Axios

"Bad Boys: Ride or Die" gave the summer box office a badly needed jolt over the weekend.

Why it matters: Domestic ticket sales so far this year are down 24% over the same period last year and down 42% from 2019, Comscore says, per The Hollywood Reporter.

Apple's generative AI play unveiled this afternoon can be summed up in three words: personalized, private, practical.

Why it matters: Apple has been the slowest of the major tech companies to detail a generative AI strategy, and today's announcements represent its broadest effort yet to hang the banner of modern AI over its popular products, Axios' Ina Fried notes.

Zoom in: Consumers are worried about how their data will be used by tech companies to train their models.

• To that end, Apple said Monday that "many" of the models needed to run AI will be done so "entirely on device" and that the company has also created "private cloud compute" when more computational power is needed from servers that "never" store or share data.

The days of getting the weekly groceries at a single store are long gone.

Why it matters: Consumers are increasingly hitting up multiple grocery stores as they stock the fridge to save money and find exclusive items. Blame it on inflation and the rise of the private store brand.

There's a growing set of issuers putting U.S. treasuries on the blockchain, including asset managers like BlackRock and WisdomTree.

• Fidelity International, meanwhile, reportedly used JPMorgan's private blockchain to tokenize money-market funds.
• Plus, there's Robert Leshner's Superstate and Lucas Vogelsang's Centrifuge on the crypto-native side.

Zoom in: BlackRock and Securitize's tokenized treasuries product BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), recently handed its holders $1.7 million in monthly dividends on Ethereum.

ProShares, the firm behind the largest futures-based bitcoin ETF, launched a pair of ether funds that aim to double daily returns on ether, whether the price goes up, or down.

Why it matters: These so-called leveraged ETFs beat the eight spot ether ETFs to market.

Zoom in: The ProShares Ultra Ether ETF (ETHT) and the ProShares UltraShort Ether ETF (ETHD), unlike the spot ether ETFs, do not directly invest in ether. They use derivatives.

• ETHT is for the number-go-up folk. ETHD, for the number go down believers.

Between the lines: These things can juice returns, but can also cut them to ribbons, because of the cost of the strategy — what's called "decay" — that eats into those returns. (They can go very wrong in other ways.)

It's tough out there for NFTs, even the storied collections that sold at auction houses like Christie's.

• The sound of a price floor breaking below 30 ETH for a blue-chip NFT caused a stir.

Zoom in: Here's CryptoPunk #8249 selling for 28.56 ETH.

The bottom line: [Whistles]

• @punksOTC observed: "First punk sale in the 20s in nearly 3 years."

Wednesday afternoon, the fate of global financial markets will hang on an array of dots that give clues into how much rate-cutting the Federal Reserve will deliver this year. But Wall Street may be putting too much weight on the so-called dot plot.

Why it matters: The dots create a lot of market noise, but they contain less true signal about the policy outlook.

While most U.S. homeowners are sitting on a mountain of home equity after years of rising house prices, in some pockets of the country an increasing share of mortgage holders are underwater on their loans.

Why it matters: That means these folks owe more on the mortgage than their home is worth, which puts them in a horrendous financial situation if they need to sell their house.

Fruit-borne disease and extreme weather, amplified by a warming climate, are throttling orange-producing regions in Brazil and Florida — curbing harvests and driving up citrus prices.

Why it matters: Oranges, one of the fruits of choice in the U.S., are currently facing a supply crisis. It's adding to the list of everyday items impacted by inflation, which continues to frustrate consumers and color their perceptions of the economy.