South Korea's KOSPI index closed up 0.46%, with SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics rising more than 1%.

Bitcoin is currently trading near the $78,000 level, down 0.04% over the past 24 hours, and still up around 1% over the past week. A stronger U.S. dollar and shifting interest rate expectations have weighed on the broader crypto market, with Solana and Dogecoin leading losses of around 2%, followed by Hyperliquid and XRP; Ethereum, BNB, Zcash, and TRON remained largely flat. Meanwhile, the Japanese yen fell below the 160 level against the U.S. dollar, trading near that threshold in Tokyo markets. Market strategists believe that a further depreciation of the yen to around 161 could trigger intervention, while the 162-163 range would face stronger intervention pressure. Following Federal Reserve Chair Waller’s speech at Jackson Hole, market expectations for higher U.S. interest rates rose, bond investors began pricing in the possibility of a Fed rate hike, and the U.S. dollar strengthened accordingly. This round of interest rate repricing has previously led institutional funds to pull out of Bitcoin ETFs. August 31 marks the final trading day of the month, so the market will closely monitor monthly fund flows into Bitcoin ETFs.

Beating AI Express: Enterprise agent platform CREAO has secured a new strategic funding round of tens of millions of U.S. dollars, bringing its total raised capital to over $30 million. CREAO’s current focus is on iterative self-improvement of its "Harness" layer, which enables agents to continuously adjust their execution systems based on errors and feedback from real-world tasks. The Harness layer sits above the underlying model, governing how agents operate, covering functions such as task planning, tool invocation, memory management, model selection, and error handling. CREAO has already implemented partial automated error correction: after an agent completes a task, the system automatically reviews the output; if issues are detected, it generates a ticket, and an AI then investigates the root cause, drafts fixes, and validates the results. The new version is first tested with a small volume of real user traffic, with automatic rollback if performance declines. CREAO’s team has previously unveiled this system. Moving forward, CREAO plans to extend this improvement to more components of the Harness layer. For example, if a category of agents repeatedly makes errors with a specific tool or task workflow, the platform can adjust its entire execution approach based on data from numerous real-world tasks, and newly created agents of the same category can directly leverage these optimizations. Looking ahead, CREAO also plans to integrate some of these learnings into its models. The company plans to conduct post-training for open-source models tailored to vertical scenarios, so that common tasks can be handled more by lower-cost specialized models, while complex tasks will still call for state-of-the-art models.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that Tether is advancing the "decentralized holding" of US Treasuries via stablecoin technology, enhancing the security of the US debt holding structure. Ardoino noted that if hostile nations hold hundreds of billions of dollars in US Treasuries in a concentrated manner, a single decision-maker could offload large volumes in a short period, creating risks to the US financial system. By contrast, the number of Treasury holders backing Tether’s stablecoins is massive: roughly 650 million people currently hold related US Treasury assets indirectly. Since investors will not make sell decisions simultaneously, this mitigates the risk of concentrated sell-offs. Ardoino added that traditional finance, despite decades of so-called "financial innovation", has failed to resolve this issue, while stablecoin technology has for the first time enabled more widespread, decentralized holding of US Treasuries.

CryptoRank reported that as on-chain credit demand rebounds, the active loan volume of major DeFi lending protocols has risen from $20.1 billion in June 2026 to $26.1 billion in August, marking a nearly 30% cumulative increase over the summer. Aave remains dominant with an active loan volume of $12.5 billion, holding around a 48% market share; Morpho ranks second at $5.1 billion, while Spark takes third place with $2.1 billion. The data indicates that the DeFi lending market continues to expand, reflecting a notable recovery in on-chain financing and credit demand.

According to Bitget market data, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index closed down 17.8 points, or 0.07%, at 25,566.99 on Monday, August 31. The Hong Kong Hang Seng Tech Index, by contrast, rose 14.72 points, or 0.32%, to end the day at 4,619.87.

Beating AI News Flash: Apple will officially announce a leadership change tomorrow. John Ternus, set to take over as Apple’s CEO, has long been skeptical of the Vision Pro, arguing the headset is too heavy, too expensive, and unlikely to become a mass-market product. By contrast, he favors Apple’s continued focus on lightweight smart glasses, and this shift is already underway. Apple recently laid off a number of employees working on Vision Pro, with cuts extending beyond gaming and immersive video to roles in device security, audio, Siri integration, testing, and operating systems. AppleInsider previously reported that at least 60 staff on the Vision project were affected. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in June that Ternus had personally approved a major revision to the headset roadmap. Multiple original Vision and smart glass projects have been scaled back, with only two smart glasses models visible to supply chain partners now: a display-less AI glasses set to launch in 2027, and a display-equipped model expected in 2029. However, the Vision Pro has not been entirely scrapped. Apple is still developing a new Vision Pro under the codename N224, with a possible launch as early as late 2028, and some within the company are urging Ternus to maintain investment in the product.