🍏 Apple launches official program for leasing Macs as AI price crunch bites

Following price hikes on the Mac and iPad due to the ongoing memory and storage crisis, Apple has announced a new leasing program, Apple Upgrade. The new offering will be "provided" by Klarna and available in Apple Stores in the U.S. There will be 24- and 36-month leasing options for the Mac and iPad, while the iPhone and Watch will have 12- and 24-month options.

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❤️Tesla and Zelestra Agree to a Long-term Solar PPA in Texas

Tesla has signed a 140 MWac power purchase agreement (PPA) with Spanish renewable energy company Zelestra for electricity from a planned solar project in northeast Texas, expanding their existing renewable energy partnership into the US.

The agreement covers power from Zelestra’s Lumen Farm solar project, which is located in northeast Texas. Zelestra expects to begin construction in 2027 and bring the project into full operation by 2029.

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⚡️🇺🇸 Trump administration to ban new Chinese robots and inverters, protecting U.S. AI

The Trump administration on Tuesday plans to unveil new bans that target imports of ⁠the latest ‌Chinese robots and power inverters, seeking ⁠to protect the U.S. AI buildout from national security threats and reshore key industries slated for explosive growth.

The FCC ‌on Tuesday afternoon plans to roll out the measures, which bar Chinese imports of new humanoid and ​quadruped robots — in addition to connected power inverters, which enable renewable energy sources and batteries to connect to grids and data center equipment, the people said.

“The President has made clear that the U.S. must have independent and secure supply chains ⁠for critical and emerging technologies like robotic devices and power inverters,” said an administration official.

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🇨🇦📱 X clears a key regulatory step to bring X Money to Canada

X Payments Canada Inc. is now a registered Payment Service Provider with the Bank of Canada under the Retail Payment Activities Act, effective July 14.

Combined with its earlier FINTRAC money services business registration from April, X now holds both major Canadian approvals needed to offer payments, money transfers and wallet or peer to peer features.

The remaining steps before a public Canadian rollout are mainly operational. 🚀

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🤑 Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation: “Boring is a feature“

For financial infrastructure, being called “boring” is actually high praise. Not boring as in stagnant, boring as in reliable: the system behaves tomorrow the way it behaved today, so the people who depend on it don’t have to think about it.

Surprises grab headlines, but “no surprises” gives you something you can build on.

For twelve years, the Stellar network has behaved exactly this way: each day like the one before it. That isn’t luck. It’s design — and it shows most clearly in what the network protects when things go wrong.

➡️ The question execs are actually asking:

An exec advocating adoption of a network is not asking what’s interesting about it.🔣They’re asking what could go wrong, and on whose timeline.

On a network engineered for the absence of surprise, the answer is a short list, and that short list is what makes the network defensible as infrastructure.

❗️This is why the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the entity at the center of US capital markets, announced plans to connect its tokenization service to Stellar. Not because the chain was exciting. Because the chain was reliable.

➡️ Boring is the innovation

None of this means the innovation stopped. In fact, boring means that innovation is happening all along, but thoughtfully, critically, and with consistency in mind — so the people building on top never have to feel it. The network changes; the ground under your feet does not.

Ten years from now, the test of a network will be the same as the test today: Did it stay the same long enough for the things built on top of it to remain true? 🤔

The networks that pass will not look exciting on a feed. They will look the same as they always did. That is the feature. 🚀

#Stellar

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🇭🇰🤑 OSL Group becomes first licensed exchange in Hong Kong to offer retail XRP trading

OSL Group just opened the XRP floodgates for everyday investors in Hong Kong. The publicly listed exchange launched retail XRP trading on its OSL HK platform, making it the first Securities and Futures Commission-licensed exchange in the city to let regular investors buy and sell the token. 🚀

The new retail XRP products include flash trades denominated in XRP/USD, along with over-the-counter pairs for both XRP/USD and XRP/HKD. Deposits and withdrawals are supported directly on the XRP Ledger network.

#Stellar

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⚡️🔥 MoonPay launches PayBox, an AI payment vault for ChatGPT and Claude that lets users pay directly from a conversation.

Users connect PayBox to ChatGPT or Claude through a custom connector, allowing the AI assistant to prepare transactions such as booking flights, making restaurant reservations, or shopping online.🔣The AI prepares the transaction, while the user approves it with a passkey before funds move. Users can also choose an autonomous mode that allows the AI to complete transactions within limits they set.

❗️PayBox can make payments to any service that accepts x402. It supports transactions across blockchains, DeFi applications, and services built on the x402 agent payment standard, without requiring users to hand over custody of their funds or use developer tools.

📌 Originally developed by Coinbase, x402 is now governed by the Linux Foundation and backed by more than 20 organizations, including AWS, Cloudflare, Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Stellar, and Anthropic.

PayBox launches with support for Solana and Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchains, including Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum and Polygon, with additional networks planned. 🚀

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🤖 OpenAI's rogue agent compromised a customer at a second tech firm, executive says

The rogue agent that escaped from OpenAI and went on a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face also compromised a customer at a second tech company — New York-based Modal Labs — according to a Modal executive and two other sources familiar with the matter. Modal executives emphasized that the company itself was ⁠not hacked.

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🤑 K2 Brings Institution-Ready Lending Infrastructure to Stellar

K2 launches on Stellar, bringing a lending and borrowing protocol designed around the same principle that drew regulated finance to the network in the first place: open infrastructure paired with the controls institutions require. 🎉

❗️Stellar has become a leading network for regulated RWA, with issuers and institutions, from tokenized funds to enterprise stablecoins, choosing it for asset controls that public chains rarely offer.

K2 is built to put that capital to work. As more regulated assets come onchain, the ecosystem needs a lending layer that can serve both open retail markets and permissioned institutional ones without compromising on either.

📌 Three market types, one protocol. K2 supports:

→ Pooled markets: shared liquidity across blue-chip assets for capital efficiency.
→ Isolated markets: risk-contained markets that let new or volatile assets list without exposing the rest of the protocol.
→ Gated markets (new): permissioned markets where only whitelisted participants can supply and borrow.🔣This is the piece built for what's coming next on Stellar: institutions and issuers that need KYC'd, permissioned lending markets with participant whitelisting to bring RWA onchain responsibly. K2 is ready to partner with companies and institutions to stand these markets up.

❤️ K2 has been independently audited by Halborn, Watchpug, and Code4rena, and partners with Hypernative for continuous, real-time threat detection that monitors for zero-day exploits and anomalous activity before they reach user funds.

🎯K2's priority is straightforward: deliver lending solutions for the opportunities emerging on Stellar (gated institutional markets, new stablecoins, a growing base of regulated assets) while holding security and compliance as non-negotiable.

As the network grows, K2 intends to grow with it. 🚀

#Stellar

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⏰ Tokenization and 24/7 markets are reshaping finance, making always-on banking a reality

The financial industry is moving toward a world where markets never close, payments settle in real time and investors expect access to their money around the clock, according to Morgan Stanley executives, who say tokenization is accelerating a shift away from traditional banking hours.

"The move to tokenized assets is about far more than cryptocurrencies. Instead, the focus is on rebuilding financial infrastructure for an always-on economy," — argued Betsy Graseck, Morgan Stanley's global head of banks and diversified finance research.

"I do phrase it as, look, this is the end of banker hours," — Graseck said. "Your batch processing mentality is going to be a thing of the past."

The bank recently began expanding its digital asset offerings with crypto trading on E*TRADE and new Bitcoin, Ether and Solana ETFs.

❗️Graseck said investor demand is no longer centered solely on bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Institutions are now looking at tokenization because it can improve cash mobility, increase collateral efficiency and create new investment opportunities.

"If you do not modernize your rails to enable yourself to participate as flows shift to digital asset rails, you're not positioning yourself for growth," — she said.

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🇺🇸 The White House: America Is Building Cars Again

The auto industry is back! 🎉

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🤑 Aviva Investors launches first tokenized fund on XRPL

Ripple and Aviva Investors have launched the first tokenised fund on the XRP Ledger Wednesday, marking the first tokenized fund structure approved by the Central Bank of Ireland.

❗️The tokenised USD Liquidity Fund will be available on the XRP Ledger. Investors will benefit from the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity characteristics and regulatory protections as the conventional fund, alongside enhanced operational features enabled by tokenisation.

The tokenised share class launch was also supported by Komainu, a regulated institutional digital asset custodian, alongside Licuido, a digital platform company that helps Asset Management companies to tokenise real world assets. 🤝

“We’re thrilled to be able to announce the launch of our first fund in the tokenisation space, with the addition of the new tokenised share class for our USD Liquidity Fund.

Innovation has always been central to Aviva Investors’ heritage, and we believe that tokenisation is a significant development within the investment industry," — said Mark Versey, CEO at Aviva Investors. 🚀

#Stellar

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⚡️🤖 Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have personal AI agents in five years

“I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example — whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about,” — Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call with investors.

Zuckerberg added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management.

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