News linked to both this project and an event.
According to official announcements, Baidu Apollo Go has received the Hong Kong Transport Department's first fully driverless test license and will commence trial operations on Airport Island on July 27. This marks the first Level 4 autonomous driving test without safety drivers on public roads in Hong Kong, as well as the first fully driverless trial in the global right-hand drive market. Over the past year and a half, Apollo Go has accumulated over 240,000 kilometers of safe driving across various locations in Hong Kong.
According to official social media channels, Huobi HTX will host a themed debate competition at 20:00 today titled "Life-or-Death Showdown Between Privacy and Regulation: Will Privacy Coins Ultimately Be Eliminated, or Will They Surge in the Darkest Hour?" During the event, Yige, Goubao, Draco, and Qiangge, as representatives of the affirmative side, will debate against negative side representatives DaDa, ZuoZuoMuXingYe, Huoshange, and FomoDao, engaging in a fierce exchange on hot topics such as the future development of privacy coins, regulatory pressure, technical value, and market demand.
According to BusinessMirror, columnist John Mangun wrote that the European Commission’s recent proposal for the first “comprehensive third-country crypto-asset services ban” against Russia reveals an underlying logic: wealthy blocs of nations can impose their policies extraterritorially on any country connected to their financial systems—a development with profound warning implications for developing countries like the Philippines. Remittances account for approximately 9% of the Philippines’ GDP, and the share channeled through crypto continues to rise. While the central bank has established a regulatory framework for virtual asset service providers (VASPs), its regulatory authority stops at the national border. Citing the Philippines’ 2021 placement on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “gray list,” the article notes that once external financial linkages are severed, compliance costs will cascade downward—ultimately borne by ordinary overseas-worker remittance-receiving households. The author warns that the Philippines’ current debt-to-GDP ratio has reached 63.2%, the highest in two decades. If crypto regulation is treated solely as a consumer protection issue—while overlooking its deeper implications for capital account management and fiscal sovereignty—the country may face a “Roosevelt-style four-day ultimatum” unprepared.
Odaily News, June 9th — BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes stated in his latest article "Reality Test" that if oil prices continue to rise due to the US-Iran conflict, it could trigger a collapse of the AI stock bubble and drag the entire crypto market down.Hayes said that if traffic restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz persist deep into the second quarter, spot prices for hydrocarbons and other key commodities could rise in the third quarter. If oil prices continue to climb and inflationary pressures impact the US midterm elections, Trump might pivot to a tough stance targeting data center construction, AI regulation, and taxation. Hayes believes the market could anticipate Trump limiting AI capital expenditure and taxing AI companies, thereby triggering the burst of the AI stock bubble.Hayes also noted that since November 2022, the scale of AI-related debt issuance has been approximately $1.5 trillion, and US M2 has increased by roughly the same amount during the same period. He believes the three factors that could pop the AI bubble include rising energy costs, the market's inability to absorb three major AI-related IPOs — namely SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI — and Trump's shift to opposing AI. In terms of portfolio, Hayes stated that Maelstrom's stock portfolio holds significant positions in US-listed energy producers; he has sold AI-related stocks and offloaded non-core crypto assets, having dumped HYPE, NEAR, and WLD last week, as well as selling ZEC due to the Orchard Pool vulnerability. He still holds Bitcoin and ETH and will execute tactical short trades via derivatives.
According to Bloomberg, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) stated that it will soon launch trials of Project Agorá—a cross-border digital payments prototype—in partnership with others, conducting real-value transactions. First announced two years ago, Project Agorá is jointly advanced by the BIS, seven central banks, and over 40 regulated institutions. It has now entered a testing phase involving actual fund transfers.
According to The Block, Lee Reiners—a lecturer in law at Duke University and former examiner at the New York Federal Reserve—published a post on May 8 stating that WLFI, the governance token issued by the DeFi project World Liberty Financial—which is closely associated with the Trump family—may constitute an unregistered security. Reiners cited the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) recently released token classification framework, arguing that WLFI is not a “pure digital commodity” and therefore falls under SEC regulatory scrutiny. He contends that WLFI was publicly presold—approximately 25 billion tokens—prior to the protocol’s launch and was marketed leveraging the Trump family’s brand, leading buyers to reasonably expect profits—a key element of the SEC’s “Howey Test” for determining whether an asset qualifies as a security. Regarding decentralization claims, Reiners referenced litigation filed by Justin Sun, noting that World Liberty unilaterally froze Sun’s tokens and revoked his governance rights—revealing a high degree of centralized control. Additionally, he highlighted clear conflicts of interest: the project borrowed $75 million in stablecoins from the Dolomite protocol, using 5 billion WLFI tokens as collateral; notably, a co-founder of Dolomite also serves as an advisor to World Liberty, and part of the borrowed stablecoins flowed directly to World Liberty itself.