You're tuned in to Tech Beat. Here are the stories shaping the day.
Robinhood's new blockchain, called Robinhood Chain, is turning heads in the crypto world. Vlad Tenev's network has overtaken both Ethereum and Base in fee generation, fueled by an unusual combination of meme tokens and tokenized stocks that appears to be drawing serious trading volume.
Sticking with crypto, Strategy — the Michael Saylor-led firm formerly known as MicroStrategy — has returned to buying bitcoin after a two-month pause. The company picked up four thousand six hundred and three coins for roughly three hundred seventy million dollars, at an average price of eighty thousand three hundred eighteen dollars per coin. That's about twenty-nine percent more than what it sold bitcoin for back in the summer, which raises some obvious questions about timing.
And on a lighter note from the world of science history, IEEE Spectrum is out with a piece on the origins of the modern battery. It traces the story back to seventeen ninety-nine, when Alessandro Volta built the first voltaic pile — inspired, of all things, by experiments on a dead frog. From blotting paper and metal discs to a multibillion-dollar global industry, the origin story is stranger than most people realize.
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