Zeros

World Cup 2026 : Sports & The Blockchain Economy The Beautiful Game Meets the Digital Economy The FIFA World Cup returns to North America for the first time since 1994 — and it's bringing the full circus of NFT ticketing, prediction markets, blockchain gambling, and an already-roaring scam economy along for the ride. Thirty-two years is a long time to wait. The last time the World Cup touched North American soil, Nirvana was on the radio, the internet was a dial-up curiosity, and digital currency meant exact change . This summer, the FIFA World Cup 2026 arrives across the United States , Canada , and Mexico — and for digital asset hobbyists who also happen to love the beautiful game , it's worth knowing exactly what FIFA has cooked up, what's legitimate, and what's already trying to pick your wallet clean before the opening whistle even blows. On the broadcast side, FOX Sports holds the English-language rights and is going all in. The n...

Shoulda Never Left: Usher Lands Back on the Billboard Hot 100 A Babyface -penned duet with Kehlani puts one of R&B's great voices back on the chart. Whether it means anything more than that is the question worth asking. Kehlani dropped her self-titled fifth album on April 24th — her 31st birthday, a date she apparently treats as a gift to the rest of us as well — and buried inside its seventeen tracks is a moment that will register differently depending on your vintage as an R&B fan. Track eight is titled Shoulda Never , featuring Usher . It is penned by Babyface. It is on the Billboard Hot 100. If you are of a certain age, you are permitted a quiet exhale. The collaboration has a backstory worth knowing. Kehlani had originally wanted Usher for the remix of Folded , the breakout single that earned her first two Grammy wins , and became something of a generational anthem for a younger R&B audience. Usher was on the road — his Past Present Future tour had h...

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 ...