Stripe's crypto acquisition 💰, OpenAI Microsoft renegotiate deal 🤝, future of Postgres 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-10-21

Oct 21, 2024

Stripe acquires stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion in crypto's largest acquisition (1 minute read)

Payments company Stripe has acquired stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion in the largest acquisition in the crypto industry to date. Bridge was previously valued at $200 million. Stripe recently reinstated crypto payments for US businesses via USDC on Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon. It also inked a partnership with Coinbase that required Stripe to incorporate Coinbase's Base Layer 2 network into its crypto payment products and Coinbase to add Stripe as a way for its customers to buy crypto within its Coinbase Wallet.

OpenAI, Microsoft reportedly hire banks to renegotiate partnership terms (2 minute read)

OpenAI and Microsoft have both hired investment banks to help revise the terms of their partnership as OpenAI plans to restructure to reincorporate its for-profit arm as a benefit corporation and remove caps that previously limited investors' returns. The negotiations are said to focus on how big of a stake Microsoft will receive in OpenAI following the restructuring. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019. The current terms of the partnership say that Microsoft will receive most of OpenAI's initial profits until it recoups its investment. OpenAI doesn't expect to become profitable until 2029.

🚀Science & Futuristic Technology

It's Time to Build the Exoplanet Telescope (12 minute read)

Starship is designed to launch at least 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit at an exceptionally low cost with a launch cadence high enough to ultimately deliver over one million metric tons per year. This will transform human logistical capacity in space and allow for greatly reduced space development costs. It would enable humanity to develop a self-assembling and ever-growing telescope in space. This telescope would be able to resolve features on the surface of exoplanets and reveal continents, mountain ranges, river systems, seasonal variations in plants and animals, and more.

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ' (7 minute read)

Heliospect Genomics is a US startup that offers embryo screening services. The company allows couples to rank up to 100 embryos based on IQ, section, height, risk of obesity, risk of mental illness, and other traits. Its services cost up to $50,000. The company's offers represent an ethical minefield. Selecting embryos based on predicted IQ is legal in the US, but not in some other countries like the UK.

💻Programming, Design & Data Science

TanStack Start (Website)

TanStack Start is a full-stack React framework that enables full-document SSR, streaming, server functions, bundling, and more. It comes with a routing system designed to handle all full-stack routing requirements with ease. TanStack Start is designed to be deployable anywhere that runs JavaScript.

The future of Postgres? (3 minute read)

Stability and reliability are core to Postgres. New features will come from extensions, which allow developers to create other storage backends, new types, and more. There are a lot of extensions available. This article covers a few of the extensions that hint at the potential of Postgres' future.

🎁Miscellaneous

How San Francisco Learned to Love Self-Driving Cars (10 minute read)

Self-driving cars have won over San Francisco after a rocky start a year and a half ago. The company is currently serving over 100,000 paid rides a week across Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. It opened its service to everyone in San Francisco this past summer. Waymo rides generally cost slightly more than Uber or Lyft, but users don't have to tip drivers, making the three apps' prices competitive. The company is already retaining riders at a higher rate than competitors while operating on a much smaller scale.

Did Automattic commit open source theft? (17 minute read)

Automattic, the VC-funded company behind WordPress, is in a full-blown corporate conflict with WP Engine, a popular managed WordPress hosting service. As part of the conflict, Automattic forked a popular plugin made by WP Engine, replaced the plugin in the plugin directory, and is migrating over 2 million of the plugin's customers silently onto the fork. The reviews for the plugin have remained as if nothing has changed and any reviews pointing out the heist are being actively removed. The silent change, aimed at reducing WP Engine's revenue, broke some production sites. The incident is a nightmare scenario for companies serious about supply chain security - the WordPress.org plugin directory is no longer reliable.

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