Stablecoin payments company RedotPay delayed a planned $1 billion U.S. IPO to deal with legal issues, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing people familiar with the decision.
The listing, initially planned for this year, is unlikely to take place before 2027, the people told the financial news organization.
“Our strategy continues to focus on global regulatory compliance and business growth,” a RedotPay spokesperson told CoinDesk via Telegram. “This week we obtained a money transmitter license in the U.S. We are preparing to launch our product in the U.S.”
The spokesperson declined to comment on the IPO plan, which emerged in February. Hong Kong-based RedotPay is said to have tapped JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Jeffries for the potential listing.
RedotPay, which describes itself as the world’s largest stablecoin payment card issuer, faces a $470 million lawsuit lodged by Binance in Hong Kong alleging that it poached roughly 470,000 users when both firms had an agreement. Under the accord, the crypto exchange allowed its customers to use Binance Pay funds on RedotPay to convert crypto to fiat currency. Binance filed a parallel case in Singapore.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
Subtraction has a ceiling: once you’ve automated the obvious, you’re left with a cheaper business, not a more valuable one.
Agents scale your execution and your blind spots equally — the more they do, the more your judgment has to be worth.
Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.
I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.
The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.
But subtraction has a ceiling, and you hit it faster than you expect. Once the obvious tasks are automated, savings flatten and you are left with a business that is cheaper to run and no more valuable than it was before. Worse, you have trained yourself to see your company as a pile of tasks to be eliminated rather than a set of judgments only you can make.
The founders pulling ahead are running a different play. Microsoft studied AI users this year and found that the most effective ones were not the people completing more tasks faster. They were the people who stopped asking what tasks define their job and started asking what outcomes they were now positioned to drive. The agents handle the mechanics. The human moves up the stack to intent, taste, and judgment.
That is not a soft distinction. It is the entire game.
Automation raises the stakes on judgment; it does not remove them.
Here is the part the cost-cutting crowd misses. The more work your agents execute, the more expensive your mistakes in judgment become. A bad decision used to ship at human speed, caught by the three people it passed through on the way out. A bad decision handed to an agent ships at machine speed, across every channel, before anyone blinks.
You do not get to delegate the judgment. You get to delegate the labor — and then you are more accountable for the judgment than before, because there is no longer a layer of humans between your intent and the market.
This is why founders who treat agents as a license to disengage are setting a trap for themselves. They are scaling their own blind spots. An agent will execute a flawed strategy with perfect efficiency and total confidence. It will never walk into your office and say this feels wrong.
What to automate, and what to guard.
The discipline is not complicated, but it requires resisting the pressure to automate by default.
Automate the mechanics. Research, transcription, data retrieval, first drafts, lead enrichment, scheduling — the repeatable workflows that drain hours and require no taste. Start with one workflow, give it narrow permissions, keep a human approval checkpoint, and measure what actually changes over thirty days. The teams that win here keep the stack small and the workflow documented before adding complexity. Stable systems beat sleek demos.
Guard the judgment. The decisions about what your company stands for, which customers you will not serve, when the data is telling you something the model cannot see, what tradeoff is worth making and what line you will not cross. These are not inefficiencies to be optimized away. They are the reason your business exists rather than a competitor’s. Microsoft’s own data names the limit clearly: agents still fall short on tasks requiring deep empathy, emotional intelligence, and nuanced social understanding. That is not a temporary gap. That is your job description.
The strategic move in 2026 is to use agents to buy back the hours you were spending on mechanics, and then to spend those hours on the judgment work you were too busy to do well. Most founders will do the first half and pocket the time as savings. The ones who compound will reinvest it.
Automation is becoming a baseline, not an advantage. When every business in your category can deploy the same agents at the same cost, the agents stop being a differentiator. What remains scarce is exactly what cannot be automated: the quality of your judgment, the clarity of your intent, the taste with which you decide what is worth doing at all.
So by all means, deploy the agents. Cut the busywork. Reclaim the hours. But do not mistake a cheaper company for a stronger one. The founders who win the next few years will not be the ones who automated the most. They will be the ones who automated everything except the thinking — and then got dramatically better at the thinking.
That is the asset no agent can run while you sleep. Make sure you are still the one holding it.
Key Takeaways
Subtraction has a ceiling: once you’ve automated the obvious, you’re left with a cheaper business, not a more valuable one.
Agents scale your execution and your blind spots equally — the more they do, the more your judgment has to be worth.
Let me be clear about where I stand. AI agents are real, and they are not hype. The market has stopped arguing about it. When AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Databricks, and the major consulting firms all describe agents in nearly identical terms — systems with goals, memory, planning and autonomy — you are looking at market structure, not a marketing cycle.
I run a data and AI consultancy. I deploy these systems for Fortune 500 clients. I am not here to tell you to wait. I am here to tell you that the question almost everyone is asking is the wrong one.
The dominant pitch for AI agents is subtraction. Cut the support team. Cut the schedulers. Cut the content drafters. Replace four roles with a digital worker that runs while you sleep. The math is seductive because it is real in the short term — a solo operator genuinely can offload lead qualification, invoice checking, meeting transcription and first-draft copy to systems that cost a fraction of a salary.
Hyperliquid [HYPE] recently showed strong upside momentum after establishing $53 as support.
The altcoin then climbed to a local high of $57. At press time, HYPE traded near $56.89, down 0.32% daily. However, heavy whale selling threatened the emerging recovery.
How much HYPE did the whale sell?
Although HYPE showed relative strength, some high-net-worth holders continued reducing their positions.
Two weeks earlier, the whale sold 1.03 million HYPE worth $57.44 million.
Across both transactions, the whale sold 1.95 million HYPE worth approximately $110.46 million. Even after those sales, the address held 969,595 HYPE worth $55.5 million.
These transfers may reflect profit-taking as Hyperliquid [HYPE] recovered from its recent decline. However, the wallet’s future intentions remained unknown.
On top of that, exchange activity showed broader selling pressure.
CoinGlass data showed that Spot Netflow remained positive throughout the past week. It stood near $7.19 million at press time.
Source: CoinGlass
Positive Spot Netflow suggested that more HYPE entered exchanges than left them. That exchange supply could intensify selling pressure if holders moved tokens there to sell.
Therefore, active sellers may limit HYPE’s recovery despite its improving price structure.
Can HYPE reclaim $60?
Even so, HYPE’s bullish structure appeared to strengthen.
The Positive Directional Indicator [+DI] stood near 21, while the Negative Directional Indicator [-DI] held around 15. The +DI also remained above the Average Directional Index [ADX]. This setup suggested that buyers held the directional advantage.
Source: TradingView
Additionally, the MACD remained negative but moved upward. This indicated that bearish momentum had weakened. Together, the indicators supported the possibility of further upside. A sustained recovery could help HYPE reclaim $60.
However, continued whale selling could disrupt the rebound. Renewed pressure may instead push HYPE toward its $53 support.
Final Summary
A Hyperliquid whale sold another 923,743 HYPE worth $53.02 million. The whale’s combined sales reached 1.95 million HYPE worth approximately $110.46 million.
A sustained recovery could lift HYPE toward $60, while renewed selling may trigger a $53 retest.
Stride (NYSE:LRN) walked into its August 4 fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call with a brand-new face running the company. Robert E. Knowling Jr., a Stride board member since 2018, was named CEO just days before the call, stepping in to lead an online education company that grew revenue 4.7% for the year and served roughly 244,000 students. The timing puts fresh leadership in charge right as the next enrollment season kicks off, and it leaves investors weighing genuinely strong numbers against a stock the market has already priced with real doubt.
Stride (LRN) Just Got A New CEO. What Happens Next?
Bull Case: The Career Learning Engine Keeps Revving
Fiscal 2026 revenue reached $2.518 billion, up 4.7% from the prior year, while adjusted EBITDA climbed 8.2% to $617.6 million and adjusted EPS came in at $8.33. The standout was career learning, Stride’s middle and high school career-focused programs, where revenue jumped 19% to $1.04 billion as enrollments grew 14% to 110,000 students. That segment is expanding far faster than the company overall, and it is where management is putting its growth story.
Capital returns back that story up. Stride repurchased about $189 million of stock during the year, extended its buyback authorization to October 31, 2027, and still has roughly $311 million left under that program, backed by $1.034 billion in cash and marketable securities. Knowling himself has run companies before, including taking COVAD Communications public, and told investors he intends to actively consider more opportunistic buybacks once Stride’s trading window reopens at the end of October.
Bear Case: The Other Half Of The Business Is Shrinking
General education, Stride’s larger segment by revenue, moved in the opposite direction. Revenue fell 2% to $1.42 billion, and enrollments dropped 2.5% to 134,000 students. Part of that softness showed up in Texas, where the Roscoe Independent School District chose not to renew its contract for Stride’s Lone Star Online Academy, even as the company works to place affected families in its other programs. Profitability also took a hit: gross margin slipped 140 basis points to 37.8% as the company absorbed costs tied to new technology platforms, and free cash flow declined by $17.8 million to $355 million.
Management’s own tone on the year ahead carried caution, too. Because Stride moderated in-year enrollment growth during fiscal 2026, the first quarter of fiscal 2027 will face a tougher comparison, and applications were tracking slightly behind last year’s pace even as conversion rates and re-registration activity improved. Stock compensation and the tax rate are both expected to tick up next year as well.
What The Market Is Pricing In
Hedge fund interest in Stride is building, with the number of funds holding a position rising from 43 to 47 in the most recent quarter. Short interest tells a very different story, sitting at 22.92% of the float, which points to a substantial bear camp already positioned against the stock. Meanwhile, shares trade at a forward P/E of just 9.24 as of August 12, a multiple that assumes little in the way of future growth.
Where This Leaves Stride Investors
Stride enters fiscal 2027 with a career learning segment growing at a rapid clip, a shrinking general education base, and a CEO who has been on the board for years but is brand new to the job. For the growth story to keep winning out, career learning needs to keep offsetting general education’s decline while margins stabilize. For the skeptics to be proven right, the tougher enrollment comparisons and rising costs flagged for next year would need to bite harder than management expects.
While we acknowledge the potential of LRN as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you’re looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on thebest short-term AI stock.
Fund flows aren’t helping either. Spot bitcoin ETFs are bleeding again, with U.S.-listed funds shedding $333 million in net outflows so far this week. That reverses course from last week’s $853 million of inflows, which had hinted at returning institutional demand. On a year-to-date basis, investors have yanked over $4 billion from these funds.
Meanwhile, adding to the pressure are Treasury notes, which underpin global finance. On Thursday, a $25 billion auction of the U.S. 30-year note drew yields as high as 5.22%, according to the Treasury Department, a level some dealers called the highest since 2001. Rising long-term yields make capital costlier and raise the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin, a dynamic that compounds an already shaky backdrop.
Taken together, stalled legislation, weak ETF demand and climbing yields suggest little room for an outright rally in cryptocurrencies, leaving majors such as XRP fragile.
The payments-focused cryptocurrency has somehow managed to hold on to the $1 support, which, if breached, could prompt holders to sell their coins. A large number of traders likely accumulated coins below this level in late 2024, anticipating a
That combination helps explain why XRP’s grip on $1 and bitcoin’s hold on its multi-week range both look increasingly fragile heading into the next session.
An image of the Snowflake logo on a corporate office_ Image by Grand Warszawski via Shutterstock_
Snowflake (SNOW), the cloud data company that helps businesses bring scattered data together through its Data Cloud platform, has given investors plenty to cheer about lately.
SNOW stock has enjoyed a strong run since late May, helped by growing enterprise demand for AI tools, an expanded $6 billion multiyear partnership with Amazon.com (AMZN) Amazon Web Services, and quarterly results that came in ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. But after that rally, some would be wondering whether Snowflake can keep the momentum going.
More News from Barchart
If Snowflake has been on your watchlist, there is one date you will want to circle – Sept. 2, 2026. That’s when the company is scheduled to report its fiscal second-quarter 2027 results after the market closes. Wall Street is already looking for double-digit growth in both revenue and earnings, while management remains upbeat about the business.
And this is where earnings reports get interesting. A quarterly report is not just about looking at how the company performed. It can give investors a glimpse of what is coming next. For Snowflake stock, the Sept. 2 report could provide exactly that – making it a date investors may not want to miss.
About Snowflake Stock
Founded in 2012, Snowflake has become one of the biggest names in modern data infrastructure. Headquartered in Montana, the company operates its Data Cloud, a unified platform that helps businesses store, manage, analyze, and securely share massive amounts of data. With a market capitalization of $115.8 billion, Snowflake has become a major player in an increasingly data-driven economy.
What makes the company particularly interesting is how broadly its platform is used. Snowflake serves customers across financial services, media, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, technology, telecommunications, travel, and the public sector. In other words, wherever businesses rely heavily on data to make decisions, Snowflake has an opportunity to play a role. The company is also pushing aggressively into artificial intelligence (AI), making AI a bigger part of its growth story.
Snowflake stock has gone from being a laggard to one of the more interesting cloud names on the market this year. The first few months of 2026 were fairly quiet for SNOW, but the stock price performance has improved significantly. Shares have jumped 123% over the past three months and gained 96% over the past six months.
The turnaround becomes even clearer when we look at the lows. SNOW touched a 52-week low of $118.30 in April and has since surged 181.6% from that level. That rally has pushed the stock 72.72% higher over the past 52 weeks, while shares recently touched a three-year high of $341.95. And year-to-date (YTD), SNOW is up 52%.
Technically, the chart suggests investors may want to expect some cooling after such a powerful run. The 14-day RSI is 80.38, putting the stock in overbought territory. The MACD oscillator signals bullishness, with the MACD line above the signal line and the histogram in positive territory. So, momentum is clearly strong, but the stock may be due for a breather.
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At first glance, Snowflake’s valuation looks expensive, with shares trading at 172.63 times forward adjusted earnings and 19.04 times sales. However, both multiples remain below the company’s five-year averages. With strong revenue growth expected this year and next, along with new enterprise deals potentially adding momentum, growth-focused investors may still find the premium valuation reasonable.
A Snapshot of Snowflake’s Q1 Results
Snowflake’s first-quarter numbers for fiscal 2027, released in May, were nothing short of impressive. The company’s non-GAAP EPS grew 62.5% year-over-year (YOY) to $0.39 on revenue of $1.39 billion, which rose 33.5% YOY. Both figures came in ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. More importantly, the growth was still being driven by strong consumption across Snowflake’s core platform.
Product revenue remained the star of the show, reaching $1.33 billion, or about 96% of total revenue. Professional services and other revenue contributed another $56.6 million, up 25.1% annually. Management also described the quarter as an important step forward for its AI strategy, pointing to faster adoption of first-party AI products alongside continued demand for its core platform. Products such as Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence are helping the company expand usage among its existing customer base.
Furthermore, Snowflake is working to make its ecosystem harder for enterprises to ignore. The company expanded its relationship with AWS through a new $6 billion multi-year agreement and signed a definitive agreement in May 2026 to acquire Natoma, aimed at strengthening secure connections for AI agents across enterprise tools and workflows.
The customer numbers tell another encouraging part of the story. Snowflake ended the quarter with 13,912 customers, adding 616 net new customers, including 13 Forbes Global 2000 companies. Meanwhile, its net revenue retention rate stood at 126%, showing that existing customers continued to expand their spending. Remaining performance obligations rose 37.7% to $9.2 billion, providing further visibility into future revenue.
The balance sheet remains another strength. As of April 30, Snowflake had $2.08 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $870.3 million in short-term investments. It generated $243.2 million in operating cash flow during the quarter, while adjusted free cash flow came in at $265.5 million.
For fiscal 2027, management raised its product revenue outlook to $5.84 billion, representing 31% YOY growth, and lifted its full-year non-GAAP operating margin target to 13.5%. It also maintained expectations for a 75% non-GAAP product gross margin and a 23% adjusted FCF margin. With AI adoption accelerating, the next test is whether Snowflake can turn that enthusiasm into sustained consumption growth.
For Q2, Snowflake expects product revenue between $1.415 billion and $1.42 billion, implying roughly 30% annual growth, with a non-GAAP operating margin of 12.5%.
Analysts tracking Snowflake predict its Q2 revenue to be around $1.48 billion, while loss for the quarter is expected to narrow 36.3% YOY to $0.51 per share. For fiscal 2027, per-share loss is anticipated to be $1.84, shrinking by 44.9% YOY and then narrowing by another 8.2% annually to $1.69 in fiscal 2028.
What Do Analysts Expect for Snowflake Stock?
Evercore ISI is feeling more upbeat about Snowflake, recently raising its price target to $360 while keeping an “Outperform” rating. The brokerage firm expects Snowflake to beat its second-quarter fiscal revenue guidance by about 300 to 400 basis points, with Wall Street likely looking for the high end.
Evercore says early CoCo momentum is now better reflected in guidance, pointing to a more normal beat this quarter. Its partner survey also signals another solid beat-and-raise quarter. The brokerage firm expects Snowflake to modestly lift second-half guidance and deliver further margin expansion. Investors will also watch how CoCo and Cortex demand affects consumption and gross margins.
Snowflake has a consensus “Strong Buy” rating overall. Of the 45 analysts covering the stock, 36 advise a “Strong Buy,” three recommend a “Moderate Buy,” five suggest a “Hold,” and the remaining one gives a “Strong Sell” rating.
The stock currently trades above the mean price target of $303.95. The Street-high target price of $500 for Snowflake implies the stock could rally as much as 49.9%.
www.barchart.com
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On the date of publication, Sristi Suman Jayaswal did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Barchart.com
If it fails that, it moves to an exclusion screen that uses five ratios – operating asset intensity, expense intensity, cash flow, fair value intensity, and capital dependence – to make the final call.
A company becomes ineligible for index inclusion if it fails four out of the five test ratios.
MSCI’s description of the so-called non-operating companies not fit for index inclusion reads like a checklist of bitcoin treasury firms without naming one.
Companies that “create value by accumulating and holding non-operating assets,” generate little cash from actual operations, and depend on outside capital rather than their own business to grow, MSCI explained. Companies not currently in the index face the stricter thresholds based on their latest single filing.
An earlier consultation, opened in October 2025, targeted “digital asset treasury” firms, specifically those holding 50% or more of assets in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. That proposal named 39 companies, triggering crypto market volatility and industry backlash. The proposal was ultimately deferred.
Nothing is decided yet
MSCI has invited feedback from market participants through Sept. 30, and the results will be announced roughly two weeks later, on Oct. 16.
It has said that any resulting changes would be folded into the November 2026 index review, if the proposal is adopted at all.
