Violent protests swept across France on Saturday, with over half a million people taking to the streets and more than 1,000 arrested as buildings were set ablaze in Paris, Lyon and Marseille over education cuts and the cost of living. Similar demonstrations hit Belgium, Italy, Portugal, as well as Albania and Tunisia, reflecting a deepening social crisis across Europe and North Africa.
Geopolitically, Donald Trump waived key provisions of new Russia sanctions, prompting Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to call the move “wrong” as Russian strikes cut power to 1 million people. In the Gulf, Egypt’s president vowed to defend Saudi Arabia from Houthi attacks, and Iranian TV aired footage of a tanker exploding in the Strait of Hormuz. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian farmers and a Washington Post journalist.
A BIS working paper found that a 1-basis-point rise in deposit rates slows stablecoin growth, reframing the debate. Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo see tokenization as a growth play, while Bitcoin slipped 0.4% to $81,218 and ETH fell 1.2% to $2,394. Anthropic’s Claude solved a 25-year NSA cryptography mystery, showing seeds came from a simple Unix random generator. Google’s quantum chip threatens Satoshi-era bitcoin.
In UK politics, a Reform UK candidate was recorded saying asylum seekers should be in “concentration camps” and that Muslims cannot be British. The SNP declared its independence campaign has begun. Tech: DeepSeek released its latest model, Meta removed language raising scraping concerns, and a super El Niño threatens Latin America with food shortages.
References
- Goldman, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley see tokenization as a growth play, not a threat
- Citrini sees a tokenization boom. The harder question is who profits
- Polygon sees Coinme acquisition as entry to payments sector dominated by Visa, Stripe
- Banks could slow stablecoin growth by paying savers more, BIS paper finds
- ‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery
- Satoshi-era bitcoin faces a bigger quantum threat after Google’s new Willow breakthrough
- Big Tech’s AI auditors will only see what they’re shown
- Traders will soon be able to bet on whether Coinbase, Robinhood and Marathon will hit their targets
- Circle targets 40 new markets as stablecoin demand grows globally
- Quantum Alliance forms amid warnings 6.4 million bitcoin face future quantum threat
- Bleached corals thrive within days when touching healthy neighbour
- Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States
- Furifont, a Japanese font that shows furigana
- The Commodore 64 hardware simulator: break chips and pins, see the results
- DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017
- Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
- Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG
- Pattern matching beats narrative reasoning
- Gold is now the top U.S. export
- Source code of the Estonian online voting system
- Trump waives broad new Russia sanctions, Zelenskyy condemns it as ‘wrong’
- Software’s new consolidator gets big vote of confidence from Berkshire
- Berkshire shares buck market sell-off, rally to highest since Buffett said he would step down as CEO
- 5 midterm money takeaways: Democrats have candidate cash. Republicans have Elon Musk
- ‘Dead money’ for a decade: Why this hedge fund approach may deliver an advantage over bonds
- These tech stocks are a buy ahead of their earnings reports, Bank of America says
- Semiconductor market to remain solid ‘at least through next year,’ South Korea finance minister says
- Trump’s student loan overhaul could lead to more bankruptcy filings, former judge says
- Trump touts his power at Kentucky rally to energize voters ahead of midterm elections
- Airport attacks put aviation in crosshairs of geopolitical conflicts