CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.
The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2071.97, down 0.4% (-9.25) since 4 p.m. ET on Friday.
Eight of 20 assets are trading higher.
Leaders: APT (+1.3%) and AAVE (+0.6%).
Laggards: XLM (-1.7%) and HBAR (-0.9%).
The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.
Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano (ADA) and one of the most important figures in the cryptocurrency sector, recently spoke about Ripple and $XRP.
Speaking on Paul Barron’s podcast, Charles Hoskinson reiterated his criticisms of Ripple’s $XRP strategy.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson criticized Ripple’s strategy of selling $XRP, suggesting the company should implement a buyback model to increase the token’s market appeal.
At this point, Hoskinson argued that $XRP would become much more attractive if Ripple used a portion of its revenue to directly buy back $XRP tokens.
He suggested that Ripple allocate 20% to 30% of its revenue to buy back $XRP tokens, saying this would provide more value to token holders.
Hoskinson stated that Ripple’s approach of selling $XRP to generate revenue was incorrect, arguing that it benefited the company but did not benefit token holders.
At this point, Barron noted that Ripple reinvested the money it earned from $XRP sales back into the $XRP Ledger ecosystem. He suggested that this could be considered a meaningful investment in the broader $XRP network.
Hoskinson agreed, but argued that it wasn’t enough. He said Ripple should tie its trading profits directly to $XRP through a buyback model.
In response, Hoskinson argued that Ripple currently has no financial or legal justification for sharing this wealth with token holders, adding that he does not expect Ripple to implement a buyback system.
He argued that Ripple would likely continue selling $XRP, earning billions of dollars, and then use that money to buy tangible assets through the company.
*This is not investment advice.
Odd News // 1 month ago
Virginia man buys 20 tickets for one lottery drawing, wins 20 times
March 27 (UPI) — A Virginia man bought 20 identical tickets for a single Pick 4 lottery drawing and ended up winning $5,000 for each ticket — a total of $100,000.
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As widely rumored earlier this year, BMG and Concord have officially announced “a definitive agreement to combine their businesses,” creating what is basically the fourth major music company, although they’re terming it “the leading independent music company in the world.”
The deal, which sources place between $6.6 billion and $7 billion, would form a company that is considerably smaller than the two dominant major music groups, Universal and Sony — but not far from the third, Warner, at least by some metrics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The combined company will operate under the BMG name and will span music publishing, recorded music, theatrical rights, and digital distribution. Collectively, the companies’ rosters include works from Jelly Roll, Paul Simon, Lainey Wilson, will.i.am, Jason Aldean, Tina Turner, Diane Warren, and Jean-Michel Jarre, to Creedence Clearwater Revival, Daddy Yankee, Denzel Curry, Hamilton, Phil Collins, R.E.M., and “The Sound of Music.”
The combined company will be owned approximately 67% by Bertelsmann and approximately 33% by affiliates of Great Mountain Partners. Affiliates of Great Mountain Partners will also receive a one-time cash payment of $1.16 billion, according to the announcement. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approvals and is expected to close in the second half of 2026.
Concord CEO Bob Valentine will serve as CEO, and BMG CEO Thomas Coesfeld as chairman of the combined company, with global headquarters in Nashville and European Headquarters in Berlin. It will be named BMG with divisions “BMG Publishing” and “Concord Records.”
The deal “includes a mid-term ambition to achieve $1.2 billion in EBITDA, building from a pro forma EBITDA base of more than $730 million in 2026, driven through organic growth, M&A, and synergies, according to the announcement.
While the company would certainly qualify as a “fourth major” in terms of scale, with few exceptions, the two companies don’t really invest in current superstars: The recorded-music divisions of both BMG and Concord don’t have anyone in the same galaxy as a Taylor Swift or Bruno Mars or Harry Styles, although BMG’s country division’s roster of recorded music does boast Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll.
Instead, the companies share similar publishing-and-catalog-heavy business models. Since 2021, BMG has invested more than $1.5 billion in music rights acquisitions and an equal amount in signings, licenses, and technology, the announcement states. Concord has invested more than $3 billion since 2020 across publishing, recorded music, theatrical rights, and distribution, and with more than 125,000 artists and songwriters around the world.
Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP is serving as legal counsel to BMG. J.P. Morgan is serving as financial advisor to Concord and Latham and Watkins LLP and Reed Smith LLP are serving as legal counsel. Alston & Bird LLP is advising Great Mountain Partners.
“We believe this is a truly one-of-a-kind opportunity to bring together two world-class teams and rosters at the right moment, as scale in rights ownership becomes increasingly critical to long-term growth,” said Thomas Coesfeld, Chief Executive Officer of BMG and designated Chairman of the combined company. “This transaction accelerates our successful BMG Next strategy by enabling a more ambitious and sustained approach to investing in artists and songwriters, as well as in rights, technology, AI tools, and the talent shaping the industry. As one unified business, we will further deepen our position as a preferred global partner to artists, songwriters, and platforms, combining scale with the agility and independence they value. We look forward to this next chapter and to the opportunities it creates for artists, songwriters, and partners.”
“We are excited to begin working together to build something truly exceptional,” said Bob Valentine, Chief Executive Officer of Concord and designated CEO of the combined company. “Both companies were founded to support great artistry and with a deep sense of responsibility to the performers, songwriters, and playwrights we serve. We share a philosophy grounded in artist development, strategic long-term management of IP, and operational discipline. Our greater scale will allow us to invest more in creative talent, global reach, accretive acquisition opportunities, and technology, while preserving the nimble, entrepreneurial spirit that artists and songwriters value most. This is not about replicating the major label model; it’s about using scale to strengthen independence. Together, we will build a company that gives artists more reach and more flexibility – all designed to support their distinct visions.”
A real-life story about a supposedly cursed painting has inspired an upcoming U.K. feature that has recently wrapped filming in the British seaside town of Hastings.
“Curse in a Frame” — from New State Pictures and the feature debut of writer-director Maria Pawlikowska — is being led by Susan Wokoma, best known for “Enola Holmes” and soon starring in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming “Narnia,” Jessie Cave, who famously played Lavender Brown in the “Harry Potter” franchise (and marking her return to film for the first time in almost a decade), and newcomer Velvet Brown (“Troubleshooting”). Kaja Chan (“Split Fiction”) Michael Kinsey (“Three Day Millionaire”) and Michael Brandon (“Dempsey and Makepeace”) also star.
Blending comedy, horror and satire, the film takes its cue from a story that went viral in 2023 about a portrait of a young girl discovered in a Hasting charity shop and was “bought twice and returned twice after having ruined the lives of its owners.” One of the owners told U.K. TV that she believed it was “haunted,” with strange events happening to her — and her mother — soon after she bought it.
Set against the local folklore and eerie coastal atmosphere of Hastings, “Curse in a Frame” takes the story and adapts it into what the filmmakers describe as a “sharp contemporary feature about belief, ambition, friendship — and the chaos that unfolds when a local story becomes an international obsession.”
“What drew us to ‘Curse in a Frame’ was its originality and the fact that the story already arrived in the culture with its own mythology,” said producer Ana Emdin. “It was funny, unsettling, and very contagious. Working with Maria Pawlikowska, whose voice as a filmmaker is so prodigious, we were able to build that initial spark into something bolder, stranger and far more expansive. And it was mind-blowing to see our exceptional cast elevate the story even further.”
Added producer Yan Fisher: “What makes ‘Curse in a Frame’ so exciting is that it feels both specific and highly exportable. It is rooted in a very British world, but the premise is instantly accessible and the tone is bold, fresh and entertaining. It is exactly the kind of original genre film that can cut through internationally.”
Directed by Pawlikowska from a script she co-wrote with Tom Woffenden, “Curse in a Frame” is being produced by U.K. production company New State Pictures, led by Emdin and Fisher, alongside Invisible String Pictures.
“I was interested in the ‘crazy but true’ premise of Curse in a Frame for its potential to mix tones, genre, formats — in a way that feels very much of the moment,” said Pawlikowska. “We journey with these lovable, contemporary characters (played by our extraordinary ensemble cast) in this mysterious, mythological setting, and it was this clash of the modern and the ancient that got me excited, that seemed to allow for a morality tale to unfold – of friendship, ambition, belief, karma.”
“Curse in a Frame” is now in post-production.
Regular physical activity and fitness levels are important for overall health and well-being.
According to a recent study, your level of cardiorespiratory fitness in midlife can not only help determine how long you live, but also how many of those years you spend in good health.
The study showed that adults with higher midlife cardiorespiratory fitness lived longer, developed fewer chronic diseases, and spent more years free from serious illness than those with lower fitness. The results were recently published in the JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology.
“People with higher fitness may also have had other health advantages, such as better diet, less smoking, or more consistent access to care,” said Robert Glatter, MD, attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. Glatter wasn’t involved in the study.
“The findings are very much in line with decades of research showing that cardiorespiratory fitness is one of the strongest markers of long-term health,” Glatter told Healthline.
Life span refers to how long you live. Health span refers to how long you live free of any major chronic diseases.
The study results showed that cardiorespiratory fitness can not only affect life span but also health span.
It followed 24,576 adults, 25% of whom were females, from the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study (CCLS). The participants were healthy individuals ages 65 or younger. The researchers later tracked their health outcomes using Medicare data.
Participants’ fitness was measured before age 65 using a treadmill test. During the study, the researchers used Medicare data to identify major chronic diseases for each participant.
They defined major diseases using 11 chronic conditions:
The results showed that males with higher fitness levels had a 2% longer health span, 9% fewer diseases, and a 3% longer life span than those with lower fitness levels. The results showed similar patterns among females.
“This study confirms our understanding of cardiorespiratory fitness as a marker of future health outcomes, and should encourage all of us to make physical activity a part of our daily lives,” Cheng-Han Chen, MD, board certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center in Laguna Hills, CA, told Healthline. Chen wasn’t involved in the study.
Mary Greene, MD, a board certified cardiologist with Manhattan Cardiology in NYC, wasn’t involved in the study but noted a “dose-response benefit” in the findings.
“Even modest increases in cardiovascular fitness can lead to a
Still, Glatter said the findings should be interpreted with caution. “The study does not prove cause and effect. It was an observational study, so it cannot prove that higher fitness directly caused the better outcomes,” he said.
The main way to improve your cardiorespiratory fitness is to maintain regular physical activity.
“The encouraging answer is that improvement does not require becoming an athlete,” said Glatter. “For most adults, the target is at least
“A useful rule of thumb is this: during moderate exercise, you can talk but not sing; during vigorous exercise, you can only say a few words before needing a breath,” Glatter said.
Chen agreed. “I would encourage people to do at least 20–30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, such as brisk walking, on most days of the week. As their fitness increases, they can then increase either the length or intensity of the exercise,” he said.
Glatter noted that some activity is better than none, and improving fitness at almost any age is a worthwhile investment in both longevity and quality of life.
ASUS is often best when it’s weird, and this year at CES 2026 the company decided to resurrect one of its weirdest laptops ever: the ROG Zephyrus Duo. Unlike the last model from 2023 that had a smallish, tilting second screen, the 2026 model rocks massive dual 16-inch OLED displays that should make it an ideal content creation and gaming machine. ASUS has now opened up pre-orders for the Zephyrus Duo and revealed that pricing will start at a breathtaking $4,500.
The Zephyrus Duo is the “world’s first 16-inch dual-screen gaming laptop,” according to ASUS. It boasts a pair of 3K HDR OLED touchscreens that offer a combined 21 inches of diagonal screen space. They’re DisplayHDR True Black 1000 certified, and can each hit 1,100 nits of peak HDR brightness. Both offer a 120Hz refresh rate and 0.2ms response time, though only the main screen supports NVIDIA G-Sync.
ASUS
Another important piece is the detachable magnetic Bluetooth keyboard. Despite the thin 5.1mm profile, it offers a generous 1.7mm of key travel and ultra-large touchpad. With the two hinging touch displays and the keyboard, it offers five dedicated operation modes. Dual Screen mode removes the keyboard altogether, Laptop mode provides a standard 16-inch screen and keyboard setup, Sharing mode sets the Duo flat at 180 degrees, Book mode sets both screens in a portrait orientation, and Tent mode has the hinge forming an A-frame.
There’s a lot of power under the hood, with a 16-core Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 or RTX 5090 laptop GPU with a max TGP of 135 watts. The latter is NVIDIA’s flagship mobile GPU with the latest AI and gaming features including DLSS 4, frame generation and fourth-gen ray-tracing cores. It also comes with a redesigned motherboard and larger vapor chamber, along with dual fans to keep things cool.
All of that is housed in a CNC-milled aluminum chassis with a new “Stellar Grey” colorway and “Slash” lighting array with 35 discrete zones. The Zyphyrus Duo is now available for pre-order from ASUS or partners including Newegg starting at $4,500 for the RTX 5070Ti version or (brace for it) $5,500 for the RTX 5090 version. Both models come with 32GB of memory and 1TB of PCIe 5.0 storage.
Amazon has today announced a software update for both the Kindle Colorsoft and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft which will bring dark mode to both e-readers. Even better, users will be able to toggle the settings for specific menus on both devices, so if they want their library dark and their notebook light, they can. Given the option is available on plenty of other Kindle devices, its omission here always felt like something Amazon was just getting around to addressing.
In addition, the update brings Smart Shapes to notebooks, enabling users to add pre-drawn lines, arrows, circles, triangles and rectangles from the toolbar. In addition, a hold-to-snap tool lets you draw a shape freehand, after which point it’ll pull itself into a nice tidy design. Both should help folks who want to add some graphical zing to their note taking who can’t do all those fancy journal designs on their own.
The update is rolling out across the ecosystem across the next few days, further empowering would-be journal scribes using these tablets. For tablets like the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, it’s clear Amazon needs to build out the Scribe half of the equation, which looks like a poor relative compared to its competition. As Cherlynn Low wrote in her review, it’s a fine e-reader, but one that’s sorely lacking in many areas.
Ripple’s move to integrate $XRP and $RLUSD directly into its Treasury system could pose some benefits to the average employee.
Just weeks after Ripple introduced this integration, $XRP community figure Chad Steingraber explained why this development could have major benefits for businesses and workers.
In a recent post on X, Steingraber said that most employees only understand payment systems from the point of view of receiving a paycheck every two weeks. He explained that many do not fully understand how corporate treasury systems work behind the scenes.
According to him, a real-time settlement system powered by crypto assets like $XRP could allow workers to receive pay every day, every hour, or even every minute, and also give them the ability to track their earnings in real time through blockchain-based systems.
To support his point, Steingraber shared a screenshot of an AI-generated explanation that described why corporate treasury has such an important role to play in business operations.
Corporate treasury often acts as an internal bank, centralizing financial activities to boost the company’s bottom line.
💯🥂corporations become Ripple // $XRP https://t.co/LFgik1hrDR pic.twitter.com/xdRVRnfGlH
— Chad Steingraber (@ChadSteingraber) April 28, 2026
The explanation stressed that corporate treasury represents the central system that manages a company’s cash, liquidity, and financial risks and makes sure there is enough money available for operations.
According to the screenshot, treasury departments handle important responsibilities such as monitoring daily cash flow, reducing financial risks around interest rates and currency fluctuations, maintaining banking relationships, and investing surplus cash.
The AI response also explained that treasury management systems, or TMS platforms, help companies monitor balances across multiple banks and currencies in real time and improve forecasting. These systems help businesses maintain liquidity, lower financial risks, and support growth.
Although traditional treasury systems already provide important benefits, Ripple’s $XRP and $RLUSD integration seeks to address many long-standing inefficiencies.
This development followed Ripple’s 2025 acquisition of GTreasury and marked the first time a treasury management system embedded Ripple-native digital asset capabilities directly into enterprise operations.
With this integration, treasury teams can now create and manage regulated $XRP and $RLUSD accounts directly inside their existing TMS platforms without needing separate wallets, outside custodians, crypto exchanges, or disconnected workflows.
$XRP and $RLUSD balances now appear alongside fiat cash accounts within the same financial system, featuring real-time fiat valuations, precise automated accounting, and unified financial visibility.
This allows companies to combine traditional treasury functions with blockchain-based assets in one system, and makes treasury management more efficient and easier to control.
Ripple Treasury’s $XRP integration brings major improvements to cash management by giving treasury teams round-the-clock visibility into digital asset balances, bank accounts, and fiat holdings within one dashboard.
Also, $XRP transactions automatically record native token values, live fiat equivalents, and market prices with precision up to 15 decimal places. This reduces the need for manual reconciliation while cutting delays and operational errors.
For liquidity management, $XRP works as a liquid bridge asset that supports near-instant cross-border and intercompany payments, removing the need for businesses to pre-fund nostro and vostro accounts in multiple regions.