Author: Bloomberg
Worldcoin — the billion-dollar startup that wants to give cryptocurrency to every living human by imaging their eyes — has recently halted operations in at least seven countries due to a host of logistical hurdles that have prompted it to redraw its launch plans. Co-founded in 2020 by former Y Combinator chief Sam Altman, Worldcoin aims to photograph the irises of everyone on earth in order to identify them so it can distribute its new digital money fairly. So far, the company has collected images of the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people in about 20 countries. But the process has been bedeviled by problems such as uneven smartphone access, confused…
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s most important media property is on the lookout for a new chief executive after tasking helmsman Gary Liu with running a spinoff that will turn artwork into non-fungible tokens. South China Morning Post, the influential Hong Kong news outlet Alibaba bought in 2015, said it launched a global search for a new leader. Liu will keep running the company until his replacement is found, Alibaba Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai told staff in a memo Wednesday. The move comes as Alibaba is said to be exploring options for media assets including the century-old English language news organization that aspired to become…
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposes the risks the U.S. faces without a “whole of government” approach to crypto policy or regulation, says V. Gerard Comizio, director of the business law program at American University Washington College of Law. He offers recommendations for federal legislation and asserts the U.S. must move with urgency. Until now, debates about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies centered on their nature: Are they actual currencies or speculative vehicles? Are they the future of money, a fad, or a new way to launder money and evade sanctions? But as the U.S. and its allies aim to punish…
Michael Novogratz, the billionaire cryptocurrency investor who heads Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd., said Bitcoin is likely to continue to trade in a range this year with the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. “I don’t think Bitcoin can rally aggressively until we get a pause,” Novogratz said during a TV interview on Bloomberg Crypto. Novogratz noted that he had earlier forecast a 2022 range of $30,000 of $50,000 for Bitcoin, which was little changed Tuesday at about $39,200 in New York trading. The largest digital asset by market value had surged last year to a record high along with other…
Microsoft Corp., Temasek Holdings Pte and SoftBank Group Corp. invested in Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin’s blockchain-technology company ConsenSys Inc. at a $7 billion valuation, more than twice what it was valued at in November. ConsenSys raised $450 million from the three giants and existing backers including Dan Loeb’s Third Point in a Series D funding round, according to an emailed statement Tuesday. SoftBank invested through its Vision Fund 2. The valuation jumped from $3.2 billion in ConsenSys’s previous round. Raising the money was “relatively easy,” Lubin, ConsenSys’s founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview. He said the company…
Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the company is building the technical functionality so that users can display their NFTs on Instagram — and even “mint” some NFTs within the app. “We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” he said during an interview at the South by Southwest conference Tuesday, but declined to share specifics on when and how the feature might work. Zuckerberg spent most of the nearly 50-minute long conversation talking about the so-called metaverse, his vision for a more immersive version of the internet. Former Meta executive David Marcus said…
A renewal of interest by traditional hedge funds in shorting Tether has highlighted the difficulty of betting against the stablecoin that serves as a foundation for much of the trading in the cryptocurrency market. At stake is not just Tether’s $80 billion market value, but also the vast array of trades facilitated by Tether in the crypto market. Fir Tree Capital Management is making a substantial short wager on Tether, predicting it could pay off within a year, Bloomberg News reported last week, citing sources familiar with the matter. For institutional investors, there are two main ways to put on the trade.…
Can you love Bitcoin and the environment at the same time? The world’s dominant cryptocurrency depends on so-called miners whose high-powered computers run day and night to process transactions. Its energy consumption is ballooning so fast that it’s alarming environmentalists, governments and other big energy users. China has banned Bitcoin mining entirely and billionaire Elon Musk won’t take the token as payment for his Tesla cars until miners switch to at least 50% renewable power. With many of them still hooked on electricity from fossil fuels, that’s going to be a tall order. 1. How much power is involved? Bitcoin’s estimated power…
Ghana wants to ensure its digital currency would function on a widely popular payment platform run by mobile-phone service providers. The use of the eCedi, through which the Bank of Ghana seeks to improve financial inclusion, needs to be as intuitive as possible, the banking regulator said in a report released Tuesday. That means it needs to work well with mobile money, which has become an indispensable part of how people pay for goods and services using their phones. “It is important that the eCedi is implemented to complement and enhance the existing payment systems,” the report said. “The various existing electronic…
Aptos Inc. is the latest crypto effort to spring from the dashed dreams of Diem, the abandoned digital currency project of Meta Platforms Inc. Founded just four months ago, Aptos on Tuesday said it had raised $200 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The blockchain startup’s financing included some big names in crypto. Andreessen Horowitz led the funding round, which also included Tiger Global, Multicoin Capital and Three Arrows Capital. The venture arms of crypto exchanges FTX and Coinbase Global Inc. also participated, as did the new crypto fund launched by Katie Haun, the former general partner and crypto…