Chris Campbell:

Crypto: Banks Won the Battle

Circle (CRCL), the stablecoin behemoth, dropped 20% in one day. The culprit: a new draft of the CLARITY Act – the first serious attempt to regulate crypto in the U.S. – that would ban yield payments on passive stablecoin balances.

No yield on your USDC. No passive income for simply holding. Banks don't like competition. Looks like they got their way. For now.

But while Circle scrambles and Coinbase takes collateral damage, there's a company that has been quietly building the most asymmetric ETH position in corporate history.

It's called Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR). BMNR currently owns 4.661 million ETH – 3.86% of total ETH supply. 3.14 million ETH is already staked and throwing off hundreds of millions in annualized staking revenue.

While the Act is punishing stablecoin yield plays like Circle and Coinbase, it's doing the opposite for BMNR. Again, the joint SEC/CFTC interpretation is now on the record: ETH is not a security. It's a digital commodity.

This means BMNR is no longer holding a speculative token of ambiguous legal status. It's holding a regulated commodity – at sovereign scale – with a staking infrastructure built to compound it indefinitely. In short, regulatory clarity de-risks the position.

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Ray Blanco:

Chip Selloff Deepens After Google Touts Memory Breakthrough

Memory chip stocks extended their losses on Thursday after Alphabet Inc.'s Google publicized research on a new algorithm, TurboQuant, that could allow more efficient use of the storage needed for artificial intelligence (AI) development.

Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc., South Korean leaders in the market, both fell at least 6% in Seoul. In the U.S., Micron Technology Inc., Western Digital Corp. and Sandisk Corp. all slid at least 5% in U.S. trading, after they closed lower on Wednesday.

Memory chip companies had been on a tear in recent months as surging investment in AI infrastructure led to shortages, triggering a spike in chip prices and profit.

However, Google said its TurboQuant algorithm can cut the amount of memory required to run large language models by at least a factor of six, reducing the overall cost of training AI. Investors may harbor concerns that could reduce hyperscalers' need for memory, pushing down the prices for components that are also used in smartphones and consumer electronics.

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Ari Goldschmidt:

A 'Pound of Flesh' From Data Centers: One Senator's Answer to AI Job Losses

The signs that AI could lead to mass job displacement are already piling up: entry-level job postings in the U.S. have sunk 35% since 2023, mass layoffs have swept across Big Tech, and even AI leaders themselves are warning about what's coming. 

Backstage at the Axios AI Summit in Washington on Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said a venture capitalist recently told him he's writing software investments down to zero in large part due to the strides of Anthropic's Claude, and a major law firm told him it's not hiring first-year associates because AI can now handle much of the work once assigned to junior lawyers.

Warner says the fear of AI-related job loss is "palpable," even as data from one AI company suggests AI hasn't yet started taking jobs. As those fears grow, they're bleeding over into a different fight, which is who should foot the bill.

Warner has a proposal: tax the data centers powering the AI boom and use that revenue to help workers through the transition. He hasn't introduced legislation yet, but the idea is gaining urgency as public anger toward AI and data centers grows.

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