Whale Tracking: Amid renewed US-Iran clashes, smart money flipped to go long on 5.5 million barrels of crude oil, while ramping up positions on "invasion of Iran" prediction shares.

Iran's Foreign Ministry announced that Iran's armed forces launched an attack on a U.S. military base in Jordan in retaliation for the U.S. strike on Iran's Larak Island. The ministry emphasized that Iran's armed forces will not hesitate to exercise their inherent right to self-defense and will take appropriate, resolute responses to any military aggression by the enemy. The U.S. strike on parts of Larak Island violated Iran's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and constituted a clear violation of the UN Charter. It called on the UN Security Council and the UN Secretary-General to fulfill their duties to maintain international peace and security and hold the aggressor accountable. Iran's Foreign Ministry also stated that the U.S. and all parties supporting its military operations bear full responsibility for the consequences of the escalating situation. It further noted that the U.S. base in Jordan was used to launch and support the attack on Larak Island, adding that the U.S.'s new act of aggression, along with the ongoing impacts of its maritime blockade and economic war against Iran, are the full responsibility of the U.S. and all parties involved in planning and executing the relevant actions. Earlier reports showed that Tasnim News Agency cited Iran's military as claiming to have launched dozens of drones at the UAE's Al Minhad Air Base. Separately, Iran's state television reported that the Iranian military carried out a drone attack on the Al Minhad Air Base in the UAE earlier on Monday.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: U.S. venture capital firm Dimension spent a week in China, visiting AI labs, investors, and founders, then wrote a 5-page internal letter to its limited partners (LPs). The firm previously conducted research in Shanghai last year; this trip covered Beijing and Shanghai, with the goal of recalibrating its assessment of China’s AI sector. A key finding highlighted is that China’s open-weight models have entered the production pipelines of U.S. AI companies. For example, Cursor’s Composer 2 was further trained on Kimi K2.5, while legal AI firm Harvey’s Tenet model underwent post-training on Kimi K3. Dimension summarized this cross-Pacific value chain as a "two-way trans-Pacific flow": U.S. labs first train cutting-edge models, Chinese labs absorb these capabilities and release open-weight models, then U.S. application companies further train on the Chinese models to build products sold to U.S. enterprises. However, despite surging usage, revenue has not accrued proportionally to Chinese model firms. Dimension summed this up in one sentence: "China is getting Western workloads, not Western revenue." Open-weight models can be deployed across multiple platforms, with U.S. inference firms like Fireworks, Baseten, and Modal capturing the bulk of service fees. Chinese models drive down costs, ultimately benefiting U.S. cloud providers, inference platforms, and AI application companies as well. Dimension’s final assessment is that it is no longer feasible to simply split China and U.S. AI into two separate systems. Hardware like chips is being decoupled: the U.S. faces constraints from power and grid infrastructure, while China lacks advanced chips. Yet models, data, inference services, and software frameworks continue to flow across borders. Debating "which side is winning the China-U.S. AI race" in simplistic terms no longer reflects the real industrial chain.

This morning session of A-shares saw the three major indexes open lower, rebound in volatile trading, then retreat toward the end of the session. By midday close, the Shanghai Composite Index fell 0.2%, the Shenzhen Component Index dropped 1%, and the ChiNext Index declined 1.29%. The AI corpus sector moved higher amid volatility. The combined turnover of Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses in the morning session was approximately 1.31 trillion yuan, a decrease of around 112.1 billion yuan from the same period of the previous trading day.

According to official announcements, Hyperliquid has launched Pons (PONS) perpetual contracts, with a maximum leverage of up to 3x. The current mark price is 0.32999, and the contract open interest stands at $524,866. The current funding rate for the PONS contract is -0.0823%.

According to TASS, Anatoly Popov, deputy chairman of Russia's Sberbank, said Russia's cryptocurrency trading volume is expected to top 4 trillion rubles (around $464.3 billion) in its first year, and could hit 7.5 trillion rubles (about $870.6 billion) by 2029. Popov noted that data from Russia's Ministry of Finance shows as of February this year, Russia's daily cryptocurrency trading volume was roughly 50 billion rubles, translating to an annual volume of about 18 trillion rubles. SberCIB investment research analysts, taking a more conservative stance, project that after cryptocurrency is legalized, roughly 20% of the annual trading volume — equivalent to 3.5 trillion to 4 trillion rubles — will be executed on trading platforms in the first year. This figure is forecast to rise to between 4.75 trillion and 5.25 trillion rubles by 2028, and reach 7.5 trillion rubles by 2029.

According to data from Bank of America, crypto funds recorded $3.2 billion in inflows last week, the largest single-week inflow since October 2025.