Tag: Business – Decrypt

Meta and CoreWeave have expanded a long-term artificial intelligence infrastructure agreement worth about $21 billion, extending their partnership through December 2032. Both companies have seen their shares rise Thursday following the announcement.

CoreWeave announced the expanded deal Thursday, describing it as an extension of the companies’ existing relationship and an increase in infrastructure supporting Meta’s AI operations.

“This is another example that leading companies are choosing CoreWeave’s AI cloud to run their most demanding workloads,” CoreWeave co-founder, CEO, and Chairman Michael Intrator said in a statement.

The agreement gives Meta access to AI cloud capacity from CoreWeave to support the development and deployment of its AI systems, including inference workloads that run trained models at scale.

The infrastructure will be deployed across multiple locations and will include some of the first deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. CoreWeave said the distributed deployment is intended to optimize performance, resilience, and scalability for Meta’s AI systems, and reflects rising demand for infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale AI workloads.

Meta and CoreWeave previously struck a $14 billion AI infrastructure deal in 2025, under which the cloud provider agreed to supply computing power to Meta through 2031.

The news comes as Meta accelerates its push into advanced AI systems. On Wednesday, the company introduced Muse Spark, a natively multimodal model capable of processing text, images, and voice and designed to tackle complex reasoning tasks using multiple AI agents.

Meta has also outlined a new Advanced AI Scaling Framework that expands how it evaluates risks and tests its most capable models before deployment.

“As we build more capable and more personalized AI, reliability, security, and user protections are more important than ever,” Meta said in a statement. “Advanced models require an advanced approach to safety—one that scales with the technology.”

Shares of Meta and CoreWeave rose after the companies announced their expanded AI infrastructure deal. Currently, Meta (META) is trading above $630 per share, up about 3% on the day, while CoreWeave (CRWV) has jumped 5.5% to a recent price of $93.70.

OpenAI has paused its planned Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure project in the United Kingdom, citing high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty, according to a report by CNBC that was confirmed by a company spokesperson.

The ChatGPT giant first announced the Stargate UK infrastructure project in mid-September 2025, in partnership with chipmaker Nvidia and infrastructure provider Nscale. The plan called for deploying up to 8,000 GPUs beginning in the first quarter of 2026, with the potential to scale to about 31,000 GPUs over time.

“Everything starts with compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement at the time. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with Nvidia to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”

The Stargate project had been expected to support local computing infrastructure for AI systems in the country. Proposed locations included sites such as Cobalt Park in northeast England, part of a designated “AI Growth Zone.”

A critical factor in the decision to halt the project stems from industrial electricity cost in the U.K., which averages about 24 pence per kilowatt-hour for medium-sized businesses—and AI data centers require far more power than typical industrial sites. Often, data centers run at 50–100 megawatts continuously, and more than 140 projects are already waiting for grid connections totaling over 50 gigawatts.

At current prices, operating a 100-megawatt data center could cost roughly $125 million to $250 million a year, highlighting the growing energy demands of AI infrastructure.

The Stargate U.K. project followed OpenAI’s July 2025 memorandum of understanding with the U.K. government, focused on adopting frontier AI systems in public services. It also comes months after the Trump administration announced a Stargate AI infrastructure initiative in January 2025.

While Altman and OpenAI have not made a public statement regarding the status of Stargate UK, OpenAI told CNBC it continues to evaluate the project and may proceed if conditions improve.

“We continue to explore Stargate U.K. and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment,” OpenAI said in a statement.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.

Publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) was uplisted to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Thursday, with shares of BMNR concluding trading on the smaller NYSE American exchange with Wednesday’s market close. 

Shares in the firm are up nearly 1% since opening on the new trading venue, recently changing hands around $21.75. 

“Today, BitMine achieved a major milestone by being uplisted to the ‘Big Board’ NYSE,” BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement. “The NYSE is the envy of capital markets around the world, and BitMine is proud to be the newest company traded on this exchange.”

Alongside its uplisting, the firm also announced its board of directors approved an increase in its previously established share buyback program, raising its limits from $1 billion to $4 billion. 

“BitMine’s expanded $4 billion buyback reflects our commitment to shareholders,” said Lee. “There may be a time in the future when BitMine shares are trading below intrinsic value, and the Company wants to be in a position to accretively retire common shares.”

It doesn’t appear that BitMine has actually used funds to repurchase shares to date. Decrypt reached out to the company for confirmation and clarification, but did not immediately receive a response.

Other publicly traded digital asset treasuries have similarly approved share buyback programs to repurchase outstanding shares when their mNAV—the ratio of their market cap compared to the value of the net assets they hold—trades below 1, or at a discount. 

For example, competing Ethereum treasury firm Sharplink (SBET) has remained committed to only acquiring ETH when its mNAV is above 1. At all other times, the firm repurchases shares of SBET in a move that is deemed more beneficial for shareholders.

While Lee indicates the firm may repurchase shares in the future when they are trading below “intrinsic value,” publicly available data shows that the firm is currently trading below an mNAV of 1. 

Nevertheless, it has sought to consistently purchase Ethereum, not shares of BMNR, adding around $150 million worth of ETH last week.  

At the time of writing, its intraday market cap is around $9.81 billion, according to data from Yahoo Finance. Meanwhile, its Ethereum tokens alone—of which it has more than 4.8 million—account for more than $10.6 billion in net assets as ETH changes hands at $2,216. 

The firm also maintains around $14 million in BTC and total cash holdings of $864 million, giving it around $11.4 billion in total holdings, according to a Monday press release.

Shares of BMNR have fallen around 63% in the last six months of trading as Ethereum itself has slid 55% from its August all-time high of $4,946.

Morgan Stanley became the first major U.S. commercial bank to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF on Wednesday, with its MSBT product posting inflows of $30.6 million in its first trading day according to data from Farside Investors.

Despite the newcomer’s first-day performance, Wednesday marked a second day of net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs, with the funds shedding $124.5 million. Nevertheless, the investment products remain in the black for the week, thanks to Monday’s $471 million one-day haul, their biggest since February.

MSBT’s 0.14% expense ratio makes it the cheapest Bitcoin ETF available, undercutting category leader BlackRock’s IBIT by 11 basis points. The launch intensifies competition with BlackRock’s IBIT, which holds $56 billion in assets while charging 0.25% annually; on Wednesday, IBIT drew in $40.4 million.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart suggested that the product “might be a loss leader,” arguing that “this is their way of, potentially trying to get some crypto millionaires—a lot of people with a lot of money—to join their wealth management product.”

In a tweet, Seyffart’s colleague Eric Balchunas called MSBT’s debut “arguably biggest btc launch since they began” and projected first-year assets under management of $5 billion.

Earlier this week, Balchunas told Decrypt earlier this week that Morgan Stanley’s offering is “not going to knock off BlackRock and become the biggest, but I believe it will do well,” adding that. “What Morgan Stanley has going for it is a captive audience. It’s got its own army of advisors.”

Bitcoin is currently trading at $71,260, down 0.6% on the day and up 6.6% on the week, per CoinGecko data. On prediction market Myriad, owed by Decrypt‘s parent company Dastan, users are evenly split on the cryptocurrency’s prospects, putting an even chance on its next move taking it to $84,000 or $55,000.

BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo has revealed that he donated $5.4 million (£4 million) to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, saying he was motivated to become politically active for the first time by what he described as a failing UK political system.

Delo, who is based in Hong Kong, wrote in a Daily Telegraph op-ed that he made the contribution earlier this year before the introduction of a £100,000 cap on donations from British citizens living abroad. He said the funding would help build Reform into “a genuine alternative party of government”.

In the article, Delo said the UK faced a “grave threat” driven by “self-deception” among political elites and argued that Reform was gaining support by recognising the scale of the country’s problems.

Delo co-founded BitMEX, one of the crypto industry’s earliest derivatives exchanges. In 2022, he pleaded guilty in the U.S. to breaching the Bank Secrecy Act after failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls, paying a $10 million criminal fine. He later received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, describing the case in his op-ed as “a regulatory failing that isn’t even a crime in the UK.”

His donation adds to significant backing for Reform from internationally based donors, including £11.4m from Thailand-based Tether investor Christopher Harborne.

Reform UK and crypto

The funding comes as Reform positions itself as the UK’s most crypto-aligned political party. It has accepted cryptocurrency donations, promoted pro-crypto policies and built ties with industry figures, distinguishing it from more cautious approaches taken by Labour and the Conservatives.

That stance has placed Reform at the centre of a broader debate over crypto and political finance. Government ministers have moved to tighten rules on overseas donations and imposed a moratorium on cryptocurrency contributions following a government-commissioned review into foreign financial influence. The review recommended capping donations from expatriates and highlighted risks around transparency and enforcement in crypto-based funding.

Reform has branded these recommendations an attack on its party specifically and has pushed back, arguing existing rules can accommodate crypto and that tighter restrictions risk disadvantaging newer parties. Critics, including transparency campaigners, argue that crypto donations could create new channels for opaque or foreign-linked funding.

Reform leader Nigel Farage, who last month invested in a Bitcoin treasury firm and has made tens of thousands of dollars from speaking engagements at crypto conferences, retweeted Delo’s op-ed, stating that “the scheming and dishonest Keir Starmer will not stop us.”

“In fact, his actions have only made brave people like Ben Delo even more determined to beat Labour at the next election,” he added.

Farage has also advocated crypto-friendly policies, including lower taxes on digital assets and the creation of a national Bitcoin reserve.

Reform described Delo as “a true patriot”.

Delo said he intends to relocate to the UK, which would allow him to continue donating without restriction. He said the move reflected both personal reasons and a desire to play a more direct role in the country’s future.

Meta launched Muse Spark on Wednesday, marking the first model built by Meta Superintelligence Labs—the team assembled nine months ago under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang after Meta’s $14 billion Scale AI acquisition. It’s live now at meta.ai and the Meta AI app, with a rollout to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp coming in the next few weeks.

This isn’t just another chatbot upgrade or a new version of Llama. Muse Spark is natively multimodal—it processes images, text, and voice from the ground up, rather than bolting vision onto an existing text model. It comes with visual chain-of-thought, tool-use support, and something Meta is calling “Contemplating mode”: a setup that runs multiple AI agents in parallel to tackle harder problems. That’s Meta’s answer to the extended thinking modes from Google’s Gemini Deep Think and OpenAI’s GPT Pro.

“Muse Spark is the first step on our scaling ladder and the first product of a ground-up overhaul of our AI efforts,” Meta wrote in an official announcement. “To support further scaling, we are making strategic investments across the entire stack—from research and model training to infrastructure, including the Hyperion data center.”

The company worked with more than 1,000 physicians to curate training data for Muse Spark’s medical reasoning. The results on HealthBench Hard—an open-ended health queries benchmark—are striking: Muse Spark scored 42.8, compared to 40.1 for GPT 5.4 and just 20.6 for Gemini 3.1 Pro. That’s not a marginal difference.

On agentic search (DeepSearchQA), Muse Spark also leads with 74.8, beating Gemini (69.7) and GPT 5.4 (73.6). On CharXiv Reasoning—figure understanding from scientific papers—it scored 86.4, the highest across the models in the comparison.

For those into jailbreaking AI, the model was cracked open within minutes:

But good isn’t the same as great. The overall benchmark picture shows Gemini 3.1 Pro still running ahead on most categories. The gap is most visible on ARC AGI 2, the abstract reasoning puzzle benchmark: Gemini scored 76.5 to Muse Spark’s 42.5.

On coding (LiveCodeBench Pro), Gemini’s 82.9 outpaces Meta’s 80.0. On MMMU Pro—multimodal understanding—Gemini scored 83.9 versus 80.4. Meta’s own blog acknowledges current performance gaps in long-horizon agentic systems and coding workflows.

There’s also a notable strategic shift baked into this launch. Muse Spark is a closed model—its architecture and weights won’t be made public. That’s a sharp departure from Llama, which built Meta’s reputation in open AI circles. After Llama 4’s underwhelming reception earlier this year, Meta appears to have decided the next chapter needs to be written differently.

The company says it hopes to open-source future versions of Muse, but for now the code stays inside Meta. The tech giant’s stock climbed nearly 9% on Wednesday following the announcement, and finished the trading day up 6.5% to a price of $612.42.

“Contemplating mode” uses parallel agent orchestration to push the model’s ceiling higher. In that configuration, Muse Spark hit 58% on Humanity’s Last Exam and 38% on FrontierScience Research—territory that makes it competitive with the most capable versions of Gemini and GPT, rather than their standard releases.

Meta is also rolling out a shopping assistant that compares products and links directly to purchases, and plans to bring Muse Spark to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in the coming weeks—following the same script implemented since Llama 3, putting it in front of more than 3.5 billion users. A private API preview is opening to select developers.

The model was built in nine months, internally codenamed Avocado, with Meta claiming that its new pretraining stack can reach the same capability level as Llama 4 Maverick using over 10 times less compute.

Muse Spark is described internally as a “small and fast” first step in the Muse family. A more capable version is already in development.

Publicly traded Bitcoin miner Cango Inc. cut its average production cost by 19.3% to $68,216 per BTC in March—down from $84,552 in Q4 last year—achieving the reduction through strategic fleet optimization rather than expansion.

The company decommissioned older mining hardware and relocated operations to regions with cheaper power, while selling 2,000 Bitcoin during the month to retire crypto-backed debt. That tally of Bitcoin is currently valued around $143 million, and the firm used the proceeds to trim its outstanding loan balances to $30.6 million.

Cango still held 1,025.69 BTC in its treasury as of the end of March 31, valued over $73 million as of this writing. The firm’s total hash rate stood at 37.01 EH/s as of the end of March, split between 27.98 EH/s from self-mining and 9.02 EH/s from leasing arrangements.

The operational restructuring involved more than simple downsizing. In high-cost hosting locations, Cango deployed hash rate leasing models to maintain revenue without bearing full operational expenses, according to the company’s announcement.

Cango plans to redirect capital from its deleveraging efforts toward AI computing infrastructure, positioning the cost reductions as preparation for business model expansion. The same filing indicated the company views AI infrastructure as a natural extension of its existing power and facility investments.

The efficiency focus reflects shifting priorities among public Bitcoin miners facing compressed margins and market volatility. Rather than competing solely on hash rate growth, companies are examining unit economics and alternative revenue streams. Several Bitcoin mining firms have made moves into powering AI computing needs, even abandoning their original business focuses in an effort to chase larger profits amid the AI boom.

Cango’s operational restructuring follows similar moves across the public mining sector. MARA recently sold $1.1 billion in Bitcoin to buy back convertible debt while cutting 15% of its workforce. Core Scientific has explored plans to sell all of its Bitcoin holdings to finance its own AI transition, while Cipher Digital shifted focus to data center operations with a 15-year infrastructure deal, highlighting the industry’s evolution beyond traditional mining models.

Cango shares (CANG) finished the trading day up 3.3% on Wednesday at a price of $0.4291 on a broadly green day for stocks, following a conditional ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. Despite the daily uptick, however, CANG shares have fallen nearly 39% in the last month.

Aiming to address the rise of AI-enabled child sexual exploitation, OpenAI on Wednesday published a policy blueprint outlining new safety measures the industry can take to help curb the use of AI in creating child sexual abuse material.

In the framework, OpenAI lists legal, operational, and technical measures aimed at strengthening protections against AI-enabled abuse and improving coordination between technology companies and investigators.

“Child sexual exploitation is one of the most urgent challenges of the digital age,” the company wrote. “AI is rapidly changing both how these harms emerge across the industry and how they can be addressed at scale.”

OpenAI said the proposal incorporates feedback from organizations working in child protection and online safety, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Attorney General Alliance and its AI task force.

“Generative AI is accelerating the crime of online child sexual exploitation in deeply troubling ways-lowering barriers, increasing scale, and enabling new forms of harm,” President & CEO, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Michelle DeLaune said in a statement. “But at the same time, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is encouraged to see companies like OpenAI reflect on how these tools can be designed more responsibly, with safeguards built in from the start.”

OpenAI said the framework combines legal standards, industry reporting systems, and technical safeguards within AI models. The company said these measures aim to help identify exploitation risks earlier and improve accountability across online platforms.

The blueprint identifies areas for action, including updating laws to address AI-generated or altered child sexual abuse material, improving how online providers report abuse signals and coordinate with investigators, and building safeguards into AI systems designed to prevent misuse.

“No single intervention can address this challenge alone,” the company wrote. “This framework brings together legal, operational, and technical approaches to better identify risks, accelerate responses, and support accountability, while ensuring that enforcement authorities remain strong as technology evolves.”

The blueprint comes as child safety advocates have raised concerns that generative AI systems capable of producing realistic images could be used to create manipulated or synthetic depictions of minors. In February, UNICEF called on world governments to pass laws criminalizing AI-generated child abuse material.

In January, the European Commission launched a formal investigation into whether X, formerly known as Twitter, violated EU digital rules by failing to prevent the platform’s native AI model, Grok, from generating illegal content, as regulators in the United Kingdom and Australia have also opened investigations.

Noting that laws alone will not stop the scourge of AI-generated abuse material, OpenAI said stronger industry standards will be necessary as AI systems become more capable.

“By interrupting exploitation attempts sooner, improving the quality of signals sent to law enforcement, and strengthening accountability across the ecosystem, this framework aims to prevent harm before it happens and help ensure faster protection for children when risks emerge,” OpenAI said.

The race between quantum computers and Bitcoin’s cryptography has become a recurring theme in the cryptocurrency industry. But even as anxieties over Bitcoin’s “Q-day” grow, a new report from investment firm Bernstein says the outcome is unlikely to be catastrophic for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.

Instead, the firm argues quantum computing should be treated as a long-term upgrade cycle for Bitcoin and the broader crypto industry rather than an existential threat to the network.

“The risk is neither existential, nor novel, and also not limited to crypto,” Bernstein wrote, noting that quantum computing also posed a threat to everything from financial services, military, and healthcare.

According to Bernstein, the highest threat from quantum computing is to the 1.7 million BTC, around $116.6 billion, in legacy wallets from the days when Satoshi Nakamoto was still active online. That’s because this stash of Bitcoin was stored in early address formats that expose public keys on the blockchain and could be targeted in a “harvest now, decrypt later” attack. For newer encryption protocols, chains, and crypto-linked real-world assets, the threat is limited to some unsafe practices that can be mitigated and managed, the firm said.

Bernstein also emphasized that quantum computing won’t impact Bitcoin mining in the near future.

“Bitcoin mining has no realistic risk from [quantum computers] based on Shor’s algorithm, as SHA encryption used in mining is quantum safe—several millions of years even after recent improvements, including Grover’s algorithm.”

Blockstream CEO Adam Back, a Bitcoin pioneer, who was recently named as the likely person behind the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto according to a new report by The New York Times, expressed a similar view.

“The Google paper is talking about algorithmic improvements, and doesn’t bring with it any hardware improvements,” Back told Bloomberg on Tuesday.

Back’s comments come as concern over quantum computing intensified after new academic research suggested fewer quantum resources may be needed to break elliptic-curve cryptography, the digital signature system used by Bitcoin wallets. A March paper from Google Quantum AI also shortened estimates for when such capabilities could emerge, pointing to a possible timeline around 2032.

Current quantum computers operate with roughly a thousand physical qubits. Breaking the cryptography used by Bitcoin would require hundreds of thousands of stable, error-corrected qubits along with major advances in engineering and hardware reliability.

Back said current quantum systems remain “extremely basic” because of limitations with error correction, calling even the most advanced demonstrations trivial compared with the calculations needed to compromise Bitcoin’s cryptography.

“The biggest calculation it’s performed is that to factorize the number 21 into seven times three,” he said. “Sort of thing that primary school children can do.”

Bitcoin relies on elliptic-curve cryptography to secure transactions and SHA-256 hashing to power mining. While the Bernstein report suggests that quantum computers could eventually target the signature system, they are unlikely to threaten the mining algorithm.

The best approach, Back said, is to prepare Bitcoin users for a gradual transition to quantum-resistant security.

“The prudent thing to do is to prepare Bitcoin and give people the option to migrate their keys to a quantum-ready format,” he said. “The longer time that Bitcoin users have in order to migrate their keys for custodians and exchanges to move their coins to a quantum-ready format, the safer it will be,” he said.

A company partnered with World Liberty Financial—the crypto project backed by President Donald Trump—has been linked to individuals connected to a sanctioned Cambodian conglomerate accused of running global scam operations, according to an investigation published Monday by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Guardian Australia.

The investigation found that a planned “blockchain theme resort” in Timor-Leste tied to the partner, AB network, involved three individuals who were later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury as part of a crackdown on the Cambodia-based Prince Group. The project, promoted as a luxury destination for cryptocurrency innovators, was backed by a local development company established with $10 million in capital.

Corporate records show that the majority shareholder of the development company was Yang Jian, a Cyprus-based businessman sanctioned in October for allegedly working with Prince Group CEO Chen Zhi on a separate resort project described by U.S. authorities as a “predatory investment.”

The three sanctioned individuals were removed from the Timor-Leste project shortly after the sanctions were announced, and there is no evidence that illicit funds flowed into the development, or that AB network is directly connected to the Prince Group.

The AB network announced its partnership with World Liberty Financial in November, granting it the right to use the company’s U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin USD1 on its blockchain. The collaboration followed a series of high-profile announcements by AB, which has promoted ties to global political figures and listed former world leaders among advisers to its Irish-registered nonprofit arm.

World Liberty Financial, founded in 2024 by partners including companies affiliated with the Trump and Witkoff families, said it had carried out due diligence on AB and was not made aware of the resort, or of individuals linked to the Timor-Leste project. Lawyers for the company told investigators it is “committed to responsible practices and compliance” and said claims of links to sanctioned figures are “unfounded and untrue.”

According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, Americans alone lost nearly $21 billion to online scams last year, with more than 1 million complaints filed. Cryptocurrency-related fraud accounted for the largest share of losses, totaling more than $11 billion across 181,565 complaints.

The Prince Group, a Cambodia-based conglomerate led by Chen Zhi, has been accused by U.S. authorities of operating one of the world’s largest online scam networks, allegedly generating tens of billions of dollars annually through fraud schemes run out of compounds across Southeast Asia.

The U.S. government last year seized $15 billion worth of Bitcoin from Chen in what it described as its largest forfeiture action against online scammers. The company has denied wrongdoing. Cambodian authorities arrested and then extradited Chen to China in January.

The AB network’s corporate structure has remained opaque. It describes itself as a decentralized ecosystem comprising an Irish nonprofit, a Cayman Islands foundation, and blockchain-based entities governed by token holders. The OCCRP‘s reporting identified two previously undisclosed figures—software developer Sui Chenggang and entrepreneur Lin Xiaofan—as key actors within the network.

Lin, who said he played a leading role in the Timor-Leste resort project, denied any connection to the Prince Group. He also said he introduced Sui to World Liberty executives.

Promotional material for the Timor-Leste development was removed from AB’s websites after OCCRP reporters began making inquiries. Lin said the project remains active but that AB is no longer involved, and provided documentation showing the partnership was terminated in November.

Despite distancing itself from the sanctioned individuals, AB continues to promote its partnership with World Liberty Financial and its network of political advisers. The collaboration has so far produced limited uptake of World Liberty’s stablecoin on AB’s blockchain, with a max total supply of around $3.6 million and just over 3,000 holders.

World Liberty Financial did not respond to additional requests for comment.

Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to move up context about the partnership.