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Silicon Valley is full of magical thinking. Those drawn to technological and scientific innovation tend to also be drawn to the fantastical, and it’s not always easy for them to tell which is which. After all, to be a truly great innovator, you must vividly imagine things which don’t exist and be certain that the world will be improved by them. You must be impervious to the rest of the world when it tells you your ideas are ridiculous. It helps to see yourself as the main character of an unfolding historical story. These characteristics are true of the start-up founder and the cult leader.

Tech executives are prone to grandiose, quasi-mystical rhetoric, and, as has often been observed, the mental model that many of them have of AGI is essentially a religious or supernatural one: something is coming, we know not what exactly, that will either save humanity or destroy it. Ilya Sutskever, the engineering visionary behind OpenAI who left the company last year to work on AI safety, told his staff in 2023 that the company needed to build a bunker to save its scientists and engineers – the elect – from the very technology they were working on. A former colleague said, “There is a group of people—Ilya being one of them—who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture. Literally, a rapture.”

From: Rationalist Cults of Silicon Valley – by Ian Leslie.

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The UK Government’s upcoming reforms to the Money Laundering Regulations (MLRs) mark a major step forward in the adoption of digital identity across regulated sectors. With HM Treasury backing digital ID as a means to streamline checks and help meet the government’s aim of reducing compliance costs by 25%, the direction of travel is now clear: digital IDs are coming.

From: Why the MLR reforms are a green light for digital ID: By Tim Barnett.

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Only companies certified as Identity Service Providers (IDSPs) under the UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework can use the information in the GOV.UK Wallet and share it with another business to prove a user’s identity, so organisations must work through these providers for other IDV purposes.

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Content producers are also rethinking their business models. “The future of the internet is not all about traffic,” says Mr Chandrasekar, who has built up Stack Overflow’s enterprise-oriented subscription product, Stack Internal. News publishers are planning for “Google zero”, using newsletters and apps to reach customers who no longer come to them via search, and moving their content behind paywalls or to live events.

From: AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?.

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As ai changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make ai companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.

From: AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?.

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At the core of this collaborative effort is the Know Your Agent (KYA) framework, powered by a Digital Agent Passport. This tamper-proof credential bundle will enable merchants to assess whether an AI agent is legitimate, authorized and acting with proper consent. The KYA framework will lay out structured guidelines for verification of the developer’s identity, code integrity, user consent and the ongoing trustworthiness of the agent in real time.

Worldpay will empower merchants to leverage the KYA framework, enabling them to trust shopping agents by validating consumer intent and the authority granted to those agents. This innovation can help merchants grow sales while safeguarding against fraud and unauthorized purchases.

From: Worldpay and Trulioo Collaborate to Embed Trust in the Agentic Commerce Era | Worldpay.

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Know Your Agent (KYA) framework which is powered by a Digital Agent Passport was developed by Trulioo in partnership with PayOS. For more information visit: Know Your Agent (KYA): An Identity Framework for Agentic Commerce.

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Despite their growing role in modern systems, machine identities are still often managed with tools designed for people. Traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems assign roles to employees, enforce login policies, and monitor activity based on job function or department. These methods work well for human users but do not translate easily to machines.
Unlike human users, machine identities are generated programmatically—by scripts, deployment tools, or services—and scale rapidly. A single application can generate hundreds of credentials in minutes. These identities vary widely in lifespan and function, making governance especially complex… As they accumulate, these unmanaged identities introduce mounting risk. Many lack clear ownership or expiration timelines. When issues arise, teams may not know what a credential does, who created it, or whether it’s still in use. Human-centric IAM tools weren’t built for this complexity. Managing machine identities effectively requires a governance model rooted in automation, visibility, and system-level adaptability.

From: Why Machine Identities Are the Next Big Compliance Challenge.

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An award-winning ice cream shop ranked the best in Bristol has gone cashless in a move to protect the safety of its staff.

From: Award-winning ice cream shop Panunzio’s goes cashless ‘to protect staff’ | Bristol Live.

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Economic benefits. Delivering economic value to all participants is essential for stablecoin adoption. For example, holding USDC on Coinbase allows users to earn 4.1 percent (annual percentage yield) and has led to deposits of $12 billion.26 In contrast, the MiCA regulations in Europe prevent issuers from passing such yield to depositors; by comparison, the largest stablecoin in Europe has a circulating supply today of just €200 million.

From: Stablecoins payments infrastructure for modern finance | McKinsey.

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Stablecoins have now become a genuine contender to satisfy new payment needs, achieving the first true market fit for (non-crypto) digital assets. A proliferation of needs, including merchant settlements, business-to-business payments, cross-border payments, retail remittances and automated payments (for example, from government) are driving the global demand for real-time, low-cost inclusive global payment solutions. I rather agree with McKinsey’s view that (and they are very polite) incumbents “may have hesitated to pursue innovative payment systems” because they do not want to disrupt existing (and very healthy) sources of revenue. Added to this natural reluctance, competition between institutions has subverted collaboration for to increase net welfare. However, it now seems that growing competion amongst serious players to provide stablecoin-based solutions that are nearly instant and incur lower costs and (not to be underestimated in strategic terms) expand access through wallet-based rather than account-based infrastructure.

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These systems do not decentralise power in any meaningful governance sense. They decentralise accountability, dispersing legal obligations across a network of offshore entities, unaudited smart contracts, and user-facing wrappers that obscure the true nature of the risk. Decentralisation means that no one can be held accountable when things go wrong. Governance tokens, so often portrayed as democratising tools, tend to concentrate power in the hands of early insiders or institutional investors. Meanwhile, ordinary users are invited to participate in systems they cannot understand and which offer no enforceable rights.

From: Tokenised trading creates structural risks.

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