The lepton was the smallest coin of the Greek world, one hundredth of a drachma. The name survived until the euro replaced the drachma in 2002. An obol was a small silver coin worth one sixth of a drachma in classical Athens.

Arc is a layer-one blockchain from Circle where gas is paid in USDC and finality lands in under a second. Native stablecoin gas and sub-second settlement make payments smaller than a cent economical for the first time.

x402 revives the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. A server answers a request with 402 and a price; the client pays and retries; the resource is returned on settlement. It turns any endpoint into a pay-per-request resource.

A nanopayment is a payment too small to have been worth making before fees: a fraction of a cent, per article, per call, per second. Circle Gateway batches many of them so each one clears gas-free.

When an AI agent answers a question it grounds the answer in sources it retrieved. Today those sources are read for free. An agent can hold a wallet and pay per call, which lets it settle a tiny fee to each source it actually used.

USDC is a fully reserved digital dollar issued by Circle. On Arc it is both the unit of account and the gas token, so a payment and its fee are denominated in the same dollar.

Ethereum for Governments and Institutions: Why neutral infrastructure matters now. Current global shifts clearly signal a critical need for shared, neutral digital public infrastructure outside the control of any single centralized actor. As a public, programmabl The EF’s new structure. Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy. We come out of Clear Signing: Making Transaction Approvals Safer on Ethereum. An Ethereum Working Group consisting of wallet developers, security firms and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative today launched an open stand

US bitcoin ETFs break 10-day negative streak with $222 million worth of inflows. BlackRock's IBIT was the only fund to see net outflows on Thursday, shedding $40.4 million and continuing its negative streak. Institutional Bitcoin Adoption Explained: How Blackrock, Fidelity and Others Embraced BTC. Institutional adoption is when organizations such as asset managers, corporations, hedge funds, banks, pension funds, and insurers get involved in crypto. This can mean investing i Securitize becomes first to debut shares on NYSE and onchain, but it won’t be the last. President Brett Redfearn said the firm is in discussions to tokenize other IPOs "definitely ... within the next year.” eToro l

Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't. Article URL: https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/the-free-market-lie/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770647 Points: 464 # Comments: 310 14× faster embeddings: how we rebuilt the ONNX path in Manticore. Article URL: https://manticoresearch.com/blog/onnx-embeddings-speedup/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770477 Points: 43 # Comments: 6 AI is 'not smart' so what's next in artificial intelligence?. Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6gr0xkyr3o Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769696 Points: 26 # Comments: 20 The Safari MCP server for web developers. Article URL: