Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, will soon integrate various financial services, enabling users to make payments and investments directly within the app.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the platform’s estimated 600 million users will eventually “be able to transact [their] whole life on the platform,” from sending money to managing investments.

The company is also considering launching an X-branded credit or debit card, potentially later this year.

X’s foray into financial services is hardly surprising, given that Musk has already confirmed beta testing for the X Money payment and banking app.

In response to a May 25 social media post, Musk said “extreme care must be taken” in the pilot phase since “people’s savings are involved.”

The official X Money account teases a 2025 launch. 

Yacarrino told the Financial Times that the X Money payment app would first launch in the US, calling it a “whole commerce ecosystem and a financial ecosystem.”

Related: Elon Musk says X’s DM feature XChat to have ‘Bitcoin-style encryption’

No mention of crypto in X Money yet

Neither Yaccarino nor Musk has confirmed whether crypto payments will be part of X’s financial ecosystem, despite Musk’s well-known support for Dogecoin (DOGE), the popular dog-themed memecoin launched in 2013.

In March 2024, Musk said DOGE could be used to buy Teslas “at some point,” though he gave no timeline. Crypto users took this as a sign that the entrepreneur could soon roll out crypto payment support across all his companies. 

While X has remained silent on potential crypto payment integration, other companies are moving forward with digital asset payment solutions.

As reported by Cointelegraph, Visa is promoting stablecoin adoption in Africa through its partnership with Yellow Card Financial, a payment processor that has facilitated over $6 billion in transactions since 2019.

Major US institutions have also shown interest in entering the crypto payment space. JPMorgan Chase recently filed a trademark application for its JPMD deposit token, which supports various crypto-related services.

On Tuesday, JPMorgan said it would pilot JPMD transactions on Coinbase’s Base network. 

Magazine: Elon Musk Dogecoin pump incoming? SOL tipped to hit $300 in 2025: Trade Secrets

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Sebastien Guillemot, co-founder of Paima Studios and dcSpark, jolted the Cardano developer community on X this afternoon with a terse progress report: “We’re up to 3 full-time developers working on Starstream (on top of myself)… We’re accelerating development to bring it to mainnet faster given all the interest.”

The message, though only two sentences long, signals a meaningful resource shift inside the still-nascent Starstream working group and suggests that Cardano’s first zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) may appear on mainnet sooner than previously expected. No target block height or hard launch window has been released, but the acceleration comes barely five weeks after founder Charles Hoskinson publicly supported the working group, calling the project “a core component of Cardano’s future.”

Why Starstream Matters For Cardano

Starstream matters because it tackles the single most common criticism of Cardano’s extended-UTXO ledger: the difficulty of building stateful, privacy-preserving applications without fracturing logic across dozens of validator scripts. In Cardano’s eUTXO model every piece of contract state lives inside its own unspent output, a design that grants parallelism and determinism but complicates long-running workflows and advanced cryptography.

Research groups inside IOG have explored adding recursive SNARKs to Plutus, yet a production implementation has remained elusive. Starstream’s answer is to step outside Plutus entirely and embed a coroutine-oriented zkVM that compiles to WebAssembly, executes off-chain, and seals each state transition inside a succinct proof verified on-chain by a lightweight Plutus wrapper.

“Starstream is a chain-agnostic, UTXO-based, zero-knowledge virtual machine that re-imagines smart-contract execution using coroutines as its foundational primitive,” notes the original technical overview published on Cardano Explorer in late April.

Coroutines give developers something they have never had: a single, linear program that can pause mid-execution, emit a UTXO that holds both data and the exact byte-code position, and later resume when a new transaction spends that output. A yield point in Starstream therefore becomes a cryptographically secured checkpoint; when the program wakes up, it needs only prove—rather than re-execute—the suspended segment.

The result is a state machine that preserves UTXO determinism while natively supporting multi-step workflows such as auctions, lending loops or on-chain games, all without shared-state contention.

Notably, Cardano has historically proceeded through carefully staged hard-fork combinator events by Hoskinson-led Input Output (IOG); Starstream, by contrast, is being built as an opt-in execution layer that can be grafted onto Cardano without a network-wide fork, making its path to mainnet limited chiefly by audit, peer review and tooling.

At press time, ADA traded at $0.684.

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June 10, 2025

The XRP Ledger is preparing to roll out an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain in Q2, marking a major step toward Ethereum compatibility.

The development was confirmed by Ripple CTO David Schwartz at the Apex 2025 event in Singapore, with blockchain firm Peersyst helping lead the effort.

The EVM sidechain is designed to combine the XRP Ledger’s low-cost, high-speed settlement layer with Ethereum’s robust smart contract capabilities.

XRP Ledger’s EVM Sidechain is Live on Testnet

Built using the evmOS software stack, the sidechain is currently live on testnet, with a mainnet launch expected later this quarter after further validator onboarding.

Unlike Ethereum-native blockchains, the XRP Ledger does not currently support the EVM environment that powers most decentralized applications.

The new sidechain aims to fill that gap while preserving XRP’s efficiency. A bridge will link the sidechain to the XRP Ledger mainnet, using Axelar as the sole provider for asset transfers.

Wrapped XRP will act as the gas token on the EVM sidechain, enabling smart contract execution without leaving the broader XRP ecosystem.

While the Flare Network already offers an EVM-compatible solution for XRP users, this move brings Ethereum integration directly under Ripple’s umbrella.

In May, the XRP Ledger expanded its stablecoin offerings with the launch of two new region-specific assets, including EURØP, a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin from Schuman Financial, and USDB, a dollar-pegged token issued by Brazil’s Braza Group.

EURØP, backed by euros and safeguarded by major institutions like Societe Generale, marks the first fully MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin on XRPL.

Meanwhile, Braza Group’s USDB stablecoin, backed by U.S. and Brazilian bonds, offers Brazilian users a secure digital asset for payments and hedging.

XRP Faces Backlash as Ripple Aligns With Europe on Digital Euro Project

As reported, serial entrepreneur and investor Gary Cardone has launched a scathing attack on XRP, accusing the digital asset of aligning itself with centralized governments in a bid to stay relevant.

His remarks follow ongoing speculation that the European Central Bank (ECB) may integrate the XRP Ledger into its digital euro infrastructure.

While the ECB has not confirmed any formal partnership with Ripple or its XRP Ledger, rumors have circulated across crypto circles.

Cardone went further, likening XRP’s influence in finance to a new virus, calling it “COVID-19 Part Two in finance.”

He warned that continued support for the token amounts to voting for “European warmongers,” framing XRP’s ambitions as a threat to freedom rather than a step forward in financial innovation.

The comments drew immediate backlash from the XRP community, which labeled the remarks as inflammatory and unfounded.

Robert Doyle, known online as Crypto Sensei, countered Cardone’s statements by noting that “there is no official confirmation” that Ripple technology will be used for the digital euro.

He emphasized that, while the ECB is exploring CBDCs, no final decision has been made regarding the technology stack.

The US trade deficit plummeted by $76.7 billion in April following the rollout of the Trump Administration’s wave of tariffs.

The total goods and services deficit was $61.6 billion in April, down from $138.3 billion in March, per a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The US clocked $289.4 billion worth of exports in April, $8.3 billion more than March, and $351.0 billion worth of imports, which was $68.4 billion less than the previous month.

“The April decrease in the goods and services deficit reflected a decrease in the goods deficit of $75.2 billion to $87.4 billion and an increase in the services surplus of $1.5 billion to $25.8 billion.

Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $179.3 billion, or 65.7 percent, from the same period in 2024. Exports increased $58.4 billion or 5.5 percent. Imports increased $237.8 billion or 17.8 percent.”

The US trade deficit skyrocketed in March as consumers and businesses stockpiled ahead of Trump’s tariffs.

The future of those tariffs remains uncertain as rulings about their legality ping-pong back and forth through the US court system.

Last week, the United States Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that many of the duties exceed the authority granted to the president by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

The federal court struck down Trump’s April 2nd executive order establishing tariffs against 57 countries worldwide and several follow-up executive orders modifying the duties’ rates and start dates.

The CIT also axed a slew of earlier tariffs Trump had applied to Mexico, Canada and China, which he claimed were retaliation for failing to stop the flood of illegal narcotics into the US.

The Trump Administration immediately appealed the CIT’s ruling and requested a stay on the judgment, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted.

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May 24, 2025

Lawmakers close to Lee Jae-myung, the frontrunner in the South Korean presidential elections, have called for Seoul to steal a march on Washington by fast-tracking the rollout of a KRW stablecoin.

The South Korean media outlet Edaily quoted Min Byoung-dug, a lawmaker for the Democratic Party and the chairman of the party’s Digital Asset Committee, as stating that stablecoins could soon become an industry on an equal footing with AI or semiconductors. Min said:

“South Korean is an internet powerhouse. We need to take the lead in institutionalizing stablecoins before US dollar-based stablecoins become firmly established. That is the only way we can secure a sure position in the global battle for stablecoin hegemony.”

KRW Stablecoin Rollout: The Time Is Now

Min added that he thought the potential for stablecoin adoption in the payments space was “limitless.” He explained:

“We should not just sit back and watch it grow into a powerful new future industry on the scale of AI or semiconductors.”

Min is a close Lee ally and an open advocate of crypto regulation reform. He has also previously called for tax parity between South Korean stock traders and crypto investors.

Lee has repeatedly promised to launch a state-backed KRW stablecoin in response to the rapid rise of USD-pegged coins like USDT and USD Coin (USDC).

The frontrunner, who leads his closest rival Kim Moon-soo (People Power Party) in the polls by almost 10%, has called for Seoul to “enter the stablecoin market quickly.”

Lee has warned that delaying the launch of such a coin could lead to further capital flight from the country.

Min echoed Lee’s calls, telling EDaily that Seoul “must expedite the institutionalization of stablecoins.”

He explained that South Korea “should not fall behind as the use of stablecoins rapidly increases, particularly in the United States.”

USDT, USDC Dominance

Min noted the fact that USDT and USDC “account for 90% of the stablecoin market in the United States.”

He also claimed that USD-pegged coins “are already being used in some parts of Korea, such as Dongdaemun Market, where many foreign payments are made.”

Min’s comments about Dongdaegmun Market, Seoul’s biggest clothing and textiles market, may be seen as contentious.

Posters on popular South Korean crypto forums last year claimed that “mass USDT adoption” was underway at Dongdaemun, with Chinese buyers particularly keen on the coin.

However, Dongaemun traders have told both Cryptonews.com and South Korean media outlets that cash, not crypto, is still king at the market.

Regardless, Min said that rapid adoption at home and overseas means Seoul risks being left out in the cold.

He said that if USDT and USDC continue to gain popularity worldwide, the space a won-based stablecoin could fill “will inevitably diminish.”

Could Lawmakers Act Before June 3 Elections?

Min claimed that a won-based stablecoin could gain global attention and drive up global demand for won-related assets, such as the government bonds underpinning a KRW stablecoin.

The lawmaker said that fans of South Korean webtoons (web-based comics) could be among the first overseas users. Readers may use a won-based stablecoin to buy webtoons, Min said.

Min added that he is already pushing for the National Assembly to approve stablecoin legislation.

The DP has a large majority in the house going into the elections. And with the nation essentially rudderless following the impeachment earlier this year of former President Yoon Suk-yeol, the party may yet decide to push ahead with such a bill before the June 3 elections.

Min has already unveiled a private member’s bill named the Basic Act on Digital Assets, prepared with the aid of industry experts.

The lawmaker said of the draft law: “I plan to submit the bill to the National Assembly after another review.”

Windows administrators from numerous organizations report widespread account lockouts triggered by false positives in the rollout of a new Microsoft Entra ID’s “leaked credentials” detection app called MACE.

These alerts and lockouts began last night, with some admins believing they were false positives as the accounts have unique passwords that are not used on any other sites or applications.

Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, is a cloud-based identity and access management service that helps organizations manage user identities and secure access to resources.

In a Reddit thread posted early this morning, Windows admins reported receiving multiple alerts from Entra indicating that some of their user accounts had been found with credentials leaked on the dark web or other locations.

These accounts were automatically locked out of the tenant, with numerous users impacted per organization.

“Us as well… about 1/3rd of our accounts got locked out about ~1 hour ago. We’re a MSP so I’m assuming this is happening to our clients as well,” posted an admin on Reddit.

The locked-out accounts showed no signs of compromise, such as suspicious sign-ins, and were protected with MFA. Furthermore, breach notification services like Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) had no matches for these accounts.​

Another report on Reddit further corroborated that this was widespread, with an MDR provider stating they received over 20,000 notifications from Microsoft overnight regarding leaked credentials from different customers 

While Microsoft has not publicly confirmed the cause of these lockouts, Microsoft told one of the affected organizations it was caused by an issue with the rollout of a new Enterprise application called “MACE Credential Revocation.”

“Just got off with engineer. It is Tenant Lockout due to this MACE ninja rollout they did. no signs of compromise. He needs an hour to convert the ticket from compromise to lockout but can breathe a sigh of relief. It was Error Code: 53003 for conditional access policy,” an admin reported on Reddit.

Multiple people confirmed this application was added to tenants right before they began receiving the alerts.

MACE Credential Revocation app is a Microsoft Entra feature used to detect leaked credentials and lockout potentially compromised accounts.

While all alerts of leaked credentials should be investigated to confirm that an account was not compromised, if you received a flurry of alerts at once this rollout likely caused it.

BleepingComputer contacted Microsoft with questions about this incident but has not received a response at this time.