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U.S. regulator says 24/7 trading is great for crypto, may not be fit for other sectors

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U.S. regulator says 24/7 trading is great for crypto, may not be fit for other sectors

As global trading trends race toward 24-hour, no-days-off markets, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission argued that it may be fine for the new blockchain-native players, but that expanded hours might not be appropriate for some of the traditional markets, the derivatives watchdog said in a Friday letter issued to the wide waterfront of firms it regulates.

The advisory — coming on the same day that the agency gave a consequential green light to native crypto platforms offering perpetual futures contracts — marks what may be a growing divide between the traditional firms and the new entrants.

“Because of inherent differences between underlying markets, switching to 24/7 trading and clearing may not currently be suitable for all asset classes,” the agency wrote to its regulated exchanges and clearing operations.

“The ability to engage in, and maintain, markets on a 24/7 basis has been, in part, paralleled by evolutions in market technologies, such as blockchain networks and decentralized infrastructure, alternate forms of collateral, including stablecoins and crypto assets, and market accessibility through smartphones and associated software applications,” the CFTC noted. “With this evolution, an increasing number of platforms, with a growing list of tradeable products, are providing 24/7 access to retail and institutional participants.”However, it said, “other derivatives markets, such as in agricultural products, may be less

suited for 24/7 trading due to their unique customer bases, regional nature, and the specialized

trading and hedging practices in those markets.”

The derivatives watchdog’s primary concern is the potential for market abuse in less-observed, off-peak activity, contending that “extending trading hours to a 24/7 schedule for certain markets or products could potentially result in reduced liquidity, increased volatility, widened bid/ask spreads, and, as a result, create greater opportunities for market manipulation.”

The platforms are responsible for policing themselves as the first line of defense and “should implement additional compliance measures designed to address the unique challenges associated with expanded trading hours.”

The advisory was meant to lay out the considerations for firms looking to expand trading hours, and the CFTC urged them to communicate their plans to the agency.

The current chief of the agency, Chairman Mike Selig, has made it one of his leading priorities to embrace new technologies including crypto and prediction markets. His enthusiasm for the advances — tracking the orders and encouragement from President Donald Trump — has led to a surge in crypto policy work meant to clear a regulatory path for the industry.

One of the crypto-native firms supervised by the CFTC, Coinbase, said in a blog post on its website on Friday that it’s trying to rebuild traditional financial services atop crypto infrastructure.

“Equities, futures, and prediction markets all operate 24/7 on our platform,” the company said, noting the agency’s new allowance of global options and perps through one of its CFTC-regulated affiliates. “Today’s announcement adds the largest and most liquid category of global crypto trading to that lineup.”



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‘There will be no CBDC’ – U.S Treasury rejects Fed’s digital dollar, backs stablecoins

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'There will be no CBDC' - U.S Treasury rejects Fed’s digital dollar, backs stablecoins


The President Donald Trump administration has ruled out the Federal Reserve’s central bank digital currency (CBDC).

In fact, the Senate recently passed legislation banning CBDC until 2030, citing state surveillance fears. 

In a recent press conference, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reinforced the same sentiment and noted, 

This Administration’s been very clear. There will be no Central Bank Digital Currency, which I think would be the first step toward tracking…so we’ve taken that off the table.

Bessent added that they’ve focused on stablecoin law and the CLARITY Act to bring back crypto investments into the U.S., calling it the “important thing.” 

Status of the global CBDC race

For the unfamiliar, CBDCs are like stablecoins but issued by the state rather than private firms like Circle or Tether.

Supporters argue that this is the best way to ensure monetary sovereignty and ease of controlling money supply, just as they currently do with physical fiat to deal with inflation. 

However, some proposed features like the backdoor freezing and limited expiries to prevent hoarding have raised concerns about state surveillance. 

The debate has now devolved into whether central banks should explore wholesale CBDCs (high-value payments between governments and major financial institutions) or retail CBDCs that compete with stablecoins. 

Given the widespread adoption of stablecoins, wholesale CBDCs for cross-border payments between major banks and governments make more sense.

In fact, most central banks are actively exploring this wholesale payments frontier via Project Agora, which is backed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). 

It’s not yet clear whether CBDCs will be involved when the live tests are done. However, as of late 2025, 91% of central banks were exploring CBDCs.  

As of 2026, Kenya, the Philippines, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the U.S. have cancelled their CBDC plans. It’s worth pointing out that, however, the U.S. may rethink its CBDC project after 2030. 

CBDC
Source: Atlantic Council 

Only four countries have launched their CBDC, including Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, according to CBDC Tracker data. The rest are either under research or in the pilot phase (like China’s e-CNY and India’s e-rupee).  

Final Summary

  • U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent rejected any CBDC plans under the Trump administration, noting that they’ll focus on stablecoin law.  
  • About 100 countries are exploring CBDC either at the research, development, or pilot stage. 



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Arla-DMK merger to proceed after EU green light

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Arla-DMK merger to proceed after EU green light


Denmark-headquartered Arla Foods and Germany’s DMK Group are moving forward with their plans to merge after securing EU approval for the deal.

The two cooperatives confirmed receiving the green light in a joint statement after the European Commission “unconditionally approved” the deal yesterday (28 May).

Brussels concluded the transaction would raise no competition concerns in the European Economic Area (EEA).

The merger, first announced in April last year, is set to take effect on 1 June. Until an expected two-year integration process is completed, the companies will continue to operate as two independent entities.

Arla Foods’ chair Jan Toft Nørgaard said: “This is a landmark day for our cooperatives, for the next generation of dairy farmers and for European food production.

“We can move forward together to secure the necessary scale, long-term economic resilience and investment capability required to contribute to shaping a food sector with a reduced impact on climate and nature.”

The merger will create “the largest dairy cooperative in Europe”, bringing together 11,200 dairy farmers across seven European countries.

The combined group will have a milk pool of 19.4 billion kg a year and pro-forma revenue of more than €20bn ($23.2bn).

It will operate under the Arla name and employ around 28,800 people globally.

The companies said the tie-up is intended to secure “stable dairy farming and production” in Europe and “strengthen their ability” to deliver value to people worldwide via global dairy brands.

They described the combination as “vital” for European food security amid “geopolitical and economic shifts”.

DMK Group CEO Ingo Müller said: “The merger will sharpen our technological edge, accelerate innovation, and open new opportunities for growth and collaboration, powered by our shared brands, deep category expertise, and the complementary strengths of DMK and Arla.

“With a collaborative culture and a strengthened position in our markets, we will be even more a pillar of strength in ensuring the secure supply of food for people in Europe and globally.”

The merged cooperative will be headquartered in Viby J in Denmark.

Nørgaard will serve as chair, and Arla Foods’ chief executive Peder Tuborgh as CEO. Once the integration process is completed, DMK’s Müller will join Arla’s executive management team as executive vice president.

Meanwhile, both co-ops have been investing to expand production in recent months.

Earlier this month, Arla Foods’ venture in Australia struck a deal to acquire Australian cottage cheese producer Brancourts.

The company also announced a €300m ($353.5m) investment this year to set up a new facility in Sweden to increase cheese production.

DMK Group recently invested around €55m to “significantly” expand its dairy plant in Edewecht, Germany.

In 2025, the German firm generated revenue of €5.3bn, up from €5.1bn a year earlier. However, the company’s net profit slipped 2.4% to €24m.

The same year, Arla Foods posted revenue of €15.1bn versus €13.8bn a year earlier. Net profit rose to €415m from €401m.

“Arla-DMK merger to proceed after EU green light” was originally created and published by Just Food, a GlobalData owned brand.

 


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Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI with a record $965 billion valuation, says Mythos is coming soon

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Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI with a record $965 billion valuation, says Mythos is coming soon

Anthropic is having a busy week. On Thursday, the San Francisco-based AI lab announced it had raised $65 billion in a new funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup in the world.

On the same day, it also shipped Claude Opus 4.8, a new AI model that Anthropic says is less likely to deceive users or cooperate with misuse than its predecessors. In the same announcement, Anthropic said it expects to bring its Mythos-class models to all customers “in the coming weeks.”

Mythos, the existence of which was first reported by Fortune in March, is notable for its coding and cyber capabilities, including the ability to find vulnerabilities in existing software and chain these vulnerabilities together to execute sophisticated cyber attacks. The model has raised concerns that it could allow hackers to easily compromise the networks and software that control critical infrastructure, from financial systems to electric grids, and Anthropic has so far allowed only a select group of users to access the model in order to find vulnerabilities in their own software and patch them. It said it would not release the model more widely until it had developed safeguards to make it more difficult for hackers to exploit its capabilities for malicious purposes.

The spate of news comes as Anthropic races toward one of the most anticipated IPOs of the year, with the company reportedly quietly working on public market preparations even as it continues to raise at record-breaking private valuations. 

In February, Anthropic was valued at $380 billion after closing its Series G. Since then, the company has gained significant momentum: it has seen a surge in consumer users, widespread adoption of its coding tool, Claude Code, by businesses, and the debut of its powerful Mythos model in a limited preview. The company’s enterprise sales growth has been particularly strong. By May, the company said its annualized run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion, up from just $10 billion at the end of 2025—a rate of growth that is unprecedented for a company of this size.

Anthropic’s most recent funding round, its Series H, was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN co-leading. Of the $65 billion total, $15 billion represents previously committed investment from hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon.

The numbers are impressive even by the skyrocketing valuations of the current AI boom—it also leapfrogs rival OpenAI’s most recent valuation of $852 billion, set when the company closed its own record funding round in March.

Anthropic’s CFO Krishna Rao said the new funding would help the company serve the new “historic demand” the company was experiencing. The company has previously acknowledged it was struggling to serve the new demand for Claude, telling Fortune that its computing infrastructure had been stretched to meet the unprecedented growth, particularly at peak hours. The company has signed new compute deals since then, including a reported $1.25 billion a month agreement with Elon Musk’s xAI running through May 2029.

Opus 4.8

On Thursday, Anthropic also released a new frontier model from its Opus tier, just over a month since it released Opus 4.7. Anthropic’s own evaluations found that Opus 4.8 shows rates of misaligned behavior (including deception and cooperation with misuse) that are “substantially lower than Opus 4.7” and comparable to Claude Mythos Preview, the company’s most advanced model.

The company says 4.8 is around four times less likely than 4.7 to let flaws in its own code pass unremarked—possibly a response to recent users complaints about sloppy code generated by Claude Code—and that it “reaches new highs on our measures of prosocial traits like supporting user autonomy and acting in the user’s best interest.”

On benchmark evaluations from Cursor, Artificial Analysis, and Anthropic’s own Super-Agent benchmark the model outperforms its predecessor, 4.7, on agentic coding and long-horizon tasks.

However, the reception from users and other evaluators has been mixed.

Andon Labs found that 4.8 performance was worse than 4.7 on certain tests of business task and on so-called “adversarial benchmarks” which are designed to probe the model’s weaknesses rather than its strengths, characterising the model as more cautious and “scared of getting caught.” Some users online have also complained about the model being restrained and combative, refusing to comply with even straightforward and benign requests.

Pricing for the new model is the same $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens as for its predecessor 4.7. But “fast mode”—a different API configuration that generates tokens from Anthropic’s Claude Opus models much faster, but which also cost users more per token—is now three times cheaper than it was for 4.7, which may soften the overall cost for high-volume users.



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Mass deployment of AI agents is a disaster waiting to happen, says CertiK CEO

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Mass deployment of AI agents is a disaster waiting to happen, says CertiK CEO

The global rush to deploy autonomous AI agents across the internet, enterprise networks and consumer applications is creating a catastrophic security debt, according to the chief of blockchain security auditor Certik.

While corporations ambitiously market these tools as productivity miracles, the crude reality is that it can be a very, very risky thing to do. Unisolated, unvetted AI agents are a massive security disaster waiting to happen, Ronghui Gu, the co-founder and CEO of CertiK, told CoinDesk.

Gu warned that users are potentially exposing their most sensitive files, local credentials and money accounts to autonomous systems that can be easily manipulated, hijacked and openly scammed.

“Right now, agents are no longer just answering questions in a chat window,” Gu told CoinDesk on the heels of CertiK’s landmark deep-dive report into widespread agent infrastructure. “They are beginning to call external tools, read local files, trigger workflows, and interact with financial infrastructure. But if you do not isolate the execution environment and scan these tools first, you are handing a compromised identity broad internal access to your entire network.”

The fundamental flaw in the current AI agent boom is a mistaken trust model, according to Gu.

Charles Hoskinson, founder and CEO of Cardano’s Input Output, said that by 2035 they will become more relevant than humans on the internet. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, recently said “very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions” and Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao, predicted they “will make one million times more payments than humans.”

Ultimate inside threat

Gu said many popular, open-source AI applications are built under the assumption that because they run locally on a user’s computer or connect via standard chat apps like WhatsApp, they are safe from external threats.

The reality is entirely the opposite, he noted. The moment a user grants an AI agent permission to read local system storage, view execution histories or manage personal email and business database credentials, that agent becomes the ultimate inside threat.

CertiK’s recent analysis of early-state, rapidly growing agent structures uncovered a staggering accumulation of security vulnerabilities, including hundreds of critical security advisories, unpatched common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and other massive exposures of local credentials and session memories resulting from completely inconsistent boundary checks.

More alarming yet is how easily these autonomous systems can be completely redirected at the reasoning layer without a single line of malicious code ever being written, Gu emphasized.

Through basic “prompt injection” attacks, a bad actor can embed hidden natural language instructions inside a benign webpage, a PDF document, or an incoming email, he added.

When the unisolated AI agent reads that file to process a task for the user, it fails to separate trusted system commands from the untrusted external data, Gu explained. The agent then silently overwrites its original rules, obeys the malicious instruction, and can be forced to exfiltrate data or trigger unauthorized fund transfers.

Hyperfast exploits

Gu revealed that CertiK discovered hundreds of malicious skills, fake installers, and lookalike dependency packages sitting directly on open agent utility hubs. Because these malicious plug-ins use standard natural language to subtly influence the agent’s behavior and change its goals, they completely bypass legacy, signature-based antivirus software.

“The scam apps use natural language to influence behavior, making them totally resistant to traditional antivirus scans,” Gu explained. “And right now, it is even easier to scam the machine than it is to scam a human.”

In what Gu describes as a bizarre evolution of financial crime, CertiK’s telemetry has observed an explosion of onchain, automated scams that run for only 10 minutes or a few hours before completely vanishing.

These hyperfast, ephemeral exploits are specifically designed by hackers to target and scam other autonomous AI trading bots and automated agent systems, executing machine-on-machine financial drainage before any human even realizes a compromise has occurred.

Gu states that the software engineering industry must completely abandon its reliance on trust-based interactions and move immediately toward an isolated, “Zero Trust” architecture where every command and dependency is continuously verified.



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Down 30% From Its Highs, SoFi Is Speeding Toward Aggressive Long-Term Profits

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Down 30% From Its Highs, SoFi Is Speeding Toward Aggressive Long-Term Profits


Quick Read

  • SoFi Technologies (SOFI) reported Q1 2026 revenue of $1.10B beating consensus by 5%, with net income more than doubling, loan originations hitting a record highs, and membership growing 35% as share price falls, creating an opportunity.

  • SoFi’s deposit-funded model, expanding network effects, and management guidance for 30%+ adjusted revenue growth through 2028 contrasts sharply with its beaten-down valuation, creating a disconnect between accelerating fundamentals and depressed price.

  • Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SoFi Technologies didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

When a high-quality fintech name retraces sharply while its fundamentals accelerate, the gap between price and performance becomes the story. SoFi closed Friday at $16.97, down 35.18% year to date from a December close of $26.18, even as the company posted record loan originations and triple-digit net income growth last month. For retail investors scanning headlines, that disconnect is the entire reason to look at fintech disruptors trading under $20 right now.

With that in mind, here is one stock under $20 that the data suggests has been mispriced against its long-term earnings trajectory.

SoFi Technologies runs an all-in-one digital finance platform spanning lending, banking, brokerage, credit cards, crypto, and the Galileo technology stack that powers other fintechs.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SoFi Technologies didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

At $16.97, SoFi sits well below the $32.73 52-week high and just above the $16.70 50-day moving average. The $21 analyst consensus price target implies a meaningful step up from here, and the stock already rebounded 8.43% in the past week, hinting that the post-earnings flush has found a floor.

The fundamentals support that view. Q1 2026 revenue hit $1.10 billion, beating consensus by nearly 5%, with EPS of $0.12 meeting expectations. Net income jumped 134.45% year over year to $166.73 million, operating income climbed 150.12%, and adjusted EBITDA reached $339.9 million at a 31% margin. Loan originations set an all-time record at $12.18 billion, up 68% year over year. The forward P/E sits around 27, which is reasonable for a business guiding to roughly 30% adjusted net revenue growth in 2026.

The bull case is straightforward. SoFi has evolved into a deposit-funded digital bank with $40.24 billion in deposits funding over 90% of liabilities, a 48 basis point cost-of-funds tailwind, and a Galileo technology platform serving roughly 133 million global accounts. Members grew 35% to 14.7 million, products rose 39%, and 43% of new products are now opened by existing members, a clear network-effect signal. New initiatives like the SoFiUSD stablecoin, the Mastercard settlement partnership, and Big Business Banking extend the platform further. CEO Anthony Noto framed it directly: “We had an excellent Q1 delivering another quarter of durable growth and strong returns.” Management’s medium-term targets call for at least 30% compounded adjusted revenue growth and 38-42% EPS CAGR through 2028.

The risks are real and worth respecting. Technology Platform revenue fell 27% on a large client departure, personal loan charge-offs ticked up to 3.03% from 2.80% sequentially, and net interest margin compressed 63 basis points. With a beta of 2.13, expect more chop. None of that derails a business compounding revenue and members at 30%-plus.

For investors willing to hold through volatility, SoFi under $20 looks like a long-duration growth story trading at a cyclical discount.

The Bottom Line

SoFi’s drawdown reflects genuine concerns about Technology Platform softness, credit normalization, and macro uncertainty. At the same time, a stock under $20 with accelerating earnings, expanding margins, and a deposit-funded balance sheet deserves a closer look than a quick scroll past the ticker. Do your own research, size positions against your own risk tolerance, and weigh the long-term compounding story against the near-term volatility the chart has already shown you.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SoFi Technologies didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.



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