Author: GT

A federal judge Tuesday found the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner when terminating contracts with three nonprofits. The judge issued a temporary restraining order that requires the EPA and Citibank to give nonprofits access to funds in their accounts. The restraining order is the latest development in a lawsuit brought by three nonprofits that were recipients of grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a part of the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law in 2022. The EPA asked Citibank to freeze the accounts over alleged concerns about waste, fraud, and conflicts of interest.…

Over the long term, the cryptocurrency industry has steadily accumulated value, but it has been a wild ride. With the prices of Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) already down by 22% from their all-time high of $109,358 (reached on Trump’s inauguration day, Jan. 20), buying these assets at the wrong time could expose your portfolio to tremendous volatility. Let’s explore what the rest of the year might have in store. Bitcoin’s latest rally is demonstrably linked to the Trump Administration. Despite falling sharply from all-time highs, prices for the digital currency are still up by more than double since President Trump’s election…

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said today that the service now has more than 1 billion active users. This number is up from last year’s reported 950 million monthly active users. Durov also noted that the company registered $547 million in profits last year. He had announced the company’s profitability in December but hadn’t provided any numbers at that time. The founder, who recently returned to Dubai after clearance from France, also took a jab at Meta-owned rival WhatsApp and called it a cheap imitation. “Ahead of us stands WhatsApp — a cheap, watered-down imitation of Telegram. For years, they’ve desperately…

As the April tax deadline approaches for more than 340 million Americans, crypto taxes are once again in the spotlight. But what’s different this year? Starting this year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will require brokers — such as crypto exchanges, hosted wallet providers, and payment processors who handle crypto transactions — to report them on Form 1099-DA, a new form specifically for digital asset transactions. Kell Canty, CEO of Ledgible, tells TheStreet Crypto: “Starting for calendar year 2025, brokers must issue a 1099-DA with gross proceeds on sales of digital assets to go out in early 2026. This is…

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has added image generation capabilities to its API. Only one model is available in the API at the moment, “grok-2-image-1212.” Given a caption, the model can generate up to 10 images per request (limited to five requests per second) in JPG format, priced at $0.07 per image. For comparison, AI startup Black Forest Labs, with which xAI partnered last year to launch image generation on Musk’s social network X, charges around $0.05 per image. Another popular image model provider, Ideogram, charges $0.08 on the higher end. In its documentation, xAI notes that the API doesn’t…

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) CEO Michael Saylor believes that Bitcoin at $80,000 is a “historic entry point.” He made the observation while speaking to CNBC on March 17. Saylor reasoned that at this price point, Bitcoin has been stripped of all the risk. He seemed assured that Wall Street, banks, and the United States government will embrace Bitcoin eventually. The Bitcoin maximalist attributed the current slump in the market to concerns around the tariff war. But once the conditions get better, “Bitcoin will rip forward with a vengeance,” he argued. Saylor doubled down on the “suitability” of Bitcoin, riding on President Donald…

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber made a splash at SXSW last week, showing up at her keynote event in a T-shirt that subtly poked fun at Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. Or, at least it seemed like it was subtle. But so many people appreciated the jab that users convinced Bluesky to reproduce and sell Graber’s shirt — even though it was an esoteric Latin language reference written in black ink on black fabric. Rose Wang, Bluesky’s COO, said that the company made more money in one day of T-shirt sales than in two years of selling custom domains. “That’s it. Pivoting…

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas believes the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is likely to approve a wave of new crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs), including those tied to Solana, Dogecoin, XRP, and HBAR. Speaking with TheStreet Roundtable host Scott Melker, Balchunas estimated the odds of approval for these ETFs at over 75%. “We’re really bullish on Solana, HBAR, and even Dogecoin,” he said. “Honestly, based on how the SEC has dropped all these lawsuits — and I heard the one with Ripple is pretty much being negotiated now — once those get dropped, the security thing doesn’t mean anything.”…

The Greenpeace logo on the green ecological awareness stand of the association in Lyon, France, on Oct. 23, 2024.Elsa Biyick | Afp | Getty ImagesA jury on Wednesday ordered environmental campaign group Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to Texas-based oil company Energy Transfer, the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline. A nine-person jury in Mandan, North Dakota, reached a verdict after roughly two days of deliberations. The outcome found Greenpeace liable for hundreds of millions of dollars over actions taken to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline nearly a decade ago.It marks an extraordinary…

A senior research scientist at DeepMind who worked on robotics and AI has left Google to create his own robotics startup, called Generalist AI, and has already obtained investment from Nvidia, TechCrunch has learned. Pete Florence was listed as co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI at a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose yesterday. The panel was for portfolio companies of Nvidia’s VC arm, NVentures. NVentures has become an especially active venture capital firm since Nvidia has enjoyed skyrocketing financial success in this new age of AI.  “We are largely still in stealth,” Florence told TechCrunch, explaining that…