Filtering the noise: July 25, 2026

Important news for today:

Macro

• Claude Opus 5, released July 24, costs $5 per million input tokens, identical to its predecessor Opus 4.8 and exactly half the price of Fable, while outperforming Fable 5 on most major benchmarks. Opus 5 scored 43.3% on Frontier-Bench v0.1, an agentic coding evaluation, versus 33.7% for Fable 5 and 34.4% for OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol; on ARC-AGI-3, a novel problem-solving benchmark, it scored 30.2% against GPT-5.6 Sol’s 7.8%, a gap that’s not close.
• SK Group and NVIDIA launched a $500B+ AI partnership to build next-generation AI infrastructure and memory.
• Verizon signs a $1 billion deal with Google for data center infrastructure.

Crypto

• Ripple has launched Ripple Mint, a platform that gives institutions new ways to access, mint, redeem and manage its RLUSD.
• Odos Protocol announced plans to shut down operations, giving users until July 30 to withdraw their assets.
• MetaDAO released a new experimental feature called Ownership Score. It is a mechanism designed to reward early, high-conviction participants and filter for long-term retail holders rather than last-minute deadline snipers. It controls up to 50% of allocations during token raises.

Corporate

• Samsung Electronics plans to expand Samsung Wallet beyond traditional payments by adding support for stablecoins.
• The Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) is planning to pilot a stablecoin-based settlement rail for cross-border payments to freelancers, virtual assistants and other workers receiving overseas income.
• Strategy published new and updated investor metrics, saying its shift from convertible debt toward preferred-equity digital credit requires fresh yardsticks. The centerpiece, net Bitcoin per share, measures the Bitcoin left for common shareholders after $22.3 billion in debt and preferred claims. The firm also redefined mNAV under a new metric that restored it to its 1.0x par and recast amplification as a roughly 1.5x equity multiplier.

Fundraising and M&As

• The World Foundation raised $52.5 million in a new funding round through a locked token sale to strategic investors to expand its digital verification infrastructure as AI disrupts online ecosystems.
• The Tie has acquired Liquidity Land. Liquidity Land is a TVL-bootstrapping application, acting as a non-custodial liquidity layer that connects LPs with DeFi.
• K25.ai raised an undisclosed amount in a series A round at $200M valuation. K25 is a live streaming and real-time prediction markets for sports and esports with AI oracle resolution.
• Memecoin.Fun raised $3.5M in a series A round. It is a token issuance platform and memecoin launchpad operating within the Robinhood Chain ecosystem.

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