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Tesla bull Dan Ives now chairs a company hoarding a Sam Altman-linked cryptocurrency

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Crypto’s newest craze is attracting some big names—including one of Tesla’s biggest bulls. On Monday, Dan Ives, an analyst at the financial advisory firm Wedbush Securities and one of the most vocal cheerleaders behind Elon Musk’s electric car company, became chair of a small, publicly traded company that aims to load its balance sheet with cryptocurrency.

Eightco Holdings, a firm that specializes in packaging and retail inventory management, announced that it had raised $250 million through a private share offering to buy up Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency linked to the crypto project World, which itself is backed by OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman. 

Ives is a widely recognized Wall Street figure, but he made his name as an analyst, not as the operator of public companies. He may appear to be a strange choice to oversee a board—let alone one devoted to accumulating cryptocurrency—but his appointment comes amid a rush of big names on the boards of so-called digital asset treasury companies, or public firms whose primary aim is to accumulate cryptocurrency, providing investors with exposure to tokens they would normally not be able to trade through brokerage accounts. 

Others include Alex Spiro, an attorney to Musk, who is chairing a company dedicated to the memecoin Dogecoin. And then there’s Kyle Samani, a well-known crypto venture capitalist set to chair a different public treasury company for the cryptocurrency Solana.

“It’s a playbook taken out of Hollywood,” said Nick Cote, CEO and cofounder of SecondLane, a newer investment bank that caters to crypto and private markets. “It’s no different than Tom Cruise or whoever gets associated with a movie.”

Treasury boom

That playbook is the latest attempt from digital asset treasury companies to differentiate themselves in an increasingly saturated market. Since January, 209 companies have announced that they were planning to raise more than $145 billion to fund crypto treasury strategies, according to data from Architect Partners, a crypto M&A advisory and financing firm.

Michael Saylor, cofounder and executive chairman of the software company Strategy, first popularized crypto hoarding when his firm announced in 2020 that it was adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet. Traders soon saw its stock as a proxy for Bitcoin, and as the world’s largest cryptocurrency soared in price, shares for Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, surged.

Copycats soon emerged, and, now, there are not only treasury companies devoted to Bitcoin but more exotic cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. 

To get traction amid the cacophony of new crypto treasury plays, some teams have increasingly resorted to eye-catching names. “It’s an obvious move to get instant eyeballs,” said Marco Margiotta, CEO of House of Doge, the corporate arm of the Dogecoin Foundation.

Margiotta’s company is behind the Dogecoin treasury vehicle with Alex Spiro, who successfully defended Musk against a lawsuit that alleged that the Tesla CEO was manipulating Dogecoin markets. But Margiotta said that his digital asset treasury company doesn’t necessarily need a Tom Cruise-style hero at the helm to thrive. “We already have a community,” he said. “We don’t need a giant spokesperson to go out there.”

Other reasons for adding recognizable individuals to the boards of crypto treasury companies include signaling trustworthiness to Wall Street investors, said Jaime Leverton, a CEO at ReserveOne, a digital asset treasury company expected to go public later this year. Her firm expects to add Wilbur Ross, the former U.S. commerce secretary, to its board. “Investors expect credible executives and strong corporate governance as signals of stability,” she said in an email.

Cote, the CEO of SecondLane, said that recognizable names and trustworthy board members were especially important for digital asset treasury companies, given crypto’s tumultuous history. “Crypto has had a history of negativity around it, billions lost, etcetera. So how can we amend that past?” he said. “You have to have credible characters who are leading that charge and telling those stories.”

While it’s unclear why Eightco tapped Ives—who usually comments on Tesla and AI, not crypto—to chair a company now devoted to accumulating cryptocurrency, he did say in an interview with CNBC that he “would not be doing this initiative if it was just a cookie-cutter token strategy.”

A spokesperson for the Worldcoin treasury company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On the new Fortune Crypto Playbook vodcast, Fortune’s senior crypto experts decode the biggest forces shaping crypto today. Watch or listen now



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U.S. trade chief says China has complied with terms of trade deals

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Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said China has been complying with the terms of the bilateral trade agreements and that the US is constantly monitoring commitments made by China in a bid to maintain a stable trade relationship.

“With China, it’s always we verify and we monitor and we watch the commitments. The commitments are quite specific,” Greer said Sunday on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing. “So all of these things that we’ve agreed to with the Chinese recently are very concrete, we can monitor them with some ease, and so far, we’re seeing that they’re in compliance.”

Greer said China has gotten approximately “a third” of the way through its soybean purchase commitment for this growing season.

Bloomberg previously reported that after a series of orders placed in late October — the first of this season — China’s purchases of American soybeans appeared to have stalled. 

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in late October agreed to extend a tariff truce, roll back export controls and reduce other trade barriers. But some elements of the deal — including the soybean purchases, sale of social media app TikTok and an increase in licenses to export critical rare earths from China — remain in progress.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Greer held a video call with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on Friday, according to China’s state-run news agency Xinhua, during which the officials had an “in-depth and constructive” discussion in which they vowed to keep stable ties and address “respective concerns” on trade and the economy, the outlet said.

Read More: Top US, Chinese Officials Pledge Cooperation on Trade Deal

Bessent on Sunday told CBS News’ Face the Nation that China will not speed up purchases, but they are still expected to take place this crop season and said soybean prices are up 12% to 15% since the agreement with China. He also said he divested from a soybean farm to comply with an ethics agreement

The Trump administration is expected to release its long-awaited farm aid plan this week, US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a cabinet meeting last Tuesday.

Asked whether chipmakers like Nvidia should give China advanced chips or if doing so would pose a security risk to the US, Greer expressed a need for the US to be cautious.

“My own view is we need to be very cautious about this,” Greer said on Fox News. “We want companies’ bottom lines to do well, but as policymakers, we need to make sure that the national security is placed first and foremost, and that’s why you’ve heard President Trump talk about the types of chips that maybe would be restricted and there’s always an open discussion on where that threshold lies, and it changes over time.”



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HP’s chief commercial officer predicts the future will include AI PCs that don’t use the cloud

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Increased focus on “privacy and security” may open the door for AI-enabled devices rather than rely entirely on cloud computing and remote data centers. 

“In a world where sovereign data retention matters, people want to know that if they input data to a model, the model won’t train on their data,” David McQuarrie, HP’s chief commercial officer, told Fortune in October. Using an AI locally provides that reassurance.

HP, like many of its devicemaking peers, is exploring the use of AI PCs, or devices that can use AI locally as opposed to in the cloud. “Longer term, it will be impossible not to buy an AI PC, simply because there’s so much power in them,” he said. 

More broadly, smaller companies might be served just as well by a smaller model running locally than a larger model running in the cloud. “A company, a small business, or an individual has significant amounts of data that need not be put in the cloud,” he said. 

Asian governments have often had stricter rules on data sovereignty. China, in particular, has significantly tightened its regulations on where Chinese user data can be stored. South Korea is another example of an Asian country that treats some locally sourced data as too sensitive to be housed overseas. 

Governments the world over, and particularly in Asia, are also investing in local sovereign AI capabilities, trying to avoid relying entirely on systems and platforms housed wholly overseas. South Korea, for example, is partnering with local tech companies like search giant Naver to build its own AI systems. Singapore is investing in projects like the Southeast Asian Languages in One Network (SEA-LION), which are better tailored to Southeast Asian countries. 

Asian AI adoption

Asia is HP’s smallest region, but also its fastest-growing. Revenue from Asia-Pacific and Japan grew by 7% over the company’s 2025 fiscal year, which ended in October, to hit $13.3 billion. That’s around a quarter of HP’s total revenue of $55.3 billion. (HP’s other two regions are the Americas; and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.)

McQuarrie also suggested that there was an opportunity to be “disruptive” in Asia. While many business leaders have been eager to embrace AI, at least rhetorically, actual adoption is proving more difficult. A recent survey from McKinsey reports that two-thirds of companies are still in the experimentation phase of AI. 

But McQuarrie believed that AI adoption in Asia could be “just as quick, if not quicker,” than other regions. 

Asia seems to be more comfortable with the use of AI, at least when it comes to users. An October survey from Pew found that fewer people in countries like India, South Korea and Japan reported feeling “more concerned than excited” about AI compared to the U.S. 

When it comes to convincing more companies to adopt AI, let alone AI PCs, McQuarrie said the answer was to make AI functions as seamless as possible, so “that it doesn’t really matter whether you understand that you’re embracing AI or not.”

“What we’re doubling down on is the future of work,” McQuarrie said. “The future of work is a device that makes your experience better and your productivity greater.”

“The fact that we’re using AI in the background? They don’t need to know that.”



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Trump administration waives part of a Biden-era fine against Southwest Air for canceled flights

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The U.S. Department of Transportation is waiving part of a fine assessed against Southwest Airlines after the company canceled thousands of flights during a winter storm in 2022.

Under a 2023 settlement reached by the Biden administration, Southwest agreed to a $140 million civil penalty. The government said at the time that the penalty was the largest it had ever imposed on an airline for violating consumer protection laws.

Most of the money went toward compensation for travelers. But Southwest agreed to pay $35 million to the U.S. Treasury. Southwest made a $12 million payment in 2024 and a second $12 million payment earlier this year. But the Transportation Department issued an order Friday waiving the final $11 million payment, which was due Jan. 31, 2026.

The department said Southwest should get credit for significantly improving its on-time performance and investing in network operations.

“DOT believes that this approach is in the public interest as it incentivizes airlines to invest in improving their operations and resiliency, which benefits consumers directly,” the department said in a statement. “This credit structure allows for the benefits of the airline’s investment to be realized by the public, rather than resulting in a government monetary penalty.”

The fine stemmed from a winter storm in December 2022 that paralyzed Southwest’s operations in Denver and Chicago and then snowballed when a crew-rescheduling system couldn’t keep up with the chaos. Ultimately the airline canceled 17,000 flights and stranded more than 2 million travelers.

The Biden administration determined that Southwest had violated the law by failing to help customers who were stranded in airports and hotels, leaving many of them to scramble for other flights. Many who called the airline’s overwhelmed customer service center got busy signals or were stuck on hold for hours.

Even before the settlement, the nation’s fourth-biggest airline by revenue said the meltdown cost it more than $1.1 billion in refunds and reimbursements, extra costs and lost ticket sales over several months.



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