If newspapers are your thing, here's the real answer from @xStocksFi on tokenized equities. Horseshoe makers were never going to like automobiles, but that's no reason to kill the innovation. Tokenized equities give individual investors real benefits, and give issuers a new way to reach them.

Weaponization of the banking system in 2022 felt like 1984. Much of the corruption links back to pressure from pockets of the government itself. Thank you @USComptroller and @SecScottBessent for bringing much needed scrutiny. Americans deserve fair access to innovative financial services, regardless of their beliefs, affiliations, or political views.

"won't the banks just buy all of the crypto companies?" well, not exactly... We signed a deal to fully acquire Saldo Bank, a digital-first specialized bank licensed in Lithuania serving retail, SME customers, and B2B partners across multiple European countries. This adds to the @Payward infrastructure, particularly in Europe, where we already serve millions of customers. The transaction will take some time to close, but very much looking forward to working with the Saldo team.

NEW: @krakenfx receives UAE regulatory approval with @Payward FZCO licensed by VARA to offer spot and margin trading in AED-denominated pairs to retail, professional and institutional clients, launching in the coming weeks.

Wyoming chartered the nation’s first digital asset banks and built a legal framework that has set the standard for digital asset regulation in the United States. I’m very pleased the Wyoming Division of Banking has partnered with the New York Department of Financial Services for streamlined chartering and joint supervision of entities engaged in digital asset activities.

For too long, regulatory uncertainty has prevented responsible, yet critical innovation from taking root in the United States. It has been a priority of my chairmanship to reverse this trend. Though temporary, the Innovation Exemption is a principled, structured grant of relief designed to resolve genuine legal uncertainty, while providing investor protections and upholding market integrity standards. Through this order and a number of ongoing initiatives, we will ensure that America remains the world’s premier destination to build the next generation of financial infrastructure.

My thanks go to everyone who put so much effort into the CLARITY Act— across the Administration, Congress, investors, and innovators. Our collective conviction that America must continue to lead is indispensable. I have been unequivocal: with or without legislation, we will act decisively within the SEC’s statutory authority to deliver certainty for American investors and for the entrepreneurs shaping our technological future. Stay tuned.

🚨 Welcome to the $15 billion California High Speed Rail to nowhere: Since 2008 California has spent $15 billion and has not connected a single city or laid a single track. It is now projected to cost more than $200 billion to finish despite being proved nearly impossible to complete. In 2008 China also announced a high-speed rail and has now connected the entire country with over 30,000 miles while California has connected 0 miles. Over $500 million has gone to contractors who could not work, homes are currently being built on the alignment, and farmers will lose their farms. In this video I go down the alignment of the high speed rail exposing the failures and confront the legislators in charge of this absolute disaster of a project. A prime example of fraud, waste and abuse of the taxpayer dollar.

MUST SEE: Amazing moment as President Trump calls Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while he's on stage at the All-In Summit. @POTUS on AI Doomerism: “I'm telling you, it's all a hoax… and we're not going to let that happen.”

What Is To Be Done? I propose a simple plan: Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism. Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way. Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have. To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such. To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose. And that is how we use AI to save the world. It’s time to build.

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

New in the Kraken app: Kraken's AI Research the market. Check your portfolio. Find out what your idle cash could be doing. Ask it anything 👇 Currently, available in the US. More regions coming soon.

Nasdaq is advancing its tokenized equities strategy by agreeing to invest $100M in @Payward, the parent company of @krakenfx. Nasdaq Ventures’ agreement to invest in Payward deepens the collaboration between the companies. Here's what it means: 🧵

the @Nasdaq + @Payward partnership just went into overdrive tokenized equities are a thing and the upgrade to the world's financial infrastructure is real. Much more to come.

.@Payward and @krakenfx are proud to stand with the @BlockchainAssn and the @crypto_council in support of their motion for a preliminary injunction against Illinois’s flawed Illinois Digital Tax Act. This tax is a doozy. Condensing its many flaws into a single tweet would be challenging. Illinoisans deserve better. We hope the Court agrees.

A worthwhile historical account from Alan Lane of Silvergate - a bank with prudent management that was taken down by the government. ...the same goverment that conducted many bank bailouts for failures.