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Bitcoin has slipped below sixty thousand dollars, capping a rare back-to-back quarterly loss to close out the first half of the year. The token is down nearly seven percent on the week, with altcoins falling even harder. Ether is also ending the second quarter in the red, a pattern that breaks from what crypto markets have historically shown in the first half of a year.
Shifting to artificial intelligence, DeepSeek has open-sourced a set of inference optimizations that the Chinese research lab says deliver between sixty and eighty-five percent faster generation speeds. The release, posted to GitHub and backed by a technical paper, adds to DeepSeek's growing reputation for squeezing remarkable efficiency out of large language models, and it's already drawing serious attention from the developer community.
And in a story that sits squarely at the intersection of trade policy and technology supply chains, Apple is reportedly seeking clearance from the Trump administration to purchase chips from a Chinese company currently on a US blacklist due to military ties. The Financial Times broke the story, and it raises hard questions about how far American tech giants will push to secure the components their products depend on.
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