WHAT’S INSIDE

• Tech News: —OpenAI superagents, a16 calls for payment rails, Palantir US government deal, Brazil Data Governance, Trade war, manufacturing slowdown

• Company Watch: Anthropic, Chime IPO, Samsung x Perplexity, Abridge, Anduril x Meta, UBTech Robotics

• Feature: Autonomous AI needs financial rails AI agents x Web 3 Rails

• Buzzy Tools: Latest Buzzy tech, AI and financial tools

• Deep Tech: The latest in deep tech, biotech, futurism and more

• Space Tech: Latest news in the space race and aerospace tech

• Crypto: Blockchain and crypto policy and startups or protocols to watch

TECH IN THE NEWS

Super Assistant Incoming — OpenAI is set to transform ChatGPT into a "super assistant" that enhances user interactions and assists with daily tasks.

Trade Truce Tensions — China accuses the Trump administration of breaching a trade truce by imposing AI chip export controls and revoking student visas, increasing tensions despite agreed temporary tariff reductions.

Manufacturing Slowdown — The trade war has seen U.S. manufacturing contracting for the third month in May, with delivery delays due to tariffs. The PMI hit a six-month low on supply chain issues and rising costs.

Debt Squeeze — High inflation and interest rates burden American consumers, especially student loan borrowers. Many turn to Buy Now, Pay Later for essentials.

Brazil's Data Wallet — Brazil is launching a world first data ownership pilot with a "dWallet" enabling citizens to monetize their data. While innovative, concerns about accessibility and exploitation amid low digital literacy and infrastructure persist.

Texas Right to Repair — The Texas Senate unanimously passed HB 2963, mandating manufacturers to supply spare parts and tools, aiming to become the first GOP-run state with such laws to enhance repairability and cut electronic waste.

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COMPANIES TO WATCH

Palantir — The US-based data analytics company saw its stock rise 140% after securing a $795M Pentagon contract under the Trump administration to grow federal data centralization.

Anthropic — The AI company has reached $3B in annualized revenue, tripling from $1B in December 2024. This growth is driven by strong enterprise demand for its code generation capabilities.

Chime Financial — The US digital banking startup is planning an $800M IPO with a valuation target of up to $11.2B. Chime generates revenue mainly from transaction fees and was valued at $25B in 2021.

Samsung and Perplexity — Samsung is nearing an investment in AI startup Perplexity, aiming to integrate its tech into devices, including pre-installed apps and enhanced features for Bixby this year as it raises $500M at a $14B valuation.

Abridge AI — The AI solutions for healthcare unicorn is raising $300M in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, increasing its valuation to $5.3B. Khosla Ventures is also participating, following an earlier $250M funding this year.

Anduril & Meta — Anduril, a defense technology company, and Meta, a social media giant, are collaborating to create extended reality devices for the U.S. military.

UBTech Robotics — Launching a $20,000 humanoid robot set to compete with Tesla's Optimus in the emerging home humanoid market with plan to ship 1,000 units this year.

Elad Gil's AI Roll-Ups — Gil is investing in AI-powered roll-ups to transform traditional sectors like law firms. By automating processes, these roll-ups aim to improve margins. Gil's investments include startups like Harvey and Enam Co.

SignalFires — Read the Top signals, Startups + Deals From Last Week

The Invisible Hand Just Got a Wallet

AI agents are choosing stablecoins over fiat as Civilization Forks its Ledger.

Web3 Was Early—AI Might Finish the Job. The agentic commerce stack is forming, and even Visa knows the game has changed. It started with autonomous emails and AI-generated spreadsheets. Then came booking agents that could buy your flights and manage your schedule. Now? Your AI is checking out with USDC. And Super Assistant Incoming alert — OpenAI just revealed it is set to transform ChatGPT into a "super assistant" that enhances user interactions and assists with daily tasks.

Agentic commerce is exploding—a new paradigm where autonomous AI systems perform economic actions on your behalf. Not with your permission every time. Not with a pop-up. They act. And increasingly, they’re skipping the banks.

a16z’s Agent Payments Stack document published last week lays out a clear vision for the agentic web 3-powered future: AI agents need three things to transact—wallets, protocols, and programmable logic. In this vision, Web3 isn’t a fringe ideology—it’s functional infrastructure. And its already being built before our eyes.

Visa and Mastercard Just Blinked

Last month, Visa unveiled a partnership to enable stablecoin settlements across supported global corridors, cutting cross-border transaction costs by up to 50%. At nearly the same time, Mastercard announced programmable payment APIs and agent-led purchasing pilots.

They’re not doing this out of curiosity. They’re doing it because stablecoins like USDC and tokenized fiat now present the fastest, most programmable, and cheapest option for the coming era of AI-native economic activity.

Web3’s Not so Missed Moment? 

If Web3 felt like a solution looking for a problem, AI agents might be the final boss that conquers our societal resistance to widespread encryption-based systems not only for finance but for everyday online interactions as the lines of reality blur with AI, and as deepfakery and fraud become rampant and widespread. It is a fast paced world in which the scammers and the builders are struggling to compete. The Web3 finance market is projected to explode from $3.89B (2023) to $40.42B by 2029—a 47.72% CAGR. Compare that to traditional embedded finance, growing to $251.5B over the same time—but from a much more mature baseline.

While we debated decentralization in theory and in the halls of Washington and Wall Street and silicon valley offices, JPMorgan, BNY Mellon, and Fidelity quietly began using blockchains for settlements and tokenized assets. Stablecoins now save banks $8–12B annually on cross-border transactions alone.

For the end user—and increasingly, the AI assistant acting as a proxy—the experience gap is shrinking. Speed, cost, transparency. Web3 wins on all three:

AI Agents Demand Financial Infrastructure

It’s no longer about whether AI agents will conduct transactions. They already do. From OpenAI’s Operator, to Amazon’s Nova Act, to Salesforce’s Agentforce, the agent economy has gone from prototype to production. These aren’t glorified chatbots—they’re autonomous workflows wrapped in memory, logic, and APIs with spending power. What they need is a wallet layer that is:

• Programmable

• Always-on

• Interoperable

That means:

• Stablecoins for instantaneous global value transfer

• Smart contracts for conditional logic

• Zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving ID

• Decentralized identity systems to help agents transact autonomously, but verifiably

The Final Catalyst for Encryption?

In a world where AI-generated deepfakes pass the Turing Test (73% of testers mistook GPT-4.5 for a human in Q1 2025), trust must be rebuilt in code, not credentials.

Encryption becomes pragmatic, not political. Agents transacting at scale need security guarantees, verifiable computation, and machine-readable infrastructure.

Even CBDCs—centralized by design—are now being built with programmable rails that mimic smart contract behavior. 80% of central banks are actively testing them.

The geopolitical stakes are shifting, too. China’s DeepSeek model and the 10 or so Chinese AI labs are neck and neck with our local models and fast catching up in hardware. State-scale AI infrastructure aren’t just about performance—they’re about owning the sovereign economic stack for autonomous actors and a level of centralized control.

China’s far more centralized experiment has some benefits as they were already able to roll out widely trusted and reliable infrastructure from a state level. And news of Trump and Palantir collaborating to centralise data and identity in the US could lead to similar levels of data and seamless frictionless payments, but as with China raises serious ethical, legal and privacy concerns. Palantir just saw its stock rise 140% after securing a $795M Pentagon contract under the Trump administration to expand federal data centralization contrasts as some protest both internal and external to the GOP and Dems over potential surveillance risks and security concerns.

Many such as Mssrs Andreesen and Horowitz, would prefer a more decentralized route alongside a robust state but many crypto natives go even further in their libertarian purism and self sovereignty demands of course.

Blurring Lines, Revealing Intent

The difference between Web3-native finance and traditional rails is narrowing, but the values underlying them remain distinct:

Where do AI agents fit? Probably somewhere in between. A new hybrid class is emerging:

• DeFAI: Decentralized Finance + AI

• Institutional DeFi: TradFi firms mining yield with DeFi protocols

• Credit Scoring by decentralized AI models with no centralized data pools

Brazil just took a major step in that direction yesterday with its launching of a world first data ownership pilot with a "dWallet" enabling citizens to monetize their data. Concerns about accessibility and exploitation amid low digital literacy and dated infrastructure persist but it is a hint of the future possible.

Civilization Is Forking Its Ledger

This isn’t the end of traditional finance. But it might be the end of its monopoly. It’s certainly the beginning of a new era.

As AI agents proliferate and programmable money becomes the default for economic coordination, the rails must catch up to match the actors.

Stablecoins, encryption, smart contracts—these aren’t future-proofing measures. They’re current requirements.

Civilization is quietly refactoring its financial layer, not through protest—but through necessity.

And somewhere in this interconnected global financial network this moment, an agent just tipped for a Robotaxi ride with a tokenized dollar—and didn’t even ask permission first. The ghost is well and truly in the machine.

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BUZZY TOOLS

Buzzy Tech Tools To Watch & Use

OpenAI — New o3 enhances Operator AI agents. GPT-5 coming next month?.

xAI — Launching Grok 3.5, better image generation - coding falls short.

DeepSeek — New model rivals GPT-4.5, potentially the best available AI.

Capgemini & SAP — Partner with Mistral for AI in regulated sectors.

Chestnut — AI agents for mortgages, faster approvals, competitive rates.

BUZZY TECH

The Latest Deep Technology & Trends To Watch

Darwin Gödel Machine — Self-improving AI rewrites code, enhancing performance.

ChatGPT Emotional Intelligence — AI exceeds humans in emotional intelligence .

Meta AI Ads — Plans Automated ads for personalized, efficient marketing by 2026.

Magnetic Catalysts — Magnetic fields enhance single-atom catalysts.

Cerebras AI Hardware — Surpasses NVIDIA Blackwell with 2.5k t/sec on Llama 4.

Lavaforming — Molten lava cities promote sustainable, innovative architecture by.

Self-Powered Synapse — Artificial synapse mimics vision, distinguishes colors.

CRYPTO WATCH

Circle Internet IPO — Circle Internet targets a $7.2B valuation in its increased U.S. IPO, aiming to raise $896M from 32M shares. The company anticipates gains from a pending stablecoin bill, despite rising costs surpassing revenue growth.

Strive Asset Management — Co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, Strive raised $750M to launch its Bitcoin treasury business. The firm aims to stand out with alpha-generating strategies and potentially become a top public Bitcoin holder.

Today’s Feature References

a16z Report — Agents using web 3 systems will handle payments for consumers and businesses, enabling seamless transactions like booking holidays or restocking inventory. However, better rails are needed for true autonomy in agentic commerce.

Stablecoin Surge — The stablecoin market is set to hit $12.3B by 2025. Major financial institutions are adopting stablecoins for transactions, with innovative use cases like yield-bearing products and cross-border payments driving acceptance.

Bond Capital AI Report — Bond Capital's latest report highlights the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, emphasizing breakthroughs in machine learning and natural language processing. The report predicts continued AI integration.

Palantir — The data analytics company saw its stock rise 140% after securing a $795M Pentagon contract under Trump. This growth in federal data centralization contrasts with internal dissent over potential surveillance and security risks.

SPACE_RACE

Jared Isaacman Nomination_Musk pick withdrawal raises concerns for NASA.

Tiangong Defense Bots — Robotic thrusters intercept and redirect collisions.

Voyager Technologies IPO_Targets $1.6B valuation, developing Starlab as ISS 2.0.

Rocket Lab — Acquires company to boost Golden Dome missile defense system.

Concerns_Satellite interference threatens South Africa's Square Kilometre Array.

SpaceX Gigabay — 1,000 Starships yearly for rapid Mars colonization.

Lunar Platinum — Moon's craters hold valuable metals, surpassing asteroid mining.

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