Trump: Deal Reached Boosting Stock Market Soars, Oil Price Drops, Press Conference to Follow

On June 17, global photonics technology firm Coherent (COHR) announced it has signed a letter of intent (LOI) with the U.S. Department of Commerce to access up to $50 million in direct funding under the CHIPS Act. This funding will support the expansion of Coherent’s 6-inch Indium Phosphide (InP) semiconductor manufacturing facility in Sherman, Texas. The investment will address soaring demand for optical networking technologies in AI data centers and further solidify Coherent’s long-standing, recently expanded partnership with NVIDIA. Once the project is completed, the Sherman facility is expected to create over 1,000 jobs, including more than 550 advanced manufacturing, engineering, and technical positions. The expansion will double the facility’s production space and quadruple its wafer manufacturing capacity. This capacity expansion will strengthen the U.S. domestic photonics chip supply chain, meet the high-speed data transmission requirements of AI computing infrastructure, and

June 17 – Digital advertising startup EarnOS has closed a $6 million Pre-A funding round. The round was led by VC firm 1kx, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, and Social Graph Ventures. EarnOS announced its Ero app has completed testing and is set to launch in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. Built for brands, the tool verifies genuine human internet traffic, cuts waste from bot activity, and rewards users for authentic digital behavior. Separately, EarnOS secured a $12.5 million non-dilutive strategic investment from Verona (formerly XION), a layer-1 blockchain, over a four-year term. The Ero app leverages Verona’s infrastructure for core functions: global traffic validation, user onboarding, and reward distribution.

June 17 update: According to MLM Monitor, eight months after XPL’s Token Generation Event (TGE), prominent trader Technorevenant still holds all 80 million XPL he purchased just days following XPL’s TGE. This stake is valued at $9.2 million, accounting for 0.8% of XPL’s total supply. As XPL’s price has climbed over the past few days, Technorevenant’s unrealized loss has narrowed from roughly $91 million at the recent price bottom to $86.6 million.

June 17: HTX market data shows XPL has rallied 26% over the past 24 hours following the launch of Plasma One, currently trading at $0.116. Earlier, Plasma officially unveiled Plasma One, its stablecoin-native digital banking app. New users who sign up within the next 7 days will receive a complimentary 1-year Core membership, valued at over $1,000.

June 17: The U.S. and Iran are in talks to move up the signing ceremony for a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) originally scheduled for Friday to Wednesday, according to sources who spoke to Axios, per a Financial Times report.

June 17, Anthropic officially announced the launch of its Seoul office and new partnerships with enterprises, startups, and research institutions across Korea’s AI ecosystem. NAVER has rolled out Claude Code across its entire engineering organization, with thousands of engineers using the tool to boost coding productivity. Global online gaming firm Nexon’s engineering team is also leveraging Claude Code for key tasks related to real-time service games: writing, reviewing, and deploying game code. On the enterprise front, LG CNS has deployed Claude to thousands of its employees and plans to expand access across the broader LG Group. Hanwha Solutions is making Claude available to its global workforce via AWS Bedrock to meet regional data residency and security requirements. Samsung SDS is rolling out Claude to Samsung Electronics employees for use cases including daily knowledge work, intelligent process orchestration, and software development. Additionally, Claude for Startups has