You're listening to Tech Beat, your daily read on the stories shaping our digital world.
NEAR Protocol is having a moment. Its token surged another fifteen percent this week, and the story behind that rally is worth understanding. The platform's cross-chain system, NEAR Intents, has now processed over nineteen billion dollars in volume and generated thirty-two million dollars in fees — real usage numbers that give this rally more substance than most crypto pumps.
From decentralized finance to a very different kind of performance enhancement — the Enhanced Games wrapped up in Las Vegas, where dozens of athletes openly competing with performance-enhancing drugs broke at least one world record. Most competitors declined to specify what they're taking, which raises a genuine question the sports world isn't ready to answer: when enhancement is the point, what exactly are we measuring?
And wrapping up, Perplexity has quietly released a security tool called Bumblebee that scans developer machines for compromised software packages and corrupted AI tool configurations. The clever part is how it works — it identifies malicious code without ever executing it, meaning it can spot an infection without triggering one. For developers increasingly relying on third-party packages and AI tooling, that's a meaningful distinction.
Stay curious out there. Tech Beat out.
