🇺🇸🇻🇪 U.S. Energy Secretary Wright finalizes oil agreements with interim Venezuelan president and officials

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🇺🇸 NYC school system to ban AI for elementary, middle school students

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels announced  a moratorium on student-facing generative AI use in schools, alongside a new screen time policy, a decision that will impact nearly 600,000 public school students, or two-thirds of the system’s total enrollment.

The policy establishes a one-year moratorium, effective in the 2026-2027 school year, on student-facing generative AI for children in 2-K through 8th  grade. It also introduces twice-yearly AI critical thinking modules for high schoolers, limited AI pilots for a small number of high school classrooms and age-appropriate screen time restrictions.

🏫 Most states favor responsible AI guidance over strict classroom restrictions, while New York City is taking a bolder approach as students return to school.

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🤖 Tether launches open-source, offline AI translation models supporting 28 African and European languages

🔜 Tether AI Research announced the launch of new families of open-source AI translation models designed to run directly on smartphones, laptops, and other edge devices with a primary focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

🔜 The release includes QVAC TranslatePsy-AfriSLM and QVAC TranslatePsy-AfriNano, supporting 19 and 8 African languages respectively, alongside QVAC TranslatePsy-EuroNano covering 9 European languages.

For hundreds of millions of people across Africa, one of the barriers to modern AI is language. The most powerful tools run in a few major languages and depend on the cloud, putting them out of reach for many. 🌍

Translation across 19 African languages can unlock the ability to deliver courses, educational content, scientific material, and AI-powered learning tools directly to children and adults in their own languages.

Healthcare will be one of the highest-impact applications. Patients may speak different local languages, while connectivity can be unreliable in the communities that need information most.

Such systems would require appropriate safeguards and clear boundaries between health education and clinical care, but the potential impact is substantial. 👏

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⚡️🇦🇪 Standard Chartered expands institutional Bitcoin, Ether trading in UAE

Standard Chartered has expanded its institutional digital assets business in the UAE by launching Bitcoin and Ether spot trading through its Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) entity, becoming the first global systemically important bank (G-SIB) to offer the capability in the market.

The move broadens the bank’s regulated digital asset offering in the UAE by combining spot trading with its existing digital asset custody services, which launched in September 2024.

❗️Eligible institutional clients will be able to trade deliverable BTC and ETH through Standard Chartered’s existing electronic trading platforms, allowing them to access digital assets using familiar foreign exchange (FX) interfaces. Clients can also settle trades with a custodian of their choice, including the bank’s own digital asset custody platform.

“By combining execution with secure custody, governance and the connectivity of a global bank, we are providing clients with a more integrated way to participate in digital asset markets,” — said Rola Abu Manneh, CEO for UAE, Middle East and Pakistan at Standard Chartered.

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⚡️🤑 $180B of USDT liquidity, now live on Stellar. Liquidity, interoperability, and accessibility, all in one partnership.

#Stellar

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🖥 Nvidia Officially Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

"I’m excited to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.

AI advances faster when people can build together. NVIDIA is going to be a great home for Hugging Face, its community and the future of open models," — Jensen Huang wrote.

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🤑 Why Regulated Finance Is Choosing Stellar

Tokenized RWA value on Stellar passed $4 billion this week, up from $868.8 million at the end of last year. What's behind the number matters more than the number.

❗️Why the architecture matters

On most networks, a regulated issuer builds its own permissioning. Who may hold the asset, and what happens when a wallet has to be frozen, becomes contract code someone writes, audits, and maintains for the life of the product.

Stellar has those controls in the protocol itself. An issuer sets an authorization flag, and from then on the asset only moves between accounts the issuer has approved. That's software nobody had to write and nobody has to keep maintaining.

⬇️ The institutions making the case

🔘In May, DTCC and the Stellar Development Foundation announced plans to enable tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on Stellar, expected in the first half of 2027.

🔘Circle chose Stellar as one of its networks for native USDC issuance for the same underlying reasons. When the infrastructure is right, the right partners show up, and they show up for operational reasons, not marketing ones.

🔘WisdomTreePrime is one of the clearest examples of what that looks like in practice, particularly on the institutional side.

🔜 WisdomTree Connect, the firm's platform for banks, broker-dealers, and other financial institutions, gives institutional counterparties direct, programmatic access to WisdomTree's tokenized funds, including 24/7 instant settlement on the WisdomTree Treasury Money Market Digital Fund (WTGXX) through a registered broker-dealer.

🔜 Institutions can transact in USD, USDC, or PYUSD, hold assets in self-custody or with a third-party custodian, and integrate directly via API or smart contract.

That's not a retail wrapper around a tokenized fund. It's enterprise infrastructure built on the assumption that compliance and settlement have to work at institutional scale, which is exactly the assumption Stellar's architecture was built around.

🎯 The early bet the community made

The Stellar community has been building and holding through multiple cycles, focused on cross-border payments, financial access, and eventually regulated asset infrastructure, not speculation or token launches.

That focus, sustained through periods when the market wasn't paying attention, is what's now making the network a credible home for institutional counterparties that have no tolerance for infrastructure risk.

🚀 What comes next

RWA value on Stellar has grown to $4 billion, held by more than 13,000 holders, but the more telling signal is who's building on it and why. DTCC, Circle, and WisdomTree didn't arrive at Stellar through the same door, retail access, stablecoin issuance, and institutional infrastructure are different problems, but they arrived at the same underlying answer.

That's what regulated finance choosing Stellar actually looks like: not one flagship deal, but independent institutions solving different problems and landing on the same network.

#Stellar

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🖥 Google’s latest AI weather model gives you no excuse to forget your umbrella

Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new AI model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often. It uses real-time satellite data to generate hourly high-resolution forecasts, precise precipitation forecasting, and clean energy variables.

WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search, Google Maps, and Gemini, as well as being available to users and researchers on Google’s cloud platforms.

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🔥 HashKey Joins DTCC Industry Working Group as the First Asian Digital Asset Service Provider

"We are pleased to announce that HashKey has joined the DTCC’s Digital Assets Advisory Services Industry Working Group, becoming the first Asian digital asset service provider to do so," — HashKey said. 🎉

🔘HashKey joins alongside more than 100 of the world’s leading financial institutions, asset managers, and digital asset firms — including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, and the New York Stock Exchange — to help define how tokenised assets are issued, settled, and safeguarded at institutional scale.

🔘HashKey is an established comprehensive digital asset group in Asia, with capabilities across three core segments: transaction facilitation, asset management, and on-chain infrastructure. It continues to deepen its strategic footprint in global financial markets, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Bermuda.

🔜 Since 2023, HashKey has been actively engaged in tokenisation initiatives across Hong Kong and other markets across Asia-Pacific, including participation in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s (HKMA) Project Ensemble Architecture Community, and the Tokenised Bond Expert Group.

🔜 HashKey has also supported clients through the issuance and circulation of tokenised money market ETFs, bonds, and notes in one of Asia’s most closely regulated financial centers.

❗️DTCC plans to officially launch standardized tokenised services in October, driving tokenised assets to fully integrate into mainstream capital market infrastructure systems. It’s a trajectory that mirrors HashKey’s own approach to building next-generation financial infrastructure.

Tokenisation is no longer a question of if, but how fast and how well it integrates with the systems the world already trusts. 🚀

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🛰🇦🇪 Starlink's high-speed, low-latency internet is now available in the United Arab Emirates!

#BRICS

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