South Korean stocks closed higher, with Samsung Electronics rising 3.25% and SK Hynix gaining 1.2%.

Beating AI News: Qwen has officially launched the Qwen-Audio 3.1 series of large speech models. This upgrade not only brings comprehensive improvements to three core models—Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and real-time speech interaction (Realtime)—but also introduces two new key models: the audio creation model Qwen-Audio 3.1-TTS-Next and the audio understanding model Qwen-Audio 3.1-ASR-Next. The five new speech models launched together form a complete audio capability stack covering "understanding, generation, interaction, and creation". To further lower user costs, all Qwen-Audio series speech models have had their prices reduced: TTS by approximately 70%, Realtime by around 85%, and ASR by up to 95%.

Binance announced it will launch U.S. dollar-margined U.S. stock Pre-IPO perpetual contracts for OURA at 16:30 (UTC+8) today, with the underlying asset being U.S. stock Oura Inc. and supporting up to 20x leverage.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost notes that while Bitcoin’s price is rising, sustained buying pressure has yet to reestablish, leaving mixed market signals. As of the 30th, cumulative spot demand stood at -180,000 BTC, remaining negative; futures demand was +54,000 BTC, still positive but slightly down. Total average demand improved from -188,000 BTC to -126,000 BTC, narrowing the gap but still in negative territory overall. A recent divergence has emerged between price and total demand: Bitcoin’s price is up, but total demand has not turned positive, indicating the rally is driven more by easing selling pressure than strong buying. Breaking down by segment, demand recovery is uneven. For institutional players, while geopolitical and macroeconomic conditions remain unfavorable, the volume-weighted Coinbase Premium briefly turned positive, signaling U.S. spot prices occasionally trade at a premium to other markets, with institutional selling pressure easing notably. ETFs have been the biggest change in this cycle: demand has flipped completely compared to this summer, with recent net purchases of roughly 70,000 BTC. Cumulative inflows for 2026 still stand at around -17,000 BTC, but are close to turning positive. For trading platforms, net outflows dominated throughout September, a trend pointing to accumulation rather than distribution—Bitcoin leaving exchanges typically translates to lower near-term selling pressure. Analyst Darkfost concludes that the current price rally is not driven by stronger buying, but rather by investors refraining from adding more selling pressure at higher price levels, leaving the market structure still fragile.

Binance announced it will discontinue Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH) deposit and withdrawal services via Fiat Trade UAH, and delist the USDT/UAH spot trading pair. Starting September 28, 2026, at 09:00 UTC+2, UAH deposits and withdrawals will no longer be supported, and the USDT/UAH spot trading pair will be officially taken offline. All outstanding orders will be automatically removed once trading stops. Users’ eligible remaining UAH balances will be automatically converted to USDT at a fixed rate of 1 USDT = 46.5 UAH by September 30, 2026, at 18:00 UTC+2. No user action is required, as the conversion will be processed automatically by the system.

Beating AI News Flash: Firecrawl secures $75 million Series B funding led by Smash Capital, and launches Alexandria. The platform integrates web search, third-party data sources, and Firecrawl’s proprietary index into a unified interface, eliminating the need for AI agents to connect to separate APIs for each data type. For instance, an agent researching a company can first search the web, then directly call Fiscal.ai for financial data; access economic data via FRED and the World Bank; and search GitHub and Firecrawl’s Developer Index for coding-related queries. Alexandria currently covers additional data types including academic papers, government datasets, commodities, real estate, and job postings, accessible via API, MCP, and CLI. Firecrawl reported that when testing the same model and prompt across 845 tasks, responses using Alexandria were 21% higher in quality than those generated by the model’s native web tools. Proceeds from the funding round will also be used to acquire and integrate additional data sources. Firecrawl already has a paid partnership with Wikimedia Enterprise, and plans to onboard more researchers, publishers, and data providers to contribute their content to Alexandria, with revenue generated when agents utilize this data.

Official data from Hyperliquid shows its open interest has reached $18 billion, hitting a new all-time high. This figure refers to bilateral open interest, calculated as the sum of long and short positions. Over the past year, Hyperliquid has expanded from a crypto perpetual trading platform into an on-chain trading infrastructure supporting stocks, commodities, indices, pre-IPO, and event contracts. Launched in October 2025, HIP-3 allows third parties to stake HYPE and deploy their own perpetual markets, with underlying assets covering U.S. stocks, gold, crude oil, the S&P 500, and private companies like SpaceX. As of early September 2026, cumulative trading volume on HIP-3 markets exceeded $548 billion, accounting for roughly 30% of the platform’s total trading volume in the past 30 days. HIP-4, launched in May 2026, filled the gap in prediction markets and event contracts, and was further opened to third-party deployments at the end of August. During the same period, firms including 21Shares, Bitwise, and Grayscale sequentially launched HYPE spot or staking-based ETFs, while the platform rolled out native lending and advanced licensed HIP-3 markets for U.S. users.