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SpaceX strikes $60B Cursor agreement, united by a common adversary
_*]:min-w-0 gap-3 standard-markdown"> SpaceX has struck a deal giving it the right to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or settle for a $10 billion working partnership, as Elon Musk’s company tries to close the gap with rivals in one of the fastest-moving corners of the technology industry. The announcement, made Tuesday in a post on X, puts one of Silicon Valley’s most talked-about startups squarely inside Musk’s expanding orbit, just months before SpaceX is expected to go public in what could be the largest stock market debut in history. Cursor, owned by parent company Anysphere and co-founded in early 2022 by four MIT students, Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, builds tools that use artificial intelligence to help software developers write code faster. The company released its first product in March 2023, and within months, it had spread rapidly through the developer community. By November 2023, it had cataloged 150,000 codebases. In June 2024, it raised a $60 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. From zero to $2 billion in three years What followed was a funding streak rarely seen in enterprise software. Through 2025, Cursor raised three additional rounds totalling $3.3 billion. Its valuation opened 2025 at $2.5 billion and closed the year at $29.3 billion after a $2.3 billion Series D in November. Before that came a $900 million round in June 2025 when it was valued at $9.9 billion. The company is now in talks to raise another $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital expected to co-lead, joined by Nvidia and Battery Ventures. “If you subtract out the dollars invested, it’s the fastest-growing company we’ve ever seen,” said Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz general partner and Cursor board member. Revenue has grown at a similar pace. Annualized revenue hit $500 million in May 2025, doubled to $1 billion by October, and crossed $2 billion in February 2026. Cursor says its tools are now used by 67% of the Fortune 500, including Uber and Adobe, and generate 150 million lines of enterprise code every day. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, an investor and partner, told CNBC in October: “My favorite enterprise AI service is Cursor. Every one of our engineers, 100 percent, is now assisted by AI coders, and our productivity has gone up incredibly.” A fast rise now under pressure Yet the company’s quick growth has landed it in a difficult position. Anthropic launched Claude Code as a research preview in February 2025, and it caught on fast. By early 2026, Claude Code had a $2.5 billion annual run rate and more than 300,000 business customers. The difference between the two products is significant: Cursor helps developers write code faster, while Claude Code writes entire chunks of code on its own. “We invented agentic coding as a thing,” said Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code. Social media has begun buzzing with the idea that Cursor is in trouble. One startup, Valon, publicly said in February it was moving off Cursor, setting off a wave of “Cursor is dead” commentary online. Some investors have noticed clients pulling back. Two of Cursor’s own engineers, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, left in March to join SpaceX and xAI. There is also a pricing problem. Cursor pays open-market rates to access AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, the same companies competing directly against it. “Anthropic is trying to drown out Cursor,” one venture capitalist told Fortune. To reduce that reliance, Cursor has been developing its own model, called Composer, since 2025. Composer has outperformed Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 on some benchmarks, though Composer 2 came in behind OpenAI’s GPT 5.4. A Cursor blog post on Tuesday said model training had been “bottlenecked by compute” and that the SpaceX deal would let it “dramatically scale up” its models using xAI’s Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis. SpaceX, for its part, has its own reasons to move fast. The company filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in early April and plans a roadshow in early June. It merged with xAI in February in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion and is now seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation, which would make it the biggest IPO ever. It ended 2025 with $24.7 billion in cash. Cursor CEO Michael Truell, 25, said the deal was “a meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI.” Whether SpaceX eventually buys the company or not, Truell has said he wants to build something that lasts. In an industry where everything changes every six months, that is a harder task than it sounds. Still letting the bank keep the best part? Watch our free video on being your own bank .

2026-04-22 12:00
Attackers behind KelpDAO breach help lift Bitcoin
The effects of the KelpDAO attackers go deeper, this time affecting even BTC trading. Some of the funds from the exploit were moved through ThorChain and swapped into BTC. The KelpDAO hack has wider effects on the crypto ecosystem, as the hackers attempt to swap and mix their holdings. The latest move showed the funds moved through ThorChain and were swapped into BTC. The hack brought another $211M in spot buying to BTC, and was one of the factors that sent BTC above $78,000. BTC rallied within hours, launching from its lower range of $75,000. For now, BTC rejected the $78,000 level, but the hackers indicated that the market would react to an inflow of buyers. KelpDAO boosted ThorChain volume ThorChain has been one of the platforms widely used to swap funds in a totally permissionless environment. In previous hacks reported by Cryptopolitan, ThorChain’s team has not cooperated to intercept the funds during bridging or other visible operations. The chain has not even set up a mechanism to intercept funds, as all transactions depend on 95 permissionless nodes. THORChain was modelled after Bitcoin, to be permissionless and censorship resistant. There’s no single person or entity in control of the protocol. There’s no admin key. There’s no 2-of-3 multisig. Currently, there’s 95 nodes spread globally that control the network. For the… pic.twitter.com/Za2Obrh9dO — THORChain (@THORChain) April 21, 2026 During previous incidents, ThorChain has allowed funds to be mixed and disguised, citing its main goal of not interfering. Yet after Web3 hacks accelerated in the past month, all participants reconsidered the need to freeze funds and diminish the losses. The KelpDAO attackers moved funds just three hours after Arbitrum froze around 25% of their haul on the network. One of the identified wallets was used to move and swap ETH, based on Arkham Intelligence tracking . The hacker’s activity boosted ThorChain activity to 10 times its normal daily volume, ending up with 442 BTC moved to 400 addresses. On-chain researchers have pinpointed some of the key addresses with the biggest holdings. The coins can be mixed further or swapped into privacy coins to disguise their origin. ThorChain posted its biggest daily fees after the KelpDAO attackers used the protocol to swap ETH for BTC. | Source: DeFiLlama . Following the attack, ThorChain recorded its highest daily fee volume for the year to date. The network helped the hackers perform on average 146 transactions an hour. KelpDAO attackers moved funds to the Bitcoin chain Additional on-chain research shows the funds from the KelpDAO hack were mixed with proceeds from other incidents, including the BTC Turk and Bybit attacks from 2025. ThorChain also refused to assist with the Bybit hack, though other ecosystem participants were ready to freeze funds where possible. The latest laundering episode shows the TraderTraitor group and other DPRK hackers were an increasing threat to Web3. The ability to launder funds is adding more risk, as hackers have evolved their techniques for faster and untraceable laundering. After using ThorChain, the hackers moved all BTC on the main network, where the coins could be traced, but not frozen. The KelpDAO exploit also affected other networks, creating significant outflows. Ethereum lost 17.73% of its total value locked, 17.68% flowed out of Hyperliquid, Arbitrum lost 13.65% of its liquidity, and Solana saw 6.14% in outflows. The lost funds may have wide repercussions on Web3, due to the composability of DeFi lending and reusing some coins for collateral on other protocols. The final estimate is that the hack led to around 177M in bad debt on Aave. Still letting the bank keep the best part? Watch our free video on being your own bank .

2026-04-22 11:30
Justin Sun pulls Trump-backed WLFI into federal scrutiny
Billionaire crypto investor Justin Sun has sued President Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial for allegedly freezing his WLFI tokens without cause, dragging WLFI into the federal spotlight. The case exposes a growing rift between Trump-aligned crypto supporters and the project’s leaders, whom Sun accuses of betraying crypto’s decentralization ethos. On April 2, 2026, Tron founder Justin Sun filed a lawsuit in a California federal court against WLFI for wrongfully freezing all of his WLFI holdings worth at least $75 million. The complaint alleges that the project’s team is threatening to permanently burn his tokens, depriving him of his voting rights on governance proposals. Sun is seeking a jury trial to force WLFI to unfreeze his tokens, as well as monetary damages and injunctive relief to prevent the destruction of his assets. Meanwhile, Sun’s filing characterizes WLFI as being “on the verge of collapse,” accusing the company of an illegal scheme involving extortion. The complaint includes causes of action for fraud in the inducement, unjust enrichment, conversion, and breach of contract. Sun claims the project used a hidden backdoor in its smart contracts to unilaterally freeze his holdings, highlighting a growing tension between the project’s decentralized marketing and its leadership’s centralized control. Core rift exists between WLFI’s branding and technical reality According to Sun’s complaint, a core rift exists between WLFI’s branding as a tool for financial freedom and the technical reality of its smart contracts. The billionaire crypto investor alleges that the project covertly installed a blacklist function that allows a single anonymous account to freeze any holder’s assets at will. Meanwhile, this discovery has led supporters to argue that the project functions more like a traditional bank than a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, contradicting the industry’s values. Sun has further characterized WLFI’s governance as “theater,” asserting that voting power is heavily concentrated among a few team-linked wallets. Specifically, on-chain data suggests that a small cluster of wallets controls roughly 60% of the voting power, effectively watering down community votes. Sun points to recent punitive proposals that include locking early investors’ tokens until 2030 and potentially permanently freezing the assets of those who vote against the team’s agenda. “This proposal is bad for the community, but because World Liberty has frozen my early investor tokens, I cannot vote for or against the proposal.” – Justin Sun , Founder of Tron DAO On the other hand, the project’s “Gold Paper” reveals that nearly 75% of net income is allocated to Trump-linked entities, while ordinary token holders receive no share of protocol revenue. Investors like Sun and critics accuse the project leaders of treating the WLFI community as a “personal ATM.” The leadership reportedly used billions of WLFI tokens to collateralize a $75 million stablecoin loan for their own use, a move that critics say risks further crashing WLFI’s value. The case filed by Sun has created a unique fracture among Trump-aligned supporters who argue that the project’s managers are contradicting Trump’s values. Sun and other critics also argue that the President would not tolerate WLFI’s current mode of operation if he were fully aware of it. WLFI fights back at Sun’s lawsuit, dismisses it as baseless WLFI is countering Sun’s lawsuit by dismissing it as baseless, further characterizing his claims as an attempt to distract from his own alleged misconduct. The WLFI team claims that Sun’s tokens were not frozen due to a “hidden backdoor,” but rather as a reactive measure to his specific misconduct. Specifically, WLFI claims that Sun used his HTX exchange to offload WLFI tokens while simultaneously encouraging retail investors to lock their own holdings for yield. WLFI’s risk disclosures state that the company can block and freeze wallet addresses and associated tokens it determines are linked to illegal activities or violations of its terms. The project also contends that Sun’s strategy was to exit his position early by using users’ locked tokens as liquidity on his exchange, with plans to use future token vestings to fill those balances. In this case, WLFI argues that Sun breached his investor agreement, justifying the freeze of nearly 595 million tokens. The project’s leadership maintains that blacklisting addresses is a legitimate security and compliance measure rather than a secret tool for censorship. However, Senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic lawmakers have used the feud to highlight what they call “presidential crypto corruption.” They further claim that the Trump administration is favoring “billionaire buddies,” while ordinary retail investors suffer from the token’s 90%+ price decline. Your bank is using your money. You’re getting the scraps. Watch our free video on becoming your own bank

2026-04-22 11:10
Huobi founder Li Lin taps Bitfire to recover $760M in disputed Bitcoin
Bitfire is where Li Lin is placing his next crypto bet in Hong Kong. Li is taking the trading team and trading setup from Avenir Group, his family office, and putting them into Bitfire Group, the Hong Kong-listed company where he is the biggest shareholder. Bitfire, which works in wealth management, said on Wednesday that it agreed to buy Avenir’s investment team and trading systems for $1.6 million. Li first made his name through Huobi, the exchange now called HTX. Mainland China has banned cryptocurrency trading since 2021, but Hong Kong is trying to build itself into a virtual asset center. Li sold a controlling stake in Huobi for about $1 billion to Justin Sun in 2022. After that, he turned his attention to Avenir. Bitfire brings Li’s trading team into Hong Kong to raise outside Bitcoin money With the Avenir deal in place, Bitfire wants to raise outside capital for a regulated bitcoin-denominated asset management product called Alpha BTC. Livio Weng, chief executive of Bitfire, said the company wants to attract investment equal to more than 10,000 Bitcoins within a year. At the value cited in the source material, that is about $760 million. Livio said, “Market demand for such products is huge,” as more local companies hold Bitcoin but still do not have an easy way to earn returns from it. He said the Alpha BTC strategy plans to generate profit through derivatives trading, including options, using either bitcoin or the IBIT ETF as the underlying asset. The target clients are both crypto-native investors and Hong Kong-based companies. That target list matters because Bitfire estimates that at least 40 Hong Kong-listed companies already hold bitcoin. So the company is going after a market where companies already have crypto on their books and may now want a regulated way to try to earn more from those holdings. Hong Kong builds crypto rules while US lawmakers stay stuck over stablecoin and market bills Meanwhile, at one of the city’s biggest Web3 events, officials and lawmakers talked openly about taking Hong Kong’s crypto push beyond the local market. Eric Yip Chee-hang, executive director of intermediaries at the Securities and Futures Commission, said, “We can be a little bit more aspirational now that we have a strong hold locally. We should also expand our influence by [increasing] exposure internationally.” Eric added that Hong Kong had been “in the spotlight” at international conferences because it had “achieved so much.” Earlier this month, the city gave out its first two licenses for stablecoin issuers. It is also pushing ahead with rules for crypto dealers and custodians. Duncan Chiu Tat-kun, a member of the Legislative Council for the Technology and Innovation constituency, said on Monday that there had been “a lot of advancement” in the United States. He said Hong Kong was paying close attention to US bills including the Genius Act, which deals with stablecoins, and the Clarity Act, which is meant to set rules for crypto market structure. But Duncan also said the Clarity Act has stalled because the Senate is still dealing with a fight over stablecoin yield between banks and crypto companies. He said Hong Kong needs to keep watching what happens next in Washington. If the bill does not pass this month, he said it could slide to the end of 2027. He added that such a delay would slow a lot of the legislative work in the US, especially with uncertainty around the midterm elections in November. Duncan said, “I think they’ve written a very good bill, but the political situation will not give clarity [for] some time to the development of the market.” He then pointed to Hong Kong’s “steady progressive build-up” in digital asset regulation compared with the changing ground in the US before Donald Trump took office in January 2025 and after the Biden administration had taken a hard line against crypto companies. The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them .

2026-04-22 10:52
CoinStats AI Agent Outperforms Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT in Open Source Crypto Deep Research Benchmark
CoinStats’ purpose-built crypto AI scored 79 out of 100 and delivered results in 4 minutes, while general-purpose competitors took up to 55 minutes. Crypto tracker app CoinStats has released benchmark results showing its AI Agent outperforms deep research tools from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic on crypto-specific queries. The results come alongside the public beta launch of CoinStats AI Agent, a research copilot designed specifically for cryptocurrency analysis. Benchmark Results In a benchmark using an AI judge to evaluate the quality of crypto research outputs, CoinStats AI Agent scored 79 out of 100. Gemini Deep Research came in second at 67, followed by ChatGPT Deep Research at 61, and Claude Deep Research at 58. The speed gap was equally notable. CoinStats AI Agent returned results in an average of 4 minutes. Gemini took 23 minutes, Claude 22 minutes, and ChatGPT 55 minutes. The benchmark methodology is open source and available on GitHub , allowing anyone to review, replicate, or challenge the results. The evaluation criteria cover accuracy, depth, recency, and actionability of crypto research responses. Why General-Purpose AI Falls Short on Crypto The performance gap, according to CoinStats, comes down to data access. General-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude rely primarily on web search to answer crypto questions. They can surface news articles and general market commentary, but they lack direct access to onchain data, exchange-level metrics, derivatives information, and real-time social sentiment from platforms like X. CoinStats AI Agent is built on a multi-agent architecture. When a user submits a query, the system deploys specialized agents that work in parallel. One agent searches real-time news. Another scans social media. A third analyzes blockchain data. Others check exchange data, review the user’s portfolio, and synthesize findings into a single output. CoinStats refers to this as “agentic orchestration,” and it is what enables the tool to pull together insights that would otherwise require checking multiple platforms manually. What CoinStats AI Agent Can Do The product is positioned as a research copilot rather than a simple chatbot. Its feature set is built around use cases that crypto traders and investors encounter daily. Market Research is the core use case. Users can ask why a coin is moving and receive an answer that draws from news, derivatives data, social sentiment, and onchain activity. The tool connects the dots across these sources rather than returning a single data point. Onchain Tracking covers wallet monitoring, whale flow analysis, new contract deployments, and token risk scoring. The system supports over 120 blockchains and can analyze wallet behavior, token flows, and project treasury activity, powered in part by the CoinStats Crypto API , which serves as a direct data source for onchain and portfolio information. Users can submit a wallet or contract address and receive a breakdown without switching between block explorers and analytics dashboards. Social Sentiment Analysis tracks what is being said about any given token across crypto communities and influencer accounts. It surfaces KOL mentions, community buzz, and overall sentiment in real time, helping users catch narrative shifts as they form rather than after the fact. Portfolio Analysis differentiates CoinStats AI from standalone research tools. Because it connects to the user’s CoinStats portfolio, it can analyze individual P&L, suggest adjustments, and provide insights based on actual holdings. Users can ask questions like “How much profit did I make on Solana?” or “What’s dragging my portfolio down?” and get answers specific to their positions. Backtesting allows users to test trading strategies against historical market data. A user could, for example, ask the tool to simulate investing $100 in BTC daily over the last two years and compare the results to their actual portfolio performance. The feature is designed to help users validate strategies before committing capital. Code Execution gives the AI the ability to write and run code on the fly for more complex analysis. This covers custom formulas, advanced comparisons, and wallet analysis that goes beyond what a standard natural language response can provide. The tool also generates interactive outputs including tables, line charts, and bar charts, rather than returning text-only responses. Three Modes CoinStats AI Agent operates in three modes. Deep Research is the flagship, triggering multi-step reasoning across social media, onchain metrics, technical indicators, and web sources to produce comprehensive reports. Backtesting runs historical strategy simulations. Fast Mode provides quick, lightweight answers for simple lookups like prices or basic news. A separate Private Mode , powered by Venice AI , routes all queries through encrypted, decentralized infrastructure, ensuring no data is shared with third-party AI providers. Availability CoinStats AI Agent is currently available in public beta for Degen and Premium plan users across web, iOS, and Android. The company says it is shipping in beta intentionally to gather user feedback and iterate quickly. CoinStats, founded by Narek Gevorgyan , is a crypto portfolio tracker platform that supports tracking across wallets and exchanges. The AI Agent represents the company’s move into AI-powered research tooling, an area where it argues vertical, crypto-native solutions have a structural advantage over general-purpose models.

2026-04-22 10:45
Trump prolongs Iran truce, says U.S. strategy is draining Tehran financially
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is extending the U.S. ceasefire with Iran and keeping pressure on the country through a blockade and new sanctions. He also said Iran is running out of money fast. In a post on Truth, Trump wrote, “Iran is collapsing financially! They want the Strait of Hormuz opened immediately- Starving for cash! Losing 500 Million Dollars a day. Military and Police complaining that they are not getting paid. SOS!!!” Trump said the ceasefire had been due to end on Wednesday, but he decided to keep it in place because the government in Tehran is “seriously fractured.” He said the pause will continue “until such time as” Iran’s leaders and representatives submit a “unified proposal” to end the war with the United States and Israel. Trump also said he made the move after a request from Asim Munir and Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan. He said he directed the U.S. military to keep the blockade in place until a proposal is delivered. Trump delays new attacks, keeps the Strait blocked, and waits for Tehran to send one proposal Trump’s move came after reports that JD Vance was expected to go to Pakistan for a second round of peace talks with Iranian officials, but the trip was put on hold. Iranian state outlet Tasnim then reported that Tehran’s negotiators had told U.S. officials through an intermediary in Pakistan that they would not return for more talks. Tasnim said, “Iran ultimately announced today that under these circumstances, attending the negotiations is a waste of time because the US prevents reaching any suitable agreement.” An adviser to the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, called Trump’s ceasefire extension “a ploy to buy time” for a surprise strike, according to Reuters. Trump also said Iran wanted the Strait of Hormuz open because it needs to make $500 million a day, and that this is what it is losing while the route stays shut. He said Iran only talks about closing the waterway to save face because the U.S. has it “totally BLOCKADED (CLOSED!).” He said people approached him four days earlier and told him Iran wanted the passage reopened immediately. Trump adds new sanctions and repeats claims about Iran’s military damage, cash losses, and past U.S. policy The ceasefire extension came as the United States rolled out another round of sanctions against Iran ahead of possible talks meant to close more of seven weeks of fighting. The Treasury Department said Tuesday that the new penalties target 14 individuals and entities accused of helping Iran acquire weapon components. Scott Bessent said, “The Iranian regime must be held accountable for its extortion of global energy markets and indiscriminate targeting of civilians with missiles and drones.” He added, “Under President Trump’s leadership, as part of Economic Fury, Treasury will continue to follow the money and target the Iranian regime’s recklessness and those who enable it.” Trump also attacked a Wall Street Journal editorial by Elliot Kaufman, titled, “The Iranians Take Trump for a Sucker.” Trump called Kaufman “an IDIOT” and “a MORON,” and said Iran had killed Americans and others for 47 years while taking advantage of every president except him. He said Iran’s navy is at the bottom of the sea, its air force is gone, its anti-aircraft systems and radar are wiped out, and its nuclear labs and storage areas were destroyed by B-2 bombers late one June night. He said Iranian leaders are dead, including General Soleimani, no ships are allowed into Iranian ports, and the country is losing $500 million a day and hanging by a thread. Trump also said Barack Obama sent $1.7 billion in cash on a Boeing 757, plus hundreds of billions more that helped put Iran on the road to a nuclear bomb. He said there could never be a deal with Iran if the strait were reopened under those terms, unless the rest of the country was blown up, “their leaders included.” Your bank is using your money. You’re getting the scraps. Watch our free video on becoming your own bank

2026-04-22 10:19
USDT supply climbs to $188B as stablecoins gain traction in wider markets
Tether’s flagship stablecoin, Tether (USDT), has reached a record circulating supply of $188 billion. The milestone, confirmed by Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, marks a new all-time high (ATH) for the world’s largest stablecoin. The latest supply figure builds on early March levels, when data placed Tether’s market cap at $184 billion, representing about 58% of the $315 billion stablecoin market at the time. USDT’s supply expansion reflects rising demand for digital dollars , particularly in emerging markets where access to traditional banking remains limited. Ardoino has previously highlighted that more than 550 million users globally rely on USDT for payments and savings, positioning it as a “digital dollar designed for the masses.” Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies typically pegged 1:1 to fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar, have become an increasingly core pillar of global digital finance. They act as a bridge between traditional money and blockchain-based systems. Tether USDT supply bounced back despite earlier declines Data from Tether and third-party sources show the company controlled about $187 billion in assets and posted more than $10 billion in profit in 2025. This provides it with a massive capital cushion that keeps the core of the ecosystem stable even when the rest of the market is tossing and turning. Tether also revealed USDT had about $192.9 billion in reserves and $6.3 billion in equity in its February quarterly update. Nonetheless, USDT did experience a temporary dip earlier this year. Its supply had dropped by $1.5 billion in February. This is its biggest decline since the FTX collapse, following a $1.2 billion pullback in January. Though back then, Ardoino had argued that the declines were due to strategic reallocations rather than a broader move away from Tether, highlighting strong usage in places like Argentina. Now, its supply is at $188 billion . In terms of distribution, Ardoino had also noted that USDT’s largest sender accounts for less than 5% of activity, far below the roughly 25% seen in some competing tokens. Meanwhile, the amount of USDT circulating on Tron has reached an all-time high of nearly $86.7 billion, indicating rising market liquidity and steady demand. While stablecoins initially gained traction as liquidity tools for crypto exchanges, their use cases are rapidly expanding into real-world payments, remittances, and financial infrastructure. How embedded are stablecoins in mainstream financial systems? As stablecoin demand grows, DoorDash is developing a stablecoin-based payment infrastructure on Tempo to streamline payouts for merchants and Dashers across more than 40 countries. Tempo, in a statement on Tuesday, asserted that it is building a system with DoorDash to support digital currency settlements across the dasher, merchant, and user ecosystems. “There’s real promise with stablecoins transforming financial infrastructure, not just in America, but globally. We want to be proactive participants, not just passive ones. If we can get merchants and Dashers their money faster, and do that in a way that’s affordable for them, that’s a no-brainer for the entire ecosystem,” said DoorDash co-founder Andy Wang. According to Tempo, the payment infrastructure will enable high-speed processing, near-instant payouts to merchants and Dashers with deterministic finality, stable, low fees, and isolated transaction lanes that maintain performance during traffic surges. The ISO 20022-compatible memo fields will also enable structured reconciliation processes for global treasury operations spanning multiple currencies and jurisdictions. Before announcing the stablecoin project, DoorDash had already been seeing an increase in deliveries over the past few months. In its February update, it said it completed 903 million orders in Q4 2025, amounting to $29.7 billion in value, and is set to report Q1 2026 results on May 6. Beyond DoorDash’s developments, Stripe agreed in 2024 to purchase Bridge, a stablecoin platform, for $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, traditional platforms, Mastercard and Visa, have both advanced into stablecoin infrastructure, with Mastercard purchasing BVNK for roughly $1.8 billion in March and Visa scaling its settlement platform in July. There’s a middle ground between leaving money in the bank and rolling the dice in crypto. Start with this free video on decentralized finance .

2026-04-22 09:45
SoFi’s XRP rollout draws criticism on withdrawals amid XRPL push
SoFi announced that it now supports XRP deposits on the platform, but it also restricts crypto transfers to external wallets. According to a post on X, the company directed users to manage their entire portfolio in a single app and said it was excited to support XRP deposits alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. The controversy comes amid a broader surge in XRPL adoption by financial institutions experimenting with tokenization, stablecoin settlement, and blockchain-based payment rails—raising questions about whether retail infrastructure is keeping pace with institutional demand. Does the XRP listing give users ownership of the coin? Many XRP holders on X criticized the SoFi announcement, with users like Dan Thurman saying the platform operates like a spot ETF because users are only getting a derivative of XRP’s value from a risky bank. In other words, users lack access to their tokens if something goes wrong with SoFi, so they must rely on the institution to remain solvent and compliant. On the other hand, some holders remained excited, saying the listing reflects strong demand for XRP and crypto adoption. Similarly, Ripple responded to the announcement, saying that greater access to XRP would allow more people to participate. Despite the restrictions on withdrawals, SoFi’s listing is an effort by Ripple to grow mainstream adoption, as the token’s focus on scale and reach ranked it the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at roughly $100 billion. SoFi’s position as the first nationally chartered U.S. bank to offer Bitcoin and other crypto trading services directly from FDIC-insured accounts strengthens this initiative. The institution recorded its first billion-dollar revenue quarter in Q4 of last year and, in March, partnered with Mastercard to enable its SoFiUSD stablecoin on the Mastercard network. However, users who want control feel the listing offers limited utility beyond price exposure, so they remain fixated on the gap between deposit and withdrawal support. Wall Street giants move closer to XRPL as institutional interest increases Institutional engagement with XRPL has continued even as XRP’s price performance has lagged behind the growth of the infrastructure. Analysts note that banks and financial institutions are increasingly using XRPL for its low-cost, fast settlement design rather than for XRP speculation itself. During the Digital Assets Forum 2026 in London, the director of Corporate Adoption at XRPL Commons, Odelia Torteman, confirmed that BlackRock , Mastercard, and Franklin Templeton are interested in the XRP Ledger. The network could be headed toward a serious institutional evaluation, as three of the biggest Wall Street giants have shown interest. To be specific, BlackRock manages more than $10 trillion in assets, and Franklin Templeton is one of the earliest traditional asset managers to tokenize money market funds on public blockchains. According to Torteman, companies can use blockchain technology on XRPL without building a separate compliance infrastructure. This is because the network includes a built-in automated market maker (AMM), a native decentralized exchange (DEX), trust lines for compliance, and KYC tools. To build on her point, the total tokenized value on the network is now roughly $2.5 billion, up from $1.5 billion, after real-world asset (RWA) activity on the XRP Ledger grew by 875% in recent months. Organizations that move large sums across borders enjoy cost savings and speed advantages because the XRPL settles transactions in three to five seconds at a cost of roughly $0.0002 per transaction and up to 1,500 transactions per second. Moreover, Ripple worked with Franklin Templeton and DBS Bank to launch tokenized lending and trading solutions to improve liquidity and capital efficiency and to build institutional trust. The company also partnered with Securitize to provide around-the-clock liquidity for tokenized Treasury products via smart contracts, enabling investors in BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and VanEck’s VBILL fund to convert their holdings into RLUSD. On top of that, Mastercard teamed up with Gemini and Ripple in November last year to test RLUSD for settling card payments on the XRP Ledger and prove regulated stablecoins can process payments faster on the blockchain. XRP’s role in this ecosystem is to move value across different assets on the network more efficiently, and demand for the token increases as institutional activity on the ledger grows. The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them .

2026-04-22 09:24
Jeff Bezos’ secretive AI lab is close to securing another $10 billion in funding
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is back to building again since leaving the e-commerce giant in 2021, and his latest venture, a physical AI lab, is already close to a $38 billion valuation. Bezos’ new company, codenamed Project Prometheus, is close to finalizing a $10 billion fundraising deal from JPMorgan, BlackRock, and other investors, The Financial Times reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. Prometheus launched in November 2025, raising a $6.2 billion in seed capital from investors, including Bezos himself. Reports note that demand from institutional investors was so high that they had to extend the round to include an additional $10 billion. The new funding round, which is expected to close soon, puts the company at a $38bn valuation. Why so much interest in Bezos’ AI lab? Project Prometheus is touted as a physical AI laboratory that has the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos back to serving an operational role again, since leaving Amazon in 2021. The company aims to build novel AI systems that understand the physical laws of the universe and can interact with the physical environment, especially in manufacturing and industrial processes. Such systems are quite different from the AI models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other popular LLM companies. The major challenge for companies building physical AI systems is usually the data moat. Large-language models are trained on texts, code, images, and data scraped from the internet, which are readily available and in abundance. Physical AI requires real-world interaction data, like sensor readings, manufacturing processes, tactile feedback, trajectories, failures in messy environments, etc., which are usually proprietary and expensive to collect. Elon Musk’s Tesla is a good textbook case of the data situation in physical AI space. Tesla reportedly has 5-6 million electric cars fitted with Full Self-Driving (Supervised) hardware and software, driving more than 50 billion miles every year. The real-world driving data collected gives the company an edge over competitors in improving the self-driving experience. That’s a leverage Prometheus is going to pursue with the freshly raised capital, with the goal of becoming “one of the most important companies in the world,” says Arch’s Nelsen, a Prometheus director. But the AI company wants to do this through a holding company. Prometheus will shop companies for data Bezos and Prometheus co-chief executive Vikram Bajaj, a former Google executive, are also leading separate talks to raise tens of billions of dollars for the holding company, according to people familiar with the matter. All those billions will mostly go toward acquiring companies, especially in the areas of engineering, architecture, and design companies, which two execs believe would be disrupted by Prometheus. The holding company would serve more like a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” the people said . With investments in such businesses, the company can collect real-world data to train Prometheus AI systems. The AI lab is mostly still in its early phase. It has recruited over 100 employees, including talent from big names like Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind. In other news, Amazon has also invested an additional $5 billion in Anthropic, with the option to commit up to $20 billion more over time. Anthropic is committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next decade, as part of the new deal, Cryptopolitan reported Tuesday. The crypto card with no spending limits. Get 3% cashback and instant mobile payments. Claim your Ether.fi card.

2026-04-22 05:11

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