Judith Murphy

Judith Murphy is a financial journalist and market analyst covering AI, technology stocks, and emerging market trends. She has contributed to multiple financial publications and brings a data-driven approach to her coverage of the technology sector and its impact on global markets.

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Judith Murphy · Jul 10, 2026 · 1:07 AM

World Prediction Market Abandons Solana for Robinhood Chain After One Week

World, the Chainlink-powered prediction market that launched inside Phantom wallet on Solana on July 1, announced on July 8 it is migrating to Robinhood Chain instead. The trade swaps Solana's crypto-native traders for Robinhood's roughly 28 million mostly retail customers, and it's left some users accusing the project of using Solana's launch hype before moving on.

Judith Murphy · Jul 9, 2026 · 8:42 PM

Mercor's Revenue Hit $2 Billion in June and the AI Data Race Isn't Slowing

Mercor's revenue hit $2 billion in June, just four months after crossing $1 billion, extending a run that made its three 22-year-old founders the youngest self-made billionaires on record. As rivals Surge AI and Scale AI get priced at $15 billion and $29 billion, a public fight between Mercor's CEO and Sequoia Capital is raising questions about how those valuations actually get set.

Judith Murphy · Jul 9, 2026 · 9:55 AM

Zhipu raises $4 billion in Hong Kong days after its stock surged nearly 1,500 percent

Zhipu priced a $4 billion Hong Kong share placement at a 13 percent discount on July 8, and the stock still jumped 22 percent the next day. The raise, six times the size of its January IPO, shows how much cash Chinese AI labs are burning to keep pace with DeepSeek and Alibaba.

Judith Murphy · Jul 9, 2026 · 1:03 AM

xAI Launches Grok 4.5 With Pricing Built to Undercut Anthropic's Opus 4.8

xAI is pushing Grok 4.5 to the public a day after Musk pitched it as an Opus-class model at a fraction of Anthropic's price, built using data from Cursor, the coding startup SpaceX is buying for $60 billion. Independent benchmarks suggest the pricing case is stronger than the performance claim right now.

Judith Murphy · Jul 8, 2026 · 6:32 PM

What Is an AI Moat and Why Most LLM Wrapper Startups Have None

What is an AI moat? It's the real answer to why OpenAI or Anthropic can't just build your product natively next quarter. Most AI startups can't answer it, and this guide breaks down the three things that actually count: data flywheels, workflow lock-in and distribution.

Judith Murphy · Jul 8, 2026 · 1:41 PM

A Paris Startup Bets Its Free AI Software Can Anchor Europe's Chip Independence

ZML, the Paris startup behind a free, hardware-agnostic AI inference engine, has joined a French partnership with Scaleway, VSORA and the Île-de-France region to build a sovereign European AI chip stack. The deal, announced at VivaTech days after Brussels unveiled its Chips Act 2.0, rests on a chip that hasn't shipped yet.

Judith Murphy · Jul 8, 2026 · 8:52 AM

Anthropic Leases a Hudson Square Tower Even as It Rations Its Own AI Model

Anthropic is leasing all 466,000 square feet of a 16-story Hudson Square tower and doubling its New York headcount to 1,000, even as it pulls Claude Fable 5 from standard subscriptions over a server capacity crunch. The moves expose a widening gap between how fast Anthropic can scale offices and money and how fast it can scale actual compute.

Judith Murphy · Jul 7, 2026 · 4:32 PM

DeepSeek Chose Huawei's Chips Over Building Its Own In-House Silicon

DeepSeek passed on building its own AI chip and doubled down on Huawei's Ascend silicon instead, timing V4's official mid-July launch with a $7 billion funding round that broke founder Liang Wenfeng's no-financing rule. The move shows China's AI self-sufficiency push is running on partnerships, not proprietary chips.

Judith Murphy · Jul 7, 2026 · 7:37 AM

US Investors Can Finally Buy Into SK Hynix Ahead of Its Nasdaq Debut

SK Hynix is set to debut on Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY on July 10, giving US retail investors direct access to the dominant HBM chip supplier for Nvidia's AI GPUs for the first time. The roughly $28 billion offering would be the largest-ever US listing by a foreign company, and it arrives as SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron race through HBM4 qualification for Nvidia's next platform.

Judith Murphy · Jul 6, 2026 · 10:47 PM

Ripple Wins Full EU Crypto License While Hundreds of Rivals Get Shut Out

Ripple picked up full MiCA authorization from Luxembourg's CSSF, becoming one of roughly 210 crypto firms cleared to operate across the EU's 30-country market after the bloc's licensing deadline shut out more than 1,200 competitors. The license, paired with its existing EU electronic money institution status, gives Ripple a single integration point for crypto and stablecoin payments across Europe.

Judith Murphy · Jul 6, 2026 · 7:13 PM

Strategy's $216 million Bitcoin sale cracks Saylor's bulletproof thesis

Strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin for $216 million between June 29 and July 5, its largest disposal ever, to fund dividends on preferred shares carrying obligations Grayscale estimates at $1.5 billion a year. Michael Saylor's public comments on AI and quantum computing remain measured, but the forced selling exposes a gap between the never-sell pitch and the cash needs of the capital structure built around it.

Judith Murphy · Jul 6, 2026 · 2:18 PM

What Is a Prediction Market and How Do Polymarket and Kalshi Price Truth

What is a prediction market? It's a live pricing system where traders buy and sell yes-or-no contracts on real events, and platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi have turned that mechanic into a multi-billion dollar business with very different legal foundations. Here's how the odds actually get set, and who's really profiting from them.

Judith Murphy · Jul 6, 2026 · 1:52 PM

Kling AI's New Funding Priced It Below the Number Investors Floated in May

Kuaishou's Kling AI closed a roughly $2.8 billion round at an $18 billion valuation with Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu on the cap table, but that's below the $20 billion figure floated when the spinoff plan first surfaced in May. The gap and the revenue growth behind it say more about where AI video money is heading than the headline number does.

Judith Murphy · Jul 6, 2026 · 1:51 AM

Amazon Quietly Puts Mechanical Turk on Its Deathwatch List

Amazon Web Services has added Mechanical Turk to its internal retirement list, closing the 2005-era crowdsourcing marketplace to new customers on July 30, 2026. The move lands as Uber guts its data-labeling leadership and Scale AI fights questions about its independence from Meta, pointing to a broader consolidation of the human-labor pipeline behind AI training data.

Judith Murphy · Jul 5, 2026 · 10:00 AM

Moonbeam abandons Polkadot for Base and bets its future on AI agents

Moonbeam, once Polkadot's record-setting flagship parachain, is shutting down its Polkadot operations entirely and migrating GLMR to Coinbase's Base network by July 31, 2026. Alongside the move, it's unveiling the Moonbeam Protocol, a still-unspecified network meant to let autonomous AI agents find each other and settle payments on-chain.

Judith Murphy · Jul 4, 2026 · 6:37 PM

How Much Equity to Give an Advisor at Your Startup, and When Not To

How much equity to give an advisor startup depends on stage and involvement, not flattery, and the real benchmarks run from 0.1% to 1%, vested over two years. This guide breaks down standard advisor equity percentages by stage, why vesting and written agreements matter more than the number itself, and how the FAST template changed the default negotiation.