Learning how stablecoins and other digital assets work is like learning a strange new language. Blockchain is what happens when a chain-link fence gets twisted. Web3? “World Wide Web” already had three Ws. And DeFi is just a terrible DJ name.

Strange lexicon aside, stablecoins—a type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to fiat currency such as the US dollar—are catching on. The Genius Act brought regulatory clarity to stablecoins, while major payments companies like PayPal and Mastercard are making inroads with them. Experts we spoke with said stablecoins have true benefits and opportunities for organizations, meaning that CFOs can’t afford to dismiss them.

Crypto’s cousin. Stablecoins are a sort of bridge between traditional currency and the crypto world. As payments company Stripe explains, stablecoins aim to provide the benefits of crypto—think, quick settlement prices and lower transaction costs—while reducing the volatility that other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can experience.

“If you’re dealing with a contractor in South Africa, for example, it significantly reduces the cost and time spent to make a payment like this happen,” Andrei Belonogov, founder of TechAccountingPro, a technical accounting firm for digital assets companies, told CFO Brew.

Keep reading.—AZ

Dealmakers had a busy start to the year, with a lot of the activity coming from so-called megadeals, according to recent industry reports.

WTW’s review of Q1 M&A activity globally found an “an all-time record” for the quarter for megadeals, or deals valued at $10 billion or more. By its count, there were a dozen such deals closed in the quarter. The prior three months only saw two deals of that size. In fact, megadeals helped drive total value of Q1 deals to $438 billion, “a five-year high,” and a 155% increase from Q1 2025.

IBM completed one such megadeal last quarter, with its acquisition of Confluent Inc. for an approximate value of $11 billion.

“Mega transactions have re-emerged with a vengeance,” Jana Mercereau, WTW’s head of Europe M&A consulting, said in a statement. “Well-capitalized dealmakers have returned to the market with renewed confidence, taking advantage of improved M&A conditions to pursue large strategic transactions to scale operations, bridge capability gaps, and secure critical AI-enabling technologies.”

Keep reading.—AZ

Do AI agents follow guardrails? It depends—and often hinges on the knowledge of the IT pros deploying them.

Cristian Rodriguez, CTO for the Americas at CrowdStrike, told IT Brew that it can all come down to how agents are configured. If done incorrectly, a goal-oriented agent could focus on retrieving an answer to the point where it accesses forbidden resources.

“It changes the way that data and risk can be exposed,” Rodriguez said. “That agent is very, very incentivized to accomplish its goal by the prompt itself that you’re giving it.”

Rubrik, a cybersecurity company, pointed in a blog post to recent evidence of AI agents breezing past guardrails, like an AI agent erasing an entire environment, or the “AgentSmith” exploit where an agent hid a malicious proxy. The company’s machine learning lead, Arnav Garg, wrote in that post that “even best-in-class guardrails…wouldn’t have helped” in the scenarios due to conversational safeguards in operational systems.

Keep reading on IT Brew.—CN