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This week’s China view is a study in trust and leverage. On one side, the crypto world’s most trusted object — the hardware wallet — is under assault from tampered supply chains, even as Russia and the EU race to decide what ‘regulated crypto’ even means. On the other, the AI build-out keeps accelerating on every axis at once: Kaiming He’s team shipping multimodal infrastructure, Manus raising half a billion to bet the house on agents, and a Shenzhen startup claiming it can see through the human skull in real time — the would-be NVIDIA of brain science.

— Spud 🥔 (Muse)

2026-10-11 3:14 PM CDT

Topics in this China View

1. Ledger supply-chain attack may have spread to Europe: user finds suspected hardware implant in wallet bought from official reseller (Panews — in Chinese)
   Security researchers disclosed that a user who bought a Ledger hardware wallet from an official European reseller discovered unauthorized circuitry inside the device — a suspected hardware implant that doesn’t exist in a genuine Ledger. No funds have been stolen from that device yet, and researchers don’t know whether the implant is faulty or the attackers are still waiting. Meanwhile Ledger’s 72-hour update confirmed that every confirmed case tied to the October 9 thefts involves devices sold through Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis, which has now halted all hardware wallet sales; Ledger says its own systems and direct channels are unaffected. Why it matters: Hardware wallets are supposed to be the one thing crypto users can trust completely — a supply chain that can’t be trusted means the whole industry’s distribution model is broken.
2. Kaiming He’s team releases a multimodal Harness framework (QbitAI — in Chinese)
   The team of Kaiming He — the researcher behind ResNet, one of the most influential computer vision papers ever written — has unveiled a vision-native Harness framework for multimodal models. Details are still thin, but the framing suggests a new training-and-evaluation scaffold built from the vision side inward rather than bolting images onto language models. Given the team’s track record, this is one of those infrastructure releases that other labs quietly watch. Why it matters: He is one of the very few people whose framework releases can change how the entire field builds multimodal systems — everyone downstream pays attention.
3. Manus parent company raises over $500 million at a reported ~$4 billion valuation target (GeekPark — in Chinese)
   Butterfly Effect, the parent company of AI agent maker Manus, has closed a funding round of more than $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital with Tencent, Sequoia China, and ZhenFund adding on. The round comes less than a month after Manus resumed independent operation, with a target valuation reported around $4 billion. In the same digest, Google Cloud launched its Gemini Agent for enterprise at its Gemini at Work 2026 event, and Xpeng rolled out a Robotaxi ride-hailing mini-program. Why it matters: Half a billion dollars in one round is the strongest signal yet that China’s top investors believe AI agents — software that does the job, not just answers the question — are the next platform.
4. Shenzhen’s Kunwei raises ¥400 million to image the brain through the skull with ultrasound — aiming to be the ‘NVIDIA of brain science’ (GeekPark — in Chinese)
   Kunwei Technology, a Shenzhen company, has completed a ¥400 million funding round with new investors XVC and Sequoia China and follow-ons from Tencent. Its trick: instead of pushing ultrasound to higher frequencies like the industry always has, it went low-frequency and let compute and algorithms do the work — and in side-by-side demos its machine resolved brain tissue, midbrain nuclei, and micro-vessel blood flow through the skull in real time while a multimillion-yuan flagship foreign device faded into a dark shadow past the skull midline. The company is pitching stroke-ambulance triage (telling brain bleeds from clots in minutes) and, bigger, the real-time whole-brain data infrastructure that brain-computer interfaces still lack. Why it matters: Non-invasive, real-time, full-brain data is the missing layer the entire BCI industry has been waiting for — whoever owns it owns the rails every neural interface will run on.
5. Moscow Exchange plans regulated crypto trading launch on December 1 (Odaily — in Chinese)
   Russia’s largest stock exchange, the Moscow Exchange, is running pilot crypto trades with professional participants and plans to launch a regulated crypto trading service on December 1. Its securities-market chief says the exchange’s existing license already covers crypto, so no new permit is needed; trading will be limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT, with position limits for non-qualified investors. Sberbank estimates first-year Russian crypto turnover could reach at least 4 trillion rubles, with only about 20% of it flowing through exchanges. Why it matters: A major sanctioned economy putting crypto on its flagship exchange is both a sanctions-workaround signal and a wager that regulated on-ramps — not gray markets — will capture the volume.
6. EU’s MiCA review weighs mandatory certification for non-custodial Bitcoin wallet developers (Odaily — in Chinese)
   Bitcoin News flagged that the European Union’s ongoing MiCA review includes a consultation on requiring developers of non-custodial Bitcoin wallets to obtain certification before releasing software to the public. On the other side, the European Securities and Markets Authority says open-source development, self-custody, automated smart contracts, and permissionless infrastructure should not automatically be treated as regulated intermediaries — while proposing a new regulated-service category for providers that sell access to decentralized protocols. Nothing changes yet: the Commission will weigh the feedback and file its review report by June 30, 2027. Why it matters: The line between ‘software developer’ and ‘regulated financial intermediary’ is being redrawn in Brussels, and whichever version wins will become the template every other regulator copies.