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President Trump signed two long-awaited executive orders on Monday focused on quantum technology, a focus area for the administration that has often taken a back seat to AI. The first order, whose draft has been circulating for months, encourages different agencies to invest in research, including developing a government-hosted quantum computer and coordinating public-private partnerships. The second is focused on building safeguards against cryptographic attacks as quantum capabilities accelerate.

From: Trump Signs Sweeping Quantum Executive Orders — The Information.

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UTIX issues blockchain backed tickets that cannot be duplicated or manipulated. Event organisers can set rules for pricing, resale and transfer, creating an environment that protects revenue and ensures customers receive genuine tickets.

From: .https://www.utix.com/about

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Most workers at a frontier AI developer in 2027 will not be humans, but AI agents. Already now, these AI agents do much of the actual work in a lab: they write and run the code, communicate the findings, and fill out the forms. The human talent is mostly responsible for coming up with ideas, taking meetings, and switching the model back to Opus when Fable gets cut off. Getting access to these AI agents in the early stages of the project will be the most difficult part of recruiting. Already today, Anthropic has limited the use of its most advanced models for frontier LLM development; it doesn’t seem absurd to think that its competitors might follow suit.

From: The Moonshot – by Anton Leicht – Threading the Needle.

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Desperate fans in South East Asia, where BTS is performing 15 of 88 shows, have lost more than $100,000 as scammers cash in on explosive demand.

From: BTS Airang tour: Fans lose $100,000 to scammers cashing in on concert ticket wars – BBC News.

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Ad giant WPP’s latest forecasts for the global ad market, released last week, put ad revenue from AI-related search and chatbots at $101 billion in 2030—roughly what OpenAI hopes to achieve on its own. But WPP’s projection includes what it estimates Google will generate from ads in AI Overviews search response, suggesting OpenAI will find it hard to meet its forecast. WPP projects AI-related ad revenues will hit $5.1 billion this year, while it sees traditional search ad revenues growing 8.4% to $267 billion.

From: Cannes Ad Festival Puts OpenAI’s Projections in Spotlight — The Information.

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China’s sinodollars shape the global financial system just as petrodollars did in the 1970s.

One of the main influences on the price of gold, for example, has been China building up its bullion reserves in exchange for its dollars. The accumulated and unremitted dollar earnings of Chinese exporters slosh around international banks. For the US, buying the goods of the world and paying for them with dollar deposits, Treasury bills and SpaceX stock at a $2tn valuation is still a pretty good deal.

From: Why sinodollars outweigh the petroyuan.

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In his videos, George Makihara appears to have a lucrative side hustle making bets on Polymarket.

In January, the college student posted a video that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word “McDonald’s” that month.

The bet was one of 145 that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket’s website between January and mid-May, based on his videos—bets adding up to almost $410,000.

But none of those bets were real, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

From: They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real – WSJ.

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Makihara, who declined to comment, is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company.

On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

From: They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real – WSJ.

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A policy note published by the World Bank within the framework of the Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative has argued strongly for digital wallets and verifiable credentials (VCs). It states that countries building digital public infrastructure (DPI) must accelerate the move away from monolithic and siloed systems where identity, data sharing, and payments are handled by separate rigid platforms, toward a modular, user-centric and standards-based architecture.

From: World Bank backs digital wallets as foundation for user-centric digital identity | Biometric Update.

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Prediction market site Polymarket reported shortly before the game started in Houston that someone with the username “BreakTheBank” bet just under $300,000 that Portugal wouldn’t win the game.

Odds of winning the bet were listed at 23% at the time but paid off when the score was 1-1 at the final whistle.

The bet returned $1,249,918.80, for a profit of more than $957,000.

From: Sports Bettor Wins $1 Million Betting Against Portugal In World Cup.

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