🇦🇺Australia Scraps Card Surcharges, but Shoppers May Still Pay the Price

Australians will no longer be slugged with a separate card surcharge from Thursday, bringing an end to the extra 1 or 2% fee added at check-outs when tapping a debit or credit card.

In March, the RBA released its long-awaited review of merchant card payment costs and surcharging, recommending three changes to Australia’s payment network. These included removing surcharges which will be banned from October 1, with businesses now having to display the entire cost -including credit charges – as part of the sticker price.

To compensate for this the RBA says they are reducing interchange fees – which are paid by a business’ bank to the customer’s bank – will be lowered while the RBA promised to ensure increased transparency surrounding fees charged by card networks. But experts warn that while the ban eliminates hidden payment fees, it will simply lead to higher shelf prices everywhere.

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🇺🇸 Paul Atkins: SEC Moves to Provide Clarity for Innovative Technologies

If you look back at the previous administration, basically there was just a closed door policy of not accepting these new innovative products.

And so we've changed that to provide clarity to the marketplace, to innovators and investors alike, starting out with a definition and a joint interpretative release with the CFTC to define what's the tokenized security versus what are other sorts of tokenized assets.

We're in the securities lane, obviously, and so we are focused. We have come out with a proposed rule that even though the Clarity Act failed in Congress to be enacted, you know, we are proceeding to provide clarity to the marketplace as far as how to raise money on chain.

And then secondly, with respect to trading of tokenized securities, we've come out with an innovation exemption, we're calling it.

So, think of a sandbox with a controlled type of environment where companies issue tokenized securities that represent the underlying rights and privileges of the security. So, it's trading the actual security on chain. And that's an important difference than what is being done offshore, which is more synthetic type of product.

So, we're trying to move things on-chain, which I think is an exciting prospect. And so, we're moving forward.

This represents more than a regulatory shift — it is a generational opportunity to advance American leadership in the digital finance revolution.

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🔥 Open USD takes on Tether, Circle with a different stablecoin model that's 'building money'

Open Standard, a new stablecoin issuer backed by Coinbase, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa, has brought its dollar stablecoin to market with a model designed to spread more of the economics and ownership across the companies that distribute and use it, rather than concentrating them with a single issuer.

❗️Open USD (OUSD), after being initially unveiled in June, went live on Wednesday on Ethereum, Solana, Coinbase’s Base and Stripe-backed Tempo blockchains.

"We want to be the most useful stablecoin, the same way the U.S. dollar is useful," — Open Standard CEO Zach Abrams said. "Every other stablecoin is building a fund. We're building money." 💸

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🤑 Soroban SDK v28 is now live. This release supports Protocol 28.

Version 28 of the Soroban Rust SDK has been released and contains a variety of build system changes, new behaviour to better support contract data migration, and new features. For most contracts this should be a seamless experience.

➡️ Spec Shaking v2
➡️ Contract Data Migration
➡️ Events Publish Sparsely
➡️ Executable References
➡️ Native Contracts Can Be Uploaded in Tests

❗️Spec Shaking v2 changes the way that specs are included, using one of the same principles that compilers use to determine if code should be included in the final binary: dead code elimination. The SDK now emits an entry for everything, and the build system in stellar-cli strips the entries the contract does not use.

A struct is represented on the ledger as a map keyed by field names. Before v28, that map had to match the struct exactly — every field of the struct had to be present as a key, and no other key could be present.

#Stellar

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🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠 🌌🌌

🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠

🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠🔠 🎇

🎆2️⃣ BIRTHDAYS ARE BETTER THAN1️⃣! 🥳🕯🎂

Stellar launched its “new” network on September 30, 2015, marking 🌌🌌 years of building a network designed to make money move faster and more freely.

But here’s the fun part: this isn’t actually Stellar’s first birthday. 🎉

The “old” Stellar network launched in 2014, with its native currency called “Stellars” and the ticker STR. As Stellar Foundation’s Head of Product Tomer Weller points out, today’s anniversary celebrates the beginning of the network as we know it today.

Since then, Stellar has continued bringing blockchain closer to the real world — from cross-border payments to tokenized assets. And recently, the network passed 22,000 RWA holders. 🚀

🌌🌌 years of innovation, two birthdays, and plenty more milestones ahead! 🎉

Here’s to the next chapter! 💫

#Stellar

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⚡️🇺🇸 Illinois agrees to six-month delay of crypto tax as industry continues court battle

The surprise crypto tax sprung by Illinois earlier this year may not start on January 1 after Illinois agreed to postpone it for six months, according to the industry groups that negotiated the delay, which will still need sign-off from a judge.

The Digital Chamber and Illinois Blockchain Association reached that accord with state officials and it could take some of the pressure off the looming tax as crypto interests continue trying to kill the idea. The joint request for a delay is expected to be filed Thursday morning in the state circuit court in Sangamon County.

If approved, the sides can skip haggling over legal injunctions and focus on the next stage in the court dispute, the "disputed issues of law regarding the constitutionality and enforceability" of the state's Digital Asset Tax Act.

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🛰 ICEYE and Nokia partner to launch secure and sovereign satellite communications for governments and defense customers

ICEYE, the European leader in sovereign intelligence from space, and Nokia announced a partnership to develop secure, sovereign and high-performance broadband low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications systems for governments, supporting missions from defense and border security to emergency services and disaster response.

Built on trusted European technology, the jointly developed satellite communications systems will give nations ownership and control of the satellites, ground segment and terminals. The first communications satellites are expected to be launched in 2028.

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🇪🇺 ‘Absolute s–t’: EU’s Microsoft Teams alternative draws bad reviews from officials

The European Commission has rolled out Element Pro, a self-hosted alternative to Microsoft Teams, as a backup if U.S. technology becomes unavailable. Some officials have slammed the system, with one calling it “absolute shit” 😁 and another saying the U.S. would “instantly win the war” if access to American technology were cut off.

Element says the Commission is still testing the platform and that early technical and usability problems are expected.

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🤑 Stellar is backing Minisend with $100k grant to keep building

Stablecoins move across multiple chains, but getting that liquidity into local payment rails can still mean dealing with bridges, gas, fragmented liquidity and P2P.

"We're building Minisend to connect those onchain flows to the local rails people already use across Africa," — Minisend said.

More chains. More rails. Simpler settlement. 🚀

#Stellar

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🏆🇺🇸 Trump: "We have the best economy anywhere in the world. There’s no economy like this economy."

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🤑 Evernorth shareholders approve $1 billion XRP treasury deal, clearing path to Nasdaq debut

Armada Acquisition Corp. II shareholders have approved its business combination with Evernorth, clearing a key step for the XRP treasury company to go public on Nasdaq.

❗️The transaction is expected to raise about $300 million in gross cash proceeds, while investors have contributed XRP in kind, leaving Evernorth expected to hold roughly 473 million XRP at closing.

Evernorth joins spot XRP ETFs as a regulated route to XRP exposure. The deal is expected to close Oct. 7, with the combined company set to trade under the ticker XRPN beginning Oct. 8.

"Going public will offer investors a regulated, transparent way to own XRP exposure and participate in the growth of the blockchain economy," — Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla said. "We're grateful to our shareholders for their support as we complete this important transaction." 👏

#Stellar

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🇺🇸 New Mexico to jump into frontier AI regulation

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is slated to propose a state framework to regulate frontier AI, pushing the state toward reining in the cutting edge of the fast-developing technology.

🧑‍⚖️ The state bill, set to be sponsored by Democratic state Rep. Linda Serrato, would require frontier AI developers to disclose safety risks, report serious safety incidents and, for the largest companies, give advance notice of major training runs and be subject to independent audits of their risk assessments.

It would also empower the attorney general to impose civil penalties for compliance violations, recover costs to the state for responding to safety incidents and sue for damages on behalf of the state and its businesses and residents harmed by the incidents.

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🛰 Can AI Run in Space? Google Is About to Find Out

Alphabet launched its homegrown AI chips into orbit on Thursday in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, a step towards making data centers in space a reality. SpaceX has promoted supercomputers in space as the next frontier in AI infrastructure, touting “infinite real estate” in orbit.

The launch window opened at 11:15 am PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California’s Santa Barbara County, with liftoff occurring without incident. SpaceX successfully deployed all payloads on board by 1 p.m. local time. 👏

The Thursday launch marks the first in-orbit test for Alphabet’s Project Suncatcher, a “moonshot” initiative Google first revealed in November 2025. The company aims to develop reliable, solar-powered AI computing infrastructure that can operate continuously in space. 🚀

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