Today’s (March 25) House Financial Services Committee hearing on “Tokenization and the Future of Securities” reflects how far the conversation about digital assets, securities law and institutional custody frameworks has traveled in a remarkably short time. The committee memorandum indicates that lawmakers are examining regulatory gaps, investor protection, market integrity and capital formation, a scope…

Fifty years ago, in a modest California garage, three men built a company that would reshape technology and culture. On April 1, 1976, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne signed the paperwork to form Apple Computer. Their first creation, the Apple I, a bare-circuit-board hand-assembled by Wozniak, sold for $666.66 and paved the way…

Nonprofits are entering their own version of a market correction. After years of pandemic-era emergency funding, major donors are pulling back. Endowments are under pressure. Government contracts are tightening. And at the same time, scrutiny around measurable impact has intensified. Large foundations and public agencies are asking harder questions about returns, scalability and long-term sustainability. …

Block’s decision to cut 40 percent of its staff in February shocked many in Silicon Valley, but the company says the move was the culmination of a long-planned shift toward A.I.-driven operations, not a spur-of-the-moment cost cut. “This has been a two-year journey for us,” Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer,…

Brett Adcock has built and sold companies in robotics, security and air taxis, and now he wants to reinvent how people use A.I. His latest venture, Hark, is a new lab that pairs personalized intelligence with custom-built hardware. Instead of specializing in models or devices alone, Hark aims to own the whole pipeline—foundation models, software…

As a child growing up in the 1960s, Peter Diamandis’s world changed when he began watching Star Trek. The sci-fi show’s utopian vision inspired him to launch companies in health, space and education and to create ambitious competitions through his XPrize Foundation. Today, he believes pop culture has swung too far in the other direction. These days,…

For decades, the financial system has operated like a collection of walled gardens, each governed by its own rules, ledger and infrastructure. When a user moves money between banks, the process requires many intermediaries, including correspondent institutions, clearinghouses and manual reconciliations.  The system has functioned because customers have had little choice but to accept the…

Executives often entertain wealthy clients, but James Arrowood’s conversations with them revolve around life, death and what comes after. As CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based nonprofit focused on cryonics—the practice of freezing human bodies, heads and even pets in hopes that future generations might one day revive them—he oversees a membership of…

Winston Weinberg understands what junior associates at law firms need because he was once one of them. In 2022, the then 27-year-old was working at O’Melveny & Meyers when he began experimenting with OpenAI models alongside his roommate, Gabe Pereyra, then a research scientist at Meta. After realizing A.I. could streamline inefficiencies in the legal…

Battery storage is scaling globally at historic speed. In just a few years, grids around the world have added record volumes of battery capacity, driven by renewable penetration, energy security concerns and surging electricity demand. Global installations reached approximately 270 gigawatts (GW)/630 gigawatt-hour (GWh) last year, achieving 43 percent year-over-year growth, with forecasts projecting exponential…