🔥 Catastrophe bonds may join tokenization rush, with plans for test issuance in 2027

Harneys, a law firm whose specialties include advising on alternative risk-transfer products including cat bonds, and droppRWA, a Bermudas-based platform that is helping Saudi Arabia tokenize its economy, plan to issue what they say will be the first catastrophe bonds whose ownership is recorded directly on a blockchain, with a first deal targeted for early 2027.

❗️Catastrophe bonds are specialized insurance products that pay out when major disasters, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, occur.

“Under the structure the firms have developed in Bermuda, the investor would hold legal title to the bond,” — Henry Tucker, partner and global head of trusts and private wealth at Harneys, said.

🔜 Catastrophe bonds are a $65.6 billion market used by insurers, reinsurers and government entities to transfer a portion of their exposure to natural disasters to capital market investors.

🔜 The investors receive coupon payments, typically a floating money-market return on the collateral plus a risk spread, but have to pay out if a qualifying event occurs. That attraction is returns uncorrelated to financial markets, economic cycles or political events.

“The issue isn’t whether you can put a catastrophe bond on a blockchain,” — said Edwin Mata, CEO and co-founder of tokenization firm Brickken.

“It’s whether the blockchain becomes the legal ownership record. If it does, transferring the token transfers legal title. If it doesn’t, you are only moving a digital version of an asset recorded somewhere else.”

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🤖 IBM`s fastest quantum processor achieves 100,000 circuits per sec computation speeds

IBM has unveiled its fastest quantum processor yet, the Nighthawk r2, with over 25 times the number of circuits over its predecessor and containing more than 7,500 gates. With this, IBM has improved the speed of computation on its processor without impacting the scale or accuracy of the system, paving the way for future improvements along its Quantum Roadmap.

Quantum computing is the next frontier of computing, promising us computations in seconds that even the fastest supercomputers of today would take years to complete. The dawn of the quantum computing age is expected to help us solve problems of climate change, drug discovery, new material research, clean energy and much more.

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🇮🇳 State Power Lender REC Set to Sell India’s First Tokenized Bond

State-owned power financier REC Ltd. is seeking investor bids for as much as 5 billion rupees ($53 million) of tokenized bonds, in what would be India’s first such issuance and could help boost liquidity in the debt market.

The New Delhi-based company is planning to issue notes due in May 2028. Tokenized bonds utilize blockchain technology for their issuance, trading and settlement. Investors will have to use the Reserve Bank of India’s digital currency to buy them.

#BRICS

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⚡️🇺🇸 Trump says if the Fed doesn't cut rates, he'll stop trading with some nations

U.S. President Donald Trump said that unless the Federal Reserve cut interest rates, he ​would stop trading with ​countries with which the United States ⁠had a deficit.

"High interest ​rates put the U.S.A. at a ​very unfair disadvantage, and I won't allow that to happen!" — said Trump, who has repeatedly demanded ​that the Fed cut rates.

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⚡️🚘 Feds launch investigation into Tesla’s Cybercab deployment

The NHTSA opened the probe mere hours after Tesla put the first Cybercabs on the streets of Austin, Texas. Federal vehicle safety regulations require manual controls like brake pedals, though the Department of Transportation recently proposed removing those requirements for vehicles that are designed to be autonomously driven.

“NHTSA fully supports the safe development and deployment of automated vehicles. But as the federal regulator, we need to ensure that all of our laws are followed,” — administrator Jonathan Morrison said.

“Our approach of balancing innovation with safety oversight will allow the United States to maintain its global leadership in AV innovation.”

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👩‍💻 AI Helps Linux Maintainers Catch Thousands of Bugs

GLM-5.3, the large language model from Chinese AI company Z.ai, recently helped uncover more than 1,000 critical vulnerabilities across major open-source projects, including the Linux kernel. That torrent of AI-detected bugs is now pushing the number of CVEs fixed per Linux kernel release to nearly 2,000, up from roughly 500 per release for several years running.

However, the vast majority of documented CVEs are either low-priority or affect obsolete drivers and long-deprecated features. The rise in AI-driven bug reports has had a silver lining for the kernel codebase too: earlier this year, maintainers cleared out a batch of old drivers, along with the entire ISDN subsystem, that had been harboring dozens of CVEs.

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⚽️🤑 Florida Athletics Debuts XRP cryptocurrency logo at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium

Florida Athletics announced a multi-year partnership with Ripple, bringing XRP to Gator Nation beginning with the 2026 Florida football season. As part of the agreement, the XRP logo will be prominently featured on the field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.

"Ripple has established itself as an innovative leader in financial technology, and we're excited to welcome XRP to Gator Nation.

This partnership brings together two organizations that think boldly about the future, and we look forward to introducing XRP to our fans," — said Scott Stricklin, University of Florida Director of Athletics. 🤝

Ripple will also support financial and technology education for Florida student-athletes and the campus community, covering both traditional finance and digital assets. 🚀

#Stellar

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🇰🇷 South Korea to start tokenizing 'all types' of securities in three stages from 2027

South Korea's top financial regulator will build a tokenization infrastructure that can be applied to "all types" of securities, including stocks, bonds, and funds. South Korea has passed amendments that legally recognize blockchain-based securities, set to take effect on Feb. 4, 2027.

⬇️The Financial Services Commission said the government has established a three-step plan to establish the infrastructure:

🔘The first stage revolves around the securities token law taking effect in February. South Korea would start the tokenization of private money-market funds and private corporate bonds for institutional investors.

🔜 Tokenization of equities would begin with unlisted shares being tokenized through a trust, where the shares would stay on the existing system, and investors would receive a tokenized trust-beneficiary security.

🔘If the first stage proves stable and successful, the second stage would expand the infrastructure to publicly offered securities.

🔘Stage three would establish an onchain settlement infrastructure that would allow investors to settle tokenized securities with stablecoins.

The FSC cited BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized fund and Hong Kong's tokenized green bonds as key references.

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🏆 Starlink won a 2026 Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy

The award honors the low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation that delivers high-speed, low-latency broadband almost anywhere on Earth and has changed how television is made and watched by ending the connectivity limits that once controlled where shows could be produced and who could receive them.

The statuette will be presented October 14th at the Saban Media Center in North Hollywood, California.

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🤑 USDT0 on Stellar is now supported on Kraken 🚀

#Stellar

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🤖 Daybreak for Frontline Defenders: OpenAI commits $1 billion to cyberdefense effort amid AI safety scrutiny

OpenAI is introducing Daybreak for Frontline Defenders, a new global initiative to help frontline defenders use frontier AI cyber capabilities to protect essential services in the U.S. and around the world.

The priority list names water and wastewater systems, electricity grid operators, state and local governments, community and regional banks, nonprofits and open-source maintainers. Crypto exchanges, custodians and blockchain protocols are not mentioned anywhere in the announcement.

❗️Open-source blockchain and crypto software, however, fits that category. Bitcoin Core, Ethereum clients, and the libraries DeFi protocols depend on are maintained by small teams and unpaid volunteers who guard code that secures billions of dollars.

"Our goal ⁠is to use frontier AI to make the systems Americans depend on harder to attack and easier to repair," — OpenAI said.

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❤️ Windows 11 will start telling apps your age, but Microsoft says it won’t share your birthday

Microsoft is overhauling how Windows 11 handles child safety and account privacy by moving age verification directly into the OS. Instead of you having to give this data, upcoming system-level APIs in Windows 11 will provide registered applications with your age range, such as 13-15 or 18+, and a status indicating whether your age has been independently verified.

Microsoft’s official age signals documentation states that “The Windows Age APIs provide a privacy-preserving mechanism for apps to determine the age group and age verified status of the signed-in user.”

The company says that this is to help developers adjust content, restrict features, and apply parental controls without forcing them to collect or store your birthday, as regulators across the UK, EU, and the U.S. push for stricter online age assurance laws.

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🤖 Figure and Nscale Sign Strategic Partnership For Up to 100,000 GPUs on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin Platform

Figure has signed a strategic partnership with Nscale to secure large-scale computing capacity for training its next generation of humanoid robot AI models. Under the agreement, Nscale will deploy up to 100,000 GPUs based on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform for Figure’s AI development.

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🤖 Scientists solve years-long mystery of 'beating' signal in a quantum material

A team of Korean researchers has become the first in the world to identify the origin of the "beating" signal that has long been a major obstacle to interpreting quantum signals in topological insulator (TI) nanowires.

Their analysis confirmed that the beating arises when two different quantum oscillations overlap: one created by topological electronic states on the surface and the other by ordinary electronic states inside the nanowire. The discovery paves the way for better interpretation of signals from topological quantum devices and attaining their desired electronic states.

"The principle of understanding and controlling the interference between different electronic states could also be applied to the design of topological quantum devices in the future," — Professor Choi Sang-Jun of the Department of Physics and Photon Science at GIST said. 🚀

The findings are published in the journal Nano Letters.

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💊 Patient Who Received Pig Kidney Becomes First To Progress to Human Kidney Transplant

In January 2026, Tim Andrews, who had received a genetically edited pig kidney in January 2025, became the recipient of a donated human kidney. His case represents the longest dialysis-free survival following porcine (pig) kidney xenotransplantation in a living human and the first transition to human kidney transplantation.

The authors report that Andrews, who was 66 at the time of xenotransplantation, successfully lived with the genetically edited kidney for 271 days — during which he did not need dialysis — before receiving a human kidney from a donor.

“The organ shortage is the greatest crisis we have right now in transplantation,” — said lead author Leonardo Riella, the HMS Harold and Ellen Danser Associate Professor of Surgery .

“Our vision is that xenotransplantation could help address this gap — initially as a bridge to get patients off dialysis while they wait for a human donor kidney, and potentially, as we establish long-term safety and durability, as a destination therapy in its own right,” — he said.

The results were published on Sept. 3 in The Lancet by Harvard Medical School.

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