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Dado Ruvic | Reuters

The first bitcoin upgrade in four years has just gone live. It is a rare moment of consensus among stakeholders, and it’s a big deal for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. 

The Taproot update means greater transaction privacy and efficiency – and crucially, it will unlock the potential for smart contracts, which can be used to eliminate middlemen from transactions. 

“Taproot matters, because it opens a breadth of opportunity for entrepreneurs interested in expanding bitcoin’s utility,” said Alyse Killeen, founder and managing partner of bitcoin-focused venture firm Stillmark.

Unlike bitcoin’s 2017 upgrade – referred to as the “last civil war” because of the contentious ideological divide separating adherents – Taproot has near universal support, in part because these changes involve fairly incremental improvements to the code.

What’s changing

A big part of bitcoin’s makeover has to do with digital signatures, which are like the fingerprint an individual leaves on every transaction.

Right now, the cryptocurrency uses something called the “Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm,” which creates a signature from the private key that controls a bitcoin wallet, and ensures that bitcoin can only be spent by the rightful owner.

Taproot will add something known as Schnorr signatures, which essentially makes multi-signature transactions unreadable, according to bitcoin miner Alejandro De La Torre.

It won’t translate to greater anonymity for your individual bitcoin address on the public blockchain, but it will make simple transactions indistinguishable from those that are more complex and comprised of multiple signatures. 

In practice, that means greater privacy, because your keys won’t have as much exposure on the chain. “You can kind of hide who you are a little bit better, which is good,” said bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi, who now runs Meow, a company that enables corporate treasury participation in crypto markets.

Smart contracts

These souped-up signatures are also a game changer for smart contracts, which are self-executing agreements that live on the blockchain. Smart contracts could theoretically be used for practically any kind of transaction, from paying your rent each month, to registering your vehicle.

Taproot makes smart contracts cheaper and smaller, in terms of the space they take up on the blockchain. Killeen says that this enhanced functionality and efficiency presents “mind blowing potential.” 

Currently, smart contracts can be created both on bitcoin’s core protocol layer and on the Lightning Network, a payments platform built on bitcoin, which enables instant transactions. Smart contracts executed on the Lightning Network typically lead to faster and less costly transactions.

“Lightning transactions can be fractions of a penny…while a bitcoin transaction at the core protocol layer can be much more expensive than that,” explained Killeen.

Developers had already begun to build on Lightning in anticipation of the upgrade, which will allow for highly specific contracts.

“The most important thing for Taproot is…smart contracts,” said Fred Thiel, CEO of cryptocurrency mining specialist Marathon Digital Holdings. “It’s already the primary driver of innovation on the ethereum network. Smart contracts essentially give you the opportunity to really build applications and businesses on the blockchain.”

As more programmers build smart contracts on top of bitcoin’s blockchain, bitcoin could become more of a player in the world of DeFi, or decentralized finance, a term used to describe financial applications designed to cut out the middleman.

Today, ethereum dominates as the blockchain of choice for these apps, also referred to as “dApps.”

Why the wait

Although the bitcoin community agreed to lock in the upgrade in June, the rollout itself didn’t happen until November. The couple month delay was designed to give enough time for testing and reducing the likelihood of something going wrong during the upgrade.

“Upgrades allow the – extremely remote – possibility of a bug entering the system, which would destroy confidence in the whole cryptocurrency system, effectively wiping it out – a ‘self-inflicted wound’ if you like,” said Jason Deane, an analyst at Quantum Economics.

Deane says this is why upgrade processes are so carefully tested, retested, and vetted over very long periods of time.

Many users in the community also remember the disastrous migration of 2013, when an upgrade gone wrong resulted in bitcoin temporarily splitting in half.

“You don’t want different clients or miners in the protocol out of sync. That’s how catastrophic stuff happens,” Nic Carter, founding partner at Castle Island Ventures, told CNBC. “Because we don’t want a repeat of 2013, we have these extremely long lead times.” 

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

Undecided on location

Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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