US companies adopt Chinese AI models to cut costs: FT

Today in crypto, Thailand’s central bank is working with the country’s security regulator to audit high-volume stablecoin and cash transactions in a gray money crackdown. Pakistan’s virtual assets regulator called for continued dialogue on the treatment of digital assets after meeting an Islamic scholar who backed a ruling against purchases made with crypto and Bitcoiners Michael Saylor and Adam Back criticize the BIP-110 proposal seeking to stamp out non-monetary Bitcoin transactions.Bank of Thailand targets USDT and cash flows in gray money crackdownThailand’s central bank is stepping up stablecoin surveillance as part of a wider effort to crack down on money laundering, illicit finance and “gray money” in the country.The Bank of Thailand is working with the Kingdom’s Securities and Exchange Commission to audit high-volume stablecoin transactions, with a focus on USDt (USDT), cash transactions and currency exchanges, to identify and stop illicit financial flows.“The measures we are implementing are not short-term fixes; they require the continuous deployment of multiple parallel strategies,” Bank of Thailand Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said, according to local media outlet The Nation on Saturday.Thailand is targeting the “gray economy,” which largely consists of cash that may have come from suspicious origins, such as scam call centers that have proliferated in the region. While there are no reliable figures for the gray economy, scam losses were 115 billion THB ($3.4 billion) in 2025, with around 173 million scam calls and texts recorded. Stablecoins have become a popular method of transferring large amounts due to near-instant cross-border settlement. Pakistan crypto chief seeks dialogue after scholar rules against crypto payments Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) chairman Bilal bin Saqib has called for continued dialogue on the treatment of digital assets under Islamic law after meeting prominent scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani, who backed a ruling against purchases made with crypto.In a Saturday post, Saqib said the discussion covered blockchain technology, digital assets, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), as well as the need to protect Pakistanis from fraud, exploitation and financial harm.Saqib said the different categories of digital assets merit “careful technical assessment alongside rigorous Shariah examination, rather than being viewed through a single lens.”The exchange highlights tension between Pakistan’s push to build a regulated crypto market and religious objections that could shape public acceptance. Religious views could carry significant weight in Pakistan, where about 231.7 million people, or 96.35% of the population, identified as Muslim in the 2023 census. Bitcoin bulls Michael Saylor, Adam Back slam BIP-110 Ordinals proposalStrategy executive chairman Michael Saylor and Blockstream CEO Adam Back have doubled down on their opposition to BIP-110, a proposed temporary fork to limit non-monetary transactions on the Bitcoin network.Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110 was introduced in December 2025 to stop nonfungible token-like Ordinals inscriptions and other arbitrary data from “spamming” the network and to preserve Bitcoin’s main use as a peer-to-peer cash system.While critical of Ordinals activity, Saylor and Back fear a fork could do more harm than good to the network’s credibility. “There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam,” Saylor said in a post to X on Saturday, adding that BIP-110 could invalidate ordinary transactions on the network.Source: Michael SaylorBIP-110 is one of the more notable protocol-level disputes in the Bitcoin development community since the Blocksize Wars between 2015 and 2017, when ecosystem participants debated whether it was worth risking a chain split to raise the block size limit for scalability. BIP-110 was introduced by pseudonymous Bitcoin developer “Dathon Ohm” with the support of Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr.