Ren Shaoqing, a well-known AI scientist, ResNet co-author, head of the Institute of General Artificial Intelligence at the University of Science and Technology of China, and NIO’s senior vice president in charge of smart driving, has formally set up a company focused on physical AI foundation models and embodied intelligence. Quantum Bit said it confirmed the move, while LatePost reported that NIO CEO William Li told employees at an internal smart-driving meeting that Ren had created an independent company. NIO will make a strategic investment and work with the new venture on business cooperation. The company has already been registered and is said to carry a unicorn-level valuation of more than $1 billion, though its name and financing details have not been disclosed. The report also said Ren remains at NIO, leaving the exact structure of the arrangement unclear. The move comes after NIO spent the past few years building out world-model capabilities for autonomous driving, including the launch of NWM, or NIO World Model, in July 2024. Ren has repeatedly described world models as a shared foundation for autonomous driving and robotics, making the new company a direct extension of that line of work.

Gate’s latest market data showed gains in precious metals, with gold rising to $4,684.17 an ounce and silver climbing to $69.385 an ounce. The moves came alongside mixed cross-asset pricing, including a slight dip in USD/CNH and a modest rise in USD/JPY. In equities, the Euro Stoxx 50, the UK’s FTSE 100, and Germany’s DAX40 all posted small intraday advances, while both WTI and Brent crude traded lower on the day. Gate also said users can trade traditional financial market products directly on its platform. According to the company, the offering covers precious metals, foreign exchange, global stock CFDs, key indexes, and commodities. Gate added that its TradFi-related functions have been integrated into both its app and web platform, allowing users to access global asset price trading without switching platforms.

Gate’s latest data showed gold rising to $4,621.62 an ounce, up 0.29% on the day, while silver climbed to $69.309 an ounce and fell 0.85% intraday. In FX, USD/CNH edged up 0.01% to 6.71823 and USD/JPY slipped 0.16% to 158.727. European stock indices were mixed, with EUSTX50 and UK100 higher and GER40 lower. WTI and Brent both declined. Gate said users can trade traditional financial market products directly on its platform, including precious metals, FX, stock CFDs, major indices and commodities, through Gate App and web.

Bitcoin posted a 23.5% weekly gain as US debt concerns, fresh ETF inflows and a new wave of regulatory developments reshaped sentiment across crypto markets. Cointelegraph’s latest Hodler’s Digest says BTC traded around $77,559 at the time of writing after briefly topping $79,000 on Friday, while Ethereum rose 31.1%, Solana 28% and XRP 53.3%. Barchart noted that Bitcoin moved back above its 200-day moving average for the first time since November 2025, a level many traders watch for longer-term trend shifts. The report ties part of the rally to US debt policy after the federal debt crossed $40 trillion. The Kobeissi Letter pointed to inflation, deficit spending and Treasury buyback plans, while Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio said investors should hold around 15% in gold and a bit of Bitcoin, warning that a US debt crisis could arrive in about three years, give or take two, if the current path does not change. On the policy front, Donald Trump renewed his call for the CLARITY Act after meeting crypto executives including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. At the same time, the SEC proposed new crypto exemptions and safe harbor language, and CFTC chair Michael Selig said the agency would move with its own rules if the Senate does not pass CLARITY.

The listing of ChangXin Technology has pushed Hefei’s long-running industrial investment strategy back into focus. In the original MarsBit article, the city’s state-owned capital system is estimated to hold about 33.1% of the company under a neutral scenario that values ChangXin at RMB 2 trillion, implying a stake worth more than RMB 660 billion. That figure is presented as nearly half of Hefei’s projected 2025 GDP of RMB 1.4 trillion. The piece traces Hefei’s investment record across three major sectors: display panels, semiconductors, and new energy vehicles. It recounts how the city backed BOE during the 2008 financial crisis with RMB 17.5 billion for mainland China’s first TFT-LCD Gen 6 line, later exiting with roughly RMB 14 billion in net profit. It then turns to ChangXin, which the article says became the city’s highest-return investment after years of losses and heavy capital support, and to NIO, which signed with Hefei state capital and strategic investors in April 2020 before the city expanded its automotive base with BYD and Volkswagen Anhui. The article does not present Hefei’s record as a streak of perfect calls. It also lists failed projects, including Xinhao Plasma, LDK Solar, Rongsheng Heavy Industries, and WM Motor. Its central argument is that Hefei’s edge came not from luck alone, but from a full-cycle industrial investment approach spanning fundraising, deployment, post-investment management, exits, and unusually high tolerance for failure.

Nexo Australia has launched regulated crypto-backed credit lines that let eligible users borrow Australian dollars or stablecoins against their digital assets without selling them. The company said the product went live after Nexo Australia became a credit representative under Australia’s National Consumer Credit Protection Act. Funds are generally available within 24 hours, repayments are flexible, and there is no fixed term or origination fee. Interest rates range from 0.9% to 21.9%, depending on the type of credit line and the client’s loyalty tier. Nexo Australia general manager Peter Stanhope said customers can choose between Smart and Standard credit lines, with differences centered on rates, supported assets and how collateral is handled if the loan-to-value ratio rises. Nexo also warned that borrowing against digital assets carries margin-call and liquidation risk, meaning clients could lose part or all of their collateral if prices fall. The launch puts Nexo among a small group of crypto platforms offering regulated crypto-backed lending products in Australia.

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China and Oxford, as cited in the source article, tested whether AI agents perform better when they use internal emotion-like representations to choose skills instead of relying only on text and external feedback. The report says the models showed consistent pairings between states such as curiosity, confusion, tension, optimism, disappointment, and the actions they took during tasks. In a shopping experiment, those pairings mapped to behaviors including product search, query reformulation, purchase confirmation, and price comparison. To check whether the pattern was more than coincidence, the researchers sampled 200 skill-selection events and found a 76.5% semantic consistency rate. The article also says emotion-driven skill selection, named EMOTION2SKILL, lifted success rates in difficult household tasks that often require recovery after mistakes. In the experiments described, success in "heating objects" rose from 9.6% to 56.9%, while "picking up two objects" increased from 4.4% to 31.3%. Separately, a Tianjin University team embedded emotion into a world model called Large Emotional World Model, or LEWM, and reported accuracy gains of as much as 45.72% on its self-built dataset. The piece links both studies to Anthropic’s April experiment on Claude Sonnet 4.5, which reportedly identified fine-grained emotion directions aligned with the Go Emotions taxonomy.

Crypto markets saw a dense mix of policy, institutional and infrastructure developments over the past 24 hours. Hyperliquid is exploring a compliant route into the U.S. perpetual futures market, according to The Information, a move that would matter because the platform does not currently serve U.S. users. At the same time, GSR markets head Spencer Hallarn said in an interview with Cryptonomist that many tokenization platforms still lack meaningful trading activity, arguing the bottleneck is platform design rather than demand for tokenized assets. Elsewhere, MARA disclosed in an SEC filing that it pledged 18,750 BTC to secure two bitcoin-backed loans totaling $750 million, with proceeds set to support general corporate purposes and its acquisition of Long Ridge Energy & Power. New York City Council has also opened an inquiry into advertising practices across prediction market platforms including Polymarket and Kalshi, adding another layer of scrutiny to the sector. Other major items included Fidelity’s plan to add staking and quarterly cash distributions to its spot Ether ETF, a Coreum bridge exploit that drained nearly 200,000 XRP, and data showing public bitcoin miners have sold about 28,000 BTC this year. The session also featured updates on Bitmine’s growing ETH treasury, Kalshi’s fundraising push, and a fresh warning from Australia’s ASIC over the digital asset platform Yepbit.