The news: Google Cloud is creating its own blockchain, named Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL), for payments and financial products. Our first take: The post-GENIUS Act environment has major institutions scrambling to get a first-mover advantage on stablecoins. Google likely is betting that it’s better positioned to offer clients and financial institutions than Stripe’s Tempo or Circle’s Arc because its blockchain service simplifies integration for multiple currencies and assets, stabilizes fees, and is designed for safety—as a private and permissioned system, it benefits from Google’s tech security stack.

The news: Stripe is developing a blockchain called Tempo with crypto venture capitalist Paradigm, per an exclusive from Fortune. Our take: Even after the completion of its ecosystem, Stripe still faces steep competition with a crowd of existing public and private blockchain networks.

The news: Circle reported $658 million in total revenues and reserve income in its first quarterly earnings as a public company, amounting to 53% growth YoY. USDC in circulation also jumped 90% YoY to 61.3 billion by the end of the quarter. Net losses hit $482 million, which largely accounted for IPO-related non-cash charges totalling $591 million. Our take: Circle’s early mover status and the newly passed GENIUS Act are working in the stablecoin issuer’s favor. Circle anticipates a 40% annual compound growth rate for USDC. If it can establish the most efficient and easy-to-use infrastructure for the nascent stablecoin industry, it can garner lasting loyalty from financial institutions.

By streamlining workflows with integrated genAI, Dia targets professionals and power users, but its success depends on pulling users away from entrenched defaults.

Last week, Arc, a web browser from startup The Browser Company, released a new AI-powered feature called pinch-to-summarize, which provides an instant summary of full web pages. That follows Arc’s release of “Arc Search,” a mobile app that will search the internet based on a user’s query and deliver an AI-generated page summarizing the breadth of information it searched. It’s not the only AI tool targeting search. Perplexity is seeing increased attention for its ability to summarize data sets, including searching in Reddit posts or YouTube videos. This month also saw the rebranding of Google’s Bard chatbot to Gemini as the company doubles down on AI search.