Company
Block, formerly Square, is a fintech company behind Square merchant payments, Cash App, and Bitcoin/Lightning projects like Spiral and TBD.
Block's Amrita Ahuja says engineers improved code review changes 150% by midyear, in a year when the company cut 40% of its staff. The figure is one executive's account from a single panel, and Fortune reports that measuring the return is still evolving.
Reality
Block's $15 million Cash App security settlement starts paying claimants in October 2026 after approving about 40,380 of more than 667,000 claims. Approved claims are valued at about $5.6 million so far, little more than a third of the fund Block agreed to.
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Neobanks and fintechs raised fraud-prevention spending 357% in a year to $8 million per institution, according to PYMNTS Intelligence. Measured against the transaction value implied by the group's own loss rate, that budget held near 2 basis points of volume in both years.
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Stripe agreed to buy Parafin, which has lent to more than 60,000 businesses through software platforms such as DoorDash, Jobber and Mindbody. The deal widens a lending business Stripe already runs and leaves open how much of the credit risk it will hold.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Anchorage Digital is cutting about 17% of staff, an estimated 68 jobs, eight months after Tether's $100 million investment valued it at $4.2 billion. That price covered a roughly 2.4% stake, and Anchorage's own 2023 record points to a cost cut it has reversed before.
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3 publishersReality
BIS data on 130 economies show stablecoin flows rise with currency stress, as dollar deposits do, while appearing less affected by capital controls. Turkey's roughly $38 billion of lira swapped into stablecoins in a year shows how large that harder-to-block channel already is.
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Block joined the x402 Foundation on Sept. 24 and is adding Bitcoin Lightning to the agent-payment protocol Coinbase built for stablecoins. The move puts a second settlement asset, and a second large payments company, into a standard its creator handed to the Linux Foundation this year.
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Nium aims to pre-fund only 50% of its payments in fiat and time the rest with stablecoins, its treasury VP said, as a Fed hike makes fronting cash costlier. Kapitus's operating chief expects a second hike before the end of 2026, and Nium's treasurer says technology investment can wait while funds go to liquidity.
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Moov Money sends transfers to a recipient's existing debit card through Jack Henry's Banno platform and the card networks' push rails. Zelle already integrates with more than 2,300 institutions and moved more than $1.2 trillion last year.
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Khozema Shipchandler stops for half an hour after every 10 notes, and each one has to name what that leader is actually driving. The ritual obliges the CEO to know 80 people's work, and he calls that group Twilio's bench.
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A 300-trial study swapped Goose, OpenCode and OpenHands-SDK under Qwen 3.6 Plus and MiniMax M2.5, and reports that the scaffold sets tokens per solved task and the failure mode while the score barely moves.
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Its second-quarter report puts the network hashrate about 50% below trend and blames the post-halving cycle and Texas power prices alongside the AI pivot, so the 50% measures the halving and the power bill as much as it measures who is outbidding whom.
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Google's server for Google Analytics is a read-only Python package you run locally through pipx, and it has been on GitHub since mid-2025. Anthropic only handed the protocol to the Linux Foundation that December.
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With CoinShares putting the second-quarter cash cost of a bitcoin at about $75,500 against a $58,400 price, public miners are switching off rigs they own and paying cash to cancel the ones they ordered.
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The $60.50 offer is gone, PayPal closed at $53.66, and roughly half the premium the bid created is still in the price, leaving a $1.5 billion cost programme to justify what the market has not yet given back.
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10 publishersReality
BVNK processed more than $30 billion of stablecoin transactions last year and now plugs into Marqeta's issuing platform, where the card rails stay as they are and the currency conversion happens out of the cardholder's sight.
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The proposed Builders Bank and Trust would take no deposits and make no loans, which leaves custody fees as its only revenue line, and the applicant queue it joins suggests approval is measured in years rather than quarters.
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Builders Bank & Trust would custody bitcoin and stablecoins under one federal supervisor instead of fifty state ones. That is worth paying for. But 23 of the OCC's last 40 applications want much the same thing.
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Dorsey's 2024 pitch for melding Square and Cash App finally has a distribution number attached. The rebate that pulled the merchants in is capped at $10 a ticket and funded by Cash App for twelve months.
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Block has published the first hard distribution of AI adoption inside a large engineering org: one agent for most, three to five for the next cohort, and a small team building the orchestrator.
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Leadership · August 26, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers
Invest · August 18, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers