Author: GT

President Trump followed through on a popular campaign promise this month. After laying the groundwork for a strategic reserve of cryptocurrency holdings in earlier commitments, the March 6 signing of Executive Order 14233 seeks to establish an official Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate Digital Asset Stockpile. Many crypto investors had been hoping for a truly game-changing strategic reserve, paving the way to massive federal purchases of Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and other digital assets. The executive order didn’t exactly deliver on those bullish hopes, and the immediate market reaction was largely negative. On the other hand, this two-pronged digital asset strategy…

Richard Teng, chief executive officer of Binance Holdings Ltd., at an event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents Association in Singapore, on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. Ore Huiying | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesBinance CEO Richard Teng says the Trump administration has been a “fantastic” reset for the cryptocurrency industry.”It’s an extremely different environment that we’re operating in,” Teng told CNBC on Tuesday.In the span of 16 months, Binance has gone from a political outcast to a possible power broker in Washington. Once the poster child for regulatory defiance – Binance was slapped with a record $4.3 billion settlement with regulators and forced…

Jonah Peretti’s career to date has been defined by constant reinvention. As the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, Peretti has been at the forefront of digital media for almost two decades, navigating changes as the once small startup transformed into, at one point, a multimedia powerhouse. But as the company grows older, one question lingers: Has Peretti’s relentless drive for innovation made him too entrepreneurial to lead BuzzFeed to long-term stability? “The nice thing about this field,” Peretti muses, “is you do something [different] all the time. It’s not been 20 years of one job. It’s been 20 years of…

A human rights campaigner, Tanya O’Carroll, has succeeded in forcing social media giant Meta not to use her data for targeted advertising. The agreement is contained in a settlement to an individual challenge she lodged against Meta’s tracking and profiling back in 2022. O’Carroll had argued that a legal right to object to the use of personal data for direct marketing that’s contained in U.K. (and E.U.) data protection law, along with an unqualified right that personal data shall no longer be processed for such a purpose if the user objects, meant Meta must respect her objection and stop tracking…

A new report showcases the 20 top-trending open source startups around the world, more than half of which are closely aligned with AI. The report is the handiwork of European venture capital firm Runa Capital, which has operated the Runa Open Source Startup (ROSS) Index since 2020. The Index serves quarterly updates on the fastest-growing projects in terms of GitHub “stars” — a metric that’s something akin to a “like” on social media. Beginning in 2023, Runa started producing annual reports, highlighting the most popular commercial open source startups in a given year. Last year’s report demonstrated that AI and…

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stories to share from this week, like the greatest hits from Nvidia GTC; the NASA astronauts finally came home; Rippling’s lawsuit; and Google bought Wiz. Let’s get to it! Google finally does it: Google made its biggest acquisition in its history this week when it confirmed that it was buying Wiz for $32 billion. Google says it will position Wiz as a “multicloud” offering, meaning Wiz will not be a Google-only shop. Last year, Google offered Wiz $23 billion for its business. Guess it pays to say no sometimes.  Speaking…

Charlie Javice’s high-profile fraud trial has become a showcase of embarrassing missteps on both sides, with eyebrow-raising details about how JPMorgan Chase was allegedly deceived into buying her startup, Frank, for $175 million when it had just 300,000 customers instead of four million. Per a new WSJ article, one pivotal moment came when former Frank engineer Patrick Vovor testified that he refused Javice’s request to create fake user data just one week before the sale, recalling she said to him: “Don’t worry. I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit.” When Vovor declined, Javice allegedly turned to a…

Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it to pay news publishers for reusing snippets of their content. But how much is displaying news worth? Google argues that publishers “vastly overestimate” the value of their journalism to its business; per its report of the tests, the actual value “could not be statistically‬‭ distinguished from…

Operation Zero, a company that acquires and sells zero-days exclusively to the Russian government and local Russian companies, announced on Thursday that it’s looking for exploits for the popular messaging app Telegram, and is willing to offer up to $4 million for them. The exploit broker is offering up to $500,000 for a “one-click” remote code execution (RCE) exploit; up to $1.5 million for a zero-click RCE exploit; and up to $4 million for a “full chain” of exploits, presumably referring to a series of bugs that allow hackers to go from accessing a target’s Telegram account to their whole…

Commercial services tech hasn’t historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous. That need has translated into a large fundraise for a company focused on streamlining commercial contracting processes. On Friday, BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, announced that it has raised $127 million in a Series C round led by Meritech Capital that values the company at $1 billion post-money.  That valuation is “more than double” the valuation BuildOps reached in its last financing — a $50 million Series B round announced in May of 2023 and a follow-on “top up”…