Techmeme: Analysis: Coinbase International saw its total trading volume grow 124% week-over-week to $119B+ this past week, up from $2.5B per day average in November 2024 (The Block)

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December 26, 2024, 4:23 AM

Top News

Gleb Bryanski / Reuters:

Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions — Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments following legislative changes …

More: Axios, CryptoPotato, The Daily Hodl, Bitcoin News, SiliconANGLE, CryptoSlate, The Crypto Basic, CCN.com, Cointelegraph, Coinpedia Fintech News, CoinGape, Crypto Briefing, Benzinga, and The Crypto Times

Bluesky: @schizanon, @hybridcap, @vernster, @sactosteve, and @lehtimaeki

Forums: r/Buttcoin and r/Bitcoin

Qwen:

Alibaba releases QvQ-72B-Preview, an experimental research model focused on “enhancing visual reasoning capabilities”, built on Qwen2-VL-72B — Language and vision intertwine in the human mind, shaping how we perceive and understand the world around us.

Bloomberg:

Taiwan's FTC blocks Uber's $950M acquisition of Delivery Hero's Foodpanda, arguing it would decrease competition as their combined market share would be 90%+ — - Fair Trade Commission concerned deal would limit competition — Uber had sought Delivery Hero's Foodpanda unit in Taiwan

More: Uber Newsroom, Delivery Hero, Taipei Times, Axios, Seeking Alpha, Benzinga, The Information, The Straits Times, Reuters, The Week, Taiwan News, Tech Xplore, and Tech in Asia

X: @newsbfm, @newsbfm, and @newsbfm

Ari Levy / CNBC:

AppLovin was 2024's top performing US tech stock, up 758% as of December 24, followed by MicroStrategy, up 467%, and Palantir, up 380%; the Nasdaq jumped 33% — Artificial intelligence is still an abstract concept for many everyday consumers unsure about how it will change their lives.

More: Cryptopolitan, Motley Fool, Tech in Asia, Yahoo Finance, and Forbes

Ashley Capoot / CNBC:

Analysis: in 2024, ~66% of 39 public digital health companies lost value, while the Nasdaq rose 32%; in 2021, digital health startups raised a record $29.1B — If the Covid era marked a boom time for digital health companies, 2024 was the reckoning. — In a year that saw the Nasdaq jump 32% …

Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to. X: @ashleycapoot and @paul_sonnier. LinkedIn: Ashley Capoot

Richard Deitsch / New York Times:

Netflix's first livestream of NFL games avoided major buffering and freezing issues that plagued the Tyson-Paul fight for the most part, after early glitches — If you believe in omens, Netflix appeared to be in for a very long day on Wednesday. As the streaming giant began …

Politico:

Examining Biden's tech legacy and the CHIPS Act, as the White House says $446B has been announced for chips and electronics manufacturing since he took office — President Joe Biden had just a single term to try to transform the nation's approach to energy, climate change, technology and jobs.

J. Clara Chan / Wired:

A look at Toontown Rewritten, an unofficial recreation of Disney's Toontown Online game that shut down in 2013; Toontown Rewritten now has 10K DAUs and 50K MAUs — Thanks to a bunch of game-makers who were still teens when Toontown Online disappeared, the beloved online world lives on as Toontown Rewritten.

Bluesky: @joeyz.io and @toontownrewritten.com. X: @pandaphilplays

Forums: r/Toontown, r/toontownrewritten, and r/pcgaming

New York Times:

Japan Airlines halts ticket sales after a cyberattack hit its network equipment, causing delays to more than 40 flights, and says flight safety was not impacted — The airline also temporarily stopped selling tickets for flights departing Thursday, but said that there was no impact on flight safety.

More: Reuters, All - Kyodo News+, Associated Press, CityNews Halifax, Wall Street Journal, Nikkei Asia, Agence France-Presse, Times of India, The Japan Times, Nippon.com, Bloomberg, Skift, NHK World, and Al Jazeera

X: @nytimes and @nhkworld_news

The Block:

Analysis: Coinbase International saw its total trading volume grow 124% week-over-week to $119B+ this past week, up from $2.5B per day average in November 2024 — - The weekly total is 124% higher than the previous week's total. — The following is an excerpt from The Block's Data and Insights newsletter.

More: The Block, Cointelegraph, Cryptopolitan, Motley Fool, BeInCrypto, Coinpedia Fintech News, and Coinspeaker

X: @pancakeswap, @daancrypto, @martypartymusic, and @kyledoops

Tharin Pillay / Time:

A look at the more challenging AI evaluations emerging in response to the rapid progress of models, including FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and RE-Bench — Despite their expertise, AI developers don't always know what their most advanced systems are capable of—at least, not at first.

Bluesky: @iseff.com. X: @tharin_p and @tharin_p. LinkedIn: Ross Dawson

Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu / Financial Times:

Opensignal ranks Japan #1 in G7 mobile reliability experience between July 1 and September 28, followed by France, Germany, the US, Canada, Italy, and the UK — Research highlights impact of poor network performance on consumers — Mobile users in the UK had the least reliable experience …

More: iPhone in Canada Blog. Bluesky: @seanfionn. X: @workmj. Forums: r/ukpolitics and r/unitedkingdom

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From Mediagazer

Dan Mangan / CNBC:

President Trump files a $10B defamation lawsuit against the BBC, alleging it intentionally doctored a Panorama documentary to misrepresent his January 6 speech

Jake Kanter / Deadline:

The UK government begins its review of the BBC's charter, set to expire in 2027, as ministers consider licence fee reforms and allowing more commercial revenue

Jem Bartholomew / Columbia Journalism Review:

US Press Freedom Tracker: 32 journalists arrested or charged in 2025, vs. 50 in 2024, and 170 assaulted, nearly as many as the previous three years combined

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More News

Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis:

Benchmarking AMD's MI300X and Nvidia's H100 and H200; in theory, AMD's GPU has advantages in specs and total cost of ownership, but software bugs hold it back

More: TechSpot. Bluesky: @halvarflake. Mastodon: @pbloem@sigmoid.social. X: @cudahandbook, @cudahandbook, @benbajarin, @cudahandbook, @cudahandbook, @realgeorgehotz, @cudahandbook, @vintrotweets, @youjiacheng, @devnull_0, @dylan522p, @lemire, @benthompson, and @theycallmemr_. LinkedIn: Phillip Hendrickson, Ph.D.

Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:

Kaiko: the share of BTC-USD trades in US market hours has now climbed to ~53% from 40% in 2021, with crypto liquidity back at levels seen before FTX's collapse

More: Cryptopolitan. X: @crypto

Suvashree Ghosh / Bloomberg:

Singapore issued 13 crypto licenses in 2024, pulling ahead of Hong Kong, where authorities have been more cautious, in the race to become a regional crypto hub

More: Blockhead, BeInCrypto, Cointelegraph, Coinpedia Fintech News, Bitcoinist.com, crypto.news, Cryptonews, Bitcoin Insider, and Tech in Asia. X: @crypto

Ann Cao / South China Morning Post:

Ant splits Alipay into the Digital Payment Business Group focused on new payment products, and the Alipay Business Group focused on user growth and monetization

More: Tech in Asia and Pandaily. Forums: r/baba

Niket Nishant / Reuters:

Fiserv to acquire Toronto-based Payfare, which lets gig workers on platforms like Uber access their wages early, for $140M, expected to close in H1 2025

More: Fiserv, Inc., Crowdfund Insider, FinTech Futures, and FinTech Global

Earlier Picks

Martin Matishak / The Record:

President Biden signs the $895B 2025 defense policy bill, including $3B for the FCC's “rip and replace” program to get rid of Chinese networking equipment

More: The White House, CHINAdaily, CHINAdaily, Newsweek, CHINAdaily, CHINAdaily, Military.com, SiliconANGLE, UPI, The White House, The Korea Times, SecurityWeek, TechRadar, Politico, Associated Press, and The Cyber Express

X: @martinmatishak and @wolfejosh. Forums: Slashdot

The Information:

A look at OpenAI's interest in robotics, from investing in startups like Figure and Physical Intelligence to, sources say, considering making a humanoid robot

More: Cryptopolitan, Interesting Engineering, Gadgets 360, TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, and San Francisco Business Times

X: @rohanpaul_ai and @steph_palazzolo

Forums: r/singularity and Slashdot

Dan Primack / Axios:

Sources: Founders Fund seeks ~$3B for its third growth equity fund; it raised $3.4B for its second growth fund and $1.8B for its eighth early-stage fund in 2022

More: The Information and Tech in Asia. Bluesky: @laurenmeidasa

Isaac Schorr / Mediaite:

Elon Musk is one of two paid subscribers of an X account that has implied South Africa was better off under apartheid, slammed “Black ruled” countries, and more

Bluesky: @joyannreid, @jim-stewartson, @mobiledom, @murshedz, @bft.wtf, @petedavidsonny, @timescarcass, @dennycarter, @garymarcus, and @juddlegum

Mastodon: @KimPerales@toad.social and @cdarwin@c.im

Threads: @bennjordan, @hunterwalk, @carnage4life, and @barrykatz41

X: @mehdirhasan, @deanobeidallah, and @meidas_laurena

Forums: r/Law_and_Politics, r/EnoughMuskSpam, r/FoxFiction, r/EnoughMuskSpam, and r/RepublicanValues

Sheldon Reback / CoinDesk:

US and Japanese law enforcement say North Korean hackers were responsible for stealing 4,502.9 BTC, worth $308M, from Japanese crypto exchange DMM in May 2024