Sarah Wynn / The Block:
The UK's FCA grants Ripple approval for its Electronic Money Institution license and crypto asset registration, clearing the way for UK expansion  —  Partner offers  —  Quick Take  — The Financial Conduct Authority granted Ripple approval for its Electronic Money Institution license and crypto asset registration in the UK.

Iain Martin / Forbes:
A16z captured 18%+ of all US venture capital allocated in 2025 and now manages $90B in assets, vs Sequoia Capital's $56B and General Catalyst's $43B  —  Andreessen Horowitz has raised $15 billion for five new growth and venture funds in one of the largest-ever raises for a venture capital fund.

The Information:
Sources say DeepSeek will launch V4, its next-generation model, in the coming weeks and say it outperformed Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT series in coding  —  Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is expected to launch its next-generation AI model that features strong coding capabilities in the coming weeks …

Pragyan Kalita / Reuters:
Rain, which helps businesses issue stablecoin-linked Visa cards, raised a $250M Series C led by ICONIQ at a $1.95B valuation, taking its total funding to $338M+  —  Stablecoin firm Rain said on Friday it has raised $250 million in a funding round led by ICONIQ, valuing the company at $1.95 billion …

Robert Hart / The Verge:
X is restricting Grok's image capabilities via the @grok command for free users, but they can still create sexual deepfakes via X's “Edit image” or Grok's app  —  X's sexual deepfake machine is still running, despite Grok saying otherwise.