SpaceX’s IPO prospectus does something rare. It strips public investors of the right to remove the chief executive. The same filing warns that his departure could be existential.

The contradiction is structural, not accidental. The S-1 asks markets to fund a single founder. It also asks them to accept a pay package whose triggers exist only in projection.

The SpaceX IPO Hardwires Single-Point Failure

Musk holds about 42.5% of SpaceX equity but 83.8% of voting power through Class B super-voting shares. The S-1 states removal from his roles requires a Class B vote. He controls those votes outright.

Harvard Law professor Lucian Bebchuk called the arrangement “not common.” Boards typically retain formal removal authority. The structure collapses that authority into Musk’s voting bloc, leaving a self-veto in its place.

The filings flag Musk’s loss as a multi-page risk factor. They cite his overlapping commitments at Tesla, xAI, X, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.

No structured succession framework appears, and no deputy is positioned to take over.

Corporate Feudalism Returns to Public Markets

Texas incorporation, mandatory arbitration, and a controlled-company exemption sit alongside a 3% or $1 million floor on shareholder proposals. The filing itself states public shareholders’ influence will be limited or eliminated.

Pension fund officials have already pushed back. CalPERS, the New York State Comptroller, and the New York City Comptroller signed a joint letter.

They call the Musk-led structure a departure from accepted public-company standards.

SpaceX argues the structure protects long-horizon goals from short-term shareholder pressure.

That defense does not address removal mechanics. Founder lockups at Meta and Alphabet look modest by comparison.

A $7.5 Trillion Mars Milestone Is Not a Valuation

The main pay tranche awards Musk up to 200 million Class B shares. It vests only if SpaceX reaches a $7.5 trillion market capitalization. The same trigger requires a permanent Mars colony of at least one million residents.

The $7.5 trillion threshold sits above the combined market value of Apple, Microsoft, and Saudi Aramco. The Mars criterion has no precedent, no infrastructure to project against, and no off-world regulatory framework.

Neither benchmark fits standard valuation methods.

A second tranche grants up to 60.4 million shares for orbital data centers with 100 terawatts of compute. The award mirrors xAI’s terrestrial AI race. The S-1 admits such operations may not be commercially viable.

That is the price of single-point governance combined with speculative pay design. Investors are asked to fund a company they cannot influence and price milestones no model can value.

The only person who could fail the mission is the one allowed to define it.

The post $1.75 Trillion SpaceX IPO Hardwires Elon Musk As Single-Point Founder Risk appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham flags extreme insider ownership concentration in $LAB, which has surged 3000% in three months.

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Payward, the parent of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, is cutting 150 jobs ahead of its planned U.S. stock-market listing. The reduction affects about 5% of its 3,000-person global workforce.

The move forms part of a broader optimization push aimed at improving margins. Management wants a leaner financial profile before going public.

Layoffs Continue a Multi-Year Lean-Out

The latest cuts extend a sustained workforce reduction that began in October 2024. Payward eliminated about 400 roles then, or roughly 15% of staff.

The reduction followed shortly after Arjun Sethi joined David Ripley as co-CEO. Further cuts then followed in early 2025 as the company merged overlapping teams.

A Payward spokesperson declined to address specific personnel decisions. The company continually evaluates its structure to align talent with strategic priorities.

Meanwhile, hiring continues in select growth areas, including derivatives, payments, and tokenized assets.

Workforce optimization has become a common pre-IPO playbook for crypto firms. Therefore, trimming costs strengthens key profitability metrics that public investors scrutinize.

IPO Plans Remain on Hold

Payward filed a confidential S-1 registration statement with the SEC in November 2025. The filing targets a public valuation near $20 billion.

However, the firm paused its listing timeline in March 2026. Weaker performance among recent crypto listings had cooled investor appetite.

Co-CEO Arjun Sethi has publicly stated the company is roughly 80% ready to go public. His comments signal the S-1 remains active despite the delay.

Meanwhile, Payward continues to expand through acquisitions, including NinjaTrader for derivatives and Reap Technologies for stablecoin payments.

Payward closed an $800 million funding round at the time of the SEC filing. The round established the $20 billion valuation now informing IPO discussions.

The financing followed a wave of secondary investments from traditional finance partners.

Whether Payward returns to the IPO queue this year may hinge on how the next wave of crypto listings performs.

The post Kraken Parent Payward Makes Deep Cuts as IPO Pressure Mounts appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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CME Group and ICE have reportedly warned the CFTC and Capitol Hill officials that Hyperliquid’s decentralized perpetual futures platform could enable market manipulation and sanctions evasion.

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Augustus Bank’s CEO, Ferdinand Dabitz, says legacy clearing banks cannot truly rebuild their cores for artificial intelligence and programmable money, as his startup moves closer to launching a US national bank designed around both.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) granted conditional approval for Augustus Bank N.A. on Monday under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which created a federal framework for payment stablecoins and clarified how banks and certain nonbank entities can issue and integrate dollar-pegged tokens under federal oversight.

Augustus now plans to establish a full-service national bank in Dallas, Texas, focused on fully reserved stablecoins, AI-driven compliance and automation-heavy back-office processes. Dabitz told Cointelegraph it was just “a couple of months” from full approval and launch. However, final approval remains subject to pre-opening conditions.

The company is targeting the “broken” correspondent clearing business dominated by global banks such as Citi, arguing that incumbents cannot fully re-platform systems built for humans, not machines, that still close on weekends and rely on decades-old cores.

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“The short answer is replacing them,” Dabitz said when asked whether Augustus could coexist alongside traditional clearing banks.

Augustus bets stablecoins and AI can remake clearing

Augustus began life in Berlin in 2021 as Ivy, a euro-clearing fintech that built a transaction banking platform for non-US financial institutions, fintechs and crypto firms.

Augustus received conditional OCC approval this week. Source: PR Newswire

The bank already runs euro payments and instant settlement for clients, including crypto exchange Kraken. “The clearing bank bond is truly broken,” he said, arguing there’s an opportunity to “rethink it as an application and deliver something pretty terrific.”

Related: JPMorgan to launch tokenized money market fund for stablecoin issuers

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Central to Dabitz’s pitch is the belief that large banks can upgrade legacy infrastructure but cannot fundamentally rebuild around AI and tokenized money. “I’ve come to the conclusion it’s impossible to re-platform a bank,” he said.

Augustus plans a three-layer stablecoin model: using stablecoins as a funding rail for payments, as a treasury and liquidity tool to release what Dabitz estimates is around $3 trillion in trapped idle capital, and as the interface layer for AI agents interacting directly with money.

He said the model could enable real-time treasury optimization and allow AI systems to become “first-class customers” of the bank, handling tasks such as liquidity management and transaction monitoring on behalf of corporates.

Competition from banking giants

Dabitz’s argument comes as major banks accelerate their own AI and digital asset initiatives.

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JPMorgan Chase says it invests more than $18 billion annually in technology, including AI, and Citi reported over $6.1 billion in clearing-related revenue in Q1 alone, highlighting the scale of the incumbent profit pool Augustus is targeting.

Dabitz argues his team can still move faster because it is designing AI and stablecoin workflows into its operating model from the outset rather than retrofitting existing systems.

Related: Argentine banks testing JPMorgan’s JPM Coin to speed up settlements: Report

He also described the US banking market as structurally under-innovated, noting that banking is unusually labor-heavy compared with other major industries, with people rather than assets forming a major part of operating costs.

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Pushing AI deeper into banking operations

Augustus wants to compress processes such as transaction monitoring, case handling and suspicious activity reporting from “20 hours to 20 minutes” using AI, with humans supervising the systems rather than manually performing every step.

Critics question whether a young, AI-focused bank with a 25-year-old leader at its helm can safely automate compliance-heavy operations without introducing model risk, explainability problems or operational failures.

Dabitz said that only makes the challenge “more exciting” and that the company plans to work closely with regulators and banking executives to ensure “the checks and balances and the harness for the AI to operate in a safe and sound manner.”

Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt

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THORChain developers announced that one of six Asgard vaults was compromised, resulting in approximately $7.4M in unauthorized outbound transactions before the network halted signing activity.

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Tokenized ETFs have crossed $430 million in total onchain market cap, with Ondo Finance’s IVVon token surging 150% in the past month on Ethereum.

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Four months after Elon Musk pledged to open-source X’s recommendation algorithm and refresh it every four weeks, the official xai-org repository still shows one commit. Crypto users are calling the release theater, not transparency.

The promise dates to January 10, when Musk said the code would publish within seven days and refresh monthly with detailed developer notes. The repository went live on January 17 and has not been touched since.

Promised Monthly Updates Never Arrived

The xai-org/x-algorithm repository contains four components, written 62.9% in Rust and 37.1% in Python. None has received a follow-up commit.

The developer notes Musk promised alongside each refresh have not appeared either. A similar 2023 release from the old twitter/the-algorithm repo received the same complaints before going dormant.

That silence lands during the same months crypto users have logged repeated complaints about suppressed reach on the platform.

“The algorithm is the worst it’s ever been. All I see is politics, rage bait, engagement bait and like 10% crypto content. Communities are dying and this app is becoming Instagram 2.0 when infact it’s best feature was the fact communities formed around topics and you stayed largely within that community on your feed,” Ethan, a market watcher, observed.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had publicly questioned whether X could meet the transparency standard before the repo even shipped.

The Numbers That Actually Rank Posts Are Missing

The published code shows the final score formula but not the weights attached to each predicted action.

The Phoenix module README states its transformer is “representative of the model used internally with the exception of specific scaling optimizations,” an admission the deployed system differs from what readers can audit.

Crypto critics also note the model learns from negative signals like reports and blocks, which turns coordinated bots into a working suppression vector.

Decentralized alternatives like Farcaster publish full forkable protocols, not sample code no one can verify against production.

What the next four weeks deliver, if anything, will say more about Musk’s transparency posture than the original repo upload ever did.

“Critique of the X algorithm is welcome. There will be monthly updates of the latest algorithm to GitHub with release notes. As reminder, you can always choose no algorithm via the Following tab,” Musk assuaged.

The post X Algorithm Repo Sits at One Commit 4 Months After Open-Source Promise appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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XRP stayed pinned below resistance even as derivatives activity surged ahead of a key Senate vote that could formally reinforce the token’s commodity status.

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