MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 3,273 Bitcoin in a new purchase valued at approximately $255 million, while prediction market Polymarket sets 10% odds on the company selling any Bitcoin before year-end.
After a rough start to the year, America’s four major publicly traded quantum computing companies are surging once again.
The latest rally kicked off about a month ago, right around World Quantum Day, and since then, all four quantum computing companies—D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS), IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ), Quantum Computing Inc. (Nasdaq: QUBT), and Rigetti Computing, Inc. (Nasdaq: RGTI)—have recovered much of their 2026 losses.
And today, their stocks are up even more. Here’s why.
America’s so-called Quantum Four publicly traded companies saw an incredible year of stock gains in 2025. But in the first part of 2026, investor sentiment soured.
Some of this was likely due to simple profit-taking after a stellar run and a little post-high clarity that while quantum computing may be the future of computing, that future is still years away.
And of course, external factors, including geopolitical uncertainty, AI bubble fears, and generalized anxiety about the economy, also helped pull down quantum stocks (as with most other tech stocks).
But in the last month, the fortunes of quantum stocks began to turn. As Fast Company previously reported, this all started around World Quantum Day in mid-April. And that April rally is now continuing into May.
As of this writing, all four quantum computing companies are seeing their stock prices jump yet again in premarket trading, including:
Keep in mind, those premarket gains are in addition to gains seen over the the previous five trading sessions. Since that time, Rigetti is up nearly 16%, Quantum Computing Inc is up over 7%, IonQ is up over 24%, and D-Wave is up nearly 15%.
Why have the Quantum Four surged so much over the past week?
The most significant reason why quantum stocks are surging recently is that we are in quantum earnings season, when all four major quantum computing companies report their latest results—and those results have been good.
IonQ kicked off the quantum earnings season last week, reporting its Q1 2026 results on May 6. The company reported a staggering 755% year-over-year revenue growth.
Rigetti and Quantum Computing Inc. were up next, with both companies reporting their Q1 2026 results yesterday, May 11.
Rigetti reported revenue growth of 193% year over year, while Quantum Computing Inc. posted an astronomical revenue growth of over 9,300% year over year for its Q1.
Finally, this morning, D-Wave reported its Q1 results. While the company’s revenue actually declined 81% year over year, it reported Q1 bookings of $33.4 million—a growth of 1,994% versus Q1 2025 bookings.
“Bookings” are signed contracts for future business, and surging bookings signify that the company’s business dealings are picking up pace.
Despite the recent stock price surge in all four quantum companies, the firms and the technology have a long road ahead before quantum computing represents as big a shift in the technology landscape as AI does today.
Many experts believe that the widespread use of quantum computers will not arrive until the mid-2030s at the earliest.
However, when it does, the shift in computing has the possibility to upend everything from communications to national security, and the companies operating at the center of that shift stand to gain the most.
For now, before today’s premarket gains, three of the four Quantum Four had stock prices in the red year-to-date, including Rigetti (down 7.4%), Quantum Computing Inc. (down 0.78%), and D-Wave (down 8.1%).
Only IonQ was positive for the year, up a respectable 26.7%.
Maple Finance announced it has crossed $7 billion in total bridge volume, signaling growing cross-chain demand for yield-bearing dollar assets.
Kenyan conservationists are slowly reintroducing a rare species of antelope into the wild. Dubbed the ‘ghost of the forest’ for its ability to camouflage itself, very few mountain bong antelopes remain, as many were decimated by diseases in the 1960s.
It appears that rising fuel costs and international geopolitical tensions are catching up with global economies, and the US is no exception.
The CPI numbers for April are out, indicating that inflation in the country has surged to 3.8%, the highest level since May 2023.
Core CPI inflation also rose above the expected 2.7%, reaching 2.8%.
Bitcoin’s price saw somewhat elevated volatility throughout the release, but the movement has so far been relatively negligible. At the time of this writing, BTC trades at slightly below $81K, down 0.5% for the day and mostly flat for the week.
It’s also worth noting that analysts from The Kobeissi Letter pointed out their expectations that
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CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam said prediction markets provide measurable value to participants and the public, committing the agency to setting regulatory standards for the sector.
Today, Spotify is releasing some never-before-seen data to users—and it’s coming in a format that looks strikingly familiar.
To celebrate its 20-year anniversary, Spotify is launching Your Party of the Year(s), an in-app experience designed to hit users with a blast of nostalgia by walking them through highlights of their own user journey with the app, including their first song ever streamed. The format is a click-through, interactive infographic, and it looks a whole lot like Spotify Wrapped.
Since it debuted in 2014, Wrapped has become a core pillar of Spotify’s business. In 2025, more than 300 million users engaged with the launch, up 20% from 2024. And that’s not even counting the free promo that Spotify raked in as a result: The campaign inspired 630 million shares across social media, up 42% year-over-year.
In a February earnings call, Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström revealed that day one of last year’s Wrapped marked the highest single day of premium subscriber intake in Spotify history.
Today, Wrapped is such a golden goose in the marketing world that countless other companies have tried to dupe the format, with varying degrees of success (looking at you, LinkedIn). Its success comes in large part due to the anticipation that builds around the campaign, which rolls out only once a year—in December—to celebrate users’ year in music.
Your Party of the Year(s) feels like the closest Spotify has ever come to a Wrapped-inspired experience outside of end-of-year—and, for Spotify’s executive team, it’s part of a delicate balance between bringing learnings from Wrapped into the rest of the year and ensuring that Wrapped remains its own distinct brand moment.
Last year, Wrapped 2025 embraced a retro, scrapbook-inspired aesthetic as a response to fans’ negative response to its more techy, AI-centric experience in 2024. Your Party of the Year(s) seems to be taking a similarly analog-looking approach: The whole experience is designed to look like a homemade (if very artistically crafted) birthday letter.
Jeremy Wirth, Spotify’s global executive creative director, says his team took inspiration from the early days of Spotify. “A lot of us behind the campaign lived the party night subculture of the early aughts. It was important to pay homage to 2006, the year Spotify was founded, so we referenced the iconography and typography of DIY party flyers,” he says. “We then combined that handmade design language with the photography style that defined the indie sleaze era—high flash dance floor candids.”
The experience opens with an animation of a wax seal—featuring the Spotify logo, of course—parting to reveal a home page with big, blocky text and a smattering of gold stars, like the kind you’d be awarded in elementary school. From there, the platform takes you on a glitzy romp down memory lane, starting with your first day on the app and moving on to a quiz about your first-ever song; your most-streamed artist of all time; and a playlist of 120 of your top-listened-to songs.
Each slide is decorated with tinsel cut-outs, disco tiles, and colorful confetti. And, of course, several of the key slides are designed to be shared directly to socials. In all, Your Party of the Year(s) is clearly a lower lift than Wrapped in terms of design and scope, but it’s drawing users in by sharing personal data that the company has never revealed before.
Your Party of the Year(s) is guaranteed to drive new engagement, user-generated content (UGC), and subscriptions for Spotify. It might seem like a no-brainer for Spotify to start rolling out more Wrapped-style experiences like these—except, at a macro level, the brand runs the risk of diluting Wrapped’s impact by over-saturating its audience with data storytelling.
According to Mark Hazan, Spotify’s SVP of marketing and partnerships, the brand doesn’t take a launch like Your Party of the Year(s) lightly. Any personalization experience at Spotify is measured against one key goalpost: It has to feel like a “genuine gift” to fans, not just a data showcase.
“Our 20th anniversary felt like a once-in-a-generation occasion. The kind of milestone that genuinely warranted doing something we’d never done before outside of Wrapped,” Hazan says. “We were very deliberate in how we designed this experience so it would feel truly distinct: less about what defined a year, and more about the broader, personal story of a listener’s entire time on Spotify.”
On the design side, Wirth’s team intentionally made Your Party of the Year(s) visually distinct from Wrapped, opting for several unique choices like full-bleed photography and stop-motion animation to give the experience its own look and feel.
The result is more intentionally imperfect than Wrapped’s dialed-in aesthetic to lean into the nostalgia of 2006. Wirth says his team also chose to highlight only stats that would work in the context of an all-time retrospective—offering them a peek behind Spotify’s data curtain that even Wrapped has never pulled back.
More broadly, Spotify has been working in recent months to incorporate more and more permanent in-app features that directly capitalize on users’ clear desire for personalization. These include AI-prompted playlists, a concept called Taste Profile that would let users control how Spotify understands their listener profile; and listening stats, which give users a bite-sized look at their week in music. The features bring learnings from Wrapped into the app without stealing the annual experience’s spotlight.
“While we will always protect the magic of Wrapped, we also know that users want to learn more about their listening data—so, we’ve found fun new ways to package it up for them,” Hazan says.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told his top team that he was getting on with governing, defying mounting calls from ministers and MPs to step down. This comes following the resignation of a junior minister, who called again for his departure. But for Starmer and his supporters, stepping down would bring in a new era of political turmoil. The situation may seem at odds with Labour’s landslide victory two years ago. But for FRANCE 24’s Angela Diffley, there are several reasons that explain it.
The DeFi United coalition crossed its rsETH backing target after a flood of weekend commitments from across the Ethereum, Solana, TRON, Avalanche, and Bitcoin ecosystems.
