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Perplexity AI made a bold bet in India by partnering with Airtel to offer free access to new users, and the gamble appears to have paid off. Even after the free offer ended, revenue climbed roughly sixty percent, suggesting the company converted casual browsers into paying customers at a meaningful rate.
Shifting to Wall Street, Citibank is preparing to launch bitcoin custody for institutional clients later this year through a platform it's calling Custody Plus. The move lets large clients hold bitcoin alongside traditional assets, and it signals that major banks are no longer treating crypto as a fringe concern, regardless of what the market is doing.
And that brings us to what the market is actually doing. A wave of failures is sweeping through the crypto space, with inflated valuations and shaky business models finally catching up to projects that thrived in easier times. The Global Settlement Network's Ryan Kirkley says this shakeout has been a long time coming, and the easy money era is firmly behind us.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
