Zeros

Trickle-Up Economics: How Stablecoins Perfected the Oldest Trick in Banking Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked demo last month showcased a partnership: USDC , live on stage, was integrated into Samsung Wallet . Circle hasn't confirmed it. Samsung hasn't named an issuer . But the image did its job — it got people talking about who actually profits when a stablecoin ends up in your pocket. The answer is more interesting than the demo. Circle, the company behind USDC, generated $653 million in revenue last quarter. Ninety-four percent of that came from one place : interest on the Treasury bills and cash backing every dollar of USDC in circulation. Not staking , not trading fees, not some exotic cryptic mechanism — plain old Treasury bill interest , the same thing available to anyone with a brokerage account. Circle just does it at a scale most of us can't. Here's the part worth considering : That interest exists because someone put real dollars into USDC. The ...

There’s always been something slightly off-kilter— in a deliberate, artfully crooked way —about Melanie Martinez . Ever since her porcelain-doll introduction on The Voice , she’s treated pop music less like a genre and more like a dollhouse she can quietly rearrange at 3 a.m. Her latest album, Hades , continues that tradition, though this time the floorboards creak a little louder. The rollout has been… curious. In a series of promotional clips on TikTok titled Introducing Circle , Martinez appears in a looping, pastel-tinted purgatory, speaking in tones just a notch too calm to be comforting. Fans of a certain tandem pop lineage may feel a faint sense of déjà vu . Specifically, the kind associated with That Poppy —or, more precisely, the unsettling creative fingerprints of Titanic Sinclair . And this is where things drift, gently but unmistakably, into fiction. Imagine, if you will, a dimly lit studio somewhere just outside Los Angeles. The walls are lined with identical ...