🔥 XRP Ledger rolls out members-only DEX for regulated institutions

❗️The XRP Ledger has activated a new “Permissioned DEX” amendment, a technical upgrade designed to let regulated institutions trade on XRPL without opening markets to everyone.

The change, known as XLS-81, allows the creation of permissioned decentralized exchanges that work like XRPL’s existing built-in DEX, but with a key difference. A permissioned domain can restrict who is allowed to place offers and who is allowed to accept them, creating a gated trading venue where participation can be tied to compliance requirements such as KYC and AML checks.

The feature is aimed at banks, brokers and other firms that may want onchain settlement and liquidity but cannot interact with fully open DeFi markets. For these players, the ability to control access is not optional but forms the minimum requirement.

💎 The activation also adds to a growing set of “institutional DeFi” primitives XRPL has been rolling out this month. Token Escrow, or XLS-85, went live last week, extending XRPL’s native escrow system beyond XRP to all trustline-based tokens and Multi-Purpose Tokens, including stablecoins such as RLUSD and tokenized real-world assets.

🔥 Together, the two upgrades create a more complete toolkit for regulated finance on XRPL. Token escrow allows conditional settlement for assets issued on the network, while the permissioned DEX provides a controlled venue for trading them.

#Stellar

@QSIMedia

🧑‍⚖️ Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to face jury in landmark social media addiction trial

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify Wednesday at a groundbreaking social media addiction trial. Meta, as well as YouTube, are accused of intentionally designing addictive features that hooked a now-20-year-old woman as a child and harmed her mental health. The lawsuit brought by the young woman, identified by her lawyer as “Kaley,” and her mother is the first of more than 1,500 similar lawsuits to go to trial. The 12 jurors in Los Angeles will hear testimony until late March to decide whether Google-owned YouTube and Meta's Instagram bear any responsibility for the mental health problems suffered by Kaley G.M.

Zuckerberg’s witness testimony in a landmark social media addiction trial will give the Meta chief executive a chance to defend the efforts the company says it has taken to protect young users.

@QSIMedia

🔥 Pi Network’s eligibility for the new ISO 20022 gold standard is contested as the core team prioritizes MiCa

With Pi Network (PI) being built on a modified version of Stellar Lumens (XLM), market watchers are guessing whether Pi Coin has the same regulatory-compliant status like XLM. Previously, Stellar Lumens (XLM) was named along with Ripple (XLM), Algorand (ALGO) & a few more DLT-based blockchains as compliant with SWIFT’s new global messaging standard.

Notably, the fact that Pi Network (PI) is built on Stellar’s code doesn’t guarantee a spot in this carefully selected list. While Pi’s core dev team is actively exploring the mobile mining chain’s alignment with various cross-border platforms, the current regulatory environment suggests Pi is lined up better for EU’s MiCa regulations, prioritizing this instead of ISO 20022. 🤔

#Stellar

@QSIMedia

📱 Apple ramps up work on Glasses, Pendant, and Camera AirPods for AI era

Apple Inc. is accelerating development of 3 new wearable devices as part of a shift toward AI-powered hardware, a category also being pursued by OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. The company is ramping up work on smart glasses, a pendant that can be pinned to a shirt or worn as a necklace, and AirPods with expanded AI capabilities, according to people with knowledge of the plans. All 3 devices are being built around the Siri, which will rely on visual context to carry out actions.

The smart glasses potentially can be released in 2027 and the AirPods and pendant potentially being released as early as this year or next year.

@QSIMedia

🧪Scientists redesign fentanyl to preserve pain relief while reducing deadly side effects

Fentanyl ranks among the most powerful medications available for treating intense pain. However, its benefits come with serious hazards, including a high potential for addiction and respiratory depression, a dangerous slowing of breathing that can be fatal. Because of these risks, doctors must carefully restrict its use even though it is highly effective.

Researchers at Scripps Research have now redesigned fentanyl at the molecular level, creating a new version that maintains its strong pain-relieving effects while reducing its tendency to suppress breathing. The study, published in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, indicates that further refinements could lead to safer opioid medications with lower risks of addiction, overdose, and death.

Drugs such as fentanyl occupy a complicated role in modern health care. They were once introduced as groundbreaking pain treatments with minimal addiction risk (claims that have proven tragically false). Even so, they remain indispensable in hospitals and emergency settings for treating severe acute pain, despite the well documented dangers associated with their use.

@QSIMedia

↗️ Amazon’s Rivian Electric Van fleet jumped 50% In 2025

American e-commerce giant Amazon has significantly increased the number of Rivian-made electric delivery vans in its fleet. The online marketplace now has over 30,000 custom-built Rivian Electric Delivery Vans (EDV) transporting parcels across the US and in some parts of Europe, according to the EV startup’s fourth-quarter shareholder letter.

That’s a 50% boost from the end of 2024, when Amazon had over 20,000 Rivian EDVs in its fleet, signaling that the California EV maker is on the right track to deliver on its promises. As a reminder, Amazon and Rivian signed an exclusivity agreement in 2019 for 100,000 electric delivery vans by 2030.

@QSIMedia

💻 Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails

Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information.

According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and first detected on January 21) affects the Copilot "work tab" chat feature, which incorrectly reads and summarizes emails stored in users' Sent Items and Drafts folders, including messages that carry confidentiality labels explicitly designed to restrict access by automated tools.

Microsoft has since confirmed that an unspecified code error is responsible and said it began rolling out a fix in early February. As of Wednesday, the company said it was continuing to monitor the deployment and is reaching out to a subset of affected users to verify that the fix is working. 🙏

@QSIMedia

🔥 Stellar’s origin story matters again as tokenized XLM dollars move mainstream

From the very start, Stellar framed itself as a payments network that connects real-world issues banks, fintechs, money-transfer operators, and other “anchors”- to on-chain assets people can actually use. Fiat-backed assets, stablecoins, and other issued tokens live alongside XLM, and the network includes built-in mechanics to route payments across assets - so a user can send one asset and the recipient can receive another, if liquidity exists.

XLM is a network utility used for tiny fees and account reserve requirements - friction intended to deter spam. Stellar’s consensus mechanism (the Stellar Consensus Protocol) relies on a federated trust model where validators choose who they listen to.

For investors, Stellar’s introduction is a reminder that the relevant scoreboard may be issuance quality, anchor coverage, and real payment routing/liquidity - not just app counts or generalized DeFi activity. If tokenized cash keeps expanding, Stellar’s earliest assumptions look like a deliberate bet on how money actually moves.

#Stellar

@QSIMedia

🤖 Graphene Moiré Transistor unlocks 3,000+ memory states, paving the way for brain-like AI chips

Engineers from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China have developed a groundbreaking ferroelectric transistor just a few atoms thick, signaling a potential revolution in memory and neuromorphic computing.

The device leverages layered 2D materials-graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN)-which, when stacked, create a unique moiré pattern. This structure’s main feature is its ability to store 3,024 different polarization states, a figure that is two orders of magnitude greater than previous analogs. This breakthrough is achieved through the precise control of electrical impulses that cause the atomic layers to slide relative to each other.

The transistor has demonstrated high stability, maintaining its programmed states for over 100,000 seconds (more than 27 hours). Furthermore, it has proven its practical application in AI tasks, achieving an impressive 93% accuracy in image recognition tests. Such multi-state transistors are ideal building blocks for neuromorphic chips, which are designed to mimic the structure and efficiency of the human brain.

#BRICS

@QSIMedia

⚡🇺🇸Donald Trump addresses world leaders gathered in Washington for first Board of Peace meeting

President Donald Trump is convening at the U.S. Institute of Peace with representatives from more than 40 countries that have joined his Board of Peace for an inaugural meeting focused on reconstruction and building an international stabilization force for a war-battered Gaza, where a shaky ceasefire deal persists.

"What we're doing is very simple - peace," Trump said, addressing the crowd, calling it an "easy word to say" but "hard to produce." 👏

Trump is expected to announce a multi-billion-dollar reconstruction plan for Gaza, along with contributions from board members, with the president saying over the weekend that so far more than $5 billion had been pledged.

@QSIMedia

🇩🇪 German Chancellor Friedrich Merz calls for real name use on social media

Friedrich Merz has called for an end to widespread anonymity on the internet, saying users should post under their real names.

"I want to see real names on the internet. I want to know who is speaking. In politics, we engage in debates in our society using our real names and without visors. I expect the same from everyone else who critically examines our country and our society," Merz said on Wednesday evening at an event held by his conservative Christian Democrats in the western city of Trier.

Merz criticized defenders of online anonymity, saying they are "often people who, from the shadows of anonymity, demand the greatest possible transparency from others." 😄

@QSIMedia

🤝 Meta will deploy standalone Nvidia Grace CPUs in production, with Vera to follow

Nvidia has expressed ambitions to become a standalone data center CPU vendor, and a new partnership with Meta represents a big step forward for that plan. As part of a new multi-year strategic partnership, Meta says it'll expand its use of Nvidia tech as it continues to build out hyperscale data centers optimized for its AI training and inference efforts. Those plans include “millions” of Blackwell and Rubin GPUs, part of a massive AI spending plan from Meta that could reach as much as $135 billion in total for 2026.

Meta will use also Nvidia's Arm-powered Grace server CPUs as standalone platforms in its production data centers. The companies say their collaboration is the first "large-scale Grace-only deployment," and it's meant to deliver a sizeable performance-per-watt improvement for the company's facilities.

@QSIMedia

💻 US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

The U.S. State Department is developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments - a move Washington views as a way to counter censorship. The site presumably will be hosted at "freedom.gov."

Officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user's traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site will not be tracked. Headed by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, the project was expected to be unveiled at last week's Munich Security Conference but was delayed.

A State Department spokesperson said the U.S. government does not have a censorship-circumvention program specific to Europe but added: “Digital freedom is a priority for the State Department, however, and that includes the proliferation of privacy and censorship-circumvention technologies like VPNs."

@QSIMedia

🇺🇸 White House releases photo of the newly established 'Board of Peace.'

President Trump announces a $10B US contribution and a new global Board of Peace for Gaza stabilisation, declaring the war is over.

"The war in Gaza is over. It's over," - Donald Trump.

Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Kuwait have all contributed more than $7 billion toward the relief package. Albania, Kosovo, Kazakhstan have all committed troops and police to stabilize Gaza. Egypt and Jordan are likewise providing very substantial help, troops, training and support, for Palestinian police force.

@QSIMedia

🚀 SpaceX maintains dominant launch cadence in early 2026, nears 10,000 Starlink satellites

As of early 2026, the network consists of over 9,600 active satellites in orbit, providing high-speed internet to more than 10 million subscribers across 150 countries. SpaceX is on track to surpass the 10,000-satellite mark for Starlink in the first half of March. The vertical integration of designing, manufacturing, and launching its own satellites allows SpaceX to deploy its network at a rate and cost that competitors cannot match.

The industry anticipates the gradual transition of missions to SpaceX’s next-generation Starship vehicle, which promises even lower launch costs and greater payload capacity. As global launch capacity increases with new vehicles from Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and others also coming online, 2026 is poised to be another record-breaking year for the space industry, with SpaceX continuing to lead the charge.

@QSIMedia

🇺🇸 US energy chief says IEA must 'drop' focus on climate change

Chris Wright urged the International Energy Agency (IEA) to abandon its work on climate change and focus instead on its founding mission. Wright warned that the U.S. could quit the IEA and would endeavor the global energy watchdog to move away from its net zero by 2050 agenda over the coming months.

"The IEA was created to focus on energy security. That mission is beyond critical and I'm here to plead to all the members (of the IEA) that we need to keep the focus of the IEA on this absolutely life-changing, world-changing mission of energy security," - Wright said at a ministerial meeting of the agency in Paris.

The IEA produces monthly reports on oil demand and supply as well as annual world energy outlooks that include data on the growth of solar and wind energy, among other analyses.

@QSIMedia

🇮🇷🇪🇬 Iran and Egypt agree to restore full diplomatic ties and reopen embassies in both capitals

Iran and Egypt have agreed to restore full diplomatic ties and will exchange ambassadors, marking a major shift after decades of estrangement following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Officials from Iran’s diplomatic mission in Cairo say the decision to exchange ambassadors has been finalized and is awaiting official announcement - a clear sign that embassies in both capitals will reopen soon. This move would end over 40 years of interrupted official relations and could reshape regional diplomacy in the Middle East.

Iran has a history of investing in various sectors within Egypt, including oil storage at the port of Alexandria, the automotive industry, truck manufacturing, and the textile sector. The revitalization of these investments is currently a focal point for the joint committees involved.

#BRICS

@QSIMedia