💰 Don't size caches for peak—let them stretch and shrink with demand to cut cost. Google applies the classic ski rental problem to a production database. Title: Optimizing cloud economics with linear elastic caching URL: 📦 Overview Linear elastic caching treats memory footprint as a variable cost that integrates over time, dynamically growing and shrinking cache size to match the workload. 🎯 The problem Cloud memory is expensive (serverless can charge up to $3/day per GiB). Fixed-size caches hit a "Goldilocks dilemma": too small hurts performance, too large wastes thousands on idle memory during low demand. 🎿 Method Each page faces a choice: "rent" (keep in RAM, paying continuous memory cost) or "buy the miss" (evict, risking latency/I/O later). A ski rental algorithm sets each page's TTL. The key result: eviction policy and rental duration can be optimized separately. 🌲 Implementation For Spanner, a lightweight shallow decision tree (compilable to C++) predicts the optimal TTL from data size, miss cost, and operation type—no heavy inference in the cache path. 📉 Results In production on Spanner: memory down 15.5%, misses up only 5.5%, TCO down ~5%, I/O impact a mere 0.5%. On public traces it consistently beat fixed-size (GDSF) baselines. #CloudComputing# #Algorithms#

Circle (@circle) launched cirBTC on Ethereum on June 8, a 1:1 BTC-backed ERC-20 where each unit sits in segregated, regulated custody at a Circle entity, marking a new product line for Circle beyond the stablecoin categories. The tokenized Bitcoin market currently exceeds $10 billion in total supply across all wrapped formats, one of the most actively used collateral asset classes in DeFi, yet still represents under 2% of Bitcoin's total market cap. The vast majority of Bitcoin value sits idle, never deployed as collateral or generating yield. For any issuer that can solve the custody and trust problem convincingly enough to attract that capital, the addressable market is orders of magnitude larger than what exists today. WBTC and @coinbase cbBTC are the two dominant wrapped Bitcoin formats on Ethereum, together representing the majority of tokenized Bitcoin supply deployed in DeFi. The protocol that makes most of that supply productive in DeFi is @aave, being the primary collateral venue where wrapped BTC is usded as the basis for borrowing, leverage, and liquidity strategies. Looking at the top 50 Ethereum holders of WBTC ($5B) and cbBTC ($2.5B), Aave V3 absorbs $3.1B (41% of combined supply), more than Morpho Blue, L2 bridges, Compound, SparkLend, and all DEXes combined. There is already an ARFC to onboard cirBTC on both Aave V3 Core and Aave V4 Core on Aave governance, also bringing DeFi utility to Circle new asset. Running in parallel on Aave V4, @babylonlabs is integrating Trustless Bitcoin Vaults into Aave V4. Under this model, users lock native BTC directly on the Bitcoin blockchain in Taproot UTXOs and use that position as collateral to borrow stablecoins on Aave V4 through a dedicated Babylon Core Lending Spoke, without wrapping, bridging, or giving up custody at any point. Babylon has already secured 51k BTC trustlessly. This is the first major native BTC collateral primitive on Aave V4. Bitcoin's market cap stands at $1.32 trillion. The entire tokenized BTC market represents roughly +$10 billion in deployed supply, under 2% of that total. Every incremental unit of Bitcoin that moves into regulated wrappers like cirBTC, or gets deployed trustlessly through primitives like Babylon's native BTC vaults, expands the total productive capacity of DeFi in a way that hardly any new stablecoin or synthetic asset can replicate.

I am the Vice President of Ad Integrity at Meta. I want to talk about the number sixteen. Sixteen billion dollars. That is what we earned from advertisements our own internal classification system flagged as "higher legal risk." Crypto scams. Romance fraud. Impersonation schemes targeting the elderly. We had a dashboard. The dashboard had a color. The color was green. Green meant revenue. Three point five billion every six months. I watched that number on the Revenue Integrity Dashboard every Monday at 9 AM. The same meeting where we reviewed takedown requests. The same room. We did not remove the ads. We removed 8,000 people. The memo said "efficiency." The memo said "leaner teams." The memo said "AI-first." What the memo did not say: the 8,000 people we fired cost us $4.2 billion annually in compensation. The ads we refused to remove earned us $16 billion in the same period. The math was never complicated. The math was the strategy. I received the Ad Quality Excellence Award in 2024. It is on my desk. It is a glass rectangle. It weighs more than the compliance reports we filed with the FTC claiming we had "robust systems" to prevent fraud. But I want to talk about April. In April, we installed software on every employee laptop in Building 20. The software tracks mouse movements. Keystroke cadence. Application switching. Idle time. It sends a report every eleven minutes. We call it a "productivity signal." The advertisers call their version "behavioral data." Same architecture. Same team built both. I know because I approved the vendor contract for the external version in 2021 and the internal version last month. The vendor is the same. The codebase is the same. The only difference is the target. When we track users, it's a $140 billion business. When we track employees, it's "performance management." When the employees objected — posted in the internal channel, filed concerns with HR, asked the obvious questions — we did what we always do. We reminded them of the NDA. We reminded them of the stock vesting schedule. We reminded them that 8,000 people were no longer receiving reminders of anything. They stopped posting in the channel. I am told the keystroke heat map is displayed on monitors in Building 20. I am told it updates in real time. I am told it looks exactly like the user engagement dashboard we show advertisers. I am told this is a coincidence. The product has always been the person. The only variable is which person. For sixteen years, it was the user. Their clicks. Their attention. Their data. For the advertisers, it was their money. Clean or dirty. We did not ask. Asking would have cost us $3.5 billion every six months. Now it is the employee. Their keystrokes. Their idle seconds. Their bathroom breaks quantified as "disengagement intervals." We are a platform that earned $16 billion from fraud we refused to stop, fired 8,000 people to "cut costs," and now tracks the survivors' mouse movements every eleven minutes to ensure they are sufficiently productive. The product is the person. The person is the product. That's the platform.

Over the past month, there has been no shortage of headlines about struggling exchanges. Some of the founders involved are people I’ve crossed paths with. This is a sobering reminder of how unforgiving every crypto downturn can be. Most conversations today focus on which exchange survives or which project fails. But after spending the past month in the US and Europe meeting with Wall Street traders and institutional clients, I came away with a different perspective. What surprised me is that the institutions many people see as the backbone of market liquidity aren’t exactly having an easy time either. Many are going through painful adjustments of their own. A few observations that stayed with me: 1. The scars from last year’s 10.10 market shock are still healing The decline in crypto liquidity wasn’t temporary, but structural. Comparing notes with several institutional trading firms, even the largest venues have generally seen liquidity decline by around 30-40% since the market turmoil. Lower liquidity isn’t just about lower trading volumes. It also raises the cost of trust. Higher volatility, more fragmented liquidity and greater sensitivity to market manipulation have made institutions much more cautious about deploying capital. One lesson has become very clear: don’t overestimate how quickly markets recover, and don’t underestimate how long it takes to rebuild confidence. Everyone is repairing balance sheets. That process takes time. 2. Long-term conviction hasn’t disappeared, but the playbook has changed Despite a difficult market, institutional interest in digital assets hasn’t gone away. If anything, more firms are quietly preparing for the next cycle while prices remain subdued. The biggest change is how they think about crypto. It’s no longer viewed as a standalone speculative asset class. It’s increasingly becoming one component within a broader global portfolio. Multi-asset strategies, tokenized real-world assets, cross-asset collateral and hedged portfolios are becoming standard discussions. That also helps explain why some of the crypto trading volume lost over the past year is being replaced by equities, FX and commodities. Institutions aren’t leaving. They’re evolving. They’re optimizing for more stable, diversified return profiles rather than relying on pure crypto beta. Platforms built only around crypto trading may find it increasingly difficult to meet those changing needs. 3. More than ever, institutions want peace of mind From FTX to the more recent incidents across the industry, every exchange crisis has reinforced the same lesson: safety is the minimum requirement for staying at the table. When I speak with institutions and VIP clients today, the conversation is no longer just about generating alpha. Asset security, risk management and capital efficiency now matter just as much. They don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket. At the same time, they don’t want their capital sitting idle or becoming fragmented across different platforms and accounts. What they are looking for is fairly straightforward: transparent third-party custody, clear risk controls and an account structure that allows capital to move flexibly when opportunities arise. This is also why products such as rToken are attracting more attention from professional investors. The same position can provide market exposure, be pledged to access liquidity and be used as margin. The goal is not to take more risk with the same capital. It is to make every dollar work harder while keeping safety at the centre of the equation. ------- The financial industry has always rewarded scale and trust, and crypto is no different. I’ve often told our team that many offshore exchanges outside the top 10 group may not survive the next few years. But even being among the largest players is no reason to become complacent. Bear markets are uncomfortable, but they have a way of forcing everyone back to fundamentals. The companies that emerge stronger won’t simply be the ones that cut costs or survive another cycle. They’ll be the ones that manage short-term risk while continuing to build infrastructure, discover genuine product-market fit and solve real customer problems. That’s what we’re focused on. And I believe that’s where the industry’s next chapter will be written.

Idle treasury assets shouldn't sit still. Kraken Institutional and @upshift_fi are bringing custom, permissioned onchain vaults into qualified custody, so eligible clients can put idle BTC, ETH and stablecoins to work without standing up new wallets and counterparties. Via @TheBlock__: