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Crypto Gets Its Rulebook
00:20:48
At long last, the government has issued guidance to crypto on what is or is not allowed. The blowup from gamers has caused Jensen to push back. A tale of contrasting IPOs from wildly different industries. And is your boss about to ask you to submit expense reports for your token use?
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Welcome to the Tech Brew. Write Home for Wednesday, March 18, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough. Today, at long last, the government has issued guidance to crypto on what is or is not allowed. The blow up from gamers has caused Jensen to push back a tale of contrasting IPOs from wildly different industries. And is your boss about to ask you to submit expense reports for your token use? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. At long last, the US Government has issued guidance on which digital assets are securities, carving out stablecoins, digital collectives and digital commodities as non securities. Quoting Bloomberg, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a long awaited token taxonomy on Tuesday, a key step forward, laying out which types of digital assets it deems to be securities. The guidance carves out payment stablecoins, digital collectibles and digital commodities as non securities. It also clarifies how federal securities law applies to protocol mining, staking and crypto airdrops, the SEC said in a memo. Digital securities or traditional securities that are tokenized are subject to SEC rules and regulations, according to the guidance. The crypto industry has long sought greater clarity on whether particular assets are considered securities, which typically require more regulatory disclosures than commodities. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission joined in the interpretation in the latest sign that Wall Street's two main regulators are no longer waiting for Congress to finalize legislation to delineate which agency has jurisdiction over which digital assets. The SEC head also said the agency would soon issue a proposed rule teeing up a safe harbor program for startups to launch crypto companies, crypto investment contracts and security tokens without necessarily having to register with the agency. The goal would be to allow companies to gain access to capital without being subject to enforcement actions, said atk, adding the safe harbor could last up to four years. Such a safe harbor would provide crypto innovators bespoke pathways to raise capital in the US While providing appropriate investor protections, Atkins said. Atkins said the latest effort would give the agencies a head start, bringing certainty to the digital asset industry but urged lawmakers to continue their work on market structure legislation. End quote. Man never rile up gamers Jensen Huang dismissed social media criticism of DLSS5 at GTC 2026, asserting that claims that the generative AI tech homogenizes games are, according to him, completely wrong. Quoting Tom's Hardware at a press Q and A with Tom's hardware at GTC 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed criticism of DLSS5, the company's new use of AI and neural rendering to infer how certain features of games would look if they were more photore. Since the debut of the feature, some critics have vocally complained on social media that the technology is making games look worse, homogenous or only show Nvidia's view of the world. Much of the criticism has focused on the updated appearances of Resident Evil Requiem's Grace Ashcroft and Leon Kennedy. Well, first of all, they're completely wrong, huang said in response to a question from Tom's hardware editor in chief Paul Alcorn about the criticism. The reason for that is because, as I've explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with Generative AI, huang continued. He added that developers can still fine tune the generative AI to make it match their style, adding that DLSS5 adds generative capability to the existing geometry of the game, but that it doesn't change the artistic control. It's not post processing, it's not post processing at the frame level, it's generative control at the geometry level, he said. Huang also said that developers can try the tool and see how they want to use it, suggesting that it's up to a developer to try and make a toon shader or see if the game should be made of glass. All of that is in the control, direct control of the game developer, he said. This is very different than generative AI. It's content control, Generative AI. That's why we call it neural rendering. We'll see if the vocal gamers who say they dislike what they see change their mind as we see more. DLSS5 is set to launch in the fall, and there'll likely be far more demos of this technology that are more fully baked before then. End quote. From the Countdown until they get out of the business entirely. File Meta says Quest users will lose access to Meta Horizon worlds on the Quest headsets on June 15. Access will continue on the Meta Horizon mobile app. Quoting Bloomberg, the move follows cuts to the team responsible for the headsets and their virtual reality offerings, known as Reality Labs. In January, Meta began eliminating 1,000 jobs from the division while also closing down some of its virtual reality game and content studios. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who leads Reality Labs, said in a note to staff at the time that Meta would primarily focus on mobile phone experiences instead of fully immersive virtual worlds accessed via headsets. Mark Zuckerberg's push into the Metaverse, an effort he had so much conviction around that he renamed Facebook as Meta, has long drawn scrutiny from investors and child safety watchdogs. Just a few years after that rebrand and sinking billions of doll into the effort, the company has shifted its spending to the fast moving artificial intelligence race. At Reality Labs, resources have been diverted from VR gaming to wearable products that advance Zuckerberg's AI ambitions, including the Ray Ban, Meta glasses. And now a contrasting tale of two IPOs. First, AI drone software company Swarmer closed up a lot in its Nasdaq debut, valuing it at more than $380 million, which doesn't sound like a lot, but more on that in a second. Swarmer's tech has been used in more than 100,000 missions in Ukraine since April of 2024. Quoting Bloomberg, Swarmer shares skyrocketed as much as 700% on Tuesday, making the artificial intelligence drone software company's debut the best trading by a U.S. stock since Newsmax's blockbuster entry nearly a year ago. Shares of the Austin, Texas based firm closed up 520% at $31 on Tuesday. The surge triggered multiple volatility based trading, including one less than a minute after the stock opened and initially dropped more than 10%. Swarmers sold 3 million shares for $5 each, which at the time valued the company at just over $60 million. The trading gave the company a market value of over $380 million, based on the outstanding shares listed in a U.S. securities and Exchange Commission filing. The company generated just $309,920 in revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025, a roughly 6% decline from the same period a year earlier. Its profitability also worsened over that stretch, with the company reporting a loss of about $8.5 million, more than four times larger than its net loss in 2024. Swarmer is a software company and not a drone manufacturer. Drones, powered by the company's artificial intelligence technology enables them to deploy and coordinate drone swarms like a bird flock at scale. Its platform has been deployed in Ukraine with more than 100,000 real world missions in active combat environments since April 2024, according to its regulatory filing. Swarmer's opening day rally comes as investors are weighing their bets on defense spending as the industry is seeing an emergence of software driven autonomous unmanned systems, reflecting a broader move in modern warfare toward low cost weapons. US defense stocks are off to a strong start in 2026, extending last year's stellar performance as geopolitical tensions ramp up and military spending rises globally. A report from the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday said the U.S. defense Department wants to mass produce a kamikaze drone the military recently used to strike Iran. The news sent shares of drone maker AeroVironment up as much as 5.1%. Meanwhile, though, sources say that Kraken has paused its IPO plans amid the downturn in crypto markets since October and may revisit a listing when market conditions improve. Quoting CoinDesk, a Kraken spokesperson said, as we announced in November, we filed confidentially with the SEC and that is all we can really share. The downturn in crypto markets since October, when bitcoin touched a record high, has made companies more cautious about going public or raising fresh capital as declining declining asset prices and weaker trading volumes weigh on valuations and investor sentiment. Payword, Kraken's parent, said it confidentially filed a draft S1 registration statement with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission in connection with a proposed initial public offering of common stock on November 19th. That was the day after Kraken said it was valued at $20 billion when it raised $800 million in new funding, including a $200 million investment from Citadel securities to support its push to bring traditional financial markets onto blockchain infrastructure. Last year, a more favorable environment at the SEC helped several major Companies, including Circle, CoinDesk and Gemini Station, successfully list their stock. Pitchbook data shows that at least 11 crypto IPOs raised a combined $14.6 billion in 2025, a sharp increase from just $310 million in 2024. In 2026, crypto IPOs are shaping up to be a pivotal test for the sector, with more infrastructure companies planning to go public. So far, however, crypto custodian Bitgo is the only digital asset company to have listed and has seen its stock price sl partly as a result of a messy market. Unlike Kraken Securitize, a tokenization firm that works closely with asset management giant BlackRock, said it still plans to go public. The firm plans to IPO as soon as it receives the SEC's green light, likely in the second quarter end quote.
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it's crunch time at work and you need to bring wings to your workday. Visit redbull.com gettingitdone and answer a couple questions about your work style to get a Spotify customized playlist tuned to your productivity. Plus, score a can of Red Bull on us while you go from to do to done. And remember, Red Bull gives you wings. Supplies are limited. Terms apply. Visit the website for more information. This episode is brought to you by Focus Features. Would you let AI pilot your plane? Raise your child? Decide your future? On March 27, Focus Features presents the AI Doc or How I Became an Apocalyptomist Critics and audience at the Sundance and Southwest film Festivals call it the most urgent movie of our time. The AI doc, or how I became an apocalyptimist. Rated PG13 only in theaters March 27.
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Sources say Apple is stopping some Vibe coding apps from pushing updates, citing rules on running code. Quoting the information, the company confirmed it has told some app developers that the Vibe coding capabilities violate long standing App Store rules that say an app can't run code that changes the way it or other apps function. Apple's crackdown is happening at a time when vibe coding apps are emerging as a potential threat to the company. By helping developers create web apps that aren't listed on its App Store, a key source of revenue and profits for Apple, Apple, some of these Vibe coding apps also help developers create apps for Apple devices. That ability has likely contributed to the explosion of new apps launching on the App Store in recent months, leading to a slowdown in the approval process in some cases, developers say. But an Apple spokesperson said the policy isn't specific to Vibe coding apps. Following the information's questions about the standoffs, two of the people with knowledge of the situation said they believe Apple was on the verge of approving updates to Replit and Vibe Code. Those app makers had agreed to either tweak the way their apps showed customers previews of Vibe coded apps or get rid of certain Vibe coding capabilities entirely, like making apps for Apple devices, they said. Some apps with similar Vibe coding features, such as Vercel's vo, have continued to release frequent updates in recent months, suggesting they haven't run into the same issues as Repl Dot and Vibe Code. Other apps that aren't solely focused on coding, such as social app Snap and web design app Canva, also include Vibe coding features that could run afoul of Apple's rules. These features allow users to generate filters, quizzes or games using AI. Both apps recently released updates through the App Store, though it is included if they included changes to Vibe coding features. Vibe coding tools effectively allow people who don't have coding experience to create applications or websites by giving relatively simple instructions in natural language. Such tools have become immensely popular with developers and non technical customers alike because of how easily they can generate apps such as a calorie tracker or a budgeting app. Vibe coding features in Replit, Vibe Code and other apps have been available for months, but such apps frequently need to release updates to fix bugs and other problems. Apple's move to delay updates could drive away customers for these apps. Since January, for instance, when Repl Dot released its last update, its mobile app has dropped from the top position to number three on Apple's free Developer Tools chart based on downloads. Repl Dot believes the drop occurred in part because of its inability to update the app, a person with knowledge of the situation said. End quote. Finally today, the Journal says that some companies have begun tracking employees AI token use, tallying the cost to see whose AI strategies should be amplified and what wastefulness should be squashed. Artificial intelligence automation platform maker Zapier has a new kind of dashboard to keep track of its workers. AI use the hot new metric how many tokens are they burning? AI output, which has turbocharged productivity and promises to change the nature of work, might seem like it materializes out of thin air, but it's really the work of data centers churning through prompts and interpreting them in an elaborate and expensive if unseen process. Every time a person prompts a bot or has an agent write code, the computing resources are measured in tokens. For text based AI, it's fairly simple. Generating 750 words takes about 1000 tokens. It gets more complicated when you're writing code, creating video and audio, or enlisting agents to perform elaborate day long tasks. But the idea remains the same. The more you do, the more tokens are used. We have this new kind of line item, says Brandon Samut, Zapier's chief AI transformation officer. The assistance AI provides, whether it's handling a support ticket or closing a deal, has a cost, and companies need to bake that into their thinking. While token pricing has gone down, token costs can be higher for some newer, more sought after models, and companies use is generally going up. Companies sometimes opt for pay as you go plans, while others might buy enterprise plans that include a certain amount of use per worker. Most businesses are still just trying to get their employees to even use AI, but those that are further along are already tracking token use and starting to tally the cost. They're scouting whose AI strategies should be amplified after generating a great return, and what wastefulness should be nipped in the bud. If Zapier leaders see someone's token use is five times higher than his or her peers, they get curious about what's going on. The person could be massively inefficient or a superstar, depending on what became of those tokens. We start to draw conclusions, said Samut. Whether that's a golden pattern we want to multiply across their peers, or whether it's an anti pattern that we want to coach our way out of. Brian Jabarian, a researcher with the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business who studies how new technologies reshape workplaces, says companies need to start measuring token use now. Everyone thought that you just use AI tokens and you have an increase of productivity and we call it a day, he says. But the reality is more complicated. A senior engineer at the AI cloud platform startup Vercel deployed a team of AI agents to analyze a research paper and build a new critical infrastructure service based on it. The bots generated a valuable code base in a day, something that would have taken humans weeks, if not months. The bill for that work? Around $10,000. It's a little bit like giving people a fire hose of fuel, says Guillermo Roach, Vercel's chief executive, who gives his employees unlimited token budgets. End quote. Later today, once I've hit publish on this episode, I'm going to edit and then hit publish on a new episode of RAD History. It's the most ambitious rad history stuff I've attempted so far. Over the last three months or so, I've read about half a dozen books about the fall of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that good stuff. And the episode that comes out by the time you hear this will be the first in a five or even six part series on that whole thing. Reagan, Gorbachev, Perestroika, star, the end of the Iron Curtain. This is an episode I wanted to do since I first first conceived of RAD history and I'm proud of how it's turning out. So if that floats your boat, search your podcast app for RAD History and check out part one of the end of the Cold War series, RAD History. Talk to you tomorrow.