Former Alibaba Vice President Zhang Kaifu: AI has entered the "self-improvement" stage, and a new round of exponential growth may arrive in the next one to two years.

Official announcements reveal that Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) now supports a fast transfer prepaid fee function. Previously, protocol fees were deducted directly from the USDC transfer amount on the destination chain; with this update, developers can pre-quote and collect fees using the source chain’s native gas token or USDC before a transfer executes, simplifying cross-chain transfer fee handling and ensuring users receive their expected USDC amount. The prepaid fee mechanism primarily enhances fee predictability in cross-chain applications. Users no longer face reduced received amounts due to extra deductions on the destination chain side. Additionally, the CCTP Quote API uniformly calculates fees across all supported chains, integrating Fast Transfer and Forwarding fees into a single quote—removing the need for developers to build separate systems to compute multiple protocol fees. Furthermore, fees can be paid directly with the source chain’s native token, with no reduction or impact on the actual transferred USDC balance. Currently, the prepaid fee feature supports USDC transfers on all EVM chains covered by CCTP, but does not yet support transfers initiated from Solana; transfers to Solana remain available. Developers can retrieve specific fee quotes via the Quote API and integrate this feature, with relevant developers advised to refer to CCTP’s official documentation to build more predictable cross-chain USDC transfer workflows.

According to BIT (Bit.com) market data, the US optical communication sector has surged sharply, with performances as follows: Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) up 9.61%; Lumentum (LITE) up 11.27%; Nokia (NOK) up 6.1%; Corning (GLW) up 8.47%; Roundhill Optical Module ETF (LYTE) up 9.08%; Coherent (COHR) up 11.25%; and Marvell Technology (MRVL) up 3.01%.

Renowned trader Bonk Guy posted that PONS has seen sustained revenue growth recently, with daily income staying above $1.3 million to $2 million for most of the past week, and not dropping below $1.1 million for seven consecutive days. Meanwhile, PONS’ buyback wallet has accumulated nearly $3 million so far; these funds will be used to repurchase PONS via Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP), and the wallet’s fee replenishment rate is currently outpacing its fund consumption rate. 100% of PONS’ generated fees are allocated to repurchases and token burns. PONS’ actual market cap is likely significantly lower than its Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV). At the time of posting, its price stood at around $0.736, translating to an FDV of roughly $736 million. However, since PONS’ launch, approximately 30% of its token supply has been repurchased and burned via fees, bringing its actual market cap closer to $515 million. Additionally, PONS hit an all-time high of ~80% market share on Robinhood Chain yesterday, holding between 75% and 80% for most of the past week. The platform also set a new all-time high for daily token issuance, peaking at 28,560 tokens in a single day, with around 27,600 new tokens launched over the past 24 hours. PONS is benefiting from the growth of the Robinhood Chain ecosystem and has established itself as the chain’s leading Launchpad. Bonk Guy noted that PONS currently boasts daily revenue of $1 million to over $2 million, nearly $3 million in buyback funds, ~30% of its supply burned, no VC unlock pressure, and strong early community support. Comparing PONS to PUMP, he argued its current actual market cap remains attractive. Traditional finance quant trading networks are also starting to take notice of PONS, calling it a potential “most tradable asset of this cycle”. He expects sustained buying during market pullbacks and is bullish on its market cap eventually reaching the multi-billion-dollar level.

According to Iran's Tasnim News Agency, the Navy of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed it captured a U.S. unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz early local time today and brought it back to Iran. The IRGC Navy stated that the vessel is "one of the most advanced intelligent unmanned submarines in the world", was delivered to the U.S. Navy in 2025, and seized at "a complex facility". The IRGC will release photos of the UUV within hours. The claim has not yet been confirmed by U.S. officials.

Cobo co-founder and CEO Shen Yu posted on social media, stating: "I really have a lingering negative impression of ZEC. Back in 2016, when Zcash’s mainnet launched, BitMEX set a hard price cap of 10 BTC. Shortly after mining kicked off on launch night, the transformer at a GPU mining farm was struck by lightning. Since then, ZEC has never appeared in my personal wallet."

Prediction market platform Polymarket today announced the launch of Squads, a new social feature for its US version of the Polymarket app. Squads provides an exclusive communication space for friends, where users can discuss markets, share their prediction selections, and trade directly with friends on Polymarket. The feature brings market discussions that originally took place in group chats onto the Polymarket platform, centralizing conversations and actual trading in one place to make it easier for friends to jointly participate in and experience prediction markets.