ben

On October 30, Musk admitted that the development of Grok 4.8 took longer than expected but assured that the new model would not disappoint. He stated that the team does not optimize for benchmark testing and he himself does not care about scores, focusing more on the practical applications of the model. On September 14, Musk revealed that Grok 4.8 has 2.5 trillion parameters and uses a brand new C++ training system, expecting to complete pre-training by the end of that week, followed by reinforcement learning.Now, more than six weeks have passed, and the new model has still not been officially released. The independent evaluation agency Artificial Analysis found that under the same xhigh inference setting, Grok 4.7's comprehensive intelligence index only increased by 2 points compared to Grok 4.6, rising from 44 to 46 points, while the average output tokens per question increased from about 38,000 to 81,000. Users in the Cursor community have also complained that Grok 4.7 consumes resources faster, but the actual improvement is not significant.In an interview with CCTV in September, Musk admitted that Grok 4.7 is not as good as Claude Opus 5.5, predicting that it would not catch up to the top tier until 2027. In October, he proposed allowing Grok Bot to call external models, including Claude, based on tasks, and plans to have Grok 4.8's high-speed version handle a large number of simple requests.

According to Cointelegraph, Standard Chartered's Global Head of Digital Assets Research Geoffrey Kendrick stated that the Binance hacking incident may accelerate the shift towards decentralized exchanges (DEX) and benefit Uniswap's UNI. Kendrick also mentioned that his previous target of UNI reaching 100 dollars by 2030 may be too low.

The modular blockchain network Celestia announced the launch of the application-specific blockchain architecture Voyager, aimed at large-scale payment scenarios in agent commerce. The official statement claims that Voyager processed approximately 21 million transactions per second continuously between 100 million accounts during its first complete benchmark test, which lasted for 5 hours.Celestia stated that Voyager splits payment processing into independently scalable threads, avoiding blocking the execution thread responsible for updating balances. Transactions are first verified for signatures and packaged at the entry layer, then enter a circular buffer inspired by the exchange system Disruptor; execution logic is built-in, and state is stored in a flat table rather than a Merkle tree. Each transaction is published to Celestia's data availability protocol Fibre, for external replay and verification of whether payments were executed correctly.The benchmark test covered approximately 40 billion random transfers, with an average throughput of 21.2 million TPS and a peak of 21.6 million TPS. Execution ran on a single CPU core, with node memory around 48 GB. This test was conducted on a single node and did not include state root computation, cross-machine replication, or real-time state queries at the same scale. Celestia claims it is advancing Voyager into production and will release more in-depth technical documentation in the coming weeks. Fibre was launched on the mainnet last week, and Voyager is the first execution layer product launched after its acquisition of Sovereign Labs.

According to Cointelegraph, Stellar has launched Project Thruput, a new execution model that has gone live on FutureNet. Early benchmarks show that the model achieves 7.02 million payments per second by scaling across multiple machines.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring on-chain data, significant capital movements are predicted in the Polymarket. A large whale invested $67,636.84 in the event "Next Prime Minister of Israel," specifically targeting "Benjamin Netanyahu." Based on the current transaction price, the latest corresponding probability for this subject is 81.35%.

According to CoinDesk, CF Benchmarks, an index provider under Kraken's parent company Payward, has launched CFB Oracle, which will introduce pricing benchmarks for BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF and CME Group's cryptocurrency futures into blockchain applications.The service provides benchmark data for markets including cryptocurrencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, and foreign exchange, supporting developers in building on-chain index funds, tokenized portfolios, and derivatives products.CF Benchmarks stated that its indices currently serve products representing over $120 billion in assets. CFB Oracle now supports Ethereum, HyperEVM, and Robinhood Chain, with plans to expand to other compatible networks in the future.Payward also plans to use this service for its upcoming U.S. perpetual contract products, providing pricing data for these products, which are still awaiting regulatory approval. The service will compete with oracle providers such as Chainlink and Pyth.

Verizon (VZ.N) CEO stated that the SpaceX (SPCX.O) network leasing deal "has no benefits."

On October 26, B.AI announced a limited-time benefit, with the latest MiniMax model MiniMax-M3.1-Flash (Space Bunny) available at 50% OFF on the B.AI web platform, Android App, and API. This model is designed for complex agent tasks, software engineering, visual reasoning, and professional analysis, helping developers efficiently complete complex tasks from code development to multi-step automated workflows.The event runs from October 26, 17:00 to November 2, 16:59 (SGT), allowing users to experience the popular new model at a lower cost and flexibly manage AI invocation costs. B.AI stated that it will continue to integrate high-quality models from around the world, providing a richer selection of models and more competitive prices through a unified entry point. Users are welcome to log in to chat.b.ai/chat to experience it immediately.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the market prediction event "Bengals vs. Ravens" on Polymarket, the "Bengals" option in the sub-market "1H Spread -10.5" has experienced a dramatic fluctuation in winning probability, dropping from 52.5% an hour ago to the current 17% (a fluctuation of 35.5%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

For the week ending October 10, the number of people continuing to claim unemployment benefits in the United States was 1.728 million, higher than the expected 1.72 million, and the previous value was 1.71 million.

The blockchain infrastructure layer Espresso announced the completion of its mainnet upgrade. Benchmark tests show that its data throughput reaches 181 MB/s, which translates to approximately 1 million stablecoin transfers per second, based on an average of 180 bytes per transaction.The average final confirmation time for transactions is 337 milliseconds, and under peak load of 1 million transactions per second, it is 778 milliseconds.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the market prediction event "Ningbo Open: Ostapenko vs. Bencic" on Polymarket, the "Over" option for the sub-market "Ningbo Open: Ostapenko vs. Bencic Total Games in Second Set O/U 8.5" experienced a dramatic fluctuation in winning probability, soaring from 34.5% an hour ago to the current 50% (a fluctuation of 15.5%). Please note the impact of relevant breaking news.

Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA (NVDA.O) announced the expansion of their strategic partnership in autonomous driving.

Harvard University's annual financial report shows that the university's endowment fund grew by 27.1% in fiscal year 2026, marking the strongest investment return performance in five years. The total size of the fund is now close to $68 billion.Harvard University's Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra and Financial Officer Timothy Barakett wrote in the annual report: "This return will enhance the endowment fund's ability to support the university's long-term development. Strong investment returns will gradually support Harvard University's various initiatives through future fund allocations."In the second quarter 13F holdings report submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Harvard University disclosed that it holds $2.2 billion worth of shares in SpaceX, making it the largest single holding by market value in the endowment fund, followed by TSMC, with a holding value of just under $350 million. Previously, it was reported that Harvard University's fund had disclosed investments in cryptocurrency as early as 2018.

According to The Block, Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer of the cryptocurrency asset management company Bitwise, stated that regardless of whether artificial intelligence drives economic prosperity, investment bubbles burst, or growth remains moderate, Bitcoin will ultimately benefit.Hougan mentioned that if the artificial intelligence-related market crashes, Bitcoin may initially decline. He anticipates that subsequent government bailouts and monetary expansion will drive Bitcoin prices up.

Ethereum Layer 2 network ZKsync announced the launch of the prover Airbender Prime. ZKsync stated that, to their knowledge, this is the first prover to demonstrate real-time proofs of Ethereum on a single GPU. Airbender Prime is designed for post-quantum security, utilizing hash-based STARK, combined with GKR sumcheck, WHIR polynomial commitment, and BLAKE2s hash; its L1 proof will use a commitment based on Keccak-256 instead of BN254 pairing. This prover is based on the open RISC-V standard and combines real-time proofs with independent validators.In a single GPU evaluation, an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell completed proofs for 99% of 7200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks, with each block taking less than 10 seconds, including witness preparation; all blocks were completed within 12 seconds. ZKsync claims that Airbender Prime leads in average proof time, GPU efficiency, and cost reported on the ETHproofs public leaderboard, and it already has dual GPU and quad GPU real-time configurations while reducing the hardware requirements for generating proofs.

According to CoinDesk, Bitmine Immersion Technologies Chairman Tom Lee stated that the intergenerational wealth transfer occurring in the coming years could become an important factor driving the next round of demand in the cryptocurrency market. Based on research data from the IRS and Fundstrat, it is estimated that between 2026 and 2028, approximately $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in wealth will be transferred between generations.As young investors inheriting wealth typically have a higher risk appetite, this may increase their allocation to risk assets such as cryptocurrencies and stocks. Tom Lee added that Wall Street's accelerated adoption of blockchain technology for asset tokenization, the development of AI applications, and treasury companies holding cryptocurrencies for the long term could also become driving factors for future market growth.

Recently, there have been reports that Ant Group's AI product "Lingguang" has launched a new version for a small-scale internal test, which is comparable to Meta Muse. In response, Ant Group stated: Lingguang has recently undergone a functional upgrade and is currently still in a very limited internal testing phase.

For the week ending September 26, the number of people continuing to claim unemployment benefits in the United States was 1.716 million, higher than the expected 1.708 million, and the previous value was revised from 1.701 million to 1.699 million.

ChainCatcher live report, at the Token2049 conference in Singapore, World Liberty Financial co-founder Eric Trump stated that over the past year, funds have rotated from the cryptocurrency market to the AI sector, suppressing Bitcoin prices, but "this is the greatest thing that could happen"------the faster AI grows, the faster digital assets will grow. He provided a practical example: in the future, people will let AI agents book hotels and arrange travel, and these transactions "will not use fiat currency, will not use cash," but will be completed directly by agents through cryptocurrency wallets.Eric Trump pointed out that funds have now flowed back into the cryptocurrency market, and prices are rising, "the faster our peers in AI sprint towards their goals, the better it will be for our industry," and the industry should embrace AI with open arms.