JohnnyMac

The infamous Johnny Mac!

[Channel 8 English @Channel8English]

Channel8 has learned from an informed source that the delegation will include the Minister of Finance and Economy, the Minister of Natural Resources, the President of the Diwan of the Council of Ministers, the Secretary of the Council of Ministers, and a representative from the Ministry of Interior.

Read more: https://t.co/EfiuGgyNVf

[Marco Salzmann 🇩🇪🇻🇪 @MarcoSalzmann80]

What if mBridge is only half of the story?
Central banks can build the rails.

But someone still needs to connect businesses, merchants, wallets and cross-border liquidity to those rails.

@veloprotocol and @lightnetgroup may be positioning themselves exactly where that gap exists. 👇

mBridge is the multi-CBDC initiative involving the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE.

And interestingly, its core focus revolves around the exact same concepts:

multilateral settlement, regional currency exchange and distributed ledger interoperability.

This is where the macro picture connects.

mBridge is a wholesale network built for central banks and large-scale institutional settlement.

But central bank infrastructure alone does not automatically reach merchants, businesses or end users.

It still needs commercial on-ramps, licensed OTC gateways, liquidity providers, wallets and regulated payment infrastructure to connect real-world commerce to these new corridors.

This is where @lightnetgroup and @veloprotocol become interesting.

mBridge’s founding corridors include China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE.

Lightnet’s roots are deeply connected to Thailand through the @CPGroup_Live ecosystem, while its expansion strategy has increasingly focused on Hong Kong and broader Asian payment corridors.

Different networks.

Overlapping geography.

Similar direction.

The Thai connection may be even more important than most people realize.

The Bank of Thailand has been a key architect of mBridge since the early Project Inthanon-LionRock experiments.

At the same time, Thailand’s CP Group sits at the center of one of the country’s most influential business ecosystems.

Through Chatchaval Jiaravanon, the CP ecosystem connects to both Lightnet and Velo.

This does not mean mBridge, the Bank of Thailand, Lightnet and VELO are formally connected.

But they operate within the same economic corridor and pursue a similar objective:

modernizing cross-border payments across Asia.

Central banks can build settlement rails.

Commercial adoption requires banks, payment providers, liquidity operators and merchant infrastructure.

That is where Lightnet becomes particularly interesting.

If regional payment systems want to reduce reliance on unregulated liquidity bridges such as USDT, they will likely need more compliant alternatives.

This is where $USDV becomes relevant.

Through BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and @Securitize, USDV connects tokenized US Treasury exposure with Asia’s emerging PayFi ecosystem.

This creates an interesting contradiction.

Many new payment networks aim to move beyond legacy financial infrastructure.

Yet the transition may depend on bringing traditional financial assets on-chain rather than replacing them altogether.

Ironically, the next generation of payment infrastructure may emerge through tokenization.

mBridge enables direct settlement between local CBDCs without relying on the US dollar as the primary intermediary.

VELO’s V-Stablecoin model points toward a commercial version of a similar idea:

regional fiat-linked digital assets used for cross-border settlement.

The bottom line:
We are not looking at isolated crypto projects.

We may be watching the early construction of a dual financial system.

On one side, the existing SWIFT and US dollar-based rails.

On the other, a new network of blockchain-native payment corridors across ASEAN, Hong Kong, the UAE and BRICS-linked markets.

mBridge may build the highway for central banks.

But ecosystems like Lightnet and VELO could help build the commercial vehicles, ramps and local roads that bring real-world business activity onto those new rails.

$VELO is not just a token.

It is an infrastructure bet on the rewiring of global trade.

[Tuoi Tre News @VietNewsGateway]

Festival expected to draw 500,000 visitors, boost lotus industry in Vietnam's Dong Thap

Details: https://t.co/BrySu21hSR

[China pulse 🇨🇳 @Eng_china5]

UNUSUAL
China is scrapping 12,000 traditional university majors and introducing more than 10,000 new ones, in the biggest educational reform affecting more than 30% of academic programs, in preparation for the age of artificial intelligence.

[Channel 8 English @Channel8English]

Masrour Barzani, Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, received Abdul Amir Yarallah, the Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Army; the meeting focused on countering threats against oil companies and strengthening coordination between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army.

[IMF @IMFNews]

Reliance on a small number of cloud providers, software platforms, or AI models concentrates risk. One exploited weakness can ripple across many institutions at once. Our blog explains why authorities must ask whether the system can absorb these shocks. https://t.co/eln39y66cz

[Parody Jeff @Parodyjeffx]

HOLY FUCK 🚨

China just exposed the US for running 336 biological labs across 30 countries, including 26 in Ukraine.

Beijing is demanding international inspections and full transparency.

[World Affairs @World_Affairs11]

BREAKING:

Iran calls Russia and China for signing deal with the US.

Both are now witnesses of Iran , the US cannot violate ceasefire now

[S p r i n t e r @SprinterPress]

The most famous technology billionaire in Turkey, Erdogan's son-in-law and the founder and head of the "Baykar" corporation, Selçuk Bayraktar, made an interesting programmatic statement about artificial intelligence (AI):

Giant monopolies, trying to control AI technology with hegemonic methods, require enormous computing power, which would consume almost all of the energy resources available to humanity.

These ambitions resemble the pyramids built with sheer brute force, like those gigantic structures that the pharaohs erected to glorify their eternal egos.

Today, global giants are collecting all of humanity's data using hundreds of thousands of processors and gaining disproportionate power.

What we need to do is not focus on the present, but on the future, as we did in our adventure with UAVs and UASs, and achieve a completely new breakthrough by shifting the paradigm instead of following the rules set by others...[...]

Collecting data about the lives of all of humanity in the global monopolies' own data centers, whose sole purpose is to maximize profits, is a treacherous blow to the sovereignty of nations and societies.

One doesn't need to be a prophet to see what this siege will turn into tomorrow.

This is the modern world's decree of voluntary slavery.

That's why, instead of giving our data to the servers of giant global monopolies, we should implement distributed learning and processing architectures.

[SMQKE @SMQKEDQG]

$114 Trillion.📈

[Channel 8 English @Channel8English]

The preparation of the June salary list for Kurdistan Region public sector employees using the “Payroll” system has been completed. While preparations are underway to dispatch the list to Baghdad, financial officials are warning of a significant decline in non-oil revenues that could trigger an imminent deficit.

Read more: https://t.co/Txm9E3vVRI

[Majeed 🇸🇦KSA🇸🇦 🤝 🇺🇸 @majeed66224499]

Tomorrow, UFC fight is sponsored by

Crypto 😉🔥😎

[Dagnum² @Dagnum_PI]

Metallicus just got their second FedNow certification.
The first one put them on the Federal Reserve's instant payment rail for live transactions.

This one is Request for Payment (RFP), which means a credit union or business on their network can now request funds from another party in real-time through the Fed's own infrastructure.

Two separate federal certifications. A blockchain company. Processing live transactions on the same rails as JPMorgan and Bank of America.

@MarshallHayner has been building $XPR while the rest of crypto was arguing about memecoins.

[ΛЯIΣᄂ @Prolotario1]

The Key Dates We Need To Look At

June 14th The UFC 250 Celebration

June 15th The IMF Meeting (Currency Revaluation)

June 24th (The Rally To End All Rallies)

June 25th (Operational Integration and Continuity Drills)

July 4th Covenant Renewal and Public Reclamation

And the following July 4th Independence Day

Our nation is about to change forever. Everything you have Bern waiting for is being completed this month so it can legally roll out to you. Do you all know what this means?

You have made it to the other side of the old system. You need to give yourself a round of applause. All of this happening this month. The story officially conclude on July 4th. Your actual "REAL" Independence Day for the 1st times in centuries.

~The Storm Will Follow 🇺🇸

[Iran Observer @IranObserver0]

⚡️NEW: Iran's State TV reports that more than 1000 vessels are waiting for Iran's permission to Transit the Strait of hormuz

The Strait of Hormuz continues to be completely closed

[Channel 8 English @Channel8English]

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi is expected to visit Washington in the second half of next month, leading a high-level government delegation for talks with senior U.S. officials on a range of security, economic, and trade issues, according to Iraqi government officials.

Read more: https://t.co/LtSuPI6ixi

[Marc Nixon @MarcNixon24]

HOLY SH💩T

CARNEY REVEALS EVERYTHING 😳

Mark Carney may have just revealed what he actually meant by “middle powers.”

When asked if Ireland was one of the countries he was referring to in his Davos speech, Carney’s answer suggested the real test isn’t economic strength, military power, or trade.

It’s climate policy.

If you’re aligned with his climate agenda, you’re in.

If you’re not, he doesn’t seem interested.

That’s a remarkable admission.

At a time when Canada is facing a recession, rising unemployment, record emigration, and an affordability crisis, Carney appears focused on building alliances around climate politics.

Canadians deserve to know:

Is Canada’s foreign and trade policy now being determined by who shares the Prime Minister’s climate goals?

[Iran Observer @IranObserver0]

⚡️BREAKING: Iran has released satellite images showing the Destruction of two Key U.S. radar systems in Kuwait and Bahrain that were used to detect Incoming missiles

[RadioGenoa @RadioGenoa]

Roma today: "Let's take back our neighborhoods! Everyone out!" The EU that has flooded our cities with parasites and criminals will soon implode.

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

🚨 WTF?! Al Jazeera confirms 77,000 Japanese citizens were found dead alone in their homes last year, some undiscovered for months!

The crisis is so catastrophic that a yogurt delivery company is now the frontline survival network to check if the elderly have collapsed!