TheChek News Flow

The pace of giant funding rounds slowed a bit this week. However, we still did see some jumbo-sized deals in the mix, topped by a $355 million growth round for First Due, a software provider for emergency responders. Healthcare and AI were also significant sectors for funding, as illustrated below.

1. First Due, $355M, public safety: First Due, a Garden City, New York-based provider of software for emergency first responders, announced that it secured a $355 million strategic minority growth investment led by JMI Equity. Founded in 2016, First Due’s technology currently helps power operations for over 3,000 local, state and federal agencies in the United States and Canada.

2. Strand Therapeutics, $153M, biotechnology: Boston-based Strand Therapeutics, a developer of mRNA-based therapeutics, raised $153 million in a Series B funding led by Kinnevik. The fundraise follows the company’s announcement of promising initial clinical data for its treatment for patients with advanced solid tumors.

3. Apreo Health, $130M, healthcare: Menlo Park, California-based Apreo Health, a clinical-stage medical device company developing a treatment for severe emphysema, landed $130 million in Series B funding. Bain Capital Life Sciences and Norwest Venture Partners led the financing, which will fund its next trials and early commercialization efforts.

4. BeatBread, $124M, financial services: BeatBread, a platform for independent musicians to make money from their work, raised $124 million in debt and equity funding. Citi Sprint led the financing for the 5-year-old company.

5. Decart, $100M, artificial intelligence: San Francisco-headquartered Decart, developer of an AI model focused on interactive experiences, reportedly closed on $100 million in a Series B funding round at a $3.1 billion valuation. Investors in the round included Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Zeev Ventures and Aleph.

6. (tied) Rillet, $70M, fintech: Fintech startup Rillet picked up $70 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq Capital. The Palo Alto, California-based company describes itself as an AI-native ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning software, built for CFOs and accounting teams at high-growth companies.

6. (tied) Chai Discovery, $70M, healthcare AI: Chai Discovery, a startup using AI to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules for drug research and development, secured $70 million in Series A funding. Menlo Ventures led the financing for the San Francisco-based company.

8. Stavtar Solutions, $55M, enterprise software: New York-based Stavtar Solutions, a provider of business spend management and expense allocation tools, raised $55 million in a Series A investment backed by Elephant.

9. Positive Development, $51.5M, healthcare: Positive Development, a provider of developmental therapy for autistic children and their families, closed on $51.5 million in Series C funding. B Capital, aMoon Fund and Flare Capital Partners led the financing for the McLean, Virginia-based company.

10. Human Interest, $50M, financial services: San Francisco-based Human Interest, a 401k retirement plan provider focused on smaller businesses, announced that Morgan Stanley Tactical Value has agreed to invest up to $50 million. The financing, revealed this week, is part of a previously announced Series E round.

Move follows surge in precious metal’s price after FT revealed US levy on imports

Donald Trump will issue an executive order “clarifying” the US’s stance on gold bar tariffs, after a ruling that a widely-traded form of the precious metal is subject to levies sent shockwaves through the bullion market.

“The White House intends to issue an executive order in the near future clarifying misinformation about the tariffing of gold bars and other speciality products,” a White House official said on Friday.

On Thursday, the Customs and Border Protection agency had published a ruling, which was first reported by the Financial Times, saying one-kilo and 100-ounce gold bars should be classified with a customs code that is subject to tariffs. Its decision stood in sharp contrast to a previous White House statement in April that bullion would be exempt from Trump’s levies.

Gold for December delivery dropped by 1 per cent to $3,460 per troy ounce on Friday after the FT reported on the White House’s plan to clarify its tariff. The precious metal had jumped to a record high earlier after the US blindsided the global bullion market by imposing tariffs on imports of one-kilo and 100-ounce bars — a staple in the global precious metals market.

The London Bullion Market Association, which represents large institutional gold traders and banks, said on Friday evening that it was “seeking clarification” from US authorities.

The US Comex is the world’s largest financial market for bullion, but to function efficiently the market relies on having unfettered access to the physical gold market centred on London — which would be threatened by any levies, according to market participants.

Many in the gold industry have questioned whether the CBP ruling, which was written in response to an inquiry from a Swiss refiner, could have been a bureaucratic mistake.

“The US has to decide if the White House was wrong in April, or if the CBP is wrong now,” said one executive.

Switzerland was dealt a particularly heavy blow as a result of the US’s tariffs decision, since the country is the world’s largest refining hub.

The tariff ruling would “negatively impact” the flow of physical gold around the world, noted the Swiss Association of Manufacturers and Traders in Precious Metals Association in a statement on Friday.

Trump reignited his global trade war earlier this week by reimposing his reciprocal tariffs on almost every US trading partner, pushing American import duties to their highest level in decades.

But the US president has also offered a host of exemptions to the levies, including to products such as pharmaceuticals or chips, that the US may apply separate tariffs to in future.

In April, the US issued further exemptions to a range of consumer electronics such as laptops, smartphones and earphones.

Trump has also signalled he may be willing to offer carve-outs for companies such as Apple that promise to make big investments in the US.

But the high volume of executive orders on trade issued by the White House in a short space of time has left many businesses seeking clarification over which products are hit and which are not.

The country’s makers of high-end timepieces should avoid the ‘horror scenario’ facing their fellow exporters

If there must be tariffs, luxury watches couldn’t be a better place to put them. Slapping hefty tariffs on Switzerland, therefore, home to elite brands such as Rolex and Patek Philippe and the source of $5.4bn of horological exports to the US last year, could be a masterstroke by President Donald Trump.

Swiss watches are well insulated from one of the main risks of tariffs: namely that as costs rise, demand falls, hurting both the companies themselves and the governments attempting to raise cash through the tax. With price tags that can run into tens of millions of dollars, high-end timepieces are a Veblen good. The more expensive they become, the more alluring. As the industry likes to say, those that can buy one, buy six.

For evidence of that axiom look no further than the wrist of Mark Zuckerberg. When he cast aside hoodies and nerdiness to reinvent himself as a man’s man, the founder of Facebook owner Meta did so by embracing jiu-jitsu and luxury watches. When he announced the end of Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme in January, he did so while flossing a $900,000 Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 watch.

A secondary benefit, albeit possibly an accidental one, is that tariffs on the most expensive accessories burnish the image of a president ostensibly focused on the everyman. Unlike, say, tariffs on Bangladesh — the origin of T-shirts that wind up in racks of affordable retailers — this is a tax that falls on those with means.

Watchmakers may thus be saved from the “horror scenario” — in the words of trade association Swissmem — faced by their fellow Swiss exporters. While carmakers and chipmakers rush to reshore to the US, the horologists can stay put, and not worry too much about reordering supply chains. That’s lucky: the artisanal industry has been solidly Swiss for nearly five centuries.

Swiss horologists are not entirely immune to the waxing ways of the world. The quartz crisis of the 1970s thrashed the industry. More recent challenges include a strong Swiss franc, rampant gold prices and a more general wilting across the luxury sector. 

Sales have yet to return to the peaks of the pandemic era, when holidays were cancelled, entertainment curtailed, and savings decanted into bling. Plenty of luxury watches are worth less than they were a year ago, according to industry tracker ChronoPulse, which tracks second-hand transactions.

But no one buys these for the short-term. Audemars Piguet debuted its inaugural Royal Oak watch at £2,850 in 1972, well above the average salary at the time; a new model released in 2021 retails at more than 50 times that. As investments go, that is streets ahead of inflation and even pips London property prices. Tariffs come and go, but prestige is timeless.

The Trump administration is helping put digital assets at the heart of the financial industry. The next crash will be very different.

The midsummer gathering in the White House complex would have been unthinkable last year.

Dozens of executives from crypto firms, including Coinbase Global, Kraken, and Ripple Labs, on July 30 piled into the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, an ornate former library adorned with French and Italian marble panels.

During President Joe Biden’s administration, many—if not most—of the companies represented had either been sued by securities regulators or were under investigation. Now, members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet and leadership team took turns extolling a newly released 160-page White House road map for embedding crypto into Americans’ everyday lives.

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“It’s a pretty wild feeling to see so many people celebrating what this administration is doing, when 12 months ago the same individuals were in literal fear of these agencies,” said one crypto executive who attended the White House event. “We’re winning.”

The Trump administration’s about-face on crypto has led some mainstream financial institutions to embrace what was once a fringe investment. Banks that were all but prohibited by regulators from doing business with digital-asset firms are now being encouraged to dive in. Companies that securities regulators sued are now being courted to implant themselves into the systems Americans use to pay the mortgage or buy groceries.

The last time crypto suffered a major crash—leading to the failure of crypto exchange FTX in 2022—there was virtually no effect on the economy or wider financial system. The next time, that’s unlikely to be the case.

“All the guardrails are being removed at once,” says Lee Reiners, a fellow at the Duke Financial Economics Center. “There will be another downturn, and when it happens, the pain will be acute.”

Trump administration officials say cryptocurrencies and blockchains could drive innovations that help investors and propel the U.S. economy. Supporting the industry will keep new crypto jobs in the U.S., they say. A crypto transition is inevitable, they say, and Americans should benefit.

Crypto prices have soared since Trump’s election. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, has risen 71% to $116,600, while Ether, the second-largest, is up 56%. The boost is also helping trading platforms like Coinbase, which is up 50% to $294 a share, and Robinhood Markets, which has more than tripled to $101.

The Trump administration’s regulatory shift has made some analysts ebullient. “As Bitcoin believers, this gives us goosebumps seeing how far the space has come,” wrote Cantor Fitzgerald analysts in July, pointing to a portion of the White House report.

Crypto’s power in Washington is new. Trump in his first term said crypto was “based on thin air,” and after leaving office in 2021 told Fox Business that it seemed “like a scam.” Those views changed abruptly in 2022, after Trump made millions of dollars off a type of crypto called nonfungible tokens. Those “Trump Digital Trading Cards,” which depicted the then-former president as a superhero, cowboy, and other characters, sold for $99 each. His family helped launch its own crypto businesses, including World Liberty Financial, which issues tokens and is creating a crypto borrowing and lending platform. The Trump Media and Technology Group, known by its ticker DJT, in August disclosed it owns $2 billion in Bitcoin and Bitcoin-tied securities. The Trump family is the company’s largest shareholder.

Industry executives promised Trump before the election that they could bring in millions of dollars in campaign donations, and Trump began to openly promote himself as the crypto president, making himself the first major-party nominee to take Bitcoin donations. The industry became one of the biggest spenders in the 2024 campaign, helping to elect not just Trump but also dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers who promised to push pro-industry regulations.

The result has far exceeded expectations. Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission in the administration’s opening weeks dropped cases and investigations against Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood, among others, for allegedly violating securities laws, which the companies had denied. Perhaps most remarkably, the SEC in May tried to reverse an injunction and reduce a penalty it had already won in court against Ripple for selling unregistered securities. The judge in that case rejected the move.

But the Trump administration, with help from Congress, hasn’t simply pulled back on Biden-era prosecutions. It’s actively encouraging traditional financial institutions to become more involved in crypto.

In April, banking regulators withdrew guidance issued under Biden that essentially required banks to seek permission before embarking on crypto-related business, like custodying digital assets. They also encouraged banks to do more business with digital-asset firms, which had said they’d been unfairly shut out of basic banking services during the Biden administration.

Banks are moving quickly. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser on the company earnings calls in July said they’re considering launching “stablecoins,” a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who in the past has called Bitcoin a “Ponzi scheme,” said he wants his bank to be “a player.” Some banks have begun to offer loans to customers using Bitcoin exchange-traded funds as collateral.

The crypto push could get supercharged over the coming months. Trump in July signed into law a bill regulating stablecoins. The law requires the coins to be backed by safe assets such as Treasury bills, bank deposits, and money-market mutual funds.

One concern is that the law gives the go-ahead for stablecoins to be widely used in payments, even though their recent history suggests they may be riskier than other payment methods, says Amanda Fischer, who served as chief of staff for Biden SEC Chair Gary Gensler.

In 2023, the value of Circle Internet Group’s USDC, the biggest U.S.-based stablecoin, dropped as low as 88 cents on the dollar on crypto exchanges after the company revealed that 8% of its reserves were locked up in Silicon Valley Bank, which failed that spring. The Biden administration agreed to bail out uninsured depositors, and the token recovered.

The consequences could have been much more dire if Americans had widely used the coin for payments, says Fischer, who is now policy director at Better Markets, a group that advocates for tighter financial regulation. If someone had tried to use USDC to pay for groceries when it traded below $1, for example, the store would have had to decide whether to trust that they would eventually be able to redeem it at face value or to force the customer to take a haircut.

“If you run a local mom-and-pop convenience store, are you supposed to keep a currency conversion chart on the wall, depending on what stablecoin someone uses?” asks Fischer. If a stablecoin lost its value, “there would be tremendous pressure on the government to bail it out.”

If stablecoins became large enough and destabilized, a run could even put pressure on Treasuries, as investors raced to cash out, Fischer says.

Circle executives have said that though the price of USDC fell on exchanges during the 2023 episode, the company has never failed to redeem USDC for a dollar. Its reserves now are housed in a government money market fund that holds Treasuries, Treasury repurchase agreements, and cash, as well as at banks.

Some financial experts have made the argument that regulators’ attempts to discourage banks from doing business with digital-asset firms in itself caused the problem. After regulators’ warnings, only a handful of banks were willing to accept crypto business, concentrating risk and making them susceptible to failure when the industry collapsed.

The Trump administration has also begun to remove the Biden-era restraints keeping crypto out of many Americans’ retirement savings accounts. In 2022, the Labor Department issued guidance warning companies that it would have “serious concerns” about plans that offered investments tied to cryptocurrencies, suggesting it would breach companies’ fiduciary duty. Trump’s Labor Department rescinded that guidance in May.

On Thursday, Trump signed an order directing the Labor Department and SEC to reexamine their guidance and rules with an eye toward easing access to crypto and other alternative assets in 401(k) plans.

The next month, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte ordered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to study allowing crypto assets to count toward home borrowers’ assets without having to convert them into cash. A group of Democratic senators wrote Pulte a letter arguing the move “could pose risks to the stability of the housing market and the financial system.”

Though Fannie and Freddie consider other volatile assets, like stocks, in underwriting a mortgage, the senators argued that the cryptocurrency market’s historic volatility and relative illiquidity, compared with the stock market, made it less likely that a borrower could quickly convert to cash at a good price to stave off a default.

Some crypto skeptics say that the U.S. has seen such deregulatory pushes before, with dire consequences. In 2000, Congress passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The law essentially prevented the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from overseeing over-the-counter derivatives, a move the White House supported to ensure that novel business remained in the U.S. Those derivatives, which included credit-default swaps, contributed significantly to the 2007-09 financial crisis.

“Crypto is sold as the future, but the policies backing it are in many ways taking us back to the past,” says Brookings Institution fellow Tonantzin Carmona. “We’re embedding something that is poorly understood into our financial system.”

The blockchain industry’s next target could be the stock market itself. The SEC says it’s exploring ways to allow companies to quickly begin offering “tokenized securities”—essentially stocks that trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on blockchains.

Kraken in May said it would begin offering tokenized stocks of companies including Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia to investors outside the U.S. Coinbase has said the SEC should offer regulatory relief, allowing it and other exchanges to offer tokenized securities quickly. In addition to round-the-clock trading, crypto executives say the tokens would reduce trading costs and enable faster settlement.

The request set off alarm bells at trade groups representing traditional finance firms, which said tokenized stocks could fragment the equities markets and circumvent securities rules that traditional players have to follow.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group including broker-dealers and investment managers, said the crypto firms’ moves raise “fundamental questions as to how investors would be protected” in a letter to the SEC this summer.

The Healthy Markets Association, a trade group including major investors such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, compared exempting tokenized securities from some regulations to the lack of rules for equity derivatives that helped lead to the collapse of family office Archegos Capital Management and to the “flash crash” in 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average collapsed 9% within minutes before recovering.

“It is ludicrous to have highly complex rules regulating order submissions, trade increments, fees, reporting, and more in one set of financial products, and then create a parallel universe to trade economically equivalent financial products without those same sets of protections for the integrity and stability of the markets,” wrote Healthy Markets CEO Tyler Gellasch.

A Kraken spokesperson said the company supported the SEC’s efforts exploring tokenization.

Industry executives and other supporters say crypto’s risks to the financial system are overblown and that blockchain technology could bring Americans lower costs, greater convenience, and economic growth, as companies are encouraged to come to the U.S. rather than build in other countries.

Coinbase in submissions to the SEC has said tokenization could lower transaction costs, increase transparency, and reduce trade-execution risk.

“If you look at every financial crisis we’ve experienced in the U.S. in recent memory, it’s largely been caused by two things: leverage and opacity,” says Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal. “Crypto has nothing to do with either of those things.”

Grewal notes that past crypto crashes have seen the value of Bitcoin and Ether drop by more than 80%. “In each case, no government intervention was required. There was not a single bailout required by anybody,” he says.

The White House and some lawmakers also say that it is disingenuous to argue that putting in place crypto-specific regulations, where there previously had been none, will increase risks.

One White House official in an interview with Barron’s pointed to the stablecoin law. The official notes that issuers will now have to hold 1-to-1 backing, be subject to audits, and meet anti-money-laundering standards. “A lot of the tech in this space is going to undergird what the new financial system looks like,” the official says. “What’s the alternative? We just don’t put in protections for consumers?”

The Trump administration isn’t nearly done with its pro-crypto push. The 160-page plan released at the White House event said the Commodity Futures Trading Commission should consider guidance on how digital assets can be used as collateral for derivatives, and for the CFTC and SEC to consider regulatory sandboxes to let crypto firms test new products without being subject to the full weight of regulations. The day after the report’s release, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said he’d launch an agencywide effort to “enable America’s financial markets to move on-chain.”

“If you’re tired of winning, hang in there, because we’re not done winning yet,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the crypto executives.

The stock looks like a cheap play on Paramount’s revival under new CEO David Ellison.

Skydance Media has completed its purchase of Paramount, and now David Ellison, the son of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, has a chance to do what once seemed impossible—revive the ailing media company. Investors might want to consider going along for the ride.

Paramount’s stock has been a disaster over the past decade. Shares have dropped 75%, weighed down by legacy media and all of its problems—cord-cutting, atrophying cable networks, and a tough advertising environment. Along the way it burned investors including Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway may have taken a 50% hit on an original $3 billion position bought in 2022 at about $30 a share and sold two years later. “I was 100% responsible for the Paramount decision…we lost quite a bit of money,” Buffett said at the 2024 Berkshire annual meeting.

But a new era is coming with David Ellison and his family. The new company, called Paramount, a Skydance Corporation, has a set of high-profile assets, led by the CBS TV network; a number of CBS stations; the Paramount movie studio; a handful of cable networks including MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central; and the streaming platform Paramount+, and Ellison appears to have the will and the cash to make a real go of it. Buying Paramount stock now means investing alongside one of the world’s richest families in a business that Ellison is determined to make work.

“Ellison appears to be positioning the company to meaningfully invest for the future,” wrote Richard Greenfield, the media analyst at Lightshed Partners.

There wasn’t a lot to like about the deal that merged Paramount and Skydance. The holders of the publicly traded Paramount Class B shares got cashed out of about half their stock at $15 a share and got stock in new Paramount on a share-for-share basis for the other 50% of their holdings. The Redstone family, which controlled Paramount via voting A shares, got cashed out at a big premium to B holders, as did public holders of the A stock. A fairer deal would have paid all holders equally, as media mogul John Malone has done in recent years in deals in which he held supervoting stock.

Paramount also appeared to overpay for Skydance, a small player in the entertainment business. It’s projected to have about $2.3 billion in revenue this year, against $28 billion for Paramount, and $275 million of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, versus more than $3 billion for Paramount, based on financial projections last year. Paramount bought Skydance as part of the transaction, paying more than $3 billion in stock, a relatively high price.

There are now about one billion shares outstanding, up from about 650 million before the deal, and public investors own about 300 million of them. The market value of the company is $11 billion, plus some $10 billion of net debt. The complex structure of the deal gave Skydance a 70% economic stake in Paramount and 100% voting control.

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The fact that the deal only got a regulatory green light after CBS made a controversial settlement in July with President Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes episode that involved a $16 million payment to Trump’s future presidential library also left a bad taste in some investors’ mouths. The shares were down 19% this past week to $10.51, not far above the 52-week low of $10.

That is all in the past—and there’s a lot to like about the company now that the deal is done. David Ellison, 42, an accomplished pilot and film buff, is the new CEO. The company, which has a new ticker symbol, PSKY, also gets the deep pockets of the Ellison family, which controls Skydance. Larry Ellison’s net worth—mostly Oracle stock—has been estimated by Bloomberg at $300 billion, second only to Elon Musk.

David Ellison might be the right leader at the right time. Despite his lack of experience running a company of Paramount’s size, he brings an outsider’s perspective and tech sensibility to an industry that has long been badly run by overpaid veterans who let Netflix come to dominate the business. And he seems to have a strong vision for where he wants the company to go. In a letter posted on Thursday when the deal closed, Ellison vowed to make Paramount into a “leaner, faster, smarter and more agile company.”

When the deal was announced last July, Paramount said it aimed to cut costs by $2 billion annually, and Ellison wrote on Thursday that he had “greater confidence” in the company’s ability to “not only achieve—but meaningfully exceed” that target. Paramount recently signaled a willingness to cut costs by canceling the Stephen Colbert late-night show next year and saving a reported $40 million annually. (Some observers blamed politics for the cancellation.)

But it isn’t all about cost-cutting. There has been speculation that Ellison might spin off the cable networks, replicating Warner Bros. Discovery’s strategy, or merge them with another company’s cable properties. Another option is to simply harvest the free cash flow and reinvest it elsewhere in the company. Paramount could also consider a sale of the company’s valuable group of 14 CBS TV stations, including flagships in New York and Los Angeles.

Judging from Ellison’s letter, he seems inclined to double down rather than pare back the asset base. And with full control, so much money behind him, and a still highly profitable Paramount to run, Ellison is under no pressure to sell anything. Instead, he has the leeway to execute his strategy as he sees fit. Ellison also said Paramount would “supercharge” creative engines while “scaling” the flagship streaming service Paramount+ and “increasing investment in premium, exclusive content.”

That includes potential investments in Paramount+, which is undersized relative to rivals even with some 78 million subscribers. The service’s strategy has been to focus on fewer, high-quality shows like Landman, unlike Netflix, which produces an enormous amount of content. And Lightshed’s Greenfield sees potentially more investing in sports, where CBS already has a big commitment to the National Football League. Thankfully, the Ellisons have the money to make it work.

“‘While Paramount and its predecessors were always owner-controlled, Ellison brings one of the richest families in the world into the equation and more importantly, an appreciation that technology is just as important as content,” Greenfield wrote.

Wall Street still needs to be persuaded. Just three out of 25 analysts covering Paramount stock rate it a Buy, with about 10 outright Sells, according to Bloomberg, making Paramount a contrarian bet in an out-of-favor industry.

Investors will be looking for more clarity on the Ellison playbook and financials in the coming weeks because the company hasn’t updated its guidance since last summer, when it projected $4.1 billion of operating income in 2026 and $4.5 billion in 2027. Paramount had paid a dividend of about 2%, but the company hasn’t set a new dividend policy yet.

Ultimately, the stock represents a cheap play on Paramount’s revival under Ellison. The company is valued at about six times annualized operating income of about $3.5 billion in the first six months of 2025—an inexpensive valuation in an admittedly low-valued industry. The stock even looks like it has a chance to stay in the S&P 500 index.

It’s even possible that the Ellison family could decide to buy out the public shareholders: The public float in Paramount totaled just over $3 billion, only about 1% of the Ellison family’s reported net worth.

With so many ways to make Paramount work, it’s a good time to make a bet on the stock.

How Quantum Computing Could Upend Bitcoin

Hackers stand to gain “a superpower.” Will the crypto industry be ready?

Two of this century’s breakthrough technologies are on a collision course. Investors in Bitcoin should pay attention.

Experts say that ultrapowerful quantum computers could eventually crack the security codes of blockchain, the underlying technology for Bitcoin. That would be a hacker’s dream. And it could deal a severe blow to investors’ trust in the $2 trillion-plus market for the leading cryptocurrency.

Roughly a quarter of all Bitcoins are now protected with algorithms that could be cracked by quantum computers in five or 10 years, Gartner analyst Avivah Litan tells Barron’s. Those are mostly older Bitcoins housed in digital vaults, or wallets, that date back as far as 15 years.

As quantum computing keeps advancing, the damage could spread to newer wallets, and then to the market’s broader structure. The computers “might eventually become so fast that they will undermine the Bitcoin transaction process,” experts at Deloitte have written. Conceivably, hackers could start rewriting the history of trades.

The crypto industry knows about these risks and is quietly preparing to defend itself.

“There are very strong incentives to protect the value in Bitcoin’s network and drive the development of quantum-resistant technology,” Litan says. Ultimately, the industry’s best weapon for the fight could prove to be quantum computing itself. Some firms are already working on that.

The big, unanswerable question is how quickly quantum develops. That is, how soon might the security features of blockchain meet their match? Will the industry finish its preparations in time?

Of the two technologies, blockchain is the easier to understand. It is essentially a digital record-keeping system consisting of “blocks,” each containing details on validated transactions. Each time an entry is created and authenticated, a block is added. It is the beating heart of the Bitcoin market.

The concept of a blockchain has existed since the 1990s, when computer scientists Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta proposed the first system to timestamp data using cryptography. In October 2008, a mysterious, faceless developer (or developers) going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper detailing a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that would become the prototype for the blockchain network.

As it happens, Nakamoto’s holdings—which the most bombastic estimates place at 1.1 million Bitcoins, or some $128 billion—could be vulnerable to the first wave of any quantum-based attacks. That’s because the assets are believed to have been tucked away since 2010 in the kind of older, digital vaults considered to be most at risk.

Quantum computing, under development since the 1980s, is derived from quantum mechanics. And what is that, exactly? The pioneering physicist Richard Feynman may have put it best: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

The remark, part of a lecture at Cornell University in 1964, drew chuckles from the audience, but the sentiment still rings true today, even as hype about the technology explodes on Wall Street. A collection of small, volatile quantum-computing stocks have become some of investors’ favorite speculative playthings.

In general, quantum computing aims to take traditional computing to an entirely new level. It seeks to solve big, complex statistical problems by examining large numbers of variables at the same time.

A typical quantum system consists of a bulky, refrigerator-like shell encasing a nest of hardware. At its core sits a quantum processor, usually no bigger than a thumbnail. Information is encoded by quantum bits, or “qubits,” which are created by manipulating and measuring subatomic particles like electrons, photons, and ions.

Because qubits allow these particles to exist in multiple states at once, quantum computers can perform calculations outside the reach of traditional machines. Theoretically, they can be used for everything from unsnarling a city’s traffic jams to discovering new treatments for cancer. And for cracking cryptographic algorithms.

“That is one of the cases where the features of quantum mechanics are used to do things that are very hard or too time-intensive—and basically impossible—otherwise,” says Thomas Ehmer, co-founder of the Quantum Interest Group at Merck KGaA.

To attackers, it’s the “holy grail,” Ehmer says. Quantum computers, he adds, could work in a “hyper-efficient” way to peel away the layers of numbers that form the core of blockchain encryption.

For most cryptocurrencies, that core is based on pairs of keys—a public key and a private key, which are mathematically linked. The public key is used for encryption, or scrambling data to safeguard it from prying eyes, while the private key is used for decryption, or converting it back into a readable format.

Think of a public key like an email address or a username. Anyone can view and share it, and anyone can use it to encrypt data. However, only the holders of the corresponding private key can decrypt the data. The security of encryption relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, or breaking a number into smaller prime numbers that, when multiplied together, equal the larger number. Current technology is unable to do that, but a fully realized quantum computer theoretically could, and in surprisingly short time.

“It’s like having a superpower that lets you quickly pick a lock that would take a normal person millions of years to even attempt,” Ehmer says.

There have already been attempts to crack the code. In a 2024 paper, Chinese scientists claimed they had used a system from D-Wave Quantum to break RSA encryptions, which are used in online banking transactions and VPN connections. The experiment, however, was conducted on a relatively small scale and wasn’t considered a major advance.

Still, fear is clearly seeping into the crypto industry’s consciousness. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, warned of the advent of more powerful computers when it prepared to launch a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund in 2024. The firm noted in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that “quantum computing could result in the cryptography underlying the Bitcoin network becoming ineffective, which, if realized, could compromise the security of the Bitcoin network” and lead to losses for shareholders. Similar language appears in BlackRock’s filings as far back as 2023.

Just how real is the risk? Some three-quarters of Bitcoins have an additional layer of cryptography that keeps them out of imminent danger. However, the threat is nothing to scoff at, according to Michael Osborne, chief technology officer at IBM Quantum Safe.

“Assets can be stolen from existing wallets if fairly simple actions are not taken to protect them,” Osborne says. The most immediate fix may be to move funds from old or reused addresses to new wallets that don’t have their public keys exposed, in anticipation of the day quantum computers gain the ability to determine a private key using a public key.

As quantum develops in the coming years, protective measures may well become harder to devise. Hackers could gain the tools to disrupt Bitcoin mining and the basic operations of the market, such as rewriting transaction history. Gartner’s Litan says that some experts place the odds of this happening at 50% by 2037.

“There is strong consensus in the Bitcoin community that preparation now is essential to prevent future catastrophe, though some view the threat as overhyped,” Litan says.

No matter the difference of opinions, developers aren’t sitting idly by. Rather, they have kicked off a digital arms race even before the true conflict has begun.

“It’s pretty widely known that the bad actors will try to use quantum computers to break classical encryption,” Quantinuum CEO Rajeeb Hazra tells Barron’s. “But that same tool can also be used to create better algorithms.”

The child of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and a United Kingdom–based start-up, Quantinuum was created through a merger in 2021. The firm received an initial investment of $300 million from Honeywell International, and released its first product—a random-number generator with cybersecurity applications—in December of that year.

In March 2025, Quantinuum teamed up with researchers at JPMorgan Chase for an experiment demonstrating how a quantum computer could best a classical machine at a random-number-generation problem. As random numbers are used in everything from computer simulations to cryptography, the study had important real-world implications.

“Forever the race will remain, right?” Hazra says with a chuckle. “We see it in the classical world, and we’ll see it taken to the next level with quantum.”

Researchers at D-Wave Quantum have approached the challenge by developing a blockchain architecture that runs on quantum computers. “The distributed nature of the Bitcoin network is based on a bunch of miners collaborating and each doing a hard cryptographic puzzle, which requires a lot of classical computational power,” explains Trevor Lanting, D-Wave’s chief development officer.

Blockchains rely on hashing, a mathematical function that acts like a digital fingerprint by converting an input into a string of characters. Hashing is used to encrypt transactions, and “proof of work” algorithms validate those transactions. D-Wave aims to replace this process with a quantum proof of work, which the company describes as a new way to securely and efficiently create hashes.

In a preprint submitted to research-sharing platform arXiv in March, scientists showed how they had tested a prototype blockchain on four D-Wave processors scattered across North America, “demonstrating stable operation across hundreds of thousands of quantum hashing operations.”

The race is far from over. Insights from IBM suggest cryptographically relevant quantum computers could arrive in a decade, while some organizations anticipate it may take up to 12 years to become quantum-resistant.

There’s an expression in the crypto community that might be appropriate here: “HODL,” or hold on for dear life.

European defense stocks are taking a breather. The Select Stoxx Europe Aerospace & Defense exchange-traded fund has plateaued for the past two months, after surging by two-thirds from January to June.

No wonder. Germany’s Rheinmetall, the sector darling, now boasts a trailing price/earnings ratio around 95, compared with 57 for Nvidia. European arms makers in aggregate trade at a one-third premium to U.S. peers, says Loredana Muharremi, the analyst covering the space for Morningstar. “The majority of European spending increases has been anticipated in market forecasts,” she says.

Questions still linger over that anticipated Old World arms bonanza, says Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the United Kingdom’s Royal United Services Institute. “The industry needs to believe that the interest is neither transitory nor likely to be spent outside Europe,” he notes.

Northern Europe, led by Germany and the Nordics, should march steadily toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s new goal of spending 3.5% of gross domestic product on defense, predicts Camille Grand, a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. The Mediterranean rim not so much. “Italy, Spain, and Portugal will probably try to evade their commitments,” he says.

Buying European could prove challenging in some of the sexier, and more expensive, weapons systems. U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets and Patriot air defense systems are best in their class globally.

Europe holds its own on the ground and at sea, though, with Germany signaling big spending on Euro-made Boxer and Patria armored vehicles, along with Leopard tanks. Rheinmetall, spurred by Ukrainian demand, now makes more 155-mm artillery shells than the U.S. “The U.S. share in the air domain is massive,” Grand says. “The land domain benefits German industry.”

Marquee U.S. systems aren’t necessarily all American, Muharremi adds. Six European companies are “tier one” contractors on the F-35, including electronics from BAE Systems and Italy’s Leonardo, and a vertical takeoff mechanism from Rolls-Royce Holdings. Rheinmetall lately signed a joint venture with U.S. champion Lockheed Martin to produce ATACMS and Hellfire missiles on the Continent.

Europe’s most intractable problem in defense is its most intractable problem elsewhere: national governments pursuing their own interests. Six European nations can manufacture arms, Muharremi says. Each one steers spending toward its national champions: Dassault and Thales in France, Saab in Sweden, and so on.

The result is a hodgepodge of 179 weapons systems supplying European militaries, compared with 33 in the U.S., where the top four contractors soak up more than half of Pentagon procurement, according to Morningstar research. “Joint procurement will be the key to expanding Europe’s defense base,” Muharremi says.

Some pan-European projects are flourishing. MBDA—a joint venture of French-based Airbus, BAE, and Leonardo—has a seven-year backlog for its missiles, including the Storm Shadow deployed to Ukraine, Muharremi says.

She still sees value in European defense names, eventually. “If you look out three years, they are still cheap compared with U.S. counterparts,” she argues.

Despite foot-dragging in some capitals, Grand sees European military spending climbing by as much as 200 billion euros ($233 billion) annually, or 45%, “in the coming years.”

Rheinmetall is Morningstar’s top pick, even at nosebleed valuations. “They are the top contractor to Germany, which is about to become the world’s No. 3 defense spender,” Muharremi reasons. She’s also keen on Leonardo as a top name in electronic warfare.

The history of Lifeway Foods seemed straight out of the American dream before its founding family started feuding.

Now, the spat could propel the American kefir maker into the arms of one of the world’s biggest food companies: Danone. The French conglomerate has owned more than a fifth of Lifeway shares since 1999, and made two offers to purchase the company last year. Lifeway rejected both.

Danone is trying to buy Lifeway once again. The new takeover bid comes with a catch: If the two companies don’t reach agreement on a sale, Danone plans to team up with the CEO’s brother and mother to oust the entire Lifeway board.

Family management can be a stabilizing force—or a destabilizing force. Lifeway is in play because one group of family members is on the outs with another. The squabble may turn the top U.S. kefir maker from an independent business to another brand in Danone’s portfolio.

Lifeway’s founding family, who together own more than 40% of shares, has been feuding for years. The battle pits CEO Julie Smolyansky, 50, against her mother, Ludmila—usually called Lucy—and her younger brother Edward, whom the company fired in 2022. Edward and Lucy have mounted several proxy fights since, seeking to remove Julie and gain control of the business.

The Morton Grove, Ill.–based company today claims 95% of the U.S. kefir market that it helped create. Sales nearly doubled in the past five years to $186.8 million in 2024, as more consumers turn to protein- and probiotic-rich foods.

Lucy and Michael Smolyansky, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, began selling kefir—a tangy, cultured dairy drink—in the 1980s and took Lifeway public in 1988. When Michael died in 2002, the couple’s daughter, Julie, took the reins as chief executive, and she still runs it.

Signs of family friction emerged in January 2022. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that month, Lifeway stated that Edward, then chief operating officer, had left the company and that Lucy’s $500,000-a-year consulting agreement had been terminated.

The company didn’t provide more details. But in a 2025 lawsuit claiming that Edward had induced Lucy to distribute their father’s shares in the company unequally, Julie claimed that Lifeway had hired a law firm to investigate “allegations of inappropriate conduct involving Edward.” In the same Cook County, Ill., circuit court filing, she alleged that Edward appeared intoxicated at a 2021 board meeting, which led to a leave of absence and eventual termination.

Edward, now 45, didn’t comment on the lawsuit but denied the allegations of inappropriate conduct and intoxication in an interview with Barron’s, and said the investigation was neither independent nor thorough. He did confirm he had been fired.

“I was a whistle-blower,” Edward explained. “I was upsetting the apple cart.”

Within months of their departure from Lifeway, the mother and son began a campaign to oust the board, install themselves, and change the company’s strategic direction. At the time, Lucy and Edward together owned about 38% of Lifeway shares, which were trading at less than $6 apiece, according to SEC filings.

The two sides reached a truce in the summer of 2022, with Lifeway agreeing to explore unspecified “strategic alternatives” and appoint Lucy to the board. But in February 2023, Lucy and Edward alleged that Lifeway had breached the agreement by failing to properly review strategic alternatives like selling the company.

Two-plus years of legal battles and personal barbs have followed. There have been five lawsuits between family members or the company, ranging from trade secrets disputes to tortious interference cases. A Cook County Circuit Court issued a protective order in 2024 that prohibits Edward from contacting his sister Julie or her family.

“I actually don’t want her contacting me for the rest of my life, not the other way around,” Edward told Barron’s. He sought his own 2024 restraining order against his sister, though it was voluntarily dismissed earlier this year in a private settlement agreement between the two parties that also saw Julie’s restraining order extended, records show.

Compensation is a longtime issue at Lifeway. After just 52.5% of shareholders approved the company’s pay advisory policies in 2019, Lifeway created a compensation committee to improve oversight of executive pay and reduced Lucy and Edward’s compensation packages. Edward then raised concerns when the board granted Julie a $2 million retention bonus last year. The award vests quarterly, and Julie is obligated to repay unvested portions if she leaves Lifeway.

Retention bonuses aren’t standard practice, said R.J. Bannister of Farient Advisors, an executive compensation consulting firm. Boards typically use them to address a particular issue, such as when there’s a risk of retirement and no succession plan, he added.

In his activist campaigns, Edward also has attacked the role of Julie’s husband, Jason Burdeen, who serves as her chief of staff. The board’s compensation committee granted Burdeen a pay package worth $313,800 last year.

Burdeen told Barron’s that he began at Lifeway a decade ago at Edward’s request, first on a volunteer basis, and that his pay receives scrutiny during compensation reviews due to his relationship with Julie.

Lifeway’s financial results are also a matter of contention. Net sales have climbed in each of the past five years, nearly doubling from $93.7 million in 2019 to $186.8 million in 2024. The company posted net losses in 2017 and 2018, but has been profitable since.

In 2024, it posted net income of $9 million and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda, of $17.2 million. Management said it was on track to deliver Ebitda of $45 million to $50 million by 2027, which would require both continued rapid revenue growth and margin expansion.

Edward contends that Lifeway can do better.

“If someone’s measure of success is 10% growth, then I think that you’re selling yourself short,” Edward said.

Others disagree. The company’s results don’t seem to support Edward and Lucy’s accusations of sloppy management and poor governance, said Ben Klieve, an analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets. Instead, Klieve sees “relatively stable margins and a flawless balance sheet.”

For their part, Julie Smolyansky and Burdeen think Edward’s crusade to remake Lifeway’s leadership is about revenge and personal resentments, rather than a good-faith effort to improve shareholder value.

“He was terminated from a company that his father founded, so it’s a very heavy burden for him to carry,” Burdeen said of Edward Smolyansky. “It would be incredibly hard for anybody to accept.”

Julie, meanwhile, told Barron’s she was proud of the way the company and she as an executive have withstood the crisis within her family.

Last September, Julie received a letter from the North American subsidiary of France’s Danone.

Danone made an all-cash offer to acquire Lifeway for $25 a share. The price represented a 59% premium to the stock’s three-month average price before the bid. Lifeway’s board turned it down. When Danone bumped its bid to $27 a share, Lifeway again declined, saying the price undervalued the business. Shares rose to about $25 after news of the first bid became public, and the price has traded around that level since then. Edward believes that the board should have accepted the offers.

Lifeway’s dominance of the kefir market and the trendiness of the product merit a premium valuation, said Klieve. He thinks the company could fetch more than $27 a share. Julie, too, said current management can take the company even further on its own.

“There is so much incredible buzz around Lifeway,” the CEO said.

A 1999 shareholder agreement gave Danone a large stake in Lifeway—currently about 23%—plus certain antidilution and governance powers. Most notably, the French outfit has the ability to block Lifeway’s board from issuing additional shares to Julie, which it had exercised in past years when the board had asked to grant more shares to her.

Danone declined to comment for this article.

In addition to rejecting Danone’s acquisition bids, Lifeway’s attorneys sent Danone a letter last November calling the 1999 agreement anticompetitive and void because it wasn’t unanimously approved by all shareholders. The next month, the board granted Julie a backlog of 283,337 shares—worth about $6.5 million at the time—without the French company’s permission.

“The board has seemingly greenlit a value-destroying gifting program for the CEO in blatant violation of the Shareholder Agreement,” wrote Shane Grant, then Danone’s deputy group CEO, in a letter to the Lifeway board after Julie’s share issuance became public on Dec. 23. “Having ignored a 25-year-old contract for Ms. Smolyansky’s personal benefit, further litigation to the detriment of the other shareholders is forthcoming.”

Danone sued Lifeway and each of its board members in March for breach of fiduciary duty for issuing the shares to Julie. Lifeway countersued.

After Lifeway rejected Danone’s offers, Edward resumed his activist campaign. He and Lucy submitted a consent statement to the SEC last month asking for shareholder approval to—among other things—remove the board and install themselves and a slate of other candidates. The vote, which Lifeway contended was unlawful, was scheduled to end on Aug. 1.

Then, Danone swooped in.

On the final day of voting, the French company revealed that it had entered into a confidentiality agreement with Lifeway “to facilitate Danone’s further review of a potential acquisition transaction.” Lifeway’s representatives had initiated discussions in June to “reset” the relationship and begin acquisition negotiations, Danone’s SEC filing said.

The companies have until Sept. 15 to reach a deal, with the potential for a one-week extension. The pact restricts Danone’s ability to remove Lifeway board members or participate in activist efforts. But the French giant still holds all of the cards.

Danone said in the SEC filing that it currently intends to vote in favor of Lucy and Edward’s proposal to replace the board if it can’t agree to an acquisition by the Sept. 15 deadline. And combined with Lucy and Edward, who calculate they together control about 23% of voting shares, Danone could get the activist effort close to the 50% threshold.

Edward told Barron’s he now plans to leave open the consent statement, which previously had been scheduled to close on Aug. 1. He added that he was pleased that it appeared Danone would support his effort.

The situation puts Julie and Lifeway’s directors in an unenviable position. Play hardball with Danone in negotiations and they risk getting voted out of the boardroom. Allow Danone to dictate terms and they may not get a premium for the company.

“Lifeway’s Board of Directors has acted and will continue to act in the best interests of its shareholders, including a sale of the company at a price that reflects a fair value of our business and brand,” Julie Smolyansky said in a statement to Barron’s.

However the saga ends, Lifeway has become a case study in the pitfalls of a family business. Some families make it work, but others descend into chaos when emotions run hot and the lines between work and family blur. Put millions of dollars and a multinational investor in the mix and things only get more complicated.

In all likelihood, Lifeway will emerge from the past few years intact—even if part of a conglomerate. The same can’t be said of the Smolyansky family.

“It’s so horrible and unfortunate that it came to this,” Burdeen said. “We were a very close family.”