🚖 Uber hit with near-$1 billion fine after algorithms suspended drivers without human review

The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 ‌million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them. The penalty would be the second-largest issued yet under Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. Uber said it would also appeal.

"Uber has committed ​serious infringements," in deactivating driver accounts without warning or human involvement, — the organisation's deputy chair Monique Verdier said.

"From one moment ​to the next they no longer had any income ... A computer should not make decisions on its own that have (such) major consequences."

Article 22 of the GDPR protects people from decisions based entirely on automated processing when the outcome has a significant legal or personal effect.

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💊 Too much or too little sleep may make your body age faster

Scientists are increasingly using aging clocks to estimate whether a person is aging biologically faster or slower than their chronological age. These tools rely on machine learning and biological information (e.g., proteins from a minimally invasive blood test) to calculate patterns associated with aging. To create the aging clocks, Wen used information from about half a million participants in the UK Biobank.

📝 The team compared sleep duration with biological age estimates from 23 aging clocks covering 17 organ systems. A clear U-shaped pattern appeared across the body. People reporting short sleep (fewer than 6 hours) and long sleep (greater than 8 hours) tended to show faster biological aging. The lowest levels of aging were seen among people who reported sleeping between 6.4 and 7.8 hours each day.

"The broad brain-body pattern is important because it tells us that sleep duration is a deeply embedded part of our entire physiology, with far-reaching implications across the body," — says study leader Junhao Wen. "This has a strong implication for future sleep management and future therapeutics."

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🤖 Meta Plans to Launch ‘Hatch’ AI Agent Platform in Coming Weeks

Meta Platforms plans to release its consumer AI agent platform called Hatch within the next several weeks, citing internal documents. The company is also working toward an October release for its newest AI model, named Watermelon.

Hatch represents the consumer version of Meta’s OpenClaw AI agent. The platform is part of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy to generate revenue from the company’s AI investments and reduce reliance on advertising income.

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📱 Nikita Bier Says X Trade Buttons Are Coming Soon

Nikita Bier said X trade buttons are coming soon, allowing users to trade tokens directly from their timelines.

"I literally built Cashtags, allowing people to add Solana and Ethereum charts directly into posts — with trade buttons coming soon.

You can even paste contract addresses for newly minted tokens. There wasn’t a single feature on X for crypto traders until I joined," — Bier said.

He also pointed to U.S. Treasury bond buybacks, not X, as a driver of the rally.

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🍎 Apple Gears Up to Launch Its First New Mac Mini in Two Years

The new desktop will debut as soon as the coming days, potentially putting the unveiling ahead of a September event to introduce the next iPhones. Apple has tested versions with both the M5 and M6 generations of its processor line.

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🇹🇭 Thailand Plans Overhaul of Market Laws to Speed Up Fraud Probes

Thailand plans to overhaul its securities laws to speed up investigations of financial crimes and tighten oversight of auditors and advisers.

The cabinet approved proposed amendments to four laws covering financial and capital markets and digital assets, the SEC Secretary-General Pornanong Budsaratragoon said. The changes would allow SEC officials to work alongside police in probes of serious market offenses.

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🔥 Franklin Templeton and Hashkey roll out U.S. tokenized money fund in Asia

Hong Kong regulated crypto exchange Hashkey has teamed up with financial giant Franklin Templeton to distribute its flagship tokenized money market fund, Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund (grBENJI), to digital asset investors in Asia.

🔜 GrBENJI is designed to provide professional investors with access to a tokenized fund investing mainly in U.S. government money market products and U.S. dollar cash assets on the blockchain.

🔜 Franklin Templeton manages $1.8 trillion in assets globally across more than 35 countries. The fund uses blockchain infrastructure to provide investors with exposure to traditional money market instruments through a tokenized wrapper, or a blockchain-based token that represents a claim on the underlying asset.

The move reflects growing institutional demand for yield-generating instruments backed by real-world assets on regulated digital platforms. Tokenized U.S. Treasury and money market funds have grown 1,500% to $15 billion in the last two years, according to data source rwa.xyz. 🚀

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⚡️🇧🇷 Brazil Slaps TikTok Owner With $30 Million Fine Over Data Use

Brazil’s data protection regulator fined TikTok parent company ByteDance more than 153 million reais (nearly $30 million) because of alleged failures in the handling of personal data of children and teenagers.

The regulatory body said in its ruling that TikTok breached data privacy laws across both logged-in accounts and guest browsing sessions through the collection and processing of young users’ personal information without a valid legal basis or adequate safeguards.

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🤑 Stellar’s Denelle Dixon weighs in on regulatory uncertainty in crypto

Stellar approaching $4 billion in RWAs on-chain, which would put it roughly alongside and potentially ahead of Solana by that measure. What does that what does a milestone like that represent to you? And what does that say about where the market is going?

So I love this stat, not just for the stat itself. The stat itself is great. But what I love is the trend line. If you think about how this started. So January, we were at a billion. We were at 2 billion a couple of months later, 3 billion in June, and now we're approaching 4 billion. So the trend line to me is way more important than the single stat itself.

🚀 Watch the full episode on CNBC

#Stellar

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🖥🇮🇳 Indian AI Data Center Firm Orders 9,000 Nvidia Vera Rubins

AM Intelligence, an Indian AI infrastructure company, has ordered 9,000 Nvidia Corp. Vera Rubin systems, seeking to become one of the first adopters of the advanced computing platform in Asia.

Servers equipped with the rack-scale systems are slated to come online next year in southern India, the Hyderabad-based company said. Customers include major cloud-service providers, AI labs and organizations aiming to develop homegrown Indian AI models.

#BRICS

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⚡️🤑 RLUSD crossed $2B in market cap last week, with close to $1B issued on the XRP Ledger

Live since December 2024, built for real-world utility and designed for enterprise use cases.

RLUSD is just getting started. 🚀

#Stellar

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⚡️🪐 Elon Musk Outlines Path to Kardashev Type II and III Civilizations

In posts on X, Musk explained that massive solar cell production, AI chips, millions of Optimus humanoid robots, and a Moon mass driver are key to reaching Kardashev Type II status, where civilizations tap their star's entire energy output, and eventually Type III for galactic scale.

He estimated one million Optimus robots plus one gigawatt of solar could create the first Von Neumann probe, a self-replicating machine that expands using local materials. The ideas blend SpaceX's Starship heavy-lift capabilities with Tesla's robotics, sparking talk of timelines like 7,000 flights for a megaton to orbit using a fleet of 35 vehicles.

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🚀🇺🇸 Starbase, Louisiana will be built to support thousands of Starship flights a year with missions launching to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond

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🤑 Checker integrates with Stellar to accelerate stablecoin adoption and settlement

As part of the Stellar network, Checker now supports cross-border transactions on the Stellar blockchain, expanding network coverage and reinforcing Checker's role as the access layer for financial institutions building products powered by stablecoins.

Stellar provides infrastructure for settlement and asset issuance, while Checker provides the on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure layer that connects stablecoins with local and international financial systems.

By connecting domestic payment rails to a blockchain purpose-built for payments, the partnership further reduces the friction traditionally associated with international transactions. Everyday use cases such as fintech operations, international payroll, and treasury management can now operate with the same speed and transparency as a local payment. 🚀

"We share a vision of making everyday international payments more direct and predictable. We believe this new generation of infrastructure, combining stablecoins with modern blockchains like Stellar, has the potential to completely transform how money moves globally," — Jack Chong, CEO at Checker.

Beyond payments, Stellar plays a key role in powering humanitarian aid and financial inclusion initiatives, aligning with Checker's recent commitment to support NGOs and charitable organizations through fee-free cross-border stablecoin transfers. 💸

The partnership was originally published on August 18, 2026.

#Stellar

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🇺🇸 Treasury Announces the Quantum-Readiness Task Force

The U.S. Department of the Treasury announced the launch of the Quantum-Readiness Task Force, following President Donald J. Trump's Executive Order 14412 establishing guidelines to strengthen cryptographic protections for America's sensitive data, critical infrastructure, and digital economy.

The Task Force supports the Administration's efforts to secure American innovation; strengthen supply chains; and ensure U.S. leadership in critical and emerging technologies. 🏆

“America must lead in securing the technologies that power our economy,” — said Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. “This Task Force will help ensure our financial system remains strong, secure, and competitive as new technologies reshape the global landscape.”

❗️The Quantum-Readiness Task Force is a public-private initiative to help accelerate the U.S. financial sector’s transition to quantum-safe technology in an orderly and operationally resilient manner, building on the G7 Cyber Expert Group roadmap for the transition to post-quantum cryptography.

🟠The Task Force will operate through three workstreams: Sector Alignment & PQC Transition; Third-Party & Vendor Readiness; and Digital Assets and Emerging Technology Risk.

Quantum computing has the potential to transform science and technology, but it also poses a long-term cybersecurity challenge because future quantum systems could break many of the cryptographic tools that protect financial data, payment systems, digital identities, and market infrastructure.

🟠The Task Force will bring together government, financial institutions, financial market infrastructures, technology providers, and other private-sector leaders to support coordinated preparation for quantum-related cyber risks.

Transitioning to post-quantum cryptography is essential to protecting U.S. economic security and strengthening the resilience of the financial system. 🚀

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⚡️🏦 U.S. state banking associations plan to launch their own nationwide blockchain network

After a year of policy battles in Washington between bankers and the crypto sector, the banks' state associations have announced they intend to launch a new bank-run blockchain network to facilitate financial innovations, including smart payments, tokenized deposits and stablecoins.

Thirty-nine of the state banking associations signed on to the "BankChain Alliance" with an aim to build out the blockchain by next year, describing the project as "industry-owned, industry-designed and industry-governed."

It's "an unprecedented collaboration representing thousands of banks," — said Kathy Kraninger, the head of the Florida Bankers Association and a former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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⚡️🇺🇸 California Becomes Latest State to Approve Plug-in Solar

California is the latest US state and the largest market to pass a law allowing residents to install small plug-in solar systems on apartment balconies and in backyards to offset soaring electricity costs.

The bipartisan bill approved by the state legislature on Tuesday now goes to Governor Gavin Newsom, who has until Sept. 30 to sign it into law. If he does enact the bill, California will become the ninth state to legalize plug-in solar since 2025.

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