News and analysis

Ripple (XRP) is up 4.5% to $2.400 this week, outperforming the broader crypto market, where Bitcoin (BTC) is adding 1.8% to $84,164. The token surged to a high of $2.587 on Wednesday following the Federal Reserve’s announcement to slow its balance sheet drawdown to $5 billion per month starting in April. Further support came from Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who confirmed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dropped its appeal in the case against the company.

Despite the rally, XRP failed to sustain levels above $2.500, leading to a pullback. From a technical perspective, prices may decline toward the key support at $2.000, though interim support at $2.250 could slow the downturn.

Google shares quickly rebounded by 4.8%, from a local bottom below $160 seen just two days ago to $166.50 at least, after the official announcement of its $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity tech Wiz. This once again confirms my concept that Google assets are significantly oversold at any price below $170. By the way, this area around $160 technically corresponded to September 2024 lows, which happily launched the next bullish wave to $200+, which reached these goals in February 2025. If so, another round of a recovery to the key $200 mark is only a matter of time, while the average 12-month estimate for Google from leading Wall Street analyst houses still exceeds $220 per share.

Last year, Google initially offered $23 billion for the 5-year old cloud security unicorn, yet finally negotiators settled the price nearly $9 billion higher. Local journalists just quoted the famous Israeli startup founder Uri Levine that Wiz actually executed its plan, but now under the Google hat. Well, now Wiz can allow Google to leave this hat on, or just to leave formerly their Wiz instead of a hat, after Google became a little bit undressed after paying so much money. So, Gemini, goes over there, turning on the lights, all the lights, coming over here, standing on that chair, and year, that's right. Raise your arms up in the air and... (singing)... you give me reason to live!... Well, that's enough Joe Cocker singing for today. While Israeli media are interested in how it happens that the deal made the unpretentious Wiz founders multibillionaires, with only an estimated $4 billion in taxes flowing into the country's national coffers, markets are more focused on benefits for Google.

Wiz cyber platform with its 1,800 workers, reportedly tailored amazingly well to map and secure any application developers build and run in the cloud, will now join Google’s Cloud business to make it even stronger, but remain independent. Wiz founders' very first business, a cloud security firm Adallom, was sold to Microsoft for $320 million only 10 years ago, but tech specialists are talking about Wiz as if it is a much more perfect creation, which can give Google Cloud an advantage over Microsoft's Azure. Wiz is also going to keep its products available on other cloud platforms, which may generate additional money, now for Google. Many businesses are facing growing network security risks, like sophisticated ransomware, malware and other breaches, so that even the current community of Wiz customers includes more than 40% percent of the Fortune 100 companies, such as Mars, BMW, DocuSign, Plaid and Agoda.

Besides, Google’s Gemini AI assistant, a tool useful in brainstorming and content generation, introduced two new features the same week, named Audio Overview and Canvas, to transform files into engaging podcast-style discussions and to improve document editing and coding. The last feature means adjusting length and formatting of the content to make it more concise, professional or informal etc. With the other hand, Google launches the latest edition of its new smartphone, named Pixel 9a to offer enhanced AI photography capabilities like Best Take, Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, Astrophotography etc, having built-in Gemini and priced at $499. Meanwhile, Google Wallet introduces a secure payment feature for kids.

This is all news from Google's parent company Alphabet over the past few days. It seems that Google has done literally everything possible to break out from under the price pressure created by the EU regulatory crackdown. Right now Google was hit with two charges of breaching landmark EU rules despite threats from Trump to levy extra high tariffs against EU countries if the EU imposes fines on U.S. companies. The Google case is on whether Google "restricts" third parties' app developers from "informing users about offers outside" its app store Google Play, and whether it "favours its associated search services" like Google Flights. As for me, these are essentially stupid stories that can only temporarily put psychological pressure on investors, but will be resolved anyway. New technical solutions will certainly allow the company's shares to surface in a more or less short period of time.

What was called "Super Bowl of AI", unfortunately, ended in a draw, leaving both bull and bear teams feeling equally proud, but not entirely satisfied. The game moved into overtime as it has not yet surpassed what was actually expected of the event in the wildest dreams of the excited crowd. We are talking, of course, about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at the GTC conference this week. The after-party mood is no apparent disappointment but rather a kind of lasting satiety with self-repetitions, as it usually happens when the next book of your favourite author has almost the same matter and a very similar plot, isn't imbued with novelty, and so you have a feeling it's still another self-portrait of the Master, even though a deuced talented copy of the previous one.

Jensen Huang knew everybody was expecting, and he decided to proclaimed the four "noble truths" he already broadcasted before when talking about his vision for AI prospects in the form of four waves, which are 1) Perception AI at the initial stage, focusing on speech recognition and other simple tasks; 2) Generative AI, with the focus of the past 5 years, involving text and image creation through predictive patterns; 3) Agentic AI, which is the current phase where AI interacts digitally and performs tasks autonomously to result in "reasoning models"; 4) Physical AI to represent "the future of AI", powering humanoid robots and real-world applications.

Nvidia's father probably tried to emphasize the multiplying AI monetization potential in stages #3 and #4 of this revolutionary era, stating that all computations take 100 times more tokens and resources than was originally expected at the current point of Agentic AI, but the market had already heard this philosophy and now wanted more precise sales numbers. Huang expected consuming companies' AI-driven capex (capital expenditures) of over $1 trillion globally by the end of 2028. Among other notable details, it was only said that in Nvidia GPU Hopper’s peaking year, they shipped around 1.3 million units, while for Nvidia’s Blackwell in 2025, 3.6 million units have been already ordered, and so traders perfectly knew how to respond.

In particular, they didn't buy the discourse and even briefly dropped the stock price from $122.9 at the peak on March 17 to a much lower range of the next day's regular session, between $114.5 and $115.5. However, the bulls were not averse to buying back these dips again, expanding the trading range to $120+ again within the rest of the week. A simple conclusion is that Nvidia may have mixed dynamics, and even with a possible downside bias in the short term, but will outperform a portfolio of other tech assets to slap into its role of the AI flagship in the months ahead once the current correction phase is exhausted. In short, a temporary decline somewhere close to $100 per share could not be ruled out, but the attractiveness of much higher targets above $180 is calling even stronger than ever.

Why are we so optimistic in the longer-term? We agree with the concept of Nvidia that each large product manufacturer will need two separate facilities, one is for manufacturing the product itself, and the second one is for production of the AI assistance on the surrounding information to sell this product better and in a more effective way with higher marginality. Nvidia's collaboration with General Motors to develop AI for next-generation vehicles, factories, and robots is a good example of it. They also work on AI-integrated wireless networks for 6G with T-Mobile and Cisco. Nvidia's open-source Dynamo Library inference software to double performance for Llama models and boost token generation by over 30x for providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Meta and Microsoft Azure is another sign of Nvidia's prevailing power.

“While much of what was announced had been somewhat anticipated, we think Nvidia’s continued full stack/platform innovation was once again showcased; NVDA is solidly in a league of its own,” Wells Fargo analysts commented on the event. “The rate of innovation on all fronts continues to impress and suggests a growing moat vs peers... We were hoping for more proof points for total addressable market (TAM) expansion and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) advantages but what is clear is the scale and strength of NVDA’s offerings across hardware/software and vertical domains”, Jefferies said. “Nothing hugely surprising given all the pre-event speculation, but we still thought it sounded good. The roadmap looks really solid, and their capability gap vs competitors across their entire massive stack continues to widen,” according to Bernstein investment house.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is down 2.3% to $0.00001265 this week, underperforming the broader crypto market, where Bitcoin (BTC) is up 2.9% to $85,150. Despite the decline, SHIB appears to be stabilizing after falling to $0.00001071 last week, near the key support level of $0.00001000.

The altcoin is attempting to recover as market sentiment improves, driven by optimism following the Federal Reserve’s dovish stance shift on Wednesday. If the positive momentum in the crypto market continues, SHIB could see a stronger rebound in the coming weeks.