The reign of Visa and Mastercard is coming to an end in Europe. A new "Pay by Bank" button is taking over online checkouts, it’s dismantling American financial dominance. No more hidden fees. No more US middlemen.
If your child becomes a reader, about 80% of the education job is already done. That's my honest assessment after working in education for over thirty years. Everything else is secondary. Most parents think science education is important. Yes it is. But if you can't read the biology textbook, you're not going to learn biology.
Reading is the meta-skill that enables all other skills. History requires reading. Science requires reading. Even math increasingly requires reading as it becomes more sophisticated. The child who reads voraciously will figure out everything else. The child who doesn't will struggle with everything.
Scaling is not really a problem for SQL databases. Shopify is running its distributed monolith on MySQL 8 and can scale to over 50 million queries per second. With every Black Friday campaign, they raise the bar even higher.
Facebook uses MySQL with MyRocks. You can find their MySQL fork on GitHub. So, if SQL works fine for the largest software platforms in the world, it's surely going to work just fine for the vast majority of your projects.
Venezuela Just Proved the Bitcoin Bull Case, And No One Is Paying Attention
Maduro used Tether to move 80% of Venezuela's oil revenue. Billions in sanctions evasion, settled on Tron since 2020.
Then the US made a phone call.
Tether froze the wallets.
Game over.
Everyone's focused on the arrest. The real story is the lesson every finance minister on earth just learned in real time:
Stable coins are a leash, not an escape.
If someone can freeze it, it isn't money. It doesn't solve sovereignty.
First principles:
USDT is dollar plumbing without SWIFT. Faster. Cheaper. Still has a CEO. Still has a compliance department. Still picks up when Washington calls.
This is why USDT adoption exploded, 71-year-old grandmothers in Caracas pay their HOA fees in tether now. But useful ≠ sovereign.
The entire value proposition for sanctions evasion just got publicly falsified.
Now do the game theory:
You're Iran. Russia. Any country hedging against dollar weaponization. You just watched Venezuela's "crypto solution" get shut off like a light switch.
Where do you put reserves now?
USDT? Compromised.
Yuan? Political strings.
Gold? Try settling $500M across borders in 10 minutes.
CBDCs? Same kill switch, government branding.
There's exactly one asset that clears final settlement without asking permission from anyone.
21 million units. No CEO. No freeze function. No phone number.
This is the ad Bitcoin never had to buy.
The most desperate, highest-stakes capital on earth just learned there's only one door.
Price doesn't reflect it yet.
It will.
🛑 Confiscating Russian assets to fund Ukraine? A declaration of war. Taking the money of one side and giving it to the other would drag the EU into the conflict. This must not happen. Thankfully, I am not the only one who sees it this way.
On va importer sans droits de douane 99000 tonnes de ça ! Du bœuf engraissé, traité aux hormones, dans des usines de 100 000 bêtes, « sans un brin d'herbe » et qui va atterrir dans nos assiettes
Le Mercosur c'est ça 😩
Revolut isn't telling you this.
8 of the 10 largest neobanks now use stablecoin rails internally for treasury settlement and cross-border payments.
When you send an "instant transfer" through their app, the backend is settling on public blockchain networks in under a second for fractions of a cent.
They don't call it crypto. They call it "instant."
The report notes Revolut, Wise, and multiple LATAM neobanks route internal liquidity through stablecoins without branding it that way.
The complexity of blockchain is abstracted away entirely.
Traditional wire: $45 fee, 3-5 days, $9,850 arrives on $10,000. Stablecoin rails: $0.50 fee, 30 seconds, $9,999.50 arrives.
The infrastructure transition already happened. The marketing just hasn't caught up.
Full report by @stablecoininfo
🚨SONY TO ACCEPT STABLECOIN PAYMENTS
Sony Group is reportedly preparing to launch a US dollar-backed stablecoin for digital games, subscriptions, and anime content as per Nikkei.