Author: GT

In an interview with TheStreet Roundtable, Konstantin Richter, CEO and Founder of Blockdaemon, gave some advice to crypto founders: embrace governance. The value of professional oversight is often overlooked in an industry that, at its core, is anti-establishment. Konstatin’s perspective is driven by his interactions with major financial institutions like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, who have been hesitant to enter the space for several reasons, including the tendency for projects to not set up traditional structures. Crypto is overrun with scams, rugpulls, and other types of fraud. Earlier this year, Hailey Welch launched $HAWK, a meme coin based on…

Microsoft researchers claim they’ve developed the largest-scale 1-bit AI model, also known as a “bitnet,” to date. Called BitNet b1.58 2B4T, it’s openly available under an MIT license and can run on CPUs, including Apple’s M2. Bitnets are essentially compressed models designed to run on lightweight hardware. In standard models, weights, the values that define the internal structure of a model, are often quantized so the models perform well on a wide range of machines. Quantizing the weights lowers the number of bits — the smallest units a computer can process — needed to represent those weights, enabling models to…

A federal judge agreed to pause an ongoing lawsuit between 18 state attorneys general and a decentralized finance lobbyist group against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday, after the parties noted the SEC’s new leadership. The state AGs, all Republicans, filed the lawsuit alongside the DeFi Education Fund last November after Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election. They allege that the federal securities regulator had exceeded its authority in filing lawsuits against crypto exchanges. In Wednesday’s filing, the SEC suggested that Paul Atkins’ confirmation as the new agency chair could end the litigation. “As support,…

Startups attracted $91.5 billion in venture capital funding in Q1, according to the latest report from data provider PitchBook. This figure not only exceeds the previous quarter’s allocation by 18.5% but also represents the second-highest quarterly investment in the last decade. Despite this seemingly positive news, Kyle Stanford, lead U.S. venture capital analyst at PitchBook, appears to be the most bearish about VC dealmaking since he started covering this market 11 years ago. The source of Stanford’s negativity? Shattered expectations that 2025 would bring significant exits, creating a cycle where IPOs and big acquisitions would generate tons of cash for…

Kia debuted its 2026 EV4 sedan at the New York International Auto Show on Wednesday, its first global electric sedan and one designed for customers looking for an affordable EV. Whether U.S. customers will gravitate toward a sedan is an open question — and one Kia isn’t necessarily betting on. The company launched sales of the EV4 in South Korea and plans to bring it to Europe by the end of the year. Sales in the United States are expected to begin in the last quarter of 2025 or first quarter of 2026, a Kia spokesperson told TechCrunch. Kia’s primary…

Where’s the bottom for bitcoin (BTC)? While acknowledging it’s possible that level has already been hit, on-chain analyst James Check suggested a true bottom may not be in place until after bitcoin suffers a true capitulation event. That would likely require a decline to the $65,000 area, said Check, calling it the “true market mean,” i.e., the average cost basis for active investors. At that point according to Check, who spoke on the TFTC podcast, the average investor may begin to feel the pressure of unrealized losses. Even long-term holders, including those who have held bitcoin for five years, could…

“We are in a period of what I’ll call fintech maximalism,” says Chemistry founder and GP Mark Goldberg. “By that, I mean the companies that grew up in the last five to 10 years in fintech, those that quietly executed through the winter of the 2021 to 2024 period, have emerged as compounders in a way that has really taken my breath away.” After nearly a decade at Index Ventures, where he backed standout fintech companies like Plaid, Persona, Lithic, and Pilot, Goldberg left in 2024 to launch Chemistry, an early-stage venture firm. Founded alongside Kristina Shen and Ethan Kurzweil,…

The U.S. dollar has been the international reserve currency since the end of World War II. Could that be changing? BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, along with several crypto experts, believe there’s a chance it could. Not immediately, but someday. Maybe. “It is very unlikely in the short term,” said CK Zheng, co-founder and CIO of ZX Squared Capital. “But in the long run, the possibility is increasing.” Check Out: 13 Cheap Cryptocurrencies With the Highest Potential Upside for You Read Next: These 10 Used Cars Will Last Longer Than an Average New Vehicle The dollar’s relative stability has made it…

Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are all locked in a race to see who can zero out their carbon pollution first.  Apple reported on Wednesday that it is more than halfway there. Since 2015, the company says it has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by around 60%. That covers everything from manufacturing and marketing to corporate operations and customer use. Many companies have successfully eliminated the carbon footprint of their core operations. Cheap solar and wind, and increasingly affordable grid-scale batteries, have made that relatively simple — and even advantageous — from a cost perspective. But Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have…

The performance of bitcoin (BTC) mining stocks was mixed in the first two weeks of April, with pure play operators outperforming those with exposure to high-performance computing (HPC), JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Wednesday. Only MARA Holdings (MARA) and CleanSpark (CLSK) outperformed the largest cryptocurrency during the period, while miners with exposure to HPC, which is used in applications including AI, such as Bitdeer (BTDR), TeraWulf (WULF), IREN (IREN) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) underperformed. The bank noted that March was a good month for the U.S.-listed miners. They added 15 exahashes per second of capacity, and mined more…