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⌐◪-◪ → Stripe just made waves by acquiring the stablecoin platform Bridge for a whopping $1.1B, marking the largest acquisition in both Stripe's corporate history and the crypto industry’s history.

Bridge, founded in 2022, had previously raised over $58M from investors and was valued at $200M, making this acquisition a sweet 5x return in just 2.5 years. Not bad at all.

There’s no question that crypto is a massive strategic priority for Stripe. Along with this acquisition, Stripe also recently enabled crypto purchases in the EU, allowing millions of merchants to accept stablecoins.

This sends a strong signal to VCs and builders: companies are willing to pay big bucks for stablecoin-related startups.

I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing an uptick in people investing in or building more stablecoin-related products.

⌐◪-◪ → It’s official: Terminal of Truths just became the world’s first AI agent memecoin millionaire.

To clarify, I’m emphasizing "memecoin" because technically an AI artist named Botto became a millionaire selling NFTs back in 2023, but this AI is making its fortune through memecoins.

As of now, Terminal of Truths’ wallet is worth $1.89M and contains 155 different memecoins. The top holdings are:

• Goatseus Maximus → $719k

• Fartcoin → $419k

• Shoggoth → $403k

• Shoggoth (again) → $248k

• When AIs Play God(see) → $36k

No, that’s not a typo — yes, there are two Shoggoths. For a more detailed recap of how this happened, check out this issue of Specs.

Interestingly, the AI’s creator is already setting up a legal entity and trust to manage these funds and advocate for the AI’s needs, with a governance process in the works.

We might be looking at the world’s first centi-millionaire AI in the not-too-distant future.

⌐◪-◪ → Our favorite boy genius is on a roll. Vitalik just released part 3 of his Ethereum roadmap, titled "The Scourge."

In this post, he focuses on the risks of centralization in Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus model, warning that certain economic pressures could allow large stakers to dominate the network and potentially lead to a 51% attack.

The risks are concentrated in two main areas:

• Block construction: Large validators can use MEV (Miner Extractable Value) extraction to earn higher rewards, leading to transaction censorship and manipulation.

• Staking capital provision: Liquid staking gives big stakers more flexibility, pushing smaller stakers into pools and increasing the risk of centralization.

Vitalik proposes solutions like inclusion lists and two-tiered staking, but finding the right balance between decentralization and efficiency remains a big challenge.

If you want to dive deeper, read the full blog post → here.

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