What I read this week... 1) On 11/24, The Genesis Mission was signed into action by Executive Order. The Genesis Mission is framed as a modern-day counterpart to the Manhattan Project, harnessing the Department of Energy’s 17 National Laboratories, industry, and academia to build an integrated discovery platform. The goal is to leverage this platform and advanced artificial intelligence to double U.S. research and development productivity within a decade. They plan to reach this ambitious goal by getting access to the world’s largest collection of Federal scientific datasets to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The initiative also emphasizes strong public-private partnerships to integrate cutting-edge commercial AI infrastructure from leading tech companies. The Genesis Mission is targeted at addressing a defined set of three critical national challenges: 1. American energy dominance: Accelerate advanced nuclear, fusion, and grid modernization. 2. Advancing discovery science: Build the quantum ecosystem that will power discoveries and industries. 3. Ensuring national security: Advance AI technologies for national security missions, deploying systems to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and accelerating the development of defense-ready materials.

2) In the past several months, Tether, long known as the issuer of the leading stablecoin USDT, has quietly become one of the largest private gold holders in the world. Fahad Tariq and Andrew Moss, equity analysts at Jefferies, recently published a report on Tether’s growing influence in the gold market. Jefferies quantifies Tether’s holdings at 116 tonnes (valued at roughly US$14 billion) and states its purchases comprised ~2% of global gold demand and ~12% of central bank buying. This corresponds to a gold position that is in the order of magnitude of the holdings of smaller central banks such as South Korea, Hungary or Greece (each holding around 100-115 tonnes of gold). A small portion of these holdings, about 12 tons, directly underpins the gold-backed token Tether Gold (XAUt). Jefferies suggests that Tether sees bullion as a structural asset: using profits and stable-coin revenue to build a long-term store of value, and even exploring investments in gold royalty and streaming companies, thus gaining exposure across the gold supply chain, not just to bars in vaults.