The price of Ripple’s XRP token jumped Thursday after Grayscale announced the launch of a new trust that gives accredited investors direct exposure to the cryptocurrency. 

XRP was last higher by more than 4.7% at 56 cents a coin, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it rose as much as 9%. XRP is the native token of Ripple’s XRP Ledger, whose main purpose is to facilitate cross-border financial transactions. It is the fifth-largest coin by market cap, excluding stablecoins Tether (USDT) and USDC.

Unlike an exchange-traded fund, the trust will primarily trade over the counter. Trusts are also more susceptible to trading at a price that does not line up with the underlying value of the portfolio.

“As crypto investors diversify beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, we believe in providing exposure to protocols that solve real-world problems,” Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, Grayscale’s head of product and research, said in a statement shared with CNBC. “XRP can reduce frictions in international payments, enabling more efficiency in an evolving global economy.”

Ripple last summer scored a partial victory in a three-year battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that was hailed as a landmark win for the crypto industry. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP is not considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges, but it is considered an unregistered security offering if sold to institutional investors.

Grayscale made history shortly after when a court ruled that the SEC was wrong to deny the crypto investment giant permission to convert its popular bitcoin trust into an ETF. The agency approved the necessary rule change in January. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and the Grayscale Ethereum Trust began trading in January and July of this year, respectively, as ETFs.

Major cryptocurrencies were flat on Thursday. Bitcoin was last trading at $58,388 and ether at $2,347.48. MicroStrategy added more than 1%. Coinbase rose 4%.

— CNBC’s Jesse Pound contributed reporting.

As fires intensify in the western United States, utility companies are on the front lines, working to protect the power lines that serve millions of customers. And as the frequency of fires and severe storms increases, so does the amount of technology that utility companies use to keep things running.

The U.S. has roughly 5.5 million miles of power lines on more than a quarter billion poles surrounded by even more trees, and keeping a human eye on all of it is impossible.

That’s why artificial intelligence is taking the lead.

Enter new software companies like Pano AI, Satelytics and California-based AIDash, which are tapping high tech to lower risk.

“Using satellites, we can monitor each and every tree, each and every pole, as frequently as we want, identify the challenges and fix them before they cause an accident,” Abhishek Singh, CEO and co-founder of AIDash, told CNBC.

Utility companies are often required by local governments to scan 100% of their lines and address any issues before fire season.

“This entire exercise of maintaining trees along power lines is a $10 billion annual spend in us alone,” Singh added. “With the labor cost increasing, and shortage of labor, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the problems without technology.”

AIDash uses its tech to not only identify current issues but also potential future ones, integrating weather data with detailed vegetation data to gauge risk levels throughout the fire season and address them. The company does the same for extreme wind and precipitation events.

National Grid, which services customers in much of the northeast, is both a client of and investor in AIDash through its venture capital arm, National Grid Partners.

“The most important thing for us is the grid reliability,” Andre Turenne, VP of investments at National Grid Partners, told CNBC, adding that the company has seen a 30% reduction in outages and a 55% reduction in the duration of outages since using AIDash.

“Their differentiator was they built an end-to-end platform, a workflow platform designed for utility engineers to actually deploy and do predictive analytics, deploy the crews on the ground and generally provide a platform for our engineers to use end-to-end,” said Turenne.  

In addition to National Grid Partners, AIDash is backed by Duke Energy, Edison International, Shell Ventures, Lightrock and SE Ventures. Its total venture capital funding so far is $91.5 million.

As part of the green transition, and as more industries make the switch to all-electric power, grid capacity and reliability will become even more vital. Over the next five years, National Grid said it plans to spend $75 billion in its jurisdictions in the United Kingdom, as well as in New York and Massachusetts, to upgrade for both.

— CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed reporting.

Microsoft told employees on Thursday that it has hired Carolina Dybeck Happe as its executive vice president and chief operations officer, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Dybeck Happe comes from GE, where she was senior vice president and chief financial officer from 2020 until September 2023.

The appointment reflects Microsoft’s commitment to ensuring it remains coordinated as so much of the company has become oriented around artificial intelligence.

She will join Microsoft’s senior leadership team alongside finance chief Amy Hood, cloud and AI engineering leader Scott Guthrie, and other executives.

“Carolina will partner with the SLT to help us drive continuous business process improvement across all our organizations and accelerate our company-wide AI transformation, increasing value to customers and partners,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.

Nadella said Dybeck Happe will take over Guthrie’s commerce and ecosystems organization, the Microsoft Digital IT team under Office software leader Rajesh Jha, and the Microsoft Business Operations unit in the finance department.

Dybeck Happe’s appointment comes months after GE’s aviation and energy businesses, known as GE Aerospace and GE Vernova respectively, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange. GE announced plans to split into three companies in 2021.

GE CEO Larry Culp called Dybeck Happe “a high-impact executive” when GE announced in 2019 that it had picked Dybeck Happe to succeed Jamie Miller as chief financial officer.

She joined GE from Maersk, where she had been finance chief. Before that, she spent almost 17 years at Swedish lock company Assa Abloy, where she became chief financial officer and deputy CEO.

Microsoft has not had an operating chief since 2016, when former Walmart executive Kevin Turner left.