US stock markets will be closed next Monday, with trading in gold, silver and oil ending early.

Beating AI News Flash: MiniMax today open-sourced the weights of its M3.1 Flash model, which is now available on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Space Bunny, which launched anonymously earlier and reportedly processed over 200 trillion tokens total, is an early iteration of M3.1 Flash. The model uses a MoE architecture with 428 billion total parameters, but only activates around 23 billion per generation. The new version fully adopts sparse attention, and adds quantization training and DSpark speculative decoding. The company states that Agent task costs are 70% lower than the previous generation, with generation speed nearly tripled. In terms of performance, it scores 73.7% on DeepSWE v1.1, lower than DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017's 77%. Independent evaluator Vals AI noted its programming capabilities have improved significantly over the prior version, though complex terminal tasks remain a weakness. The weights are released under the MiniMax Community License. Commercial use requires attribution of the model source; if the annual revenue of related products or services exceeds $20 million, prior written authorization is required.

According to YuEmber Monitoring, a wallet address went long on SOXL twice and was liquidated both times over four hours from last night to early this morning, yet continued opening long positions. At 11 PM last night, the address opened a long position worth $5.42 million in SOXL, which was liquidated less than a minute later, resulting in a loss of around $316,000. At 1 AM today, it opened another long position worth $4.97 million in SOXL, liquidated two hours later, with a loss of roughly $270,000. Just two minutes after the second liquidation, the address opened a new long position worth $2.22 million in SOXL, which has not been liquidated as of now.

DFINITY founder Dominic Williams has published an accusation alleging that NEAR Intents’ chain abstraction feature unauthorizedly uses DFINITY’s threshold ECDSA signature technology, which is exclusively licensed for the Internet Computer. He noted the related work was advanced by an individual who was dismissed by DFINITY in 2021. Citing academic papers and GitHub records, Williams said NEAR has been using the algorithm for roughly two and a half years, and is now attempting to switch to a slower scheme requiring three rounds of signature interactions. He questioned the project’s decentralization and user security. Williams added that the matter involves legal issues and needs resolution, though his article did not disclose any lawsuits filed.

a16z Crypto general partner Ali Yahya announced in a post that he will leave the firm to launch his own company. Yahya noted that while the venture is still in its early stages, his current focus is on building infrastructure that enables an "open software ecosystem". Earlier reports revealed that a16z Crypto was recently rebranded as a16z Frontier, with its investment scope expanded to cover frontier startups.

According to the New York Post, a source familiar with the matter disclosed that Matthew Modabber, who has served as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Polymarket since January 2024, has been dismissed. The termination follows an internal investigation the company launched into a series of high-profile incidents that raised concerns among its investors. One key incident involves Modabber’s team being accused of creating fake web pages to promote staged videos showing users profiting from fraudulent trades. This scheme was exposed in a June Wall Street Journal report, which subsequently triggered an investigation by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The probe remains ongoing, and no violations have been identified so far. Insiders noted that Modabber is a close confidant of Coplan, Polymarket’s 28-year-old CEO. During his executive tenure, Modabber often made impulsive decisions that led to public relations crises for the company. Polymarket is currently finalizing Modabber’s separation agreement, with both parties maintaining mutual respect throughout the process.

Tom Lee, chairman of Ethereum treasury firm BitMine, told CNBC in an interview today that the market is in a sell-off, with tech and semiconductor sectors under heavy pressure. Defensive sectors have instead strengthened, reflecting clear risk-averse traits in the market. Lee added that the market is currently overly pessimistic, and his technical analyst Mark Newton believes tech stocks have basically hit their support levels.