Author: GT

Remember when CryptoPunks were the ultimate flex? The 10,000 avatars issued by Larva Labs back in 2017, were among the crown jewels of the non-fungible token (NFT) craze in 2021. Some NFTs of that collection fetched as high as $56 million worth of ether (ETH) on the open market in 2024. The top five most expensive NFTs belong to the CryptoPunk collection, data from NFT analytics service CryptoSlam shows. But holders seem to be moving their money out. The wallet behind CryptoPunks #3100, the third-highest NFT sale ever, sold their collectible earlier Friday for 4,000 ETH — a 500 ETH…

Microsoft announced on Friday that it is buying 3.7 million metric tons of carbon removal credits from CO280, a project developer that works with pulp and paper mills. The purchase covers 12 years of emissions from CO280’s first carbon capture project at a mill on the Gulf Coast. CO280 expects the facility to start capturing CO2 in 2028. Microsoft’s purchase should help it meet its goal of becoming a carbon-negative company by 2030 — that is, removing more carbon than its business produces. But even with Microsoft’s enviable balance sheet, it’s a tall order: the company generated 17.1 million metric…

The U.S. dollar index (DXY) has fallen below 100 and gold has surged to new all-time highs as escalating tariffs have heightened global economic uncertainty. Consequently, asset prices have taken a hit—most notably in the tech sector and cryptocurrencies. Since reaching its all-time high of $109,000 in January, bitcoin (BTC) has declined approximately 26%. When compared to the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks, bitcoin’s drawdown sits right in the middle, signaling its growing maturity as an asset. Tesla (TSLA) is currently the worst performer, down nearly 50% from its peak. NVIDIA (NVDA) follows with a 31% drop. Apple (AAPL), Bitcoin, Meta…

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright is not worried about falling oil prices and their impact on America’s shale oil industry, and is stressing that the coming years should be a time of energy abundance for the world’s largest economy.”The U.S. shale industry is going to is going to survive and thrive,” Wright said in an interview with CNBC’s Dan Murphy in the United Arab Emirates’ capital Abu Dhabi. “But of course,” he added, “investment decisions are going to be tailored if prices stay long for stay this low for a long period of time.…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Startups aren’t isolated from the world. But this week, funding news felt positively uncorrelated from the overall news cycle, offering somewhat of a reprieve — or perhaps just more time to prepare to invest in “planetary and societal health,” as one new fund plans to. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits:Getty Images This week included an exit, a lawsuit, a disappointing sale, and a scientific controversy. OpenAI alumni: Former…

For a brief moment after President Donald Trump announced his  tariffs, it looked as if Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) could keep its head as markets all around it were losing theirs. The stock market plummeted on April 3 and April 4, as investors and businesses digested the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs (which have since been put on hold for three months). Bitcoin dropped just over 1.5% while the S&P 500 lost more than 10% in those two days. It is a rare day when crypto is less volatile than stocks. But Bitcoin did stumble in the following days. Let’s…

This photo illustration created on January 7, 2025, in Washington, DC, shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and an image of the Meta logo. Drew Angerer | Afp | Getty ImagesMeta will face off against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday in a high-stakes antitrust trial that could result in the company divesting Instagram and WhatsApp.The trial in Washington is expected to last weeks and centers around the FTC’s allegations that Meta monopolizes the personal social networking market. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives are…

In the world of tech, some might argue that the term of the decade is AI, but in the bigger scheme of things, beyond this single sector, the most important word may well be “resilience.” How well prepared are people, organizations, and countries for unforeseen, negative economic, geopolitical, social, and environmental developments? It’s a question that’s triggering a lot of scrambling in search of answers.  This existential crisis is also playing out in the world of tech. We’re more reliant than ever before on services working — on uptime, in other words — and downtime may speak to bigger crises…

By Hannah Lang (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed into law a bill to overturn a revised rule from the Internal Revenue Service that expanded the definition of a broker to include decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, according to a statement from the White House. In the last weeks of the Biden administration in December, the IRS updated its crypto tax reporting rule that it had finalized earlier in 2024 to clarify that its new guidelines would also apply to decentralized finance – or DeFi – exchanges. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate in March voted to nullify…

The sale of bankrupt EV startup Canoo’s assets to its CEO has been approved by the judge overseeing the case. After evaluating a number of limited objections to the sale, Judge Brendan Shannon said in a hearing Wednesday he believes the process was fair and that no one else but Canoo CEO Anthony Aquila made a bid. Shannon’s decision paves the way for Aquila to buy most of the assets of the EV startup for around $4 million in cash. Aquila plans to offer services to customers such as NASA and the Department of Defense, which purchased a few Canoo…