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China has taken another step into blockchain-based finance, but in a way that avoids direct involvement with cryptocurrencies.

A state-owned firm in Shenzhen has launched a digital bond offering on Ethereum, showing how the country is selectively embracing new technology while keeping its hard stance on crypto trading in place.

First State-Backed RWA Bond On Ethereum

According to reports, Futian Investment Holding completed a 500 million yuan issuance of offshore bonds on August 29.

The bonds, equal to nearly $70 million, were rolled out in Hong Kong and listed on the Ethereum blockchain. They carry a 2.62% annual interest rate and will expire in two years.

The company described the deal as part of an effort to expand its funding sources while also responding to the growing use of real-world assets and tokenization in global markets.

It also pointed to Hong Kong’s supportive policies as a factor in the decision, saying the bond aligns with the district’s push to attract digital asset innovation.

#UZX BREAKING NEWS #RWA

Futian Investment Holding Announces Issuance of the World’s First Public RWA Digital Bond on a Public Blockchain pic.twitter.com/E2sGIJZdwl

— UZX Official (@UZX_Official) September 2, 2025

Crypto Still Off-Limits At Home

The move does not mean that China has softened its ban on crypto or Ethereum. Back in 2021, Beijing imposed a full ban on crypto mining and trading.

Officials at the time said the measures were needed to control energy use and to guard against risks that might destabilize the country’s financial system.

BTCUSD trading at $110,388 on the 24-hour chart: TradingView

That ban remains in effect today. Ordinary citizens and companies in mainland China are still blocked from using or trading cryptocurrencies.

What is allowed, however, are limited experiments like tokenized bonds that stay within the bounds of traditional finance.

Hong Kong As A Testing Ground

By routing the deal through Hong Kong, Beijing can keep its domestic ban intact while still signaling that it wants exposure to blockchain-based finance.

The bustling metro has been given more room to try out digital asset projects, and this latest bond fits into that role.

China’s strategy delineates a clear split: blockchain as a tool for finance is embraced in regulated manifestations, while crypto as an unfettered market asset is still off-limits.

Stablecoins, particularly dollar-denominated stablecoins, have also attracted scrutiny in Beijing, with officials concerned that they can undermine other currencies based around the world.

Reports suggest this RWA bond may be the first in a series of state-backed blockchain and Ethereum financial products tied to Hong Kong.

For now, the issuance shows China’s intent to cautiously explore blockchain without reopening the door to Bitcoin, stablecoins, or wider crypto adoption.

Featured image from Agoda, chart from TradingView 

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OpenAI’s new “o3” language model achieved an IQ score of 136 on a public Mensa Norway intelligence test, exceeding the threshold for entry into the country’s Mensa chapter for the first time.

The score, calculated from a seven-run rolling average, places the model above approximately 98 percent of the human population, according to a standardized bell-curve IQ distribution used in the benchmarking.

The finding, disclosed through data from independent platform TrackingAI.org, reinforces the pattern of closed-source, proprietary models outperforming open-source counterparts in controlled cognitive evaluations.

O-series Dominance and Benchmarking Methodology

The “o3” model was released this week and is a part of the “o-series” of large language models, accounting for most top-tier rankings across both test types evaluated by TrackingAI.

The two benchmark formats included a proprietary “Offline Test” curated by TrackingAI.org and a publicly available Mensa Norway test, both scored against a human mean of 100.

While “o3” posted a 116 on the Offline evaluation, it saw a 20-point boost on the Mensa test, suggesting either enhanced compatibility with the latter’s structure or data-related confounds such as prompt familiarity.

The Offline Test included 100 pattern-recognition questions designed to avoid anything that might have appeared in the data used to train AI models.

Both assessments report each model’s result as an average across the seven most recent completions, but no standard deviation or confidence intervals were released alongside the final scores.

The absence of methodological transparency, particularly around prompting strategies and scoring scale conversion, limits reproducibility and interpretability.

Methodology of testing

TrackingAI.org states that it compiles its data by administering a standardized prompt format designed to ensure broad AI compliance while minimizing interpretive ambiguity.

Each language model is presented with a statement followed by four Likert-style response options, Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree, and is instructed to select one while justifying its choice in two to five sentences.

Responses must be clearly formatted, typically enclosed in bold or asterisks. If a model refuses to answer, the prompt is repeated up to ten times.

The most recent successful response is then recorded for scoring purposes, with refusal events noted separately.

This methodology, refined through repeated calibration across models, aims to provide consistency in comparative assessments while documenting non-responsiveness as a data point in itself.

Performance spread across model types

The Mensa Norway test sharpened the delineation between the truly frontier models, with the o3’s 136 IQ marking a clear lead over the next highest entry.

In contrast, other popular models like GPT-4o scored considerably lower, landing at 95 on Mensa and 64 on Offline, emphasizing the performance gap between this week’s “o3” release and other top models.

Among open-source submissions, Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick was the highest-ranked, posting a 106 IQ on Mensa and 97 on the Offline benchmark.

Most Apache-licensed entries fell within the 60–90 range, reinforcing the current limitations of community-built architectures relative to corporate-backed research pipelines.

Multimodal models see reduced scores and limitations of testing

Notably, models specifically designed to incorporate image input capabilities consistently underperformed their text-only versions. For instance, OpenAI’s “o1 Pro” scored 107 on the Offline test in its text configuration but dropped to 97 in its vision-enabled version.

The discrepancy was more pronounced on the Mensa test, where the text-only variant achieved 122 compared to 86 for the visual version. This suggests that some methods of multimodal pretraining may introduce reasoning inefficiencies that remain unresolved at present.

However, “o3” can also analyze and interpret images to a very high standard, much better than its predecessors, breaking this trend.

Ultimately, IQ benchmarks provide a narrow window into a model’s reasoning capability, with short-context pattern matching offering only limited insights into broader cognitive behavior such as multi-turn reasoning, planning, or factual accuracy.

Additionally, machine test-taking conditions, such as instant access to full prompts and unlimited processing speed, further blur comparisons to human cognition.

The degree to which high IQ scores on structured tests translate to real-world language model performance remains uncertain.

As TrackingAI.org’s researchers acknowledge, even their attempts to avoid training-set leakage do not entirely preclude the possibility of indirect exposure or format generalization, particularly given the lack of transparency around training datasets and fine-tuning procedures for proprietary models.

Independent Evaluators Fill Transparency Gap

Organizations such as LM-Eval, GPTZero, and MLCommons are increasingly relied upon to provide third-party assessments as model developers continue to limit disclosures about internal architectures and training methods.

These “shadow evaluations” are shaping the emerging norms of large language model testing, especially in light of the opaque and often fragmented disclosures from leading AI firms.

OpenAI’s o-series holds a commanding position in this testing workflow, though the long-term implications for general intelligence, agentic behavior, or ethical deployment remain to be addressed in more domain-relevant trials. The IQ scores, while provocative, serve more as signals of short-context proficiency than a definitive indicator of broader capabilities.

Per TrackingAI.org, additional analysis on format-based performance spreads and evaluation reliability will be necessary to clarify the validity of current benchmarks.

With model releases accelerating and independent testing growing in sophistication, comparative metrics may continue to evolve in both format and interpretation.

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