Now you can Shopify with USDC

Top News

• Shopify adds stablecoin payments: The e-commerce giant will allow merchants to start accepting Circle’s USDC token payments on-chain. Sellers can then convert these into local currency settlements without incurring additional fees for foreign transactions. As an added bonus, Shopify will also give 1% cash back to customers who are paying with USDC. The payments will be processed by Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, Base.

• Scale AI promotes Jason Droege to CEO: Now that Meta has taken a 50% stake in the company — and stolen away founder and current CEO to Alexandr Wang for its new AGI brain trust — current Scale AI Chief Strategy Officer Droege will take over the reigns as the company’s new CEO. Other Scale employees are also expected to make the jump over to Meta in the coming weeks.

• Meta sues popular “nudify” app: The Facebook, WhatsApp, and IG owner filed suit against Hong Kong’s Joy Timeline HK Limited for repeatedly violating its terms of service. The company produces an app called “CrushAI” that allows individuals to generate nude images of people without their consent. According to 404 Media, Joy Timeline had run over 5,000 ads on Meta platforms, and 90% of the traffic to the Crush app came directly from Meta.

TWiST500

TWiST 500 faves OpenAI are teaming with Barbie doll makers Mattel on a new line of artificially intelligent toys and games. The collaboration will send their first AI-powered products to stores later on this year.

In a statement, Mattel says it plans to “bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate experiences,” and stressed that they are emphasizing “innovation, privacy, and safety” above all in developing the product suite. (The partnership will extend behind the scenes, as OpenAI is also outfitting Mattel’s staffers with its ChatGPT Enterprise suite of AI business tools.)

The potential benefits of combining AI with toys and other products for kids are obvious. Unlike a parent, guardian or babysitter, an AI doesn’t get tired of reading books or playing toys or singing silly songs, and ChatGPT’s ability to access vast troves of information and knowledge make it ideally suited as a learning tool, or for answering toddlers’ infamously big questions about the world. (You may not be able to explain why the sky is blue off the cuff, but ChatGPT can!)

Educational AI models, and AI-powered toys, are a growing market for this very reason. Just a few weeks ago, we featured Magical Toys founder Fateen Anam Rafid on “This Week in Startups” to tell us about Dino, his talking AI-powered dinosaur plushie for kids.

But there are of course also some big concerns and potential downsides here. Everyone famously knows about AI’s tendency to sometimes hallucinate or get things wrong, and there are several real world situations in which kids and teens have apparently been negatively impacted after engaging with AI chatbots. (Most infamously, there’s the ongoing Florida lawsuit in which a mother alleges her 14-year-old son committed suicide following an intense conversation with a Character.AI chatbot.)

Rafid assured us that Dino, his plushie AI dinosaur, has strict guardrails preventing any inappropriate discourse with kids. And Mattel surely has a plan for keeping kids safe while they’re hanging out with AI Barbie. If technologists can assure parents that AI playthings are perfectly safe for their young ones, this could be just the shot in the arm that the tariff-plagued US toy industry needs. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2137: We’re testing out a brand-new panel discussion format: The TWiST VC Roundtable! On our first installment, Jason and Alex chat with Paige Doherty of Behind Genius and Meghan Reynolds of Altimeter about the rise of secondary markets, the resurgence in M&A activity from major tech players, questions about potentially inflated ARR figures from YC startups, and lots more!

E2136: Jason’s calling in from the coast for a special Monday episode, chatting with Alex about the sky-high valuations for many new Y Combinator companies, despite their relatively low ARRs. What does this mean for the investment landscape more generally? Plus the guys are taking Office Hours with CustomerIQ founder Sean Steigerwald, exploring his startup’s AI sales agents that live inside your email inbox.

E2135: On a brand-new bicoastal TWiST, Jason checks in from LA, while Alex remains at home on the East Coast. They’re talking about Circle’s explosive IPO, and what it means for the markets and crypto looking forward. PLUS the benefits of tokenizied venture capital funds, more crazy Cursor growth, deeper insight into the Anthropic-Windsurf kerfuffle and more details on the Deel-Rippling espionage saga.

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