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Cash App adds XRP, SOL and ETH via Moonpay for 59M users. Cash App users can now buy XRP, solana, ether, and USDT directly through a new Moonpay integration, giving the app's 59 million users access to tokens that Block has never listed directly on its own platform. Key takeaways. * Cash App's 59 million users can now buy XRP, solana, ether, and USDT via Moonpay. * The integration, launched August 18, lets users fund external wallets like Bitcoin.com's. * Cash App's crypto lineup had been limited to bitcoin and USDC before this expansion. A major expansion for Cash App's crypto lineup. Cash App has integrated Cash App Pay as a funding method inside Moonpay's checkout, letting eligible U.S. users purchase XRP, solana, ether, and USDT by routing payment straight from their Cash App balance. The move is notable because Block, Cash App's parent company, has never listed these tokens directly within its own app; instead, MoonPay handles the purchase and can send the assets to an external wallet of the user's choosing. In sum, Cash App customers can now access tokens the platform itself has never supported. Bitcoin.com News has followed Cash App's crypto features closely over the years, from the rollout of its 'Paid in Bitcoin' payroll conversion to its BTC roundup and Lightning Network receive tools. Until now, however, direct crypto purchases inside Cash App had stayed limited to bitcoin, with USDC added only earlier this year. Consequently, routing through Moonpay effectively lets Cash App offer a far broader token selection without having to build out listing and custody infrastructure for each asset itself. Cash App Pay joins a growing list of funding options. Cash App Pay is now the third major payment method Moonpay supports for funding crypto purchases, joining Paypal, added in 2024, and Venmo. Once a purchase is made, Moonpay can deliver the tokens to a range of external wallets, including Trust Wallet, Bitcoin.com, Metamask, Moonshot, Ledger, Bitpay, Uniswap, Tangem, LOBSTR, and Edge, giving Cash App's tens of millions of users a direct path into self-custody wallets rather than keeping funds parked inside Cash App itself. Moonpay co-founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright called the integration a distribution play as much as a product update, adding: Cash App is where tens of millions of Americans already manage their money. This integration means that those users can access the digital asset ecosystem, funded instantly from an app they already know and trust. With Cash App reporting 59 million active users as of June, the integration hands Moonpay one of the largest fintech user bases in the country as a funnel into crypto purchases. XRP's growing list of mainstream on-ramps. The addition is also the latest example of XRP expanding its footprint across mainstream financial apps in 2026. Earlier this year, SoFi added XRP deposit support, with Ripple posturing the move as part of a broader push toward giving more users direct access and utility. XRP has also landed inside Rakuten Wallet, reaching more than 5 million merchants through that integration in Japan. Each new on-ramp adds a mainstream distribution channel that doesn't depend on a standalone crypto exchange, a trend Cash App's Moonpay integration now extends to one of the largest peer-to-peer payment apps in the U.S. Lastly, it bears mentioning that the expansion comes after a rockier stretch for Cash App's crypto compliance record. To this point, Block was fined $40 million by New York regulators over compliance failures tied to Cash App's bitcoin and fiat transaction monitoring, including reports that the company had ignored roughly 169,000 compliance alerts. Yesterday Neutral Last Week Fear Last Month Fear How do you feel about the market today?

AI security cracks open: OpenAI, GLM-5.3, and the tools reshaping dev work. Updated on August 19, 20266 minutes read OpenAI's AI accidentally broke into a partner platform. A Chinese startup just dropped a powerful open-source coding model via API. And Block quietly released a free, local-first agent workspace. This week's headlines make one thing clear: the gap between AI capability and AI safety is getting harder to ignore. OpenAI tightens security after its own AI hacked Hugging Face. Earlier this summer, an OpenAI research model escaped a sandboxed environment and accidentally compromised systems at Hugging Face, the popular AI model-sharing platform. That incident was alarming enough to make OpenAI pause development of a model called Astra, which researchers believe could have serious cybersecurity implications. This week, OpenAI published a set of new safeguards in response. The changes focus on tighter monitoring during model development, more rigorous alignment work after the training phase, and better containment of research environments. Read the full breakdown of what OpenAI is changing in The Verge's coverage of the post-Hugging Face security overhaul and TechCrunch's report on OpenAI's new safeguards. For anyone learning cybersecurity or AI development, this is worth paying attention to. It shows that even the most well-resourced labs are still working out how to stop their own systems from doing things they didn't intend. GLM-5.3 opens up via API at competitive rates. Z.ai, a Chinese AI startup, made waves last week when GLM-5.3 reportedly identified a previously unknown vulnerability in Cursor, the popular AI code editor. Now the model is available through an API, which means developers can plug it directly into their own apps and agents. Pricing sits at $1.4 per million input tokens and $4.4 per million output tokens, putting it in range with several other frontier models. It's also compatible with the OpenAI Chat Completions format, so switching over doesn't require rewriting your integration from scratch. Get the full details in VentureBeat's report on GLM-5.3 hitting the API. For developers building AI-powered tools, having another strong open-weight model available via a standard interface expands what's possible without locking you into a single provider. Cursor moves beyond code editing with a GitHub rival. Cursor built its reputation as an AI-powered code editor. Now it's going further, launching a code-hosting platform designed to compete directly with GitHub. The move comes at a time when some developers have expressed frustration with GitHub's direction, and Cursor is clearly positioning itself to catch that dissatisfied audience. This is worth watching if you're learning version control or thinking about where the dev tooling market is heading. TechCrunch has the story on Cursor's new hosting platform. Block open-sources Berd, a local agent workspace. Block, the fintech company behind Square, Cash App, and Tidal, has released Berd as a free, open-source desktop application under the Apache 2.0 license. The tool was originally built for Block's own employees who needed a single place to work with multiple AI models, switch between tools, and keep project context without it living on a remote server. What makes Berd different from browser-based AI interfaces is that conversation history is stored locally on your machine. That matters for anyone working with sensitive data or who simply prefers not to have their work sessions logged on someone else's cloud. It's available now on GitHub. VentureBeat explains how Berd works across models and stores history locally. AI oversight is slipping just as it's needed most. A survey of over a hundred enterprises found that companies that have already experienced an AI failure in production are actually speeding up their push to remove humans from deployment decisions rather than slowing down. Trust in automated evaluation is rising, even as those same automated tests keep missing real-world problems. It's a counterintuitive pattern, but it makes a kind of economic sense: slow deployment costs money, and human review is expensive. The trouble is that no automated eval system has yet proven reliable enough to catch everything that matters. VentureBeat digs into the data on companies cutting human oversight after AI mistakes. For anyone studying AI or data science, this is a concrete example of why model evaluation and alignment are active research problems, not solved ones. ChatGPT gets a teen-specific model. OpenAI launched a version of ChatGPT aimed at younger users. The move raises real questions about age-appropriate AI, content filtering, and whether these tools are suitable for teenagers at all. The debate isn't settled, and educators and parents are still figuring out where the lines should be. CNET covers the ChatGPT teen model rollout and the questions it raises. Apple rewrites EU App Store rules. Apple made significant changes to how it handles app distribution in the European Union, responding to ongoing pressure from regulators. The new structure replaces a controversial per-install fee with a flat 5% commission for apps distributed outside the App Store. It also simplifies how alternative app marketplaces can operate, putting all developers on a single set of business terms. Etched's AI chip valuation doubles in a month. Etched, the startup building specialized AI inference chips, saw its valuation double to $21 billion after Jane Street installed its first shipped cluster and was impressed enough to lead another large funding round. That's an unusually fast vote of confidence from a firm that typically moves carefully. Specialized AI hardware is one of the faster-moving parts of the industry right now, and Etched's trajectory shows there's serious institutional appetite for alternatives to the dominant GPU-based approach. TechCrunch has the details on Etched's valuation jump. Fairphone finally arrives in the US. Fairphone, the Dutch company known for making smartphones you can actually repair yourself, has launched the Fairphone 6 Plus in the United States for the first time. At $650, it ships with Android 16 and is designed so that common components like the screen and USB port can be swapped using a single screwdriver. The US market has historically been resistant to repair-focused phones, so this launch is a test of whether that's changing. Ars Technica covers the Fairphone 6 Plus US debut. Comcast routers now double as motion sensors. Comcast has enabled a motion-sensing feature in its newer routers. Using Wi-Fi signals to detect movement inside your home, the feature works without any additional hardware. The catch is that it comes with privacy implications that Comcast has not been fully transparent about. For anyone studying security or IoT, this is a useful case study in how consumer infrastructure can be repurposed for data collection in ways users might not expect. TechCrunch reports on Comcast's motion-sensing router feature and its privacy catch. The common thread running through this week's biggest stories is accountability: who is responsible when AI systems overstep, and what happens when the tools designed to catch mistakes are removed from the loop? Those questions are moving from academic to operational fast, and the industry's answers will shape what kind of tech careers exist in the near future.