Circle minted 250 million USDC on the Solana network 6 hours ago

On March 17, stablecoin issuer Tether announced that its AI platform QVAC Fabric has launched the world’s first cross-platform LoRA fine-tuning framework for Microsoft’s BitNet (1-bit large language model). This framework enables billion-parameter-scale LLMs to be trained and inferred on everyday hardware—including laptops, consumer-grade GPUs, and smartphones. Officially, the framework drastically cuts the VRAM and computing power requirements for AI model training, supporting Intel, AMD, Apple Silicon, and a range of mobile GPUs (such as Adreno, Mali, and Apple Bionic). In testing: - A roughly 1.25-billion-parameter BitNet model fine-tunes in ~10 minutes on a Samsung S25. - A 10-billion-parameter model takes ~1 hour 18 minutes on the S25, and ~1 hour 45 minutes on an iPhone 16. - The team even successfully fine-tuned a 13-billion-parameter model on an iPhone 16. For performance: - BitNet models see 2–11x faster inference speeds on mobile GPUs than on CPUs. - BitNet

**March 17 – Bank of America’s latest March Global Fund Manager Survey (FMS) shows global asset managers are ramping up cash holdings at the fastest pace since the 2020 pandemic amid Middle East geopolitical tensions and rising inflation expectations, with risk appetite sliding sharply.** Key findings: - Average cash positions for surveyed managers jumped from 3.4% in February to 4.3%, while overall investor sentiment hit a near six-month low. - Net optimism about global economic growth plummeted from 39% to just 7%. - Some 45% of respondents expect global CPI to keep rising over the next year, cooling Fed rate-cut expectations dramatically: only 17% now see cuts this year (down from 46% in February). Allocation highlights: - 34% are overweight commodities (highest since April 2022). - 53% are overweight emerging market (EM) stocks (new peak since February 2021). - Allocation to non-essential consumer (discretionary) stocks dropped to its lowest since December 2022.

On March 17, Gency AI—a decentralized AI and blockchain infrastructure firm—announced it has closed a $20 million funding round, with participation from TikTok, HF0, XYZ, Streamlined Ventures, Hat-Trick Capital, ViaBTC, Basics Capital and other institutional investors. The company said the fresh capital will be used to expand its decentralized ad execution and settlement network, strengthen its privacy computing tech stack, and accelerate product rollouts and ecosystem partnerships across North America, Asia and Europe. Gency AI aims to build verifiable advertising infrastructure using blockchain and smart contracts, recording ad impressions, conversion outcomes and revenue distribution on-chain to enable automated settlement and transparent revenue sharing. This addresses longstanding pain points in the digital ad industry, including data ownership, attribution transparency and cross-platform settlement efficiency. Its technical architecture includes an on-chain identity syst

On March 17, crypto liquidity provider and trading firm GSR announced it has acquired advisory firms Autonomous and Architech in a $57 million deal to launch an integrated crypto capital markets and treasury management platform. Per the announcement, Autonomous will retain its brand while providing token issuance, financial management, and infrastructure support within the GSR ecosystem. Architech, meanwhile, will become a core component of GSR’s digital asset advisory arm, collaborating on institutional trading, liquidity solutions, and asset management capabilities. GSR CEO Xin Song noted that crypto capital market services remain highly fragmented today—new projects often need to hire separate structural advisors, tokenomics experts, market makers, and listing consultants. The integration aims to deliver a one-stop solution spanning project creation, token design, fundraising, exchange strategy, and long-term capital planning. The platform will also provide treasury managem

On March 17, OpenAI entered into an agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to sell artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the U.S. government. (Golden Ten)

March 17 — Payment giant Mastercard announced plans to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK, with a total transaction value of up to $1.8 billion. In a joint statement Tuesday, the two parties noted roughly $300 million of the amount is contingent consideration. Reportedly, the acquisition follows a $2 billion potential deal between BVNK and Coinbase Global that fell through four months ago. The transaction also underscores that traditional payment giants are accelerating their expansion into stablecoins and on-chain payment infrastructure.