Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Sources: the EU's executive arm is drafting new legislation aimed at promoting tech sovereignty and openly discussing the security risks posed by US tech (Wall Street Journal)

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Elliptic: ruble-backed stablecoin A7A5 surpassed $100B in transactions in under a year, but demand cooled and daily volume fell from a peak of $1.5B+ to ~$500M (Melos Ambaye/Bloomberg)

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Counterpoint: India smartphone shipments were flat YoY at ~153M; Apple shipped 14M iPhones, raising its share of shipments to a record 9%, up from 7% in 2024 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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A look at Kalshi and Polymarket's rise; reports say Polymarket had 491K monthly active traders in December 2025, and <0.04% of addresses took 70% of profits (Benjamin Wallace/New York Times)

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OpenAI and longtime US government contractor Leidos announce a partnership to roll out generative and agentic AI tools for specific missions at federal agencies (Miranda Nazzaro/FedScoop)

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Sources: the Trump administration dismissed two Commerce Department officials, who focused on Chinese tech threats, raising concerns about a softening stance (Wall Street Journal)

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Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Chew hailed the establishment of the TikTok USDS JV as "great news", and said the app is used by 200M US users and 7.5M US businesses (Dan Whateley/Business Insider)

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Intel's stock, riding high for months after the US government took a 10% stake, crashed 17% on Jan. 23, after the company flagged continued operational issues (Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: Grab's planned acquisition of GoTo has hit a snag over Indonesian carrier Telkomsel's unwillingness to sell its ~2% stake in GoTo at current valuations (Bloomberg)

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Google acquires Common Sense Machines, which offers AI models that create 3D assets from 2D images; the startup was founded in 2020 and last valued at $15M (The Information)

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TikTok users in the US were presented with a new privacy policy; the changes were part of the app's ownership transition and now allow precise location tracking (Reece Rogers/Wired)

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Court filing: SEC drops a case against Gemini Trust, founded by the Winklevoss twins, major Trump donors; the case stemmed from Gemini Earn's implosion (New York Times)

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Google Photos' latest generative AI-powered feature, "Me Meme", lets users create memes from their own images, launching first in the US (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Source: Greenoaks, one of Brex's top investors, will return twice its investment after Capital One's Brex acquisition for $5.15B in a half-cash, half-stock deal (The Information)

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Solos Technology sues Meta and EssilorLuxottica, alleging they willfully violated several patents that cover "core technologies in the field of smart eyewear" (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the US DOJ opened a criminal probe and sent out grand-jury subpoenas in recent weeks over allegations that Deel recruited a spy inside rival Rippling (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: China deepens its probe into Meta's Manus acquisition in December to investigate cross-border currency flows, tax accounting, and overseas investments (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Richard Socher's Recursive is in talks to raise hundreds of millions at a $4B pre-money valuation to build self-improving superintelligent AI (Bloomberg)

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Source: Databricks obtained $1.8B in fresh debt and now has over $7B in debt ahead of a potential IPO; it raised $4B+ in December at a $134B valuation (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Source: Binance considers reintroducing stock tokens after removing them in 2021; OKX, Kraken, Bitget, and others are expanding their tokenized stock offerings (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

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