OUT: Bitcoin; IN: Stablecoin

OUT: Bitcoin; IN: Stablecoin

Bitcoin [BTC] continued its decline on Tuesday, falling as much as 2.64% to $62,858. It is now down more than 19% in February, its worst monthly performance since June 2022. Meanwhile, stablecoin could be poised for significant growth as a result of the Genius Act. According to a Bloomberg Intelligence report, stablecoin revenue accounted for 19% of Coinbase’s [COIN] revenue in 2025, but could grow by as much as seven times if adoption in payments accelerates.

Autonomy-as-a-Service

“What’s going to determine the success or failure of autonomy in the world is whether it can be commercialized,” said Uber [UBER] President and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald, announcing the launch of Uber Autonomous Solutions, an initiative that will support the growing number of providers entering the autonomous vehicle (AV) space. It will provide insurance, roadside assistance and AV mission control software for monitoring vehicles, the Financial Times detailed, as well as fleet financing to help partners cover deployment costs.

US Energy Storage Installations Are Surging

Battery storage installations are now four times higher than three years ago, according to the Q1 2026 US Energy Storage Market Outlook from SEIA and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, as reported by Electrek. Utility-scale storage hit 137GWh in 2025, with an additional 19GWh in commercial/industrial and 9GWh residential. Growth is projected to exceed 600GWh by 2030, with Texas set to surpass California as the US’ biggest battery storage market in 2026.

RBLX, TTWO and U: Gaming Stocks to Watch

At the end of January, Alphabet’s [GOOGL] Google unveiled Project Genie, a tool that lets users prompt AI to create virtual worlds. It was described by Google as “an early research prototype”, but this did not stop video gaming stocks from selling off sharply. OPTO looks at three companies that, while they were caught up in the selloff, appear well-positioned to weather the storm: Unity [U], Take-Two [TTWO] and Roblox [RBLX].

Claude vs Dinosaur

IBM [IBM] shares tumbled more than 13% on Monday, marking their largest single-day drop since October 2000, after artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic unveiled Claude Code, a tool that can modernize Cobol, the legacy programming language still widely used on IBM systems. The decline leaves IBM down 27% in February, on pace for its worst monthly performance since at least 1968, Seeking Alpha detailed.

Anthropic Calls Out Chinese Rivals

Elsewhere, Anthropic is on the back foot, accusing three Chinese AI labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax — of conducting “industrial-scale distillation attacks” on its models, raising national security concerns. The attacks allegedly involved 24,000 fraudulent accounts and 16 million interactions, which Anthropic claims were used to replicate its technology without comparable computing resources, the Financial Times reported.

Is IonQ at a Tipping Point?

Ahead of IonQ’s [IONQ] earnings call on February 25, OPTO unpacks the quantum firm’s narrative and identifies some key metrics to monitor. Strong revenue growth, major partnerships and ambitious qubit milestones are suggestive of real progress toward commercial quantum computing. However, the stock remains highly speculative, trading on future promise rather than current profitability, with valuation and sector risks still elevated.