Author: GT

By Hannah Lang (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury on Friday lifted economic sanctions against Tornado Cash, a firm that makes cryptocurrency transactions harder to track, which the Biden administration had accused of helping launder more than $7 billion for North Korean and other cyber hackers. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklisted Tornado Cash in 2022 after concluding it was helping launder the proceeds of cyber crimes, including more than $455 million stolen by Lazarus, a North Korean government-backed hacking group. Six users of Tornado Cash – a cryptocurrency “mixer” that obscures the origins and recipients of transactions…

Social network Bluesky, an open source X rival, has made a change that will allow publishers to better track the referral traffic originating from posts on its platform. According to a comment from Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the company is now sending referral traffic through Bluesky’s “go” subdomain to make it easier for publishers to track when visitors to their site came by way of a link shared on the social network. When you click on a link shared on Bluesky, you’ll notice that it briefly displays as a “go.bsky.app” URL before landing you on the publisher’s own domain. This…

Over the past week, Bitcoin has fluctuated between $81K and $87K, even though interest rates are holding steady. Despite Trump’s pro-crypto stance and the launch of a U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, bitcoin’s price has stalled, primarily due to economic pressures like inflation and investor sell-offs. In the short term, volatility is still a factor, but big players like BlackRock and Fidelity are doubling down, and Bitcoin’s role in global trade and finance keeps growing. The long-term outlook is still bullish. Bitcoin is cementing itself as a significant financial asset, and those playing the long game stand to benefit the most.…

As generative AI moves increasingly into the physical world through robotics, vehicles, and drones, the need to map cloud-based AIs to real-world environments can lead to a huge mismatch. Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, which builds a data stack for this emergent kind of “physical AI,” has secured $17 million in seed funding to help AI developers smooth out the bumps from code to road, as it were. The seed round was led by Point Nine out of Germany, bringing the 2022-founded startup’s total funding to date to $20.2 million. Nikolaus West, co-founder and CEO of Rerun, told TechCrunch that…

By Nate Raymond BOSTON (Reuters) – The founder of a cryptocurrency financial services firm pleaded guilty on Friday to U.S. charges that he participated in a wide-ranging scheme to manipulate the market for digital tokens on behalf of client companies. Aleksei Andriunin, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency “market maker” Gotbit, and his company entered guilty pleas in federal court in Boston to charges that they conspired to commit market manipulation and committed wire fraud. The pleas by the Russian national and his company came less than a month after Andriunin, 26, was extradited from Portugal, where he had been…

Meta’s social network Threads, an X competitor with more than 320 million monthly active users, is now rolling out new features related to topics, reply controls, and video playback in the app, among other things. It’s also making political content suggestions more personalized to the user, the company says. Combined, the features aim to make the app more relevant to users and keep them engaged with the network’s content, at a time when X is no longer Threads’ only competitor. Today, Meta faces the rise of alternative networks like Bluesky, which now has over 33 million users and a platform…

OpenAI is bringing new transcription and voice-generating AI models to its API that the company claims improve upon its previous releases. For OpenAI, the models fit into its broader “agentic” vision: building automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users. The definition of “agent” might be in dispute, but OpenAI Head of Product Olivier Godement described one interpretation as a chatbot that can speak with a business’s customers. “We’re going to see more and more agents pop up in the coming months” Godement told TechCrunch during a briefing. “And so the general theme is helping customers and…

Tokyo-based Metaplanet is forming a strategic board of advisers with Eric Trump as one of the appointees, as the company continues to spur bitcoin (BTC) adoption, according to a press release on Friday. “We are honored to welcome Eric Trump as the first member of our Strategic Board of Advisors and look forward to welcoming him to our annual meeting,” said Simon Gerovich, Representative Director of Metaplanet Inc, in the release. “His business acumen, love of the Bitcoin community and global hospitality perspective will be invaluable in accelerating Metaplanet’s vision of becoming one of the world’s leading Bitcoin Treasury Companies.”…

The closure of London’s Heathrow Airport due to a nearby fire on Friday has put the focus on the aviation industry’s ability to handle a crisis, according to a travel industry expert.At the time of writing, Heathrow remained shut after a fire at an electricity substation that caused a power outage on Friday.”The growth of the [aviation] industry is happening faster than the growth of infrastructure,” said Anita Mendiratta, founder of consultancy AM&A, who stressed that aviation needs to become more resilient to incidents like an energy supply disruption, or to geopolitical or weather events.The Heathrow outage is “putting a…

Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it. Web search is available now in preview for paid Claude users in the U.S., Anthropic said in its blog, with support for free users and additional countries coming soon. Users can toggle on web search in their profile settings from the Claude web app, and Claude will automatically search across sites to inform certain responses. For now, web search only works with the latest Anthropic model powering Claude, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic said. “When Claude incorporates information from the web into its responses,…