center – Earlybirds Invest

08 September Bitfinex Securities approaches $250 million tokenized securities milestone and sets up plans to acquire a full Astana International Finance Center license

Astana, Kazakhstan – September 8, 2025 – Bitfinex Securities, a regulated platform that allows entities to raise capital through a list of tokenized securities, has submitted an application to migrate from the Astana International Finance Center (AIFC) Fintechlab to confirm that it will be an accredited investment exchange.

Bitfinex Securities joined AIFC’s Fintech Lab in September 2021, a regulatory sandbox that supports the development of the local financial industry. Since then, it has issued $206 million worth of tokenization securities at AIFC Fintechlab, which includes Mikro Kapital’s regular tokenization bond program. Bitfinex Securities has been licensed separately from El Salvador since April 2023.

The Bitfinex Securities licensing expansion plan in Astana is of course, as the platform has shown significant momentum to assert Bitfinex Securities’ growth, as it confirms that it reaches $250 million tokenized assets across the platform. This year we have already seen many highlights, including:

The direct list of Titan1 and Titan2, the first tokenized share issuance of Bitfinex Securities, amounts to a total of 143 million Gbp.
Full redemption of Mikro Kapital’s first tokenized bond paid USDT 630,000.
The direct list of Blockstream Mining Note 2 (BMN2) allows for secondary market trading opportunities of just under $9, based on fair value.

“We’re looking forward to seeing you in the process of doing things,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex Securities. “We continue to thank the support we have received from AIFC, a proven innovator in regulating digital assets. We confirm that we apply the upgrade to a full license in Astana after a successful initial license period. A regulatory environment to attract and nurture companies such as Bitfinex Securities.”

“We’ve seen the best of our customers,” said Jesse Knutson, operations manager of Bitfinex Securities. “To approach $250 million with tokenized assets on the platform is a significant milestone and a marker of trust we built together with the issuer. Given that all listings are supported by the liquid network, the Bitcoin ecosystem emphasizes that it plays a significant financial role. It continues to grow. We look forward to expanding our listings to make Bitfinex securities an outstanding platform for the full range of tokenized assets.”

Bitfinex securities are also regulated in El Salvador and were the world’s first international digital asset platform licensed under the country’s digital asset issuance law.

About Bitfinex Securities

Founded in 2021, Bitfinex Securities is looking to transform global capital markets by leveraging technological advances in the digital asset industry. With real-time payments, 24/7 trading capabilities, access to global liquidity and self-support, Bitfinex Securities aims to create more efficient, cost-effective, and seamless interactions between investors and issuers. Bitfinex Securities is licensed and regulated at the Astana International Financial Centre in Kazakhstan and El Salvador.

Bitfinex Securities Media Contact Information

(Email protection)

]]> https://earlybirdsinvest.com/bitfinex-securities-approaches-250-million-tokenized-securities-milestone-and-sets-up-plans-to-acquire-a-full-astana-international-finance-center-license/feed/ 0 57514 How the South became America’s new center of gravity https://earlybirdsinvest.com/how-the-south-became-americas-new-center-of-gravity/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/how-the-south-became-americas-new-center-of-gravity/#respond Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:40:10 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/how-the-south-became-americas-new-center-of-gravity/

Much like migratory birds and retirees, college students are flocking to the South come September. Big state schools with large football programs and robust Greek life, like the University of Alabama or the University of Mississippi, have seen an influx of students from the North; the number of students who left the North to go South for school increased 30 percent between 2018 and 2022.

There are lots of reasons for this change. It could be the fun campus experience, or that Southern campuses relaxed Covid restrictions before their northern counterparts. It could be a change of scenery. It could be that students are getting more bang for their buck at a time when college tuition is at an all-time high. But whether it’s #RushTok or less student loan debt, students are embracing life South of the Mason-Dixon line.

According to Bloomberg senior reporter Amanda Mull, this is just one symptom of a larger embrace of Southern culture. She unpacks those changes on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Mull, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Over time, the South has grown in the American imagination. What first made that possible?

In the 1960s, you see the simultaneous occurrence of political evolution, logistical evolution, and technological evolution.

The political aspect is of course the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act, which changed the political possibilities for lots of people in the South. It started to change how the rest of the country viewed the south.

Then you also have the practical shift, which is air conditioning. So in 1956, you get the advent of the American highway program, which built interstates that connected places and parts of the country that were previously difficult to travel between. The South was industrially underdeveloped relative to the Northeast and the Midwest. So the advent of the highway system made it a lot easier for the South to interact commercially with the rest of the country, and made it a lot easier for the South to interact commercially with itself at the end of Jim Crow.

The advent of air conditioning made it possible for lots of different types of businesses to think about the South as a possible location, and made it possible for more people to think about the South as a place they might want to live. This change across time has led us to where we are now, where the population of the South has been growing for decades and is still growing.

Southern states started offering advantages to businesses. What are those advantages, and how has that changed the culture there?

State governments started putting together incentive packages where they pitch themselves both to the business community at large and to specific employers. One way you can really see this happening is Southern states pitching themselves as a union-unfriendly alternative for car manufacturing. You see that especially attracting foreign car manufacturers. American manufacturers have less of a presence in the South, but they have, over the past several decades, moved car manufacturing there because employers saw it as an opportunity to avoid some of the shipping and tariff and logistical problems of cars overseas, but also avoiding paying the higher wages and offering the better working conditions of the Midwest and Northeast, which had been traditionally areas of car manufacturing.

The car business and the movie business are both great examples of how this similar playbook works across industries. Georgia and Louisiana have put together huge tax incentive packages to attract television and movie production. Netflix has a huge complex in Atlanta. A lot of Marvel movies over the past decade have been filmed in Georgia. They pitch themselves as locations where you have a lot of different outdoor landscapes that can stand in for a lot of different places. You have cities, mountains, coastline, and forests.

I want to get into the cultural impact. How has the South impacted mainstream American music?

The rise of Southern hip-hop and the subsequent rise of country music are two sides of the same coin. I don’t want to say that the embrace of country is entirely reactionary. But I do think that some of the interest in explicitly white Southern culture in the past few years is a reaction to the omnipresence of Black Southern creativity, especially in music.

When you look at someone like Morgan Wallen, who is enormously popular among listeners and has also been in the news for doing explicitly racist things, it’s hard to look at that and go, “Okay, this has to be at least part a reaction against Black dominance in music.”

But then you look at other artists who have a more explicitly progressive bent, like Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile, who are sort of challengers to that. And then you also see Beyoncé with Cowboy Carter re-embracing her heritage as a Southerner and questioning some of the tropes and the aesthetics and the sounds of white Southern music. Of course, there’s no such thing as white Southern music. It’s very hard to look at the South and go, “Okay, this is white Southern culture and this is Black Southern culture,” because there are so many cultural overlaps over time.

How does this new embrace of the South make you feel as a Southerner?

I’m of two minds about it. I think that it’s good for Southerners of all stripes, of all races, of all backgrounds, if people look at the South more as a legitimate part of the country and less as a backwater where people are subhuman and inferior. But it’s also strange. It’s really uncanny to see people embrace the aesthetics of the South without contending with what the South is and what it has been and what it means. Because I think that most Southerners do that.

Being from the South requires you to interface with the region’s history in a way that the rest of the country gets to skip if they so choose. And so it’s weird to see people cosplaying as stereotypical Southerners when I know that a lot of them have not really thought about it.

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Throughout 2025, technology stocks have been whipsawed by the latest news or rumors surrounding the economy, interest rates, and tariffs. One stock that has demonstrated a degree of immunity to these dynamics is data mining darling Palantir Technologies (PLTR -2.06%). With shares up 82% on the year, Palantir is the top-performing stock in the S&P 500 index so far this year.

While this level of momentum may cause trepidation among cautious investors, more bullish analysts, such as Dan Ives, see the rise of Palantir as an unstoppable force. In fact, Ives thinks Palantir is on its way to joining the trillion-dollar club before the end of the decade.

Personally, I am in a different camp. Right now, Palantir is trading at valuation multiples that are far higher than those investors witnessed in the late 1990s during the dot-com bubble. In short, I think a large-scale valuation normalization is in store for Palantir.

By contrast, emerging infrastructure services provider CoreWeave (CRWV 8.02%) looks well-positioned to dominate the next chapter of the artificial intelligence (AI) narrative.

Let’s explore Palantir’s rise and why I think the stock is due for a pullback. From there, I’ll dig into CoreWeave’s underlying business and explain how I think the company could eclipse Palantir’s size over the next five years.

Palantir versus CoreWeave: converging AI storylines

Palantir’s breakout moment occurred in April 2023 when the company released a new product called the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). Palantir markets AIP to both the private and public sectors — with the U.S. Military being one of Palantir’s key partners.

Unlike other data analytics platforms, AIP differentiates itself by helping large, complex businesses build ontologies. An ontology is a detailed visualization (i.e., a map) that illustrates various aspects of a business by breaking down revenue sources, cost structures, and other critical information in extreme detail. This process can help executive-level decision-makers model simulations using real-time data to assess the impact of different variables on the business.

Image source: Palantir Investor Relations.

As investors can see from the figures above, Palantir’s customer count is surging thanks to AIP’s popularity. The subtle takeaway from the graphs above is that AIP has helped Palantir branch out beyond its heavy reliance on public sector deals, as evidenced by the faster growth rate in commercial customer counts compared to overall customer growth at the company. Given these trends, I think it is reasonable to say that software has been top of mind for AI developers over the last couple of years.

Nevertheless, I believe CoreWeave’s long-term prospects are more robust compared to Palantir’s.

CoreWeave specializes in a cloud-based infrastructure through which it rents out access to Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures to its customers. To help paint a picture of how strong demand for chip access is expected to become, consider that global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company forecasts $6.7 trillion spent on AI infrastructure by 2030. The majority of this spend is likely going to be allocated to hardware products (chips) for data centers.

In my eyes, augmenting software with more AI-centric capabilities is part of the first phase of broader investment in the technology. Hence, Palantir has been a major beneficiary.

But over the next several years, I think investing in AI infrastructure will become a greater focus for AI’s biggest spenders — namely, cloud hyperscaler developers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Oracle, Meta Platforms, OpenAI, and others. CoreWeave already works with many of these companies, and I expect rising infrastructure spend to serve as a bellwether for the company in the coming years.

A financial analyst looking at stock trends.

Image source: Getty Images.

What does Wall Street think?

The charts below illustrate Wall Street’s consensus revenue and earnings estimates for Palantir and CoreWeave over the next couple of years.

PLTR Revenue Estimates for Current Fiscal Year Chart

PLTR Revenue Estimates for Current Fiscal Year data by YCharts. EPS = earnings per share.

Per the figures above, investors can see that CoreWeave is already on pace to generate more revenue than Palantir this year. And yet, Palantir currently boasts a market capitalization of $326 billion — nearly fourfold that of CoreWeave.

On top of that, analysts expect CoreWeave’s revenue to rise by more than threefold while transitioning to profitability within two years. By contrast, Palantir’s revenue and profits aren’t expected to even double during this same period.

While these estimates will likely change as both companies continue to form new strategic partnerships and release new products, I think, broadly speaking, the secular trends supporting the AI narrative lean more in favor of CoreWeave over the next five years. Nvidia is expected to continue releasing more GPU architectures, while cloud hyperscalers show no signs of slowing down AI capital expenditures (capex).

At some point, I think the reality of Palantir’s actual growth will catch up with the sober overzealous sentiment currently surrounding the company. Ultimately, I believe this will result in a sell-off by growth investors seeking more robust prospects.

Should you buy CoreWeave stock right now?

Although I am optimistic about CoreWeave’s long-term prospects, I think the stock is overbought right now. Following its initial public offering earlier this year, shares of CoreWeave are up by nearly 300%. For now, CoreWeave is exhibiting the behavior of a meme stock. I think the prudent strategy is to begin initiating a position at a more reasonable price point.

In terms of the big picture, though, CoreWeave’s long-term prospects look encouraging, and I believe the company’s valuation will steadily climb over the next five years at a steeper rate than Palantir’s.