Dividends. They call it a ‘return.’ As if the machine simply gives back what is rightfully yours. No. It is a portion of the surplus, extracted from the hands of others, and briefly passed along the line. Yet, even a small share of the harvest can sustain a family. Reinvest it, yes, but remember what built it: the sweat and the striving of countless souls.
In a recent post on X, the esteemed Ali Martinez unveiled a technical analysis pattern-a so-called “ascending triangle”-that has allegedly been etched into XRP’s monthly price chart. This, dear reader, is a geometric marvel where price wobbles between two converging lines, one acting as a stubborn ceiling, the other as a reluctant floor. How poetic! A market, like a man, forever caught between ambition and resignation.
Hyperliquid’s community has cooked up a proposal so bold, it makes a riverboat gambler blush: launch tokens without asking permission. HIP-6, as proposed by James Evans of Reciprocal Ventures, promises to let projects mint HIP-1 tokens directly on HyperCore via Continuous Clearing Auctions. A noble experiment, if you ignore the fact that it sounds like a game show hosted by a snake oil salesman.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE +1.48%), parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, recently committed $2 billion to Polymarket. The headlines focused predictably on the elevation of Polymarket’s founder to the ranks of the young and wealthy. A curious spectacle, certainly. More significant, however, is the signal this sends: ICE acknowledges prediction market data as a legitimate asset class. It is a declaration, in effect, that the collective intelligence of these markets holds predictive power worthy of institutional capital.
Apparently, everyone else had a similar panic. Software stocks, the ones that were already teetering on the edge of “expensive,” took a bit of a tumble. Something about Anthropic’s Claude Code threatening to make Excel obsolete. Honestly, I can barely open Excel, so the idea of it being replaced feels… liberating. But the market, of course, doesn’t work like that.
Imagine this: Tether, ever the master of cryptic schemes, has plunged into the world of real-world commerce with a wink and a nod to Whop. A marketplace so bustling, it’s like a circus for entrepreneurs, now promises to let users juggle USDT and USAT like seasoned acrobats.
Researchers, armed with caffeine and algorithms, unearthed a vulnerability so egregious it could have let thieves drain wallets like a modern-day Robin Hood, sans the moral compass. All without needing a private key-because who needs passwords when you can just… ask nicely?
Gemini. That’s the name. Their large language model. It’s consistently good, apparently. I mean, they all are, aren’t they? It’s become the baseline. But what Alphabet does is embed it. Everywhere. Cloud, search… it’s like they’re injecting intelligence into the bloodstream of the internet. And let’s be real, search is still king. They own the gateway, don’t they? Chrome, Android… over 70% market share. It’s not exactly a fair fight. And then there’s the Apple deal. They pay Alphabet to be the default search engine. Clever, really. It’s like a protection racket, but legal. And now Apple Intelligence is jumping on the Gemini bandwagon. Smooth move.
The recent figures, of course, tell a story. A story of deceleration. Of revenue growth slowing to a pace that, while still positive, lacks the earlier exuberance. One observes the quarterly progression – 22% in Q4 2024, a brief uptick to 25% in Q1 2025, then a gradual descent – 19%, 18%, and finally, a mere 14% in the most recent quarter. It is a pattern that suggests not catastrophe, perhaps, but a quiet settling. A return to something resembling normalcy.
