Month: April 2025

Asia holds crypto liquidity, but US Treasurys will unlock institutional funds

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Opinion by: Jack Lu, CEO of BounceBit For years, crypto has promised a more open and efficient financial system. A fundamental inefficiency remains: the disconnect between US capital markets and Asia’s liquidity hubs. The United States dominates capital formation, and its recent embrace of tokenized treasuries and real-world assets signals a significant step toward blockchain-based … Read more

Bitcoin Price Tops $84.5K, Looks to End Downtrend as Trump Exempts Key Tech From Reciprocal Tariffs

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Bitcoin (BTC) rose over 1.5% to $84,900 Saturday, looking to break a three-month downtrend after the Trump administration issued new guidance on reciprocal tariffs, listing several exemptions like smartphones, computers, chips and other electronics. These exclusions published by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection exclude the listed products from President Donald Trump’s 125% China tariff … Read more

Hiro Yamada on Building First Mate Technologies: Silicon Valley Expertise Meets Global Perspective

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Hiro Yamada’s journey in tech has been defined by a commitment to solving real-world problems, a belief in the power of collaboration, and the pursuit of authentic connections. As the co-founder and CEO of First Mate Technologies, Yamada draws on experience from Silicon Valley and Asia to help startups navigate the ever-evolving challenges of software … Read more

The AI Engineer’s Playbook: Mastering Vector Search & Management (Part 2)

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Vector embeddings are the backbone of modern AI systems, encapsulating complex patterns from text, images, audio, and other data types. However, even the best embeddings are essentially useless without solid systems in place to store, retrieve, and manage them efficiently at scale. This often-overlooked aspect, known as Vector Search & Management (VS&M), is crucial for … Read more

Seeing With Less: MindEye2’s Efficient Approach to Brain-Based Image Decoding

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Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 MindEye2 and 2.1 Shared-Subject Functional Alignment 2.2 Backbone, Diffusion Prior, & Submodules 2.3 Image Captioning and 2.4 Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion XL for unCLIP 2.5 Model Inference 3 Results and 3.1 fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction 3.2 Image Captioning 3.3 Image/Brain Retrieval and 3.4 Brain Correlation 3.5 Ablations 4 Related Work … Read more

Trump excludes smartphones, computers, chips from tariffs

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The Trump administration has excluded “smartphones, computers, and other electronics” from tariffs, even those imported from China, reports Bloomberg. Late last night, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updated its guidance to exempt smartphones, laptops, hard drives, computer processors, and memory chips from the tariffs, according to Bloomberg. The same goes for the machines used … Read more

This Is What Happens to Telecom Networks When Everyone Streams at Once

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Telecom networks have always fascinated me during global online usage peaks because they perform under heavy traffic conditions. The unpredictable nature of traffic surges in major worldwide events and sudden work-related changes demands fast solutions because they occur without warning. Recent market predictions indicate mobile data traffic will increase dramatically from 109 million terabytes per … Read more

MindEye2: Novel Functional Alignment for fMRI

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Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 MindEye2 and 2.1 Shared-Subject Functional Alignment 2.2 Backbone, Diffusion Prior, & Submodules 2.3 Image Captioning and 2.4 Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion XL for unCLIP 2.5 Model Inference 3 Results and 3.1 fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction 3.2 Image Captioning 3.3 Image/Brain Retrieval and 3.4 Brain Correlation 3.5 Ablations 4 Related Work … Read more

There’s nothing wrong with a thong made out of a keyboard

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In December 2024, actor and fashion icon Julia Fox stepped out on the street with a flip-phone buckle strapped across her chest, wires on her nails, and an old Discman-turned-compact mirror hanging from her wrist.  Fox didn’t start the retro-tech fashion trend. Celebrities and internet fashionistas were already wearing iPod Shuffle Minis as hair clips … Read more

More SEC Case Updates

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Late Friday, attorneys with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Binance filed a joint status report asking a federal judge to continue a 60-day pause in the case for another 60 days. You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for … Read more

Gold and Bonds’ Safe Haven Allure May be Fading With Bitcoin Emergence

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The idea of “safe haven” assets—traditionally marked by gold and government bonds—amid market turmoil, is being tested like never before. For decades, portfolio construction and risk management were simple: 60% equities, 40% bonds and when markets panicked, capital typically flowed into gold and government bonds. These assets were slow, steady, and predictable, making them an … Read more