US just dropped a bombshell on ASML. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned executives that America has evidence a restricted EUV lithography machine was diverted to China, and accused the company of not acting in good faith on export controls.

Floating AI data centers are heading to the open ocean. Portland startup Panthalassa has raised $140M in a Peter Thiel-led round at a near-$1B valuation. The wave-powered “lollipop” platforms generate electricity from ocean waves and use seawater for cooling. Commercial units targeted for 2027.

Rowan Jacobsen highlighted on JRE how outdated U.S. sunscreen rules lag behind Europe. Today, the FDA approved bemotrizinol, the first new active ingredient in over 20 years.

Illinois is now the most hostile state in America for bitcoin and digital asset businesses. It didn't happen overnight. In August 2025, Governor Pritzker signed two laws creating a BitLicense-style regulatory framework for digital asset businesses and strict rules for bitcoin ATMs. The industry actually worked with the state on those bills. The Digital Chamber said the final products "reflected industry input and numerous compromises." Not ideal, but workable. Then on June 16, 2026, Pritzker signed a $55.9 billion state budget with the Digital Asset Tax Act buried inside. It was slipped in overnight with zero stakeholder outreach. Starting January 2027, Illinois will impose a 0.2% tax on the gross value of any digital asset exchanged, transferred, or stored for customers. No profit required. No capital gain. Any brokered digital asset activity triggers the tax. The law's treatment of peer-to-peer and self-custody transfers remains unclear. Violations carry felony charges. Move $1 million through a bank wire and Illinois takes nothing. Move that same $1 million as bitcoin and the state takes $2,000. There is no comparable tax on stocks, bonds, or any traditional financial instrument anywhere in the country. The reason is straightforward. Illinois carries a 197.2% unfunded pension liability, the worst in America. Its projected budget deficit hits $3.5 billion in FY2027. The rate of businesses leaving the state has tripled since the pandemic. Caterpillar, Boeing, Citadel, and Tyson have all relocated. Pritzker also paused data center tax incentives effective July 2026, cutting off bitcoin miners from state support. The new tax is expected to raise roughly $60 million, a rounding error on a $56 billion budget. Illinois is doing what fiscally desperate governments always do. When the tax base shrinks and obligations grow, they find new things to tax. Digital assets are an easy target because the industry is young, the voter base is small, and the regulatory framework is still forming.

Anthropic is negotiating with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to get its Mythos and Fable AI models back online after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them last week. Talks are reportedly going well. Anthropic is pledging to improve communication with the White House and resolve security concerns faster going forward. No timeline for when the models come back. The irony remains thick. Dario Amodei spent years arguing the government should have the power to shut down AI models it deems dangerous. When they did exactly that, Anthropic dismissed the security flaw as a "narrow" problem. That didn't go over well. "Had Anthropic taken it seriously and, rather than dismissing it as isolated, moved to fix or pause access, this never would have happened," a senior administration official said.

Cheat code: 21 million.

Anthropic just released Phase 2 of Project Fetch. They gave their latest AI model a robotic dog and told it to figure out how to control it. No human help. No robotics training data. Just raw intelligence applied to a physical machine. Claude Opus 4.7 completed every task roughly 20x faster than the best human team that had AI assistance less than a year ago. It wrote 10x less code and got most of it right on the first try. None of this came from targeted robotics training. It emerged from general model scaling. The AI got better at controlling robots because it got better at thinking. That is a fundamentally different dynamic than anything we have seen in automation before. Anthropic keeps seeing the same pattern across domains. First AI helps humans do the task. Then humans help AI do the task. Then AI does the task alone. They saw it in cybersecurity. Now they are seeing it in physical robotics. The model still failed the final challenge of precisely nudging a beach ball to a target. Real-time perception and adjustment is still out of reach. But the gap is closing fast, and it is closing as a byproduct of general intelligence, not domain-specific engineering. Less than two years ago the AI could not even connect to the robot. Now it programs the robot 20x faster than the humans who built the experiment.

Tether Wallet just added Lightning Network support.

AnthropicAI just released Phase 2 of Project Fetch. They gave their latest AI model a robotic dog and told it to figure out how to control it. No human help. No robotics training data. Just raw intelligence applied to a physical machine. Claude Opus 4.7 completed every task roughly 20x faster than the best human team that had AI assistance less than a year ago. It wrote 10x less code and got most of it right on the first try. None of this came from targeted robotics training. It emerged from general model scaling. The AI got better at controlling robots because it got better at thinking. That is a fundamentally different dynamic than anything we have seen in automation before. Anthropic keeps seeing the same pattern across domains. First AI helps humans do the task. Then humans help AI do the task. Then AI does the task alone. They saw it in cybersecurity. Now they are seeing it in physical robotics. The model still failed the final challenge of precisely nudging a beach ball to a target. Real-time perception and adjustment is still out of reach. But the gap is closing fast, and it is closing as a byproduct of general intelligence, not domain-specific engineering. Less than two years ago the AI could not even connect to the robot. Now it programs the robot 20x faster than the humans who built the experiment.

BlackRock files what appears to be the final amendment for its Bitcoin Premium Income ETF ($BITA) with a fee of 65 basis points. Eric Balchunas says it's lower than the two largest covered call ETFs (95bp and 99bp) and expects a launch soon. BlackRock is racing to beat Goldman to market, who is targeting around July 1.

Seven years ago today Facebook announced Libra. Congressional hearings, mass defections, a rebrand to Diem, and a fire sale later, the project was dead.

"Are you happy with the way the Clarity Act is turning out?" Jamie Dimon: "No. It allows them to effectively pay interest on deposits without the protection they should have. The banks will not accept it that way. The ABA, the small banks, the credit unions, not just the big guys." Then on Coinbase's Armstrong: "He's full of shit."

Europa is a new decentralized VPN marketplace built on Nostr and paid exclusively with Bitcoin. It launched this week from , the developer behind the Cashu ecash protocol. The concept is simple but the implications are significant. Instead of trusting a single VPN company with a global server fleet, one privacy policy, and one monthly subscription, Europa lets independent VPN operators list their servers on an open directory. Each operator runs their own infrastructure in their own jurisdiction, writes their own no-log policy, and sets their own price. Users browse the directory, pick an operator, and pay them directly over Lightning or Cashu ecash. The marketplace never touches the money and takes no cut. After payment, the operator delivers a standard WireGuard or OpenVPN config file. No proprietary app, no custom client. Users import it into the same open-source VPN software they would use anywhere else and connect. When the bundle runs out, the tunnel goes quiet. No auto-renewal, no card on file, no surprise charges. The reputation system runs on Nostr. Instead of editorial ratings or paid placements, recommendations and complaints come from people in your social graph. Sign in with a Nostr identity and the directory weights endorsements from accounts you already follow. If Nostr is not your thing, ignore the feature entirely and start with the smallest bundle from an unfamiliar operator to limit your risk. The entire protocol is built on public Nostr events. Operator listings, reputation data, and payment coordination all live on the Nostr network. The Europa website is just one viewer of that data, not the source. Other directories can exist. If Europa makes bad editorial choices, users can leave without losing access to the underlying marketplace. The protocol spec is CC0 (public domain) and the code is MIT licensed. What makes this meaningful is the architecture. Traditional VPN providers consolidate trust into one company in one jurisdiction. If that company gets acquired, served with a warrant, or breached, every customer is exposed at once. Europa distributes that trust across independent operators. Users can spread their traffic across multiple operators they actually chose rather than trusting a single brand to make every decision for them. Anyone with a server can become an operator. Anyone with a Lightning wallet can become a customer. No accounts required for either side.

Ross Ulbricht and wife Caroline announce they are expecting their first child.

Trump on growing fears of AI: "I'll tell you, AI has been amazing, because right now we have more jobs, more people working right now in the United States by far, than we ever had before."

The Japanese yen just hit a 23-month low. Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio sits at 237%, the highest of any major economy, and the Bank of Japan owns over 46% of all outstanding government bonds. The BOJ just raised rates to 1% days ago, the highest since 1995, but it hasn't been enough. The rate differential between Japan and the US keeps crushing the yen, which has lost roughly 45% of its value against the dollar since 2020. The BOJ is trapped. Raise rates further and risk blowing up a bond market where you're the largest holder. Hold steady and watch the currency continue to melt. You can suppress interest rates or defend your currency, but you can't do both forever.

Trump just announced Intel and Apple are teaming up to build chips on American soil.

The Fed just dropped its first rulemaking under the GENIUS Act, a joint proposal requiring stablecoin issuers to run full KYC/AML on their customers.