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Stellar Development Foundation Invests in Archax to Boost Tokenization

by admin August 18, 2025

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), the organization supporting the Stellar

blockchain, invested in UK-based digital asset exchange and tokenization firm Archax as part of a broader partnership to boost tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), the firms said in a press release shared with CoinDesk.

Archax has already started using Stellar, integrating the network into its in-house tokenization platform and launching a tokenized Aberdeen money market fund.

The firms didn’t disclose the size of the investment.

The deal comes as tokenization of traditional financial instruments like bonds, funds and stocks, often dubbed real-world assets (RWA), is gathering speed. Global banks and asset managers are exploring this technology to cut settlement times, increase transparency and keep markets open around the clock. The tokenized RWA market has doubled over the past year to $26 billion and is projected to grow into a trillion-dollar market by 2030, according to reports by McKinsey, Ripple, BCG and others.

“The Stellar network was purpose built to enable fast settlement times, low costs, and the tokenisation of real-world assets that is the future of finance,” said Raja Chakravorti, chief business officer at the Stellar Development Foundation. “

Archax acquired BaFin-regulated Deutsche Digital Assets last month in a bid to expand into crypto exchange-traded products in Europe.

Read more: Real-World Asset Tokenization Market Has Grown Almost Fivefold in 3 Years

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August 18, 2025 0 comments

GameFi Guides

Meta Invests $14 Billion in Scale AI to ‘Deepen’ its Work on Superintelligence

by admin June 13, 2025

In brief

Meta has acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3B, its second-largest deal ever.
Scale CEO Alexandr Wang has joined Meta to lead a new superintelligence lab.
The investment illustrates Meta’s aggressive strategy to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google.

American multinational tech company Meta has made a significant investment in Scale AI, the data-labeling startup essential for training artificial intelligence systems, recruiting its young founder Alexandr Wang to build out a “superintelligence” lab focused on achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The $14.3 billion investment acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI, raising its valuation to over $29 billion. This is Meta’s second-largest investment, following its $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition in 2014.

Scale AI announced that Wang would continue to serve as a director on the company’s Board of Directors, with the firm’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jason Droege, stepping into his shoes as interim CEO.

In a tweet, Wang shared a note to employees, describing Meta’s investment as a “major milestone and a powerful validation of the hard work you’ve all put into Scale’s mission.”

For Meta, which has been working on its own AI strategies and recently released a new model and a standalone AI app in the past couple of months, the deal would “deepen the work” it has been engaged in for “producing data for A.I. models,” according to company statements shared with media.

Meta’s AI race

This speaks to the urgency of Meta’s move to catch up in the AI race, as it faces mounting pressure from other players working on “frontier models” which are advanced, large-scale systems pushing the boundaries of AI.

Yet the move also highlights a key tension between large tech firms such as Meta and others building on decentralized platforms, according to Renz Chong, CEO of a16z-backed modular on-chain platform Sovrun.

“Earlier this year, we saw the rise of open-source frontier models that can go toe-to-toe with closed models from Big Tech,” Chong told Decrypt. “That’s a clear signal: ‘state-of-the-art’ no longer has to mean centralized or proprietary.”

Because most other AI-on-chain projects still lean on “centralized inference endpoints or off-chain APIs,” the predicament places pressure on decentralized players.

“Early infrastructure players are laying critical groundwork, offering decentralized compute and incentivized training layers,” Chong noted.

What is Scale AI?

Scale AI specializes in data labeling services that are essential for training AI systems, working with clients including Google and OpenAI. The startup employs human annotators to classify data that fuels AI models, with much of the work conducted outside the U.S. through labor-intensive processes.

Meta’s investment would reportedly give it a minority stake in Scale AI, allowing the startup to maintain operational independence—a structure that could help Meta avoid additional regulatory scrutiny amid ongoing antitrust battles. Earlier in April, Meta was accused of assisting China’s AI ambitions, prompting a Senate inquiry.

Still, the consolidation of AI resources between tech giants has prompted alternative visions from the decentralized sector. Sovrun, for instance, recently entered a joint venture with Virtuals Protocol to build ReadyGamer, a platform that integrates AI-driven NPCs into popular game worlds.

While those projects experienced a decline in revenue earlier this year, a resurgence is underway, with daily numbers slowly returning to previous levels, according to data maintained by Virtuals Protocol.

Chong argues the real shift may be found not just in making better systems, but in “changing who gets to shape them” and building “outcomes that matter to the communities they serve.”

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June 13, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Meta invests $14 billion in Scale to catch up in the AI race

by admin June 13, 2025

Meta is paying $14.3 billion to acquire 49 percent of Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to revamp its troubled AI efforts.

As part of the deal, Wang will report directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and remain on Scale’s board of directors, both companies announced on Thursday. Sources say Wang will lead a new AI lab at Meta tasked with building “superintelligence.” Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy says the company “will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”

Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting a new team of researchers from rival firms to join Wang’s team, according to people familiar with the matter and other press reports. The Meta founder has reached out to potential recruits directly — usually via a cold email or WhatsApp message — and lured some of them away from companies like Google with seven- and eight-figure compensation packages.

Scale works with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to help train their models by having humans annotate and label the data that feeds them. Most of that work is done through low-cost labor outside of the US, and it has become a critical component of AI development. With Wang joining Meta, Scale is naming Jason Droege, its former chief strategy officer, as its new interim CEO.

“We’ve grown to over 1,500 people and become the trusted partner for model builders, enterprises, and governments building and deploying the smartest Al tools and applications,” Wang, who at age 21 became known as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire because of his stake in the company, said in a memo to Scale employees.

“Scale is now one of the most impactful companies in the world, accelerating the development of what may be the most important technology in human history. Today, we are announcing a massive new investment from Meta. This is a major milestone and a powerful validation of the hard work you’ve all put into Scale’s mission.”

Wang added that the “proceeds from Meta’s investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders, while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders.”

By not fully acquiring Scale, Meta is following Big Tech’s established playbook of hiring key AI talent while also investing in their startups. This process is designed to reduce the risk of antitrust scrutiny; however, the deal with Scale is likely to still be scrutinized by governments, even though Meta will receive only non-voting shares in the company.

This year, Scale signed a deal with the Department of Defense for a first-of-its-kind AI agent program for US military planning. Since then, it has expanded its business with other governments, recently inking a five-year deal to provide AI tools to Qatar. The company’s work with governments in Asia and Europe could result in a sizable portion of its overall sales over the next two quarters.

Meta, meanwhile, just went to trial to defend itself from being broken up by the US government. The outcome of that case is still uncertain.

Since the disappointing debut of Llama 4 earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been eager to catch up with competitors like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. Llama 4’s release was delayed multiple times, and then Meta was caught gaming a public leaderboard to make the model appear better than it actually was. The company has still not released Llama 4 Behemoth, its largest and most expensive version that was teased in April.

Last month, Zuckerberg said that two of Meta’s top priorities for 2025 are making its ChatGPT rival, Meta AI, “the leading personal AI” and “building full general intelligence.” He recently stated that Meta AI has reached one billion monthly users, although the prominence of the assistant across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook heavily influences this number.

In April, Meta released a standalone app for Meta AI, featuring a social feed that showcases how people are using it. The app briefly reached the top of the App Store but hasn’t sustained that level of popularity.

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June 13, 2025 0 comments