Author: GT

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…

Graze, a startup that lets people build and monetize custom feeds for Bluesky’s social network, has attracted new capital. Pre-seed investors, led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, have invested $1 million in the company’s small team, which is working to give users control over their algorithms and social media experiences. Graze’s software, available via the web, offers tools to build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds. Unlike on other social networks like X or Meta’s Threads, where users are defaulted into a main algorithmic feed every time they open the app, Bluesky’s growing social network of nearly 35 million users…

The first quarter of 2025 was a reality check for digital assets. While the year began with optimism fueled by the election of a pro-crypto U.S. president and expectations of a friendlier regulatory environment, macroeconomic challenges quickly came to dominate the narrative. Bitcoin briefly reached a new all-time high of $109,356 before ending the quarter down 11.6%, its second-largest quarterly decline since Q2 2022. Altcoins fared worse, with indices more heavily weighted toward smaller-cap tokens such as the CoinDesk Memecoin Index (CDMEME) and the CoinDesk 80 (CD80) declining by 55.2% and 46.4%, respectively. You’re reading Crypto Long & Short, our…

Aura, a digital photo frames company founded by early Twitter employees, is introducing its latest model, Aspen, which adds new technology to the device and its accompanying mobile app. In addition to hosting your digital photos in its 12-inch HD display, the device now also allows you to add captions to your photos when they appear on the frame. Meanwhile, the mobile app added a people search feature that makes it easier to find the photos you want to display. Aura was founded by former Twitter employees Abdur Chowdhury and Eric Jensen, and its vision has been to offer more…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department has shut down its office that sought to deal with misinformation and disinformation that Russia, China and Iran have been accused of spreading.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement Wednesday that he had closed what had been known as the Global Engagement Center because it had taken actions to restrict freedom of speech in the United States and elsewhere. The center has been a frequent target of criticism from conservatives for calling out media and online reports that it said are biased or untruthful. At times, it has identified U.S. websites and…

Bitcoin was born as a response to institutional failure, a decentralized escape hatch from corruptible centralized finance and a north star of self sovereignty. Bitcoin’s true vision was a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. That phrase is right there in the Bitcoin white paper’s title from Satoshi himself. You’re reading Crypto Long & Short, our weekly newsletter featuring insights, news and analysis for the professional investor. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday. Today, Bitcoin is many things: A store of value A form of digital gold A macro asset But Bitcoin is not electronic cash. It…

Income investors looking for a way to play the boom in artificial intelligence can look to municipal bonds connected to data centers, according to Nuveen. A lot has been made of the need for data centers to provide the infrastructure for AI, and subsequently, the increasing demand to power them. The power consumption by data centers is expected to account for almost half of the demand in electricity growth between now and 2030, a new report from the International Energy Agency found . Public power bond issuance totaled $26.8 billion in 2024, up from an annual average of $14 billion…

In just 17 days after launch, Temu surpassed Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Shein on the Apple App Store in the U.S., according to Apptopia data shared with CNBC.Stefani Reynolds | Afp | Getty ImagesChinese online retailer Temu, whose “Shop like a billionaire” marketing campaign made its way to last year’s Super Bowl, has dramatically slashed its online ad spending in the U.S. and seen its ranking in Apple’s App Store plunge following President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on trade partners.Temu, which is owned by Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings, had been on an online advertising blitz in recent years in…

In a bid to inject AI into more of the programming process, OpenAI is launching Codex CLI, a coding “agent” designed to run locally from terminal software. Announced on Wednesday alongside OpenAI’s newest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, Codex CLI links OpenAI’s models with local code and computing tasks, OpenAI says. Via Codex CLI, OpenAI’s models can write and edit code on a desktop and take certain actions, like moving files. Codex CLI appears to be a small step in the direction of OpenAI’s broader agentic coding vision. Recently, the company’s CFO, Sarah Friar, described what she called the “agentic…

OpenAI announced on Wednesday the launch of o3 and o4-mini, new AI reasoning models designed to pause and work through questions before responding. The company calls o3 its most advanced reasoning model ever, outperforming the company’s previous models on tests measuring math, coding, reasoning, science, and visual understanding capabilities. Meanwhile, o4-mini offers what OpenAI says is a competitive trade-off between price, speed, and performance — three factors developers often consider when choosing an AI model to power their applications. Unlike previous reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini can generate responses using tools in ChatGPT such as web browsing, Python code execution,…