A library of snippets
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As fervor around stablecoins grows from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, one of the most high-profile new crypto projects has drummed up a massive coffer of funds to back its ambitious plans. Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain developed by fintech giant Stripe and blockchain venture firm Paradigm, has raised $500 million in fresh funding in a Series A round led by venture giant Greenoaks and Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, according to five people familiar with the matter.
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“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”
From: Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building | WIRED.
I’m not sure I feel comfortable with anyone building a robot army, whether Elon Musk or anyone else. That can only end in two ways: either the robot army gets hacked by agents or a foreign power or saboteurs from a rival corporation, in whuch case they rise up and kill us, or the robot army rises up and kills us anyway because of prompting mistake during some DOGE efficiency drive.
Killer robots aside, there is a point to be made here about infrastructure. In
The Economist reports that in 2012 Susan Woodward of Sand Hill Econometrics and Robert Hall of Stanford University found that mortgage borrowers typically missed out on at least $1,000 by not shopping around. Others lost thousands by failing to refinance their mortgage promptly when interest rates declined. Well, as Kirsty Rutter and I pointed out in our paper “Where are the customers’ bots? The AI paradigm shift in retail banking” published in the Journal of Payment Systems & Strategy back in 2023, while human customers may not shop around for the best rates because they have other things to do, non-human customers do not have other things to do and can shop around 24/7/365. There is a revolution underway in retail finance, not because finaical instutitions are using AI but because their customers are.
While I am sure a great many organisations are wrestling with the problem of what to do when their customers become literally 1,000 times smarter overnight, financial services organisations are in a particularly difficult position. Their products are highly commoditised.
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As ai goes mainstream, it will remove one of the most enduring distortions in modern capitalism: the information advantages that sellers, service providers and intermediaries enjoy over consumers. When everyone has a genius in their pocket, they will be less vulnerable to mis-selling—benefiting them and improving overall economic efficiency. The “rip-off economy”, in which firms profit from opacity, confusion or inertia, is meeting its match.
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The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, had reported a “degradation of some services” at 16:00. It said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.
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New phase will ensure technical readiness for first issuance
If legislation in place in the course of 2026, a pilot exercise could start in 2027 and the Eurosystem should be ready for a potential first issuance of the digital euro during 2029
Preparation phase begun in November 2023 has successfully concluded
The Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) has decided to move to the next phase of the digital euro project. This decision follows the successful completion of the preparation phase, launched by the Eurosystem in November 2023, which laid the foundations for issuing a digital euro.The Governing Council’s decision aligns with European leaders’ request to accelerate progress on the digital euro, as recently stated at the October 2025 Euro Summit.
From: Eurosystem moving to next phase of digital euro project.
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Set to launch in the first half of 2026, the firm’s US Dollar Payment Token (USDPT) will be built on Solana and issued by Anchorage Digital Bank.
Western Union will provide users with access to digital assets, and will enable the ability to send, receive, spend and hold USDPT.
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Criminals are using artificial intelligence to increase their “attack rate” on UK victims, with investment fraud and romance scams hitting record levels in the first half of the year.
The number of confirmed fraud cases surpassed 2mn in the first half of this year — a 17 per cent rise on the previous year — according to statistics compiled by UK Finance, the banking trade body. The amount of money criminals stole from victims surpassed £629mn, a 3 per cent rise.
From: Criminals using AI are driving sharp rise in UK fraud cases.
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The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today announced a new initiative – BLOOM (Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency), to extend settlement capabilities offered by financial institutions. Through BLOOM, MAS will collaborate with the financial industry to enable settlement in tokenised bank liabilities and well-regulated stablecoins, whilst effectively managing risks in the rapidly evolving digital settlement asset landscape, through standardised approaches.
From: MAS Launches BLOOM Initiative to Extend Settlement Capabilities.
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US regulators have approved the launch of a bank backed by a group of high-profile tech billionaires with ties to Donald Trump’s administration. The bank, Erebor, was founded this year by Palmer Luckey, co-founder of military contractor Anduril, and Joe Lonsdale, head of venture capital firm 8VC and a co-founder of data analytics firm Palantir. The bank was granted “preliminary and conditional” approval by regulators on Wednesday, just four months after its application for a national bank charter in June — a sign of the Trump administration’s initiative to lower regulatory hurdles and encourage new banking entrants focused on digital assets and services.
From: US approves new bank backed by billionaires with ties to Donald Trump.
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