Latest news with #Stripe
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Business
- Yahoo
3 Key Headwinds Facing XRP
XRP has a lot in its favor at the moment. But no investment is without a few obstacles. XRP's biggest problem at the moment is that it has plenty of competition. 10 stocks we like better than XRP › Investors in XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) are in a good position today. The coin has broken above $2 and sports a market cap north of $127 billion, making it the world's fourth-largest cryptocurrency. It's seeing widespread adoption by institutional investors, and there are a plethora of other reasons to be bullish about XRP's future. Yet three headwinds are blowing straight in its face, and they explain why the gains have cooled since March. None of them are fatal, but ignoring them is like pretending a stiff breeze won't slow a kayak. So let's look at each challenge and see what it might mean for long-term holders. The first challenge is the chain's competition from other cryptocurrencies and fintechs. Ethereum now anchors roughly $126 billion of the $240 billion stablecoin market, cementing its role as the default solution for dollar-denominated transfers in the crypto sector despite its frequent clunkiness and mediocre user experience on average. Every stablecoin dollar routed through Ethereum is one less unit that might have been transferred via the XRP Ledger (XRPL). Meanwhile, traditional payment processors are rolling out the same kinds of cross-border tools that once made XRP look revolutionary. Visa just backed a fintech moving $12 billion a year in stablecoin settlements for businesses. Stripe, another payment processing company, is striking bank partnerships to do the same. These companies own distribution channels, meaning that merchants already clear trillions of dollars through their pipes every year. If they add stablecoin rails, corporate treasurers have fewer reasons to bother with a crypto they have never held. In theory, XRPL's speed and tiny fees still shine. In practice, network effects reward the chain where counterparties already keep accounts. Unless Ripple, the business that issues XRP, can persuade the next wave of stablecoin issuers to launch natively on XRPL or deliver a blockbuster central-bank deal, the payments pie could keep enlarging without XRP securing a bigger slice. For a value-oriented cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, the scarcity of coins is a major driver of higher prices, as new coins can only be produced at a very slow rate. So there's no untapped major reservoir of supply that buyers can reliably count on. With XRP, supply trickles in like clockwork. Ripple's programmatic schedule releases 1 billion XRP from escrow on the first of every month. Roughly 80% of that sum is relocked and thus retained, but 100 million to 200 million coins still hit the float (get sold) in each cycle. At $2.15 per coin, that is $215 million of potential sell pressure every 30 days. Annualized, the unlocked supply could reach 1.2 billion coins, equal to about 2% of XRP's circulating base of 58.9 billion. That dilution is mild compared with new token issuance elsewhere, yet it matters in a market where marginal buyers care about float, not total cap. Every fresh tranche forces investors to absorb inventory before the price can advance. And aside from preventing prices from surging upward due to a supply shock, the mere existence of the tokens leaving escrow is enough to spook some investors and discourage them from buying anything at all. Finally, market sentiment about the crypto sector as a whole is stuck in a rut that's likely dragging on XRP to some degree. A Pew Research Center study from 2024 found 63% of U.S. adults have little to no confidence that today's crypto platforms are safe or reliable. Given XRP's commitment to offering compliance tools to help institutional investors and banks obey regulations, those fears are overblown, but people still have them. Another Pew survey, from 2022, found that 46% of people who actually bought crypto say performance has fallen short of expectations. Skepticism translates into smaller purchases and slower conversion of the curious into the committed. That matters because retail investors still drive a big slice of crypto's price elasticity. Crypto fatigue is psychological, and bear market scars heal on their own timetable. Assuming continued macro calm, a few years of visible real-world usage could flip the narrative. Until then, doubt will act like gravity on XRP's rallies -- but be aware that doesn't mean it can't grow significantly anyway. Before you buy stock in XRP, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and XRP wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $891,722!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, Visa, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 3 Key Headwinds Facing XRP was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Globe and Mail
3 hours ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
‘It'll Be One of the Most Important and Valuable AI Systems That Gets Built': Why Meta's Mark Zuckerberg Is Pumping Billions Into This New Tech
At a recent Stripe Sessions event, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined Stripe President John Collison to discuss the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) in business and the broader economy. Zuckerberg's remarks provided a candid look at how Meta Platforms (META) is leveraging AI to automate advertising and reshape enterprise workflows, with significant implications for investors and the company's stock performance. Zuckerberg's Take on AI: From Hype to Real-World Impact Zuckerberg acknowledged the rapid pace of AI development, stating, 'AI is going to transform pretty much every category of product and every part of the economy.' He addressed the ongoing debate over whether the current enthusiasm represents a bubble, noting that even if it takes five to ten years for AI to permeate every enterprise workflow, progress has consistently outpaced expectations. 'Being even more ambitious has been more predictive over the last few years about where things are likely going to be in the industry,' he said. The Future of Advertising: Fully Automated by AI Zuckerberg's most striking comments focused on Meta's vision for AI-driven advertising. He described a future where businesses no longer need to create their own ad creatives, identify target audiences, or measure campaign performance manually. Instead, 'any business can come to us and say what their objective is, how much they're willing to pay to achieve those results, connect their bank account and then we just deliver as many results as we can. I think it'll be one of the most important and valuable AI systems that gets built,' he explained. Don't Miss: Move over Netflix & Disney: This Pre-IPO Startup Is Unlocking $2 Trillion in IP & Licensing Revenue Global Content Battles Are Brewing — And This Pre-IPO Studio Just Raised $3.1M to Enter the Fight Meta's roadmap aims to enable fully automated AI advertising by 2026, allowing businesses to launch campaigns with minimal input — potentially just a business URL and a budget. AI will handle creative generation, targeting, and optimization, making advanced marketing accessible to companies of all sizes and reducing the need for specialized marketing expertise. For Investors Meta's aggressive push into AI-powered automation is a key driver behind its strong stock performance in 2025. The company's shares have surged 19% year-to-date, outperforming many of its tech peers. As of June 17, 2025, Meta's stock currently sits just under $700, reflecting investor confidence in the company's AI strategy and the broader digital advertising market. Analysts point to Meta's expanding AI capabilities and the potential for fully automated ad platforms as major catalysts for future growth. The anticipated rollout of end-to-end AI advertising solutions by 2026 could further solidify Meta's dominance in digital marketing and unlock new revenue streams. Mark Zuckerberg's comments at the Stripe event show Meta's commitment to harnessing AI for business transformation. By automating the entire advertising process, Meta aims to democratize access to marketing tools, drive efficiency, and deliver superior results for businesses and shareholders alike. As AI continues to evolve, Meta's bold strategy positions it at the forefront of the next wave of digital innovation
Nahar Net
4 hours ago
- Science
- Nahar Net
Greenhouse gas accumulation accelerating, more extreme weather will come
by Naharnet Newsdesk 20 June 2025, 14:45 Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study to be released Thursday. The report predicts that society will have emitted enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 that crossing an important long-term temperature boundary will be more likely than not. The scientists calculate that by that point there will be enough of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to create a 50-50 chance or greater that the world will be locked in to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times. That level of gas accumulation, which comes from the burning of fuels like gasoline, oil and coal, is sooner than the same group of 60 international scientists calculated in a study last year. "Things aren't just getting worse. They're getting worse faster," said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth. "We're actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there's a silver lining. I don't think there really is one in this one." That 1.5 goal, first set in the 2015 Paris agreement, has been a cornerstone of international efforts to curb worsening climate change. Scientists say crossing that limit would mean worse heat waves and droughts, bigger storms and sea-level rise that could imperil small island nations. Over the last 150 years, scientists have established a direct correlation between the release of certain levels of carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases like methane, and specific increases in global temperatures. In Thursday's Indicators of Global Climate Change report, researchers calculated that society can spew only 143 billion more tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide before the 1.5 limit becomes technically inevitable. The world is producing 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) a year, so that inevitability should hit around February 2028 because the report is measured from the start of this year, the scientists wrote. The world now stands at about 1.24 degrees Celsius (2.23 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times, the report said. Earth's energy imbalance The report, which was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that the rate of human-caused warming per decade has increased to nearly half a degree (0.27 degrees Celsius) per decade, Hausfather said. And the imbalance between the heat Earth absorbs from the sun and the amount it radiates out to space, a key climate change signal, is accelerating, the report said. "It's quite a depressing picture unfortunately, where if you look across the indicators, we find that records are really being broken everywhere," said lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds in England. "I can't conceive of a situation where we can really avoid passing 1.5 degrees of very long-term temperature change." The increase in emissions from fossil-fuel burning is the main driver. But reduced particle pollution, which includes soot and smog, is another factor because those particles had a cooling effect that masked even more warming from appearing, scientists said. Changes in clouds also factor in. That all shows up in Earth's energy imbalance, which is now 25% higher than it was just a decade or so ago, Forster said. Earth's energy imbalance "is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system," Hausfather said. Earth keeps absorbing more and more heat than it releases. "It is very clearly accelerating. It's worrisome," he said. Crossing the temperature limit The planet temporarily passed the key 1.5 limit last year. The world hit 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times for an entire year in 2024, but the Paris threshold is meant to be measured over a longer period, usually considered 20 years. Still, the globe could reach that long-term threshold in the next few years even if individual years haven't consistently hit that mark, because of how the Earth's carbon cycle works. That 1.5 is "a clear limit, a political limit for which countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies," said study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. The mark is so important because once it is crossed, many small island nations could eventually disappear because of sea level rise, and scientific evidence shows that the impacts become particularly extreme beyond that level, especially hurting poor and vulnerable populations, he said. He added that efforts to curb emissions and the impacts of climate change must continue even if the 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded. Crossing the threshold "means increasingly more frequent and severe climate extremes of the type we are now seeing all too often in the U.S. and around the world — unprecedented heat waves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms," said University of Michigan environment school dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn't part of the study. Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist who wasn't part of the study, said the 1.5 goal was aspirational and not realistic, so people shouldn't focus on that particular threshold. "Missing it does not mean the end of the world," Dessler said in an email, though he agreed that "each tenth of a degree of warming will bring increasingly worse impacts."
Forbes
6 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
The GENIUS Act Cements Stablecoins' Place In Cross-Border Payments
A digital representation of a US dollar stablecoin. Stablecoins are set to see a regulatory boost ... More with the passing of the GENIUS Act. Earlier this week, the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act passed its final vote in the Senate, and now proceeds to the House where, if it is passed, it will move to the final steps to become law. The passing of the bill, which establishes a long-awaited regulatory framework for fiat-currency-pegged digital currencies in the US, looks increasingly likely, and comes amid a growing focus on stablecoins from the cross-border payments industry. While the industry has explored stablecoins before, this exploration has previously been very peripheral: few mainstream players have touched stablecoins directly, engaging through arms-length partners, if at all. That, however, is beginning to change. Over the past few years, stablecoins have become more prominent in mainstream fintechs. PayPal launched its own stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD) with issuer Paxos in August 2023, and in October 2024 used PYUSD to execute a business transaction for the first time. In February of this year, Stripe completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure player Bridge, which in May launched USDB, its own infrastructure-focused stablecoin. Meanwhile, growing numbers of payments players have begun to add stablecoin support, with Worldpay partnering with BVNK to deliver stablecoin payouts and Shopify adding acceptance of leading stablecoin USDC for merchants via a partnership with Stripe and Coinbase. The passing of the GENIUS Act, however, would bring another level to this. Multiple traditional financial organizations have expressed interest in launching their own stablecoins if the bill passes, including Bank of America, Fifth Third Bank and US Bank, while there have also been reports of interest from retail majors including Amazon, Expedia and Walmart. While there are those that are quick to characterize stablecoins as a no-brainer replacement for every aspect of cross-border payments, the truth is more nuanced. Cross-border payments using stablecoins can represent an improvement over traditional correspondent banking in terms of speed and cost. Whilst it is not clear that it solves all use cases, there are a number where stablecoins can be seen to add real value. In parts of the world where local currencies are highly volatile, stablecoins are finding popularity as a means of being paid and holding value in US dollars. Meanwhile, cross-border payments involving emerging markets are also a rapidly growing use case, with many providers of stablecoin-based business-to-business payments reporting taking business from local banks whose cross-border infrastructure remains slow and expensive. Out-of-hours liquidity is also key, with increasing interest in stablecoins to plug time windows outside of standard US or international banking hours, which often act as significant constraints for fintechs catering to an international customer base. While early business adopters of stablecoins were largely those looking to interoperate between volatile cryptocurrencies and the US dollar without having to pay large on and offramping fees every time they wanted to move money out of a volatile digital currency, such applications are driving growing use among those without any crypto interest. If the GENIUS Act becomes law, it is likely that confidence in the use of stablecoins will grow within the financial sector, something we have already seen reflected in the share price of key companies. In the day following the bill's passing in the Senate, recent public market entrant Circle saw its share price rise by 34%, while crypto exchange Coinbase, which retains an interest in Circle's USDC stablecoin, rose by 16%. If the act proceeds into law, traditional players will increasingly feel able to make use of the technology, while applications and solutions are likely to proliferate further. Although adoption of stablecoins for cross-border payments has grown significantly, there is still very significant headroom to grow. My own company, FXC Intelligence, estimates that the global size of the non-wholesale cross-border payments market was $40tn in 2024, however stablecoins represent only a very small fraction of this: the market capitalization of all stablecoins has never topped its current peak of around $252bn. The GENIUS Act's passing through the Senate has already prompted a surge in the market cap of stablecoins, but its shift into law and the subsequent expansion of the industry will only increase this further, potentially taking a greater share of cross-border payments in the process.
NDTV
10 hours ago
- Science
- NDTV
Rise In Greenhouse Gas Release Causing More Extreme Weather, Scientists Warn
Washington: Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study to be released Thursday. The report predicts that society will have emitted enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 that crossing an important long-term temperature boundary will be more likely than not. The scientists calculate that by that point there will be enough of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to create a 50-50 chance or greater that the world will be locked in to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times. That level of gas accumulation, which comes from the burning of fuels like gasoline, oil and coal, is sooner than the same group of 60 international scientists calculated in a study last year. "Things aren't just getting worse. They're getting worse faster," said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth. "We're actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there's a silver lining. I don't think there really is one in this one." That 1.5 goal, first set in the 2015 Paris agreement, has been a cornerstone of international efforts to curb worsening climate change. Scientists say crossing that limit would mean worse heat waves and droughts, bigger storms and sea-level rise that could imperil small island nations. Over the last 150 years, scientists have established a direct correlation between the release of certain levels of carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases like methane, and specific increases in global temperatures. In Thursday's Indicators of Global Climate Change report, researchers calculated that society can spew only 143 billion more tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide before the 1.5 limit becomes technically inevitable. The world is producing 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) a year, so that inevitability should hit around February 2028 because the report is measured from the start of this year, the scientists wrote. The world now stands at about 1.24 degrees Celsius (2.23 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times, the report said. Earth's energy imbalance The report, which was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that the rate of human-caused warming per decade has increased to nearly half a degree (0.27 degrees Celsius) per decade, Hausfather said. And the imbalance between the heat Earth absorbs from the sun and the amount it radiates out to space, a key climate change signal, is accelerating, the report said. "It's quite a depressing picture unfortunately, where if you look across the indicators, we find that records are really being broken everywhere," said lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds in England. "I can't conceive of a situation where we can really avoid passing 1.5 degrees of very long-term temperature change." The increase in emissions from fossil-fuel burning is the main driver. But reduced particle pollution, which includes soot and smog, is another factor because those particles had a cooling effect that masked even more warming from appearing, scientists said. Changes in clouds also factor in. That all shows up in Earth's energy imbalance, which is now 25% higher than it was just a decade or so ago, Forster said. Earth's energy imbalance "is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system," Hausfather said. Earth keeps absorbing more and more heat than it releases. "It is very clearly accelerating. It's worrisome," he said. Crossing the temperature limit The planet temporarily passed the key 1.5 limit last year. The world hit 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times for an entire year in 2024, but the Paris threshold is meant to be measured over a longer period, usually considered 20 years. Still, the globe could reach that long-term threshold in the next few years even if individual years haven't consistently hit that mark, because of how the Earth's carbon cycle works. That 1.5 is "a clear limit, a political limit for which countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies," said study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. The mark is so important because once it is crossed, many small island nations could eventually disappear because of sea level rise, and scientific evidence shows that the impacts become particularly extreme beyond that level, especially hurting poor and vulnerable populations, he said. He added that efforts to curb emissions and the impacts of climate change must continue even if the 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded. Crossing the threshold "means increasingly more frequent and severe climate extremes of the type we are now seeing all too often in the U.S. and around the world - unprecedented heat waves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms," said University of Michigan environment school dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn't part of the study. Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist who wasn't part of the study, said the 1.5 goal was aspirational and not realistic, so people shouldn't focus on that particular threshold. "Missing it does not mean the end of the world," Dessler said in an email, though he agreed that "each tenth of a degree of warming will bring increasingly worse impacts."
