BlockAI News editorial desk — breaking stories and market signals from the Web3 × AI frontier.
Funding
Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela says AI video is the prequel — world models that simulate physics, causality and persistent state are next. Runway has raised ~$860M at a $5.3B valuation (Series E led by General Atlantic), going head-to-head with Google and OpenAI.
AI
Mayo Clinic's REDMOD AI — published in Gut, validated on ~2,000 multi-institution CT scans — detects pancreatic cancer up to three years before clinical diagnosis (median 16 months). It catches 73% of cases vs 39% for specialist radiologists, on scans already in the EHR.
Funding
Tether Investments proposed merging Twenty One Capital (XXI), Jack Mallers' Strike, and miner Elektron Energy into one listed entity. The combined company would hold 43,500+ BTC, mine ~5% of hashrate at <$60K all-in, and run Strike — XXI popped 8%.
Regulation & Policy
Alex Mashinsky reached a $10M FTC settlement that permanently bars him from any product or service used to deposit, exchange, invest or withdraw assets. The original $4.7B judgment is reduced; reporting and record-keeping obligations stretch up to 18 years. Mashinsky is already serving 12 years.
Web3 Security
An attacker drained roughly 13.71 billion SWEAT tokens (~65% of total supply, ~$3.5M) from top holder accounts on Near in a 30-second window. Blockaid flagged it; the SWEAT team paused the contract; MEXC and Rhea Finance froze attacker liquidity. All external account balances were fully restored.
RWA
Computershare — transfer agent for over half the S&P 500 — has partnered with BlackRock-backed Securitize to enable US-listed companies to issue tokenized equity via Issuer-Sponsored Tokens (ISTs). Pitched as the on-ramp for the $70T US public equity market.
AI
Microsoft disclosed over 20M paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats — up from 15M in January — and said weekly engagement now matches Outlook. The number of customers buying more than 50,000 seats has quadrupled. Bayer, J&J, Mercedes and Roche each have 90K+; Accenture is rolling to 743K employees.
AI
Google Cloud crossed $20.03B in Q1 2026 revenue (+63% YoY) but Sundar Pichai openly conceded the segment is "compute constrained in the near-term." Backlog doubled to $462B; Gemini API throughput hit 16B tokens per minute — both signals that demand has structurally outrun supply.
Funding
MoonPay acquired Israeli key-management firm Sodot in an all-stock deal worth roughly $100M and launched MoonPay Institutional, led by former CFTC Acting Chair Caroline D. Pham. Sodot already secures $50B+ in transactions for clients including eToro, BitGo, Flow Traders and Exodus.
Stablecoins
Meta has rolled out USDC stablecoin payouts to creators in Colombia and the Philippines via Stripe, with on-chain delivery on Solana and Polygon. Four years after shelving Libra under regulatory pressure, Meta is back in stablecoins — through the safest possible wrapper.
Stablecoins
Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to nine blockchains by adding Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Arc and Tempo, joining existing support for Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and Stellar. Annualized stablecoin settlement volume hit $7 billion — up 50% quarter-over-quarter.
AI
Satya Nadella told TechCrunch he is "ready to exploit" the restructured OpenAI partnership — Microsoft no longer owes a revenue share, the license is non-exclusive, and Azure can price OpenAI's tech to enterprise without a markup. The competitive math just changed.