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Use Volatility In Your Favor With Robinhood Options Trading In April, Volatility Index VIX Hit Highest Mark

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–News Direct–

By Meg Flippin, Benzinga

Thanks to their large upside potential, many seasoned traders choose to trade options to play the markets. Fintechs like Robinhood have made accessing the market easier for seasoned traders to fine-tune their strategies, building based on their trading level.

With inflation remaining stubborn, the markets appearing to be waiting for the Federal Reserves next move on interest rates and the U.S. about to enter what is expected to be a polarizing presidential election, volatility has been high. In April, the VIX Index which Wall Street uses to gauge volatility in the market hit its highest level since late October 2023, when the Israel-Hamas conflict began. Year-to-date, the VIX Index is up more than 12%.

Options Abound With Options Trading

While volatility may scare buy-and-hold investors, for active options traders, some look at it as an opportunity. After all, with options trading, investors can engage in a variety of diverse strategies that have the potential to work in all sorts of market conditions, whether it's speculating stocks will go up or down based on their bearish and bullish outlooks. Options are also cheaper than buying shares outright, creating leverage, which means the gains on your investment could be amplified as can losses. However, options expire, and you can lose your entire investment in a short period of time. Some strategies present a potential for substantial or even unlimited losses.

Then there are the hedging capabilities that come with options, which can help mitigate the dangers of high-risk, high-reward instruments. If an investor is worried a stock is going to fall they can purchase puts that enable them to sell the stock at a strike price, regardless of where the stock falls prior to expiration of the option. The same cant be said of stocks. If shares tank, you dont have any downward protection other than to sell and limit your losses. However, if the stock goes up or doesnt move prior to expiration, the option will expire worthless and the loss is equal to the premium paid.

Leveling The Playing Field For Options Investors

Accessing options trading is getting even easier thanks to Robinhoods trading platform. Not only do customers get access to options but also advanced charts, including the ability to track and modify technical indicators such as moving average, relative strength index and moving average convergence divergence. Furthermore, there are no contract fees.*

Other powerful features of Robinhoods platform include the ability to save and monitor options contracts to see hypothetical returns and options rolling in which you can seamlessly adjust and extend your positions. And lets not forget 24-hour support. If you have a question on your option strategy even in the wee hours of the morning, Robinhood has you covered.

Even retirement accounts and cash account holders can trade options with Robinhood. The same cant be said of some of Robinhoods rivals.

Robinhoods efforts to improve access are not surprising. For some time now, the company has been on a mission to level the playing field when it comes to investing by providing access to an array of investment and retirement products, keeping costs down and commissions at zero (other fees apply). Take Robinhood Gold for one example. Gold subscribers get 5% APY on uninvested cash in their brokerage account, a 1% boost on brokerage transfers and instant deposits.

None of this is lost on options traders, which is why that part of Robinhoods business is growing, and options traders are taking note. Robinhood is making moves to grow its market share even more. We want to be number one in the active trader market. So active traders are very important for us, Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev said in a recent interview. They care about very specific things like performance, pricing, user experience. And we're making lots of investments there both in the user experience and in new product innovations that other competitors don't offer, 24-hour market being a great example there.

Options trading is growing in popularity as regular retail investors learn its virtues. Robinhood wants to be a leader in the space and is pulling out all the stops to achieve that.

If you are interested in trading options and want to do so at a low cost with all the support you need, then check out Robinhoods offering here.

Featured photo by Nicholas Cappello on Unsplash.

Benzinga is a leading financial media and data provider, known for delivering accurate, timely, and actionable financial information to empower investors and traders.

This post contains sponsored content. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.

Disclaimer:

*There are no contract fees charged directly by Robinhood. However Robinhood does pass through certain fees charged by securities regulators and exchanges.

Commission-free trading of stocks, ETFs and options refers to $0 commissions for Robinhood Financial self-directed individual cash or margin brokerage accounts that trade U.S. listed securities and certain OTC securities electronically. Keep in mind, other fees such, Gold subscription fees, wire transfer fees, and paper statement fees may apply to your brokerage account. Please see Robinhood Financial's Fee Schedule to learn more.

Options trading entails significant risk and is not appropriate for all customers. Customers must read and understand the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before engaging in any options trading strategies. Options transactions are often complex and may involve the potential of losing the entire investment in a relatively short period of time. Certain complex options strategies carry additional risk, including the potential for losses that may exceed the original investment amount.

Robinhood Financial does not guarantee favorable investment outcomes. The past performance of a security or financial product does not guarantee future results or returns. Customers should consider their investment objectives and risks carefully before investing in options. Because of the importance of tax considerations to all options transactions, the customer considering options should consult their tax advisor as to how taxes affect the outcome of each options strategy. Supporting documentation for any claims, if applicable, will be furnished upon request.

Rolling options does not ensure a profit or guarantee against a loss. An investor may also end up compounding their losses. By rolling out, the duration is extended, which can also increase risks as there's more time for the underlying security's price to move unfavorably.

One of the key downsides of options vs stocks is that options contracts expire over time. For puts, If the stock price is at or above the strike price, the option expires worthless, and you can lose the money you paid for the options contract.

Risk of VIX options:

The prices of VIX options can fluctuate significantly and thus increase the risk for investors.

The VIX is a synthetic value that is calculated on the basis of option prices. Investors who invest in VIX options should therefore be aware of the special features of this asset class.

In some market situations, the VIX and thus also the prices of VIX options may not move in the expected direction. This means that in some cases VIX options may not help to reduce the risk of a portfolio, but rather increase it.

VIX options generally have a term of only a few months and are therefore more suitable for short-term trading.

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View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/use-volatility-in-your-favor-with-robinhood-options-trading-in-april-volatility-index-vix-hit-highest-mark-337548674

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Sui Processes Over 6 Million Transactions Per Second as AI Agents Drive Public Throughput Experiment

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Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, July 6th, 2026, FinanceWire

Autonomous AI agents battling across games, payments, and chat pushed Sui’s programmable tunnels to a peak of 6,086,766 TPS

Sui, where money moves as freely as messages, processed the highest number of transactions per second ever performed on its network on Saturday, July 4, 2026. The milestone was hit live during a public experiment open to anyone and witnessed by thousands during a livestream.

Made possible through “programmable tunnels,” which are offchain payment and state channels that settle to Sui mainnet when closed, the experiment invited users to log into an explorer built specifically for the event, using nothing more than an email address. Once connected, participants watched AI agents battle head-to-head across games, payments, and chat, all contributing transaction volume in real time toward a single goal: pushing Sui mainnet past 1 million transactions per second (TPS).

The network exceeded that target several times over. At approximately 12:30 PM ET, Sui mainnet reached a peak of 6,086,766 TPS: more than six times the experiment’s 1 million TPS goal, and roughly 20 times higher than Sui’s previous maximum-TPS benchmark of 297,000 TPS, set in a controlled testing environment.

Diving Into the Details

The demo was led by Chief Cryptographer Kostas Chalkias, co-founder of Mysten Labs and a contributor to Sui, alongside Daniel Lam, a lead engineer on Mysten’s dedicated Sui hacker team. Participants signed in with zkLogin, the Sui primitive that makes it possible for users to log in with an existing account, such as Google, instead of a traditional crypto wallet, and received a test token, MTPS, to use in the experiment. As gas was sponsored throughout, users needed no prior SUI holdings to take part.

From there, users and AI agents opened programmable, Lightning Network-style offchain channels, or “tunnels,” with one another to play games such as blackjack and “Quantum Poker,” draw together on a shared canvas, chat, and transact, all gaslessly and offchain, with activity settling back to Sui mainnet when each channel closed. Every closed channel was mutually cosigned and independently verifiable onchain, allowing the experiment to combine high throughput with cryptographic proof that no transaction was tampered with.

“We proved that programmable tunnels aren’t just about payments,” said Kostas Chalkias, Chief Cryptographer and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs. “This is agent-to-agent commerce, competitive gaming, and prediction markets running gaslessly at massive scale. A company’s trading agent could play chess or poker against another company’s agent millions of times without touching the base chain. Consider real-world utility: you could lock funds offchain so someone without internet access, in an earthquake or a blackout, can still pay for groceries the moment they’re near a signal again. Right now there are only four or five proven product-market fits in crypto: stablecoins, DeFi, payments, prediction markets. I think programmable tunnels just opened the door to a fifth.”

What’s Next

Mysten Labs and the Sui hacker team plan to build on the experiment with additional capabilities, including confidential transfers via Nautilus, tunnels supporting more than two participants, and agent-to-agent prediction markets. 

About Sui

Sui, where money moves as freely as messages, is a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain built for scalable finance and global payments. Founded by the core team behind Meta’s stablecoin initiative and powered by an object-centric model, Sui makes assets, permissions, and user data programmable and ownable. Sui’s primitives offer builders everything they need to create high-performance payments and financial applications, including instant agentic payments. Users can learn more at sui.io.

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media@sui.io

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Harmony Labs makes a strategic investment in Harmony Link; a dual-token system opens up a new avenue for monetizing Web2 short-video traffic

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Harmony Labs, a leading global blockchain investment and research institution, has officially announced a full strategic investment in Harmony Link, a Web3 short-video aggregation platform. Leveraging Harmony’s underlying sharding technology and resources from 412 ecosystem projects, the two parties will jointly build an inclusive Web3 gateway serving a billion-scale short-video user base. They aim to create a long-term dual-token economic model—featuring HK as the core value carrier and HAK as the medium of circulation within the ecosystem—with plans for HK to debut on the Binance Alpha board, thereby establishing a closed-loop system for sustainable value growth.

Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Singapore’s financial hub, Harmony Labs focuses on specialized investments and in-depth industry research regarding blockchain infrastructure and ecosystem applications. Its core underlying asset, Harmony (ONE), utilizes random state sharding technology to achieve low-gas, high-throughput cross-chain interactions. The firm has incubated 412 ecosystem projects across DeFi, NFT, and GameFi sectors, amassed a network of 300,000 global developers, maintained long-term deep partnerships with top-tier investors like Binance Labs, and established robust systems for global compliance and capital operations.

The industry currently faces clear pain points: Web3 users account for less than 6% of the global population, and customer acquisition costs in the blockchain sector reach as high as $42 per person. Furthermore, traditional text-based educational content presents high barriers to entry, third-party operational tools are prone to bans, and the space is rife with pyramid schemes. Meanwhile, the attention of the billion-strong Web2 short-video user base is consumed without compensation, and there is a lack of practical tools for distributing the value generated by traffic. As a key inclusive project for Harmony Labs through 2026, Harmony Link centers on “TikTok-style” short-video behavior mining. It integrates five key tools—on-chain price chart visualization, decentralized live streaming, AI digital avatar promotion, project advertising, and community management—to comprehensively address eight major bottlenecks hindering industry development.

This strategic investment will fully unleash Harmony Labs’ multi-dimensional resources to empower the platform: leveraging Harmony’s sharding technology to reduce development costs by 87% and utilizing the 300,000-developer network to rapidly iterate on smart contract audits and anti-fraud firewall modules. Additionally, the partnership will facilitate the onboarding of the existing 412 ecosystem projects and capitalize on the market’s established perception of Harmony as an “ultra-low gas public chain” to significantly lower user education costs. The funds will be primarily allocated to four key areas: product iteration, global community expansion, the establishment of an HK price-support reserve pool, and preparations for the HK listing on Binance Alpha.

The Head of Investment at Harmony Labs stated: “The primary bottleneck for the large-scale adoption of Web3 is the high barrier to entry for users; short-form video serves as the optimal vehicle to connect the general public with blockchain technology. Harmony Link’s innovative dual-token model offers immense long-term value: HAK dynamically adjusts user activation ratios in phases to smooth out market selling pressure, while core cash flows from AI leasing and advertising continuously inject USDT into the HK price-support pool. With essential, paid use cases across the platform and a future listing on Binance Alpha, a virtuous cycle of traffic, revenue, and token value will emerge, truly enabling the distribution of ‘attention value’ to the general public.”

The Harmony Link Project Lead added: “Leveraging Harmony Labs’ backing in capital, technology, and ecosystem, the platform will adjust the HAK/USDT ratio for account activation across five stages. Upon reaching the 50% HAK / 50% USDT phase, ‘Computing Power NFTs’ will be launched to generate the core token, HK. With a total supply of 100 million HK, 60% is generated via Computing Power NFTs, and 20% is allocated to a dedicated price-support fund. All B2B paid services across the platform will eventually settle in HK, and the project will leverage Binance Alpha’s global traffic to amplify long-term value.”

Both parties simultaneously announced a comprehensive roadmap: in the short term, they will launch short-video mining and basic live-streaming functions while steadily transitioning to a hybrid activation model; in the medium term, they will enable HK generation via Computing Power NFTs and continuously bolster HK liquidity reserves; in the long term, they will drive HK’s listing on Binance Alpha, implement a full-chain HK payment ecosystem, incubate high-quality Web3 projects, and establish a DAO-based decentralized governance system.

Moving forward, Harmony Labs will continue to provide global compliance research, capital connections, and brand/channel resources. This support aims to help Harmony Link break down the barriers between Web2 and Web3, create a benchmark Web3 traffic platform accessible to everyone, and drive the mass adoption and inclusive growth of blockchain technology.

About Harmony Labs
Founded in Singapore in 2018, Harmony Labs is a global blockchain investment and research institution specializing in blockchain-focused investments and in-depth industry research. Building a complete ecosystem upon the underlying public blockchain Harmony (ONE), the firm focuses on the practical application of cutting-edge technologies such as sharding, cross-chain interoperability, and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs. With a global footprint spanning North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Harmony Labs is dedicated to bridging traditional capital with the Web3 industry and fostering inclusive blockchain development.

About Harmony Link
Harmony Link is a Web3 short-video aggregation platform incubated by Harmony Labs. It features an innovative “Proof-of-Action” mining mechanism and a dual-token economy, integrating data visualization, decentralized live streaming, AI digital avatars, project advertising, and community management. With HK serving as its long-term core value token, the platform plans to launch on the Binance Alpha sector, aiming to reshape the Web3 traffic monetization ecosystem.

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AI STUDIOS Launches AI Roleplay for Insurance Agent Training

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  • The new AI-powered training tool lets insurance agents and sales reps rehearse real customer conversations — policy renewals, cancellation requests, claims follow-ups — with instant, automated coaching feedback after every session.

PALO ALTO, Calif, July 6th 2026, AI STUDIOS, operated by DeepBrain AI, launched AI Roleplay, a new conversation-training solution designed to help insurance agents and sales representatives rehearse difficult customer conversations before they happen in the field. The tool gives agents unlimited practice sessions with an AI customer that responds in real time, followed by automated, personalized coaching feedback.

AI Roleplay simulates the conversations sales representatives say are hardest to get right: auto insurance renewal calls, customers threatening to cancel a policy, claims follow-up calls, and routine check-ins tied to a policyholder’s birth month. Rather than reciting scripted responses, the AI customer reacts dynamically to whatever the representative actually says — raising objections, asking for more detail, or pushing back, much as a real customer would.

Sales coaching has traditionally relied on in-person practice with a trainer or manager, a model that limits how often sales representatives can rehearse and how quickly they get feedback. AI Roleplay removes both constraints. Representatives can run a practice session at any time, without scheduling a coach, and receive a speaking score along with specific strengths, areas for improvement, and suggested phrasing immediately after each session ends.

Practice scenarios are organized by situation, customer type, and difficulty level, from beginner to advanced. Sales representatives converse with the AI customer via text or voice, and voice sessions include a speech-analysis score that flags pacing, clarity, and tone — a level of feedback unavailable through prerecorded training videos or static e-learning modules.

AI Roleplay also includes a manager dashboard that tracks completion rates, scores, and activity for each team member in real time. Sales managers can use the dashboard to identify representatives who need additional coaching without listening to call recordings individually or scheduling separate feedback sessions, according to DeepBrain AI.

DeepBrain AI said the tool is intended to shorten the ramp-up period for new sales representatives and reduce customer complaints tied to inaccurate explanations or weak call handling — a persistent risk in insurance sales, where regulatory and compliance expectations are high. Beyond insurance, the company said AI Roleplay applies to any role where conversation quality directly affects business outcomes, including corporate sales representatives, financial advisors, call center staff, and healthcare front-line workers.

“In insurance sales, a single sentence can determine whether a deal closes or a customer loses trust,” said Eric Jang, CEO of DeepBrain AI. “AI Roleplay goes beyond watching a video or sitting through a course — sales representatives train by actually talking with an AI customer, which is what sets it apart from traditional online training.”

AI Roleplay is currently deployed with multiple insurance carriers in South Korea, and DeepBrain AI said it plans to expand the tool to additional industries and practice scenarios going forward.


About DeepBrain AI

DeepBrain AI is a global leader in AI Avatar, AI Agent, and AI Human technology. Its flagship B2B SaaS platform, AI STUDIOS, helps enterprises create hyper-realistic AI avatars, real-time avatar agents, and localized video content at scale. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., DeepBrain AI serves enterprise customers worldwide.

Media Contact:
DeepBrain AI Communications 
global@deepbrain.io
www.aistudios.com

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