Amazon has discontinued a secretive effort to develop an at-home fertility tracker, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.

The company had been working to launch a fertility monitoring device and companion smartphone app for the past four years as part of a project codenamed “Encore,” said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. The team sat within Amazon’s Grand Challenge, also known as its Special Projects division, the sources said.

Last month, Amazon told people working on the tracker that it was disbanding the team. Those being laid off will remain on Amazon’s payroll until Dec. 27, but won’t be expected to work during that time, according to documents reviewed by CNBC.

If staffers don’t secure another job by that date, Amazon will provide them with a “lump sum” severance payment equal to one week of salary for every six months of tenure at the company, the documents said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been reeling in costs companywide since late 2022, when inflationary pressures and rising interest rates led to a slowdown across the tech and consumer markets. In addition to slashing more than 27,000 jobs, Jassy has shuttered several projects, ranging from a roving sidewalk robot to a telehealth offering and a rapid delivery service.

The wave of frugality marks a distinct departure from the approach taken by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Jassy’s predecessor, who was known for greenlighting experimental projects and giving employees extended runway to develop them, even if they burned cash along the way. Grand Challenge was one of the hallmarks of that era.

Bezos launched Grand Challenge in 2014 as a way for Amazon to tinker with riskier projects that may or may not see the light of day. Grand Challenge was the brains behind a pair of connected eyeglasses equipped with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and a machine learning tool for analyzing medical records.

Other Grand Challenge projects, like the Amazon Care telehealth service, a video-calling device for kids, a virtual tours service and an augmented reality headset for meetings were discontinued.

On the morning of Oct. 28, employees working on the fertility tracker were told to join a videoconference where a director of the team informed them that the project was ending. The call lasted about two minutes, one of the people said.

A layoff notice viewed by CNBC was signed by Doug Weibel, who took over as the head of Grand Challenge after its founding leader, Babak Parviz, left in 2022 and joined Madrona Venture Group.

Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed the layoffs and the existence of the project in a statement to CNBC. Roughly 100 employees will be laid off, Callahan confirmed.

“Following a recent review, we’ve decided to discontinue this project within Grand Challenge, and we’re working directly with employees whose roles are impacted to support them through the transition and help them find other opportunities within Amazon,” Callahan said.

Business Insider reported on aspects of the fertility device in 2022, when its codename was Project Tiberius.

The team was working to develop its own saliva collection device and mobile app, which could predict when a user might be in the fertile window. Users could also log their period symptoms, sexual activity and other data to assist with tracking their fertility. There are similar offerings on the market from companies including Inne, Oova, Ava and Mira, along with fertility and ovulation tracking apps like Flo, Clue and Max Levchin’s Glow.

Amazon initially aimed to release the product this year, but the timing was pushed out after the team encountered technical issues with the device, one of the people said. It was a costly endeavor and required significant upfront investments for lab research and development, in addition to the high salaries for scientists and engineers, the sources said, adding that the team’s weekly overhead was roughly $1.5 million. Amazon didn’t comment on the figure.

Only one project now remains active within Grand Challenge. Its focus is on health tech, the people said.

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BlackRock has expanded its tokenized money market fund to include several more blockchains.

The investment manager said Wednesday that its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is now available to investors on the Aptos; Arbitrum; Avalanche; OP Mainnet, formerly known as Optimism; and Polygon blockchains. It initially launched the fund on Ethereum in March.

The BUIDL fund, which BlackRock debuted two months after iShares Bitcoin Trust, its popular bitcoin exchange-traded fund, gives investors an opportunity to earn U.S. dollar yields through a blockchain-based vehicle. The idea of tokenizing “real world assets” such as gold, a key aspect of decentralized finance, or DeFi, has gained popularity among financial institutions that are cautious on crypto assets but keen on the underlying blockchain technology.

“There’s some irony in the fact that with … [iShares Bitcoin Trust], we took a crypto native investment exposure and we put it in a traditional finance wrapper … and with tokenization, we’re taking traditional finance investment exposure, and we’re putting it in a crypto native wrapper,” Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, said in March.

“That dichotomy will persist for a while,” he added at the time. “But eventually, we expect there will be some convergence that looks like the best of the old system and the best of this new technology fused into a next generation infrastructure set in finance.”

The announcement follows a weeklong rally in cryptocurrencies after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. Polygon’s token climbed 28%, according to Coin Metrics. On the campaign trail, Trump promised more supportive regulations for crypto projects and businesses, a reversal from Biden administration policy, in which the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has largely regulated the industry through enforcement actions, hampering growth.

DeFi is one of the most popular sectors among crypto market participants but has suffered from the lack of regulatory clarity, with tokens of some DeFi projects being classified as securities in SEC lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase last year.

Bitcoin rose above $93,000 for the first time on Wednesday, adding to its postelection rally, as traders pored through October inflation data.

The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 3% at $92,612.27. At one point, it briefly rose to a fresh record of $93,469.08.

Traders were digesting the most recent consumer price index, which showed prices increased 0.2% in October, bringing the 12-month inflation rate up to 2.6%. That was in line with expectations.

Bitcoin, which has recently benefited from a big postelection rally across risk assets, is seen by many investors as a hedge against potential fiscal policy that could spark inflation.

Other cryptocurrencies got a small boost as traders digested the past week of postelection gains. Ether and the Solana token were each higher by about 1%.

Dogecoin added 3%. It has been one of the biggest winners since the election due to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s involvement in President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign and forthcoming role in his administration, which was announced Tuesday night.