You're listening to Tech Beat, your daily read on the technology stories that matter.
Japan's financial giant SBI Holdings is moving to become the country's dominant force in crypto, striking a deal worth nearly two hundred eighty nine million dollars to acquire the exchange Bitbank. The transaction still needs regulatory sign-off, but if it clears, SBI would claim the top spot in Japan's increasingly competitive digital asset market.
Closer to the infrastructure layer, Coinbase-backed Ethereum network Base had a rough stretch this week, going dark for more than two hours after running into a block production problem. The outage hit just ahead of a planned upgrade, which is about the worst timing imaginable, and it's a reminder that even well-resourced layer-two networks carry real reliability risk.
Meanwhile, Story Protocol — once positioned as an intellectual property network for the blockchain era — has pivoted hard toward AI training data after its IP token lost ninety eight percent of its value. The rebrand is striking, but it also reflects a broader pattern: when one crypto narrative collapses, teams reach for whatever the next wave happens to be, and right now that wave is AI.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
