U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has placed new restrictions on Congressional visits, a policy change that is likely to escalate tensions between the controversial federal law enforcement agency and its critics.
ICE detailed the policy changes in a memo published to its website. Under the new rules, ICE asserts that lawmakers must give 72 hours of advance notice before visiting an ICE field office. Lawmakers are explicitly allowed by law to visit ICE facilities that detain or otherwise house aliens unannounced, but the agency wants to stop surprise visits to its broader constellation of immigration enforcement centers across the country, which it claims do not meet that criteria.
The new guidance comes as Democrats clash with the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, which has targeted refugees who were offered legal status during the Biden administration, mistakenly deported a Maryland resident to a mega-prison in El Salvador and expanded immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants.
The policy also states that Congressional staffers must now provide 24 hours of notice before entering a detention facility. Visitors attempting to circumvent entry requirements may be subject to arrest or other legal action, the agency warns.
Under its new visitation policy, the agency tries to draw a distinction between its detention facilities and field offices, the latter of which it claims arent used to detain people.
ICE does not house aliens at field offices, rather these are working offices where Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) personnel process aliens to make custody determinations based on the specific circumstances of each case, the memo argues, adding that anyone brought to a field office who needs to be detained is transferred to a purpose-built facility.
ICE operates 25 field offices across the country. According to the agencys field office directory, the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the ICE law enforcement arm that conducts deportations, manages all aspects of the immigration enforcement process through those offices.
ICE clashes with elected officials are escalating
In Trumps second term, ICE officers have not hesitated to handcuff, arrest and even press charges against elected officials. Earlier this week, New York City comptroller Brad Lander was arrested at a Manhattan immigration court while escorting a man sought by immigration agents. In a video of the incident, Lander is shown repeatedly asking a group of plainclothes agents if they have a judicial warrant before being wrestled against a wall and removed from the building.
In another recent confrontation, California Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a press conference when he tried to interrupt Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with a question.
On Friday, Congressional Democrats sent a letter to Noem and the acting director of ICE accusing the agencies of continued obstruction of legal oversight visits by members of Congress. The lawmakers specifically named a Manhattan field office that normally serves as a brief stop for immigrants moving through the system but is now reportedly overcrowded and forcing people that are detained for multiple days to sleep on the floor.
ICEs deputy field director in New York confirmed that multiple detainees slept on the floor or on benches in the facility, an admission the group of Democrats pointed to in their letter demanding access. The lawmakers also demanded that ICE rescind its new guidance claiming that its field offices are not subject to unannounced visits by members of Congress.
Given the overaggressive and excessive force used to handcuff and detain elected officials in public, DHSs refusal to allow members of Congress to observe the conditions for immigrants behind closed doors begs the obvious question: what are you hiding? the group of lawmakers wrote.
Anshul Ramachandran knew theyd landed on something special when engineers started having opinions about color palettes. Probably one of my favorite moments was when we showed other people at the company the brand book for the first time and I heard the audible wows and ahs, the cofounder and head of product and strategy at Windsurf says. If you can get a bunch of engineers in a room to do that about colors and lines, you probably did something that works.Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, is an AI-based development environment that was bought last month by Open AI for $3 billion30 times its valuation. Ramachandrans clients are mainly engineers, and so any redesign needed to speak directly to them. So Windsurf enlisted Vancouver design agency Metalab to create a visual identity that looks more like athletic gear than business software. The result breaks every rule about how tech companies are supposed to look. [Image: courtesy Metalab]Back to the humanWindsurf builds AI tools for more than a million software engineers, helping them accelerate their coding workflows through what the company calls seamless AI collaboration. But their previous brand identitya black background with teal accentsfelt limiting for a product that was expanding beyond basic code generation.The previous branding iteration. [Image: Windsurf]Theres sort of a very grayscale, kind of boring treatment to a lot of [technology] products, says Allison Butula, marketing director at Metalab. The standard tech aesthetic had become a liability for a company positioning itself at the intersection of human creativity and machine intelligence. When machines seem to be taking over our world, it makes sense that a brand should work to make technology feel more human.[Image: courtesy Metalab]The timing of the redesign aligned with broader changes at Windsurf. The company released the Windsurf Editor in November, which generated such momentum that users began identifying the company by its product name rather than its corporate name. The company officially renamed to Windsurf in April. It was a natural time as we were also changing the name of the company, Ramachandran says.[Image: courtesy Metalab]The big creative riskYash Mittal, lead designer at Windsurf who oversaw the project internally, tells me the team was deliberate about taking creative risks. At the end of this process, where do we want to be? And were like, we want to take this big risk. And even if it fails, were okay with that because we dont want to end up with a brand that looks just like any other tech brand, he says.[Image: courtesy Metalab]Metalab has helped to turn technical products into emotionally resonant brands in the past (including Slack). Jordan Darbishire, brand director at Metalab, anchored the visual identity in a core emotional concept. It was the idea of feeling this unlimited potential. So its all about flow state. Its all about doing your best work and the tool affording you time, which is obviously a very precious resource, she says.[Image: courtesy Metalab]The brand flows indeed. The flat white logomark is a stylized W that makes it look like waves in the ocean. Its smooth thickness variations give it a hand-drawn quality, but at the same time it is precise, recalling an engineers calligraphy on a blueprint. The variable width typographyhow the W letterform grows wider, then thinner, then wider again, creating visual rhythm that suggests energy and movementtransmits a flow state, Mittal says. The logomark also visually echoes the wordmark: The Ws curves literally repeat the delicate thin ligatures of the brands typeface, Tomato Grotesk, adding to the repetition and the flow Mittal speaks aout.[Image: courtesy Metalab]The design process required balancing seemingly contradictory elements, Darbishire says. We want to really meld the natural and the technical, she says. To achieve that, the team created wavelike gradients that guide the eye through compositions while incorporating blueprint elements that communicate technical sophistication, which are at the same time a big contrast to the flat nature of the Windsurf brand and, at the same time, extend its human nature.Early design concepts and inspiration [Image: courtesy Metalab]Surfing UX AIThese pretty gradients are a key part of the brand book. Metalab developed a comprehensive gradient system with dotted line language and dash patterns that Windsurfs designers could use to build new shapes and applications. The color palette drew inspiration from actual windsurfing sails. A lot of them utilize these bright neon colors so you can see them on the water. Its also sort of the design language of that sport, Darbishire says. It looks like it could be a windsurf, like a windsurfing athletic company. And we really want to lean into that because its just so unique.[Image: courtesy Metalab]It wasnt the most aggressively sporty option, however. The team explored directions that felt too fashion-forward, too technical, or too vibrant before finding the balance point. We arrived at the sweet spot where we were very creative and expressive, but also we communicated our product values extremely clearly, Mittal notes. The gradients and colors will be an element that permeates the entire UX.[Image: courtesy Metalab]Luke Des Cotes, CEO of Metalab, says his company has had a front row seat of these kinds of waves in technologythe big boom of crypto companies that all come forward. And now its been AI companies that have kind of come forward. Creating a unique brand is key during a gold rush, he adds. There is going to be like this real renaissance of value put towards brand as being a core differentiator, he says.While Windsurf launched its new logo in mid-April, testing market reception before the full brand rollout, the complete rebranding across the site and all materials happens today (a day before International Surf Day). The logo has been a success so far, Ramachandran says. Almost all of our customers, especially on the enterprise side, theyre like, okay, yeah, thats great. You see the W, I see the wave, I see the flow. It makes a lot of sense.
Aflac Incorporated (NYSE: AFL) was the most recent target of a sophisticated cybercrime group that has led a campaign against a number of insurance companies in recent weeks, according to a statement issued by the company today.The cyberattack, which was first identified by the company June 12, was stopped within a few hours and business operations were not impacted. However, the number of Aflac insurance-holders affected by the breach is still unknown. Files containing personal information, such as Social Security numbers, health information, and insurance claims information, could have been compromised during the attack, the company said.
We regret that this incident occurred, the company wrote in a statement. We will be working to keep our stakeholders informed as we learn more and continue investigating the incident.
During the investigation, Aflac is offering credit monitoring, identity theft protection, and a two year Medical Shield policy for free to any customers who call their incident-dedicated call center.
The company suspects social engineering helped the cybercrime group infiltrate its networks. Social engineeringwhich includes tactics like phishing emailsinvolves deceiving a victim into revealing personal information or providing access into otherwise secure systems.
Aflac is only the latest insurance company impacted by these cybersecurity incidents. Erie Insurance and Philadelphia Insurance Companies issued statements about similar cyberattacks earlier this week, exposing a growing threat to the insurance industry.
The insurance industry is a recent target of a cybercrime group called Scattered Spider, John Hultquist, chief analyst of Googles threat intelligence group, shared Monday on X.
Scattered Spider, also known as UNC3944, is reportedly a group of hackers who target large organizations primarily in English-speaking countries. The group previously gained attention targeting U.K. retailers, such as Marks & Spencer and Harrods.
To defend against attacks by Scattered Spider, Googles threat intelligence group suggests companies should educate employees about social engineering tactics and strengthen security measures, such as identity verification and authentication procedures.
Aflac did not immediately respond to a request for comment about which social engineering tactics were used in the attack and whether additional cybersecurity measures would be put in place to ward off future attacks.
After a 1.37% drop between the close of trading Wednesday and opening on Friday, Aflacs stock price is looking up as the dust settles following the incident.
If you value critical thinking, you may want to rethink your use of ChatGPT.
As graduates proudly show off using ChatGPT for final projects, and with 89% of students admitting to using it for homework, have you ever wondered what effect this is having on our brains?
A new study conducted by researchers at MIT split 54 participants (aged 18 to 39 from the Boston area) into three groups. Each was tasked with writing 20-minute essays based on SAT prompts using either OpenAIs ChatGPT, Googles comparatively more traditional search engine, or their own brains.
Researchers then used electroencephalogram (or EEG) to record brain activity across 32 regions. Of the three groups, those assisted by ChatGPT engaged their brains the least and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.
The study found that using ChatGPT reduced activity in brain regions associated with memory and learning, as some human thinking and planning was offloaded to the LLM. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT users felt less ownership over their essays compared to the other groups. They also struggled to recall or quote from their own essays shortly after submitting themshowing how reliance on the LLM bypassed deep memory processes.
Over several months, those using ChatGPT became lazier with each essay. By the end of the study, their work amounted to little more than copy-and-paste. Two English teachers who assessed the essays called them largely soulless. The papers lead author, Nataliya Kosmyna, told Time: It was more like, Just give me the essay, refine this sentence, edit it, and Im done.
By comparison, the group using their own brains showed the highest neural connectivity, were more engaged and curious, and expressed greater satisfaction with their essays. The Google Search group also showed high satisfaction and active brain function.
Given how frequently ChatGPT is now used in educational settings, these findings give cause for concern. A February 2025 OpenAI report on ChatGPT use among college-aged users found that more than one-quarter of their ChatGPT conversations were education-related. The report also revealed that the top five uses for students were writing-centered: starting papers and projects (49%), summarizing long texts (48%), brainstorming creative projects (45%), exploring new topics (44%), and revising writing (44%).
The MIT paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. However, the authors believed it was important to release the findings to draw attention to the damaging long-term impact that use of large language models may have on our brainsas more and more people outsource everything from work tasks to texting.
What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 68 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, Lets do GPT kindergarten. I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental, Kosmyna told Time. Developing brains are at the highest risk.
Next time you are struggling with a writing task, stick with it. Your brain will thank you.
It seems Americans cant get enough of Olive Gardens never-ending soup or salad and breadsticks: The chains parent company reported quarterly results on Friday that buck a broader slump in dining out trends.
Darden Restaurants reported stronger-than-expected sales and earnings growth in its most-recent quarter that slightly beat analysts estimates. The Orlando-based company reported that same-store sales increased 6.9% at Olive Garden and 6.7% at LongHorn Steakhouse, which both beat analysts expectations. Across the companys 11 brands, same-restaurant sales rose 4.6%.
The company, not surprisingly, credits its model for its success. Rick Cardenas, Dardens president and CEO, said the company has been very prudent in keeping its price changes below inflation.
What we believe is happening right now in the casual dining space is our consumers are figuring out that casual dining is a great value, he said Friday on a call with Wall Street analysts. Consumers want to go out and spend their hard-earned money, and we think were taking some wallet share from fast food and fast casual.
Americans have soured on fast food lately, as both McDonalds and Chipotle reported declines in same-store sales during their first quarters, albeit for different timeframes than Darden. Traffic at U.S. quick-service restaurantswhich includes the likes of McDonalds and Chipotlehas been steadily declining, and fell again in May versus last year, according to figures from Revenue Management Solutions (RMS), which provides insights about the restaurant industry.
Saving money is the main reason keeping people from heading out to eat, as 69% of Americans say theyre eating at home more often, according to KPMGs Consumer Pulse Summer 2025 report. And consumers surveyed said they expect to spend 7% less at restaurants each month this summer.
Olive Garden’s Momentum
Despite weakness elsewhere in the industry, Darden is forecasting solid growth in its 2026 fiscal year thats now underway. The company forecast total sales growth of 7% to 8% following gains of 6% in the 2025 fiscal year.
One thing thats helped Olive Garden, Dardens biggest brand, is a delivery partnership with Uber Direct. In the most-recent quarter, Uber Direct accounted for about 3.5% of Olive Gardens total sales.
And more broadly, Cardenas said that Darden is focusing on how to keep up its recent strength, particularly for Olive Garden. Were going to continue to find ways to keep that momentum going.
Dozens of Kirkland’s Home stores will close as part of the retailers recently announced rebranding efforts. Some existing stores will be converted to Bed Bath & Beyond Home stores as part of the transformation, the company said this week.
Kirkland’s will streamline its footprint by closing at least two dozen of its 313 existing Kirkland’s Home stores.
The company will launch its first Bed Bath & Beyond Home store in Brentwood, Tennessee, in August 2025, with five stores to follow. Pending the initial market launch, the retailer intends to open approximately 75 additional stores through 2026.
The Tennessee-based retailer also plans to open its first physical Overstock store location in Nashville, with about 30 additional stores to open after the initial launch. These plans align with Kirklands broader goal to be a multi-brand retail operator.
“By consolidating real estate and leveraging underperforming store closures to reduce excess inventory, we believe we will drive faster inventory turn and maximize return on assets,” the retailer said in a press release. “Following the consolidation, we expect to move forward with approximately 290 of our current store locations as the foundational footprint for Kirkland’s Home, Bed Bath & Beyond Home, and Overstock.”
Fast Company contacted the brand to request a list of locations that will close. We will update this story if we receive a reply.
Kirkland’s Home rebrand reflects a broader transformation
Kirklands corporate name will officially change to The Brand House Collective pending shareholder approval at the company’s next annual meeting on July 24, 2025. Its ticker symbol will also change from “KIRK” to “TBHC,” pending approval next month.
Kirkland’s CEO, Amy Sullivan, explained the intention behind the rebrand in the company news release: “We’re aligning our identity with our vision to become a multi-brand merchandising, supply chain and retail operatorand backing it with decisive actions to strengthen our foundation: reducing excess inventory, closing underperforming locations, optimizing real estate assets, and enhancing talent across the organization.”
Amy Sullivan will lead as the CEO and chief merchant and creative officer of The Brand House Collective. The company announced the following additions to its corporate team:
Chief Operating Officer Jamie Schisler will oversee operations.
VP General Merchandising Manager of Bed Bath & Beyond Home Kerri Dlugokinski will lead all merchandising efforts.
VP of Supply Chain Courtenay Adolf is responsible for global sourcing, transportation, and distribution centers.
The retailer also announced changes to its board of directors. Effective June 24, 2025, appointees Eric Schwartzman, Neely Tamminga, Tamara Ward, and Steve Woodward will serve as board members.
In October 2024, Kirkland’s announced a strategic partnership with Beyond, Inc., which owns brands Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, and buybuy Baby.
Artificial intelligence is evolving at an unprecedented pace, advancing from simple generative tasks to autonomous decision-making through agentic models. Now AI is moving beyond the digital realm into the physical world. This next frontier, known as physical AI, combines advanced algorithms with sensors and actuators, enabling machines to perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world environments.
At Hexagon LIVE 2025 in Las Vegas, a physical AI humanoid robot named AEON made its debut. Think Tron meets I, Robot, but powered by next-gen AI and hardware rather than movie magic.
Developed by Sweden-based industrial tech giant Hexagon in partnership with Nvidia, AEON is designed for real-world industrial work. It can inspect equipment in cramped industrial corridors, navigate hazardous construction zones, and manage logistics in understaffed warehouses.
Spencer Huang, Product Lead for Robotics at Nvidia and the son of CEO Jensen Huang, sees a massive opportunity in humanoids, as their form allows them to perform tasks that are dangerous and demanding for humans.
Humanoids are one of the many embodiments of Physical AI. To be able to perform human-like requires powerful brains trained on massive amounts of data, Huang tells Fast Company. During the test phase, the biggest challenge was to ensure these robots can safely perform tasks in complex, dynamic environments.
Humanoid robots like AEON aim to help solve an emerging labor crisis. A report from the World Economic Forum shows nearly 50 million manufacturing and logistics jobs remain unfilled globally. In the U.S. alone, the manufacturing sector will need up to 3.8 million new workers by 2033. Hexagon plans to deploy AEON across key industrial applications, including sorting and moving parts, inspecting for defects and compliance, and performing complex tasks such as precision scanning with high-end sensors.
What sets AEON apart from other humanoids, including Teslas Optimus Gen 2 and Figure AIs Helix, is its ability to learn. Traditionally, training industrial robots requires months of manual programming and physical testing. AEON skips that. Tasks such as balance, locomotion, and precision manipulation, which usually take five to six months of coding and trial-and-error, took AEON just two to three weeks.
The key lies in AEONs ability to generate its own synthetic training data, learn through autonomous simulation and reinforcement, and apply those lessons in the real world. This self-learning AI loop marks a shift in how quickly physical AI systems can adapt to complex environments.
Simulation helps solve the robotics data challenge, enabling faster, safer development and testing cycles. It also cuts costs by reducing the need for physical prototypes and hardware, Huang says. A simulation-first approach lays the groundwork for robots to ultimately improve on their own and even generate new scenarios to challenge themselves, all in virtual environments.
[Photo: Hexagon/Nvidia]
A Platform Shift for Physical Intelligence
To build AEON, Hexagon used Nvidias AI supercomputers to train and fine-tune foundation models; the Nvidia Omniverse platform to test and optimize those models in simulation; and IGX Thor robotic computers to run the models on the robot itself. The company also employed Isaac Sim, a robotic simulation tool built on Omniverse, to train AEON on tasks.
AEON features 22 multimodal sensors and 12 cameras that enable AI-based spatial awareness, asset scanning, and digital twin creation, without needing retraining for each new environment.
AEONs wheel-based locomotion allows it to traverse factories and pivot in all directions at speed, says Arnaud Robert, President of Hexagons Robotics division. It has a battery self-swap mechanism by which it can change its own battery with no downtime, allowing for continuous operations. These design choices separate it from what we have seen on the market.
For initial training, human demonstrations are collected using teleoperation tools such as the Apple Vision Pro, which streams natural hand movements into a simulated environment in Isaac Lab.
These authentic human actions serve as the foundation for all subsequent data generation. Synthetic motion generation takes these demonstrations and creates a large number of new motion trajectories, says Huang. This multiplies the available training data, enabling robots to learn from a much wider range of scenarios than manual collection alone.
Hexagon is also exploring the use of Nvidias Isaac GR00T N1.5 open foundation model to enhance AEONs reasoning capabilities, and GR00T-Mimic to generate larger volumes of synthetic motion data from just a few human demonstrations.
Unlike many humanoids still in the R&D phase, AEON is headed for production. It is already set to pilot in real-world environments with German automotive company Schaeffler and Swiss aircraft manufacturer Pilatus, taking on tasks ranging from part inspection to reality capture.
AEON can do a reality capture of an average factory in an hour, and this could be done multiple times a day, says Robert. AEONs awareness and spatial intelligence algorithms give us a significant edge. If the humanoid is moving quickly across a factory floor and detects a person 10 feet away, it will automatically slow down or adjust its trajectory to avoid getting too close.
A New Playbook for Robotics
AEON suggests that physical AI is catching up fast. Could its simulation-first, agentic approach be the blueprint for a new class of physical AI systems?
Nearly every, if not all, humanoid company is exploring and embracing simulation to bootstrap their development and alleviate the bottlenecks and constraints of capturing real-world data, Huang explains. Not every company has the time or the resources to ely on human demonstrations only. Simulation will continue to play a critical role in robotics.
Robert adds that growing labor shortages and the need for uninterrupted operations are pushing companies beyond automation toward fully autonomous solutions.
In todays landscape, industry leaders increasingly view a cost-effective humanoid as not just an advantage, but a necessity, says Robert. Our vision is to build an autonomous future, and AEON is our flagship product in executing that strategy. We expect to introduce several variants in the years ahead, all in pursuit of that vision.
Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters.Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently.The app will display an on-screen label warning about “AI-generated content” and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators.Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an “industry-wide issue.” It’s committed to “safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favor of training AI models,” CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release.Deezer’s move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet including text, images and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such training data without paying for it.According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year, 18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks, are now completely AI generated. Just three months earlier, that number was 10%, Lanternier said in a recent interview.AI has many benefits but it also “creates a lot of questions” for the music industry, Lanternier told the Associated Press. Using AI to make music is fine as long as there’s an artist behind it but the problem arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said.Music fraudsters “create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties,” he said.Musicians can’t upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels or digital distribution platforms can do it for artists they have contracts with, while anyone else can use a “self service” distribution company.Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total streams on Deezer. But the company said it’s “evident” that fraud is “the primary purpose” for these songs because it suspects that as many as seven in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming “farms” or bots, instead of humans.Any AI songs used for “stream manipulation” will be cut off from royalty payments, Deezer said.AI has been a hot topic in the music industry, with debates swirling around its creative possibilities as well as concerns about its legality.Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, are being sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and face allegations they exploited recorded works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey.Gema, a German royalty-collection group, is suing Suno in a similar case filed in Munich, accusing the service of generating songs that are “confusingly similar” to original versions by artists it represents, including “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Daddy Cool” by Boney M and Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”Major record labels are reportedly negotiating with Suno and Udio for compensation, according to news reports earlier this month.To detect songs for tagging, Lanternier says Deezer uses the same generators used to create songs to analyze their output.“We identify patterns because the song creates such a complex signal. There is lots of information in the song,” Lanternier said.The AI music generators seem to be unable to produce songs without subtle but recognizable patterns, which change constantly.“So you have to update your tool every day,” Lanternier said. “So we keep generating songs to learn, to teach our algorithm. So we’re fighting AI with AI.”Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed to a criminal case last year in the U.S., which authorities said was the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming. Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least $10 million.
Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer
The share price of crypto and fintech company Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) is rising yet again today in early market trading.
After the stock jumped over 33% on Wednesday (markets were closed for Juneteenth on Thursday), shares in the newly publicly traded company were up as high as another 15% in premarket trading this morning. And you can thank the U.S. Senate for that. Heres what you need to know.
What is Circle?
Circle Internet Group, better known as Circle, is a fintech company that offers a range of financial products. Circle was founded in 2013 as a Bitcoin payments processor. The company currently offers a range of fintech developer services, including digital wallets and blockchain transfer solutions.
However, Circle is best known for its two stablecoins, USDC and EURC. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that is much less vulnerable to wild price swings because a stablecoins price is tied directly to a real-world asset. In the case of the USDC stablecoin, its value is tied directly to the U.S. dollar. Circles EURC stablecoin is tied to the value of the Euro.
Stablecoins thus help provide investors with stability while still allowing them to invest in crypto assets. In terms of market cap, USDC is currently the seventh most valuable cryptocurrency with a value of over $61 billion. The most valuable stablecoin in terms of market capitalization is Tether, which has a total valuation exceeding $155 billion. Cryptocurrency king Bitcoins market cap is currently north of $2.1 trillion.
In March 2024, Fast Company named Circle as one of its Most Innovative Companies based on the impact its stablecoin was having on the crypto industry.
Why is CRCL stock rising today?
Shares in Circle Internet Group were at one point trading over 15% higher in premarket trading this morning. Some of those gains were lost when the markets opened, but currently, CRCL stock is still up over 12% in early market trading. That follows an impressive 33% rise in the stocks price on Wednesday.
So why is Circle popping today?
Well, you can thank the U.S. Senate. The congressional body passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) on Tuesday. The act is the first to seek regulation of stablecoins.
Its passage would establish a regulatory framework for stablecoins, further legitimizing the digital tokens and integrating them more closely within the U.S. economy. Such a move would likely only benefit stablecoin providers, like Circle.
The GENIUS Act would also benefit stablecoin investors because it would require that stablecoins be backed by liquid assets, including U.S. dollars or short-term Treasury bills, notes Reuters. Issuers of stablecoins would also be required to disclose their reserves composition on a monthly basis, leading to greater transparency.
Circle stock price may depend on House now
However, while Circle investors continue to cheer the Senates passage of the GENIUS Act on Tuesday, the act may still not become law. Thats because it now must go to the House for approval. And as Reuters notes, various groups, including the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, are calling for critical changes to the bill.
If the bill stalls in the House, or is killed, CRCL stock may give back some of the gains it has made this week.
But as of today, Circles stock price run has been nothing short of impressive. Circle Internet Groups initial public offering (IPO) was held just over two weeks ago on June 5.
Since then, the price of CRCL stock has surged a staggering 589%.
The IPO price of CRCL was $31 per share. As of the time of this writing, CRCL shares are trading at over $225 per share.
Rather than the Sunday scaries or toxic bosses, employees have unlocked a new workplace fear: office chair butt.
While not a new concern, the term has resurfaced on TikTok to describe how sitting for long stretches affects the look of your behindwhat medical professionals call atrophy of your gluteal muscle group.
A lack of conditioning in your gluteus maximus and surrounding tissue leads to weakness, making it build up fat tissue and appear flatter or saggy, occupational therapist Michael Milicia told the Cleveland Clinic.
And its not just an aesthetic issue. Other symptoms of office chair butt can include poor posture, lower back pain, and limited mobility over time. Theres a reason researchers have dubbed sitting the new smoking, linking chronic sitting to serious health problems including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, and anxiety.
Now, the term has gone viral on TikTok. And theyre not taking it sitting down.
I refuse to be a victim, posted one TikTok user, showing the routine of squats, lunges, and standing leg lifts she performs at her desk. I dont think youre in danger, one person commented.
@dan.paulaa I wil not fail my glutes #gymtok #fitness EoO – Bad Bunny
No office chair butt for us, another user posted, leading her coworkers through a series of exercises. The video quickly inspired others: Just saw this while at work and immediately put my desk to standing, read one comment.
@nikkiiim aw hell nah #fyp #officechair #deskchair #corporatelife #workoutmotivation #corporatetiktok #corporatehumor #lmao Bunna Summa – BunnaB
Since most workplaces dont come with a fully equipped gym, employees have gotten creative. Some use the office escalator as a makeshift StairMaster. One video shows an employee swapping out traditional weights for a water cooler while performing Bulgarian split squats. Me every 30 minutes when I find out what office chair butt is, another TikTok user wrote, running up and down stairs and doing laps around a conference room.
@krystinamaysonet I REFUSE TO FALL VICTIM! sooo its actually a thing, I was legit shook. You wont catch me sitting during a shift again #officelife #gymtok #officechair #playboycarti #fyp #parati #lilyachty #future #glutesworkout som original – Trap Music Fun
If youre reading this: Give me 10 squats. Stat.
