⚡️🧠 Neuralink's 72-Hour Hackathon: Your Questions Answered

Neuralink engineers spent 72 hours with one of their speech restoration study participants, rapidly prototyping a cluster of new features designed to make thought-based communication more natural, more mobile, and more integrated into everyday life. The results offer the clearest window yet into where the VOICE trial is headed.

The VOICE trial is Neuralink's clinical program specifically targeting speech restoration — not cursor control or typing, but the ability to communicate verbally through thought alone. Participants are individuals who have lost the ability to speak, typically due to conditions like ALS or spinal cord injury.

According to previous Neuralink reporting, the trial began implanting participants in 2026, and by September of this year one participant had already spoken using a voice decoded directly from his brain signals. The hackathon was conducted with one of these active study participants, giving engineers real-world feedback that lab simulations simply cannot replicate.

🔥 Watch the full video on YouTube

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🇧🇲🤑 WalletConnect Expands Stellar Network Support and Partnership with Penrose Partners to Bring Walletconnect Pay to Bermuda in Support of the Government’s Onchain Economy Vision

WalletConnect today announced expanded support for the Stellar network and a partnership with Penrose Partners to bring WalletConnect Pay to merchants in Bermuda. This initiative is meant to support the Government of Bermuda’s plan to become the world’s first fully onchain economy.

➡️ Stellar support lets apps and wallets in the Stellar ecosystem connect to the WalletConnect Network, which reaches 900 million end users, thousands of institutions and 700+ wallets. Wallets and custodians supporting the integration of launch partners including Fireblocks, Utila, LOBSTR and Arculus.

➡️ WalletConnect Pay now supports payments on Stellar, so customers can pay merchants directly from their Stellar wallets. LOBSTR, the Stellar wallet built by Ultra Stellar, is the first wallet live with WalletConnect Pay on Stellar, available from today. 🚀

Raja Chakravorti, Chief Business Officer of the SDF, commented:

“Bermuda’s work to make digital assets part of everyday commerce is exactly the kind of real-world use Stellar was built for. WalletConnect Pay brings that experience to the point of sale for users who already hold assets in Stellar wallets."

#Stellar

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🤑 Airtm and BVNK partner to expand wallet-native payments to emerging markets

Airtm, the trusted last-mile financial network for the Global South, and stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK, a Mastercard company, today announced a partnership that brings wallet-native payments to emerging markets. 🤝

The announcement comes as Airtm launches Airtm Connect, which allows digital asset companies around the world, including BVNK, to build wallet connections with Airtm's global user base. Through the integration, Airtm users will be able to use funds held in their wallets to pay participating retailers enabled by BVNK, while also creating new ways to fund and receive money.

This partnership strengthens Airtm's position as the financial rails for underserved global markets by enabling Airtm users to pay participating retailers directly from their wallets, removing friction that has long plagued the Global South's path to mainstream commerce. This means real access to global commerce.

#Stellar

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🤖 Man granted first-of-its-kind religious exemption against mandatory AI use at work

David Durman, a research administrator at the University of Kentucky (UK), has successfully argued that using AI violates his beliefs as a humanist and has received Title VII religious accommodation from university officials not to use the technology.

According to the Religion News Service (RNS), Durman believes in "the human part of life," which includes making his own decisions.

❗️However, he says that when the UK asked its employees to use AI, he felt that doing so would mean outsourcing his thinking to tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, thus violating his deeply held beliefs.

“The process and work involved in thinking through situations, through my work, through my ethics, through the way I handle other people, is a key component in being able to develop myself as a moral person,” Durman said.

“And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it’s taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor.”

Because of this, the research administrator was granted a Title VII exemption under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whichWhile humanism is often a non- prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. While humanism is often a non-religious philosophy or a worldview, federal courts have ruled that it qualifies as a religion.

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🤑 MetaMask makes Stellar a default network, bringing global payments into the Open Money platform

MetaMask, the world's largest self-custodial financial platform, today announced that Stellar, the blockchain network purpose-built for global payments, is now a default network within MetaMask Mobile and Extension.

MetaMask is the first major self-custodial platform to make Stellar a default network. Until now, MetaMask users who wanted to transact on Stellar needed a separate wallet. Every MetaMask account now includes a Stellar address, derived from the recovery phrase users already have. Existing Stellar users can import SRP from other wallets.

Users can hold and manage XLM, trustline assets and Soroban tokens alongside assets on other networks, send and receive them, and swap between Stellar and other supported networks.

🤝 Stellar joins MetaMask as the platform expands beyond Ethereum-based networks toward Open Money: one account for holding, sending, spending and trading money in both crypto and traditional forms.

"For most of the world, where you're born still decides what money you can hold, where you can send it, and what it costs to move," — said Gal Eldar, Chief Product Officer at MetaMask.

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🤖 ChatGPT and Claude blocked by Swedish government over "problematic" security concerns

Swedish officials are no longer allowed to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude for government work due to concerns over security.

The government will allow workers to continue using platforms that are regulated and approved, such as Microsoft CoPilot, but concerns that sensitive information could be fed into unregulated platforms have been cited as a reason for the ban.

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🤑 Curve Brings Onchain Liquidity Infrastructure to the Stellar Network in Its First Native Non-EVM Integration

Curve Finance, one of the leading DeFi protocols for stablecoin trading, has launched on the Stellar mainnet, marking its first native deployment outside the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem.

The initial release brings Curve’s audited StableSwap implementation to Stellar, enabling users to create pools permissionlessly, discover existing pools, swap assets and provide liquidity. StableSwap is designed for low-slippage trading between stablecoins pegged to the same currency and other closely correlated assets.

The deployment was built specifically for the Stellar network’s smart-contract environment, with support from the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF).

“At Curve, we started exploring possibilities of launching beyond EVM chains if there is demand. Stellar looks like a good fit: it's closer to the familiar EVM world than many other chains.

And at the same time, the demand for Curve is there, and it comes from institutions. Excited to see where this integration goes!” — said Michael Egorov, founder of Curve Finance. 🚀

#Stellar

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⚡️🕵🏼‍♂️ Binance freezes withdrawals after $6.3bn security breach

The crypto industry is reeling from a massive hack at Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Digital assets worth more than $6.3bn (£4.7bn) have reportedly been taken from Binance by North Korean hackers, apparently after a laptop belonging to one of its engineers was hacked.

The company said its teams are “working around the clock” to resolve the issue.

“Rest assured that user funds are completely safe,” — a Binance spokesperson said in a statement.

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⚡️🇺🇸Trump reposts a conversation between Obama and Jesus on Truth Social 😁

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🇧🇩🇺🇸Bangladesh in Talks to Buy More American Gas, Says US Ambassador

Bangladesh is poised to sign deals to buy more US liquefied natural gas as the Trump administration pushes to expand energy exports, says the American ambassador to the country.

Several LNG sales proposals are in various stages of the approval process with the Bangladeshi government, and agreements to buy liquefied petroleum gas could follow, said Ambassador Brent Christensen.

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🧑‍⚖️ New York governor signs AI chatbot child safety law

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed a law that aims to protect children from AI chatbot harms. The legislation requires AI companies to verify users' ages. They'll need to offer users at least one verification method that doesn't entirely rely on government ID. Companies will have to delete this "age information" after use.

If a user is under 18 or a company has yet to confirm the person is an adult, their chatbot will need to abide by certain restrictions. For instance, it cannot pretend "to be a real person, to be alive or to have human emotions."

There will be a website through which the public can file complaints to New York's attorney general. Companies that break the law may be on the hook for civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation, as well as damages, restitution and other forms of relief. They may also have to delete any data they collect unlawfully along with models trained on that information. The law will take effect in six months.

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🤑 Stellar Development Foundation Makes Strategic Investment in Marketnode to Expand Institutional Tokenized Real-World Asset Adoption in Asia-Pacific

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced a strategic investment in Marketnode, Asia-Pacific’s trusted digital market infrastructure (DMI) operator backed by Euroclear, HSBC, SGX Group, and Temasek. 🤝

The investment will support Marketnode’s work to expand institutional access to tokenized real-world financial products on the Stellar network across Asia-Pacific—connecting asset managers, issuers, distributors, and eligible investors with a growing ecosystem of digital assets and financial institutions.

➡️ Marketnode provides institutional market infrastructure across funds, credit, and structured products — supporting the issuance, distribution, and servicing of tokenized assets, providing institutions with the infrastructure to bring products onchain and connect them with established distribution channels and investors.

➡️ Most recently, Marketnode announced that it would offer onchain access to select BNY Investments funds on the Stellar network.

➡️ Marketnode also distributes tokenized investment products from regional and global asset managers including CGS International, Franklin Templeton, Maybank Asset Management, and WisdomTree that are available on the Stellar network.

For SDF, the investment reflects a continued focus on growing institutional adoption of the Stellar network in Asia-Pacific, as financial institutions across the region move digital asset initiatives from experimentation toward commercial deployment. 🚀

#Stellar

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🚫 FTC shuts down 19 imposter websites, secures more than $80 million for consumers in scam crackdown

The Federal Trade Commission has secured more than $80 million in consumer redress and helped shut down 19 websites impersonating the agency as part of its ongoing crackdown on government and business impersonation scams.

❗️The FTC announced the enforcement results as it continues efforts to combat fraudulent operations that deceive consumers by falsely claiming to represent legitimate businesses or government agencies. Impersonation scams have remained the most frequently reported category of fraud in recent years, with consumers reporting billions of dollars in losses.

“Imposter scams have been the top reported fraud category over the past several years with consumers reporting billions in losses,” — said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection.

“The FTC takes these scams very seriously and will continue to vigorously enforce the law against bad actors. If you pretend to be, or to be affiliated with, an entity to deceive consumers, you should expect to hear from the us.”

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🤑 Ripple has just released a new video!

Trust or innovation? Why choose when you can have both? 🤔

Ripple is showing how blockchain technology can bring together the trust financial institutions rely on and the innovation shaping the future of finance.

It's happening with Ripple. 🚀

#Stellar

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