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The U.S. government has shut down. Last night, Congress failed to pass a new funding bill that would have kept the federal government operating normally. However, at 12:01 a.m. today, the existing funding bill ceased to be in effect, and with no new one in place, large parts of the government are now shut down. Fast Company has previously explored how the government shutdown will affect everyone, from Social Security recipients to travelers to federal workers. But the shutdown will also no doubt have an effect on the markets. And not just the stock markets. The U.S. government shutdown appears to already be having an impact on cryptocurrency markets. Heres how Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies are performing in the hours after the federal government shut its doorsand how cryptocurrencies reacted the last time there was a government shutdown. The government is down, but crypto is up The first thing to note about markets of all stripes today is that some are down and some are up. As of the time of this writing, futures of the three major stock market indexes in the United States are all downbut not by a staggering amount. S&P futures are currently down by about 0.58%, Dow futures are down by about 0.52%, and Nasdaq futures are down by about 0.67%. But those declines are opposite to how most major cryptocurrencies are performing. As of the time of this writing, nearly every major cryptocurrency is up by multiple percentages, including: Bitcoin: Up 2.8% to $116,281 Ethereum: Up 2.8% to $4,283 XRP: Up 3.1% to $2.93 Other popular cryptocurrencies are also up as of the time of this writing, including Dogecoin, up 5.2%, and Solana, up 4.81%. Why are crypto prices rising? Many major cryptocurrencies began spiking around the time that the U.S. government officially entered its partial shutdown. But why? Investors are likely seeking safe-haven assetsinvestments that are seen as safer bets than stocks or bonds when there is a wave of economic uncertaintyuncertainty that is often created by a government shutdown. Historically, gold has been seen as the de facto safe-haven asset during uncertain economic times. But in recent years, as cryptocurrencies have become more mainstream, investors often see the digital assets as safe havens when political turmoil has the potential to upset traditional markets. However, investors in crypto would be wise to act cautiously because while crypto currently seems to be benefiting from those seeking safe-haven assets, theres no guarantee that the digital assets will continue to riseor remain stablein the days and weeks ahead. Indeed, the last time there was a government shutdown, Bitcoin lost value during the period that the U.S. government shut its doors. Bitcoin lost value during the last shutdown Prior to this government shutdown, the federal government last shut down during President Trumps first term. The U.S. government entered a partial shutdown between December 22, 2018, and January 25, 2019. This was the longest government shutdown on record. And in the early days of the shutdown, Bitcoin appeared to receive a boost. According to Yahoo Finance data, Bitcoin opened at $3,898 per coin on December 22, 2018. It closed the day above $4,014. Two days later, Bitcoin climbed to an intraday high of $4,271 on December 24. But then the gradual slide began. Over the course of the next month, Bitcoin steadily declined, and by January 25, 2019, it closed below $3,600. If you go by Bitcoin’s closing prices of $4,014 on December 22, 2018, and below $3,600 on January 25, 2019, that means Bitcoin lost roughly 10% of its value during the last U.S. government shutdown. Of course, this historic loss cannot be relied upon to predict what might happen to digital assets during the current federal government shutdown. However, what this history suggests is that asset prices can vary significantly in the later stages of a government shutdown compared to the early stages.
Category:
E-Commerce
Every holiday season feels high stakes, but 2025 may be the most unforgiving yet. Consumer demand remains resilient, but retailers are facing a tangle of economic headwinds, from tariffs and supply chain volatility to rising ad costs and leaner teams. In an uncertain economy, the margin for error shrinks, and the cost of a slow site or a fragile storefront grows even steeper. For years, retailers have measured holiday readiness by promotions, inventory planning, and staffing strategies. But theres a blind spot: performance readiness. How fast, resilient, and visible your digital storefront is when shoppers show up can determine whether you hit your holiday forecast or miss it by millions. The challenge is that many e-commerce leaders still operate under assumptions that no longer hold true. These assumptions quietly undermine performance and cause retailers to stumble at the moment they most need to shine. Assumption 1: Performance Is a Side Project Retail leaders spend months calibrating promotional calendars, forecasting inventory swings, and allocating marketing budgets. Yet digital performance gets treated like an afterthought, or a box to be checked by IT. In reality, it is a revenue program. What happens in the first few hundred milliseconds of a visit sets the tone for everything that follows and has measurable consequences. A faster, more resilient storefront doesnt just feel smoother. It directly drives higher conversion rates, greater cart completion, and improved ROI on every marketing dollar. Research shows that 63% of shoppers abandon a page that takes longer than four seconds to load, and shaving even one second off load time can lift mobile conversions by 3%. Thats not just a technical winits a financial one. When ad costs are rising, supply chains are fragile, and budgets are tight, squeezing more value out of the traffic you already have is one of the most dependable levers retailers can pull. The companies that win in 2025 will be those that recognize speed and stability not as a side project but as a boardroom priority. Assumption 2: Shoppers Are Only Human This holiday season has a twist: not every shopper will be human. 2025 will be the first year of Cyborg Monday. AI agents are already comparing prices, summarizing reviews, and recommending products. They do not get tired, they do not impulse-buy, and they have little patience for heavy pages or unstable components. Just as SEO reshaped how teams built for Google, the rise of AI answers and generative engine optimization (GEO) is pushing a new discipline that favors clean markup, predictable rendering, and fast pages so experiences are easy for humans and machines to understand. Recently, I wanted to find a kid-friendly music player with streaming capabilities. I did not start with a traditional search engine. Instead, I asked an AI. In seconds it produced options, pulled in reviews, and linked to retailers. In that moment, the agent was the primary shopper. Multiply that instinct across millions of households this holiday season, and you can see why 2025 will be different. Retailers arent just competing for human clicks anymore. Theyre competing for placement in AI-generated answers, shopping summaries, and bot-driven carts. Thats why performance readiness is about more than keeping the lights on. Its about ensuring your site is fast, resilient, and discoverable, whether the shopper is a person on a smartphone or an AI agent buying on their behalf. Assumption 3: More Traffic Equals More Revenue In uncertain economic times, the reflex is to double down on traffic acquisition. Retailers pour money into ads, believing more visitors will guarantee growth. But the assumption that volume alone drives revenue is increasingly flawed. When load times lag or pages break, additional visitors do not translate into additional sales. Instead, they magnify losses. Every click that doesnt convert represents wasted spend. Buying more top-of-funnel only works if your experience converts reliably under pressure. Under peak load, third-party tools can stall or fail. Without orchestration, you pay for clicks that never become customers. The smarter bet is to extract more value from the traffic you already have by raising conversion, reducing abandonment, and protecting every paid visit with speed and stability. The Imperative: Build for Speed and Agility Recognizing flawed assumptions is only the beginning. Most teams dont lose sales because they lack a strategy; they lose them because theyre weighed down by fragility. Modern e-commerce storefronts are like orchestrasdozens of third-party vendors, from ratings and reviews to personalization engines, all playing at once. But under the heavy traffic of peak shopping season, many of those instruments stall, fall out of sync, or fail to load entirely. Performance readiness in 2025 means more than checking a Lighthouse score. It means building agility into the stack itself: Continuous optimization, not one-time fixes. Performance isnt static. Codebases evolve, vendors push updates, and new scripts pile up. Optimization must be ongoing. Real-time resilience under load. Peak traffic reveals fragility. Stress-testing and load resilience need to be continuous capabilities, not seasonal exercises. Orchestrate third parties and dont blindly trust them. Every vendor integration affects performance. Leaders must demand visibility and orchestration across the stack. Tie visibility to revenue. Technical scores are helpful, but what matters is the financial translation: how many sales are lost or gained through performance. The Bottom Line Holiday pressure is coming. You cant control tariffs, shipping costs, or consumer sentiment. You can control what happens when shoppers or their agents hit your site. The first Cyborg Monday will not reward those with the loudest promotions or the biggest ad budgets. It will reward those who have built fast, resilient, bot-friendly storefronts. In this new era of e-commerce, milliseconds wont just decide whether you win or lose a customer. They will decide whether you appear in the consideration set at all.
Category:
E-Commerce
Miklu Silvanto, Ouras chief design officer, says incorporating advanced computing power into a tiny ring is a major challenge. It’s just as challenging to make a ring that people will actually want to wear around the clock. So Silvanto, an industrial design veteran who has worked at Apple and Bang & Olufsen, must also think of himself as a jewelry designer. “A ring is such an intimate object,” he says. “You might wear it alongside your wedding ring. You need to think comfort, and beauty, and fashion.” On October 1, Oura launches a new collection of ceramic rings that are more fashion-forward than its previous ones, which resemble metallic wedding bands. Since ceramic takes well to color, the new rings come in an array of hues, including petal pink, tide green, cloud white, and midnight blue. The company has also developed a new charging system that will allow wearers to switch between rings seamlessly, without losing any data. [Image: Oura] These new rings cost $499, while the metallic versions are priced between $350 and $500 depending on the finish. Users must also pay $70 annually to use the app that presents their health data, analysis, and advice. Given how expensive this product is, the idea of switching rings based on your outfit of the day may be an affordable reality to only a small, wealthy slice of the population, epitomized by some of the most famous Oura wearersMark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian, Prince Harry, and Gwyneth Paltrow, to name a few. Still, the rings are resonating with consumers around the world. Oura sold 2.5 million rings last year, making up half of its total sales since 2015. And the company expects to generate $1 billion in sales this year, making it one of the biggest players in the wearable technology industry. After its $825 million Series E round, its now valued at $11 billion. [Photo: Oura] The Tiniest Computer For a designer like Silvanto, working on a smart ring involves incorporating as much technology as possible into the tiniest of products. When Oura launched a decade ago as a Kickstarter project, its first ring was much chunkier and could monitor only sleep and daily activity. [Image: Oura] Since then, the Oura’s designers have managed to make the ring smaller. Both the metal rings and the new ceramic ones are roughly 8 millimeters wide, 2 millimeters thick, and weigh between 5 and 8 grams depending on the size. And the rings are able to track around 50 biometrics. To do this, they use several sensors, including an infrared LED that measures blood oxygen levels, green and infrared PPG (photoplethysmogram) sensors that track heart rate, a digital thermometer that measures body temperature, and a sensitive accelerometer that tracks movement. Oura has benefited from broader changes in the technology industry that has been working toward miniaturization. (This is similar to what has been happening at, say, Dyson, which is incorporating more and more powerful motors into smaller hairdryers and vacuums.) [Photo: Oura] Silvanto says Oura has focused on incorporating this tech into a design that is as comfortable and beautiful as possible. The new rings are made from zirconia ceramic, which is significantly harder and more durable than the ceramic used for vases and dishware. The rings are shaped and then fired in a kiln, which chemically transforms them into the harder material. (In fact, it is so hard that it can scuff softer metals.) Silvanto stresses the appeal of the materials ability to take on colors. The four hues in the new collection are glossy and vibrant. If Oura’s metallic rings look like simple wedding bands, these ceramic rings evoke the color of gemstones. It’s jewelry that allows users to express their tastes and aesthetic preferences. [Photo: Oura] Oura ring as fashion object Now that Oura is framing its rings as fashion objects, it wanted to ensure users were able to easily swap them on a daily basis to go with their various styles or moods. Silvanto says creating a system that would allow users to change rings while keeping all their data intact wasn’t simple. Data is stored in the ring itself, in the app, and in the cloud. “When a user switches between rings, all of this data needs to be synchronized to ensure that the tracking would be accurate,” he says. (This new data-synching capability is live on iOS apps today and will be available on Android starting October 10.) While the new ceramic designs are a significant launch for Oura, Silvanto says his team is already focused on dreaming up the companys next-gen rings. As sensor technology continues to shrink, rings will become even thinner. And the team will continue to work on making them as stylish and fashin-forward as possible. “The best ring is one that people actually want to wear,” Silvanto says. “And to do that, you need to think beyond technology and about culture.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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