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Stablecoins are a catalyst. They have evolved from a niche trading instrument into foundational plumbing, and they are becoming the layer on which a new generation of global financial products gets built.

From: The new stack for global finance: Stablecoins edition – a16z crypto.

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Former Alabama football player wore wigs and makeup to impersonate NFL players in $20 million fraud, prosecutors say

From: Former Alabama football player wore wigs and makeup to impersonate NFL players in $20 million fraud, prosecutors say | Fortune.

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April 16 – A former Alabama football player impersonated three NFL players to take out millions of dollars of loans in their names, federal prosecutors contend.
Luther Davis, who played for the Crimson Tide from 2007-10. has ​been charged with wire fraud and identity theft after he allegedly created false documents and wore wigs to convince lenders that he was one of the players, ESPN reported, citing federal court records.

From: Report: Impersonator posed as NFL players to secure loans | Reuters.

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De Nederlandsche Bank will sign a major contract tomorrow with Schwarz Digits, the IT arm of Lidl owner Schwarz Group. DNB aims to reduce its dependence on American cloud companies.

From: Dutch central bank chooses Lidl for European Cloud – Techzine Global.

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The federal government announced it’s planning to ban crypto ATMs in order to protect Canadians from scammers using the machines to defraud victims.

The Liberals’ spring economic update on Tuesday referred to crypto ATMs as a “primary method for scammers to defraud victims and for criminals to place their cash proceeds of crime.”

From: Federal government plans to ban crypto ATMs to stop scammers from defrauding Canadians | CBC News.

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Note that last number. As Jasmine Sun, an anthropologist who is one of the sharpest observers of the tech industry, puts it : “Most people don’t know anyone working at an AI company or on AI governance; they have no real agency to shape the trajectory of the tech. Talk of aggregate consumer surplus is scarce solace to an illustrator or cab driver losing their job. When people feel disempowered, they grasp at whatever leverage they can get.”

From: Tech bros, beware: resistance to AI moves from theory to ….

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Financial regulation has always been shaped by the boundaries it seeks to defend. Once, those boundaries were physical—bank branches, vaults, national borders. Then they became digital, defined by networks, firewalls, and systems.

Today, those perimeters are dissolving. In their place, a new focal point is emerging: identity. As financial services fragment across platforms, jurisdictions and technologies, the question is no longer just where risk resides, but who carries it. Increasingly, regulation is following that shift—reorienting itself around identity as the most persistent, portable, and contested layer in the system.

From: Is identity becoming the new perimeter of financial regulation? – RegTech100.

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They specialise in “trend simulation” — creating hundreds of posts, with tracks by their clients playing in the background, to manufacture the feeling that a song is everywhere.

From: Has taste in music been hijacked?.

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Target updated its terms and conditions on March 22 as it prepares to launch a partnership with AI bot Google Gemini. The integration could enable the AI to suggest products and complete purchases on a shopper’s behalf. The agent would not be able to buy products without the shopper’s approval.

The new terms and conditions say that if a customer authorizes an AI shopping agent to act on their behalf, those purchases and transactions would be “considered transactions authorized by you.”

In other words, the customer would still have to pay, even if, let’s say, the bot ordered the wrong item.

From: Target Updates Terms for Google Gemini AI Shopping Integration – Business Insider.

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X Money is not the end state, it’s the foundation for building a Retail Media network where their proprietary cobranded payment token replaces Google cookies & The Trade Desk UIDs for promotional attribution, shifting ~$1.2T in global promo spend toward pay-for-performance Cost per Action CPA economics tied to verified intent & outcome.

From: Feed | LinkedIn.

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