The Crypto Fear & Greed Index has risen to 65, with the market remaining in "greed" territory.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated at a Washington press conference yesterday that the Trump administration may designate digital assets, aviation and shipping sectors as new sanctions targets amid further pressure on Iran’s economy.

Amid recent sharp volatility in the bond market, investors are awaiting two key U.S. data releases that could influence Federal Reserve policy decisions: the August non-farm payrolls report due this Friday, and August CPI data to be published on September 11. However, Bank of America (BofA) believes these two metrics carry different weights for the Fed’s September 15-16 policy meeting. The bank describes the non-farm payrolls report as more of an "appetizer," while the "main course" that will truly determine whether the Fed raises interest rates remains CPI. BofA analysts stated on Wednesday: "Non-farm payrolls are unlikely to be a decisive factor for a September rate hike. A significantly weak report could lower the probability of a rate hike, but CPI remains the key data point that will decide whether the Fed follows through on a rate hike. We maintain our call for a September rate hike." Unless the upcoming non-farm payrolls data shows a clear downside surprise, the jobs report is unlikely to be the final determining factor in the September FOMC meeting. The bank particularly emphasized that inflation remains the Fed’s primary concern at present.

Top crypto KOL Unipcs bought $150,000 worth of JINQIAN tokens last night during the token’s rapid price surge, driven by FOMO, when its market cap hit $29.8 million. The KOL ultimately exited the position this morning, incurring a total loss of $118,000. Unipcs has been reaping solid gains on the Robinhood Chain recently, having repeatedly shared its trading performance on X, with $8.45 million in profits over the past month.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: Baidu's Basic Model Research and Development Department (BMU) is beefing up its core model team. Sources familiar with the matter said that department head Sun Tianxiang has brought in a researcher codenamed "Wu Qin" from a North American frontier lab to join the team and enhance Ernie's pre-training. The researcher has participated in the development of several generations of cutting-edge large models over the past two years, though their real name and former affiliation remain undisclosed. Separately, former DeepSeek researcher Wei Haoran and his team have also transferred internally to BMU, where he will serve as head of Ernie's multimodal algorithms. Wei Haoran's move had already been hinted at earlier. In June, when Baidu open-sourced Unlimited OCR, the technical director among the three core contributors was only credited under the pseudonym "YY", sparking community speculation that it was Wei Haoran. Wei Haoran is the first author of DeepSeek-OCR and DeepSeek-OCR 2; DeepSeek-V4's technical report also noted that he had left the company. When Unlimited OCR was released, it scored 93.92% on OmniDocBench v1.6, once setting a new record for end-to-end OCR performance. It adopts DeepSeek-OCR's DeepEncoder and redesigned the attention mechanism at the decoding end, enabling continuous parsing of dozens of pages of documents in one go. Sun Tianxiang took over BMU in July, simultaneously joining Baidu's Model Committee; at the end of the month, he was also admitted to Baidu's Technical Strategy Committee. Two months later, both of Ernie's core lines – pre-training and multimodal – have started adding personnel.

According to market data, Lighter has surged over 10% in the past 24 hours, with its token price now at $3.84, hitting a new all-time high. The project has recently gained multiple positive tailwinds: it has been deeply involved in the formulation of U.S. crypto-friendly policies, and has also integrated closely with the recently trending Robinhood Chain.

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.