Bitcoin on Thursday surged to its highest price in nearly a month, as traders bet on a U.S. inflation cooldown and digested news that lawyers for defunct crypto exchange FTX found billions of dollars’ worth of assets.
The world’s largest digital currency climbed above $18,000 for the first time since Dec. 14 late Wednesday, increasing in value by about 5% in the last 24 hours. Bitcoin was trading at $18,154.35 as of 5 a.m. ET Thursday morning, according to CoinMetrics data.
On Wednesday, attorneys for collapsed crypto exchange FTX said they had found around $5 billion in “liquid” assets, including cash and digital assets. The recovery will be a welcome boon to FTX customers after the crypto exchange imploded in November.
FTX lawyers nevertheless warned the $5 billion cache was so high that selling the assets could lead to significant downside pressure on the market, driving down their value.
“Bitcoin has been in a downtrend for over a year now, which is a standard period of a bear market in crypto,” Vijay Ayyar, vice president of corporate development and international at crypto exchange Luno, told CNBC in emailed comments Thursday morning.
“We’ve had many negative events transpire over the past year, and if one looks at the price reaction to those events, in general it’s been declining less and less — an indication that the market is accepting the news quite well, sell pressure is being absorbed, and hence we’re moving to an accumulation stage,” he added. “This could also mean that the market thinks the worst is over for crypto and that most negative news in now priced in.”
U.S. inflation data due out Thursday is forecast to show a softening of inflation. Economists polled by Dow Jones anticipate that the consumer price index declined 0.1% month-on-month in December.
Inflation is still expected to rise 6.5% year-over-year, though this would be down from a 7.1% jump in November and well off a 9.1% peak rate in June. Investors hope the decline may put pressure on the U.S. Federal Reserve to reverse interest rate increases.
The Fed and other central banks have been raising interest rates over the past year or so in an effort to tame soaring inflation — in moves that forced stocks and cryptocurrencies sharply lower in 2022.
The hope now is that the central bank will cut rates, taking some pressure off risk assets.
“Today’s CPI numbers could be quite telling, and a hot CPI print could definitely throw a spanner in the works for risk-on assets such as crypto,” Ayyar said.
That or further negative news in crypto may cause the price of bitcoin to slip below $17,000, Ayyar warned, setting the stage for additional declines and a potential fall of the digital asset within a $12,000 to $14,000 range.
Bitcoin is down about 74% from its November 2021 all-time high of $68,990. Last year, nearly $1.4 trillion of value was wiped off the cryptocurrency market, as traders dumped risky assets like technology and growth stocks.
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Bitcoin and the broader digital currency market also slumped, suggesting increasing correlation with major stock benchmarks like the Nasdaq Composite.
The plunge was also caused by crypto-specific issues, including the collapses of projects and companies like FTX and Terra.
Bitcoin has however started 2023 on positive footing, with its price rising steadily over the last 12 days.
Other digital currencies were buoyed by the jump in bitcoin prices Thursday. Ether, the second-largest coin, rose almost 5% to $1,397.78 while Binance’s BNB token rose 3% to $283.
Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, told CNBC Wednesday that the exchange plans to increase hiring by 15% to 30% in 2023, in stark contrast with other exchanges that have cut jobs.
Binance, which earlier earmarked $1 billion for a fund aimed at propping up the industry after the collapse of FTX, has itself been beset by fears over the soundness of its reserves. The auditor working on the company’s so-called proof of reserves, Mazars, paused all work with crypto companies in December.
Binance says it has more than enough assets to cover liabilities.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address during the Nvidia GTC 2025 at SAP Center on March 18, 2025 in San Jose, California.
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Nvidia said on Tuesday that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion tied to exporting H20 graphics processing units to China and other destinations. The stock slid more than 6% in extended trading.
On April 9, the U.S. government told Nvidia it would require a license to export the chips to China and a handful of other countries, the company said in a filing.
The disclosure is the strongest sign so far that Nvidia’s historic growth could be slowed by increased export restrictions on its chips, which the U.S. government says can be used to create supercomputers for military uses. Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results on May 28.
During President Biden’s administration, the U.S. restricted AI chip exports in 2022 and then updated the rules the following year to prevent the sale of more advanced AI processors. The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the company’s last quarterly earnings call in February that revenue from China had dropped to half of pre-export control levels. Huang warned that competition in China is growing, and for the second straight year, Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual filing.
China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.
Nvidia’s H20 chip is comparable to the H100 and H200 AI chips used in the U.S. and other countries, but it has slower interconnection speeds and bandwidth. It’s based on a previous generation of AI architecture called Hopper introduced in 2022. Nvidia is now focusing on selling its current generation of AI chips, called Blackwell.
DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose competitive AI model R1 unveiled earlier this year upended markets, used H20 chips in its research.
In addition to the existing Chinese export controls, Nvidia also faces new restrictions on what it can export starting next month, under “AI diffusion rules” first proposed by the Biden administration.
Nvidia has argued that further controls on its chips would stifle competition and potentially even erode U.S. competitiveness in technology. The company previously said it moved some of its operations, including testing and distribution, out of China after the 2022 export controls.
At the company’s annual conference last month, when asked about Chinese export controls, Huang said Nvidia works to comply with the law, but he also noted that about half of the world’s AI researchers are from China, and many of those work at U.S.-based AI labs.
Nvidia said in Tuesday’s filing that the U.S. government told the company on Monday that the license requirement for H20 chips would be in effect “for the indefinite future.”
Nvidia shares have dropped 16% this year, largely due to President Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs on top trading partners. While exemptions have been made on various electronics products, including smartphones, computers and semiconductors, Trump and some officials said over the weekend that the reprieve was temporary and part of plans to apply separate tariffs to the sector.
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday following Nvidia’s disclosure. AI chipmaker Broadcom fell almost 4%.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma Inc., after the morning sessions at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 11, 2024.
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Design software maker Figma said on Tuesday that it has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering.
The confidential filing lands 16 months after the company scrapped a deal to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion due to regulatory pressure in the U.K. The San Francisco startup had originally agreed to the deal 2022. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.
Figma’s software is popular among designers inside companies who need to collaborate on prototypes for websites and apps. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a 2024 tender offer.
“There are two paths that venture-funded startups go down,” Dylan Field, Figma’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Verge last year. “You either get acquired or you go public. And we explored thoroughly the acquisition route.”
The announcement lands at a precarious moment for the tech IPO market, which has been largely dormant since late 2021. The Trump presidency was expected to revive new offerings due to promises of less burdensome regulations.
But after filing their prospectuses with the SEC, fintech company Klarna and online ticket marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs earlier this month following the market turmoil caused by Trump’s announcements on widespread tariffs. Digital banking service Chime, which had filed confidentially with the SEC, also postponed its planned offering.
Turo, a car-sharing service, withdrew its IPO prospectus in February, three years after filing its initial prospectus.
Figma was founded in 2012 and is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Durable Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. The company, which ranked 26th on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2024, had about $600 million in annual revenue as of early last year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning out Instagram in 2018 on concerns about the rising threat of antitrust litigation against Facebook, according to an email presented Tuesday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom.
During Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony in Meta’s antitrust trial with the Federal Trade Commission, lawyers representing the FTC introduced an email from May 2018, in which Zuckerberg appeared to comment on the possibility of separating the photo-sharing app his company purchased in 2012 for $1 billion.
“And i’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email. “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway. This is one more factor we should consider.”
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, when the photo app had 13 employees and Zuckerberg was poised to take his company public in what, at the time, was the largest tech IPO on record. The purchase of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion are at the heart of the blockbuster antitrust trial that kicked off Monday and could last weeks.
The FTC alleges that Meta monopolizes the social networking market, and has argued that the company shouldn’t have been able to complete those acquisitions. The agency is seeking to cleave the apps from Meta as a possible remedy.
Meta disputes the FTC’s allegations and claims the regulator mischaracterizes the competitive landscape and fails to acknowledge a number of rivals like TikTok and Apple’s iMessage, and not merely other apps like Snapchat. Earlier in the trial, the FTC also presented an Oct. 2013 email in which Zuckerberg told other Facebook executives that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel rebuffed his $6 billion offer to buy Snapchat.
Zuckerberg also said in the 2018 email that the company’s “best estimates are that, had Instagram remained independent, it would likely be around the size of Twitter or Snapchat with 300-400 million MAP today, rather than closer to 1 billion.” MAP is short for monthly active people.