Ray Blanco:

Albania Appoints World’s First AI-Made Minister

Albania has become the first country in the world to have an AI minister — not a minister for AI, but a virtual minister made of pixels and code and powered by artificial intelligence. Her name is Diella, meaning sunshine in Albanian, and she will be responsible for all public procurement, Prime Minister Edi Rama said Thursday.

During the summer, Rama mused that one day the country could have a digital minister and even an AI prime minister, but few thought that day would come around so quickly.

At the Socialist Party assembly in Tirana on Thursday, where Rama announced which ministers would get the chop and which would stay on for another mandate, he also introduced Diella, the only non-human member of the government.

Rama stated that decisions on tenders would be taken “out of the ministries” and placed in the hands of Diella, who is “the servant of public procurement.” He said the process will be “step-by-step,” but Albania will be a country where public tenders are “100 percent incorruptible and where every public fund that goes through the tender procedure is 100 percent legible.”

“This is not science fiction,” he said.

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Davis Wilson:

OpenAI Secures Microsoft’s Blessing To Transition Its For-Profit Arm

OpenAI announced Thursday it reached a nonbinding agreement with Microsoft, its largest investor, on a revised partnership that would allow the startup to convert its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation (PBC).

The transition, should it be cleared by state regulators, could allow OpenAI to raise additional capital from investors and, eventually, become a public company.

In a blog post, OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor said under the nonbinding agreement with Microsoft, OpenAI’s nonprofit would continue to exist and retain control over the startup’s operations. OpenAI’s nonprofit would obtain a stake in the company’s PBC, worth upward of $100 billion, Taylor said. Further terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In recent months, nonprofits such as Encode and The Midas Project have taken issue with OpenAI’s for-profit transition, arguing that it threatens the startup’s mission to develop AGI that benefits humanity. OpenAI has responded by sending subpoenas to some of these groups, claiming the nonprofits are funded by its competitors — namely, Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Encode and The Midas Project deny the claims.

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Chris Campbell:

BlackRock Wants To Tokenize Its ETFs

Bloomberg reported that BlackRock is preparing to tokenize ETFs and other real-world asset (RWA) funds, expanding beyond its existing on-chain cash management product, BUIDL.

The move is pending regulatory approval, but it represents a major step toward bringing traditional investment vehicles onto blockchain rails.

BlackRock launched BUIDL with Securitize in 2024, giving institutions tokenized exposure to U.S. Treasuries.

Now, the firm wants to extend that model to ETFs and additional fund structures, which would mark the first time a traditional manager has tokenized mainstream funds at scale.

Potential types of funds include: equity ETFs, bond/fixed income funds, money market funds, real estate funds, and private credit funds. These sectors represent trillions in assets ($12.5T in Q2 2025 to be exact). And a huge chunk of them (maybe eventually all) are coming on-chain.

“BlackRock is tokenizing their ETFs and you're bearish? Everything will be tokenized," remarked Graeme Moore, Head of Strategy at Project 11, after the news broke.

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