Coinbase Advisor, an AI investment advisor built into the Coinbase app to assist users in making investment decisions. On the enterprise front, Coinbase is introducing payment capabilities for AI agents, allowing businesses to accept USDC payments from AI agents via Coinbase Business, with native integration of the x402 standard—no need to build separate payment processes. Coinbase notes that this solution eliminates credit card-style chargeback risks, idle USDC can earn 3.35% rewards, and enterprises can manage funds, reconcile accounts, and withdraw funds all within the same account. Additionally, Coinbase has launched the CDP x402 SDK, enabling developers to integrate AI agent payment capabilities into APIs or MCPs with just approximately 3 lines of code, without requiring deep expertise in x402 technology. Coinbase adds that as AI agents gain autonomous payment capabilities, they also require a marketplace to discover and purchase services. The x402 is emerging as an open payment standard for machines, enabling agent-to-agent transactions without human intervention; when AI agents need capital, they can turn to Coinbase. The company refers to this entire ecosystem as "AI Finance" (AiFi), stating that the global economy is being restructured around AI agents.

According to GMGN market data, the market capitalization of the Meme coin "Niu Lai" on BNB Chain briefly exceeded $15 million, and is currently trading at $14.2 million, surging more than 150 times in 24 hours. Recently, the summer animated film "Niu Lai" unexpectedly gained widespread attention due to controversies over its visual production. A relative of the director revealed that the film was created entirely by the director and his mother—no production team was hired, and all work was done manually over five years. As of press time, today's box office has reached 852,800 yuan. BlockBeats reminds users that most Meme coins lack practical use cases, feature highly volatile prices, and thus require caution for investment.

CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. noted in a post that Bitcoin is currently trading in the lowest range of the Rainbow Chart model — "basically a fire sale price". This represents an extreme discount relative to the cryptocurrency’s long-term price trajectory, and is not merely a measure of how much Bitcoin has declined. The Rainbow Chart model compares Bitcoin’s current price to its long-term trend, so the gap reflects the market’s deviation from historical patterns. The volatility-adjusted Z-Score now stands at -2.293, the lowest reading since 2016 and lower than the -1.979 recorded at the 2022 bear market bottom. This metric accounts for volatility differences across distinct market cycles, meaning the current downward deviation from the model is more severe than that seen at the last bear market’s trough. Bitcoin is now in an extreme discount zone, with the volatility-adjusted Z-Score hitting a 10-year low. This signals significant undervaluation relative to the model, but it does not alone confirm the final market bottom. Extremely low valuations point to a potentially attractive entry range, though a market reversal would need separate confirmation. Note: The Z-Score is a widely used standardized statistical metric that quantifies how far a data point lies from the mean, measured in units of standard deviation.

Google announced that users can now remove visible watermarks from its AI-generated content, including images, videos, and songs. The company clarified that this change does not impact invisible SynthID watermarks or metadata related to the C2PA standard. Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Gemini, stated in a post that this toggle will apply to the Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models. He added that the setting to turn off visible watermarks will be available in Gemini and Google’s Video Editor Flow, with support for Search launching soon. The feature will roll out gradually over the coming days; once live, users can access "Settings > Media Watermarks" to enable or disable visible watermarks. Google has also open-sourced a new library named Credentio, designed to help developers embed local verification mechanisms into their own applications.

DeFiLlama founder 0xngmi posted on social media that for months, he has been working to get Apple’s App Store to take down a fake app impersonating DeFiLlama, repeatedly reporting trademark infringement and unauthorized impersonation of the official app to Apple. The team then loaded a small amount of funds into a test wallet, downloaded the fake application, and as expected, all funds in the wallet were stolen. The incident was reported to Apple, and the app was removed from the store within days. 0xngmi noted that he hopes other cryptocurrency companies will learn from this to avoid wasting time on similar efforts, as his team did.

According to CCTV News, on local time August 15, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Baghaei said that despite US obstruction, talks between Iran and Oman are still advancing actively, and the two sides have reached an agreement on a navigation plan for the Strait of Hormuz.