Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Deposits on Aave's newly launched Monad market surpassed $100 million on Saturday morning, according to TokenLogic on X, roughly two days after the lending protocol went live on the network.

Aave (AAVE), the largest decentralized lending protocol, deployed V3 on Monad on Thursday, bringing lending, borrowing, and its GHO stablecoin to the chain for the first time. The market launched with support for 12 assets, including USDT0, USDC, GHO, WETH, and Coinbase's cbBTC.

Deposits topped $75 million within the first 24 hours, Aave said Friday.

Monad (MON) is the high-throughput, EVM-compatible Layer 1 network built by former Jump Trading developers that launched its mainnet and MON token on Nov. 24 of last year. The network claims 10,000 transactions per second and 800-millisecond finality.

The early inflows are substantial relative to the size of Monad's DeFi ecosystem. The entire network held about $359.5 million in total value locked as of June 8, according to a LlamaRisk assessment posted to Aave's governance forum, meaning the new Aave market attracted the equivalent of more than a quarter of that figure in two days.

The deposits are also heavily subsidized. Under the deployment proposal authored by TokenLogic in May, the Monad Foundation committed $15 million in incentives over the first 12 months and agreed to acquire and hold 10 million GHO for more than six months, while the Aave DAO pledged another 500,000 GHO to support the stablecoin's adoption on the network.

Risk service provider LlamaRisk backed the deployment with conservative initial parameters, citing Monad's roughly seven months of operating history. The risk firm noted that network activity had compressed after a strong start, with liquidity concentrated in established protocols like Uniswap, Curve, and Morpho.

Notably, Monad received Aave V3.7 rather than the protocol's latest version. Aave V4 launched on the Ethereum mainnet in late March with a new hub-and-spoke architecture, and Aave Labs founder and CEO Stani Kulechov told The Block at the time that the team was pursuing a controlled rollout, as it had with prior versions. The governance proposal leaves it to the Monad Foundation to decide whether and when to migrate to V4.

Aave V4 separately crossed $250 million in deposits on Saturday, per Kulechov. "This is a remarkable milestone for Aave," Kulechov wrote on X. "Can't wait to see Aave to grow towards [$1 billion] with more crypto-backed loans and expanding to securities backed-lending."

In a statement on the Monad deployment, Kulechov said "the next generation of blockchain applications depends on fast execution and deep, reliable liquidity." Keone Hon, co-founder and general manager of the Monad Foundation, said Aave is a lending standard trusted by institutions and that the deployment puts Ethereum's core liquidity primitives on a faster chain.

The launch extends a multichain expansion that saw Aave go live on OKX's X Layer in March. Per the governance proposal, the next phase on Monad is expected to add Pendle PT assets and Fastlane's shMON liquid staking token.

The deployment caps an active week for the Monad ecosystem: MetaMask launched its Money Account product on Tuesday with Monad as its "home chain."

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Solana has recently emerged as a focal point in the cryptocurrency market, attracting attention with both surging transaction volumes and new proposals that could significantly impact the network’s future token supply. According to market data, activity on the blockchain has picked up notably, with analysts maintaining a long-term bullish outlook for the ecosystem.

Transaction volume sees explosive growthMarket expert Zensei reported that Solana’s transaction volume soared by 170.3% year on year for April, May, and June. By comparison, growth on the Hyperliquid platform was limited to just 9.1% in the same period, underscoring that Solana’s rate of increase was nearly 19 times greater than its peer network.

Solana is recognized for its high speed and low transaction fees, which have kept users and capital engaged on the network. As transaction flows intensify, investor attention has shifted from mere price trends toward the protocol-level changes driving the uptick in activity.

According to DeFi Dev Corp, approximately 60,000 new SOL tokens are minted daily on the Solana network, while only 650 SOL are being burned in return.

Technical outlook: $270 resistance comes into focusVuori Trading notes that after its recent correction, SOL appears to have entered a recovery phase and may be embarking on the fifth wave of the Elliott Wave cycle. If the current market optimism persists, $1,259 is cited as a potential medium-term target for Solana. The present pullback is interpreted as a fourth-wave correction rather than a breakdown in trend.

Technical indicators point to $107.94 as the main support level. Meanwhile, $270 stands out as the primary resistance zone. A decisive move above $270 could reinforce upward momentum, while a dip below $107.94 would increase the risk of a deeper correction.

The Relative Strength Index (RSI) remains one of the key metrics closely monitored by traders. With RSI nearing levels historically associated with the end of major declines, several analysts are watching SOL’s price structure with heightened attention.

Mini glossary: The Elliott Wave Theory proposes that price moves in repeating wave patterns, aiding technical analysis. RSI measures the speed and strength of price movements, helping identify overbought or oversold conditions in assets.

New proposals could reshape supply dynamicsBeyond technicals, proposed protocol upgrades within the Solana community may bring lasting changes to the token’s economic structure. DeFi Dev Corp revealed that with approximately 60,000 new SOL entering circulation daily versus only 650 SOL burned, the current supply inflation remains pronounced.

Currently, three SIMD proposals aim to address this disparity. SIMD-550 seeks to accelerate the reduction in inflation, effectively decreasing the future supply of new tokens. On the other hand, SIMD-123 is designed to increase institutional staking via validator pools, thereby reducing the circulating supply of SOL.

Vuori Trading emphasizes that the recent pullback appears more like a routine correction than a trend reversal, with the potential for higher levels to be retested if overall market support continues.

If these proposals are accepted, the Solana network could see lower inflation, higher staking participation, and more tokens burned as network usage grows. Market participants are closely watching governance decisions, the network’s capacity to accommodate rising activity, and SOL’s price behavior above the $270 mark.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Optimism’s grand experiment in Layer 2 economics has always rested on a simple premise: if you build on our stack, you pay rent. The OP Stack’s revenue-sharing framework, known as the Law of Chains, requires participating Superchain members to contribute the greater of 2.5% of their sequencer revenue or 15% of net sequencer profits to the Optimism Collective.

That model has historically generated an estimated $4.5 million annually for the Collective’s treasury, with the lion’s share coming from one chain in particular: Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 juggernaut. But cracks in the arrangement are starting to show, and the implications for the OP token could be significant.

How the royalty machine works The Law of Chains was introduced in July 2023 to standardize how Superchain members share revenue with the broader Optimism ecosystem. The structure is straightforward but clever in its design. Chains pay whichever amount is larger: 2.5% of gross sequencer revenue or 15% of net sequencer profit.

For chains running lean operations with tight margins, the 15% net profit threshold kicks in. For those printing money on transaction fees, the 2.5% gross revenue floor ensures Optimism always gets its cut.

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OP Mainnet itself operates differently, contributing 100% of its net sequencer revenue to the Collective. That distinction matters because it positions the flagship chain as the ecosystem’s largest benefactor, not just another tenant.

The funds flow into two primary channels. First, they support Retroactive Public Goods Funding, or RPGF, which is Optimism’s signature initiative for rewarding builders who create value for the ecosystem after the fact. Second, governance has begun directing portions of revenue toward OP token buybacks starting in 2026.

Base’s complicated relationship with the Collective Base has been the Superchain’s revenue engine. Historical estimates pegged Base’s annual contribution to the Optimism treasury at roughly $4.5 million alone. In Q1 2026, Base’s contribution to the Collective came in at approximately $1.4 million, distributed specifically through RPGF.

That Q1 figure, annualized, would suggest around $5.6 million per year. But the context around Base’s anticipated exit from revenue sharing complicates that projection considerably. If Base moves toward greater independence from the Superchain’s financial obligations, the revenue base supporting Optimism’s public goods funding and token buyback programs shrinks materially.

The OP token and market implications For OP holders, the revenue-sharing framework creates a direct link between Superchain adoption and token value. More chains building on the OP Stack means more sequencer revenue flowing to the Collective, which in turn funds buybacks and ecosystem development.

The governance decision to begin directing revenues toward OP token buybacks in 2026 is particularly notable. The Law of Chains isn’t enforced by smart contracts at the protocol level. It’s a governance framework, which means compliance is ultimately a function of incentive alignment rather than immutable code.

Investors watching this space should track two metrics closely. First, the number of new chains joining the Superchain and their aggregate sequencer revenue growth. Second, whether existing large contributors like Base maintain their financial commitments or negotiate alternative arrangements.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Updated Jul 4, 2026, 8:16 p.m. Published Jul 4, 2026, 6:00 p.m.

6 min read

(Boitumelo/Unsplash)Summary

Ethical hackers from security firm Hexens discovered a flaw in the Aptos blockchain that was patched but could have put up to $70 billion in digital assets at systemic risk, including stablecoins and cross-chain bridges.Researchers simulated the attack with a over-90% success rate under real network conditions, using a well-provisioned server setup that cost just $3,000 to simulate about 1/3 of the validator network, and the attack required no insider access or special permissions.The vulnerability was reported through emergency security channels on Feb. 25, and a patch was deployed within days to prevent any funds from being lost.A $3,000 server was enough for a blockchain security researcher to simulate an attack path they say could have put as much as $70 billion in crypto infrastructure at risk.

At the center of the disclosure was a flaw in Aptos, a layer-1 blockchain built on Move, the smart contract language used by Aptos and Sui, that stems from Facebook’s shelved Diem project.

In late February, researchers at the blockchain security firm Hexens reported a critical vulnerability in the Aptos Move virtual machine, the execution environment that processes smart contracts on the chain, to the project’s development team. Hexens identified what it described as a "stale-cache bug" leading to a type-confusion vulnerability, a condition in which software can be tricked into treating one type of onchain resource as another.The

Aptos team did patch the vulnerability when it was flagged, and no funds were lost.

“Aptos Labs was notified of a potential issue through our bug bounty program on February 25 that was already being triaged internally at the time," an Aptos spokesperson told CoinDesk. "A fix was developed, tested, and deployed to mainnet within hours of discovery. No users or funds were impacted at any point."

The Aptos spokesperson also disputed the practical exploitability of the bug to CoinDesk. "Our analysis determined the bug would have extremely low exploitability in real world conditions."

However, the details of what researchers found offer a sobering look at how close the ecosystem came to a potentially industry-altering event.

The sensitivity of this class of bug comes down to how the Move language handles authority. Protocol permissions in Move, including the right to mint a stablecoin, control a bridge, or administer a lending market, are often stored directly as onchain resources. If those resources are compromised, the damage does not stop at one protocol. It extends to everything that trusts them.

Hexens' researchers offered a practical analogy to the bug: it is roughly comparable to a bug on an Ethereum-style chain that would allow attacker-controlled code to write into storage belonging to other contracts, bypassing the type-system guarantees that Move was specifically designed to uphold.

Mudit Gupta, CTO at Polygon, independently reviewed the proof-of-concept materials and said the exploit held up. "It ran as claimed, and the exploit made sense," he told CoinDesk. "It required a few conditions to be met, which it seems like they did on the mainnet."

Meanwhile, Grego AI, which independently verified Hexens' proof-of-concept, calculated that approximately $250 million in Aptos-native TVL was directly at risk based on the near-90% success rate, separate from broader cross-chain exposure.

The $70 billion riskThe vulnerability, discovered by Vahe Karapetyan, CTO and co-founder of Hexens, could, if left unchecked, have exposed a far larger systemic risk surface across bridges, stablecoins, DeFi protocols and centralized exchanges, costing billions and creating a crisis far beyond Aptos itself.

And all it would've taken was a few thousand dollars' worth of servers.

The total cost to spin up the infrastructure needed to run this experiment was approximately $3,000 for a server that simulated an environment designed to approximate Aptos mainnet conditions. Although if a malicious attacker were to actually go through the exploit, it would have required considerably less, without requiring validator access, insider knowledge or privileged protocol permissions.

The team ran the exploit path roughly 20 times in a simulated environment and succeeded 17 or 18 times. The two or three failed attempts didn't stop the network, meaning the attacker could have simply had another window to try again.

The simulation was built to closely approximate real network conditions, using a cluster of more than 30 validator nodes, a mainnet-shaped stake distribution, organic transaction traffic and heavy execution contention. The Hexens team also tested what they call "non-armed calibration techniques": dry runs that measured mempool and block-construction conditions before committing to an armed attempt. The firm said those steps materially reduced the uncertainty introduced by the exploit's probabilistic elements, making the attack path more reliable in practice.

Based on public data collected at the time of reporting, Hexens assessed direct and first-order protocol exposure on Aptos, covering DeFi protocols, tokenized assets, stablecoin infrastructure and liquid-staking systems, at low single-digit billions.

In such exploits, however, the broader risk could've been greater, as blockchain-level compromises rarely stop at the affected chain.

Hexens assessed that the broader first-order systemic risk was approximately $70 billion — a huge number that includes value accessible through bridges, cross-chain messaging systems, stablecoin administration flows and centralized exchanges.

Grego AI noted that the exploit could also be used to steal protocol capabilities, including those held by LayerZero, Wormhole and USDC's CCTP. "If malicious actors had access to this bug, they would have been able to take all [the] TVL that they want[ed]," said Justus Hanna, CEO at Grego AI.

The simulation shows the industry remains vulnerable to hidden bugs in the blockchain technology.

If an attacker had actually found and exploited the bug, in theory, it could have easily dwarfed the massive $1.5 billion stolen in a Bybit hack last year. Most recently, in June, Zcash (ZEC) plummeted 38% after developers revealed a critical bug that had lurked undetected in its privacy pool for four years, one that could have allowed an attacker to print unlimited counterfeit tokens without anyone knowing. Before that, nine-figure bridge hacks and protocol exploits drained liquidity pools and rattled confidence in the infrastructure underpinning the broader market.

It’s worth noting that $70 billion is an estimate based on minting a mammoth amount of USDC stablecoin and using Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) to move it across chains. If a malicious attacker did this, and given how large the number is, it’s also likely a company like Circle would halt USDC transfers, although that has come under scrutiny recently as the stablecoin issuer said it doesn't freeze assets without legal authorization. So, in theory, if everyone stepped in, the entire $70 billion figure likely wouldn't be achieved—but it would still have rocked the industry nonetheless.

What this proof-of-concept testing demonstrated was access to the kinds of authority that sit at the top of cross-chain systems: bridge capabilities, signer capabilities, master-minter roles and protocol accounting state. Researchers said they validated a takeover of a master-minter-style role and demonstrated the use of a legitimate administration path, stopping short of actually minting tokens but showing why such roles belong in the threat model. The dominant vector into the broader surface runs through centralized exchanges, specifically the Aptos bridge pathways that connect onchain activity to exchange deposit crediting.

Response and disclosureThe same day Hexens filed its report, a "SEAL911" emergency warroom was opened to coordinate the response. SEAL911 is a volunteer security group that has become a key first-responder layer across the crypto ecosystem.

The vendor was notified hours after the warroom opened, and four major downstream projects were alerted that afternoon, each receiving local-runnable proof-of-concept material and analysis of relevant authority patterns.

A public pull request reflecting the patch became available on February 27. Aptos stated that a private-validator patch had been deployed before the public commit.

Hexens, meanwhile, says it has not received a technical rebuttal or evidence-based argument disputing the demonstrated impact classes. The firm claims that the main concern relayed back to the researchers involved the probabilistic aspects of the exploit, precisely what the team's calibration work was designed to address.

While no funds were stolen, the simulation showed that in a blockchain-level compromise, rate limits, issuer freezes, bridge controls, exchange monitoring and validator patches are not secondary safeguards. They can become the boundary between a contained bug and a market-wide exploit.

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Building the Zcash Machine: Tachyon and Quantum Readiness

Building the Zcash Machine: Tachyon and Quantum Readiness

Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.

Jun 30, 2026

Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.

Why it matters:

Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.

Xbox at a gamescom briefing in 2014. Microsoft is pressing its games division to turn a profit. (Microsoft Photo) In 2007, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 consoles started dying — overheating until three lights on the front blinked red, a defect gamers came to call the “red ring of death.” Microsoft’s response was to extend the warranty on every machine and take a charge of more than $1 billion to fix the problem, making it one of the costliest product failures in the company’s history.

Microsoft could afford it financially, but the bigger factor was strategy. Xbox was a bet on the living room, and for a company minting money on Windows and Office at the time, losing a billion or so was a justifiable cost of staying in the game.

Nearly two decades later, that patience has run out.

“Going forward, this cannot continue,” the new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote in a memo to employees last month, offering a blunt assessment of a business that has spent more than $20 billion over five years, only to see its core revenue fall by nearly half a billion dollars, running at a thin 3% profit margin, by Microsoft’s own internal measures.

Asha Sharma took over as CEO of Microsoft’s Xbox business in February. In a memo to employees last month, she wrote that the division’s heavy spending and shrinking revenue “cannot continue.” (Microsoft File Photo) With thousands of layoffs expected to be announced across Microsoft as soon as next week, the Xbox division is likely to be among the hardest hit.

The cuts reach across the company — including sales and consulting — part of a restructuring that has become routine around the close of Microsoft’s fiscal year. But for Xbox, they’re an early step in a broader effort to reset the business, rein in costs, and position the division for healthier profits.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been blunt about it: the company has spent years subsidizing Xbox rather than profiting from it, and that era is over. The videos and livestreams of people playing Xbox games that fill YouTube generate more money than Microsoft makes from the games themselves, he noted in an appearance on the Hard Fork podcast.

“No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years,” Nadella said. “And now we have to turn this into a sustainable business.”

Long-term strategic bet Turning it around means breaking a pattern that runs through Xbox’s entire history.

Xbox launched in 2001 and lost money for most of its first decade. Microsoft absorbed the losses and stayed in — going up against Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo — because it saw a strategic prize in owning a piece of the living room, and later of mobile. Online gaming also gave the company early experience running services at scale, which fed its cloud ambitions.

Over time, the goal shifted from selling hardware to selling subscriptions.

Xbox Live, launched in 2002, turned online play into recurring revenue. Game Pass, which arrived in 2017, let players pay a monthly fee — the top tier is about $23 — for a library of games, including Microsoft’s own new releases the day they come out. The idea was to get people paying for Xbox everywhere: consoles, PCs, phones and the cloud.

And when growth stalled, Microsoft doubled down. It paid $7.5 billion in 2021 for Bethesda, the studio behind Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, then $69 billion in 2023 for Activision Blizzard (whose games include Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo and the mobile hit Candy Crush) the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history.

A series of economic headwinds Microsoft could afford to be patient through all of it. Now it’s not so simple. In recent years, almost everything about the economics of gaming has turned against Xbox at the same time.

Hardware loses money, and AI is making it worse. Microsoft sells consoles at or below cost, banking on games and subscriptions to make up the difference. But AI data centers are consuming so much memory and storage that chip prices have spiked. That has forced Microsoft to raise Xbox console prices, most recently a $100-to-$150 hike this summer that it blamed directly on component costs.

Xbox lost the console war. By most estimates, Sony’s PlayStation 5 has outsold the Xbox Series X and S more than two to one. A smaller base means fewer game sales and subscriptions to offset the upfront hardware losses. That has left Xbox a distant second for the entire generation.

Revenue is shrinking. Even setting aside the games it gained from Activision, Xbox’s annual revenue has fallen nearly $500 million over five years — while the money going into the business keeps climbing. It has been investing more to earn less.

Microsoft’s most recent quarterly filing shows gaming revenue of $16.8 billion for the nine months through March, down about $1.1 billion, or 6%, from a year earlier.

Game Pass cuts into sales. Handing subscribers a new game the day it launches undercuts the roughly $70 they would have paid to buy it. The service delivers steady subscription income, but thinner economics on the games themselves.

Activision didn’t fix the margins. Even with one of gaming’s most profitable businesses folded in, Xbox earns only about 3 cents of profit on every dollar — well under the 17 to 22 cents typical in the industry. If the biggest acquisition in company history can’t move the margin, little will.

Every spare billion is flowing to AI. Microsoft is pouring more than $100 billion a year into the data centers and chips behind its AI push, trying to capitalize on the boom. Against a risk and payoff that big, a gaming business that barely breaks even feels like yesterday’s strategic bet.

What’s next for Xbox The cuts have already started. In recent weeks, Microsoft has signaled plans to close or sell some studios, including Ninja Theory, maker of the acclaimed “Hellblade” series.

Shedding staff, studios and marketing will lift Xbox’s profit margins in the near term. What it won’t do is fix the underlying problem: a business can trim its way to a better number only so much before it has to generate more revenue.

Sharma’s plan, so far, is to concentrate on Xbox’s biggest franchises, funding blockbusters like Halo and Fallout while pulling back elsewhere. It’s leaning on Game Pass and releasing most of its games on PCs and rival consoles from Sony and Nintendo, reaching players well beyond Xbox’s shrinking base, even as it holds back a few new exclusives like Gears of War to give owners a reason to stay.

Microsoft is also rethinking the console itself. In her memo, Sharma described a “hardware component crisis” that has left the company unable to make as many consoles as players want, and called for “a new business model and partnerships” for its hardware.

How far the reset ultimately goes is an open question. The Information reported that Microsoft has weighed making Xbox a standalone subsidiary, a joint venture, or a spin-off, though nothing is imminent.

Microsoft’s response to the Xbox 360 “red ring of death,” July 6, 2007. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer / NewsBank) Whatever happens next, it’s clear that times have changed. In 2007, as the red ring of death crisis emerged, Peter Moore, who ran the Xbox business at the time, and his boss Robbie Bach went to then-CEO Steve Ballmer to ask for the money to repair and replace the failing consoles.

Ballmer didn’t flinch. “What’s it going to cost?” he asked, as Moore later recalled.

Told it was $1.15 billion, Ballmer said, simply: “Do it.”

Moore credits that decision with saving Xbox. There would have been no Xbox One, he said, without Ballmer’s willingness to spend more than a billion dollars to protect the brand.

But nearly two decades later, Microsoft is done writing that kind of check for Xbox.

A $10,000 investment in Intel (INTC 5.61%) at its Jan. 2 closing price of $39.38 would have bought about 254 shares. At Thursday's close of $120.35, that stake is worth about $30,561 as of this writing. In six months, the money more than tripled.

But two footnotes belong next to that figure. First, it was briefly even better: at Intel's June 30 close of $139.63, the same stake was worth more than $35,000, before the stock gave back about 14% across the first two trading sessions of July. Second, almost nobody saw this coming. In January, Intel was still widely viewed as the chipmaker that had missed the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

Which raises the question for everyone who watched from the sidelines: What turned Intel into 2026's most dramatic large-cap comeback, and what has to keep going right from here?

Image source: Getty Images.

How Intel tripled The rally wasn't built on PCs. It was built on two things: booming demand for the processors that feed AI data centers, and renewed faith in Intel's foundry -- the company's long-suffering bet on manufacturing chips for other companies.

Intel's first-quarter results, reported in April, showed both engines running. Revenue in the company's data center and AI segment rose 22% year over year to $5.1 billion, and Intel Foundry revenue grew 16% to $5.4 billion, while the classic PC chip business grew just 1%. Total revenue rose 7% to $13.6 billion, and non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share more than doubled, to $0.29.

"This deliberate reset to how we operate drove a sixth consecutive quarter of revenue above our expectations, as well as new and deepened relationships with strategic partners," said CEO Lip-Bu Tan in the company's first-quarter earnings release.

For years, the foundry consumed cash and produced doubt. What changed in 2026 is that customers -- and investors -- began treating the manufacturing turnaround as on schedule. Each new commitment matters twice over. It brings future revenue and signals to prospective customers that Intel's factories can be trusted with cutting-edge work.

Add a chip sector in full boom, and the repricing was violent. A stock that entered the year priced for slow decline exited June priced for a successful transformation.

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What has to keep going right But now Intel investors face a problem: At a valuation of about $604 billion, Intel is priced as if both its transformation succeeds and its business will grow rapidly for years to come -- even though the company remains unprofitable over the trailing 12 months. When a stock reprices from skepticism to confidence this quickly, the burden of proof shifts to every subsequent quarter.

The next test arrives July 23, when Intel reports second-quarter results.

When the report is released, three things will arguably matter most: whether foundry revenue continues growing, whether gross margins continue to expand, and whether new customer names continue to arrive. Because the gap between today's revenue and today's price tag is bridged almost entirely by future contracts and expanded profitability.

Meanwhile, the stock's early July slide is a preview of what happens when confidence wobbles. Shares of Intel fell about 9% in a single session on July 1 amid a broad pullback in chip stocks, with no company-specific stumble required. After a run like this year's, many of the stock's owners arrived recently and can leave quickly, which could make drawdowns sharper.

So what should investors who feel they missed it do? The honest answer is that the stock's single biggest repricing -- from left-for-dead to credible -- is probably already over. From here, returns likely have to be earned the slow way, through quarters of foundry growth and proof that profits are following the revenue.

I wouldn't chase the stock after a triple, and I personally wouldn't buy ahead of the July 23 report either. But for patient investors who believe American chip manufacturing has years of demand ahead of it, Intel remains one of the most direct ways to own that idea. Bought gradually, in a position sized to survive the swings a stock like this all but guarantees, it can still earn a place in a long-term portfolio.

CoreWeave (CRWV 4.58%), a neocloud provider of AI infrastructure services, went public at $40 per share on March 28, 2025. By June 20, it had reached a record high of $183.58. But as of this writing, it trades at about $82. Let's see if that pullback is a good buying opportunity.

Image source: Getty Images.

What does CoreWeave do? CoreWeave was originally an Ethereum miner, but it repurposed its GPUs to remotely process AI tasks after the crypto market crashed in 2018. It subsequently expanded its data center count from just three centers at the end of 2022 to 49 centers today, and it supports that infrastructure with more than 250,000 Nvidia (NVDA 1.39%) GPUs.

CoreWeave's AI-optimized servers can handle advanced AI workloads 35 times faster and 80% cheaper than larger cloud infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Its largest customers include Microsoft, Meta (META 4.80%), OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and the quantitative trading firm Jane Street.

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How fast is CoreWeave growing? CoreWeave's revenue surged from $16 million in 2022 to $5.1 billion in 2025. Its backlog swelled to $99.4 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, and analysts expect its annual revenue to grow at a three-year CAGR of 99% to $40.3 billion in 2028. That's a jaw-dropping growth rate for a stock that trades at just 3.5 times this year's sales.

However, CoreWeave's net loss also widened from $31 million in 2022 to $1.2 billion in 2025, and analysts expect it to nearly double to $2.2 billion by 2028. It also ended its latest quarter with $50.8 billion in total liabilities, giving it a high debt-to-equity ratio of 10.8. When we include that debt in its enterprise value of $86.3 billion, it looks a bit pricier at 6.8 times this year's sales.

Is CoreWeave's pullback a buying opportunity? CoreWeave has plenty of growth potential, but investors aren't sure it can execute its expansion without breaking the bank. When CoreWeave's stock hit a record high last summer, investors were expecting the Fed to cut interest rates, making it cheaper for the company to expand.

But today, more analysts expect interest rate hikes in the second half of 2026 if inflation doesn't cool off. That's why investors backed away from unprofitable, high-growth companies like CoreWeave. Competition from other neocloud companies and Meta, which recently decided to sell some of its excess cloud computing power, is exacerbating that pressure. However, CoreWeave should become appealing again as interest rates stabilize, it locks in more customers, and economies of scale kick in. So if you're looking for an AI stock to hold for a few years instead of a few quarters, CoreWeave's latest pullback could be a golden buying opportunity.

Leo Sun has positions in Amazon and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Ethereum, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Rocket Lab (RKLB +0.32%), a developer of reusable orbital rockets, recently agreed to acquire Iridium (IRDM 3.54%), a provider of satellite communications services, for approximately $8 billion. It expects to close the cash-and-stock deal by mid-2027.

Image source: Getty Images.

Rocket Lab generates most of its revenue from launch services for its Electron rockets (and upcoming Neutron rockets) and from the sale of satellite subsystems. These businesses are growing, but they're capital-intensive and operate at low margins. SpaceX's (SPCX +2.69%) upcoming Starship rocket could exacerbate that pressure by drastically reducing launch costs.

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By acquiring Iridium, Rocket Lab gains a higher-margin, cash-generating business with recurring revenue from more than 2.5 million subscribers. It also gains dozens of satellites, its own weather-resilient L-band spectrum, and Iridium's consumer-facing data network. That expansion could pave the way toward stable profits in the future.

Rocket Lab's improved scale and diversification will make it a more formidable competitor for SpaceX -- which launches its own rockets through its space division, supports internet satellite services through Starlink, and is trying to tie it all together with its nascent AI business. Rocket Lab is still a lot smaller than SpaceX. Still, it will become the only other company to control the entire stack -- the factory, the rocket, the spectrum, and orbital operations -- for the space economy.

Leo Sun has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Rocket Lab. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

PI Posts Worst Weekly Return in CMC Top 100@PiCoreTeam's native token $PI has emerged as the weakest performer across CoinMarketCap's top-100 assets over the past seven days, shedding approximately 9% during the period. The decline extends a painful run for the token: Pi Network reached an all-time high of $2.99 and is now trading roughly 96% below that peak. The price has been testing key support near $0.12 amid heavy token unlocks.

A persistent supply overhang is a central concern. Over 127 million PI tokens are set to unlock within 30 days, creating significant sell-pressure risk, and technicals remain bearish with price below the 20-day, 50-day, 100-day, and 200-day EMAs. The backdrop is notable given that the @PiCoreTeam launched three new products on June 28 during its annual Pi2Day event. The launches, branded PiVerify, Pi Sign-in, and SoloHost, are intended to pivot the project toward AI and identity infrastructure. PiVerify opens the network's KYC system, used to verify over 18 million users, to external businesses that must pay for the service in PI tokens. Despite the product announcements, the token failed to find buying support, with price continuing to drift lower through the week.

JTO and CC Round Out the Weekly Laggards@jito_sol's $JTO and @CantonNetwork's $CC followed PI as the next worst performers on CMC's top-100 list over the same period. Jito is a liquid staking and maximum extractable value (MEV) protocol for the Solana network, designed to help decentralize Solana by spreading stake across the network. JTO serves as the governance token of the Jito protocol, putting decision-making in the hands of the community. The token faces its own structural headwinds: network stress events on Solana can weigh on sentiment and TVL across Solana DeFi, directly hurting Jito's fee income, while ongoing token unlocks continue to add sell-side pressure.

The broader picture reflects a difficult stretch for mid and large-cap altcoins, with token unlock schedules and weak demand compounding downside pressure across several projects in the top 100.

Sources
CoinMarketCap: Latest Pi Network Updates
CoinGecko: Pi Network (PI) Price and Market Data
CoinMarketCap: Jito (JTO) Price and Market Data

There's a new stablecoin in town that wants to shake up the industry. On June 30, a consortium of over 140 organizations announced the launch of Open USD, which has an enticing offer for partners. It proposes joint governance and sharing the interest it earns on its reserves with its partners, as well as free Open USD minting and redemptions. 

Image source: Getty Images.

Circle Internet Group (CRCL +4.20%), which issues USD Coin, fell 22% over the 48 hours following the announcement, though it has since pared its losses.

So, is this another flash-in-the-pan token that will fall away like many stablecoin projects have? Or could it take market share from the two dominant players, USDC and Tether?

What is Open USD? The Open Standard consortium says it will launch Open USD, its dollar-pegged stablecoin, later this year. The list of major companies on board is impressive, including Visa (V +2.87%), Mastercard, BlackRock, Alphabet, Coinbase (COIN +3.92%), and more. Given that Coinbase was one of the original forces behind USDC and the crypto firm still shares part of Circle's revenue, its participation raised eyebrows.

Open USD's yield revenue-sharing promise also goes against the grain. By law, U.S. stablecoin firms must back each token they issue with readily accessible reserves, and they can earn interest on those reserves. Circle holds the majority of its assets in U.S. Treasuries, and its reserve yield accounted for $2.63 billion of its total $2.75 billion in revenue in 2025. Investors are worried that Open USD could challenge that stream.

Is the writing on the wall for Circle? Things can turn on a dime in the cryptocurrency and stablecoin markets, particularly because speculation often drives price action. However, the dramatic drop in Circle's stock following Open USD's announcement seems overblown for a stablecoin that hasn't even launched. Open Standard won't be able to replicate Circle's regulatory progress nor its payment network overnight, if at all.

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On a practical level, a consortium of 140 names is impressive, but getting buy-in on key decisions will be a challenge. I have enough trouble organizing an annual holiday with 10 friends -- if that feels like herding cats, I can only imagine the behind-the-scenes wrangling it will take to get those big banks, payment processors, crypto firms, and tech companies to bring Open USD to market.

Plus, neither Tether's dominance nor Circle's first-mover advantage in the U.S. will be easy to shake, as other high-profile stablecoin projects have discovered. Tether launched in 2014 and, despite being dogged by questions about how it handles its reserve funds, there are still $184 billion USDT in circulation -- almost 60% of the total. Circle's USDC ranks second at $73 billion, while the others barely register. For example, PayPal launched PayPal USD in 2023, and it has issued only $2.75 billion in tokens since then.

Can stablecoins achieve their potential? The bigger question is whether the stablecoin industry can really grow at the rate many predict. Issuance soared last year, but growth has slowed in 2026. The market could be worth trillions of dollars, but it depends on stablecoins becoming part of people's day-to-day money management. There's huge potential, but rewiring payment infrastructure takes time.

I am not buying the Circle dip, but that's got nothing to do with Open USD. I want to see how the stablecoin sector evolves, and right now, I think established players like Visa, which is embracing blockchain technology, or Chainlink (LINK +3.05%), the oracle crypto that provides essential data for on-chain and real-world operations, have more potential.

Emma Newbery has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, BlackRock, Chainlink, Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa. The Motley Fool recommends Coinbase Global and recommends the following options: short September 2026 $47.50 calls on PayPal. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs hemorrhaged more than $2 billion in net outflows across a two-week stretch in late May and early June, part of a broader 13-day redemption streak that ultimately drained approximately $4.4 billion from the products.

BlackRock’s IBIT, the largest spot Bitcoin ETF by assets, was the primary source of the bleeding. The fund saw $1.3 billion in outflows in a single week, with multiple individual trading days exceeding $500 million in redemptions.

What triggered the exodus The outflows didn’t happen in a vacuum. Bitcoin’s price declined from early-year highs above $80,000 to a range between $60,000 and $73,500 during the same period.

Analytics firms including SoSoValue, CoinShares, and Glassnode tracked the selling in real time. The consensus explanation involves a cocktail of factors: shifting market sentiment, geopolitical tensions, rising Treasury yields, and recalibrated expectations around interest rate cuts.

Post-rally profit-taking played a role too. Bitcoin had a strong run earlier in the year, and a portion of the selling likely reflects investors simply locking in gains rather than making a broader bearish call on the asset class.

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Ethereum ETFs weren’t spared either. Those products faced their own extended outflow period, though Bitcoin funds dominated the overall redemption numbers by a wide margin.

Context matters more than the headline number Total assets under management across spot Bitcoin ETFs sat near $100 billion to $103 billion before the May pullback began. That means the two-week outflow represented roughly 2% of total AUM. The broader 13-day streak, at $4.4 billion, still only accounted for about 4% to 4.5% of the total pie.

Bloomberg Intelligence analysts made a similar observation. With nearly $100 billion still parked in these products, the vast majority of investors held firm. The outflows, in their view, amounted to constrained noise rather than a structural shift in demand.

Cumulative inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs since their January 2024 launch had reached approximately $58 billion by April 2026. Even after the May-June selling, the products remained firmly in net-positive territory on a lifetime basis.

Signs of a floor emerging By early July, the selling pressure showed signs of exhaustion. After ten consecutive days of outflows, Bitcoin ETFs recorded a modest net inflow of roughly $221 million to $222 million.

What this means for investors The outflow episode highlights a tension that will define Bitcoin ETFs going forward. These products make it extraordinarily easy to buy Bitcoin exposure. They also make it extraordinarily easy to sell.

Traditional Bitcoin holders who custody their own assets face friction when selling: transfers, exchange deposits, withdrawal limits. ETF holders can redeem with a single click during market hours. That convenience cuts both ways, and it means ETF flow data will increasingly serve as a real-time sentiment gauge for institutional Bitcoin appetite.

The competitive landscape among ETF issuers also matters here. BlackRock’s IBIT bore the brunt of the outflows in part because it holds the most assets. When large institutional investors rebalance or de-risk, they sell what they own the most of.

For investors watching from the sidelines, the key metric to track isn’t any single day’s flow number. It’s the cumulative inflow trend over rolling three-month and six-month windows. At $58 billion in lifetime inflows, the structural bull case for Bitcoin ETF demand has significant cushion.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Litecoin has once again entered the spotlight, but this time, it is not a dramatic price surge capturing attention. Instead, the regulatory landscape is at center stage. The Litecoin Foundation announced that Litecoin is now officially compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation. As the EU rolls out its comprehensive crypto asset framework, this move could strengthen Litecoin’s standing within regulated markets.

MiCA compliance takes priority over price actionAccording to the Litecoin Foundation, Litecoin is now recognized under a legitimate legal framework in the EU and meets MiCA’s requirements. The Foundation, established in 2017, is recognized as a core supporter of the Litecoin ecosystem’s development.

Glossary: MiCA is the EU’s unified regulatory framework for crypto asset issuers and service providers. Its aim is to standardize rules across member states while strengthening investor protection.

The Litecoin Foundation characterized this step as a significant signal of credibility, stronger consumer protection, and increased regulatory clarity.

Despite the major regulatory milestone, market reaction remained muted. At the time the announcement was published, Litecoin was trading at $42.56, marking a 0.35% decline over the past 24 hours. While the news sparked community interest, there was no noticeable upward momentum in the price.

A look at technical charts shows Litecoin consolidating around the $42 range. The cryptocurrency is struggling to push past resistance at $45.12, as investors remain cautious amid broader market conditions. For now, the news alone has not triggered a decisive shift in price action.

Key technical levels shape the outlookFollowing a sharp drop in June, Litecoin’s daily chart reveals a sideways trend. Technical indicators such as On Balance Volume have begun turning upward after recent lows, signaling a possible easing of selling pressure. This suggests a gradual return of buyer appetite could be on the horizon.

Yet, the technical picture has not produced a clear breakout. If Litecoin’s price can surpass and hold above $45.12, a recovery toward higher resistance levels becomes more likely. On the other hand, a dip below the $42 support zone, especially alongside negative overall sentiment, could spark renewed selling pressure.

Derivatives and on chain data confirm cautionMarket analytics reveal that investors have not rushed to reprice Litecoin following the regulatory news; instead, most are maintaining existing positions. According to data from Coinglass, the total open interest in Litecoin futures has remained flat at around $290 million, indicating that new leveraged bets have not entered the market.

IndicatorLevelInterpretationPrice$42.56Trading in a narrow rangeResistance$45.12Critical upside thresholdSupport$42Key level to monitor on the downsideOpen InterestAround $290 millionLimited appetite for new riskLiquidation data from the past 24 hours also reveals no clear dominance between buyers and sellers. DefiLlama figures show active address counts have stayed close to recent averages, suggesting that user engagement on the network remains steady even as prices trade sideways.

Overall, market indicators highlight that investors in Litecoin are seeking stronger confirmation signals before making major moves.

Greater regulatory clarity could support Litecoin’s long term outlook. Still, for any short term price direction to emerge, investors are likely waiting for higher trading volumes and a convincing move above key resistance levels.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

XRP has made its way into Australia’s financial parliamentary record. In the Australian Parliament’s Register of Members’ Interests, Labor MP Sally Sitou indicated her only cryptocurrency holding is XRP with local exchange CoinSpot.

Australian MP Lists XRP The filing identifies the digital currency as “Cryptocurrency (Ripple).” No Bitcoin and no Ether. Only XRP, included in the financial records of one of the world’s 15 largest economies.

The filing also shows that Sitou has physical gold through ABC Bullion and holds a wide-ranging portfolio of Australian and U.S. equities like the Commonwealth Bank, BHP, Meta Platforms and Costco. XRP is currently the sole listed digital asset.

Australian MP XRP Filing This disclosure sits inside a broader shift in how Australia treats crypto. The country’s Digital Assets Framework Bill Passed Parliament in April 2026, requiring exchanges and tokenized custody providers to obtain an Australian Financial Services License. Ripple is already pursuing that license, an early sign of its intent to entrench itself in the country’s regulated market.

Australia’s approach to regulation has changed significantly. In under a year, the nation moved from years of legislative silence to a well-organized licensing system for crypto firms.

The shift provides Ripple, the company behind XRP, an obligation as well as an opportunity. The moved has drawn wide attention on X, citing a continuation in adoption.

🚨🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA MAKES XRP OFFICIAL 🇦🇺🚨

Australia has officially disclosed XRP holdings in a Member of Parliament’s Register of Interests.

XRP is now publicly listed as part of a lawmaker’s financial assets in one of the world’s largest economies.

Adoption continues. 👀 pic.twitter.com/gJmALhkHYE

— John Squire 🇺🇸 (@TheCryptoSquire) July 4, 2026

White House Official’s XRP Filing & XRP’s Track Record Sitou’s revelation was not the only one capturing attention. Ian Kelley, who serves as the War Room Director at the White House and is also a Special Assistant to the President, reported XRP in a public financial filing after his appointment in January 2025.

His filing places the holding in a Coinbase wallet, valued between $1,001 and $15,000. Unlike Sitou, Kelley holds a broader crypto portfolio, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Chainlink, and Cardano all appear alongside XRP.

Each asset in Kelley’s portfolio falls within the same $1,001 to $15,000 disclosure range. Neither filing reveals the exact number of tokens held. But both put XRP on the record in two separate governments on two separate continents.

Political financial disclosures carry weight. They are sworn documents. When a lawmaker or White House official lists an asset, it signals more than personal preference, it normalizes that asset within the official financial order.

For XRP, appearing in two such filings in a single week adds to a growing pattern of political legitimacy. The company’s pursuit of an Australian Financial Services License shows it is tracking the regulatory door as it opens.

Explore the most hyped crypto presale projects before they hit major exchanges.

Charles Hoskinson believes the network’s Ouroboros Leios upgrade will increase transaction capacity, positioning Cardano alongside some of the industry’s fastest blockchain networks, including the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

Hoskinson made the assertion during a virtual interview with David Gokhshtein on The Breakdown podcast. During the discussion, he revealed that Leios technology could boost Cardano’s throughput by as much as 60 times its current capacity.

“Leios will be 60x in terms of throughput inside the system,” he said, highlighting the upgrade’s potential to significantly increase the number of transactions Cardano can process per second. 

If Cardano reaches that level, Hoskinson believes the network will “be as performant as the XRP Ledger (XRPL).” 

Cardano Aims to Match XRPL’s Speed and Efficiency For years, the XRPL has built its reputation on fast settlement times and high transaction throughput, making it a preferred option for payments and cross-border transfers.

The network typically settles transactions within three to five seconds and supports a throughput of up to 1,500 TPS. Notably, the blockchain surpassed 120 TPS in March 2026 while processing around 650 transactions during peak activity.

Against this backdrop, Hoskinson’s latest remarks suggest that Cardano no longer views transaction speed as a competitive disadvantage. Instead, he believes the introduction of Leios will place the network on par with leading blockchain platforms in terms of performance and scalability.

Preserving Decentralization and Security Notably, Hoskinson stressed that Cardano achieved these throughput gains without sacrificing its core principles, particularly decentralization and security.

The blockchain industry has long struggled to balance scalability, decentralization, and security, a challenge commonly known as the blockchain trilemma. Many networks improve performance only by compromising one of the other two elements.

However, Cardano aims to prove that such trade-offs are not inevitable. With Leios, Cardano hopes to deliver the speed required for mainstream adoption while preserving the principles that have guided the ecosystem since its inception. 

Current Status of Leios  Meanwhile, the Ouroboros Leios upgrade officially launched its public testnet on June 23, 2026. Named Musashi Dojo, the testnet represents the first time the protocol has operated in a live network environment.

Looking ahead, Cardano plans to deploy Leios on the mainnet later this year, marking what could become one of the network’s most significant scalability upgrades to date.

DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.

The fintech giant of Europe, Revolut, has announced the delisting of Tether’s USDT stablecoin. This move hinges on regulatory changes under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework affecting the crypto industry.

Revolut Moves To Delist Tether’s USDT The company has sent out emails to users with a timeline to sell their USDT before it is withdrawn from eligible accounts.

As explained in the notice, Revolut said, “We’re delisting USDT from our crypto offering.” It also warned users that “From 31 August 2026 12:00 PM GMT, you’ll no longer be able to hold USDT in your Revolut account.”

It will be rolled out in phases. Customers will be able to keep buying USDT until July 6th. After 30th July, the new USDT deposits will not be accepted. Users will continue to be able to sell their tokens or send them to supported external crypto wallets until Aug. 31.

Revolut also urged customers to “Review your holdings before 31 August 2026 12:00 PM GMT.” This provides a couple of weeks for them to consider their options.

If you still have USDT in eligible accounts at the end of the deadline, they will no longer be in crypto. According to Revolut’s crypto delisting policy, any remaining balance will be automatically converted to the base currency that the account is denominated in at the market price of USDT when the delisting is activated.

Tether’s MiCA License Setback Revolut’s decision comes in response to stricter implementation of EU’s MiCA regulations. Stablecoin issuers and crypto services in the bloc must now adhere to new licensing, reserve, disclosure and supervisory requirements.

Tether has not been granted a MiCA licence for USDT. Previously, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino had said that the framework was not designed for the world’s largest stablecoin due to MiCA’s requirement for reserves. This raised questions around the stablecoin reserve composition, liquidity management, and redemption risks.

Following the July 1st enforcement date of MiCA, Revolut joins the growing list of platforms restricting customers’ access to USDT in Europe. Also, it’s important to note that these restrictions will only affect notified users of Revolut. Hence, it will not impact on the availability of USDT in the jurisdictions in which the stablecoin remains supported.

If you’re looking for decentralized futures trading, visit our page on Perp DEXs.

There are four companies in the world worth $3 trillion or more: Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet. What they have in common is that they either develop the most important consumer hardware on Earth, run the software infrastructure that enterprises depend on, or design the chips that power the AI revolution.

The fifth member of that club is none of those things. Instead, it produces key components for all of them. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM 2.15%) sits at roughly $2.24 trillion in market value as of late June 2026. That makes it the sixth most valuable company on the planet.

Given the numbers it's putting up right now, the $3 trillion mark is not far away. Here's how it gets there.

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The numbers make the case In 2026's first quarter, TSMC reported revenue of $35.9 billion, up 40.6% from the same quarter a year earlier. Net income rose 58.3% year over year. Gross margin came in at 66.2%. Net profit margin was 50.5%. Take a second with that last number. For every dollar TSMC brings in, it keeps fifty cents as profit. That's a level of operational leverage most companies would consider impossible.

For Q2 2026, management guided for revenue between $39 billion and $40.2 billion. The full-year 2026 growth forecast is above 30% in U.S. dollar terms. At that trajectory, TSMC will generate well north of $150 billion in annual revenue this year. If margins hold even close to where they are, the profit picture is extraordinary.

To get from $2.24 trillion to $3 trillion, the stock needs to gain roughly 34%. With earnings compounding at 50% or more year over year, that gap closes quickly.

Why TSMC is the real AI story Everyone focuses on Nvidia when they talk about AI chips, and that's fair. But Nvidia does not manufacture its own chips. Neither does Advanced Micro Devices. Neither does Apple. Every advanced processor in those companies' lineups comes out of a TSMC fab. TSMC has roughly 70% global market share in advanced chip manufacturing, and no competitor is close to challenging that at the most cutting-edge nodes.

Advanced technologies at 7 nanometers (nms) and below now account for 74% of TSMC's wafer revenue. That mix has shifted fast, and it matters because leading-edge nodes carry higher prices and better margins. As AI drives demand for 3nm and eventually 2nm chips, TSMC gets paid more per wafer and keeps more of it.

The AI infrastructure build-out is not a quarter or two of demand. Every hyperscaler is building massive graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters, and every GPU in those clusters is a TSMC chip. Nvidia has Blackwell. Amazon has Trainium. Alphabet's Google has tensor processing units (TPUs). They all flow through TSMC's fabs.

Image source: Getty Images.

Arizona changes the story For years, the argument against owning TSMC was the geopolitical risk. All the important fabs were on Taiwan, and the uncertainty around that geography created what analysts called a "Taiwan discount" on the stock's valuation. That discount is starting to shrink.

TSMC has committed $165 billion to its Arizona expansion, a campus covering more than 2,000 acres with six planned fabs, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center. The first Arizona fab already turned a $514 million profit in its first year of production. Phase two, running at 3nm, is on track for 2027, a full year ahead of the original schedule.

As more production moves to U.S. soil, institutional investors who previously avoided TSM on geopolitical grounds have a reason to buy. That is not a small shift. More buyers chasing the same fundamental story pushes multiples up, which pushes market cap up alongside the earnings growth.

TSMC is not invincible. A serious escalation in Taiwan tensions remains a risk that no analyst can fully price. The company also relies on equipment makers like ASML Holding for the tools it needs to manufacture at leading-edge nodes, which creates supply-chain dependencies. And semiconductor cycles can turn. A broad slowdown in AI infrastructure spending would show up in TSMC's numbers fast.

But if you believe AI is a decade-long build-out, and that someone has to manufacture all those chips, TSMC's path to the $3 trillion club is one of the more visible roads in the market right now.

Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends ASML, Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Mark Alan Peterson, EVP & Chief Financial Officer, reported an open-market sale of 8,334 shares of EPR Properties (EPR +2.18%) for a total consideration of ~$500,000, according to the SEC Form 4 filing.

Transaction summaryMetricValueShares sold (indirect)8,334Transaction value$500,040Post-transaction shares (direct)0Post-transaction shares (indirect)207,750Post-transaction value (direct ownership)$0Transaction value based on SEC Form 4 reported price ($60.00). EPR closed at $58.85 on the transaction date, June 10th 2026.

Key questionsHow does this transaction compare to Peterson’s historical sale sizes?
This 8,334 share sale is at the lower end of Peterson’s historical sell-only transactions, which have ranged from 8,334 to 13,700 shares, reflecting a declining trend as available share capacity has diminished over time.Does the transaction affect Peterson’s overall economic exposure to EPR Properties?
Despite the sale, Peterson continues to hold 207,750 shares indirectly through the Jill J. Peterson Rev. Trust, maintaining substantial economic exposure to the company through convertible Common Shares of Beneficial Interest.What is the significance of the 10b5-1 trading plan in this context?
This sale was effected under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted on Dec. 23, 2025, indicating the disposition was pre-scheduled and consistent with routine liquidity management rather than market timing.How does the transaction value relate to recent market pricing?
The $60.00 per share sale price was slightly above the June 10, 2026 closing price of $59.36, representing a ~1.1% premium to the closing level on the transaction date.Company overviewMetricValueRevenue (TTM)$718 millionNet income (TTM)$275 millionDividend yield5.39%1-year price change8.3%Note: 1-year price change calculated as of July 1, 2026.

Company snapshotEPR owns and leases a portfolio of experiential real estate assets, including entertainment, recreation, and education properties across 44 U.S. states.It operates as a specialty REIT utilizing a net lease model, generating revenue primarily through long-term rental agreements with tenants in leisure and recreational sectors.The company serves operators of out-of-home entertainment venues, recreational facilities, and specialty education centers seeking stable, high-quality real estate solutions.EPR Properties manages a diversified portfolio valued at approximately $6.7 billion, focusing on properties that facilitate unique consumer experiences. The company’s disciplined underwriting and investment approach targets assets with resilient cash flows and long-term growth potential. This specialization in experiential real estate provides EPR Properties with a distinct competitive advantage in the specialty REIT sector.

What this transaction means for investorsPeterson's sale was pre-scheduled back in December, and it priced slightly above where EPR shares were trading that day, so there's little to read into the timing itself. The more useful question for investors is what has to keep going right for EPR's growth story to hold up. The company just raised its 2026 earnings guidance and expanded its investment spending target to as much as $600 million, largely to fund a $315 million push into attraction properties including a portfolio acquired from Six Flags. That's a bet that regional parks and similar destinations keep pulling in reliable foot traffic even as EPR leans away from its old core of movie theaters. The company's occupancy across its experiential portfolio sat at 99% last quarter, which suggests tenants are performing well enough to support the expansion. The risk is concentration: a handful of tenants still make up a large share of EPR's rental income, so any stumble from a major operator would matter more here than at a more diversified REIT. I like this company for the long haul, and at current levels I think it's worth starting a position or adding a little if you already own it. One thing worth considering: REIT dividends are typically taxed as ordinary income, so where you hold this stock matters. If you're building a position, a Roth IRA can be a smart home for it, since it lets those dividends and any future gains grow and come out tax-free.

Seena Hassouna has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends EPR Properties. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

© Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

The AI arms race has entered a new phase. For the past three years, the biggest technology companies have competed by buying as many Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) GPUs as they could get their hands on. Now they’re racing to build something even more valuable: their own AI chips. 

That shift is about more than lowering costs. It gives hyperscalers greater control over performance, supply chains, and the pace of innovation. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) appears ready to take another major step in that direction with a reported $6.5 billion agreement that could strengthen its long-term AI ambitions while reshaping the semiconductor landscape.

Meta Is Building More Than Just Another AI Chip According to reports from Korean media, Meta is negotiating a roughly $6.5 billion agreement with Samsung Foundry to manufacture its third-generation Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) processors. Unlike the first two MTIA generations, which were built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), the new chips would be produced using Samsung’s cutting-edge 2-nanometer SF2 manufacturing process featuring Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor technology.

The scale of the reported agreement stands out. The contract reportedly covers hundreds of thousands of semiconductor wafers, making it one of Samsung Foundry’s largest AI orders after its reported $16.5 billion Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) agreement.

The supplier change is just as important as the technology.

MTIA Generation Manufacturing Partner Strategic Focus First Generation TSM Launch custom AI silicon Second Generation TSM Expand AI inference capabilities Third Generation (reported) Samsung Foundry Diversify supply chain and adopt 2nm process This isn’t simply about building faster chips. It’s about ensuring Meta can keep expanding its AI infrastructure without depending on a single manufacturing partner.

Why This Matters for Meta’s AI Strategy Meta has made no secret of its AI ambitions. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure while targeting as much as 5 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2030. That scale demands more than buying Nvidia hardware — it requires custom silicon optimized for Meta’s own Llama models and recommendation engines.

Custom chips also improve economics. NVIDIA’s GPUs remain the gold standard for AI training, but they command premium pricing and face periodic supply constraints. By designing its own accelerators, Meta can tailor performance to its workloads while reducing dependence on outside suppliers.

Buying chips is a race to the bottom—owning them is a bid for total dominance. Inside the $6.5 billion power play that signals the end of the Nvidia arms race. © 24/7 Wall St. Diversifying manufacturing adds another layer of protection. TSM remains the world’s leading foundry, but its production capacity is stretched by demand from companies including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), and Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO). Using Samsung reduces concentration risk while providing leverage during future pricing negotiations. It also helps hedge against geopolitical uncertainty surrounding Taiwan.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Meta didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Looking ahead, these chips could support something even bigger. As Meta expands into AI cloud services, proprietary hardware could become a competitive advantage, much like Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN)  AWS built custom Graviton processors or Google developed its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

The Bigger Trend Investors Should Watch Meta isn’t acting alone. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Amazon, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Tesla have all invested heavily in custom AI silicon. The common goal is simple: reduce long-term infrastructure costs while differentiating their AI platforms.

That doesn’t spell the end for Nvidia. Training frontier AI models will continue requiring enormous numbers of GPUs for years. But inference — the process of actually running AI models — and specialized workloads increasingly favor application-specific chips that consume less power and cost less to operate.

Samsung also benefits if the reported agreement closes. After trailing TSM in advanced manufacturing for years, landing another hyperscaler on its 2nm process would strengthen its credibility and help build momentum for its foundry business.

Key Takeaway In short, Meta’s reported $6.5 billion Samsung agreement is about far more than changing chip suppliers. It’s another sign that the largest AI companies are shifting from buying generic hardware to building customized infrastructure designed around their own software.

Granted, Nvidia remains the dominant force in AI accelerators, and custom chips won’t replace its GPUs overnight. That said, investors should recognize the broader trend. The AI chip market is becoming more fragmented, with hyperscalers increasingly controlling their own destinies.

Ultimately, Meta’s reported move strengthens its long-term competitive position by lowering supply chain risk, improving cost control, and supporting future cloud ambitions. For long-term shareholders, that’s the real story — and one worth following well beyond the latest headline.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Meta didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Visa (V +2.87%) has historically been a market-beating stock, but it's been struggling this year, and investors are noticing several headwinds. The stock is down 2% this year, compared with a 9% increase for the S&P 500. Is this a buying opportunity?

The world's tollbooth Visa is the largest credit card network in the world, with more than $17 trillion in payments processed last year and more than 330 billion transactions. It works with 14,500 partnering financial institutions that provide credit, while Visa provides the network that moves the money, taking a small fee from each transaction. It acts as a global "tollbooth" for payments, a service-oriented business that generates high revenue and strong profits.

This is a classic "cash cow" business, with Visa in a dominant position and high barriers to entry. Its network is entrenched in global payments, and it continually adds new services to its platform as finance enters the digital age.

Image source: Getty Images.

In the 2026 fiscal second quarter (ended March 31), revenue increased 17% year over year, while adjusted earnings per share (EPS) were up 20%. Those are powerful results, especially in the high-inflation climate.

However, the market isn't seeing it that way. There are several headwinds, specifically in the rise of stablecoins, which challenge the Visa global network, and legislation related to interchange rates. Stablecoins bypass the Visa rails, and the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) threatens to lower fees and break up the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.

On top of that, cross-border volume has been trending down over the past few quarters since it bounced back from pandemic lows.

Is Visa stock a bargain at this price? Visa has a strong economic moat and a dominant position by far. It has an excellent, profitable business model that makes it an important part of the global economy, and it has a robust innovation engine. These are prized features, and Visa stock is typically expensive because of them.

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At the current price, Visa stock trades at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio just under 30, which is slightly below recent averages (31 over the past three years) and much lower than historical averages (35 over the past 10 years). It's a good deal, but not an incredible bargain.

Visa is an excellent, all-weather stock to own for the long term. At this price, I'd call it a great business at a fair price, which is how Warren Buffett looks for stocks. It was part of the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio for years until Greg Abel recently sold it, and it could be a great stock to add to a diversified portfolio at the current price.

Jennifer Saibil has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Berkshire Hathaway, Mastercard, and Visa. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Shares of semiconductor giant Broadcom NASDAQ: AVGO got pummeled after the company’s last earnings report, dropping nearly 20% in two days. Possibly the biggest reason for the company’s large post-earnings decline was its decision not to raise its AI semiconductor revenue guidance.

Broadcom Today

$360.45 0.00 (0.00%)

As of 07/2/2026 04:00 PM Eastern

52-Week Range$269.58▼

$495.00Dividend Yield0.72%

P/E Ratio60.08

Price Target$493.24

In its fiscal year 2027, Broadcom continues to place its sales forecast at over $100 billion for this segment. However, there is a belief in the market that Broadcom’s AI semiconductor sales will be much higher than $100 billion. CEO Hock Tan himself alluded to this, saying in the company’s last earnings call, “2027 will exceed very easily $100 billion.”

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One customer that is likely to play a significant role in Broadcom reaching and potentially soaring past this milestone is ChatGPT maker OpenAI. In 2025, the two companies announced a massive 10-gigawatt (GW) partnership, where Broadcom will develop chips for OpenAI. Notably, the two firms just took a key step forward in their partnership: unveiling Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first Intelligence Processor. For Broadcom, Jalapeño isn’t just a fancy new chip; it’s the key to unlocking a huge revenue opportunity over the coming years.

Jalapeño: Unlocking the Door to $200 Billion in Revenue?Approximately nine months ago, Broadcom and OpenAI announced their 10 GW partnership. At that time, Broadcom noted that it would not start deploying AI chips and systems for the partnership until the second half of 2026. With the firms just now unveiling Jalapeño, it appears that the partnership is progressing right on schedule. In turn, Broadcom’s plan to convert its 10 GW partnership into a large revenue stream is on track.

GWs are a standard unit of measurement for evaluating the size of data center deployments, and each one can translate into billions of dollars in revenue. In fact, in a Broadcom earnings call, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon estimated that Broadcom’s revenue opportunity was in the range of $20 billion per GW. While the revenue opportunity per GW can vary significantly, Hock Tan said the reality was “not far from” Rasgon’s estimate.

Thus, while acknowledging that these estimates are not precise, it is possible that Jalapeño marks an early step in Broadcom unlocking a $200 billion opportunity. While 10 GWs are not expected to be fully deployed until the end of 2029, that would be a massive revenue driver, nonetheless. Notably, Broadcom’s total revenue over the last 12 months was “only” around $75.5 billion.

OpenAI: A Testament to Broadcom’s Long-Term PartnershipsThe potential size of this opportunity highlights the value of the long-term partnerships that Broadcom engages in. Notably, the two firms announced their partnership nine months ago. However, investors are only now getting a substantial update. Furthermore, significant revenue generation from the deal will not begin until 2027, as revenue will be small through the rest of 2026. This equates to well over a year between the deal announcement and substantial sales. That may seem like an uncomfortably long timeline, but it is exactly what investors should expect from Broadcom.

This is due to the nature of Broadcom’s AI chips. Broadcom designs application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). ASICs are fundamentally different from NVIDIA’s NASDAQ: NVDA graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs are highly flexible, being able to perform many different tasks well. Due to this, they can serve a wide range of customers right out of the box.

By contrast, as their name implies, ASICs are application-specific; they perform a specific set of tasks extremely well. The tasks they perform depend on each customer's needs. Thus, Broadcom has to closely collaborate with its customers to design a customized chip in the first place.

In the case of Jalapeño, the companies designed it specifically for large language model (LLM) inference. Inference refers to when an LLM generates answers. This contrasts with training, where LLMs learn to think.

Importantly, the vast majority of revenue generation doesn’t take place until after this design phase, when the chips actually get deployed into data centers. Considering this, when Broadcom announces a new custom chip design partnership, investors should not expect it to have an immediate sales impact. Rather, investors should understand that it takes time for these sales to ramp up, and the OpenAI partnership is just another reason to have confidence in Broadcom’s long-term growth opportunities.

Broadcom’s Valuation Sinks as OpenAI Opportunity Nears CloserBroadcom shares now trade at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of around 62x. That sits substantially below its average P/E near 80x over the past three years.

Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) Price Chart for Saturday, July, 4, 2026

Meanwhile, with Jalapeño, Broadcom’s huge opportunity with OpenAI is one step closer to becoming a reality. With its valuation down and a large growth driver not far on the horizon, Broadcom shares look well positioned going forward.

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Moonbeam Network, one of the earliest and most prominent parachains on Polkadot, announced on July 3 that it will fully migrate its GLMR token to Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2. The move effectively ends Moonbeam’s four-year relationship with Polkadot and repositions the project within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Holders have until July 31 to bridge their GLMR tokens 1:1 to a new ERC-20 version on Base through a dedicated migration portal. Centralized exchanges are expected to handle the swap automatically for tokens held in custody.

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What’s actually happening here Moonbeam launched in January 2022 as the first parachain on Polkadot. Its entire selling point was giving Ethereum Virtual Machine developers a home inside the Polkadot ecosystem, complete with staking, cross-chain compatibility, and familiar tooling.

Now it’s leaving. The project is rebranding around something called the Moonbeam Protocol, described as a decentralized network focused on AI agent communication and settlement for on-chain economies.

Users currently participating in DeFi protocols on Moonbeam’s parachain need to withdraw their assets before the migration completes. Tokens stuck in liquidity pools, staking contracts, or lending protocols need to be manually unwound before the chain winds down.

What investors should be watching The 1:1 token migration means GLMR holders aren’t being diluted. The more nuanced question is whether the move to Base and the pivot to AI agent infrastructure actually improves the token’s long-term value proposition.

The migration deadline of July 31 creates a compressed timeline that could lead to confusion, lost tokens, or liquidity disruption. Users who don’t actively manage the transition risk complications. The automatic migration through centralized exchanges should catch a large portion of passive holders, but on-chain users need to be proactive.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

When a stock is removed from the S&P 500, the immediate reaction is mechanical: Every index fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the benchmark must sell it. That creates a short window of artificial selling pressure, pressure that has nothing to do with the underlying business.

For dividend investors willing to look past the noise, that moment can be worth a close look.

On June 22, two companies were shown the door by S&P Dow Jones Indices: The Campbell's Company (CPB +1.04%) and Pool Corporation (POOL +1.75%). Both were replaced by semiconductor and electronics names -- a signal of how far the S&P 500 has tilted toward tech. Both Campbell's and Pool Corp. are in the S&P SmallCap 600 now, which means they're not disappearing from the market. They're just less visible.

Image source: Getty Images.

1. Campbell's: The 7% yield story Campbell's carries a dividend yield north of 7% right now. The stock has been under pressure for over a year, plagued by weaker volumes, lingering costs from its 2024 Sovos Brands acquisition, and an ERP system conversion that created operational headwinds. Markets punished the stock, and the yield climbed as the share price fell.

The dividend itself has been in place for 51 years. The payout ratio sits at roughly 76% of earnings -- not lean, but covered. Cash-flow coverage is even healthier. When a 51-year dividend streak is backed by both earnings and cash flow, it carries weight.

What Campbell's has going for it beyond the math is Rao's. The brand crossed $1 billion in trailing-12-month net sales, and in May 2026, Campbell's deepened its commitment by acquiring a 49% stake in La Regina, the Italian producer behind Rao's sauces. The partnership keeps production rooted in Scafati, Italy -- the artisanal identity that made Rao's a premium brand worth paying for. That kind of brand equity is hard to manufacture.

The honest caveat: Campbell's dividend growth has been slow. The payout has grown barely 1.26% over five years. For investors who care about income keeping pace with inflation, that matters. Campbell's today is a high-yield, low-growth dividend story, not a compounding machine. Whether that suits you depends on your investment strategy.

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2. Pool Corp.: The dividend growth machine Pool Corp.'s yield looks modest compared to Campbell's -- around 2.4% today. But the story isn't the yield, it's the trajectory.

Pool has raised its dividend every year for 22 consecutive years. Over the past decade, the dividend has grown at roughly 17% per year. That's the compounding engine the user manual talks about.

When a company grows its earnings consistently, it can raise its dividend consistently. Every raise on a growing base means the investor who bought earlier is now collecting a much higher yield on their original cost. That's the whole idea behind dividend growth investing, and Pool has executed it as well as almost any company in the market.

The business itself distributes pool supplies, equipment, and chemicals to wholesale buyers and professional contractors. About 60% of revenue comes from maintenance and repair -- people have to keep pools clean and running, whether the housing market is hot or cold. First-quarter 2026 net sales were up 6%, with operating income up 7%. The recovery in discretionary pool spending, which stalled after the pandemic boom, is grinding forward.

The digital side is also quietly gaining ground. Pool's proprietary platform, Pool360, now accounts for 13% of net sales and is growing. That's operational efficiency the company is building into the business for the long haul.

The risk worth noting: Pool Corp. is tied to housing market activity and consumer confidence in a way Campbell's simply isn't. If interest rates remain elevated and homeowners continue deferring big-ticket outdoor projects, discretionary sales will remain soft.

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The takeaway Both stocks were pushed out by mechanical index rebalancing, not deteriorating businesses. Campbell's offers an income-heavy position at a rare yield for a consumer staples name, with Rao's as a legitimate long-term growth driver. Pool Corp. is the dividend growth story -- a company that has earned its raises over 22 years and has the business model to keep earning them. Neither is a sure thing, but both deserve a look that goes beyond what the index removal implies.

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Disney is bolstering its namesake streamer by integrating shows and features from Hulu. Illustration by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images; Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images Disney has momentum in streaming, and its leaders are looking for ways to further narrow the gap with Netflix in the battle for eyeballs.

Since launching Disney+ in 2019, Disney's direct-to-consumer business has gone from a promising but costly project to a profit engine.

CEO Josh D'Amaro is prioritizing streaming by investing in technology like AI-generated ad tools for Disney+. He's also named TV head Dana Walden as the company's first-ever chief creative officer and tapped Adam Smith and Joe Earley as co-presidents of the DTC business.

Business Insider recently published organizational charts showing who reports to D'Amaro and Walden, and we have new details on who's helping lead its streaming strategy, including key product and tech executives.

Smith, who's also the product and tech chief for Disney Entertainment, joined the company in September 2024 from YouTube. He has eight direct reports, including Andre Rohe, Disney's EVP of Product Engineering.

Smith has delivered a number of key updates to streaming staffers, including clarity on its "super app" ambitions, news of a shake-up of its streaming commerce and data teams, and a progress report on the Disney+ AI ad tool, which the tech chief said in a recent meeting is "one of the clearest areas where we're really making traction."

Rohe has helped Disney tech staffers better grasp the company's AI goals, including by saying that employees shouldn't be "tokenmaxxing," or using AI tools regardless of how productive they are.

Disney's standing in the streaming warsDisney's streamers have gained ground in 2026, scoring their highest monthly TV viewership share in nearly three years in March before posting their best month versus Netflix in nearly a year, according to Nielsen's US data. The slight rebound comes after Disney's streaming viewership had stagnated for years.

Disney+ and Hulu have become profitable thanks to a large base of loyal, engaged subscribers. Disney made $582 million in streaming profits last quarter, and while the company no longer discloses its subscriber count, it had 196 million subscriptions as of late September 2025.

Despite a steady stream of price hikes, Disney+ and Hulu have the lowest cancellation rates in the business, besides Netflix. Less than 4% of those services' customers quit in May, according to data firm Antenna.

To boost engagement further, D'Amaro is bringing Disney+ and Hulu together to create a one-stop shop in streaming, while looking to use resources more efficiently. The Mouse House's flagship streamer is also betting on short-form video, as are Peacock, Netflix, and Paramount+.

To better understand Disney's product and tech strategy, Business Insider is publishing parts of Disney's internal streaming org chart, based on screenshots sent by an employee.

Below are the complete org charts showing Smith's and Rohe's direct reports, based on Disney's records.

Here are the direct reports to Smith, Disney Entertainment's product and tech chief, in alphabetical order by first name:

NamePositionAndre RoheEVP, Product EngineeringChristopher (Chris) LawsonEVP, Content Platforms & OperationsDanette DugasSenior Executive AssistantDimitri KontopidisExecutive Director of Product & Tech Strategy and OperationsErin TeagueEVP, Product ManagementMeghan BorsicSVP, DesignMichael CupoSVP, Business OperationsTony DonohoeEVP, Ad PlatformsHere are the direct reports to Andre Rohe, Disney's EVP of product engineering, in alphabetical order by first name:

NamePositionAndrew HydeVP, Product Software EngineeringChristopher ShattuckHead of India Product & TechChristopher (Chris) SwordDirector of Data AnalyticsDevika ChawlaSVP, Product Software EngineeringDominique CharretteVP, Data AnalyticsJay DonnellSVP, Product Software EngineeringJustin AltwiesDirector of Product Engineering and Business OperationsMali SonnierSenior Executive AssistantMayank SachanVP, Growth EngineeringMehran BozorgiSVP, Product Software EngineeringNicholas BrookinsSVP, Media EngineeringZachary CavaVP, Product Software EngineeringDo you work for Disney or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at jamesfaris.01.

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Media Exclusive Disney More Disney Plus Hulu

For the first time in six decades, Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB +1.61%)(BRKA +1.41%) is run by someone other than Warren Buffett. Greg Abel took over as CEO at the start of 2026, and his first months have given investors plenty to chew on -- most of all a record cash pile of about $397 billion at the end of the first quarter, up from $373 billion at the end of last year. That war chest is equal to more than a third of the company's $1.1 trillion market value.

So, with a new leader and an enormous amount of dry powder, is the stock a buy?

Image source: They Motley Fool.

Abel is already putting his stamp on it Abel has not sat still. In his first big deal, Berkshire agreed to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison for $6.8 billion, or $72.50 a share -- a 24% premium. He also steered Berkshire into an unusual place for a firm that long avoided technology: a $10 billion private placement in Alphabet, taken at a discount, that pushed its stake in the Google parent past $26 billion. Meanwhile, he put a stop to the recent trimming of the Apple position before he took over, leaving it the portfolio's largest at about 22%. And he restarted buybacks with a repurchase of about $234 million in March, after a 21-month pause.

The pattern says a lot. Abel is deploying capital, not just hoarding it -- but selectively, waiting for a price he likes before he acts. That is recognizably the Buffett playbook, with a sharper willingness to move on a good opportunity.

Taken together, the moves sketch a CEO willing to lean into places his predecessor mostly sidestepped -- homebuilding tied to a national housing shortage, and artificial intelligence by way of Alphabet's spending on it. Warren Buffett, who stayed on as chairman, publicly praised the Taylor Morrison deal, saying Abel pulled it off faster than he could have himself. That matters because the biggest question hanging over Berkshire was never its businesses. It was whether a new hand could allocate capital with the same discipline. Early on, Abel is answering it.

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On valuation, Berkshire trades at about 1.5 times book value, close to its 10-year average, and around 15 times earnings. That is neither cheap nor expensive. What you get for it is a collection of durable businesses -- a sprawling insurance operation, the BNSF railroad, a large energy unit, and an equity book worth more than $300 billion -- plus that record pile of cash.

The operating businesses are pulling their weight, too. First-quarter operating earnings rose about 18% year over year, helped by the insurance units whose float gives Berkshire cheap capital to invest. Those earnings are lumpy (insurance almost always is), but the collection of railroad operations, utilities, and wholly owned businesses under the stock generates meaningful, growing profit that doesn't depend on which way the equity portfolio swings in a given quarter.

And the company's cash is the real swing factor. In a jittery market -- and the recent sell-off in chip stocks is a reminder that volatility always finds its way back -- $397 billion of ready capital is an asset, giving Abel the means to pounce if prices fall. The flip side, however, is that the same cash raises the stakes on how well he deploys it. A misjudged megadeal is the clearest downside, and the fresh tech tilt adds both some opportunity and a risk to a famously tech-averse portfolio. With that said, Apple has been Berkshire's largest equity holding for years. So maybe the growing Alphabet stake is just a normal evolution of Berkshire's business.

On balance, I think Berkshire is a reasonable buy here for patient investors. It isn't a bargain, but it is a fairly priced set of high-quality businesses backed by a record war chest and a new CEO who has shown he will act. The Abel era looks like continuity with a harder edge -- and at about 1.5 times book value, that strikes me as a fair price to pay for it.

For a while now, Michael Saylor’s Strategy has been on a wild ride of criticism. Now, major players like JPMorgan are beginning to issue some warnings. In fact, the banking giant recently called out Strategy’s Bitcoin sales policy. 

For context, Strategy has long relied on a straightforward business model: Raise capital through debt and equity offerings, then use that money to purchase additional Bitcoin [BTC]. 

As a result, a sizeable amount of the circulating supply was essentially locked away rather than actively traded due to its enormous treasury of 847,363 BTC. However, the company’s most recent capital structure is now altering that dynamic.

Strategy’s new game plan raises red flags To pay dividends on its preferred stock or other financial commitments, Strategy has now formally permitted itself to sell a limited quantity of Bitcoin. At the same time, it authorized preferred stock repurchases and launched a $1 billion common stock buyback program. 

Even though the company’s cash reserves of about $2.55 billion cover about 17 months’ worth of preferred dividends and interest costs, JPMorgan thinks this buffer is still insufficient to completely rule out the possibility of future Bitcoin sales. 

The team led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou argued,

A higher coverage of 24-36 months would be needed (by issuing common equity to further increase dollar reserves even if this leads to the common equity trading at a discount to NAV) to make investors more comfortable with the idea that Strategy would not need to sell bitcoins in the foreseeable future.

What is the underlying issue? The primary issue is the rise of what JPMorgan refers to as “two-way risk.”

In the past, Strategy operated virtually solely as a Bitcoin buyer, continuously consuming supply whenever it raised new funds. However, under the new framework, the business can switch between buying and selling based on how much cash it needs.

The fact that Strategy is no longer assured of removing Bitcoin from the market—it might even turn into a source of supply when money is needed—introduces uncertainty.

What’s ahead? In fact, in one of the few times the company has sold Bitcoin for operational rather than portfolio adjustments. Even though the $1.25 billion authorized sale capacity only makes up a small portion of its total holdings, the psychological impact could be far greater than the volume of sales. 

Unfortunately, these shifts occur at a time when the U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETFs are facing net withdrawals, and the price of Bitcoin is also struggling.

Henceforth, the only hope at this point is the approval of the CLARITY Act. It has the potential to restore market integrity and the price of Bitcoin, in turn improving the air surrounding Strategy.

Final Summary Instead of an actual warning, JP Morgan has suggested a higher coverage of 24-36 months for Strategy. Though the recent sell-off by Strategy was minimal, it has still induced fear and uncertainty in the market.