OP, the governance token for OP Mainnet, has increased as much as 5% since Tuesday night following news that Ether.fi, a decentralized finance protocol known for providing noncustodial crypto payment cards, completed its migration to the ethereum layer 2 blockchain network. 

Ether.fi’s move resulted in around $220 million in total value locked coming to OP Mainnet, the largest single TVL event in the network’s history, as well as over 70,000 payment cards and more than 300,000 accounts, according to a blog post from Ether.fi. 

Originally on alternative layer 2 network Scroll, Ether.fi made the switch to OP Mainnet due to lower median transaction fees of $0.00001 and sub-250-millisecond finality times. 

“To ship what comes next, we needed infrastructure that could handle real-time payments at consumer volume,” Ether.fi CEO Mike Silagadze told Sherwood News. “OP Mainnet delivered on every dimension. Three days to migrate $220M with no downtime answered the question. Now we get to build.” 

The migration comes about two months after Coinbase-incubated blockchain Base announced moving away from Optimism’s OP Stack. 

Shares of Robinhood Markets and Webull are surging in premarket trading after the US Securities and Exchange Commission gave the green light to removing a rule that had impeded small traders from day trading.

The pattern day trading rule will no longer bar traders from making more than four day trades over a five-day period if their margin account has less than $25,000. The changes were initially proposed by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Under the SEC order published Tuesday after the close of regular trading, all traders, regardless of account size, will just need to have enough in their margin account to cover their exposure.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

New data published Tuesday by the US Census Bureau has revealed the most common names provided in the 2020 Census, in the first release to include forename data since 1990.

As described in the brief, Michael was the most popular name for males in the US, with roughly 3.5 million American men reporting having this name or a close variant. This is up from fourth place in the 1990 Census, when the top US male name was James — though there were still 3 million Jameses in 2020’s tally.

Despite a three-decade gap, Mary remained the top name for American females in both censuses, with the 2020 survey counting almost 1.8 million females with this given name. Interestingly, Mary was one of just two predominantly female names that broke the top 10 given names in the US, with the overall list dominated mostly by male monikers.

In all, American females had far more first-name diversity than male counterparts: 16% of US males had one of the top 10 most frequent names among men, compared with 7.8% of women. Zooming out, almost 3x as many given names were needed to cover a quarter of the US female population than that of males.

Snap jumped as much as 10% in premarket trading on Wednesday after the social media company announced that it may cut about 1,000 roles, or roughly 16% of its full-time employees, in an attempt to improve profitability.

In an SEC filling that followed its Investor Update presentation on Wednesday, Snap also added that it will be closing more than 300 open roles. As a result of the job cuts and other measures, the company expects to save roughly $500 million in annualized expenses by the second half of 2026.

Through the latest moves, Snap is “pivoting towards profitable growth,” per CEO Evan Spiegel, doubling down on its more than 60% gross margin target for 2026. It also joins a growing list of tech companies cutting jobs citing AI, with Spiegel adding that “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence [will] enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers.”

In the same investor update event, Snap also updated parts of its Q1 financial outlook, including reduced guidance on its stock compensation and adjusted operating expenses. The company now expects revenue of approximately $1.529 billion, up 12% year over year and just above analyst expectations of $1.524 billion, as compiled by Bloomberg. Snap expects adjusted EBITDA to come in at $233 million, again ahead of Wall Street’s current forecasts ($184 million).

Broadcom is ticking up 3% in premarket trading on Wednesday after yesterday’s announcement that it will expand its partnership with Meta to produce multi-generation custom chips to power Meta’s in-house AI accelerators through 2029.

As the “first phase of a sustained, multi-gigawatt rollout,” the announcement includes an initial commitment of over 1 gigawatt of computing capacity (or enough to power some 750,000 US homes). JPMorgan estimates that this first deployment implies a $12 billion to $15 billion revenue opportunity for Broadcom.

The partnership also builds on the two companies’ goal to “co-design and scale the hardware required to bring real-time generative AI features and personal superintelligence to billions of people globally” across Meta’s apps.

It’s the latest in a series of positive announcements from Broadcom, which spiked after issuing an optimistic AI sales outlook when delivering its quarterly results last month. The custom chip specialist followed that up with expanded deals with Anthropic and Google, its most important customer.

More broadly, custom chips have been having a moment as hyperscalers look to utilize tailor-made offerings in their data centers for both training and inference, with even Nvidia pouring in $2 billion to Broadcom’s rival, Marvell Technology, proving its commitment to working toward other companies’ hardware integrating well on its platform.

“Overall, Broadcom continues to benefit from the accelerating shift toward custom chip designs by hyperscalers and original equipment manufacturers seeking greater performance, power efficiency, and cost differentiation tightly integrated with their software frameworks,” wrote JPMorgan analyst Harlan Sur following this announcement.

Meta is currently developing its AI silicons with a “portfolio approach,” by matching the right accelerator out of its multi-generation chips to each workload needed for its many apps and services. Broadcom’s XPU platform will allow Meta to design and scale hardwares in a way to best optimize Meta’s custom AI infrastructure. That platform-based strategy will also be backed by Broadcom’s high-bandwidth Ethernet networking technology for better efficiency and precision.

As part of the deal, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan will leave Meta’s board of directors to move to an advisory role on its custom silicon strategy, the companies shared in a joint statement.

Bitcoin and retail-sensitive stocks are rallying again, so Robinhood Markets is too.

Shares of the brokerage, which counts crypto trading as a key revenue stream, jumped as much as 10% on Tuesday as bitcoin breached $76,000 for the first time since early February. Strong gains for the crypto asset, which doesn’t really have fundamentals, the outfit that’s been synonymous with retail activity, and the stocks retail traders like the most are key signals that risk appetite is returning after the geopolitically induced drawdown.

Separately, Bernstein also sounded a bullish tone on prediction markets, another Robinhood business line, calling for volumes to hit as high as $1 trillion by 2030. Analysts reaffirmed their “outperform” rating and $130 price target on the shares, saying they offer “asymmetric upside potential.”

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

The brokerage has been trading like three cryptos in a trench coat over the past three months, with the 63-session correlation between the stock and the iShares Bitcoin Trust lingering near its all-time high reached last month.

Robinhood and bitcoin’s all-time highs came in October, with both since suffering large sell-offs along with a host of other speculative assets.

Ethereum has rallied 8% in the last 24 hours to trade just under the $2,390 level, liquidating over $151.7 million worth of ethereum short positions in the period. 

The last time ethereum was at its current level was the last day of January, data from CoinGecko shows.

According to Jim Hwang, COO of investment company Firinne Capital, ETH has been acting as a risk asset: declining in times of heightened uncertainties such as the conflict in Iran, inflation expectations, and diminished rate cut hopes.

“Only in the last 24+ hours when these uncertainties have diminished are we seeing prices lift again. We can feel a bit of optimism but to the extent that this cease fire remains tentative, we should probably view the current ETH price gains with caution,” Hwang told Sherwood News. 

A GlassNode senior analyst, who maintains the pseudonymous X account CryptoVizArt, said on X that ethereum has “reclaimed the one-to-three month holder cost basis at around $2,300. So far, this structure is consistent with a bear market relief rally, comparable to the bounces observed in Q3-Q4 2022, rather than a structural trend reversal.” 

Tom Lee, chairman of ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies, said ethereum’s performance since the start of the Iran conflict demonstrates how the cryptocurrency is a “wartime store of value,” per the firm’s press release on Monday, in which it announced acquired 71,524 additional tokens worth $170.5 million. That brings its total stockpile to nearly 4.9 million tokens, or 4% of the total supply of ethereum. 

That said, the founder of venture capital firm Kenetic, Jehan Chu, told Sherwood, “It’s clear that regaining ATH [all-time high] will take real-world revenue-generation, and not just a Tom Lee narrative.”