Polygon Crosses $29.8 Billion in Monthly Stablecoin Volume: A Deep Dive Into Web3 Payments

What does it look like when a blockchain starts processing more payment volume than mid-sized banks? While most of the crypto conversation in early 2026 has centered on Bitcoin ETF flows, meme coin cycles, and AI agent tokens, Polygon just posted numbers that no other blockchain matched. The network moved $29.8 billion in stablecoin volume … Read more

Discord distances itself from Persona age verification after user backlash

Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord’s head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company “ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has … Read more

The HackerNoon Newsletter: Your Prices Shouldn’t Be the Same in Every Country (2/23/2026)

How are you, hacker? 🪐 What’s happening in tech today, February 23, 2026? The HackerNoon Newsletter brings the HackerNoon homepage straight to your inbox. On this day, we present you with these top quality stories. From Urgency as Office Culture (duh, AI makes it worse) to Your Prices Shouldn’t Be the Same in Every Country, … Read more

If Big Tech cared about fighting AI slop, it wouldn’t be drowning us in it

Progress towards reliable deepfake labelling tech is sluggish, despite all the “help” from AI providers. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images As 2025 drew to a close, Instagram head Adam Mosseri ended the year by doom-posting about AI. “Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible,” Mosseri lamented. “Everything that made creators matter – the … Read more

Yep, it’s fast: Donut Lab’s solid-state battery gets its first test result

Since announcing earlier this year that it was on the cusp of a major battery breakthrough, Finnish startup Donut Lab has faced a lot of questions, and plenty of skepticism, about its production-ready, solid-state battery. Could the company really make a fast-charging battery at scale while avoiding some of the theoretical production headaches that have … Read more

Agentic AI with multi-model framework using Hugging Face smolagents on AWS

This post is cowritten by Jeff Boudier, Simon Pagezy, and Florent Gbelidji from Hugging Face. Agentic AI systems represent an evolution from conversational AI to autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning, tool usage, and code execution. Enterprise applications benefit from strategic deployment approaches tailored to specific needs. These needs include managed endpoints, which deliver auto-scaling capabilities, foundation … Read more