Most Americans know Stripe as the checkout box on a website. That picture is five years out of date.

Stripe reports that businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent in a single year. By the company’s own reckoning, that is roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. It claims 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100 as customers.

A private company, owned by insiders and venture funds and answerable to no public shareholder, already clears a measurable share of the world’s commerce. Now it is building the payment system for customers that are not human.

Two Kinds of Token

This writer has spent the past year explaining tokenization: stocks, bonds, real estate, and dollars converted into programmable entries on a digital ledger. That is the first kind of token.

There is a second kind. Every artificial intelligence model consumes and produces “tokens,” the small fragments of text that are the unit of machine computation. Every query to an AI model is metered in tokens and billed in tokens.

Tokens of value and tokens of computation are different things. Stripe is the one company positioning itself to meter, price, and settle both.

Emily Sands, Stripe’s Head of Data and AI, is an economist by training. In a recent interview with Nate B. Jones, she said this about inference tokens:

“Tokens are not yet a currency—maybe they will be, we’ll see—but they are certainly a very valuable asset.”

Stripe’s own AI chief is saying publicly that units of machine computation could become money.

The Pieces, In Order

The factual record comes from Stripe’s own announcements.

• Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin platform. Its 2025 annual letter reports that stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, that an estimated 60 percent of it was business-to-business, and that Bridge’s own volume more than quadrupled.
• With the venture firm Paradigm, Stripe built Tempo, which it describes as “a blockchain purpose-built for payments.”
• The Machine Payments Protocol. On March 18, 2026, Stripe launched the protocol alongside the Tempo mainnet. It lets a business tell an AI agent, in machine-readable form, what it sells, what it costs, and how to pay.
• Stripe acquired Metronome, a usage-based billing company that meters consumption in real time.
• Streaming payments. At its Sessions 2026 conference, Stripe combined the two into “streaming payments.” These are stablecoin micropayments on Tempo, tied to Metronome’s meter, so that a business can “get paid for every token, exactly at the moment it’s used.”

Stripe was candid about why the old system cannot do this: “The amounts are too small and the usage is too fast—existing systems aren’t capable of processing minute sums every few milliseconds.”

A credit card cannot move a penny, because the fees alone exceed the payment. A stablecoin on a purpose-built chain can. Sands was measured about it: “Stablecoins bring us a long way. It is not the only way… but so far stablecoins seem to be an important part of microtransactions.”

Why OpenRouter Matters

In August, the financial press reported that Stripe had agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion.

OpenRouter is a switchboard. A developer sends it a task, and OpenRouter routes that task to whichever of some 400 AI models best fits the required cost, speed, and quality. Roughly eight million developers use it.

Every request through OpenRouter is a metered event, and every metered event is a bill. With the acquisition, the company that counts the tokens and the company that collects the money are the same company.

Stripe has always seen the revenue side of a business: who paid, how much, how often. OpenRouter shows it the cost side: which model was used, what it cost, and how well it performed. Sands said it directly:

“You want to maximize profit on both the revenue side and the true-cost side, which requires getting deep into the guts of the underlying intelligence in your product and agent.”

She also gave the acquisition a name: “the rails for intelligence—not the rails for money, but the rails for intelligence.”

Stripe president Will Gaybrick told Payments Dive that the company is evolving from a payments company into “an AI infrastructure player.” He predicted there will not be room “for 100 different AI orchestrators.”

That describes a company expecting the market to consolidate around a few orchestrators and planning to be one of them.

The Permission Layer

The payments are the visible part of the system. The reputation scoring that precedes them matters more.

Sands described how Stripe helped the AI coding company Cursor with a new kind of theft: fraudsters opening accounts to steal free computing credits. No payment had occurred, so there was no transaction to flag. Stripe solved it anyway:

“That allowed us to move from scoring transactions to identifying abusive or risky customers.”

Because Stripe sees across millions of businesses, it can judge a person at the moment he creates an account, before he has bought anything. It then passes those scores to sellers, so that, in Sands’ words, “businesses can make decisions.”

Stripe’s Link wallet, which Sands puts at about 300 million consumers, is becoming “the wallet for agents.” Your identity is attached to it. Your agent spends through it. The human owner sets the spending limits, and every purchase traces back to a named person.

The stated purpose is fraud prevention, and the fraud is real. But a cross-merchant reputation score, run by one private company and applied before any transaction exists, is a permission system whatever its purpose. This writer has documented the same architecture at the Bank for International Settlements and the largest banks. Stripe arrived at it from the commercial side, with no mandate and no public debate.

What This Means for the Individual

Sands made two admissions that deserve attention.

First, on pricing: “There is probably no longer such a thing as a SKU.” The fixed, posted price, the same for every buyer, is giving way to pricing that adjusts continuously by customer and by outcome.

Second, on negotiation between machines:

“Agents are relentless. They are willing to negotiate as long as they need to negotiate… You could imagine consumer surplus being eroded relatively quickly.”

Consumer surplus is the economist’s term for the good deal, the difference between what you would have paid and what you did pay. An economist at the center of this system expects that difference to shrink.

My Thoughts

My inference is as follows. Stripe has assembled, under one private roof, a wallet bound to identity, a reputation score that precedes the purchase, a meter on machine intelligence, a stablecoin, and a blockchain to settle it. Each piece has a reasonable business justification. Together they amount to the ledger, the meter, and the gate for machine commerce.

Technocracy was defined in 1938 as the science of social engineering, with the measurement and accounting of all production and consumption at its core. The original Technocrats had no instrument that could do it. Stripe’s stack, built for ordinary commercial reasons, can.

Whoever owns the meter sets the terms of commerce, and Stripe now owns the meter.

References

CoinDesk, “Coinbase-Backed AI Payments Protocol Wants to Fix Micropayment but Demand Is Just Not There Yet,” CoinDesk, March 11, 2026. Cites Artemis data: about $28,000 daily volume, about 131,000 daily transactions, average payment about $0.20, roughly half of activity self-dealing or wash trading.

Forrester, “Why Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol Signals a Turning Point for Micropayments,” Forrester Blogs, 2026. Machine Payments Protocol launched March 18, 2026, with the Tempo mainnet, co-created with Paradigm.

Nate B. Jones, “AI Agents Are Starting To Buy. Stripe Is Building How They Pay,” interview with Emily Sands, Head of Data and AI, Stripe, YouTube, 2026. Source of all Sands quotations.

Payments Dive, “Stripe Acquisition May Bolster Its AI Strategy,” Payments Dive, 2026. Reported price above $7 billion (Bloomberg) and up to $10 billion (Wall Street Journal); about 8 million developers and 400 models; Gaybrick statements.

Stripe, “Stripe Publishes 2025 Annual Letter and Announces Tender Offer,” Stripe Newsroom, 2026. $1.9 trillion total volume, up 34 percent; roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP; 90 percent of the Dow and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100; stablecoin volume around $400 billion; Bridge volume more than quadrupled; Tempo.

Stripe, “Stripe Builds Out the Economic Infrastructure for AI with 288 Launches,” Stripe Newsroom, Sessions 2026. Streaming payments; Metronome metering with stablecoin micropayments on Tempo; Link wallets for agents.

Technocracy Inc., The Technocrat magazine, 1938. Definition of Technocracy as “the science of social engineering.”

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The Senate on Tuesday failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, falling short of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633. The vote, held at about 2:15 p.m. ET, was the first floor test of comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation in the chamber. It was not a vote on final passage. It was a vote on whether debate could even begin. The answer was no, with 50 no votes and 49 yes votes.

Every Democrat voted against the measure. Three Republicans – Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Jerry Moran of Kansas – also voted against the measure

The Clarity Act is the market-structure half of the crypto legal framework Congress began building last year, the companion to the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules. It draws the line between digital assets regulated as commodities under the CFTC and those regulated as securities under the SEC, puts spot trading platforms under a federal registration regime for the first time, and sets statutory terms for self-custody, noncustodial software and rewards on stablecoin balances. It cleared the House last July with 78 Democrats and then spent a year in Senate rewrites.

That result effectively freezes the bill in place with almost no calendar left before the midterms. Republicans control 53 seats. They needed at least seven Democrats, and more if GOP holdouts peeled off over bank or law-enforcement concerns. They did not get them.

The House passed its version 294-134 in July 2025. The Senate Banking Committee reported a version 15-9 in May 2026, with Democrats Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland joining Republicans. Tuesday was supposed to be the moment those committee crossovers turned into a floor coalition. Both Gallego and Alsobrooks voted no on cloture. Instead, the first hurdle became the last one of 2026.

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 The Crypto CLARITY Act has failed to pass the Senate cloture vote. pic.twitter.com/0VAw1H9Eyl

— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) September 15, 2026

Aaaaand, Bitcoin isn’t happy.

How the deal collapsed in 48 hours

Senate Republicans released what they called their “last, best and final” text Sunday night. Sens. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Banking Chair Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Agriculture Chair John Boozman of Arkansas said the draft folded in 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats. The package included new ethics language modeled on a Tillis-Gallego proposal, edits to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act for noncustodial developers, Agriculture Committee guardrails on affiliate trading and tribal gaming, and a Treasury “circuit breaker” meant to address bank fears that stablecoin yield would drain community-bank deposits.

Lummis’s line was blunt: Democrats got what they wanted; now take yes for an answer.

Democrats did not. Late Monday they sent a counteroffer. According to people familiar with it, they did not reopen the stablecoin-yield fight – sources had described that as a “Republican-only” problem – but they did demand more on ethics (large holdings, dependent children, paid crypto promotions), a narrower BRCA that expressly does not modify criminal law, and tighter Ag-title rules on exchanges and conflicts. Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia said the White House-approved ethics language still needed work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts went further, arguing the enforcement design left the Trump administration too much control and left loopholes around existing presidential crypto interests.

Republicans rejected the counteroffer Tuesday morning. “In response to a significant step in their direction, Democrats have chosen to move the goalposts again,” Senate Banking Committee spokesman Jeff Naft said. “Yet we are hearing the same unreasonable asks and the same refusal to take yes for an answer. The final text is public.” Lummis’s office said the Democratic paper “looks identical to their opening position at the start of recess.”

Read full story here…

At this point, if you’re not using personal access to political power to run billion-dollar crypto scams, you’re seriously missing out.

Previously, it was the Trump dynasty cashing in, using the family name to rake in over $1 billion off the backs of gullible crypto bros. Now, it’s former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, whose memecoin $LAPTOP is following the tell-tale signs of a cyrpto rug pull.

If you’re not familiar with this side of the cryptoverse, here’s a quick breakdown. A memecoin is basically an extremely volatile financial vehicle designed to cash in on trending memes or other viral phenomena. Unlike other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, memecoins lack even the thinnest pretense of real world utility. Instead, they live or die on hype alone, with the vast majority of memecoins collapsing like a house of cards as soon as a few early investors begin selling off their holdings.

This, of course, is exactly what happened with $LAPTOP. According to DeCrypt, the young Biden’s memecoin launched at 8 am on Wednesday morning, peaking at a price of $190.81 dollars just two minutes after opening to traders. Before 9 am rolled around, the value of the memecoin had plummeted to just $3.70, collapsing from a fully diluted value of $144 billion to $4.8 billion in a matter of minutes.

As the Washington Post observed, roughly 80 percent of people who bought the crypto token ended up losing money.

Biden, for his part, touted $LAPTOP as a way to reclaim his honor in the wake of the convoluted laptop controversy of 2020, where it was alleged that the younger Biden was appropriating his father’s political position in business dealings in Ukraine and China.

“The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery,” Biden posted on X-formerly-Twitter before the memecoin went public. “They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.”

It’s unclear exactly how much he made from the rugpull, or where exactly any of that money went. In his post, Biden alluded to a “mechanism” by which “20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community,” without elaborating on what that means.

A further portion of the tokens could be sent to a charity in a spiteful dig at Trump, as Biden cryptically explained.

“Thirty percent of the tokens are tied to a pre-programmed mechanism,” he tweeted. “We publicly say what has to happen in the world. If it happens, the corresponding tokens are permanently burned. If it does not, those tokens are sent to charity. Either way, they leave our hands and an additional 50 million tokens will go to charity no matter what.”

“With $TRUMP, nearly one million wallets have collectively lost ~$3.8 [billion],” Biden continued. “With my token, 20 percent of the coins will be airdropped to the community, and I am even including people that lost money on the $TRUMP grift.”

A follow-up post published on the blogging platform Medium clarifies that this “mechanism” is a kind of prediction-market line, where “30 percent of supply is tied to public, verifiable events criteria.”

“When a prediction resolves YES, the tokens are burned. When it doesn’t, they go to charity,” Biden explained. Basically, there are dozens of these “events” baked into $LAPTOP that determine what happens to the tokens as time goes on. Some of them are relatively straightforward, like “will President Trump be impeached during his term?” while others only add to the labyrinthine scheme.

“The first event, 5,000,000 tokens, was resolved yesterday when Beeple referenced $LAPTOP,” Biden wrote on his blog.

Of course, the memecoin’s valuation matters a great deal: whether the five millions tokens are priced at a few cents or a few hundred dollars when the prediction resolves has drastic implications for the final payout. Now that the price of LAPTOP is in the gutter, the not-at-all-ironclad law of memecoins says that it’s extremely unlikely to shoot back up without a major cash injection.

In all, it’s an extremely sketchy — not to mention gimmicky — setup for a guy who’s already worth $17 million.

Maybe it’d be one thing if all of the proceeds were guaranteed to end up with a charity, but that whole mechanism looks to be a distant afterthought. Instead, Biden is focused on the more nebulous task of “help[ing] each other and our country to get back up” — though how a hundred-billion-dollar crypto scam is supposed to accomplish that remains to be seen.

More on crypto scams: Trump Fans Confused by How Their Investments in His Crypto and Stock Are Now Worth a Tiny Fraction While He’s Getting Richer

The post Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP Meme Coin Is Either a National Disgrace or the Funniest Thing He’s Ever Done, and We’re Not Entirely Sure Which appeared first on Futurism.

Back in August, a massive leak in El Reno, Oklahoma spewed close to four million gallons of local water into the ground, forcing the city into an unofficial stand-still.

The cause was quickly traced back to a damaged water line belonging to a Bitcoin-mining data center operated by the company Athlon BT. As ABC5 reported at the time, city inspectors trawling the building’s exterior uncovered the failed water line, as well as violations around drainage, maintenance and access, and expired building permits.

Weeks later, an investigation by the local fire marshal inside the El Reno data center uncovered a further laundry list of horrifying violations.

The inspectors discovered vessels full of flammable liquid stored near combustible materials, Oklahoma station KFOR reported, in addition to fire extinguishers that weren’t properly maintained.

Electrical equipment and crucial wiring was also found in disrepair, while a lockbox meant to hold keys for emergency first responders to easily access the facility was left empty. Vegetation on the building’s exterior was in violation of the fire code.

As a result of the copious fire hazards, the city gave the data center a “failing” grade, indicative of a building with severe structural or safety failures.

When it comes to data centers, fire safety is no small matter. The structures are already highly prone to conflagration due to massive electrical loads, lithium-ion batteries, and chips that run at extremely high temperatures.

In one Ohio township, fire fighters reported being overwhelmed by the high volume of calls to two local data center campuses. In addition to tying up first responders, data center fires are costly affairs for taxpayers, as property tax abatements mean nearby residents — not data center owners — can be the ones fronting the bill whenever the fire company gets a call.

More on data centers: Data Center Caught Watering Its Lavish Lawn While Human Neighbors Are on Year-Long Water Restriction

The post Fire Marshal Uncovers House of Horrors Lurking Inside Bitcoin-Mining Data Center appeared first on Futurism.

There was a time in the United States when the richest moguls, regardless of their many personal shortcomings, embraced philanthropy in a cynical effort to keep the angry mobs at bay. Andrew Carnegie famously built libraries, John D Rockefeller helped fund research that eventually eradicated hookworm, while JP Morgan donated vast collections of art and books to museums and other cultural institutions.

Today’s robber barons aren’t in such a giving mood. Sure, there are some figures like Microsoft’s Bill Gates — who has plenty of his own problems, to be clear — but they seem to be quickly becoming the minority.

Case in point, the billionaire CEO of cyrpto-trading company Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, recently went on a tirade about how charity is actually a “net negative on the world.”

“The common view is that philanthropy is a noble cause,” Amstrong said during a recent appearance on the right-wing Katie Miller Podcast. “And like, Bill Gates after the DoJ thing is like, ‘I’m going to go rehabilitate my image, I’m going to do philanthropy.'”

That’s a fool’s errand to Armstrong, however, as such philanthropic aspirations — selfish as they are — can become “captured by ideology.”

“I guess I have sort of a contrarian view where a lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world,” Armstrong continued. “And they get captured. It’s actually remarkably hard to find a foundation that has not gotten captured by ideology.”

Though Amstrong’s estimated net worth of around $8.7 billion puts him in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, he says that “so far, I’ve just been like ‘I’m not going to do that.’“

More on tech billionaires: AI Billionaires Are So Greedy That They’re Supercharging Sales of Yachts and Private Jets

The post Billionaire Coinbase CEO Boasts That He Would Never Donate to Charity appeared first on Futurism.

At Macstock, Alessandra White explains how blockchain can give creators greater control and permanence over their digital content. She discusses Hive, decentralized publishing, digital sovereignty, and ways creators can preserve posts and videos beyond centralized platforms. The conversation also examines blockchain’s permanence, including the trade-off that published material cannot simply be deleted…ever.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/maclevelten/MV26229.mp3 This MacVoices […]

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For four hours in July, some of the biggest players in finance put Wall Street’s long-running blockchain experiment to work across an ordinary trading day.

After years of tests with digital versions of securities, cash and trading networks, the focus has shifted to whether these technologies could work together. This time, nearly 40 firms were testing how tokenized assets could move through the institutions that keep modern markets moving.

Over blockchain networks, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Invesco Ltd. and Citadel Securities LLC traded stocks and Treasuries, posted collateral, met margin calls and transferred assets. Overseeing it all was the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., which monitored the exercise from “war rooms” in New York and New Jersey as the firms completed dozens of transactions across various use cases.

The broader aim was to test whether tokenized versions of familiar assets can move through new blockchain systems without sacrificing the settlement, custody and risk controls of traditional markets.

“We tried to replicate the activities that occur in the market on a day to day,” said Nadine Chakar, DTCC’s global head of digital assets. “You don’t want tokenization to be done in isolation. You want it to be part of the daily workflow.”

That is the bet behind much of Wall Street’s tokenization push: not just longer operating hours as markets move toward 24/7 trading, but whether assets can move more freely across institutions, reducing trapped liquidity and some of the handoffs involved in moving collateral.

The July pilot was an attempt to test that proposition under something closer to real market conditions, bringing together exchanges, clearinghouses, banks and asset managers rather than limiting transactions to bilateral trades. Transactions included collateral pledges, margin calls, repo trades, delivery-versus-payment and transfers between blockchains using digital versions of stocks, exchange-traded funds and Treasuries on DTCC’s private network built using Besu and the Canton Network.

DTCC said it plans to move the service from limited tests toward ongoing use in October, adding another blockchain network, expanding support for Treasury corporate actions — coupon payment and Treasury maturity dates — and opening it to eligible participants beyond the July group.

DTCC’s role in the test was key because it maintains the official record for trillions of dollars of securities. If tokenized trades still have to be reconciled back to that traditional record at the DTCC, some of the promised efficiency disappears.

DTCC declined to provide transaction values or client-specific details. Chakar said “the purpose of the day was to simulate a representative snapshot of the market by including exchanges, clearing houses, buy-side and sell-side participants.”

Major hurdles remain, Chakar said, including adoption, regulatory alignment and integration with existing systems.

DTCC says Wall Street’s current tokenization push is different from previous attempts to deploy blockchain to financial markets because institutional demand has grown. The agency pointed to an industry working group that has nearly doubled in a few months to more than 100 members. Whether that matters commercially is a different question, said Vivian Fang, a finance professor at Indiana University.

“Many enterprise blockchain pilots over the past decade failed not because the technology didn’t work, but because they lacked the conditions needed for commercial adoption,” she said. “The ultimate test will be whether market participants meaningfully adopt tokenized securities and whether the platform delivers measurable economic value.”

Collateral Movement

Collateral offered one of the clearest tests of whether tokenization has economic value. In one transaction, DTCC tokenized an equity it held and deployed it as margin at CME Group Inc. within minutes. Tokenized collateral can settle almost instantly, potentially reducing trapped liquidity and allowing firms to put assets to work more efficiently, Chakar said.

JPMorgan, participating as a DTCC clearing member, separately converted securities collateral into digital tokens and used them to fund a margin call. The bank also tested tokenized equity collateral, including Invesco’s Nasdaq 100 ETF, ticker QQQ.

“Tokenization could reduce friction, improve collateral mobility and enable assets to be deployed more efficiently in support of margin requirements,” said Danny Hand, digital assets lead for prime financial services at JPMorgan.

There is a catch. JPMorgan can create tokenized collateral, but clearinghouses still have to accept it, custodians have to handle it and risk systems have to account for it. Broader adoption will depend in part on central counterparties recognizing tokenized collateral after DTCC expands the service.

That helps explain why early adoption may cluster around a handful of uses. Citigroup Inc. has projected tokenized assets could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, rising to $8.2 trillion in a bullish scenario. Bank of America Corp. Global Research analysts expect early adoption to focus on collateral mobility, on-chain cash management and settlement of standardized financial instruments, with stocks and credit developing more gradually.

Legal clarity remains another obstacle, according to Noelle Acheson, author of the “Crypto Is Macro Now” newsletter. But DTCC is “in the relatively unique position of being able to move the industry forward by setting standards and working with global partners,” she noted. “That said, the transformation is likely to take about a decade.”

Even if those uses take hold, another problem remains: firms are building on blockchain networks that do not automatically communicate. Moving an asset between them still requires both systems to agree on what moved and who owns it.

The July transactions also tested whether separately built systems could work together. Digital Asset Holdings LLC’s Canton Network underpinned several of those trades.

“It was a real functioning secondary market set of activities that was enabled by market participants,” said Kelly Mathieson, the company’s chief business development officer.

For all the activity in July, the exercise was carefully choreographed. Participants spent months testing together in an intentionally narrow window and a relatively small amount of assets were converted into an onchain form. October begins the harder phase: whether the system gets used by a larger group during the course of everyday business.

“It was a massive step for the market and for the overall state of readiness for all participants come October,” Chakar said. “There’s nobody questioning anymore whether the technology works.”

Read full story here…

Hackers made away with more than $100 million worth of Bitcoin from thousands of supposedly secured “cold” wallets hosted by Canada-based company Coinkite.

As Bloomberg reports, the hackers managed to infiltrate the wallets despite clients having a physical hardware key associated with their accounts, which was supposed to provide nearly impenetrable security.

“The moment it loaded I knew I was screwed because I saw red lines for withdrawals,” one of the victims, Johnathan Goodman, told Bloomberg. “Between 9:36 and 9:43 pm on July 29th, all three of my wallets were completely drained.”

Crypto insights company Galaxy Research estimated that around $110 million worth of Bitcoin had been drained from around 5,000 wallets last week, a figure that grew to at least 7,300 by Monday.

The incident highlights persistent lapses in security plaguing the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry.

In the case of Coinkite, it was a particularly egregious lapse in security. The firm warned its customers on July 30 that hackers were exploiting a software bug that allowed them to reconstruct wallet “seed phrases,” which are sequences of random words that act as a master key to “cold” — or offline — wallets.

Coinkite promised in an email to Bloomberg in a followup story that it was racing to get a full picture of the embarrassing situation, saying it was working on “helping affected customers.” However, the company refused to estimate the scale of the losses, vowing to conduct a “post-mortem” at an unspecified future date.

“We’re not in a position to independently confirm total losses or validate the specific figures being reported by third parties,” the company told Bloomberg. “We won’t speculate on a number we can’t verify directly.”

The company also kicked off an “ongoing ecosystem-wide security audit” which has revealed “numerous critical bugs in key software systems across the ecosystem using frontier AI models.”

The cryptocurrency firm has since gone into full damage control mode as it investigates the major slipup.

In an “update on customer data retention” published on its website today, the company said that “due to legal obligations arising from the security incident, including the preservation of records that may be relevant to ongoing and anticipated legal proceedings, we have temporarily suspended our automated data-blanking process.”

“This means that customer records that would otherwise have been blanked under our standard schedule will be retained until further notice,” the company wrote.

More on crypto: Trump Boasts That He Can Profit Off Presidency as Much as He Wants: “I Found Out That Nobody Cared”

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President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, cofounded a crypto mining venture called American Bitcoin Corp last year — and it’s already in deep trouble.

As the Bitcoin community reels from a major downturn — the digital currency has plummeted by over 40 percent year to date — the company’s shares have plummeted right along with it, crashing over a whopping 95 percent compared to their peak.

On Wednesday, its stock price hit an all-time low of well under $6, down from a high of $140 last autumn.

That means Eric Trump’s six percent stake in the company has lost more than $600 million in market value, per Bloomberg‘s calculations, a bruising crypto play that perfectly illustrates the enormous risks of going all-in on extremely volatile digital assets.

After merging with an existing mining company, the company made the questionable decision last year to pivot from building data centers — an extremely lucrative industry that has seen massive interest as of late — to crypto mining, a gambling-like practice that’s far from guaranteed to make a profit.

Since then, the crypto world has had a rude awakening. As prices plunged, the industry made a sharp turn towards leasing all of that hardware to AI companies instead of mining Bitcoin.

However, American Bitcoin stuck to its guns, ultimately going down with the ship. Most of its assets are tied up in crypto-mining hardware and Bitcoin holdings, meaning it didn’t really have anywhere to run.

Eric Trump, meanwhile, is doubling down.

“Thrilled to announce American Bitcoin crossing the 8,000 BTC mark!” he gloated in a July 7 tweet. “The stacking continues.”

He also argued that it would be “beyond catastrophic” to sell its holdings during a recent podcast episode.

Despite Trump’s enthusiasm, American Bitcoin lost well over $100 million in the first quarter of this year. Whether the tide will turn and crypto will see another rise in value is ultimately a question of belief.

“Just hold on guys, just hold,” Eric Trump warned during this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas.

The elder Trump appears to have fared far better, reporting last week that he had made more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s crypto ventures in 2025 — an astronomical conflict of interest, considering we’re talking about the president of the United States.

More on Trump and crypto: Trump Fans Confused by How Their Investments in His Crypto and Stock Are Now Worth a Tiny Fraction While He’s Getting Richer

The post Eric Trump Has Lost $600 Million of Daddy’s Money Betting on Crypto appeared first on Futurism.

Cryptocurrency entered public discussion with a reputation for anonymity. Wallet addresses appeared disconnected from real world identities, and

Criado em 2022 como Non Fungible Conference, numa altura em que os NFTs estavam no auge da popularidade, o NFC Summit tem vindo a evoluir e, este ano, a arte digital, a IA e a cultura contemporânea estão no centro da programação, numa edição que, pela primeira vez, teve como palco a Unicorn Factory Lisboa.

The post Da arte às novas formas de colecionismo: NFC Summit vai além dos NFTs e quer ser um espelho da cultura pop digital appeared first on Tek Notícias.

Entre os dias 4 e 6 de junho, a Unicorn Factory Lisboa, no Beato, vai receber o NFC Summit 2026. Nesta edição o evento reúne mais de 350 oradores internacionais, mais de 200 artistas, mais de 36 expositores principais, distribuídos por oito programas e 50 mil metros quadrados. 

The post NFC Summit 2026: Fábrica de Unicórnios de Lisboa recebe três dias dedicados à arte digital, IA e blockchain appeared first on Tek Notícias.