Overseas investors dumped 4.03 trillion yen ($27.3 billion) in Japanese government bonds over June and July, the largest two-month outflow since early 2023, according to Ministry of Finance data. The selling pressure comes as the yen strengthened to a six-month high against the dollar, breaching levels last seen during July's joint US-Japan currency intervention. Markets now price a near-certain 25 basis point rate hike at the Bank of Japan's meeting next week, with OCBC strategist Christopher Wong noting the move is "almost fully priced in." The rapid yen appreciation threatens to unwind carry trades that have fueled global risk asset rallies.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi has rolled out MiMo Desktop, its first AI desktop client designed for real-world work scenarios, with limited-time beta testing now open. The application supports reading multiple file formats including spreadsheets, images, videos, and PDFs, automatically breaking down tasks and calling tools to generate editable documents, presentations, web pages, 3D models, and software engineering projects. It features a "Smart" scheduling system that routes between different models and multi-agents, and can operate browsers for retrieval, form filling, and web verification. The product leverages context caching and local editing to control costs for long-running tasks.

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has launched an internal beta of its v4.1 Flash model, featuring a new architecture with native multimodal support, enhanced capabilities, higher speed, and lower costs. Users can access the model by setting the model name to deepseek-v4.1-flash-expires-on-0910 while keeping the existing base URL unchanged. Pricing remains identical to deepseek-v4-flash, with an account-level concurrency limit of 20 requests. The release signals DeepSeek's continued push to compete with Western AI leaders on both performance and affordability.

South Korea's Shinhan Financial Investment is recommending investors allocate 2% to digital assets and 8% to alternative assets, according to chief researcher Park Woo-yeol. The traditional 60% stocks and 40% bonds strategy has weakened due to rising stock-bond correlation, Park said in a report. His analysis showed that a portfolio combining gold and bitcoin at an 8:2 ratio delivered relatively better risk-adjusted performance. The recommendation from a major Korean financial institution highlights growing institutional acceptance of crypto as a portfolio component.

A US federal court in Washington D.C. has ordered the forfeiture of 158,123 USDC and 54,574 USDT, totaling approximately $212,700, from a wallet linked to North Korean overseas IT worker money laundering. The Justice Department is seeking to confiscate a total of $7.74 million in North Korea-related crypto assets. The case underscores ongoing efforts to disrupt Pyongyang's use of cryptocurrency to fund its weapons programs through illicit remote work schemes.

San-in Godo Bank, a regional Japanese bank, has partnered with NTT Data and Securitize Japan to research tokenized securities for local financing. The three parties will first assess the feasibility of the bank issuing bond-type security tokens and selling them to investors. No actual issuance decision has been made yet, but the collaboration reflects growing interest in Japan to modernize capital markets using blockchain technology and support regional economic development.

South Korean digital asset custodian BDACS has adopted LayerZero Labs' OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) standard for its won-backed stablecoin KRW1, enabling native cross-chain interoperability. KRW1 becomes the first Korean won stablecoin that can move natively between major DeFi ecosystems without wrapped tokens, avoiding liquidity fragmentation. The integration positions KRW1 for broader use in decentralized finance across multiple blockchains.

A 22-year-old Singaporean man is set to plead guilty in a US court over his role in a massive crypto theft that stole approximately $240 million in bitcoin from a single investor. Prosecutors allege his accomplices posed as Google and Gemini customer support agents, using social engineering to trick the victim into transferring bitcoin to wallets controlled by the scammers. The case highlights the global reach of crypto fraud networks and the use of impersonation tactics targeting high-net-worth individuals.

4Stock, a tokenized stock asset launched by Four.meme on BNB Smart Chain, skyrocketed over 1,980% within five hours of trading, reaching a market cap of $67 million and an all-time high above $70 million. The token is pegged 1:1 to US stocks and designed as a "stock meme" base asset. With 24-hour trading volume of $45.46 million against only $1.65 million in liquidity, the asset shows extreme volatility and thin market depth, raising concerns about potential price manipulation and liquidity risk for retail investors.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's Chengdu branch has issued Sichuan province's first "Token computing power" loan to a high-tech enterprise, incorporating AI computing consumption and token procurement costs into its credit evaluation system. The loan targets companies lacking traditional collateral but with genuine AI business demand, using actual computing bills, token call logs, service contracts, and AI orders as core evidence. Funds are earmarked for large model API fees and computing rental costs, addressing the mismatch between upfront AI expenses and delayed project revenue.