🤑 KBRA Assigns Rating to Ripple Prime CIV US BD HoldCo LLC

Global credit rating agency Kroll has assigned Ripple Prime CIV US BD HoldCo LLC, the intermediate holding company, and Hidden Road Partners CIV US LLC (“Ripple Prime US”) an investment grade issuer rating (BBB), reflecting the financial strength, business expansion and disciplined execution of growing prime brokerage platform. Built at the intersection of traditional and digital asset capabilities, Ripple Prime is meeting the demand for trusted, well-capitalized prime brokerage services. With this rating, the market is taking notice.

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🚑 World’s first solar-powered ambulance designed for remote healthcare needs

AIKO has announced a new collaboration with Solar Team Eindhoven, bringing its high-efficiency ABC (All Back Contact) solar cells to power Stella Juva, the world’s first solar-powered ambulance designed to operate entirely on solar energy while supporting onboard medical equipment.

Developed by students from Eindhoven University of Technology, Stella Juva aims to enable healthcare delivery in remote or infrastructure-limited regions. Expected to hit the road in July 2026, the project represents a significant step in redefining the role of solar-powered mobility, from transport solutions to mobile energy systems supporting essential services.

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⚖️ Crypto market structure bill release pushed back as industries view revised stablecoin yield compromise this week

Representatives of the crypto and banking industries are meeting with legislative staffers on Thursday and Friday to review revised compromise language on stablecoin yield provisions in the market structure bill. Industry representatives first viewed the compromise language, spearheaded by Senators Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), last week.

At the time, the proposed compromise banned yield based solely on stablecoin balances, but did allow companies to pay out yield based on activities. The crypto industry had some issues with the language. The text was originally expected to be released this week, but that is now unlikely.

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💊 This one vitamin may help protect your brain from dementia years later

Higher levels of vitamin D in the blood during middle age may be tied to lower amounts of tau protein in the brain years later, according to a study published in Neurology Open Access, an official journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Tau is a key biomarker associated with dementia.

The study followed 793 adults, with an average age of 39, who did not have dementia at baseline. These results suggests that higher vitamin D levels in midlife may offer protection against developing these tau deposits in the brain and that low vitamin D levels could potentially be a risk factor that could be modified and treated to reduce the risk of dementia.

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🤝 IBM announces strategic collaboration with Arm to shape the future of enterprise computing

IBM announced a strategic collaboration with Arm to develop new dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads. Through this collaboration, IBM and Arm aim to extend this track record of innovation by combining IBM's enterprise leadership in systems reliability, security, and scalability with Arm's own leadership in power‑efficient architecture, workload enablement expertise, and broad software ecosystem, to build flexible and scalable computing platforms for the future.

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🇨🇺Cuba frees over 2,000 inmates as energy strains weigh on island

Cuba’s government authorized the release of 2,010 prisoners in a sweeping pardon, a move that comes as the island begins to see some relief from a crippling energy blockade. It's the second time this year its communist-run government has announced a prisoner amnesty amid talks with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Cuba's state-run Granma newspaper called the measure a "humanitarian and sovereign gesture."

The decision applies to inmates who have demonstrated good conduct, served significant portions of their sentences, or face chronic health issues. Those eligible include women, young people, and seniors over 60, as well as foreign nationals and Cuban citizens residing abroad.

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💻 Microsoft charts $10 billion of outlays in AI-Eager Japan

Microsoft unveiled a four-year, US$10 billion investment package for Japan, a major pillar of its Asia-wide AI push. The early OpenAI backer will develop cloud and AI infrastructure alongside Sakura Internet and telecom operator SoftBank with the two Japanese entities supplying graphics processing units and other computing resources. It will invest in cybersecurity partnerships and train a million AI engineers through 2029.

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🪙 Coinbase’s AI payments system joins Linux Foundation, gathers support from Google, Stripe, AWS and others 🤝

Coinbase's AI-focused payment protocol x402 is moving toward becoming an open, standardized infrastructure under the Linux Foundation, the non-profit hub for open-source software development. The open-source consortium also includes initial intent and support being expressed by the likes of Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ant International, Visa and Microsoft.

The protocol has formed an initial governing body, the x402 Foundation, that includes internet services firm Cloudflare and payments giant Stripe. x402 can handle transactions worth only fractions of a cent at high frequency — something traditional credit card networks struggle to manage. The move aims to create a community-governed ecosystem for high-frequency, micro transactions that legacy finance can’t efficiently handle.

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🤑 Stellar supports the Machine Payments Protocol

Stellar now supports the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), the open standard by Stripe and Tempo that lets AI agents pay for services over HTTP. The MPP SDK handles any stablecoin on Stellar with server-sponsored fees so agents never need gas tokens.

The MPP is an open protocol that enables programmatic, per-request payments over HTTP, designed especially for AI agents and APIs. It extends the 402 Payment Required HTTP status code into a machine-readable payment negotiation layer for both humans and autonomous agents.

On Stellar, MPP works with Soroban SAC (Stellar Asset Contract) token transfers so that clients can pay for API requests natively, without an external facilitator. This makes it ideal for micropayments, AI agent-driven APIs, and payment-enabled applications.

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⚡️🇺🇸 Trump Directs Rest of DHS Staff to Be Paid as Shutdown Drags On

President Donald Trump issued a memo ordering that the remaining Department of Homeland Security employees be paid during a record-long partial government shutdown impacting the agency.

“I hereby direct the Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, to provide each and every employee of DHS with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown, consistent with applicable law,” — Trump wrote in the memo.

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⚖️ Ten Foreign Nationals Charged In An International Operation Targeting Cryptocurrency Market Manipulation

Federal grand juries indicted 10 executives and employees of Gotbit, Vortex, Antier, and Contrarian for orchestrating fraud schemes to artificially inflate the trading volume and price of cryptocurrencies. Three defendants, including two chief executive officers, were arrested and extradited from Singapore and made their initial appearance in federal court in Oakland.

These so-called pump-and-dump schemes caused losses to investors in the U.S. and elsewhere. More than $1 million in cryptocurrency has been seized to date. The indictments and arrests were the result of an undercover operation by FBI and IRS-CI targeting illicit “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry.

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🇲🇬 Madagascar says it foiled plot to assassinate the President

Thirteen people, of whom 11 are now in custody, will be charged with planning to kill President Michael Randrianirina, said public prosecutor. Patrick Rakotomamonjy, an army colonel, was one of the main organizers and is yet to be arrested.

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🇸🇦 The anonymous social app that thinks it can work in Saudi Arabia

Fizz, an anonymous social app that started on college campuses, is going global in more ways than one.

“We’ve always known that our big goal is to be a generational social product, rather than a college social app, and now we’re finally executing on it,” — Solomon said.

When Fizz quietly debuted in Saudi Arabia in the middle of March, founder and CEO Teddy Solomon wasn’t expecting the app to catch on like it did. Within 48 hours, the app hit number one overall on the App Store charts; it remains number one in the news category. Fizz users have sent more than one million messages in the past week.

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🇦🇹 Europe’s spying capital drafts law to crack down on espionage — Austria’s government plans to make it illegal to spy against the EU and international organizations based in Vienna.

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🇰🇷🇫🇷 South Korea, France agree to deepen defence and energy ties

Lee Jae Myung and Emmanuel Macron said they planned to boost defence cooperation and work together to address the economic and energy crises triggered by the war in Iran.

"What we want to do is give ​this cooperation a contemporary dimension," — Macron said. 🤝

They signed a number of preliminary agreements to cooperate in sectors including critical minerals, semiconductors, quantum technologies, nuclear energy and wind power, aerospace and defence. The countries also aimed to increase bilateral trade to $20 billion by 2030 from $15 billion in 2025.

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🤝 Anthropic buys biotech startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal

The deal comes as Anthropic continues its push into healthcare and life sciences, following its Claude for Life Sciences, a tool that aims to help scientific researchers make discoveries. Coefficient Bio is using AI to help make drug discovery and other forms of biological research more efficient.

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🇮🇪 Ireland tests digital ID to verify age of social media users

Ireland has begun the pilot phase of its national digital wallet, a Government-issued app that can verify a user’s age online without sharing personal details such as a date of birth with third-party platforms. The digital ID will be able to facilitate age verification to help protect children and young people from harms on social media platforms.

The Irish government is required under the EU’s eIDAS 2.0 regulation to make a digital wallet available to citizens by the end of 2026. Banks and credit institutions will be required to accept it for identity verification a year later, and private companies including social media platforms could begin using it by the end of 2027.

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