This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos felt different this year, and not just because Meta and Salesforce took over storefronts on the main promenade. AI dominated the conversation in a way that overshadowed traditional topics like climate change and global poverty, and the CEOs weren’t holding back. There was public criticism of trade policy, warnings about AI […]
Recent remarks from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have pointed toward the need for a single, unified blockchain for tokenized markets, and have intensified the focus on platforms capable of handling institutional-scale liquidity, compliance, and settlement. With its long track record in smart contracts, extensive developer ecosystem, and growing role in regulated financial products, Ethereum is now emerging as the most likely candidate to serve as the settlement layer for tokenized capital markets.
Why Asset Managers Prefer Familiar Infrastructure
In an X post, the Ethereum Daily shared a video in which BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made it clear that tokenization is necessary. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Fink said the financial system must move rapidly toward digitization, adding that a single, common blockchain could reduce corruption and improve transparency across the global markets.
While Fink did not name a specific network, the most plausible candidate could be ETH, based on BlackRock’s own initiatives and public statements that emphasized the role of ETH in asset tokenization. The firm has consistently highlighted ETH as a core platform for its on-chain strategy. Meanwhile, BlackRock launched its BUIDL tokenized money market fund directly on ETH, a product that has already grown to over $2 billion in total value locked. “There’s no second best,” Ethereum Daily noted.
In the staking space, Bitmine has turned Ethereum staking into a multi-billion-dollar business. An analyst known as Milk Road has revealed that the company now has 1.83 million ETH staked, worth roughly $6 million at current prices, and plans to scale that figure toward 4.2 million ETH over time. Over the past months, Bitmine Immersion Technologies Inc. (BMNR) has accounted for nearly 50% of all new ETH entering the staking queue.
Staking at this scale is important because it removes ETH from the liquid supply and locks it into long-term infrastructure rather than keeping it for short-term trading. When one player is willing to commit billions of dollars worth of ETH to staking, it reflects confidence in ETH’s future economic prospects. A lower liquid supply, combined with sustained network demand, will create structural pressure over time.
How Support Built Through Multiple Market Cycles
Analyst Milk Road has also highlighted that Ethereum is holding near a critical support zone around $3,000, hovering just above the lower boundary of its long-term rising structure, an area that has acted as a stress test for ETH throughout the cycle. Historically, when ETH drifts into this area, the market will need to decide whether the weakness is temporary or structural.
The $2,750 level remains the key line because it has repeatedly stopped downside pressure after macro-driven or narrative-driven pullbacks, making it a reliable floor for the broader trend. As long as ETH holds above that level, the broader multi-year uptrend will remain intact.
The CEO of stablecoin issuer Circle has weighed in on the importance of stablecoin rewards and why he believes the banking industry’s concerns about interest payments on these assets are “absurd.”
Circle CEO Rejects Banks’ Stablecoin Fears
Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Circle’s CEO, Jeremy Allaire, discussed banks’ growing concerns that paying interest on stablecoins poses a threat to the industry, calling the deposit flight narrative “totally absurd.”
The banking sector has expressed concerns about stablecoin rewards, arguing that interest payments will distort market dynamics and affect credit creation. In the US, banks have heavily criticized the GENIUS Act, claiming that it has loopholes that could pose risks to the financial system.
The executive rejected the sector’s general arguments, citing historical and practical reasons. He asserted that this exact argument has been historically used when new financial products, such as government money market funds, have emerged.
Notably, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan recently compared the digital assets to money market mutual funds, which require reserves to be held in short-term instruments, such as US Treasuries, reducing lending capacity in the system.
The executive told investors that the banking sector, small- and medium-sized businesses in particular, could face significant challenges if the US Congress does not prohibit interest-bearing stablecoins, as up to $6 trillion in deposits, or 30% to 35% of all US commercial bank deposits, could flow out of the banking system and into the stablecoin sector.
However, Allaire pointed out that, despite institutions claiming that financial products would “draw all the deposit base,” their growth has not “stopped the ability for lending to happen.”
The importance Of Rewards
Circle’s CEO also argued that stablecoins should not be singled out when rewards for other financial products exist and contribute to the system. “Those rewards (…) exist in every balance that you have with a credit card that you use. They exist around so many other financial products and services that we have,” he detailed.
“These rewards are actually very important,” Allaire continued. “They help with stickiness, they help with customer traction. They are not themselves like these huge monetary policy dampers.”
Most importantly, he pointed out that lending is moving away from the risk-taking of banks, with “a huge amount of lending is moving towards private credit.”
He cited a Wednesday WEF panel, in which a capital markets participant highlighted how the vast majority of GDP growth in the United States was “formed by capital market formation around junk bonds.”
“So private credit issuing junk bonds, capitalizing the build out of the American technology advancements, not bank credit,” the executive added.
Previously, Coinbase Institute shared a similar argument, affirming that “credit is evolving, not shrinking. Lending is shifting to private credit, fintech, and DeFi channels that don’t depend on deposits. Liquidity moves—it doesn’t vanish.”
Allaire concluded that “we want stablecoin money to be cash instrument money, prudentially supervised, very, very safe money. And then I think what we want to do is we want to build models for lending that build on top of stablecoins.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the World Economic Forum in Davos. (Screenshot via LinkedIn)
Bicycles for the mind. … Information at your fingertips. … Managers of infinite minds?
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella riffed on some famous lines from tech leaders past this week in an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and offered up his own trippy candidate to join the canon of computing metaphors.
Nadella traced the lineage in a conversation with former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
“Computers are like a bicycle for the mind” was the famous line from Apple’s Steve Jobs.
“Information at your fingertips” was Bill Gates’ classic Microsoft refrain back in the day.
And now? “All of us are going to be managers of infinite minds,” Nadella said. “And so if we have that as the theory, then the question is, what can we do with it?”
He was referring to AI agents — the autonomous software that can take on tasks, work through problems, and keep going while you sleep. Microsoft and others have been talking for the better part of a year now about people starting to oversee large fleets of them.
Nadella said it’s already reshaping how teams are structured. At Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, the company has merged design, program management, product management, and front-end engineering into a single new role: full-stack builders. Overall, he called it the biggest structural change to software teams he’s seen in a career that started at Microsoft in the 1990s.
“The jobs of the future are here,” Nadella said, putting his own spin on a famous line often attributed to sci-fi writer William Gibson. “They’re just not evenly distributed.”
Nadella’s comments came during a live stream for LinkedIn Premium members, hosted from Davos by LinkedIn VP and Editor in Chief Daniel Roth, after Sunak mentioned his two teenage daughters, and the world they’ll enter. Young people may not manage lots of people at age 20 or 21, he said, “but they will be managing a team of agents.”
Sunak was referencing an essay by Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti in Time.
The agentic shift, Argenti wrote, requires “moving from being a sole performer to an orchestra conductor” — your team now includes AI agents that “must be guided and supervised with the same approach you would apply to a new, junior colleague.”
Nadella agreed, saying “we do need a new theory of the mind” to navigate what’s coming, before he offered up his new metaphor about managing infinite minds.
In other remarks at Davos, Nadella made headlines with his warning that AI’s massive energy demands risk eroding its “social permission” unless it delivers tangible benefits in health, education, and productivity. Energy costs, he added, will decide the AI race’s winners, with GDP growth tied to cheap power for processing AI tokens.
Whether “infinite minds” catches on like “bicycles” and “fingertips” remains to be seen. But it’s definitely more psychedelic. And if this shift is stranger than what came before, maybe we do need a mind-expanding metaphor to make sense of it all.
A decade-old report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) is resurfacing in the crypto space, highlighting early recognition of Ripple and XRP’s potential in the banking sector. Analysts say the document illustrates how decentralized networks like Ripple may allow institutions to settle payments faster and more directly in the future.
WEF Spotlights Ripple For Settlement Case Study
A crypto market analyst identified as ‘SMQKE’ on X recently revived a 2015 WEF report, sparking fresh discussions in the crypto community. The document explores how traditional banks could interact with emerging payment technologies, and it specifically mentions the company as a system capable of transforming interbank settlement.
The WEF report revealed that, as alternative payment methods, such as decentralized networks, grow in popularity worldwide, banks have the opportunity to integrate them into their services. By adopting these technologies, institutions can make it easier for customers to move value in and out of non-traditional networks while also exploring new financial products. Ripple is cited as an example of a protocol that could serve as one of these alternative rails.
Beyond customer use, these networks can also improve how banks operate internally. By leveraging non-traditional networks, banks could streamline processes and offer smoother, faster products and services. Ripple’s protocol, for instance, enhances this process by enabling real-time settlement between banks, eliminating the need for traditional clearinghouses or correspondent banks.
A case study in the WEF report focuses on German-based Fidor Bank, an online full-service bank that implemented the payment firm for its internal settlement operations in 2014. According to the World Economic Forum, broader adoption of Ripple could enable other banks to settle payments instantly with one another. This early example demonstrates how the crypto payments company was already seen as a practical tool for improving banking efficiency.
Though the WEF report is over a decade old, its insights remain relevant as financial institutions continue exploring blockchain-based payment solutions. Notably, this is not the first time the World Economic Forum has mentioned Ripple in its reports. In its May 2025 report, the international organization highlighted Ripple and the XRP Ledger (XRPL) as key technologies in the future of asset tokenization.
How XRP Fits In The Bank Settlement Scheme
As the native token of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), XRP is designed to serve as a digital bridge for fast, low-cost cross-border payments between financial institutions. By leveraging XRPL, Ripple enables banks and payment providers to settle transactions in seconds rather than days.
Due to its high throughput and ability to handle large transaction volumes with minimal effort, the XRP Ledger appears well-suited for the demands of modern banking. Its efficiency and speed have led many to compare Ripple to SWIFT, the long-standing messaging network used by banks worldwide for international transfers.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei unloaded on both the administration and U.S. chip companies over plans to sell to China. The criticism was particularly notable because one of those chipmakers, Nvidia, is a major partner and investor in Anthropic.
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