Author: GT

Fidelity Investments is in the final stages of testing its own U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin as part of its growing interest in blockchain-based financial products. The $5.9 trillion asset manager is expected to integrate the token into its tokenized U.S. Treasury money market fund on Ethereum. This move follows Fidelity’s recent SEC filing for an on-chain share class of its Treasury Digital Fund (FYHXX), an $80 million fund primarily holding U.S. Treasury bills. The on-chain share class, which is pending approval, is set to take effect on May 30. Other financial institutions are also entering the stablecoin market. Custodia and Vantage…

OpenAI has pulled its upgraded image generation feature, powered by the advanced GPT-4o reasoning model, from the free tier of ChatGPT. The decision comes just a day after the update was launched, following an unforeseen surge in users creating images in the distinctive style of renowned Japanese animation house, Studio Ghibli. The update, which promised to deliver enhanced realism in both AI-generated images and text, was intended to showcase the capabilities of GPT-4o.  This new model employs an “autoregressive approach” to image creation, building visuals from left to right and top to bottom, a method that contrasts with the simultaneous…

Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user’s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speaker’s voice and only switches phonemes to match American accents. The feature has apparently been tested in enterprise environments, and a beta version is now coming to the Krisp desktop app. Users can turn the feature on any time during or before calls. Arto Minasyan, the company’s co-founder, said the idea for the feature…

Risk assets such as bitcoin (BTC), xrp (XRP), solana (SOL) are back in focus as President Donald Trump warned of even more reciprocal tariffs if other countries collude to do “economic harm” to the U.S. “If the European Union works with Canada in order to do economic harm to the USA,” he wrote in a Truth Social post in early Asian hours Thursday, “large scale Tariffs, far larger than currently planned, will be placed on them both in order to protect the best friend that each of those two countries has ever had!” “Liberation day in America is coming, soon,”…

It’s getting easier to build new applications on ATProto, the protocol that powers Bluesky’s social network and a growing number of other apps. At ATmosphere, the ATProto community conference held over the weekend in Seattle, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee offered attendees a glimpse of what’s ahead for the protocol’s development and how those will help developers build more applications to expand the ecosystem in the future. One of the key additions coming soon is support for the authentication standard OAuth, which some developers are already testing today, though not in a finalized state. With OAuth, developers will be able to…

There’s a long-standing rivalry between the king of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), and the coin that many have considered to be the heir to the throne, Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH). But there aren’t actually too many similarities between these two, despite what their competition suggests. And there’s a much stronger case for buying a lot of one than there is for the other, so let’s dive in and analyze the situation. Bitcoin is both a store of value and to a lesser extent a medium of exchange, fulfilling two of the canonical properties of money. Its value is created by demand from…

Chinese AI innovation is reshaping the global technology landscape, challenging assumptions about Western dominance in advanced computing. Recent developments from companies like DeepSeek illustrate how quickly China has adapted to and overcome international restrictions through creative approaches to AI development. According to Lee Kai-fu, CEO of Chinese startup 01.AI and former head of Google China, the gap between Chinese and American AI capabilities has narrowed dramatically. “Previously, I think it was a six to nine-month gap and behind in everything. And now I think that’s probably three months behind in some of the core technologies, but ahead in some specific…

People gather at the beach after sunset with offshore oil and gas platform Esther in the distance on January 5, 2025 in Seal Beach, California. Mario Tama | Getty ImagesOil executives are warning that President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his “drill, baby, drill” message have created uncertainty in energy markets that is already impacting investment.The executives, shielded by anonymity, bluntly criticized Trump in their responses to a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from March 12 to March 20.”The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets,” one executive said. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of…

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+, along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication, Alexa Fund leader Paul Bernard explained that the company now wants to invest in areas including AI-enabled hardware and smart agents. “While the Alexa Fund’s mission has evolved beyond the initial focus on voice technology over the years, the rapid developments in…

With the stock market off its record high, it looks like investors have adopted a more cautious approach toward cryptocurrencies as well. After the market cap of the digital asset industry peaked at about $3.7 trillion in December, it has fallen 22% (as of March 24). The asset class is once again showing investors how cyclical it can be. If you’re a long-term investor, though, then there’s an opportunity to take advantage of the volatility and fear. In fact, there’s one cryptocurrency, which is currently trading 19% off its peak, that has 14,623% upside. That’s according to Michael Saylor, the…