According to Bijie.com, Sand.ai (founded in January 2024) announced the completion of two rounds of financing totaling over $100 million. Investors include Look Capital, Lollapalooza Capital (Wang Huiwen's family office), Jiukun Venture Capital, Matrix Partners China, MSA Capital, Innovation Works, Source Code Capital, IDG Capital, Baidu Ventures, and many other leading institutions. Xinghan Capital served as the financial advisor for this round of financing. Sand.ai founder Cao Yue stated that the team adheres to an autoregressive video generation approach and plans to release a new generation video generation model using the MoE architecture in July 2026, balancing efficient inference with the largest parameter scale in the open-source field. Furthermore, Sand.ai's music agent product, VidMuse, achieved $10 million in ARR within two months of its launch.

According to data released by South Korean customs on Monday, South Korea's export growth remained strong in early June, thanks to the continued boom in the semiconductor industry. Adjusted for working day differences, exports in the first 20 days of June increased by 49.7% year-on-year, compared to 52.6% in the same period in May. Without adjustment, exports increased by 60.4% year-on-year, while imports increased by 23.2%, resulting in a trade surplus of $17.5 billion. Chip exports once again led the growth, increasing by 188.4% year-on-year, while computer-related product exports increased by 293.3%. Petroleum product exports benefited from rising energy prices. The data shows that external demand remains strong, driven by rapid growth in investment related to artificial intelligence and data centers. Semiconductors remain a major driver of South Korea's economic growth, helping to offset weakness in other economic sectors.

Odaily Planet Daily reports that Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Taiko has announced a breach of its chain state verification mechanism, rendering the security assumptions of all bridges deployed on Taiko unreliable. Taiko urges users to immediately withdraw funds from the affected bridges. Taiko stated it is coordinating with partners to control the incident and has suspended the affected systems. Crypto security firm Blockaid suggests the root cause appears to be a flaw in how Taiko bridges verify source signals. Attackers could submit message proofs on Ethereum lacking valid on-chain proofs for Taiko, thereby registering and extracting fraudulent bridge messages, leading to the unauthorized release of ERC20 vault assets. Blockaid estimates at least $1 million was stolen, while Lookonchain and PeckShield believe the stolen assets could be worth up to $1.7 million. PeckShield reports that the attackers transferred approximately 1.99 million TAIKOs to MEXC, worth about $189,000. Data from blockchain intelligence firm Arkham shows that the Taiko attacker's wallet held approximately $1.5 million in assets, primarily in Ethereum. (Cointelegraph)

According to Huoxun Finance, the Japan National Commercial Enterprise Pension Fund, comprised of approximately 1,200 small and medium-sized enterprises, plans to launch cryptocurrency investments in fiscal year 2026. It intends to allocate 1% of its total assets to crypto assets, indirectly through a multi-crypto asset passive fund managed by a large hedge fund. The asset allocation for fiscal year 2026 will be adjusted: the Japanese yen's share will decrease from 80% to 70%, with an additional 10% allocated to developed country currencies, and the remaining 5% allocated to emerging market currencies, gold, and crypto assets. The core objective is to diversify exchange rate risk. The fund's executive director stated that the US dollar's global benchmark currency status may weaken, and Bitcoin's correlation with the US dollar index is almost zero, making it a viable tool for hedging against currency depreciation and enhancing the portfolio's inflation resistance.

According to Huoxun Finance, the Bank of Korea's digital currency (CBDC) experiment has entered a new phase, with integration into commercial banks' actual account systems. Participating banks are building infrastructure based on Naver Cloud in a central bank-designated testing environment. This infrastructure includes e-wallets for customers and merchants, a fiscal payment voucher system, digital currency management tools, and a blockchain integration module. Ultimately, it will be integrated with the bank's core account ledger and smart banking services.