Rising concerns over AI financing push SoftBank’s credit risk to a near four-year high.

Bitget has launched four popular stock perpetual contracts: CSTOCK (Citibank), MDT (Medtronic), BP (British Petroleum), and VLO (Valero Energy). The contracts are settled in USDT, support up to 20x leverage, and enable 24/7 trading. As of now, Bitget supports a total of 368 stock contract underlyings.

Beating AI News Insight: The U.S. Treasury Department on October 19 added MiraclePlus, founded by Lu Qi, and three of its affiliated entities to its sanctions list. Shanghai Zhisuan Technology was also sanctioned in the same batch, bringing the total number of Chinese entities targeted to five. Sanctions include freezing assets under U.S. jurisdiction, restricting financial transactions, and prohibiting U.S. persons from making certain equity and debt investments. The sanctions stem from the trade secret theft case of former Google engineer Ding Linwei. The U.S. Department of Justice said Ding secretly uploaded more than 2,000 pages of internal Google documents during his tenure, covering TPUs, GPUs, and AI supercomputing infrastructure. Ding later founded Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, and when pitching projects at MiraclePlus’s startup camp, he claimed to be able to replicate Google’s AI supercomputing technology. The U.S. State Department disclosed that MiraclePlus provided seed funding to Ding and received equity in his company, leading to its designation as having provided significant support to the relevant trade secret theft activities. In January this year, a jury found Ding guilty of seven counts of trade secret theft. However, a judge in August dismissed seven additional counts of economic espionage, ruling there was insufficient evidence to prove he intended to benefit the Chinese government. The U.S. Treasury Department allows MiraclePlus and its three affiliated entities to wind down existing transactions gradually under a transitional license until January 19, 2027.

After two consecutive days of rebound and what seemed like a near-term bottom, South Korea’s Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) plunged again, hitting a peak decline of 4.76% and falling below the 5,500-point threshold during intraday trading. Driven by rising U.S. Treasury yields and weak first-day performance of a data center firm, foreign investors have been offloading South Korean stocks, while institutional investors including pension funds also joined the sell-off, exerting significant downward pressure on the market. As of press time, foreign investors recorded a net sell of 636.7 billion won in South Korea’s securities market. Institutional investors also posted a net sell of 467 billion won, with financial investment institutions selling 241.8 billion won and pension funds offloading 159 billion won. Retail investors and other corporate entities net bought 838.8 billion won and 261.6 billion won respectively, in an effort to prop up the index and limit further declines. Huh Jae-Hwan, an analyst at Eugene Investment & Securities, said: “The sell-off is indiscriminate, with nearly all stocks falling. The market appears very fragile.” Even battery manufacturers, which led the rebound on Monday, have now retreated.

Elon Musk announced in a post that X’s timeline recommendations are getting two key adjustments. The first is a new AI and super-intelligent ranking model designed to better predict how much time users will spend on the platform. The second is a trained retrieval model that prioritizes pushing posts users will read in full. Musk also noted that X’s user active seconds are growing exponentially, hitting new highs almost daily. The accompanying chart shows that the 2026 user activity curve is significantly higher than in previous years, climbing to over 500 billion seconds by late October.

US President Donald Trump thanked Elon Musk in an early morning post for the "national US airdrop". Trump stated, "I sincerely thank our legendary friend Elon Musk, who generously donated SpaceX stocks to millions of American children via the TRUMP account! This is exactly the vision we had when we launched the TRUMP account—uniting the great private sector, Elon, and many other forces to invest in our children, our most valuable and important assets, so that every American child can have a piece of the American Dream." Yesterday, Musk announced in a post that he will gift one SpaceX share to every child in the US next year, calling this the first in a series of similar upcoming initiatives. Some market analysts note that Musk's action is partially driven by a desire to support Trump's midterm elections.

Blockchain security firm Asymmetric Research has disclosed a vulnerability in Solana’s on-chain governance program svmgov: when validators do not participate in voting, delegators’ pre-submitted independent votes may fail to be counted in the final results. The bug was reported to the Solana Foundation on July 10, and mainnet fixes were completed on August 3, ahead of the governance vote held on August 24. Based on on-chain data, Asymmetric Research estimated that if the vulnerability had not been patched, the approval rate for Proposal SGP-0002 (which aimed to accelerate the reduction of SOL inflation) would have dropped from the actual 67.00% to 66.65%, below the 66.67% approval threshold. The vulnerability was fixed before the vote, so it did not actually alter the proposal’s outcome.