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Brad Garlinghouse, chief executive officer of Ripple, speaks during the CoinDesk 2022 Consensus Festival in Austin, Texas, US, on Saturday, June 11, 2022.

Jordan Vonderhaar | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Blockchain company Ripple said Thursday it received in-principle regulatory approval to operate in Singapore, in a rare moment of good news for the cryptocurrency industry globally as it faces tightening policy back home in the United States.

Ripple said that it was granted in-principle approval of a Major Payment Institution Licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country’s central bank.

The license will allow Ripple to offer regulated digital payment token products and services and expand the cross-border transfers of XRP, a cryptocurrency the company is closely associated with, among its customers, which are banks and financial institutions.

XRP was trading at around 50 cents late Wednesday evening.

Ripple, a San Francisco-based fintech company, is mostly known for XRP as well as an interbank messaging services based on blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins many cryptocurrencies.

The company’s on-demand liquidity service uses XRP as a kind of “bridge” between currencies, which it says allows payment providers and banks to process cross-border transactions much faster than they would over legacy payment rails.

But Ripple also operates a blockchain-based international messaging system called RippleNet to facilitate massive transfers of funds between banks and other financial institutions, similar to the global interbank messaging system SWIFT.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ripple, co-founder Christian Larsen and CEO Brad Garlinghouse with conducting an illegal securities offering that raised more than $1.3 billion through sales of XRP.

Ripple denies the SEC allegations, contending that XRP is a currency rather than a security that would be subject to strict rules.

Singapore is one of the largest currency corridors from which Ripple sends money across borders using XRP, the company said in a press release.

Bitcoin is going to continue to be 'the winner' in this market, says investor Anthony Pompliano

A majority of Ripple’s global on-demand liquidity transactions flow through Singapore, which serves as the company’s regional Asia-Pacific headquarters, Ripple said.

Ripple has doubled its headcount in Singapore over the past year across key functions including business development, compliance, and finance, and plans to continue increasing its presence there.

MAS, the Singaporean financial regulator, was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

The central bank was previously in the news for blasting Three Arrows Capital, the disgraced crypto hedge fund that imploded after betting billions on failed stablecoin terraUSD, for providing misleading information concerning its relocation to the British Virgin Islands in 2021.

The Asian megacity has gained a reputation over the years for being a more financial technology and crypto-friendly jurisdiction, opening its doors to a number of major companies including domestic banking giant DBS, British fintech firm Revolut, and Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com.

Garlinghouse is due to speak at the Point Zero Forum in Zurich, Switzerland, next Wednesday to “discuss the resurgence of innovation in digital assets through investment and thoughtful regulation,” the company said.

It comes on the heels of Ripple’s $250 million purchase of Metaco, a crypto custody services firm, to expand its reach in the Swiss market and diversify away from its home in the U.S. Recently, Ripple’s Garlinghouse said the firm will have spent more than $200 million in legal fees by the time its legal battle with the SEC is wrapped up.

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.

Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.

This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.

Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.

The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.

In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all. 

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in $2.4 billion licensing deal

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in .4 billion licensing deal

In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.

Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP

Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.

Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.

OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.

“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”

Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.

Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.

“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”

Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.

WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

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Musk’s xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok’s ‘horrific’ antisemitic posts

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Musk's xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok's 'horrific' antisemitic posts

The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024. 

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.

“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.

X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.

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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.

“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.

Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”

xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.

Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.

CNBC’s April Roach contributed to this article.

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