Author: GT

A cartoon image of US President-elect Donald Trump with cryptocurrency tokens, depicted in front of the White House to mark his inauguration, displayed at a Coinhero store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. Paul Yeung | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesThe $TRUMP meme coin jumped more than 50% on Wednesday after the top 220 holders of the token were promised dinner with the president.”Have Dinner in Washington, D.C. With President Trump,” reads a message on the front page of the Trump coin’s website. The dinner — black tie optional — is scheduled for May 22, with a reception for…

Khosla Ventures-backed Fireflies.ai, an AI-powered note-taking app, on Wednesday released a set of domain-specific “mini apps” to extract insights from meeting transcripts automatically. With the widespread availability of automatic speech recognition models and generative AI, meeting intelligence startups like Otter, Read AI, Circleback, Krisp, and Granola have registered impressive growth. Fireflies, similarly, has seen 8x expansion in terms of users and has achieved profitability, according to co-founder and CEO Krish Ramineni. To boost growth further, the startup is releasing over 200 mini apps within its platform for different roles and use cases, including sales, marketing, recruiting, operations and management, customer…

If crypto were a celebrity, you could describe its journey as a surprising rise from obscurity to cult classic to mainstream appeal, and you could even go so far as to say it’s in danger of being overexposed. Find Out: 7 Tax Loopholes the Rich Use To Pay Less and Build More Wealth Read Next: 4 Affordable Car Brands You Won’t Regret Buying in 2025 Members of the first family even launched their own meme coins earlier this year to decidedly mixed reactions. Now, everyone’s paying attention to cryptocurrencies — including the Internal Revenue Service. Tax agencies worldwide are ramping…

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet Inc., speaks at the inaugural 2024 Business, Government, and Society Forum at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Stanford, California, on April 3, 2024.Carlos Barria | ReutersFive years removed from the onset of the Covid pandemic, Google is demanding that some remote employees return to the office if they want to keep their jobs and avoid being part of broader cost cuts at the company.Several units within Google have told remote staffers that their roles may be at risk if they don’t start showing up at the closest office for a hybrid…

Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads’ over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level of content next to which the ads run. The company says that the new ad placement within the Threads feed will be switched on by default for all new ad campaigns that use either Meta’s Advantage+ or Manual Placements. However, advertisers on the latter plan…

The maturation of DeFi technology has created a paradox: while battle-tested codebases and rising technical proficiency have lowered the barrier to entry for launching new protocols, securing sustainable liquidity has never been harder. As thousands of projects built on increasingly standardized infrastructure compete for a finite pool of capital, the ecosystem faces a systemic challenge that threatens genuine innovation and growth. 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. Liquidity in DeFi is fragmented across protocols, chains and token…

Trump’s tariffs have upended global trade and created an environment of uncertainty. But this situation wasn’t created in a vacuum. The rules of business have been shifting for years as technology moves quicker than regulation, geopolitics descend into turmoil, and the law erodes and becomes weaponized.  Businesses might be asking themselves, how are they meant to keep their heads above water? And what can they do to fight back?   Hence AI co-founder Sean West has some answers. With a team spread across the U.K., Rwanda, the U.S., and the Netherlands, the London-based startup has raised $5.2 million to date with…

This is a daily technical analysis by CoinDesk analyst and Chartered Market Technician Omkar Godbole. Bitcoin (BTC) has finally surpassed a key resistance that limited recovery rallies earlier this year, after rising over 5% to $93,500 in 24 hours. The leading digital asset by market value has topped the “Ichimoku Cloud,” confirming a bullish shift in momentum, while other major cryptocurrencies lag. The Ichimoku cloud, developed by a Japanese journalist in the 1960s, is used to identify support and resistance, momentum, and trend change in price actions. The indicator comprises five lines: Leading Span A, Leading Span B, and the…

Headphones are seen in front of displayed Discord app logo in this illustration taken March 29, 2021.Dado Ruvic | ReutersDiscord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down from the gaming-focused social messaging service, the startup said Wednesday.Citron will be replaced by former Activision Blizzard Vice Chairman Humam Sakhnini, who will assume the reigns as Discord CEO and join the company’s board on Monday. Citron will remain on Discord’s board and become an advisor to the CEO, the company said. In a public memo to employees, Citron said “it feels like the right time” to move on from the executive…

A new venture firm aims to prove that the most successful startup ideas don’t have to be born or scaled in Silicon Valley. Fluent Ventures, a global early-stage fund, is backing founders replicating proven business models from Western markets in fintech, digital health, and commerce across emerging markets. The more cynical might describe this as a clone factory, but founder and managing partner Alexandre Lazarow calls the firm’s strategy “geographic alpha.” Fluent’s premise is that many of the world’s most valuable startups are not entirely new concepts that haven’t been tried before, but more simply, local adaptations of models that…