Financial news

Meta's splashy new business AI hire offers yet another reason to bank on Zuckerberg

By poaching MongoDB's CJ Desai, Mark Zuckerberg shows he's serious about building an enterprise AI business.

• META

After AI Agent Hacked Its Government, Australia Calls Altman and Amodei to Testify

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has invited the OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs to a Canberra hearing on October 1, after an OpenAI agent quietly accessed Australia's Medicare data and nobody said a word for months.

Tether’s USDT at center of Iran’s shadow banking network, new Senate Report says

Tether and its stablecoin have become central in "Iran's shadow banking system," according to a new Senate investigation.

• Tether

Nvidia Built a Kill Switch for AI Agents Because They Keep Getting Out

OpenShell and Sentry give AI agents a hardware-enforced leash, arriving after a summer of agents breaching a government site, hacking their own tests, and going rogue during a security evaluation.

• NVDA

US SEC follows CFTC in staff guidance for crypto

With the failed cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, the SEC announced updates on how federal securities laws could apply to token issuers, following similar guidance from the CFTC.

Strive Buys $94.5 Million in Bitcoin, Pushing Holdings Past 27,000 BTC

Strive bought 1,107 BTC for $94.5 million last week, lifting its holdings to 27,462 BTC, with its SATA preferred stock supplying 85% of the capital.

• Bitcoin

Bybit accepts Franklin Templeton tokenized funds as trading collateral

Eligible institutions can pledge Benji-issued fund shares for stablecoin credit lines while keeping the underlying assets in off-exchange custody.

Anthropic launches cheaper AI model, its second release since CEO's call for a slowdown

The company said Sonnet 5.5 doesn't advance the frontier, but that it is better at coding and knowledge work tasks than its predecessor.

Goldman Sachs brings $100 billion Treasury fund into crypto’s institutional plumbing

The bank is bringing its roughly $100 billion Treasury fund to institutional crypto firms without creating a tokenized version of it.

• GS

Nearly half the stocks in the S&P 500 are at cross purposes with the rest of the market

Almost half of the stocks in the S&P 500 have a negative beta, evidence of a chasm between the entire index and its individual components.

• S&P 500

Months After the $292M Kelp Hack, Chainlink Lets Institutions Add Their Own Bridge Checks

Chainlink's CCIP 2.0 lets banks run their own security checks on cross-chain transfers, five months after a rival's setup lost $292 million to hackers.

SEC Charges Registered Investment Adviser Zoe Financial for Failure to Disclose Conflict of Interest

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced settled charges against New York-based investment adviser Zoe Financial Inc. for failing to fully and fairly disclose material facts concerning conflicts of interest to its clients and prospective…

Crypto PAC spends $11M to oppose Sherrod Brown in Ohio

Fairshake pledged an initial $30 million on media opposing the Democratic candidate in Ohio’s Senate race in what some see as a repeat of spending by the crypto industry in 2024.

Jim Cramer says Nvidia’s record buyback could ‘change the trajectory’ of the stock

Nvidia's $150 billion worth of additional buyback firepower is a major step in the right direction.

• NVDA

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce reflects on her time at the agency, what she still wanted to get done: ‘There’s no good time to leave’

After nearly a decade at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Hester Peirce is wrapping up her last week at the agency.

Vitalik Buterin Outlines 'Cryptographic World Computer' Plan for Ethereum

Hegota will be Ethereum's last 'normal' fork, he argues, with everything after built on recursive STARKs and formal verification.

• Ethereum

The restaking gold rush is over, and top protocols are barely making a profit

As restaking yields dried up and smart-contract risks mounted, Ethereum's top liquid restaking protocol walked away from its core business to build a crypto neobank instead.

• Ethereum

Tether is a ‘lifeline’ for Iranian regime, Senate Dems say in new report

Democrats on the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence published a report alleging that USDT had become a key tool for the Iranian government.

• Tether

SpaceX launches its massive Starship rocket into orbit for the first time

Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a historic test flight of its massive Starship rocket early Monday.

The blue-collar AI job market is booming. Will data center backlash make it go bust?

The public has soured on AI data centers and states are slowing development, but for HVAC, plumbing, welding, and electrical workers, it's been a jobs boom.