The manufacturing industry is at a crossroads: Geopolitical instability is fracturing supply chains from the Suez to Shenzhen, impacting the flow of materials. Businesses are battling rising costs and inflation, coupled with a shrinking labor force, with more than half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. alone. And climate change is further intensifying the pressure, with more frequent extreme weather events and tightening environmental regulations forcing companies to rethink how they operate. New solutions are imperative. DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT Meanwhile, advanced automation, powered by the convergence of emerging and established technologies, including industrial AI, digital twins, the internet of things (IoT), and advanced robotics, promises greater resilience, flexibility, sustainability, and efficiency for industry. Individual success stories have demonstrated the transformative power of these technologies, providing examples of AI-driven predictive maintenance reducing downtime by up to 50%. Digital twin simulations can significantly reduce time to market, and bring environment dividends, too: One survey found 77% of leaders expect digital twins to reduce carbon emissions by 15% on average. Yet, broad adoption of this advanced automation has lagged. “That’s not necessarily or just a technology gap,” says John Hart, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Production Technologies at MIT. “It relates to workforce capabilities and financial commitments and risk required.” For small and medium enterprises, and those with brownfield sites—older facilities with legacy systems— the barriers to implementation are significant. In recent years, governments have stepped in to accelerate industrial progress. Through a revival of industrial policies, governments are incentivizing high-tech manufacturing, re-localizing critical production processes, and reducing reliance on fragile global supply chains. All these developments converge in a key moment for manufacturing. The external pressures on the industry—met with technological progress and these new political incentives—may finally enable the shift toward advanced automation. Download the full report. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. This content was researched, designed, and written entirely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

Apple Watch users can earn a Global Close Your Rings Day award on April 24.

On the latest episode of the HomeKit Insider Podcast, Samsung SmartThings and Aqara have massive Matter updates, including new features for Apple Home users. There's also the upcoming launch of the Ballie robot and a quick review of the UAG Monarch AirTag holder.HomeKit Insider PodcastBoth Samsung and Aqara had major Matter updates coming this past week. Notably, Samsung is adding support for a ton of new Matter devices found in the 1.4 update to the Matter spec.Aqara followed suit, adding more than 40 device types of its own. Among the new supported devices include robotic vacuums, air quality sensors, water valves, vehicle chargers, solar panels, and more. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Preregistration is now open — click here to receive program updates. When you hear the words futuristic, visionary or daring in the context of architecture, what comes to mind? For most of us, it’s rarely something that’s actually been built. I, for one, usually picture something out of a sci-fi movie. Cities that float. Forests in skyscrapers. Buildings that don’t seem bound by physics (let alone local planning regulations). Yet, these “unbuildable” ideas have always propelled architecture forward. Many of the most iconic projects in architectural history were never realized. Nevertheless, their influence reshaped the discipline. The utopian blueprints of Modernist pioneers, like Le Corbusier or Archigram, once seemed intangible too. But those visions played a major role in shifting how we think about cities, mobility and design itself. Today’s visions for the future are no different. We still see wildly ambitious ideas that seem detached from reality. But arguably, the need for radical thinking is more urgent than ever. For these reasons and more, Architizer is thrilled to be relaunching the Vision Awards, a global program honoring the world’s best architectural ideas, concepts and imagery. Pre-Register for the Vision Awards As the world grapples with one environmental crisis after the next, rapid urbanization and emerging technologies, visionary design remains a critical tool — not despite its impracticality, but because of it. Yet, when your day-to-day as an architect involves planning standards, fast-approaching deadlines and tight budgets, it’s easy to question the value of ideas that may never get built. After all, why chase the impossible? The short answer: Because that’s how progress starts. And the long one? Well, this essay dives into that… From Utopias to Urban Plans: Visionary Design in the 20th Century As mentioned above, many of the boldest architectural ideas of the last century were never fully built. However, their influence is still visible in the way cities have been planned, imagined and debated ever since. View this post on Instagram A post shared by arch uncovered (@archuncovered) Arturdiasr, Planalto Central (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0 Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) was one of the most ambitious modernist proposals. Though the full concept was never realized, its emphasis on vertical housing, functional zoning and open green space shaped postwar planning around the world. Projects like Brasília borrowed heavily from its logic. And while many of these interpretations were criticized for being sterile or inhumane, they also sparked serious conversations about density, light, infrastructure and how cities might function more efficiently at scale. Archigram, working in 1960s London, pushed things further. Their Plug-In City imagined buildings as components that could be added, removed or replaced, treating architecture as infrastructure. It was wild, idealistic and totally unbuildable at the time. But the ideas stuck. Modular systems, prefabrication and temporary structures gained momentum and today, those principles show up in everything from emergency housing to tech campuses designed for flexibility. Jordy Meow, Nakagin, CC BY-SA 3.0 The Metabolists, in Japan, took a similarly future-focused approach. Their designs looked extreme (organic, megastructural, endlessly expandable) but they helped shift architecture toward systems thinking. The most famous built example, Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, sparked ongoing debates about modularity, obsolescence and sustainability. More broadly, the movement introduced a new way of thinking about cities—not as static compositions, but as evolving organisms, capable of growth, renewal and change. And while many of these visions seemed (and were) too radical to realize, they served their purpose. They stretched the discipline’s boundaries, challenged its assumptions and expanded the space between dreams and possibilities. The Digital Visionaries of the New Millennia Heydar Aliyev Center by Zaha Hadid Architects, Baku, Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev Center by Zaha Hadid Architects, Baku, Azerbaijan By the late 1990s and early 2000s, a new kind of architectural experimentation took hold. This time, however, it moved beyond sketchbooks and manifestos, made possible by emerging software. Digital modeling and parametric design tools introduced a different kind of freedom, one where form no longer had to follow the rules of gravity, repetition, tradition and well, function. Zaha Hadid Architects were early pioneers in this space. Projects like the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku or the Bee’ah Headquarters in Sharjah showed how fluid, algorithm-driven forms could become buildable realities. Their architecture often looked like it had been poured rather than constructed, which at the time was sa sharp departure from conventional geometry. Around the same time, firms like BIG and MAD Architects began exploring equally ambitious ideas, often combining speculative visuals with cultural narratives or sustainability claims. This era also gave rise to hyper-speculative mega-projects like NEOM’s The Line, which proposes an entire city compressed into a single vertical strip in the Saudi desert (extremely controversial, to say the least, but undeniably bold). Some of these projects were not, well…practical (and that’s putting it kindly). Many were critiqued for prioritizing form over function, driven more by spectacle than substance. But in hindsight, that might not be the point. These projects showed us that what once felt unbuildable (all of those fluid, gravity-defying, digitally generated forms) could leave the sketchbook and become reality. Some starchitects may have pushed boundaries for the wrong reasons, but the results still expanded the profession’s sense of what was materially and technologically possible. They tested the limits of fabrication, pushed software development and encouraged collaboration across disciplines. And in doing so, they reminded the industry that it can still take risks, surprise people and imagine at scale. In their own way, these digital visions carried forward the same legacy as their Modernist predecessors: using imagination as a tool to provoke, challenge and, sometimes, to inspire meaningful change. Today’s Dreamscapes: Designing in the Face of Uncertainty If the radical ideas of the past pushed the limits of what architecture could do for the world, today’s most ambitious ideas are responding to something deeper — what the world needs architecture to do. Instead of pushing boundaries through new materials or technology, what we can now call visionary design is actually a response to the global issues we are facing right now: uncertainty, volatility and the growing sense that our systems aren’t built to last. Natura Verita by David Scott Martin, Special Mention, 2023 Architizer Vision Awards Sandstorm Absorbent Skyscraper by Kalbod Design Studio, Dubai, United Arab Emirates It’s clear that we’re no longer just speculating for the sake of form. We’re speculating because business-as-usual no longer holds. Architects are now imagining responses to mass displacement, rising sea levels, ecological collapse and resource scarcity; not because these challenges are coming, but because they’re already here. And the scale of these issues makes incremental design feel insufficient. This is where visionary design matters most. Not as a theoretical pursuit that offers unattainable solutions, but as a tool that creates a much-needed space to ask the right questions. Could housing be fully self-sustaining? Could infrastructure evolve in real time? Could entire cities be rethought from scratch, not to impress but, at this point, to survive? ROMA by Mahdi Eghbali, The Moon Whether wildly optimistic or dystopian, the possible answers to these questions reflect the emotional reality of our time: the desire to reimagine is more important than ever, because continuing as we are is no longer an option. What unites these visions isn’t style or software, but an urgency to imagine a livable future, even if we don’t yet know how to build it. To Dream or Not to Dream? The Floating City by Jingwei Li, Special Mention, 2023 Architizer Vision Awards Visionary design doesn’t have to predict the future. It just needs to hold space for it. Amidst all the urgency and uncertainty, the act of designing optimistically, boldly and unapologetically becomes its own kind of resistance. We may never see cities in the clouds (at least not in our lifetime), but imagining them helps us build better cities on the ground. And maybe that’s the point. Even if most ideas stay unbuilt, some won’t. And sometimes, all it takes is one bold vision to shift the conversation, change what we believe is possible and move the discipline forward juuuust a little bit. Architizer’s Vision Awards are back! The global awards program honors the world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery. Preregistration is now open — click here to receive program updates. Learn More About Architizer’s Vision Awards The post In Defense of “Unbuildable” Architecture: Why We Still Need Big, Visionary Ideas appeared first on Journal.

Developer Gaming Factory has released a new trailer for its upcoming driving game JDM: Japanese Drift Master. The trailer focuses on showcasing some of the customisation that players will have not only to the physical appearance of the car, but also its under-the-hood performance aspects. Check out the trailer below. The trailer specifically focuses on how a player can go about tuning their cars to offer the perfect blend of control and chaos that ends up providing a satisfying drift. While upgrading the car’s internal, the narrator notes that, when the highest-tier version of a part has been installed, players will also often get access to further tuning options. This is then shown off by not only showing off how the car’s height can be changed thanks to advanced suspension parts, but also how advanced axles can allow players to have more control over the angles of their wheel’s alignment. Referred to as camber, the narrator notes that, in this instance, they are going for a negative camber in a Nissan 350Z’s front wheels, while the rear wheels will be more centred. While the negative camber allows the car to turn more easily in the midst of a drift, the centred camber of the rear wheels allows for even greater control because the entirety of the tire is gripping the road. When it comes to visual customisation, JDM: Japanese Drift Master seems to have plenty of options available, from the hood, to wheels, to even the side mirrors. Players will also have plenty of choices to make when it comes to spoilers, be they more subtle or oversized monstrosities. JDM: Japanese Drift Master also allows players to customise the internals of their cars. This includes the steering wheel, the gear shifter, and even the seats. As the narrator notes, “internal parts are equally important in building the car’s vibe.” JDM: Japanese Drift Master is under development for PC, and will be available through Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG. The title was originally slated for release on March 26, but has since been delayed to May 21. The studio revealed that the decision to delay the game was made due to it wanting more time to polish up the gameplay and having taken feedback from its fans into account. The driving game takes place in the fictional Japanese prefecture of Guntama. It will offer players a wide-open world with more than 250 km of roads to race and drift through. The world will also feature plenty of landmarks that players can drive to, including the Daikoku parking area and Himeji Castle. When it comes to cars, JDM: Japanese Drift Master will feature plenty of licensed ones from companies like Mazda, Subaru, and Nissan. More cars are also going to be added to the game after its release. The gameplay in JDM: Japanese Drift Master has been described by Gaming Factory as being a simcade racer. This means that the title will offer a mix of arcade-styled fast-paced driving as well as some more realistic aspects in order to make the game’s drifting mechanics feel more satisfying.

Episodes in Public Architecture by Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) Episodes in Public Architecture By Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) Architect Andrew Frontini’s recent book is a hybrid between monograph and memoir. The book presents 11 projects completed over the course of Frontini’s career at the Toronto branch of Perkins&Will. Interspersed among glossy colour photos of each project are pamphlet-like inserts with Frontini’s candid musings about the process of the project’s making and lessons learned. The case studies trace Frontini’s career back to being an upstart at Shore Tilbe Irwin & Partners, the firm that would later become Perkins&Will’s Toronto office. In an “act of total insubordination,” he and colleague Marc Downing “hijacked the design concept” for the Whitby Library and Civic Square competition, developing a modernist composition framing a town square instead of the centrally placed basilica-and-rotunda scheme they had been instructed to execute—and winning the job. As his career evolved, Frontini reflects on how evolved from being the singular “hand” behind a design to a team leader, the “watcher of hands.” This is especially evident in Dawes Road Library, a project now entering construction, designed in collaboration with Eladia Smoke of Smoke Architecture. Deeply informed by dozens of conversations and hundreds of individuals, the building will be draped in a curved cladding evocative of an Indigenous star blanket—which, as Frontini explains, is a traditional “gift made and bestowed by the community for valuable work that benefits the community.” Episodes in Public Architecture by Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) Nuggets of wisdom and insight pepper the other stories in this book. The high-pressure, high-stakes work that went into the design-build for the University of Toronto Mississauga Instructional Centre—a mere 22 months from project award to completion—is a thrilling tale. I recalled observing from the sidelines, in 2013, a dust-up between Phyllis Lambert and Perkins&Will over the firm’s redesign of Arthur Erickson’s Bank of Canada headquarters; here, the full story is recounted from Frontini’s perspective. Episodes in Public Architecture by Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) In several of the projects presented, Frontini’s propensity for storytelling wins the day. A bit of narrative stagecraft—curating Perkins&Will’s Dupont Street studio as a gallery showcasing key elements of its approach—helped gain the firm the initial commission for Toronto Metropolitan University’s Daphne Cockwell Health Sciences Complex. A wooden model based on a Japanese puzzle-box gives the head librarian at the University of Toronto Mississauga a proposal that she can sell to other stakeholders. Frontini’s narrative skills shine in this book, too: his texts bring his projects to life, taking readers along on the sometimes-fraught adventures that resulted in the successful creation of these dozen buildings. The post Book Review: Episodes in Public Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declared that AI would write 90% of code within six months, the coding world braced for mass extinction. But inside Salesforce, a different reality has already taken shape. “About 20% of all APEX code written in the last 30 days came from Agentforce,” Jayesh Govindarajan, Senior Vice President of Salesforce AI, told me during a recent interview. His team tracks not just code generated, but code actually deployed into production. The numbers reveal an acceleration that’s impossible to ignore: 35,000 active monthly users, 10 million lines of accepted code, and internal tools saving 30,000 developer hours every month. Yet Salesforce’s developers aren’t disappearing. They’re evolving. “The vast majority of development — at least what I call the first draft of code — will be written by AI,” Govindarajan acknowledged. “But what developers do with that first draft has fundamentally changed.” From lines of code to strategic control: How developers are becoming technology pilots Software engineering has always blended creativity with tedium. Now AI handles the latter, pushing developers toward the former. “You move from a purely technical role to a more strategic one,” Govindarajan explained. “Not just ‘I have something to build, so I’ll build it,’ but ‘What should we build? What does the customer actually want?'” This shift mirrors other technological disruptions. When calculators replaced manual computation, mathematicians didn’t vanish — they tackled more complex problems. When digital cameras killed darkrooms, photography expanded rather than contracted. Salesforce believes code works the same way. As AI slashes the cost of software creation, developers gain what they’ve always lacked: time. “If creating a working prototype once took weeks, now it takes hours,” Govindarajan said. “Instead of showing customers a document describing what you might build, you simply hand them working software. Then you iterate based on their reaction.” ‘Vibe coding’ is here: Why software engineers are now orchestrating AI rather than typing every command Coders have begun adopting what’s called “vibe coding” — a term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. The practice involves giving AI high-level directions rather than precise instructions, then refining what it produces. “You just give it a sort of high-level direction and let the AI use its creativity to generate a first draft,” Govindarajan said. “It won’t work exactly as you want, but it gives you something to play with. You refine parts of it by saying, ‘This looks good, do more of this,’ or ‘Those buttons are janky, I don’t need them.'” He compares the process to musical collaboration: “The AI sets the rhythm while the developer fine-tunes the melody.” While AI excels at generating straightforward business applications, Govindarajan admits it has limits. “Are you going to build the next-generation database with vibe coding? Unlikely. But could you build a really cool UI that makes database calls and creates a fantastic business application? Absolutely.” The new quality imperative: Why testing strategies must evolve as AI generates more production code AI doesn’t just write code differently — it requires different quality control. Salesforce developed its Agentforce Testing Center after discovering that machine-generated code demanded new verification approaches. “These are stochastic systems,” Govindarajan explained. “Even with very high accuracy, scenarios exist where they might fail. Maybe it fails at step 3, or step 4, or step 17 out of 17 steps it’s performing. Without proper testing tools, you won’t know.” The non-deterministic nature of AI outputs means developers must become experts at boundary testing and guardrail setting. They need to know not just how to write code, but how to evaluate it. Beyond code generation: How AI is compressing the entire software development lifecycle The transformation extends beyond initial coding to encompass the full software lifecycle. “In the build phase, tools understand existing code and extend it intelligently, which accelerates everything,” Govindarajan said. “Then comes testing—generating regression tests, creating test cases for new code—all of which AI can handle.” This comprehensive automation creates what Govindarajan calls “a significantly tighter loop” between idea and implementation. The faster developers can test and refine, the more ambitious they can become. Algorithmic thinking still matters: Why computer science fundamentals remain essential in the AI era Govindarajan frequently fields anxious questions about software engineering’s future. “I get asked constantly whether people should still study computer science,” he said. “The answer is absolutely yes, because algorithmic thinking remains essential. Breaking down big problems into manageable pieces, understanding what software can solve which problems, modeling user needs—these skills become more valuable, not less.” What changes is how these skills manifest. Instead of typing out each solution character by character, developers guide AI tools toward optimal outcomes. The human provides judgment; the machine provides speed. “You still need good intuition to give the right instructions and evaluate the output,” Govindarajan emphasized. “It takes genuine taste to look at what AI produces and recognize what works and what doesn’t.” Strategic elevation: How developers are becoming business partners rather than technical implementers As coding itself becomes commoditized, developer roles connect more directly to business strategy. “Developers are taking supervisory roles, guiding agents doing work on their behalf,” Govindarajan explained. “But they remain responsible for what gets deployed. The buck still stops with them.” This elevation places developers closer to decision-makers and further from implementation details—a promotion rather than an elimination. Salesforce supports this transition with tools designed for each stage: Agentforce for Developers handles code generation, Agent Builder enables customization, and Agentforce Testing Center ensures reliability. Together, they form a platform for developers to grow into these expanded roles. The company’s vision presents a stark contrast to the “developers are doomed” narrative. Rather than coding themselves into obsolescence, software engineers who adapt may find themselves more essential than ever. In a field where reinvention is routine, AI represents the most powerful compiler yet—transforming not just how code is written, but who writes it and why. For developers willing to upgrade their own mental models, the future looks less like termination and more like transcendence. Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI. Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.

Today, I’m talking with Vlad Tenev, the cofounder and CEO of Robinhood, which is one of the most well-known consumer finance apps in the world. It started as a way to open up stock trading, but the company’s ambitions have grown over time — and they’re getting even bigger. Just a day before Tenev and I talked, Robinhood announced it would soon be offering bank accounts and wealth management services, which would allow Robinhood to be involved with your money at every possible level.So I was interested to sit down with Tenev and really hash out where Robinhood is going and why he’s so adamant that big ideas, like prediction markets based around everything from sports games to presidential elections, are going to play such a pivotal role in the future of finance. And I really wanted to talk about the responsibilities that come with that role.Robinhood is on a lot of people’s phones — especially young men — and it’s a quick jump from doing a little bit of casual retail investing to potentially dumping all your money into a bunch of unpredictable, unstable markets. There’s a whole generation out there who might have bought a GameStop share as a joke during the COVID-19 pandemic and are now finding themselves consistently gambling in the crypto and prediction markets.Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!Tenev and I really dug into some of the complexity around these ideas. For example, you’ll hear him say he thinks of prediction markets as “the news faster” and that there is a meaningful difference between a prediction market guessing if the Lakers will win their next game and just simply placing a bet on DraftKings or FanDuel for the same outcome. You’ll hear him say that prediction markets communicate unique information that reflects reality, rather than just a dressed-up version of gambling that mostly reflects how people feel.You will also hear my deep skepticism of these ideas. I really pressed Tenev for answers on how he thinks about the risks involved, especially for regular retail investors, and whether the regulatory environment can keep up with that escalating amount of risk. It’s already causing problems: New Jersey and Nevada both ordered Robinhood to halt its prediction markets, and the company’s partner Kalshi launched lawsuits to push back. You’ll hear Tenev say that he has no firm idea where any of this might go, but that he fundamentally believes people should get to do whatever they want with their money — and that he wants to position Robinhood as a central destination for all of those transactions. That made me curious as to what Tenev sees as Robinhood’s ultimate destination. So I asked him outright: does he think Robinhood is just selling an updated version of the American dream, where you can make the right wager on a prediction, buy the right stock, or invest in the right meme coin to shortcut your way to financial freedom? I won’t spoil it, but I think you’ll find his answer pretty illuminating. Like I said, you’re going to hear us disagree quite a bit throughout this episode, but I want to give Tenev credit: he was game to really sit in some of the ambiguity and controversy here and talk about it in ways that many in the crypto and finance worlds simply aren’t. I rather enjoyed this one, and I think you will, too.Okay: Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Vlad Tenev, you are the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood. Welcome to Decoder.Thanks for having me, Nilay.I have so much to talk to you about. I think I have 900 pages of questions for you. There’s a lot going on in financial services. You all just launched banking services. There’s a lot going on in crypto. I know you’re very interested in prediction markets. I have a million questions about that. So, if you’re game, I’d like to go through the Decoder questions about structure and decision making very fast at the top and then get to the rest. Are you okay with that?Yeah. I’ll try to be brief.Because usually I do all this windup, but I think people know what Robinhood is, and I think your ideas about where it’s going are really interesting. Let’s just start with Robinhood. You founded it, then you were the co-CEO for a minute with your co-founder, Baiju Bhatt. He went to become the chief creative officer, you became sole CEO, and then he left the company. Just talk about that set of choices. That’s a pattern we see in startups quite often. How did that all go down?Yeah, I think we technically started as co-CEOs as well, although in the early stages things are always a little bit murky. And then what happened was in the early days of the company, roles don’t really matter because you’re 10 people and you’re all in one room and you’re doing what’s necessary to make the company win. We both didn’t really have any concrete finance, business, or even technical skills when we started the company.We met in college. We were actually both physics majors at the time, and we were brought together by our love for physics. We wanted to seek to understand answers to the big questions like what happened before the Big Bang? Or my favorite one: how can we unify general relativity and quantum mechanics? That’s how we became good friends; we were banging our heads against the wall trying to do problem sets in physics and math in college.Then we learned to build products and build businesses together. We were co-founders of a few companies before Robinhood. When we started Robinhood, we moved to San Francisco together. He became a designer. He literally bought a Wacom tablet and started designing. And I became an engineer. I still remember on the Caltrain ride from San Francisco down to Palo Alto, I would watch Paul Hagerty’s iOS development classes at 2X speed, and that’s how I learned to be an iOS engineer. So that was the division of labor; I was writing code, he was doing the designs. We built a team around that. Then we became managers, and then we became executives. I think at each point, we reassessed what we wanted to be spending our time on, how we could add the most value to the company.When it became clear that we’re going to have executives and we’re going to be a public company, Baiju made the decision that he didn’t want to be the CEO of a public company — that didn’t feel like how he wanted to spend his time and his energy. So he took the chief creative officer role, and then I think a couple years ago came to the decision that he wanted to go back to the original passion when we met, which was doing things with a more overt math and physics component.So he ended up starting another interesting company, Aetherflux, which aims to bring solar energy in a more efficient form down to Earth and targeting remote outposts and military locations where energy is sorely needed. So he went off to start that and is still a board member. As the company changes, I think we’re pretty good at reevaluating our roles and what we want to spend time doing, and it was just an organic evolution over time.So much of our audience is people who build things and people who want to be founders, people who are at different stages of being a founder. I always say that no one ever talks about act two — going from managing people to being executives and managing managers. It seems like you have chosen you’re going to be the eye of the storm of the public company that’s changing how finance is done. Are you comfortable with that now? It’s been several years; you’ve been the CEO since 2020. Have you settled into that role?Well, I don’t know. You can never be too comfortable. What I’ll tell you is the things that I enjoy, do tend to align pretty well with being a public company and the activities of a public company CEO, like communicating the vision and figuring out how we can distill it in a simple form. I love the idea that institutional power and things that normally would’ve been reserved for institutions are now, through technology, available to individuals. That’s very much part of the genesis of Robinhood. It was all about individual participation in equity markets. As a public company, we allow individuals to participate in being shareholders of Robinhood in a much bigger way, and so we’ve been doing all sorts of things to change what being a public company looks like. We were among the first to actually engage retail [investors] in a substantive way in our IPO. I think, to my knowledge, we were one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in terms of retail IPO allocation at the time. We let Robinhood customers through the Robinhood app participate in our own IPO. Then we bought a company called Say Technologies that does shareholder communications. If you’ve listened to Tesla, Palantir, or Robinhood earnings calls, they take questions from retail via our Say Technologies platform.Last quarter, we did a live video earnings call. That was actually very cool. I think the inspiration was a post-game interview at an NBA game. We were like, “That’s fun, what are the other settings where you have people that just went through something hard talking about it and it’s enjoyable to watch?” And I’m an NBA fan and I actually look forward to the post-game interviews. I want to see what they’re wearing. If it’s a big loss, then I want to hear LeBron James talking about what they could have done better. It’s also fun if they win.I think news, entertainment, financial services, sports to some degree… these are all merging over time, and they’re part of our collective consciousness. I think retail investing is a big part of that. A big, enduring trend is power and capabilities that were formerly reserved for institutions going to the individual level. I think we can change a lot of things about what it’s like being a public company participating in earnings calls. Traditionally, they were viewed as a chore and nobody really liked doing it, and it was considered B.S. that you have to deal with that was a cost, but I think it as an opportunity. I think if executed appropriately, it’s another opportunity to get the message out. I enjoy doing that.I’m still learning, and I don’t have it figured out yet, but I think we can discover new things and being a public company definitely provides us opportunities to do different things that we wouldn’t normally be able to do.I want to come back to that theme of what it’s like to be the founder and CEO of a startup versus the public company CEO of what is now basically a bank. Those are different characters, and I’m going to come back to that theme a few times throughout this conversation. How is Robinhood structured now? You’ve had some changes, you’ve had some layoffs over the past few years. How have you organized the company now?So we have a parent company, Robinhood Markets, Inc., and that’s publicly traded. We have a number of subsidiaries and we typically organize the subsidiaries by business line, but now we also have international businesses, so we’ve got some international subsidiaries. I’ve got general managers who are basically CEOs in their own right that report to me that manage the business. Steve Quirk, who’s our chief brokerage officer, is also the general manager of our brokerage business. He’s got a couple of broker dealers that he oversees, like Robinhood Financial and Robinhood Securities, which is our clearing firm. We’re essentially a vertically integrated brokerage business under Steve Quirk. Then we’ve got Johann Kerbrat, who’s our general manager of crypto. He runs our crypto business. Deepak Rao, who presented at the Gold event and runs Banking now and our credit card, he’s the general manager of money. He’s running his own PnL and business as well. Then we have a couple of GM’s in different areas that are building businesses. JB Mackenzie runs futures and also prediction markets. He’s got international brokerage responsibilities. There are a few others here and there, a few earlier stage efforts, but those are the big businesses. We also try to give full accountability, full responsibility, to our GMs so they have their own product resources. By and large, they have their own engineering resources as well. Although we have central platform engineering that builds the underlying technology for everything.Design and branding is more so centralized under me because I think it’s important for all of our business lines to have a cohesive design language and also cohesive story when they communicate to the public. Those remain centralized, but most everything sits under the GMs.That’s unusual for a startup of Robinhood’s age. Most startups at this time are still pretty functional. Everything rolls up to the CEO. Have you structured the divisions in this way because of regulatory concerns, or because it’s more efficient? The app is still the app. You express all of Robinhood to the user as one single app. Why have you broken out into divisions inside of that app?We do have multiple apps. We’ve got a crypto wallet, which is a separate app, and banking is a separate app. Then there’s the main Robinhood app and all of our trading and investment services are in that one. So we do have three apps, but you’re right in that the GM divisions are not per app. GMs collaborate and share app services and I have a product leader that manages the core app. They’re in charge of navigation and design of the overall experience. We try to solve it that way.But there’s puts and takes with every org structure. When people are separated in divisions, as you say, then it becomes a little bit harder to find ownership over the core surface areas because that’s not natural. And also, the tension points where they interact or where maybe they have different goals bubble up to me or to the core product team. We’ve tried to engineer around that by making those tension points at least knowable and specific. We know it’s going to be design, core app, and marketing.But yeah, the flip side is if everything’s functional and you’re rolling out multiple businesses, then nobody owns the PNL (profit-and-loss) of those businesses. If I ask someone, for example, “Why is options market share the way it is or options revenue?” They’re like, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve got the product. The product’s great. The engineering is working according to spec.” But the PnL accountability for all business lines would be me. There’s not one person in that structure besides the person at the top that’s living and breathing and losing sleep over the business results of what they’re working on, which is, I think, a flaw. At least for us, which is a multi-product line, multiple entity business, I think it’s worked really, really well.We made that transition in 2022, and I think since that point, the results have become apparent. I think all the GMs feel huge accountability and responsibility over their entire businesses. They have more ownership. They love it, and I think we’ve been executing really, really fast. It’s worked very, very well for us, but not without risks that have to be managed. I think there is a nice thing about it being aligned with the regulatory structure. We’re regulated. We have lots of regulated businesses. Each of them have different licenses. A lot of the time, the regulations stipulate that the business needs to have a president with actual authority, a chief compliance officer, and so aligning the regulatory structure to how we operate very, very closely just reduces complexity.I think in a functional structure, you have to fight against that and compensate for that to some degree. Other people have strong feelings about actually hiding the regulatory structure from users and absorbing that complexity as an organization. But I think if you can figure out how to align with it and actually use it effectively, it saves time and streamlines things so that we’ve embraced it rather than fought against it.The structure question is the big Decoder question. The other one I always ask everybody is how do you make decisions? What’s your framework?I would say I operate at opposite ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, I’m a math and physics person. I love data, I love numbers. I’m very quantitative. I like digging into the details and breaking things into constituent bits; I’m reductionist in that way. One of the values that we have is first principles thinking. I’m generally allergic to thinking by analogy. “Oh, this is the way it worked at E-Trade,” for example. When I hear something like that, I immediately get skeptical. I don’t love reasoning by analogy. I don’t like doing things just because others have done them that way. We have this saying, “We only follow the crowd when they’re right.” I don’t want to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian either. I think that’s silly. But the ultimate thing is “is it right?” And we’ll follow the crowd if they’re right. If they’re wrong, we’ll gladly go against them. That’s one side.I think the other side is I’m also incredibly comfortable just doing things based on gut feel. I think you need that in order to actually push design forward, because design by its very nature is not super quantitative. A good design is opinionated, which means you’ll piss people off who disagree with it. I have no problem with that. I’d like to say the endpoints are important. It’s good to make some decisions intuitively based on gut feel, others quantitatively, and generally the middle takes care of itself.Let’s put some of that into practice. You’re big on prediction markets. I know you have a lot of thoughts there. I’m eager to dig into them. This is the rare Decoder where there’s breaking news on this show that is nominally about org charts. Just before you came on to tape with us here on Friday, March 28th, the New Jersey Department of Gaming Enforcement, which calls itself Nudge (NJDGE), asked you to halt bets in New Jersey, on prediction markets on March Madness specifically. I’m just going to read the quote: “This activity constitutes a violation in New Jersey sports wagering acts. Which only permits licensed entities to offer sports wagering to New Jersey residents on collegiate sports events occurring in New Jersey.” It’s similar in Nevada. The quote from the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board: “Every sports pool in Nevada must undergo an extensive investigation prior to licensing.” Massachusetts is also investigating this.You’ve halted trading in New Jersey, you’re complying with the cease and desist there. It’s a big decision to go launch in these markets when you know that there’s an enforcement authority, particularly in New Jersey and Nevada where they have casinos at scale. Why make that decision? Why not go to them first and say, “Are we in compliance?”This is sort of new ground. If you think about the history of how this came about, Kalshi had a big lawsuit.Kalshi’s your partner on prediction markets.Yeah. For prediction markets we’re operating under the CFTC regime, which is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. They regulate futures and swaps, and prediction markets falls under that purview. We registered to be a futures commission’s merchant, which is basically the equivalent of a broker, but in CFTC land. And companies like Kalshi, which we partner with for these particular contracts, also ForecasteX, which we partnered with for the presidential election prediction market last year, they’re called designated contract markets (DCMs). They’re like the exchange to our broker.With all prediction markets, since we’re not a designated contract market, we rely on the DCMs to list contracts. And once it’s listed by a DCM, which again is the exchange in CFTC land, we can list them on our platform. Our view is we want to list all prediction markets. We believe that they have societal value in addition to any value they have as a trading asset for our traders. We think they’re a better source of information.Obviously the line between prediction markets and what should be federally CFTC regulated and what should be under the purview of states who have gaming — which is regulated and taxed at a state level — that line is going to be debated right now. I think Robinhood’s a big part of that because we believe in prediction markets. That’s the intersection here, particularly with sports. While we believe that these are CFTC regulated products, we also recognize that this issue has to be debated and worked out, and it’s not very, very clear. For that reason, we decided to respect the state of New Jersey’s demand to halt operations for its citizens, even though we disagree with it. We’re going to work it out over the next couple of months. We’ll be in conversations. But as you can imagine, there’s a lot of states — there’s a lot of people, a lot of counter parties — that could take issue with various aspects of it. And a lot of established interests are at play here. I think this is going to be an interesting area to watch. But I do believe prediction markets are the future, and they have societal value across all categories.Were you ready for this? When you launched it, did you know a bunch of states are going to get mad and we might have to geolocate our services or halt them in certain states?Well, we launched without Nevada, as you know. Yeah, of course we built the capabilities of that, as we have in the traditional non-prediction markets business. Crypto also has a state by state component to it. For example, in New York, we don’t offer crypto transfers. You can’t transfer in and out. There’s differences between the coins that are available on a state level. Up until recently, we weren’t in all 50 states. It’s nothing new to us. There’s a state component to everything that we do.But were you expecting New Jersey to show up and say, “Turn this off until we deal with it”?I don’t know if we were expecting New Jersey in particular, but obviously it’s not a surprise that if we’re in this new area where states have vested interests to make sure that it’s state regulated that they would have concerns.The argument that you’re getting at is the difference between a prediction market and gambling. But straightforwardly, that is what is happening here. The states are saying, “We regulate gambling in our states. You pay taxes, we have revenue. We want to protect our citizens. This looks an awful lot like gambling. Go ahead and stop.”I would offer you the opposite argument. I know a lot of people who believe the markets are gambling, that merely investing in the stock market, or meme coins and meme stocks, is a kind of gambling that has taken place because it has been democratized by apps like Robinhood and even E-Trade before it. I see the difference there very clearly. In the stock market, you should be able to look at the fundamentals of some company or its earning reports and you should be able to derive some secondary value. “I understand what this company is doing, I understand how much money it’s making, how much money it’s losing, where it’s investing, what its opportunity is. I can draw some line to its future stock capability.”That is the most important thing that undergirds the market. That’s the argument against “the market is gambling.” There’s some mathematical reality there. What is that same argument for a prediction market on sports? Because you can’t go look at the Lakers and say, “Well, LeBron’s there, so they’re definitely going to win every game.” That’s just not how it works.You’re making a valid point. I think the line between gaming and gambling and finance is a debated thing. There’s people that will go on Twitter and say, “Anytime you’re taking a risk, it’s a form of gambling.” I think the term is not properly defined and specifically defined, which I think adds to the confusion. And in particular when you deal with derivatives markets, which I think prediction markets are a subset of the overall derivatives market space, there’s several types of market participants. There’s folks that are coming into a market to hedge, and if you’re a farmer, then you’re sensitive to crop yields and rain and weather and all sorts of things. One of the original use cases was for these derivatives markets to apply to farmers for them to hedge their exposure so they can smooth out their returns and their risk over time. And actually, I think for these types of historical reasons, the CFTC and these derivatives markets are overseen by the Senate Agriculture Committee [specifically the U.S. Senate Agriculture Subcommittee on Commodities, Derivatives, Risk Management, and Trade], which is a weird historical fact. And now crypto being in there has a side effect of Senate Agriculture overseeing crypto. But yeah, it’s the historical reason of futures and derivatives being especially valuable to farmers.You have hedging, which is one use case, but you also have speculation. Speculation is people just making predictions on what the price is going to be in the future. Without the speculators, it’s not an effective market for hedgers because you can’t just have people taking the opposite view of what’s going on in reality because then it won’t be an effective hedge, so you need the speculators to be in there speculating in order for the market to be liquid. Then you also have arbitrageurs. And arbitrageurs, which is how I began my career as a trader, just look at all markets and, using technology, compress the prices. If you have the same thing trading in two different places, you just buy it where it’s cheaper, sell it where it’s most expensive, and eventually the prices converge. These are the three types of participants necessary to make any derivatives market work. And so now your question is if you look at folks that are speculating, is there a difference between speculation and gambling?Let me make that question more specific just based on your example. My father-in-law is a farmer. I married a farmer’s daughter. The utility of him being able to hedge is very clear. Yes, it’s historical and, yes, now the regulatory scheme has this quirk of the [Senate Agriculture Committees] overseeing the derivatives market, but we all still got to eat, right?Yep.The farmers have to stay in business. The utility of that remains exactly the same as it was when these regulations were initially passed. And then you need to do some market making. You need to have the speculators and the people doing arbitrage in order to create the market for the hedging. But the utility of that for the farmer and then downstream of the farmer, us literally filling our plates, is obvious. What is the utility of that for sports? For the Lakers. Are you trying to hedge against the risk of losing for the Los Angeles Lakers?I’ll tell you that sports is a big industry in the US. There’s lots and lots of different types of businesses that rely on sports and the sports industry economically. And it’s gotten much bigger. It’s not just like fans, but sports betting, since that’s been legalized, has just grown to tens of billions of dollars. And it’s still much smaller than what it would be in Europe.Do you think that’s good? Do you think sports betting is good?Do I think it’s good? My view is people should be allowed to do what they want with their money. Yeah, I think that markets are good, generally individual accountability is important. There’s folks that trade very, very actively and process lots of information and actually are quite scientific about taking advantage of mispricings. And as a former arbitrageur, I do think that that has value. I want to get away from actually trying to judge every contract on an individual level because I think you can get into trouble. Of course, maybe I can come and give you examples of contracts that I don’t think are great and I wouldn’t trade personally, but I think prediction markets does have significant societal value.It’s an evolution of what the newspaper served in the past. You have the front page, which is events that people want information about that are trending right now, then you have the business section, arts and leisure, style, and of course you have sports. And the newspaper obviously had value. People were paying for it after the fact. Prediction markets actually give you that news faster; in some cases before it even happens. I think it certainly has enormous economic value.I view sports as a subset. It’s one of the categories of information and news that people really, really care about. That’s why it’s so interesting to people and people are going to want to protect their purview over that domain. But yeah, I would distinguish prediction markets from gambling in that way. I have mixed feelings obviously about gambling in general, but prediction markets I’m a big believer in.When I said I had 900 pages of questions, by the way, that thing you said about information, that’s 850 of those pages. We’re going to get into that. But I just want to stay on this for one more second. What specifically to the user, as expressed in your app, is different from betting on sports versus buying a contract in a prediction market? Because I looked at Robinhood today, and I understand there’s some difference and there’s some vocabulary differences, but what I saw was I’m looking at March Madness, and if I pay 80 cents for a contract and this team wins, I’ll get $1. And that feels a lot like betting. It was Auburn, by the way. I don’t know if they won or not.Yeah, they’re the No. 1 seed. Traditional sports betting, let’s say digital sports betting, not even on-premise stuff, there’s a house. That means that when you enter a bet, you’re basically betting against the house, and with that comes all of the negative effects. There’s no market, the house is just giving odds. There’s a line. They’re setting the line, and if you win too much, you get kicked off the platform, which is unfortunate. In most cases, once you’re locked in, you can’t get out of your bet.Because this is a market, there’s no house. Buyers and sellers are meeting directly in an exchange. We’re crossing orders, which facilitates price discovery. Since there’s no one setting the line, the market sets the line. It becomes a more effective prediction, and from the user standpoint, the spread gets tighter because, for a variety of reasons, price discovery leads to tightening of spreads. I think that’s the major thing. There’s no house. Buyers and sellers meet. You can get out of a position during a game, which at [sports] betting platforms is not a commonly offered feature. It’s very similar. You get all the benefits and the power and the rigor of financial markets.But just at the base level, some 20-year-old kid downloads this app and they want to wager on March Madness, the technical implementation of “put in some money and get some money out if the team you’ve predicted to win, wins” is different. And I think the regulatory approach you’re taking is different. You’re saying these are effectively derivatives contracts and you should be regulated differently because it’s not traditional gambling. But the effect on the user is the same. The reason we regulate gambling is because it has bad collective effects in society. People can get addicted to it; they throw their savings away. There’s a lot of reasons outside of the technical implementation of “the house sets a line and can move against you.” There’s reasons that we regulate it. Do you think those reasons are applicable to what you’re doing with derivatives contracts? Because I look at it from the user pushing a button, and the button says, “If they win, you get money,” and the technical implementation of that doesn’t really matter.I think some of those reasons are applicable. A lot of the origins of the state-by-state regulations come from a world where you actually had physical places where you would go. And so these turning into digital platforms in and of itself, not even CFTC but also state-regulated gambling, are new things. I think the regulations have to evolve either way. But yeah, certainly we want to make sure that suitability and all of those checks are followed through.And I think actually the traditional financial markets, futures markets are highly regulated. You do KYC (Know Your Customer regulations), you do monitoring and surveillance. There are suitability checks that make sure people really know what they’re getting into and they have to self-certify. And I think that’s a benefit for prediction markets being in the CFTC regime because you have high standards. Saying that these are financial markets isn’t, in my opinion, a lowering of standards in any way, I think it’s a heightening of standards.Well, the standards don’t exist yet, as applied to this specific thing. The standards exist abstractly for derivatives markets, and now we have to apply them to this behavior. And at least some states are saying, “Actually, this just looks like gambling to us.”Yeah, but what I’m saying is CFTC-regulated markets are highly regulated. It’s not accurate to say that there are no standards, because we’re following the CFTC standards, which are very rigorous. One of the things I worry about with our audience, we have a lot of young men who listen to the show, and who read The Verge, is a sense that these types of markets — whether it’s crypto, the regular stock market, derivatives, prediction markets, or just FanDuel — are a quicker path to riches than regular work. There’s a sense that we’re replacing the American dream with a very financialized secondary market economy. Is that how you want people to perceive Robinhood, that this is the future of the American dream?Yeah, I did write an article, back in I think it was 2021, about how the American dream itself as a concept has evolved. It used to be very tied to homeownership. You’d buy a house, you’d get a 30-year fixed mortgage, and that was the American dream, and that’s actually not ideal from an investment standpoint. The amount of interest in fees you’re paying on that, if you view it from an investment standpoint, is actually incredibly high. If you’re going into U.S. equities — which are now commission-free and very, very low cost — that the American dream should perhaps evolve towards U.S. equities.I didn’t make the claim that it should be crypto and derivatives or all of these things. And in fact, a couple of days ago, we actually crossed the bridge from being a purely self-directed platform into offering investment advice with Robinhood Strategies. If you look at the asset allocations of the portfolios there, it’s very much listed equities and ETFs. And then if you actually look at what we incentivize as business, what we’re giving matches for, it’s things like retirement where you get a 3% match on contributions.I think I would distinguish between what the right way to invest is for the bulk of your money, which I do think for most people that have income and assets should be passively managed. But also, I do think people that have the income and can passively manage a portion of it, I don’t think it should all be passively managed, I think there is a room in your portfolio for every person for it to be actively managed. That could be in things that you have high conviction in, whether it’s individual stocks, cryptocurrencies, or options. If you’re at a startup, you implicitly have high conviction and lots of concentration in the company that you’re actually working for. And if you consider yourself an expert in an industry or even in sports, I think the derivatives markets live in that bucket.But yeah, I wouldn’t say if you look at Robinhood, the actual mission and the future vision is for us to manage every dollar. I don’t think every dollar should be in derivatives markets; probably a small portion of them. But the reality is people bet on sports, people engage in derivatives trading, and that’s money that’s leaving Robinhood accounts. If we can serve all of those dollars with our platform in a seamless and easy way at the lowest possible cost and the best user experience, then we’ll have full wallet share with our customers across multiple generations. I think we could both add value and build a significant and important company that way.“Wallet share of our customers across generations,” is an all-time Decoder phrase. I thank you for it. It’s going on the wall. Let me ask about information and risk. What you’re describing is a spectrum of risk. You’ve got your new bank accounts, you’re paying people, what, a 4.5% yield — that’s low risk. That’s just your bank. All the way on the other hand, you’ve got prediction markets for sports, which are maybe the most risky thing you can do. And then in the middle, you’ve got your thesis about information. Prediction markets are this new source of information.The thing that gets me is when you make prediction markets, the value of the information skyrockets, and then you have a lot of incentive. You’ve created an enormous incentive to affect the outcome. In the best case, you work at a startup, you’ve got stock in the startup. You have a huge incentive to affect the outcome positively. The company will be a success. You’re going to work really hard. You’re going to make a lot of money.I look at the NFL, for example. I’m a big NFL fan. The amount of time we now spend talking about referees in the NFL officiating because of gambling has gone up. The notion that the league is scripted and that the games are rigged because any individual referee can make one penalty call at the end of the game and shift the outcome is skyrocketed because of the inclusion of gambling by the NFL into the product itself. That feels like a bad outcome to create all of these incentives to shift the outcome without any regard for the quality of the outcome itself. How do you manage the prediction markets against that incentive? Because I see that as totally distorting and in most cases negative.Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And that’s one of the areas where the traditional financial system already has lots and lots of infrastructure because we’ve faced this problem for decades. You have insider trading rules and regulations, and it’s very analogous to a company insider using proprietary information for their own benefit to make money in financial markets. That very much exists.There’s also general anti-fraud protections that go into place when you’re not dealing with securities. If you remember, Coinbase had a case a couple of years ago with the DOJ and what they found was that some employees used knowledge of forthcoming listings. I think it was some meme coins, they bought those meme coins because they knew that they were going to be listed and made a bunch of money. And of course, this was caught and tracked by surveillance and they got in a lot of trouble. I think generally the same principles apply. Sure, but how does that track with your sense that this is the new source of information? Because the information only enters the market if people have it and they begin trading on it. If you want to outlaw insider information, you have to prevent people who have that information from trading on it. How does that get into the prediction market?Yeah, basically individuals who have proprietary information shouldn’t participate in the prediction markets, and all of the DCMs basically have rules against this. Because we know who’s making the trades, everyone has to be KYC’d (know your customer) at regulated DCM / FCM (futures commission merchant)-regulated prediction markets, we have the capabilities of identifying abuse. And of course all of these rules can evolve over time. If there’s new vectors for abuse as the markets expand, there’s mechanisms for those to be incorporated and to become new rulemaking. Hopefully the rules should evolve, as with any system. And if there’s new vectors coming in, then we can evolve the rules to account for those. But I’m actually not sure if there are new vectors that aren’t accounted for by the existing rules. And I think this is one of those things where because the state regulatory regimes haven’t really accounted for this, they may be less well positioned to oversee abuse than the federal level.Where does the information come from then? If I’m looking at a prediction market on Robinhood and the line moves sharply, that’s the information you’re talking about. This is the new source of information. You’re going to get it before the news gets it, or the traditional media gets it. You’re going to watch that line move and you know something happened before everyone else knows it happened. How do you get from that second order effect — the line moved, people started moving their money against some new information — to the information itself?In the same way it happens in financial markets. You have sophisticated participants. Some of them are retail, many are institutional that actually make sense of all of the data that’s coming in real time and actually crunch the numbers and see what it means. And a lot of this is happening using automated computing methods. They’re crunching all of the data.But yeah, you can think of it as, let’s say you’re watching the news on election night and you’re getting all of this polling data and all the early returns from the polls, and they’re telling you Ohio results just came in, and there’s this many voters in Ohio out of this many that are reported. There’s a process by which you take that and actually price what the likely outcome of the election is. And so the people that are really good and fast at doing that have an opportunity for profit.That opportunity for profit isn’t the information itself, though. That’s what I’m getting at. I’ve heard you say the information line before. You said it to my friends, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, on the podcast Hard Fork. You said you’re going to get information before it happens. That prediction markets are not just the future of trading, but also information. What prediction markets are “is the news faster.”But here, you’re saying prediction markets are reacting to the news, they’re reacting to information. If you’re a regular Robinhood investor and you’re looking at the line move, how do you get back to, “Okay, the smart money made some decisions. The smart money is watching Harry Enten say on CNN, ‘Here are where the votes are,’ and now I’m repricing the contract? That’s not the news, that’s a derivative of the news.Yeah, I guess this is also an area where there’s ambiguity in what we’re saying. I think traditionally what I would say about the news, about the election, is when the news networks call. “Election news” is probably when CNN, MSNBC, NBC and all those networks say, “Okay, Donald Trump’s the winner of the election.” That happened the next day in the vast majority of cases. The news of who won the election hit next day, but the prediction markets priced Trump at 95/5 within a few hours of the polls opening. I would call that knowing the news before it happened. If you were paying attention to the prediction markets, you knew what the outcome of the election was within some band of error. But I’d say 95/5 is pretty good, right? At that point.Right. The difference for the media outlets is they can’t be wrong. Or at least when they’re wrong, there are consequences for them being wrong. They lose their credibility or they have to issue retractions or, I don’t know, Trump sends them all to El Salvador or whatever he wants to do. There’s not a consequence if you trust the prediction market and it gets it wrong. The consequence is you lose money. How do you think about that accountability?Well, I think that accountability is only part of the story. I think the other part is that there’s an incentive to keep viewers glued and entertained. And you want them to watch for longer, so you don’t want to just be like, “Oh, the election’s over. Everyone can go back to what they’re doing.” They have an incentive to actually prolong it and say, “Hey, it’s still anyone’s game. Anything can happen. Keep watching.”And it’s the same thing for sporting events, actually. I remember I was watching the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight. And that wasn’t available in the U.S.-based prediction markets, but I opened up Polymarket to just view what was going on. I think by the second round, the prediction markets had it quite clear: it was 90/10 for Jake Paul. But if you listen to the announcers, it was, “Oh, all Mike needs is just one punch,” or, “He just needs to hold out a little bit longer.” It’s like they made it sound like it was 50/50.You didn’t know the outcome of that fight before it started? I knew the outcome of that fight before it started. I know why lots and lots of people that were betting on it did bet on Paul, and they knew why the fight was stretched out the way it was. And that’s the danger. What you are describing is the danger. Here’s this totally synthetic event that we’re going to make people pay for and then have people bet on, and then everyone will believe at the end that it was rigged. The announcers have nothing to do with it, it’s the distorting factor of the gambling that occurred around it that made everyone think, “Oh, this is totally rigged.” Both Mike Tyson and Jake Paul got a lot of money for participating in this thing that most people believe was a sham, and they had a lot of incentive for the outcome to be made a little bit longer, right? Make it feel like this isn’t totally a joke. Everyone knows that that’s what happened. Or at least they perceive that they know. And that’s the distortion that I worry about.I don’t have any details about that, but my point really was, I think to your question, I don’t think the only incentive is for the media to get it right, I think the incentive is actually to have people watching longer, which sometimes conflicts with giving you the information as quickly as possible. I think you have to agree that that’s the incentive. I think platonically, yes, the media is held to a very high standard; you have to get it right. We’d like to think that everyone is working with that in mind, but there’s also a strong incentive to maximize viewership, to maximize time spent versus other networks. Because if you don’t do that as a media enterprise, eventually you’re drained of resources and you die. And I think sometimes that incentive actually can contradict with getting you the absolute truthful information as quickly as possible.Yeah, I work in the media, I would say there’s an equal incentive to be first. That is equally damaging. As somebody who runs this race every day, that’s equally distorting. But then on the flip side, I would say it’s also not working, right? The media is losing jobs and it is dying and it is falling in relevance. There’s a lot of reasons for that that I don’t think have anything to do with stretching out the information. But what I just keep coming back to is the incentive to change the outcome by allowing people to have a financial stake in it seems very, very distorting, and there might be some rules against it. The NFL does injury reports because getting access to injury reports early was helping gamblers, and the NFL wanted to tamp down on that, and that’s the history of the injury report. I get it. We’re doing transparency. We’re doing regulation around this stuff to try to control it.But here it seems like the regulatory regime is new where you’re trying to fit a behavior into a regulatory regime that wasn’t built for it from the start and you’ve got a lot of young people taking part in this behavior who believe now that everything is rigged, that the world is a casino of this kind. This is what I was going to ask about. That seems like that’s where you have to make the turn from startup founder with a disruptive idea to, “I am the CEO of a bank.” The responsibility rests with you. And I’m wondering how you’re shouldering that burden. Because once you have the bank accounts and you can move it into the highest risk category, that’s a big deal.Yeah, I think that is a criticism for sure. I think in a more precise form, it’s basically do you want your betting in the same app as your bank account? Can these things coexist under the same platform? I don’t think that it’s the highest order criticism because if you think about it, all these things are on your phone, and so it’s fairly straightforward. And now everything can link to your bank account anyway. If you had a DraftKings account, you could link your DraftKings to your bank account pretty easily and move money back and forth. We get into this, well, but should they be separate apps? Should they be separate brands? Do we want the same thing? But the reality of it is everything’s on your phone. It’s all your phone. It’s pretty easy to just go to the home screen, tap a button, and go from one service to the other.I actually don’t think that criticism is higher order. Basically, it’s just a completely meaningless decision. It’s a business decision. It’s like where do customers want it most? Because if they want it in the same app, functionally there’s no difference between it being in the same app and being in a completely different brand elsewhere on your phone. Because the difference between going from one to the other is three seconds instead of two.There have been some good reasons in the past to separate these at the corporate level. And I hear you that it’s pretty easy to just move money into FanDuel. But there was the Great Depression, and then we did Glass-Steagall, and we said the investments and the banks have to be farther apart. Then we allowed them to get closer together, and we had the 2008 financial crisis, and then we moved them slightly farther apart. And now you’re saying, “Look, because of phones, this distinction is meaningless,” but history suggests that bad things happen when you let investments in banking get closer together.Well, that’s for safety and soundness reasons. You don’t want the same organization to be over leveraged and to take proprietary risk with their capital when they’re also supposed to be safeguarding that capital. But we’re not taking proprietary risks because we’re just a broker routing orders to a marketplace where buyers and sellers interact, so the safety and soundness concerns that you’d want to separate proprietary trading from retail banking don’t apply in this case.Don’t the concerns apply to the individual consumer, though, who is less sophisticated than banks, which often get themselves in trouble?Well, again, that’s the point of the individual has money. They have a bank account. They’re moving things to different accounts. It’s the same thing from their perspective. It doesn’t affect them whether those accounts are at different entities or one, barring safety and soundness concerns that are entity concentration, which don’t apply in this case.Would you accept a regulation that said when you open the Robinhood banking app that you were prohibited from advertising or marketing the derivatives products in the Robinhood app themselves?Possibly, yeah. I haven’t thought about that. I don’t think we should accept new regulations lightly in any sense, but I’m certainly a believer in regulation. I run many highly regulated businesses. Yeah, I don’t want to just be glib about it and say, “Oh, that sounds like a good one.” You’d have to look at the pros versus the cons deeply.I generally think that we get into trouble by having lots of regulations. We don’t have mechanisms to remove them. Once it’s added, you just keep building this giant, thick underbrush of regulations and nobody ever wants to remove them. And then now we’re in a situation where, as a country, we’re looking around and saying, “How did we get here?” We can’t do anything anymore. You can’t build a bridge. You can’t trade crypto. And yeah, I think that’s a problem. I think I generally agree with some variant of for every one you add, you should probably remove one because things change and the regulations, to a large extent, don’t make sense.I’ll give you another example: accredited investors. This is probably one that maybe you’d agree with even because it’s less controversial. But accredited investor rules basically stipulate that you can’t be investing in OpenAI or SpaceX unless you’re accredited because of some variant of “they’re too risky.” And why are they too risky? Back in the day when these regulations were created, it was hard to get information. There were no prediction markets, there wasn’t the internet. There was a lot of murkiness. And maybe the wealthy folks had access to information and enhanced due diligence, normal people didn’t so we have accredited investor rules. Now we’re in a situation where meme coins are fine. You can put all of your money, anything you want in meme coins, sports betting, whatever have you, but OpenAI or SpaceX, companies like that are too risky. I think those cannot stand.As you can probably tell from our conversation, I don’t think we should ban trading in meme coins and sports betting; people should generally be allowed to do what they want with their money. And so I think the accredited investor rules need a complete reboot and probably something closer to self-certification and some requirements for brokers and platforms like ourselves to put these things into buckets based on how much disclosure they have. Maybe if you’re an early stage startup and there’s no disclosure, we have to put a skull and crossbones in red and tell you, “This is an incredibly risky thing. You could lose 100 percent of your money.” But yeah, I think the status quo needs a serious reboot.I just had the idea of Sam Altman doing a meme coin to fund OpenAI’s expansion. It seems more likely than not. Let me ask you about crypto, just to wrap up here. I have another 850 pages of questions about crypto, for sure.Let’s do it.Why should anybody sell a bitcoin?My general philosophy for myself is I’ve only ever had regrets selling investments, pretty much. I think I tell people all the time when I was in college, I bought Nvidia stock. And I thought Nvidia was a great company. They made amazing GPUs for playing computer games. Doom 3 at the time was my favorite computer game, and so I bought it for that reason. And I think I got it at 20 and sold it at 30. And I felt really, really good about myself. I think everyone has those stories of something like that where they exited a little bit early.I think people should sell. My own philosophy, I’ll sell if I have to. But generally speaking, I’m more of an accumulator. I like to accumulate things and hold onto them for a very, very long time. But people have different needs. Sometimes you need to buy something; you have an expense, and you don’t have that luxury. In that case, the fact that these markets are liquid and you can sell and get a good price is very, very important. And imagine you’re someone who bought Bitcoin in 2011 when you got it at, what was it, $1 or $2 a coin? I think it’s not unreasonable for someone like that to sell at some point along the way.I asked that question because my thesis is people only care about Bitcoin because of dollars. It’s the value of Bitcoin as expressed in dollars that makes everybody care about it. And if there’s no reason to get rid of one unless you need the money in dollars, then you will never transact in Bitcoin. It will never stabilize to the point where buying an Nvidia GPU in Bitcoin is a better idea than buying it in dollars. And if you can’t get there, then we really do just have a store of value. We just have another thing. We have digital gold. And you run the platform, and I’m wondering if that’s your view as well.Yeah, I think the properties of Bitcoin right now are much more conducive to it being a store of value than an actual mechanism for transacting and buying things. I think the fees are really high. And it’s very, very easy, including using platforms like Robinhood to take your crypto or any other asset and convert them back to dollars for when you need to transact. But I don’t think that’s unique to Bitcoin. I think stocks can essentially be thought of as a store of value from the retail investor standpoint. Nobody’s sending little bits of stock between each other to pay for things.But when you buy a stock, you have a thing. You own some insignificant part of a company. You have voting rights. You could fire the CEO, maybe. There’s a tangible value to owning the stock besides the stock itself.Yeah, yeah, I do, yeah. But what I’m saying is I don’t think that it not being used for payments really puts a ceiling on its value. I think that actually it being a medium, I think the medium of exchange use case is becoming less and less important over time. Pretty much anything can be a medium of exchange. Imagine if everyone had Robinhood accounts. Basically if you wanted to pay someone, you’d only need to convert it to dollars at the moment of paying them, and then the recipient can convert it into an asset that appreciates more. And you would obviously have probably a small portion of your portfolio in actual dollars. I think medium of exchange was more important when fungibility was much more difficult like it was back in the day. But now fungibility has never been easier, and so the store value use case probably dominates.It’s weird that I have one vision of the economy that’s like everything’s a casino and another one where everything is Disney bucks, and I don’t know how to reconcile those two things.Well, Disney owns ESPN, so there you go.We’re all going to be gambling on Disney bucks, it’s going to be great, on ESPN Bet. In order to keep the value of Bitcoin or any of these store value coins high, you need a constant buyer. Do you think that the Trump crypto reserve is a good idea? Because that’s the purpose it seems to be serving.Well, I’m not sure. We get the question ourselves about should Robinhood as an entity should have some of its balance sheet in Bitcoin. Every other company is doing that. Why aren’t we doing it? And again, I come back to we only follow the crowd when they’re right. We obviously haven’t jumped into crypto on the balance sheet yet, and I think part of the reason why is that it’s not critical to our purpose as an organization. Of course, if we incidentally had some crypto as part of serving our customers with various activities, we can and do do that, but we also don’t want to become some vehicle for people that just want exposure to Bitcoin to buy our company. I think generally speaking, with the U.S. government, I think you can make the argument that the U.S. spends money on a lot of things that are worse than Bitcoin, and I think that’s true. There’s just blatant waste out there in things like that.Boy, do I disagree with you on that. Also, buying Bitcoin is not a service, right?Yeah.The government mostly spends on services for the citizens. Do you think the Reserve as announced is the right mix of holdings? I’ve heard it called a “Shitcoin Reserve” because it has Solana in it. You trade on all these coins, the platform enables all these coins. Is it the right mix of holdings in the Trump Reserve?I think that generally what they announced was not selling the coins that they seize through various mechanisms. I think that’s fine. That’s probably the most I would’ve done if this decision was up to me. And I think there’s reasonable arguments to be made for that. Selling something is also a conscious, affirmative decision. You’re moving a market; you’re doing something by selling it. And again, my personal philosophy, I’ve only had regrets when I’ve sold stuff. I actually think what they outlined was reasonable. Now, it depends on the details of what budget-neutral acquisition of Bitcoin could be. I think that’s a fairly high bar for it to be budget-neutral. I think we’ll see. But yeah, probably I think it’s reasonable. It’s a sensible approach. If it was my decision, I don’t know if I would’ve gone further. Probably not.Part of your new banking service is that you can get physical cash delivered on demand to your doorstop, because you don’t have locations obviously. How on earth does that work? Are you mailing cash to people?No. We are using on-demand delivery logistics. We haven’t announced our partnerships yet, but we’re not actually doing everything ourselves. Yeah, it’s basically combining the power of on-demand delivery logistics with financial services to bring the retail bank to you. If you look at digital banking before Robinhood, there was always a sacrifice. You had a nice convenience of the digital app, but there were no branches. And so, if you wanted to get cash or even deposit cash, but most likely withdraw, you’d have to go to a 7-Eleven or a CVS or something. And nothing against going to 7-Eleven. I love 7-Eleven, but it’s not quite the private banking experience.In fact, with my private banking experience, I was a FRB client, First Republic Bank, and they had this amazing feature where they would deliver cash to you. It is a high net worth feature, but of course it would be slow, it would be super expensive, it would be for a lot of cash and it would come in an armored vehicle. We asked ourselves, “How can we make that experience for everyone?” And this is what we came up with. I think we’re excited to roll it out.Wait, are you going to roll up an armored truck to people’s houses?Well, probably not for a small amount, but if you think about it people already get iPhones delivered, and an iPhone is an expensive item — $1,000, give or take. It’s a small, expensive item, and a high-ticket charge. My estimate is the average ticket charge for a cash delivery order offered by Robinhood is probably going to be in the low hundreds of dollars. Similar dollar value to a delivery order. Maybe a little bit higher, but probably not quite as high as delivering Apple products. I think if you wanted to get a quarter million dollars delivered, you would need an armored truck, and we’d like to facilitate that as well. But for your typical ATM-like transaction, the idea is that that would be a smaller amount, it would get delivered to your house. And we’d like to figure out how to do it outside of your house too, if you’re out at a place that’s in a service area. But that’s a little bit more complicated. But yeah, if it could come to you in 10 or 15 minutes and at low cost, I think there’s real value there. Sixteen percent of payments in the US are still cash payments. Even though we’d all like cash to go away, cash is still very much a giant part of the economy here.Well, I think you can tell I could talk to you for hours and hours about a wide variety of things. We’re going to have to have you back just to talk about the logistics of locating cash around farmers markets throughout the country, because that’s very exciting for me. Vlad, this has been great. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.Thanks so much for the time.Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!Decoder with Nilay PatelA podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other problems.SUBSCRIBE NOW!See More:

Diffusion processes have emerged as promising approaches for sampling from complex distributions but face significant challenges when dealing with multimodal targets. Traditional methods based on overdamped Langevin dynamics often exhibit slow convergence rates when navigating between different modes of a distribution. While underdamped Langevin dynamics have shown empirical improvements by introducing an additional momentum variable, fundamental limitations remain. The degenerate noise structure in underdamped models where Brownian motion couples indirectly to the space variable creates smoother paths but complicates theoretical analysis. Existing methods like Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) bridge prior and target distributions using transition kernels, while Unadjusted Langevin Annealing (ULA) implements uncorrected overdamped Langevin dynamics within this framework. Monte Carlo Diffusion (MCD) optimizes targets to minimize marginal likelihood variance, while Controlled Monte Carlo Diffusion (CMCD) and Sequential Controlled Langevin Diffusion (SCLD) focus on kernel optimization with resampling strategies. Other approaches prescribe backward transition kernels, including the Path Integral Sampler (PIS), the Time-Reversed Diffusion Sampler (DIS), and the Denoising Diffusion Sampler (DDS). Some methods, like the Diffusion Bridge Sampler (DBS), learn both forward and backward kernels independently. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, NVIDIA, Zuse Institute Berlin, dida Datenschmiede GmbH, and FZI Research Center for Information Technology have proposed a generalized framework for learning diffusion bridges that transport prior distributions to target distributions. This approach contains both existing diffusion models and underdamped versions with degenerate diffusion matrices where noise affects only specific dimensions. The framework establishes a rigorous theoretical foundation, showing that score-matching in underdamped cases is equivalent to maximizing a likelihood lower bound. This approach addresses the challenge of sampling from unnormalized densities when direct samples from the target distribution are unavailable. The framework enables a comparative analysis between five key diffusion-based sampling methods: ULA, MCD, CMCD, DIS, and DBS. The underdamped variants of DIS and DBS represent novel contributions to the field. The evaluation methodology uses a diverse testbed including seven real-world benchmarks covering Bayesian inference tasks (Credit, Cancer, Ionosphere, Sonar), parameter inference problems (Seeds, Brownian), and high-dimensional sampling with Log Gaussian Cox process (LGCP) having 1600 dimensions. Moreover, synthetic benchmarks include the challenging Funnel distribution characterized by regions of vastly different concentration levels, providing a rigorous test for sampling methods across varied dimensionality and complexity profiles. The results show that underdamped Langevin dynamics consistently outperform overdamped alternatives across real-world and synthetic benchmarks. The underdamped DBS surpasses competing methods even when using as few as 8 discretization steps. This efficiency translates to significant computational savings while maintaining superior sampling quality. Regarding numerical integration schemes, specialized integrators show marked improvements over classical Euler methods for underdamped dynamics. The OBAB and BAOAB schemes deliver substantial performance gains without extra computational overhead, while the OBABO scheme achieves the best overall results despite requiring double evaluation of control parameters per discretization step. In conclusion, this work establishes a comprehensive framework for diffusion bridges that contain degenerate stochastic processes. The underdamped diffusion bridge sampler achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple sampling tasks with minimal hyperparameter tuning and few discretization steps. Thorough ablation studies confirm that the performance improvements stem from the synergistic combination of underdamped dynamics, innovative numerical integrators, simultaneous learning of forward and backward processes, and end-to-end learned hyperparameters. Future directions include benchmarking underdamped diffusion bridges for generative modeling applications using the evidence lower bound (ELBO) derived in Lemma 2.4. Check out Paper. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 85k+ ML SubReddit. Sajjad AnsariSajjad Ansari is a final year undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur. As a Tech enthusiast, he delves into the practical applications of AI with a focus on understanding the impact of AI technologies and their real-world implications. He aims to articulate complex AI concepts in a clear and accessible manner.Sajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/NVIDIA AI Releases UltraLong-8B: A Series of Ultra-Long Context Language Models Designed to Process Extensive Sequences of Text (up to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens)Sajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/LightPROF: A Lightweight AI Framework that Enables Small-Scale Language Models to Perform Complex Reasoning Over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) Using Structured PromptsSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/ByteDance Introduces VAPO: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Framework for Advanced Reasoning TasksSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/TorchSim: A Next-Generation PyTorch-Native Atomistic Simulation Engine for the MLIP Era

I think we can all agree the Pokémon TCG is a wallet-endangering hobby, but that doesn’t mean we have to overpay for cardboard. Amazon clearly got the memo because a bunch of solid bundles just dropped , including Surging Sparks, Journey Together and Paldean Fates. If you’ve been telling yourself you’re just buying “a few packs for the kids,” this is your moment to stock up and pretend it’s not for you. I’m not judging. I’m doing the same thing.Catch Surging Sparks, Journey Together and Paldean FatesPokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet - Surging SparksPokémon TCG: Iono’s Bellibolt ex Premium Collection$56.18 at AmazonMass Effect Merchandise$59.99 at IGN Store Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet: Paldean Fates: Booster BundleSee it at AmazonFellow Traveller Publisher Bundle Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet Shrouded Fable Elite Trainer Box$54.96 at Amazon Pokémon TCG: Terapagos ex Ultra-Premium Collection$135.00 at AmazonPokémon TCG: Shining Fates Collection Pikachu V Box$53.46 at AmazonI also want to point out the Mass Effect statues in the IGN Store, because apparently my bookshelf wasn’t crowded enough with plastic space heroes. Commander Shepard and crew are up for pre-order, and yes, I already added Jack to my cart because I enjoy chaos. There’s also a Humble Bundle packed with narrative indies that scream “you have emotions, deal with them.” All in all, it’s a good day to make impulsive but justifiable purchases.Pokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet - Surging SparksPokémon TCG: Scarlet & Violet - Surging SparksI picked up Surging Sparks because six booster packs under $50 is lower than what Amazon has been charging recently (It's still above MSRP though) Honestly, I wanted something new to crack open. It’s part of the latest Scarlet & Violet expansion, so if you’re trying to keep up with current sets or just enjoy the chaos of pulling a good card, this one’s a smart grab.Pikachu ex - 238/191$399.99 at TCG PlayerMilotic ex - 237/191$140.00 at TCG PlayerPikachu ex - 247/191$95.97 at TCG PlayerHydreigon ex - 240/191$79.99 at TCG PlayerAlolan Exeggutor ex - 242/191$55.99 at TCG PlayerPokémon TCG: Iono’s Bellibolt ex Premium CollectionPokémon TCG: Iono’s Bellibolt ex Premium Collection$56.18 at AmazonThis one’s for the collectors who care as much about presentation as they do the pulls. Iono’s Bellibolt ex Premium Collection comes with six packs, a full-art promo, and a display sheet that’s more elaborate than it needs to be — in a good way. It's also a cool way to snag Journey Together packs with a fantastic promo card.Lillie's Clefairy ex - 184/159$224.74 at TCGPlayerN's Zoroark ex - 185/159$249.97 at TCGPlayerIono's Bellibolt ex - 183/159$149.99 at TCGPlayerHop's Zacian ex - 186/159$100.39 at TCGPlayerN's Zoroark ex - 189/159$62.95 at TCGPlayerMass Effect MerchandiseMass Effect Merchandise$59.99 at IGN StoreI think anyone who's replayed Mass Effect more than once knows exactly why these statues are tempting. I pre-ordered Jack immediately because, well, it felt necessary. The line includes Shepard, Tali, Legion, and others, and they look good enough that I’ve already made space for them on the shelf. If you're still quoting Garrus unironically, these are for you. Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet: Paldean Fates: Booster Bundle Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet: Paldean Fates: Booster BundleSee it at AmazonPaldean Fates is priced a double MSRP, but it's also very hard to come by in 2025. I grabbed it because the baby shiny sub-set is awesome, but if you just want to grab the single cards from this set, it might actually save you money.Charizard VMAX 107/122$65.00 at TCG PlayerSkyla 072/072$13.76 at TCG PlayerDitto VMAX 119/122See itSuicune 022/122$2.50 at TCG PlayerGalarian Ponyta 047/122$5.20 at TCG PlayerFellow Traveller Publisher BundleFellow Traveller Publisher BundlePay less to get fewer items, or pay extra to give more to publishers, Humble, and charity One Tree PlantedThis bundle has some of the better narrative indies from the last few years. I paid the $12, added the games to my backlog like I always do, and immediately booted up The Pale Beyond. It’s a strong lineup if you like character-driven games and don’t mind occasionally being emotionally wrecked by minimalist storytelling. Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet Shrouded Fable Elite Trainer Box Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet Shrouded Fable Elite Trainer Box$54.96 at AmazonI think of this one as the all-in-one box for when you want cards and a bunch of gear you probably won’t use but still want around. Nine booster packs, a promo, sleeves, dice, and enough extras to make you feel like you’re doing more than just opening packs. It’s a solid option if you like having a little structure with your chaos.Persian - 078/064 - SV: Shrouded Fable$67.61 at TCGPlayerCassiopeia - 094/064 - SV: Shrouded Fable$59.98 at TCGPlayerFezandipiti ex - 092/064 - SV: Shrouded FableSee it at TCGPlayerHoundoom - 066/064 - SV: Shrouded Fable$49.99 at TCGPlayerDuskull - 068/064 - SV: Shrouded Fable$49.88 at TCGPlayer Pokémon TCG: Terapagos ex Ultra-Premium Collection Pokémon TCG: Terapagos ex Ultra-Premium Collection$135.00 at AmazonI hesitated on this one, then immediately remembered it includes 18 booster packs and a playmat. It’s definitely a big spend, but if you’ve been waiting for a premium bundle that actually justifies the price, this checks out. I picked it up more for the experience than the individual cards, and that’s the right way to approach it.Squirtle - 148/142$75.31 at TCG PlayerBulbasaur - 143/142$74.88 at TCG PlayerTerapagos ex - 170/142$57.98 at TCG PlayerDachsbun ex - 169/142$38.00 at TCG PlayerHydrapple ex - 167/142$41.99 at TCG PlayerPokémon TCG: Shining Fates Collection Pikachu V BoxPokémon TCG: Shining Fates Collection Pikachu V Box$53.46 at AmazonI grabbed Shining Fates Pikachu V mostly because I never actually opened it when it first dropped, and now seemed like a good excuse. Four booster packs, a Pikachu promo, and the oversized card that ends up somewhere near your desk — standard stuff, but still a nice throwback if you missed it the first time around.Yamper 039/122$3.00 at TCG PlayerLapras VMAX 111/122$4.50 at TCG PlayerGalarian Rapidash 048/122$4.75 at TCG PlayerAlcremie VMAX 073/072$4.40 at TCG PlayerPoke Kid 070/072$1.63 at TCG PlayerWhy Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Christian Wait is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything collectable and deals. Christian has over 7 years of experience in the Gaming and Tech industry with bylines at Mashable and Pocket-Tactics. Christian also makes hand-painted collectibles for Saber Miniatures. Christian is also the author of "Pokemon Ultimate Unofficial Gaming Guide by GamesWarrior". Find Christian on X @ChrisReggieWait.