#cryptocurrency

#cryptocurrency

To no one's surprise, Sunday's Super Bowl was a star-studded event. A host of big names in business and tech flocked to Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, to watch the New England Patriots battle it out with the Seattle Seahawks. The game, which saw the Seahawks winning the NFL championship, was highly anticipated, with Grammy-winning Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny headlining the halftime show. Here's who showed up.

Just in time to create a new Super Bowl ad, Crypto.com founder Kris Marszalek has made the priciest domain purchase in history, buying AI.com for $70 million, according to the Financial Times. The deal, paid entirely in cryptocurrency to an unknown seller, shatters previous records. (Broker Larry Fischer, who facilitated the sale, is presumably celebrating his good fortune.)

The marketing stunt has been launched by Polymarket, a company that has made a name for itself by letting people bet on real-life occurrences, like celebrity news and political events. The Polymarket grocery is scheduled to open on February 12, with passersby able to walk in and pick up groceries without shelling out cash. The idea is that a fully-stocked market won't require any purchase from New Yorkers to access groceries inside the store.

The markets are a mixed bag in the first trading session of February as technology stocks reach a fork in the road. Bullish performance out of Oracle ( Nasdaq: ORCL) stock is being overshadowed by a declining Nvidia ( Nasdaq; NVDA) share price amid uncertainty around its OpenAI investment, damaging overall market sentiment to kick things off. Oracle has recaptured the spotlight as traders and investors cheer the legacy software giant's plans to pour $50 billion into AI-related capex.

As his flight departed from Amsterdam's Schiphol airport en route to Kuwait via Istanbul, Canadian crypto fugitive Andean Medjedovic was unaware that his globe-trotting lifestyle would soon be halted. Just two weeks later, on Dec. 11, 2023, Dutch authorities issued a European arrest warrant for the then 21-year-old, alleging he had pulled off a "sophisticated hack" that netted him $48 million US in cryptocurrency.

Metals are hot, and Bitcoin's not, much to the chagrin of the crypto sector. Silver peaked above a record-high $120 per ounce in the early hours of trading on Thursday, and gold also rose to a record price of about $5,600. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is down below $85,000, plummeting about 33% since its all-time high in October, according to Binance.

This amount is really greater than the sum total of everything he made from his inheritance, from being on The Apprentice, and from all the licensing deals while he was on The Apprentice.

"Today, an increasing number of consumers include crypto in their investment portfolios, while major financial institutions are deepening their involvement in crypto assets, supported by key regulatory developments," Newrez President Baron Silverstein said in the announcement, adding that now is the "right time" to weave crypto into the mortgage lending business.

When Adams revealed his "NYC Token" project to a gaggle of reporters in Times Square on Monday morning, he was short on specifics. The former mayor declined to clarify who else was involved with the cryptocurrency, and instead pointed to a website without functioning buttons. He added that the project would teach New York's children about the virtues of blockchain technology and fund initiatives fighting antisemitism.

But Adams, 65, says he is hard at work. In an interview with Fox Business early on Monday morning, Adams announced that he was working on a cryptocurrency called New York City Coin. Speaking with Maria Bartiromo, Adams said the main reason he was launching this coin was to promote the use of cryptocurrency in New York City. It would also fund three separate initiatives: antisemitism awareness and education, "crypto education for New York City youth," and scholarship opportunities for the aforementioned crypto-educated youth.

AMY GOODMAN: In The Wall Street Journal, you recently revealed that ventures launched since Trump's reelection have generated at least $4 billion in proceeds and paper wealth for the Trump family, that figure based on company statements and security filings. In addition, you've reported how one of the family businesses, Trump Media & Technology, recently announced a $6 billion merger with a firm aiming to build the world's first viable nuclear fusion plant to power AI projects and data centers,

It wasn't that long ago that the whole narrative around a so-called "crypto winter" forming was on most investors' minds. Indeed, the decline we saw in 2022 was significant, and certainly scared plenty of investors away from this asset class altogether. Of course, the reality is that investors who stuck with the game plan and continued to hold through the volatility are most likely ahead of the game.

Artificial Intelligence AI adoption is rapidly growing, and some of the biggest conversations this year have been on how it will shake up the workplace and reimagine economies. In October, the Reuters Institute carried out a survey in six countries and found that the proportion of respondents who said they used a generative AI system such as ChatGPT jumped from 40 percent to 61 percent this year. As governments try to regulate the fast-growing

Artificial intelligence is making waves with crypto predictions as the year wraps up. We ran a real-time accuracy test to see which AI gets the correct prediction of top crypto prices by December 31. We asked ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek to forecast year-end prices for Bitcoin ( ), Ethereum ( ), Solana ( ), and XRP ( ). Currently, BTC is trading at approximately $88,000, ETH around $2,965, XRP at roughly $1.88, and Solana hovers around $122.

When Islamic State needed to move and disguise its money, it turned, US prosecutors said in 2023, to the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange: Binance. So too did al-Qaida, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which used the platform to help bankroll its operations in the years leading up to the 7 October attack in Israel. Binance was not accused of directly financing these groups, but prosecutors found that it knowingly allowed its exchange to function as a conduit enabling extremist organisations to shift funds, evade scrutiny

Iran has executed a man convicted of spying for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, judicial authorities announced, as Tehran continues a widening crackdown on alleged collaborators following the 12-day Israel-United States-Iran war earlier this year. Aghil Keshavarz was put to death on Saturday morning after the Supreme Court upheld his conviction on espionage charges, according to Mizan, the judiciary's official news agency.

For better or for worse, this year had it all-from the AI industry shaping the global economy and our lives, to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency taking over US federal agencies under Elon Musk's leadership. In today's episode, host Zoë Schiffer and executive editor Brian Barrett get together to reflect on some of this year's key moments-and how they give us important clues as to what we can expect this upcoming year.