Waymo said it plans to launch a fully autonomous, all-electric commercial ride-hailing service in Singapore in 2028 through the Waymo app, marking the company’s first move into Southeast Asia. The company said it will work with Singapore’s Ministry of Transport and Land Transport Authority, with the first batch of Jaguar I-PACE vehicles expected to arrive in the coming months to establish local operations. A preparation phase is scheduled for 2027, during which trained autonomous vehicle specialists will manually drive the cars to help the system learn local road geometry, intersection layouts, and monsoon weather conditions while collecting data for regulatory approval. Waymo said it has logged more than 20 million fully autonomous trips globally and more than 300 million kilometers on public roads, adding that injury-causing crashes in its U.S. operating cities were 94% lower than those involving human drivers. Singapore’s Transport Minister and Second Minister for Finance Chee Hong Tat welcomed the company’s entry, saying it would bring world-class technology and operating experience while creating jobs. Singapore currently has only two autonomous vehicle operators, Grab and ComfortDelGro, running 11 and 5 vehicles respectively on three fixed shuttle routes in Punggol.

MEXC CEO Vugar Usi said the exchange is building around retail users rather than institutions, arguing that zero-fee trading and broader asset access can change how crypto platforms compete. In an interview with ChainCatcher at Coinfest Asia 2026 in Bali, Usi said his move to MEXC followed years of watching large exchanges lean heavily on institutional volume, with roughly 80% of activity on top platforms coming from institutions. He said MEXC’s focus is different: lower entry barriers for ordinary investors and combine crypto with tokenized stocks, commodities, precious metals, savings products and card-based spending inside one platform. Usi also outlined the business logic behind the company’s fee policy, saying MEXC saved users about $1.1 billion in fees last year, with average savings of about $320 per user and some large traders saving $7 million to $8 million. He said nearly all spot trading on the platform is zero-fee, around 200 futures and digital-asset pairs carry zero fees, and all stocks and tokenized stock products are also zero-fee. On transparency and security, he said MEXC has been publishing proof-of-reserves reports with third-party partners since last November, maintains roughly 160% reserve ratios for BTC and ETH, about 130% for stablecoins, and plans to expand its Guardian Fund from $100 million to $500 million within two years, with 1,000 BTC added as part of that expansion.

ABMedia, citing analysis from The Motley Fool, said investors looking beyond Tesla in the autonomous driving trade may want to watch five U.S.-listed names tied to different parts of the ecosystem: Mobileye, Nvidia, Uber, Lyft and WeRide. The report came after Tesla recently unveiled Cybercab and as more than 10 companies globally have moved into autonomous vehicles and robotaxi-related business lines. The analysis breaks the market into several layers, including AI chip suppliers, ADAS providers, fleet operators and demand-matching platforms. Mobileye was highlighted for supplying roughly 30 million vehicles a year with Level 1 and Level 2 driver-assistance chips and software, while Nvidia was described as a central technology supplier through its NVIDIA Drive platform. Uber was framed as a demand aggregator with about 12 autonomous driving partners, Lyft as a potentially attractive acquisition target because of its dispatch network, and WeRide as a company showing overseas expansion, with latest quarterly revenue of $34.1 million and growth of nearly 100% year over year.

Bitget PoolX has listed BGBTC, allowing users to stake BGBTC and share a 4,000 UNI airdrop. The individual staking cap is 30 BGBTC, and the staking window runs from 19:00 on September 4 to 19:00 on September 9 (UTC+8).

Hugging Face-owned Pollen Robotics has opened preorders for Microduck, a 25-centimeter biped robot duck priced at $399 and scheduled to ship before Christmas. The device weighs under 800 grams, comes in four colors, and ships with seven preloaded behavior policies trained with reinforcement learning. It can walk, squat, stand back up after falling, grab small objects with its hinged beak, and enter a skating mode with detachable roller bases. The product traces its roots to Open Duck Mini, an open-source project started by Pollen Robotics engineer Antoine Pirrone. That earlier effort gained more than 2,600 stars on GitHub and drew attention after a June Google I/O demo showed two units running Google’s Gemma 4 model locally on Raspberry Pi 5 and Jetson Orin Nano hardware. Microduck shifts the focus away from on-device talking and toward physical control, with policies trained in MuJoCo and deployed on the robot at 50 Hz. Pollen says the software stack is fully open source under Apache 2.0, including the SDK, simulation environment, and training pipeline, while the hardware design and schematics remain closed. The launch also lands against a larger backdrop: on the same day preorders opened, multiple media outlets reported that Nvidia was close to a roughly $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face. In that context, Microduck sits at the intersection of low-cost robotics hardware, developer community building, and embodied AI strategy.

The Wall Street Journal reported that 1789 Capital, the investment firm where Donald Trump Jr. serves as a partner, is preparing to invest about $300 million more into prediction market platform Polymarket. The check would be part of a new funding round of roughly $1 billion led by 1789 Capital. If the deal closes, Polymarket is expected to reach a valuation of about $21 billion. The firm has already invested about $200 million in Polymarket and, after this round, is expected to become one of the company’s largest shareholders. The development puts fresh attention on both sides of the deal. On one side is 1789 Capital, a fund launched in October 2022 by Omeed Malik, Rebekah Mercer, and Chris Buskirk, and later joined by Donald Trump Jr. after the 2024 election. On the other is Polymarket, whose valuation has climbed in step with regulatory shifts, strategic acquisitions, and backing from major investors including Intercontinental Exchange. At the same time, questions remain over Polymarket’s economics. Revenue estimates from Sacra and DefiLlama differ sharply, and competition in prediction markets has intensified as Kalshi, brokerages, centralized exchanges, and on-chain protocols expand their own offerings. Even after regaining a compliant path into the U.S., Polymarket still appears to draw most of its fees and trading activity from international users.

AEON, an AI-native payment protocol focused on the so-called agentic economy, completed its token generation event on July 27 and began trading on Binance Alpha, Bitget, OKX, Gate and KuCoin, before adding a KRW pair on Bithumb on July 29. The project says it is building a crypto settlement layer for AI agents rather than another consumer wallet, aiming to support verifiable and settleable payments as agents move from answering questions to making purchases and carrying out tasks on their own. According to data released by AEON on July 28, the network has more than 2.3 million users, monthly transaction volume above $30 million, coverage across nearly 20 emerging markets, access to more than 50 million merchants and cumulative processed volume of $475 million. The company said its stack integrates x402, ERC-8004, Google AP2/A2A and MCP, while local payment rails such as VietQR, QR Ph and Pix help convert onchain payments into fiat received by merchants. AEON also points to protocol ties with Coinbase and BNB Chain, an $8 million pre-seed round led by YZi Labs in May 2026, and a three-stage roadmap that stretches from payment verification to execution verification and, later, broader AI financial services based on KYA credit records.

The Hamster Kombat Daily Combo for January 28, 2026, offers players 5 million in-game coins by purchasing or upgrading specific cards. This limited-time task is a key fast-track for coin accumulation within the Telegram-based play-to-earn game.