South Korea’s foreign exchange reserves posted a record increase of $14.33 billion in August.

Colombian fintech Plenti has secured $3 million in seed funding led by Tether, with Verda Ventures participating. Tether will hold a minority stake in Plenti. The capital will be used to strengthen Plenti’s operations in Colombia and expand into Peru and Bolivia. Plenti provides services including cross-border transfers, multi-currency accounts, and investments in stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies. It currently has over 150,000 active users, with annual transaction volume exceeding $3.1 billion across its B2B and B2C businesses.

With the Bank of Japan (BOJ) policy decision looming, yen traders are bracing for possible fresh foreign exchange intervention by Japanese authorities. As the BOJ’s announcement will be followed by a three-day holiday, market watchers believe authorities could act during the low-liquidity holiday window. The yen extended its Wednesday gains on Thursday, underscoring market nervousness ahead of the BOJ’s September 18 policy meeting, where a rate hike is broadly priced in. In April this year, Japanese authorities waited until a domestic holiday to conduct their first intervention since 2024. Now, investors are speculating Japan may use a similar tactic during the "Silver Week" holiday, which kicks off shortly after the BOJ meeting. Commonwealth Bank of Australia strategist Samara Hamoud noted: "Silver Week could further amplify uncertainty around yen moves, primarily because market liquidity tends to decline even more during holidays. Over time, USD/JPY may retest the previous highs that triggered intervention. If this occurs quickly, especially around the BOJ meeting, the risk of further intervention will rise significantly."

Beating AI Express: AI inference platform fal has launched a faster, cheaper iteration of the H3 Max, which was released just one week ago. The H3 Max Turbo is built on MiniMax H3 post-training, optimized exclusively for fal’s proprietary inference system. In official tests of 5-second, 768p videos, generation latency fell from 3.49 seconds for the original H3 Max to 1.40 seconds—roughly a 2.5x speedup. While speed improved, quality saw a minor decline: fal’s internal testing benchmarks the original H3 Max at 100% quality, with the Turbo version scoring 97%. The company states that prompt comprehension, aesthetics, and overall quality are largely preserved, and the Turbo still outperforms the original MiniMax H3 and other tested video models. The H3 Max launched only on August 27, so fal is already delivering a faster, lower-priced variant just one week later. The regular price for the Turbo’s 768p offering is $0.04 per second, half of the H3 Max’s $0.08 per second. A launch promotion is now running with a 75% discount, bringing the rate to $0.01 per second—making a 1-minute video cost just $0.60.

Lawyer Ariel Givner tweeted that hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger is facing a class-action lawsuit in New York. The complaint alleges that a December 2023 security incident exposed customers’ personal identifiable information (PII) including names, email addresses, and phone numbers, and that Ledger failed to disclose the breach in a timely and complete manner. Hackers subsequently exploited the leaked contact details to impersonate Ledger officials, tricking customers into approving fraudulent transactions to steal their crypto assets, with the exposed data also ending up on the dark web.

According to its official page, Robinhood’s blockchain-based token issuance platform Pons added support for multiple stock token pairs this morning, including Snap, Lululemon, Figma, Moderna, Pfizer, and others.

Circle and decentralized perpetual contract trading platform edgeX jointly announced that on September 16, coinciding with the launch of the Arc mainnet, edgeX will serve as Arc’s flagship perpetual product, offering 24/7 forex trading on the mainnet’s first day. The two parties will collaborate to advance Arc’s on-chain foreign exchange and global asset trading markets. On the mainnet launch day, edgeX will debut a 24/7 tradable USD/JPY perpetual contract, alongside over 150 perpetual contract markets covering U.S. stocks, commodities, and crypto assets. All markets use Arc’s native USDC as margin and settlement asset. Arc is Circle’s Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin finance, featuring a built-in FX engine (StableFX), institutional-grade RFQ (Request for Quote) system, and 24/7 on-chain PvP (peer-to-peer) settlement, with USDC as its native gas token. Backed by Circle Ventures, edgeX will be the exclusive launch partner for Arc’s FX perpetual market. A globally leading centralized perpetual contract exchange, edgeX has recorded over $900 billion in trading volume since its launch, enabling users to trade perpetual contracts for U.S. stocks, commodities, forex, and crypto assets around the clock. Prior to this, Circle and edgeX teams had collaborated on EDGE Chain’s native USDC issuance and CCTP integration. This partnership will combine Circle’s expertise in stablecoin financial infrastructure with edgeX’s on-chain trading experience to expand 24/7 global asset trading use cases. Looking ahead, the two sides plan to gradually add more major forex pairs based on market demand and liquidity, and explore non-U.S. dollar stablecoin margin and on-chain FX spot markets.