Initial coin offerings (ICOs) have been a way for people in the crypto space to fundraise capital that involved users sending ethereum to a smart contract with the expectation of receiving a project’s tokens.

Despite the popularity of ICOs, a number of projects failed, were unable to meet fundraising goals, and then, for one reason or another, were unable to return investors’ capital. One such example was HongCoin, which aimed to be a decentralized venture fund across borders.

On Sunday morning, blockchain sleuth 0xFlorent announced unlocking 1,003.62 ethereum tokens, worth $2 million, in HongCoin’s 2016 smart contract, enabling the 48 initial investors to claim funds that have been trapped for nine years. Of the investors, two have so far claimed a combined 96.5 ethereum.

The contract held all of the investors’ ethereum and was meant to auto-refund the cryptocurrencies, but “a bug in the refund function quietly broke that, and the funds got stuck,” 0xFlorent said in an X thread.

The HongCoin recovery was the second one the ethereum developer has disclosed in the past eight days. Last Sunday, 0xFlorent said they unlocked over 19.3 ETH, worth $40,590, that were stuck in two old contracts.

As to whether 0xFlorent will unlock more tokens stuck in ICO contracts, the security researcher doesn’t know. “It’s not my main activity and I did it because I found a way to help people. That’s it," 0xFlorent told Sherwood News.

IBM shares are jumping in early trading because of both old and new praise. The old: a video featuring President Donald Trump complimenting the company’s CEO, Arvind Krishna, was reshared by Polymarket Money’s X account, but without the context of it being from December. The new: Barclays initiated coverage of IBM at “overweight” with a $350 price target.

Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow urged investors to stop looking at IBM through the lens of legacy hardware in a Monday note. Instead, he said to focus on the sheer defensive dominance of IBM’s highly specialized software segment, which currently generates nearly half of the corporation’s overall revenue and the vast majority of its net profit.

“While software has a negative investor connotation at the moment, IBM is offering infrastructure software (the good part) to large, often heavily regulated customers, which creates a very sticky set-up that should not see negative AI implications,” Lenschow noted.

Compounding the institutional buying enthusiasm is a wave of retail momentum triggered by social media posts, as traders on X and TikTok began widely sharing a video clip from 2025 where Trump explicitly praises the technology company, confidently stating that IBM stock is going to “go up a lot more.”

IBM’s move builds on momentum from last week following its commitment to spend $10 billion in quantum computing over the next five years to build the first large-scale quantum computer. This comes after the Trump administration signed a number of letters of intent to award a total of $2 billion in grants to nine quantum companies, including IBM, in deals that also include equity stakes.

Tesla sales surged across Europe in May, Reuters reports, with sales jumping double and even triple digits in a number of early-reporting markets. Of course, 2025 was a very difficult year for Tesla sales in Europe, so the growth is coming off notably small denominators.

Interestingly, the resurgence is happening without EU approval for supervised Full Self-Driving, something CEO Elon Musk predicted would cause sales to “improve significantly” after blaming the absence of the tech for its weak sales.

The company has received approval for a version of its FSD tech in the Netherlands, as well as Lithuania and Estonia, and expects “EU-wide” permission in the second or third quarter.

Nvidia shares are rising after the company announced its push into the PC processor market, unveiling the company’s highly anticipated RTX Spark “superchip,” a new processor designed to bring advanced AI capabilities directly to Windows laptops.

“There is no question this reinvention of the computer is as big of a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the Computex trade show in Taipei.

Nvidia said the company is reimagining the PC “for the first time in 40 years” and the new platform is built for “agentic AI,” allowing AI models and assistants to run locally on laptops rather than relying entirely on cloud computing. Microsoft simultaneously unveiled its Surface Laptop Ultra powered by RTX Spark, while Dell, HP, and Lenovo are expected to launch systems based on the chip later this year.

RTX Spark combines an Arm-based CPU, Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics architecture, and dedicated AI hardware into a single chip designed for AI-heavy workloads.

This move put the company into more direct competition with Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple in the personal computing industry. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD are all sinking right now after the Nvidia announcement. The move also positions the RTX Spark on a collision course with the M5 from Apple, which is also trading lower. Meanwhile, Arm Holdings, on whose architecture RTX Spark is built, surging in premarket trading along with Microsoft and HP Enterprise.

For investors, the announcement serves as another reminder that the AI trade is increasingly expanding beyond data centers and into consumer hardware.

History suggests that BlackBerry does extremely well when 1) it’s considered to be pioneering a transformative technology, or 2) there’s widespread retail enthusiasm for stocks.

If you squint (or dream), you could argue that both are going on right now.

Shares of the once-upon-a-time smartphone giant are up more than 160% over the past three months. The only times the shares have had a hotter run of form than this are at the tail end of the dot-com bubble, and in early 2021 when was it part of the meme stock craze headlined by GameStop.

Let’s start with the easy part first — here’s Scott Rubner, head of equity and equity derivatives strategy at Citadel, on retail’s significant footprint in the shares’ rally:

“Retail traders are the new price setters in the market. May volumes across our retail cash equities and options platforms are currently tracking at record levels. Daily volumes on our cash platform are setting new highs and are on pace to finish nearly ~10% above the previous record established during the January 2021 meme-stock era.”

And then there’s the harder part, part of the story that the traders bidding up BlackBerry now are dreaming about: the QNX division, which offers software that the company is positioning as an operating system for robots.

QNX’s software has early uptake in the field of autonomous driving, with BlackBerry eyeing a much more widespread role: in April, it announced a partnership to deploy this technology on Nvidia’s robotics platform. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, for his part, has long been calling for agentic AI adoption to be followed by physical AI (i.e., robots).

In a QNX press release unveiling a report this week, the company argued that software, not hardware, is the real problem in terms of making sure robotics works.

I supposed it would be poetic, in a way, if the company at the leading edge of the smartphone revolution also plays a big role in the proliferation of robotics.

The sui blockchain is stalled again on early Friday, with the last transaction occurring more than two hours ago, data from blockchain explorer Suiscan shows.

“The Sui Core team is actively investigating. Updates and incident review will be shared as soon as they are available,” the team wrote on X.

The ongoing pause comes immediately after experiencing a halt the day before “due to a crash bug in the gas charging logic introduced by the 1.72 release,” the team said on Thursday.

SUI, the network’s native cryptocurrency, has dropped around 20% in the past seven days, according to CoinGecko.