Fidelity argues that the online activity brought about by AI agents may not necessarily translate into value for the public chain and tokens. Closed platforms, stablecoin payments, and regulatory factors could all lead to a diversion of profits.

Bitcoin rises to $75,000; foreign media say Trump's stance on cryptocurrencies and declining U.S. inflation boost market sentiment, but geopolitical risks may still bring downward pressure.

Cramer says that valuations of U.S. stocks are diverging from the actual performance of companies, and high interest rates, oil prices, and consumer pressures are dragging down market pricing.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) held its first meeting of the Innovation Advisory Committee on August 20 in Washington. The committee was restructured from the former Technical Advisory Committee and is tasked with providing recommendations to regulatory authorities on technical, legal, policy, and financial cross-cutting issues. Its members come from exchanges, clearinghouses, crypto companies, predictive markets, academia, and public interest organizations. The meeting itself does not automatically result in new regulations, nor does it equate to consensus among committee members, but it indicates that discussions on derivatives regulation in the United States are shifting from principle-based support for innovation to more actionable issues such as market structure, product boundaries, monitoring capabilities, and customer protection.

On August 21, the Statistics Bureau of Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released consumer price data for July. Nationwide, excluding fresh food, the core CPI rose by 1.8% year-on-year, in line with the median expectations of market surveys, and continued to rebound from 1.6% in June. There is also an important change that is easily overlooked in this release: Japan has officially started using the CPI series with 2025 as the base period. The update of the base period will adjust the weights of goods and services and reset the index reference point to the new consumption structure. Therefore, the July data is not only an inflation reading but also a new starting point for observing changes in residents' spending patterns after the pandemic and the energy shock.