alliance

During the Circle Q2 earnings call, Citigroup analyst Pete Christensen asked about the competitive landscape following the launch of the Open USD Alliance, inquiring how Circle would compete for distribution channels given that reserve revenue sharing is gradually becoming an industry standard and Circle is constrained by its existing economic arrangements with Coinbase.Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire responded that Circle has signed distribution cooperation agreements with over 150 companies and often collaborates with Coinbase on distribution efforts. An example of this is the revenue-sharing arrangement that Circle and Coinbase have jointly established with Hyperliquid. He added that about 70% of the companies expressing interest in participating in such alliance projects are already partners in the Circle network. On the day of the earnings report, Circle also announced that Visa and Mastercard would expand their cooperation as key infrastructure partners for Arc.

According to The Block, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin proposed the establishment of a NEAR sovereign fund, intending to hold the protocol treasury and revenue in the form of NEAR tokens, generate returns, and partially use it to fund security and public goods, with a long-term goal of reducing inflation.

SK Hynix announced at the FMS 2026 conference the joint release of the first High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) standard specification with Sandisk, just about 6 months after the establishment of their alliance in February this year. The standard is publicly available through OCP and covers key specifications such as capacity (up to 512GB), bandwidth (divided into three levels, with a maximum of approximately 3.0TB/s), and the use of the UCIe interconnect interface. Google and Tenstorrent have confirmed their participation in the HBF alliance.The HBF technology is positioned as a new storage tier between HBM and SSD, combining HBM-level high-speed transmission with NAND's large capacity expansion capabilities. SK Hynix publicly showcased the 10th generation (V10) 375-layer 4D NAND wafers and products for the first time during the exhibition, achieving a 2.5 times improvement in energy efficiency compared to the previous generation, with mass production expected early next year. During the conference presentation, SK Hynix executives proposed using a "Tiered Memory" architecture to address the data processing challenges of the AI inference era.

According to official news, Alliance has launched Onchain Atlas, an experimental encyclopedia of on-chain mechanism design. It currently covers 462 records from 2011 to 2026, organizing hundreds of blockchain experiments from 2011 to the present along a timeline, covering core areas such as AMM, liquid staking, stablecoins, and NFTs.Each product includes its complete history: what was done right, what was done wrong, and an interactive simulator where users can adjust key variables and see the product's response in real-time. The project aims to promote the birth of the next generation of on-chain unicorns by reviewing historical inspirations. Atlas prioritizes primary sources such as contract code, official documents, and founder retrospectives, with all entries compiled and analyzed by AI research agents, published after quality audits and editorial checks.

According to Jinshi reports, Saudi Arabia has formed a maritime defense alliance aimed at protecting shipping in the Red Sea, with 13 other countries participating.

According to the Korea Herald, the South Korean government and industry have established the AI Data Center (AIDC) alliance, planning to cultivate AI data centers into the next generation of export industries through public-private cooperation.

Visa announced its third-quarter financial report for fiscal year 2026, with revenue of $11.6 billion, a year-on-year increase of 14%. Payment transaction volume, cross-border transaction volume, and processed transactions all achieved double-digit growth. In the earnings call, Visa outlined its stablecoin strategy, stating that it is actively investing in various levels of the stablecoin stack, including blockchain, issuance, wallets, infrastructure, and applications. The company announced its membership in the OpenStandard alliance, which plans to issue the OpenUSD stablecoin for global capital flow.The Visa stablecoin platform will provide partners with stablecoin settlement, on-chain wallet-as-a-service infrastructure, and exchange services between fiat and stablecoins, initially supporting OpenUSD. The platform will also integrate with Pismo to provide tokenized deposit support for financial institutions and plans to introduce third-party tokenized deposit infrastructure providers in the future. Visa views stablecoins and AI as complementary technologies, believing that "agent commerce will expand the reachable market and drive future growth." Cross-border transaction volume increased by 13% year-on-year, while processed transaction volume grew by 10%.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang posted a second tweet on the X platform, announcing the establishment of the "Open Secure AI Alliance," aimed at uniting global technology companies to jointly develop security technologies and tools to protect AI software and AI Agents.Huang stated that attackers already possess cutting-edge AI capabilities, and defenders need to establish a cutting-edge AI ecosystem driven by the global community, combining the advantages of both open and closed-source models to enhance AI security capabilities.He pointed out that in the previous Hugging Face security incident, closed-source AI limited critical forensic work, while open-weight cutting-edge models helped the team control the intrusion event, which is also the reason for establishing the Open Secure AI Alliance.According to NVIDIA, the alliance will collaborate with several companies and institutions, including Adobe, Microsoft, Hugging Face, IBM, NVIDIA, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Palantir, Red Hat, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, SpaceX, and SK Telecom, to develop new AI security technologies and protective tools.

Nine financial institutions and Bitcoin companies announced the joint establishment of the Bitcoin Security Alliance, with founding members including Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity, Galaxy, and Strategy, covering the entire chain of institutions such as custody, trading, infrastructure, payments, and asset management.The alliance commits to providing a total of $15 million in funding over the next three years to support developers and researchers in the field of Bitcoin security, including long-term work to prepare Bitcoin for the future era of quantum computing. Each member independently decides which developers, researchers, or organizations to direct their funding towards. The daily operations of the alliance are coordinated on a voluntary basis by Brink Executive Director Mike Schmidt, with Brink being a nonprofit organization that funds Bitcoin open-source developers.The alliance clearly states that it does not formulate or direct Bitcoin protocols, does not express opinions on specific protocol changes, and does not represent Bitcoin or its developers—Bitcoin development continues to be carried out by a globally decentralized community of contributors. Its positioning is to emulate the model of industry organizations that have long supported open-source software, providing resources and attention to developers without controlling the underlying work.Strategy CEO Phong Le stated, "As long-term holders, ensuring the security of Bitcoin for generations is our greatest incentive"; BlackRock's Global Head of Digital Assets Robert Mitchnick pointed out that the work of Bitcoin core developers is "extremely important," and this commitment will provide "significant additional funding" for Bitcoin's long-term security needs. The alliance will also serve as a reliable source of information for investors, the public, and the media in the field of Bitcoin security, with plans to publish and continuously update materials related to Bitcoin security in the coming months.

According to Bloomberg, producing the world's most popular advanced semiconductors requires a large amount of energy and relies on rare mineral resources. A UK AI startup, CuspAI, which was founded just two years ago, is betting that artificial intelligence can optimize this process and has raised nearly $500 million in funding for this purpose.CuspAI announced the establishment of the AI Materials Foundry alliance. This alliance brings together more than 48 tech giants, industrial companies, and research institutions, including Nvidia, Meta, and Hyundai Motor Group. The alliance aims to integrate the computing power resources and research capabilities of its members to jointly develop AI software, helping researchers develop new materials suitable for chip manufacturing and other industries at lower costs and faster speeds, thereby improving the efficiency of material research and accelerating innovation in advanced semiconductors and related industries.

According to The Block, Samsung Electronics, Dunamu (the parent company of Upbit), and several other South Korean companies have been listed as members of the Open Standard's OUSD stablecoin alliance, but many companies stated that they have not formally agreed to participate.A relevant person from Samsung Electronics told South Korean media that they have not received a formal inquiry and do not know what role they will play. Shinhan Financial Group, Dunamu, and Kbank stated that they only replied "we will look into this matter," and then their names were listed. Other companies claimed they simply responded casually with "we will consider it if things go smoothly," only to find themselves listed, feeling confused.Open Standard announced this week the formation of an alliance consisting of over 140 institutions, including Visa, Mastercard, and BlackRock, with plans to launch the OUSD stablecoin within the year.

ARK Invest Research Director Lorenzo Valente commented on the OpenUSD stablecoin project launched by several institutions. He stated that, despite the strong capabilities of the participants (including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, etc.), OpenUSD faces multiple significant obstacles:First, there are liquidity and cold start issues; USDC and USDT have already formed strong network effects, dominating exchanges, payment processors, and brokers, making it difficult for the new stablecoin to gain trading pairs and large-scale holding willingness;Second, the decision-making speed of the alliance composed of 500 competitors will be extremely slow, lacking successful precedents, and conflicts of interest will be hard to coordinate;Third, the regulatory and antitrust risks are extremely high; the joint issuance of currency by large banks and card networks is likely to become a regulatory focus;Fourth, the revenue-sharing model results in issuers retaining too little capital, making it difficult to cover high operational and promotional expenses;Fifth, the actual commitments from partners are limited, mostly consisting of letters of intent (LOI), and parties are still supporting competitors, preferring multiple hedges rather than exclusive binding.Valente concluded that OpenUSD is essentially similar to "a DAO of multiple competitors," making it difficult to execute and make decisions quickly, and it may ultimately repeat the governance failures of early DAO projects, which could not be effectively implemented.Affected by the OpenUSD plan, Circle's stock fell over 17% in a single day, and ARK Invest took the opportunity to buy in.

According to Jinshi News, the Eastern Alliance Investment Research Institute stated that the Federal Reserve is expected to remain inactive in the upcoming meetings. The agency pointed out that the current monetary policy has basically returned to neutral, and if energy costs rise and transmit to broader prices while economic growth accelerates, the risk of interest rate hikes will increase. Eastern Alliance expects the trend of slowing inflation to resume in 2027, which will allow the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates next year.

WEEX officially launches the global recruitment for "Star Alliance Partners," aiming to recruit content creators, community leaders, KOLs/KOCs, and ecological partners from the Chinese-speaking market to jointly create an open and diverse Web3 collaborative ecosystem. Eligible partners can learn about the program details and submit their application through the pinned posts on the official Chinese social media.

Alliance co-founder Imran Khan posted on X: "There is a project team within Alliance composed of former team members from Anthropic, exploring a very interesting entry point that focuses on the intersection of cryptocurrency, trading, and AI. The imaginative space and potential market in this direction are much larger than they appear on the surface. We will share more details soon, stay tuned."