Zeros

Coinbase is cutting 700 jobs and calling it an AI transformation. Some of us have seen this movie before. If you've been around the digital currency space long enough, certain plot points start to feel like old wallpaper — peeling at the edges, but still recognizable. Markets dip. Companies tighten their belts . And someone, sitting in a very comfortable chair, writes a very sincere email about the future. Coinbase just sent that email. CEO Brian Armstrong announced this week that Coinbase is eliminating approximately 700 positions, which is roughly 14% of its global workforce . The official explanation is a two-for-one: a softening digital asset market and the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. Armstrong painted it as a deliberate pivot, a chance to, "rebuild Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it." One-person teams. Engineers who design, build, and product-manage simultaneously. Fleets of AI agents where departments ...

A Plea Deal, a Rehab Stint, and the Same Old Questions Britney Spears resolved her DUI case yesterday. Whether anything has actually changed is a harder question. Monday morning brought a quiet legal resolution to a story that has been anything but quiet. Britney Spears pleaded guilty today to a reduced charge of wet reckless — a lesser form of reckless driving — stemming from her March 4th arrest in Ventura County, California . She will not serve jail time . She will, however, spend the next twelve months on probation, complete a mandated DUI class, and operate under a strict condition: no possession of drugs without a valid prescription. For anyone who has followed the last decade of her life, that last clause carries a particular weight. The night of the arrest, the California Highway Patrol pulled her over on US-101 near her Westlake Village home after dispatch audio indicated her black BMW was swerving between lanes. She was taken to a hospital for a blood draw, t...

Meet Pepeto: Because Pepe Wasn't Enough Frog for You Somewhere between Pepe  and the heat death of the universe, the digital asset space found room for one more frog . His name is Pepeto . He is, according to his own promotional materials, the God of Frogs — the one who returned with what Pepe never had. What did Pepe never have, you ask? Technology and optimization, apparently. Additionally, presumably, a press team that sends out four nearly identical GlobeNewswire releases per week . Pepeto is an Ethereum -based token project that positions itself as a more complete alternative to the original Pepe memecoin , emphasizing a fully audited smart contract and transparency as distinguishing features. It also boasts a cross-chain bridge connecting Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana , a zero-fee exchange called PepetoSwap , and an AI -powered token screening engine designed to flag rug pulls and malicious contracts before a trade executes. That last part is genuinely useful ...

God Save the Scene The House of Windsor has been America's favorite soap opera for forty years. Somewhere along the way, nobody asked us if we wanted a refund. Let us pause, for just a moment, and register appropriate astonishment. The British Royal Family — that ancient institution of hereditary ceremony, chinaware, and corgi photographs — has managed to become genuinely confusing to the American public in a way that no war, no Brexit  backstop, and no number of Downton Abbey seasons ever quite accomplished. We are not confused because the story is complicated. We are confused because we cannot figure out whose side we are supposed to be on , and nobody in Buckingham Palace seems interested in helping us work that out. Cast your mind back, if you will, to the early 1980s. Charles and Diana. The wedding dress with the preposterous train. A billion people are watching on television. The entire Western world was invited to believe that something genuinely fairytale ...

Are stablecoins truly ready for wholesale markets? And what about the potential of smart contracts?  Let's explore these exciting developments together! Recently, an argument has been pushed forward that stablecoins fall short of the standards required for wholesale financial market transactions— the kind of large-value, institution-to-institution settlements that underpin the global banking system . The main argument, grounded in post-2008 regulatory frameworks , is that settlement assets must carry demonstrated  zero credit or liquidity risk . Central bank reserves are the gold standard, and stablecoins aren't . But the argument largely sidesteps something worth contemplating: the role smart contracts play in changing the settlement equation entirely .  Pulling the Thread The critique rests on real regulatory architecture. Financial Market Infrastructures , the entities that handle wholesale settlement , operate under 24 inter...

If you’ve been even half-paying attention to the softer corners of the internet lately, you already know: the world has quietly, collectively adopted one tiny, wide-eyed soul. His name is Punch , and at just about nine months old now , he may be the most heartbreakingly adorable toddler you’ll ever see. Punch—the baby Japanese macaque at the Ichikawa City Zoo — was born in July 2025 and almost immediately had to figure life out on his own after being abandoned by his mother . And yet, if you’ve seen the videos ( and let’s be honest, you have ), what stays with you isn’t the sadness—it’s the astonishing, almost uncanny sweetness of how he moves through the world. Because Punch doesn’t just act like a baby monkey. He acts like a baby. He studies his hands with the seriousness of a tiny philosopher, flexing his fingers as if he’s counting them— one, two, three —like he’s just discovered math and is pretty pleased about it. He toddles, yes toddles , upright across the enclo...