2025 marked an inflection point in AI productivity, as AI agents evolved from something you could chat with to something that can perform work on your behalf. Read @JozefARK's Substack "2025: The Year Chatbots Became Agents" for a look into Big Ideas. 🔗

Employment Friday delivered mixed signals. Non-farm payrolls beat expectations at 117k, but household employment fell for the third straight month. Manufacturing is picking up. Services are lagging. Historically, one follows the other. The US budget deficit is shrinking despite massive tax refunds flowing to corporations and individuals. That tells you the economy is probably stronger than the headlines suggest. Truflation has core Consumer Price Index (CPI) excluding food and energy at 1%. Producer prices are running above consumer prices, which usually happens when consumers push back on price increases. We think inflation will surprise to the downside over the next 6 to 9 months. Oil is the wildcard, but supply is growing fast. Capital spending has broken out of a 30-year range. AI is pulling old-guard names like Cisco, Corning, and Akamai back into growth. The manufacturing buildout is real and broadening. The innovation equity space has been frustrating this year. We've been selectively adding to innovation positions. We think the selloff in innovation stocks will clear as the economy turns. From where we sit, the economy is healthier than the headlines suggest, inflation is lower than people fear, and the innovation cycle is accelerating. Watch “In The Know” for Cathie Wood’s full economic breakdown.

Shopify is more than just a storefront for e-commerce. Learn how it’s leveraging AI to become THE operating system for modern commerce in a new Substack from the ARK Next Gen Internet Team. 🔗

Two structures. One mission: bring private markets to everyday investors. @CathieDWood sat down with @RobinhoodApp CFO @ShivVerma to compare how the two firms are trying to solve the same problem from different angles, and why the pursuit matters. Watch.

New Substack article on $SHOP! AI makes product discovery easier with agentic commerce and entrepreneurship easier with better merchant tools. @Shopify is at the center of both dynamics, creating a powerful commerce flywheel. Read more on our Substack👇

What started out as a diabetes drug is now rippling into industries far beyond healthcare. Fast food chains, alcohol sales, apparel retailers, among others. And fewer than 1 in 10 patients who could benefit from a GLP-1 may even be taking one. And I don’t think GLP-1s will be an anomaly. The oral GLP-1s just launched this year. @novonordisk and @EliLillyandCo's most recent earnings revealed that ~80% of patients starting oral pill formulations are new to the drug class entirely. Oral delivery is expanding the user base, not cannibalizing injectable users. And the clinical reach keeps expanding well beyond diabetes — weight management, cardiovascular risk reduction, kidney disease, sleep apnea — establishing GLP-1s as an important longevity-relevant therapy with effects that exceed its original indication. The consumer effects are already surfacing in household spending data and financial reports across industries that may seem far removed from healthcare. Fully untangling GLP-1 impact from broader affordability pressures is difficult. But the impact should intensify as adoption continues to broaden. GLP-1s are likely an early example of a pattern that should recur with increasing frequency. As the convergence of AI and multiomics accelerates our understanding of biology and improves drug discovery and development, an increasing number of effective therapies targeting interconnected biological systems are likely to follow. Medicine is shifting from managing symptoms to treating the underlying biology of disease. For industries built around chronic disease — and the consumer behaviors that drive it — the consequences should compound. Read my full take in @ARKInvest's weekly newsletter. 👇

Money is going onchain. Stablecoin transaction volumes more than doubled YoY to $4.4T in Q1, and USDC now accounts for 63% of that activity [1]. We believe the infrastructure powering it is becoming one of the most important shifts in financial services in decades. That's why we're excited to announce that ARK has invested in the @arc token. For the better part of a decade, ARK's research has focused on the convergence of public blockchains, digital money, and AI. We believe @arc sits at the intersection of all three. We've watched Layer 1 networks (L1s) launch since 2015, and the space has produced remarkable innovation along the way. Each new network has contributed something, whether in consensus design, execution environments, developer experience, or economic models, and we believe there's room for several L1s with different trade-offs to have meaningful impact over the coming years. The financial system is large enough, and the use cases varied enough, that no single chain will serve every need. What a decade of observation has also taught us is that first-mover advantage in crypto is rarely decisive. @Uniswap wasn't the first decentralized exchange (DEX). @HyperliquidX wasn't the first perpetual futures DEX. @opensea wasn't the first Non-fungible token marketplace. The teams that ultimately led their categories were often the ones that arrived later, studied what came before, and built something materially better. Arc takes the best primitives developed across a decade of blockchain experimentation, including EVM (ethereum virtual machine) compatibility, sub-second finality, predictable fees, configurable privacy, and institutional validators, and combines them with something we think L1s have historically underinvested in: a strong, opinionated view on the application layer. For much of the past decade, the prevailing L1 design philosophy treated the base layer and the apps running on top as separate problems. Build a fast, neutral chain and let the market figure out the apps. That approach has produced important infrastructure, but it has also left a lot of capacity waiting for use cases to find it. @circle is taking a different path. @arc launches with USDC, EURC, USYC, CCTP (cross chain transfer protocol), Circle Mint, Agent stack and CPN (circle payment network) native from day one, with a clear thesis about who the network is for and what they'll do with it. We think that's a meaningful evolution in L1 design, and we're excited to see Circle take it on. Circle has the franchise to back it up: → $77B of USDC in circulation across 30+ chains → $21.5T of onchain USDC volume in Q1 2026 alone → CCTP processes ~60% of all cross-chain traffic → Circle Payments Network now spans 180+ countries with 136 financial institutions enrolled → 200+ ecosystem partners contributing to Arc, including Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, BlackRock, Apollo, and Standard Chartered [2] We believe the convergence of AI and onchain finance is the single largest paradigm shift since the mobile internet. AI agents need economic infrastructure that operates at software speed. Circle's nanopayments infrastructure, which enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001, makes machine-to-machine commerce economically viable for the first time. Arc is the rail this happens on. @jerallaire and the Circle team have spent over a decade earning the regulatory standing, institutional relationships, and operational track record that a network like Arc requires. We're proud to back this vision. The financial system is being rebuilt. @arc is positioned to be at the center of it. [1-2] Sources: Circle Earnings materials

ARC 🤝 ARK Invest Read the ARC whitepaper on how a native coordination asset could support the network as we move toward Arc Mainnet: *ARC is offered by Circle which is not affiliated with ARK Invest

CZ built @Binance into the world’s largest crypto exchange. Now he’s explaining what he sees next for crypto, stablecoins, AI, and global finance. New FYI with @CathieDWood + @cz_binance and @LorenzoARK.