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subtl daily briefing
Good morning. The Pentagon just locked in AI access deals with six tech giants — and conspicuously shut out Anthropic over military guardrail disputes. Meanwhile, April 2026 went down as the worst month in crypto hack history with $635M stolen, and MegaETH's token launch doubled DeFi TVL even as prices quickly tumbled. Let's get into it.
In today's briefing
- 1.Pentagon Picks AI Winners — and One Loser
- 2.April 2026: Worst Crypto Hack Month Ever
- 3.MegaETH Token Launch Shakes Up DeFi
- 4.SaaS Is Alive — But AI Is Reshaping the Bill
- 5.World Markets: The Fully Onchain Exchange
- ⚡Quick hits on other news
Latest Developments
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Everything else in the news today
Apple quietly removed its $599 Mac mini, raising the entry-level price to $799 amid supply constraints driven by surging AI workload demand.→
Meta re-entered crypto with USDC creator payouts in Colombia and the Philippines via Solana and Polygon — four years after shelving its Libra project.→
Circle launched a USDC nanopayments gateway across 11 EVM chains, enabling micropayment-native app architectures.→
Pumpfun committed 50% of all future revenue to a PUMP token buyback-and-burn program, a major tokenomics signal for meme coin infrastructure.→
Ethereum set a new daily transaction ATH of 3.6M, surpassing prior records as L2 activity and onchain app usage accelerated.→
Bitmine acquired over 101,000 ETH last week, including 10,000 ETH purchased OTC directly from the Ethereum Foundation.→
1inch crossed $800B in total onchain volume routed — a milestone for DEX aggregator adoption.→
xAI's Grok 4.3 supports voice cloning from just 120 seconds of audio, a capability threshold that dramatically lowers the bar for synthetic voice applications.→
Meta's acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence signals it is building a vertically integrated humanoid robotics stack, not just an AI layer on top of third-party hardware.→
The x402 protocol enables AI agents to make per-call micropayments to API endpoints instead of storing credentials — a foundational security primitive for the agentic web.→