Web3 news: Here’s all of the top yarns you need to start your day
- OpenAI and Microsoft make it official, announcing a multi-billion-dollar partnership.
- Bitcoin miners are experiencing a temporary boom despite recent crypto troubles.
- Gemini and Spotify join the growing of companies cutting back on staff.
- Today’s top cryptocurrency performers.
Microsoft x OpenAI: it’s happening
This morning, Microsoft announced a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment deal with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
While Microsoft didn’t provide a specific dollar amount, reports from earlier this month estimate that Microsoft was looking to investing approximately US$10 billion for a 49% stake in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) company.
The deal marks the third phase of the partnership between the two companies, following Microsoft’s previous investments in OpenAI in both 2019 and 2021. Microsoft said the renewed partnership will accelerate breakthroughs in AI and help both companies commercialise the burgeoning technologies in the future.
According to reports, the terms included in the new deal will see Microsoft scrape a healthy 75% of all OpenAI’s profits until Microsoft breaks even on its US$10 billion investment. This is all hangs on OpenAI actually figuring out how to turn a profit on its chatbot ChatGPT and image creation tool Dall-E, which are currently running at a loss for the Artificial Intelligence firm.
OpenAI, which was originally founded in 2015 by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former president of Y Combinator Sam Altman, made the viral AI assistant ‘ChatGPT’ freely available for public use on November 30 last year.
Bitcoin mining is back on the menu
According to the latest data, Bitcoin mining has never been more difficult (which is actually a good thing btw).
When looking at how Bitcoin mining is performing, good signs of overall growth are usually shown by a growing hash rate (the total computational power of the network) and increasing mining difficulty (which means that more miners are competing to solve BTC network problems).
Showing that despite suffering some major setbacks in 2022, the Bitcoin network is back on track with overall mining difficulty reaching a new all-time-high on January 15 along with a growing hash rate, that peaked on January 6.
Adding some more good news to the mining sector’s temporary relief, the stock of Bitcoin Miner Argo Blockchain (ARBK), has resumed trading on the Nasdaq. In mid-December last year, Nasdaq suspended all trading of Argo stock for not achieving a closing price of US$1 for more than a month.
The news comes as a rare glimmer of hope for Argo, which suffered through most of last year.
Web3 news: Gemini & Spotify cut back on staff
According to an internal document surfaced by The Information, Gemini — the Winklevoss owned crypto exchange whose customers have been caught up in an ongoing feud between it and another crypto firm Genesis Trading — is laying off 10% of staff.
Also joining the growing ranks of tech companies to layoff staff is music-streaming giant Spotify which is looking to cut roughly 6% of its global 10,000-strong workforce, meaning that around 600 people are out of a job.
Web3 news: Crypto… todays’ best performers
Biggest gainers
- STEPN, the native token of Move-to-Earn app Stepn is up 19%.
- Lido DAO, a lending and staking solution for Ethereum is up 12%.
- AXS, the token of the popular Play-to-Earn app Axie Infinity is up 10%.
Biggest losers
- Aptos (APT), a new layer-1 blockchain network is down 2.5%.
- Helium (HNT), a device network token is down 1.3%
- Optimism (OP), a layer-2 scaling network for Ethereum is down 0.2%
- GMT
(GMT) - Price $0.170
- Market Cap
$507.44 M
And that’s all the crypto and Web3 news you need to know before you start your day.
