The Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), the country's largest insurance company, offers various plans for all age groups, including children, seniors, and women. These plans are particularly popular among those planning for life after retirement to avoid financial difficulties.
One such product is the LIC Smart Pension Plan, which guarantees a lifelong pension. This plan was launched last year, in 2025, and is a product that provides income simultaneously with investment. From the perspective of receiving regular income after retirement, it can be an optimal choice.
The LIC Smart Pension Scheme falls under the category of immediate annuity plans. This means that policyholders start receiving a pension immediately after making a lump-sum contribution, and this payment continues throughout their lifetime. This plan is designed for people who prefer low-risk investments, avoiding stock market fluctuations, and are looking for a stable guaranteed income.
This LIC plan is Non-Linked and Non-Participating, which eliminates any risks associated with the stock market. The pension rate is fixed at the time of policy issuance and remains unchanged throughout the entire term. The minimum amount to purchase an annuity under the Smart Pension Plan is set at 100,000 rupees, while there is no limit for maximum investment, allowing for a higher pension upon increased contributions.
This scheme is especially useful for retired employees, individuals working in the private sector, and senior citizens wishing to receive a regular monthly income. For example, to receive a monthly pension of 20,000 rupees under the Smart Pension plan, an investor would need to make a lump-sum investment of 3.5 million rupees. With such an investment, an annual income of 2.87 lakh rupees is guaranteed, equivalent to a monthly amount of 23,940 rupees.
The author recalls their experience investing in Bitcoin in November 2017 during the bull run, after which they became convinced that Bitcoin is the most reliable form of money invented by humanity. Despite its proven technological foundation, the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency remains slow.
Humanity has historically used various forms of money, such as shells, salt, cattle, and glass beads, but all were displaced due to the possibility of cheaper production, leading to the loss of savings for holders of old money. As Robert Bridle states, quality money must possess the following characteristics: divisibility, durability, portability, recognizability, and, most importantly, scarcity. Gold dominated for millennia due to its exceptional rarity, which cannot simply be produced or printed.
Bitcoin surpasses these criteria: it is divisible into hundred-millionths, has no weight, can be transferred across the planet in minutes, and, critically, its issuance is limited to 21 million units by code that has been functioning for 17 years. The network has demonstrated operational stability with a level above 99.98% (excluding the initial Value Overflow incident and the chain fork in 2013), and its core consensus rules have withstood attacks for over 15 years. Unlike gold, whose supply increases annually by 1–2% due to mining, Bitcoin's issuance schedule is fixed until the last coin is mined around 2140, making it the first currency in history with ideal scarcity.
Furthermore, no company can create the 'best Bitcoin,' because money operates on a 'winner takes all' network effect principle, and trust in Bitcoin is based on a fair, founder-less launch that cannot be replicated; any coin with an issuer requires trust in that party.
When comparing Bitcoin's ideal scarcity with money in a bank account, it becomes clear that in August 1971, US President Richard Nixon ended the dollar's link to gold. Since then, the entire world has operated on government money not backed by assets, and this experiment has lasted 55 years. The results of this experiment are visible everywhere: since 1971, the dollar has lost about 86% of its purchasing power, while the US money supply M2 has grown from approximately $630 billion to over $22 trillion. The situation with randomness is even worse. The pandemic demonstrated the consequences of active money printing: in 2020, the US money supply increased by 19%, and in 2021, by another 16%, significantly exceeding the average annual rate of 6% over the previous two decades, as about $6.4 trillion in new money was injected into the economy.
The subsequent surge in inflation is not accidental but is a consequence of the financial system's design. Central banks may argue that moderate inflation is an advantage, stimulating spending and giving policymakers the ability to fight recessions. However, the price of this flexibility falls on the shoulders of everyone who saves in this money, i.e., the majority of the world's population, whose funds are constantly being devalued.
Nevertheless, the adoption process is underway. The US created a strategic Bitcoin reserve in 2025, holding about 200,000 confiscated coins. Bhutan converted its reserves into a treasury worth over a billion dollars, El Salvador retains its assets, and Brazil and Kazakhstan are discussing creating their own reserves. Wall Street entered through spot ETFs—the most successful ETF launch in history, attracting $107 billion in the first year. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust became the fastest ETF to reach $80 billion in assets, doing so in 374 days, compared to the previous record holder, SPDR gold ETF, which took 1,691 days. These funds collectively hold over 1.2 million Bitcoins, accounting for nearly 6% of the total supply, and asset storage giants like BNY Mellon and State Street have developed platforms for digital assets.
Despite this, ordinary people remain in the minority. Estimates of Bitcoin ownership vary widely: blockchain analysis indicates about 106 million holders, while 2025 surveys counted about 365 million, including indirect participation through ETFs and fintech applications. With a global population of 8.2 billion, this represents between 1.3% and 4.5%. Most governments do not own Bitcoin at all, which causes a feeling of extreme slowness among enthusiasts.
The question of speed was posed by Farzam Eshani, co-founder and CEO of the crypto exchange VALR, who previously headed blockchain initiatives at Rand Merchant Bank and saw the situation from both sides. He noted that behavioral and societal changes seem slow in the process, but in retrospect, it becomes clear how quickly everything changed. Eshani emphasized that Bitcoin is only 17 years old, which is not considered adulthood in human terms, yet it has transformed from an unknown concept and technology into a multi-trillion-dollar asset class owned by the largest asset managers, institutions, and even central banks.
He confirmed that this year the Czech National Bank acquired Bitcoin for a test portfolio of $1 million, marking the first instance of Bitcoin appearing on a central bank's balance sheet in the EU. Eshani acknowledged that prices have dropped by about 50% from peaks, and Bitcoin trades around $65,000 at the time of writing, compared to a historical high of about $126,000 in October 2025. Nevertheless, he believes that Bitcoin's attractive characteristics—digital scarcity, decentralization, censorship resistance, and native nature on the internet—have remained and strengthened.
In Eshani's view, financial history has repeatedly shown that money changes its form and nature, and civilization evolves. Humanity is currently experiencing one such evolutionary period, transitioning from money belonging to citizens of a specific nation to money belonging to the whole world. He also added that today's young crypto enthusiasts will become future members of the boards of major institutions, and along with the change in leaders, the views and priorities of these organizations will change.
Existing barriers remain significant. The traditional system is not neutral: the dollar grants enormous privileges to the US, and entire industries—banking, payments, government borrowing—are built on the ability to arbitrarily expand credit. No one voluntarily dismantles their privileges. Regulators act slowly, and rules for institutional custody and accounting required many years to clarify, and volatility still frightens treasurers. Furthermore, energy consumption in Bitcoin mining remains a subject of debate.
The newest threat is quantum computing. Google Quantum AI researcher Craig Giddins showed last year that hacking modern encryption might require 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously assumed. In a subsequent paper in March, jointly with Dan Bonhom from Stanford, it was estimated that elliptic curve cryptography protecting Bitcoin signatures could be compromised by a machine with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits. Although such a machine does not yet exist (the largest processors today have several thousand qubits), Google set a goal of migrating to post-quantum protection by 2029, and the timeline is shortening.
Bitcoin developers are actively working on this. In February, the specification BIP-360, defining a quantum-resistant address type, was integrated into the official Bitcoin repository, and a related proposal by security veteran Jameson Lopp describes a phased transition from vulnerable addresses. Neither has been activated on the network yet, as it requires community consensus and a soft fork. The race is on to achieve this consensus and implement it before a cryptographically significant quantum computer appears, and there are trillions of dollars in incentives for this.
Perhaps Eshani is right: adoption happens quickly if measured in centuries, which is what gold required, and Bitcoin users just need more patience. However, watching how currency devaluation affects the lives of ordinary people who can buy less every year, patience is wearing thin.
This is particularly noticeable in Africa, where the volume of crypto transactions on the network grew by 52% to over $205 billion before June 2025, largely thanks to Nigerians seeking to escape the depreciating Naira. Venezuela demonstrates an extreme example: amid the collapse of the bolivar and inflation approaching 270%, almost 40% of peer-to-peer transactions are conducted in cryptocurrency. Most of these are dollar-pegged stablecoins, not Bitcoin itself, likely because they seem more familiar. But here the same lesson emerges: when money collapses, people run to the 'hardest' currency they can find. Ordinary people do not wait for permission; they are already gradually abandoning the old system.
As the saying goes, do your own research. The author did not meet anyone who deeply studied Bitcoin and remained doubtful (with the exception of Nassim Taleb, whose main objection applies equally to fiat money in a wallet). Economist Saifedean Ammous wrote an entire book, 'The Bitcoin Standard,' based on the lesson that when monetary systems clash, the hardest currency wins. Seventeen years later, this lesson remains true.
The British robotics startup Humanoid has successfully raised $152 million in a Series A funding round. This capital infusion has boosted the company's valuation to $1.35 billion, making it the first unicorn in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics in the UK.
The funding round was led by the US venture firm Prime Movers Lab. Since its founding in 2024, Humanoid has secured a total of $270 million. This success marks Europe's entry onto a significant stage in physical artificial intelligence, demonstrating the ability of European robotics companies to scale rapidly and compete globally.
Humanoid focuses primarily on developing specialized wheeled robots designed for complex manufacturing environments. The company emphasizes wheeled mobility, creating a platform that offers greater stability, speed, and heavy-load-carrying capacity on industrial floors, unlike traditional bipedal humanoids. The technical core of the ecosystem is the patented physical AI framework KinetIQ, which functions as the robot's central processor, processing sensor data in real-time to ensure accurate spatial reasoning.
This allows machines to navigate busy work zones and perform complex assembly tasks alongside humans safely, eliminating the need for massive physical barriers. By integrating proprietary hardware with native AI software, Humanoid addresses the growing labor shortage in global manufacturing, logistics, and retail distribution centers.
Achieving a billion-dollar valuation was made possible by rapid commercial progress and collaborations with major industry players. Humanoid has entered into strategic agreements for both software and hardware with leading global technology companies, including NVIDIA, SAP, Siemens, and Bosch. Most notably, there was a recent signing of the largest publicly announced commercial deal in the industry with motion giant Schaeffler. Under this multi-year partnership, Schaeffler plans to deploy thousands of Humanoid wheeled robots across its global production sites.
Investors view such large-scale deployment as a clear sign that general-purpose industrial robotics is rapidly moving out of research labs and directly onto active production lines. Founder and CEO Artem Sokolov emphasized that transforming advanced physical AI into practical, everyday industrial tools required a high pace of execution from a specialized engineering team.
The new capital will be directed towards expanding Humanoid's operational infrastructure and increasing research capabilities to boost production. The company currently employs over 250 engineers and roboticists, with offices located in London, Boston, Vancouver, and San Diego. With the new funding, Humanoid intends to begin commercial deployment of beta-version robots for select client enterprises in the fourth quarter. Furthermore, the company plans to launch full-scale mass production of its wheeled robots.
Early scaling of production will help Humanoid secure a strong position in the industrial automation market. The startup is also considering expansion into general-purpose robotics. This funding is particularly noteworthy because most investments in physical AI have previously been concentrated in the United States and China. Humanoid's trajectory proves that the startup ecosystems of the UK and Europe are capable of creating world-class, commercially viable robotics companies.
Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan activated freight services based on the e-TIR system. This was announced by Kenan Gurbanov, Secretary General of the Azerbaijan International Road Transport Association (ABADA).
The test freight service was transported from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan via the Caspian Sea. In the next stage, this cargo will be sent to Turkmenistan. This is considered the first electronic TIR shipment between the two countries.
The e-TIR system replaces the paper TIR Carnet and serves to speed up the processes of handling and transiting international cargo. Furthermore, the introduction of the e-CMR electronic consignment note is planned to further simplify transport relations in the future.
According to ABADA data, Azerbaijan has fully prepared the necessary infrastructure for e-TIR. It is also implementing the exchange of electronic permits with Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
