Trump announced "productive dialogue" with Iran, but Iran said that was not true. However, 15 minutes before the announcement, a $1.5 billion futures trade was already in place.

1｜Trump calls for peace, $1.5 billion wagered 15 minutes before he spoke

On March 23 at 6:49 a.m., the New York futures market saw an influx of $1.5 billion in S&P 500 contracts and $650 million in oil contracts. Sixteen minutes later, Trump posted on Truth Social announcing a five-day pause on bombing Iran's energy infrastructure, stating that there had been "very good and productive dialogue" between the two parties. Oil prices plummeted by 15%, and the S&P surged by $1.7 trillion.

Iran's response was three words: no such thing. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps called Trump a "fraud president," and state media issued a statement denying any direct or indirect communication. On the same day that Trump spoke of "peace," Tehran and other cities were subjected to massive bombings.

UBS chief economist Paul Donovan offered a cooler assessment, stating that investors were not trading on information but rather on social media posts. The market's reaction speed to positive news is far quicker than its digestion of negative evidence. This was not a peace trade, but a confirmation bias trade. As for what happened in that 15-minute time gap, there has yet to be an official explanation.

(Source: Fortune / CNBC / Al Jazeera / UBS / NPR)

2｜Mattis says "there are no good options," war is burning into the cloud

Former Defense Secretary Mattis provided a more honest assessment at the Houston CERAWeek conference than the Pentagon. "A target strike list can never make up for a missing strategy." He warned that if Trump announces a victory withdrawal now, Iran will claim control over the Strait of Hormuz and tax every ship passing through. The U.S. and Israel have destroyed Iran's air force and navy, but the anti-ship cruise missiles distributed along Iran's coastline for hundreds of miles are not something that airstrikes can resolve.

On the same day, AWS's Bahrain data center was interrupted for the second time this month due to attacks by Iranian drones. Earlier in March, three AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain were attacked for the first time, crippling banks, payments, and delivery applications. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps explicitly stated that the reason for the attack was Amazon's support for the U.S. military. As the war burns from oil fields to data centers, "digital neutrality" is no longer an option. Goldman Sachs’ extreme scenario predicts Brent crude at $147 per barrel, with United Airlines' CEO already planning emergency measures for $175.

(Source: Axios / S&P Global / Tom's Hardware / Al Jazeera / The National / Fortune / Goldman Sachs)

3｜Alibaba built the world's strongest open-source CPU for free with RISC-V, natively running DeepSeek V3

Alibaba's Damo Academy launched the Xuan Tie C950 in Shanghai, a 5nm, 3.2GHz server-class CPU. The SPECint2006 benchmark test exceeded 70 points, with performance more than three times that of the previous C920, setting a global record for RISC-V. The key point is that the C950 natively supports inference for large models with tens of billions of parameters for the first time, capable of running both Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3 directly.

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture that does not require the licensing fees associated with Arm. In the context of U.S. senators calling for a pause on Nvidia's AI chip exports to China, Alibaba's path is clear: instead of competing on Arm's territory, rebuild from the ground up with a free architecture. Xiaomi also released its 2025 financial forecast on the same day, announcing over 200 billion yuan in R&D investment over the next five years, focusing on AI, smart driving, and robotics. As Chinese tech companies aggressively pursue both chip architecture and application layers, "regulation" is transforming into a catalyst for "accelerating autonomy."

(Source: Reuters / CNBC / 36Kr / Digitimes / Electronics Weekly)

4｜$2.2 trillion asset management giant Invesco takes over on-chain government bond fund, tokenization moves from experimentation to mass production

Invesco announced it has taken over Superstate’s USTB fund, which holds $967 million in U.S. government bonds and will continue to operate on-chain, now under Invesco's branding and management. USTB is the fourth largest tokenized real-world asset (RWA) fund globally, ranking behind BlackRock’s $1.9 billion BUIDL.

Look at this together with Fink’s annual letter from early reports. Fink, managing $11.6 trillion, defined tokenization in his letter as "a key tool for expanding market access," while Invesco, managing $2.2 trillion, voted with its actions on the same day. The market size for tokenized U.S. government bonds has reached $12 billion, with McKinsey predicting that global tokenized assets will reach $20 trillion by 2030. The increase from $12 billion to $20 trillion will not come from crypto natives but from traditional asset management firms that are laying pipelines. Nasdaq was also reported the same day to be seeking to embed cryptocurrency into Wall Street's trading infrastructure.

(Source: Fortune / CoinDesk / PR Newswire / Bloomberg / McKinsey)

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Delve suspended demonstrations due to allegations of "falsified compliance," and Insight Partners deleted investment articles. Whistleblowers alleged that the startup falsified audit evidence, leading the lead investor in its Series A round to promptly delete an article explaining investment logic. (Source: TechCrunch)

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