Business intelligence platform MicroStrategy has reiterated its commitment to its Bitcoin (BTC) investment strategy after turning its first quarterly profit since 2020. The Michael Saylor-founded firm went back into the green in the first quarter of 2023 with a profit of $94 million, which was largely attributed to a one-time income tax benefit of $453.2
Month: May 2023
Legislators in the European Union have pushed forward with a draft of a new bill designed to keep artificial intelligence technology in check. According to the bill, the high-risk tools will not be banned entirely, though they will be subjected to stricter transparency procedures. In particular, generative AI tools, including ChatGPT and Midjourney, will be
Gold companies operating in China ramped up their production levels during the first quarter of 2023. According to industry reports, the Chinese gold industry managed to recover its extraction levels, reaching numbers it saw before the Covid pandemic, with the country engaging in a record streak of purchasing gold during the last five months. China
Blockchain technology was introduced in 2008 as a decentralized, secure, transparent system for managing digital transactions. Its primary aim was to provide a solution to major problems with traditional transactional systems, including trust, security, decentralization and efficiency. Blockchain has since expanded beyond finance and has been used in supply chain management, healthcare, games, digital media
Liquid staking solutions such as Lido and Rocket Pool now have more total value locked (TVL) than decentralized exchanges (DEXs), making them the top category of DeFi protocols, according to data from crypto analytics platform DefiLlama. For the first time, the Liquid Staking category has surpassed DEXes in total value locked, making it the leading
The deadline has come for comments on a consultation paper and call for evidence released by the United Kingdom’s HM Treasury on a proposed crypto asset regulatory framework. The long-awaited paper, published in February, drew detailed responses from a variety of cryptocurrency industry players. Blockchain provider Polygon Labs, venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the Association for
Mawson Infrastructure Group announced on Monday that the company has secured a new mining site in Corning, Ohio. The bitcoin mining firm, on May 1, 2023, unveiled its plans to set up its miners at the new location by Q3 of this year, with an aim to raise the operation’s hashpower by 1 exahash per
Your biweekly roundup of cool AI stuff and its impact on society and the future. The past two months have seen a Cambrian explosion in the capabilities and potential of AI technology. OpenAI’s upgraded chatbot GPT-4 was released in mid-March and aced all of its exams, although it’s apparently a pretty average sommelier. Midjourney v5
On May 1, cryptocurrency exchange OKX announced that it would be listing memecoin Pepe (PEPE) at 17:00 Hong Kong Time (HKT) and open Pepe withdrawals on May 2 at 17:00 HKT. In supporting the listing decision, OKX staff wrote: “Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character and internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Pepe
Bitcoin (BTC) headed toward $28,000 support after the May 1 Wall Street open as markets digested fresh United States banking jitters. BTC/USD 1-hour candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: TradingView Suspicions mount over First Republic contagion Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD dropping to multi-day lows at the time of writing. The pair continued
JPMorgan Chase emerged as the winner in the auction to acquire the deposits and a “substantial majority of assets” of the troubled bank First Republic. This marked the failure of the third regional bank in the United States since March and laid open the vulnerabilities in the legacy banking system. Meanwhile, Bitcoin (BTC) has risen
Layer-2 blockchain protocols have been in the spotlight in 2023, bringing major performance improvements to a variety of platforms and services operating in the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem. Zero-knowledge proofs have been key in the roll-out of a variety of layer 2s, with the technology pioneered by the decentralized scaling network Starknet. StarkWare, the technology firm behind
Gary Gensler, the United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) chair, recently appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee for a hearing regarding his leadership of the regulatory agency. The hearing, with Gensler as the only witness, promised to be unpleasant for the SEC chair, with the federal agency’s actions during Gensler’s leadership
Charlie Munger, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stated in a recent interview that American banks are burdened with poor-quality commercial real estate loans. His comments arrive amid the collapse of three major U.S. banks and the expected seizure of First Republic Bank by the federal government. Despite the potential challenges, Munger emphasized that the
A Coinbase executive claims to have discovered a “jailbreak” for artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, allowing it to calculate the probability of bizarre crypto price scenarios. The crypto exchange’s head of business operations and avid ChatGPT user Conor Grogan shared a screenshot of the results in an April 30 Twitter post — showing that ChatGPT states
Block, a financial services and technology company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced it has completed the prototype design of its new five-nanometre (5nm) Bitcoin (BTC) mining chip — which it claims is key to decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining rigs. According to a blog post published on April 28, Block