Trump announces “productive dialogue” with Iran, Iran says it’s not true. But 15 minutes before the announcement, $1.5 billion in futures trades were already in place.
1｜Trump calls for peace, $1.5 billion was bet 15 minutes before he spoke
At 6:49 AM on March 23, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 contracts and $650 million in crude oil contracts flooded the New York futures market. Sixteen minutes later, Trump posted on Truth Social announcing a 5-day halt to bombing Iran’s energy infrastructure, claiming the two sides had “very good and productive dialogue.” Oil prices plunged 15%, while the S&P surged by $1.7 trillion.
Iran’s response was three words: not true. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard called Trump a “lying president,” and state media issued a statement denying any direct or indirect dialogue existed. On the same day Trump spoke of “peace,” Tehran and other cities were subjected to massive bombings.
UBS Chief Economist Paul Donovan offered a colder assessment: investors aren’t trading on information; they’re trading on social media posts. The market reacts to positive news far faster than it digests negative evidence. This isn’t peace trading; it’s confirmation bias trading. And what happened in that 15-minute gap still lacks an official explanation.
(Source: Fortune / CNBC / Al Jazeera / UBS / NPR)
2｜Mattis says “no good options,” war is burning into the cloud
Former Defense Secretary Mattis gave a more honest assessment than the Pentagon at the Houston CERAWeek conference. “A target list will never make up for a lack of strategy,” he warned. If Trump now declares victory and withdraws, Iran will claim control of the Strait of Hormuz and tax every transiting vessel. The U.S. and Israel have destroyed Iran’s air force and navy, but the anti-ship cruise missiles distributed along hundreds of miles of Iran’s coastline aren’t a problem air strikes can solve.
On the same day, the AWS data center in Bahrain was disrupted for the second time this month by an Iranian drone attack. In early March, three AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain were first attacked, causing widespread outages in banking, payment, and delivery applications. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard explicitly stated the strikes were due to Amazon’s support for U.S. forces. When war spreads from oil fields to data centers, “digital neutrality” is no longer an option. Goldman Sachs’ extreme scenario puts Brent crude at $147 per barrel, and United Airlines’ CEO is already planning for $175.
(Source: Axios / S&P Global / Tom’s Hardware / Al Jazeera / The National / Fortune / Goldman Sachs)
3｜Alibaba uses free RISC-V to build the world’s most powerful open-source CPU, natively runs DeepSeek V3
Alibaba DAMO Academy in Shanghai released the Xuantie C950, a 5nm, 3.2GHz server-grade CPU. It scored over 70 on the SPECint2006 benchmark, with performance more than three times that of the previous-generation C920, setting a new global record for RISC-V. The key is that the C950 natively supports inference for large models with hundreds of billions of parameters for the first time, allowing Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3 to run directly.
RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture that doesn’t require licensing fees like Arm. Against the backdrop of U.S. senators calling for a halt to Nvidia’s AI chip exports to China on the same day, Alibaba’s path is clear: don’t fight on Arm’s turf, but rebuild from the ground up using a free architecture. Xiaomi released its 2025 financial report on the same day, announcing over 200 billion yuan in R&D investment over the next five years, focusing on AI, autonomous driving, and robotics. As Chinese tech companies advance simultaneously in chip architecture and application layers, “restrictions” are becoming catalysts for “accelerating autonomy.”
(Source: Reuters / CNBC / 36Kr / Digitimes / Electronics Weekly)
4｜$2.2 trillion asset manager Invesco takes over on-chain treasury fund, tokenization moves from experiment to mass production
Invesco announced it will take over Superstate’s USTB fund. This fund, holding $967 million in U.S. Treasuries, will continue operating on-chain, rebranded and managed by Invesco. USTB is the world’s fourth-largest tokenized real-world asset (RWA) fund, trailing behind BlackRock’s $1.9 billion BUIDL.
Pair this with Fink’s annual letter from the morning report. Fink, managing $11.6 trillion, defined tokenization as a “key tool for expanding market access” in his annual letter, while Invesco, managing $2.2 trillion, voted with action on the same day. The tokenized U.S. Treasury market has reached $12 billion, with McKinsey predicting global tokenized assets will hit $2 trillion by 2030. The growth from $12 billion to $2 trillion won’t come from crypto natives but from traditional asset managers laying the pipelines. Nasdaq was also reported on the same day to be seeking to embed cryptocurrencies into Wall Street’s trading infrastructure.
(Source: Fortune / CoinDesk / PR Newswire / Bloomberg / McKinsey)
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