Man Severed Spine of Ex-Girlfriend’s 2-Year-Old Daughter Just Days After She Broke Up with Him
A Florida man has been sentenced to life in prison after he severed the spine of a 2-year-old girl in his care, causing her to die a week after her mother broke up with him.
After the jury deliberated for nearly two hours, they found 27-year-old Travis Ray Thompson guilty of first-degree murder for killing 2-year-old Jacklyn Schwingel, the Fifth Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
On May 2, 2022, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office received reports of child abuse when a 2-year-old was rushed to the emergency room in critical condition. Doctors attempted life-saving measures but Jacklyn couldn’t be saved and was pronounced dead, according to the attorney’s office statement.
Jacklyn’s mother had left her daughter in the care of Thompson that morning, and headed off to work. 25 minutes after leaving for work, she got a call from Thompson who said that there was something wrong with the toddler, the sheriff’s office said.
The mother told the sheriff’s office that when she arrived, “Jacklyn was lifeless, with a shallow pulse and a distended abdomen.” Both the mother and Thompson got into a vehicle and took Jacklyn to a nearby hospital when she stopped breathing.
The mother told Thompson to call 911, and an ambulance showed up at a nearby business to transport the 2-year-old for medical treatment, the attorney’s office statement said.
When the medical team at the hospital suspected the child was suffering from internal bleeding, they notified the sheriff’s office and the Department of Children and Families.
In an interview with detectives, Thompson claims he was in a different room when he heard a loud noise and found Jacklyn unresponsive and not breathing. “Despite being the only person left with the victim, Thompson claimed he did not know how the victim became injured,” the attorney’s office said in their statement.
On Sept. 1, 2022, the Medical Examiner’s Officer determined that Jacklyn’s cause of death was traumatic injuries to her torso, including a severing of her spine and internal bleeding in her abdomen.
The Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Thompson had to apply significant gradual force to Jacklyn’s upper and lower body, bending her backward beyond her “natural range of motion” until her back broke, they wrote in a statement.
“This monster stole the life of an innocent child, and today, the justice system made sure he will never walk free again,” Bill Gladson, State Attorney for the Fifth Judicial Circuit said. “Life in prison is too good for this kind of evil.”
If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.
Crypto Treasury Companies Are Bullish on Bitcoin and XRP. But Don’t Invest
Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) (formerly called MicroStrategy) famously pioneered the Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) treasury concept, buying the crypto and holding it on the company’s balance sheet. Now, a crop of start-ups promises to provide the same kind of leveraged exposure to select digital assets for anyone willing to buy their shares.
But before you hand any treasury operator a dime, it’s important to look at who really captures the value they’re advertising, and to understand how the existence of these companies might be favorable for the coins you hold.
Crypto treasuries are popping up like weeds
In a nutshell, crypto treasury companies are businesses that accumulate cryptocurrency assets such as Bitcoin and XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) on their corporate balance sheets.
Their aim is to provide investors with indirect exposure to these digital assets while theoretically offering some diversification or additional value compared to investors just buying and holding the main underlying asset. They are a very recent phenomenon, and most will probably not survive even if their main assets do fine during the next decade or so.
Over the last quarter, at least five companies launched or pivoted to stockpiling coins as their main strategy, or as a pillar of their financing strategy for their other lines of business. Hong Kong-based logistics group Reitar Logtech Holdings just filed to buy as many as 15,000 Bitcoins, worth roughly $1.5 billion at today’s prices. Another company, Twenty One Capital, wants to procure 42,000 Bitcoins, enough to rank third worldwide among corporate holders.
Renewable energy player VivoPower International raised $121 million to start a $100 million XRP purchase program. Two smaller private firms announced their intent to form XRP reserves within 24 hours of that deal. More might be on the way.
But why are these assets so appealing to hold, and why would investors want to buy shares of a business that only manages assets they don’t have any control over?
In short, chief financial officers are seeing that low yields on relatively safe assets they already hold, like U.S. Treasuries, look even punier in comparison to the meteoric run-up in prices for assets like XRP and Bitcoin during the past 10 years.
They likely figure that a small coin allocation offers a hedge against inflation, without as much risk as an investment in stocks — though it’s not clear that they’re correct on that latter point. Furthermore, buying and holding cryptocurrencies means that a company doesn’t have to take on any risk of making capital investments in value-generating equipment, nor put hardly any of their operational expenses toward labor, like most companies do.
Here’s the catch
The catch is that every one of these new crypto treasury companies is banking on the same set of assets, and the same infrastructure to support them. Therefore, none of them have any economic moat, nor do they have any competitive advantage. And that means that over the long term, they are more likely to be bad investments than the assets they hold.
For example, VivoPower’s deal depends on BitGo for cold storage of its coins. Reitar’s prospectus lists Coinbase Prime and Anchorage Digital as backup custodians. Insurance, auditing, chain attestations, and cold-storage logistics are effectively off-the-shelf services, which makes them great for operational security, but terrible for outperforming competitors.
In other words, if you invest in these crypto treasury businesses, you are paying a premium for coin exposure that’s being diluted by the company’s need to pay overhead.
A skeptical investor might also ask whether picking up shares in these crypto warehouses is safer than holding coins directly. The answer is “not really.” Balance-sheet leverage not only amplifies the upside, but also the downside if prices swoon, leaving investors with losses.
There’s an easy move to capitalize on this trend
On the brighter side, assuming that demand from crypto treasury adopters keeps rising, the existence of supply scarcity favors buying and holding the coins themselves.
Twenty One’s goal of 42,000 Bitcoins alone is equivalent to almost 93 days of global Bitcoin mining issuance. Add Reitar, VivoPower, and a dozen smaller imitators, and the circulating float of coins available for public trading will shrink. None of that accrues uniquely to the corporate holders; it accrues to the protocol.
Therefore, the easiest way to surf the wave here is to buy and hold a disciplined position in the digital assets these companies chase.
Lastly, remember that volatility cuts both ways. If these crypto treasuries are forced to dump their coins to meet margin calls, prices can swing more violently than what’s normal for crypto.
Over long time horizons, assuming scarcity and consistent adoption remain intact, equity holders will be forced to eat management fees, dilution, and execution risk that they did not bargain for, whereas those who simply hold the coins won’t need to pay for any extras whatsoever.
1 Top Cryptocurrency to Buy Before It Soars 6,220%, According to Cathie Wood
Ether (CRYPTO: ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, lost more than 30% of its value over the past 12 months. Its first spot-price ETFs were approved last July, but those funds didn’t attract as much attention as Bitcoin‘s (CRYPTO: BTC) earlier ETFs.
Instead, Ether seemed to be held back by concerns about competition from newer and faster blockchains, its slowing network activity, and the Trump Administration’s unpredictable tariffs. Nevertheless, some investors remain fiercely bullish on Ether’s future. One of those bulls is ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, who believes Ether’s price could reach $166,000 by 2032.
That would represent a gain of nearly 6,220% and boost its market cap to more than $20 trillion. Bitcoin, which Wood is also bullish on, currently has a market cap of $2 trillion. Could Ether skyrocket to those levels, or should investors maintain more realistic expectations?
The differences between Ether and Bitcoin
Ethereum originally ran on a proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism like Bitcoin. This meant it needed to be mined by GPUs or other chips.
But in 2022, Ethereum transitioned to the proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, which was roughly 99% more power efficient than the PoW mechanism. So instead of being mined, Ether is now staked (or locked up for rewards) on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum’s transformation into a PoS blockchain also enabled it to support smart contracts, which are used to develop decentralized apps (dApps), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other crypto assets. Bitcoin’s PoW blockchain doesn’t support smart contracts.
Therefore, Ether’s value is often linked to Ethereum’s popularity as a development platform. Bitcoin is still valued by its scarcity and limited supply — since 19.6 million of its maximum supply of 21 million tokens have already been mined.
Ether doesn’t have a fixed maximum supply, but its overall supply declines when its network activity rises. That’s because a portion of every transaction fee in Ether is burned. But when Ethereum’s network activity slows down, its supply rises as more Ether tokens are created than burned.
So while Bitcoin is always deflationary, Ether can be both inflationary and deflationary. But to remain a popular platform for developers and investors, it needs to keep providing fast transaction times with low fees.
That’s becoming increasingly difficult as faster and cheaper PoS blockchains like Solana and Cardano challenge Ethereum. Solana processes transactions much faster than Ethereum, while Cardano usually offers lower fees.
Ethereum’s catalysts and challenges
Ether’s next big upgrade — The Verge — aims to upgrade its security features and lower its hardware requirements so it can run on smaller devices like smartphones, wearables, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It also aims to reduce its off-chain Layer 2 (L2) fees with a series of upgrades for its network to clear more space for fresh data. Those upgrades could help it indirectly reduce its congestion issues by absorbing some of its core Layer 1 (L1) network traffic.
Assuming those upgrades bring in more developers and investors, its network activity will increase, reduce its supply, and stabilize Ether’s price. Another potential catalyst would be the approval of new spot-price ETFs with staking features.
The first batch of Ether’s spot-price ETFs only held Ether in cold storage and didn’t pass on any of its interest-like staking rewards. The next batch could pass on those rewards (about 3% to 5% annually) and make them more appealing.
However, Ether could still be held back by competition from other PoS blockchains, a lack of approvals for new ETFs with staking rewards, or the messy macro environment that is curbing the market’s appetite for cryptocurrencies and other speculative investments.
Should you believe Cathie Wood’s bullish outlook?
Wood believes Ether’s value will rise as Ethereum becomes a foundational layer of a new digital financial ecosystem that challenges traditional banks with decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, NFTs, and tokenized versions of real-world assets.
She also expects Ether’s staking yield to become more appealing than the yields of U.S. Treasuries as interest rates decline, and for the approvals of new staking ETFs to bring in even more institutional investors. Just as with Bitcoin, Wood expects the growing institutional adoption of Ether over the next few years to drive its price a lot higher.
That thesis sounds reasonable, but claiming it could reach a $20 trillion market cap within the next seven years — compared to gold’s current market cap of $3.4 trillion — seems too bullish.
So while it might be smart to accumulate Ether as it rolls out new networking upgrades, attracts more developers, burns more tokens, and gains more attention with new ETFs, we should take Cathie Wood’s forecasts with a grain of salt. It will probably stabilize and rise higher, but its long-term value isn’t that easy to gauge.
