Robinhood logo displayed on a phone screen and representation of cryptocurrencies are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on January 29, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Online brokerage giant Robinhood on Thursday said it’s launching a cryptocurrency trading feature in the European Union, pushing further outside the United States as the company looks to unlock growth from international markets.
Robinhood said its new crypto product would allow customers to buy, sell, and hold from a range of more than 25 tokens, including bitcoin, ether, ripple, cardano, solana, and polkadot. The company hopes to offer more tokens, as well as the ability to transfer and “stake,” or earn rewards from, crypto in 2024.
The move marks Robinhood’s second major expansion outside of the U.S., after it announced late last month that it plans to launch stock trades for U.K. customers by early 2024. The company opened a waitlist in the U.K. last week for the service, which will offer yields of up to 5% on customer deposits.
Robinhood is looking to tempt EU users into using its service with the ability to earn free bitcoin for users who trade lots and refer the app to their friends. The company will offer users up to one bitcoin, based on a a percentage of their monthly trading volume and the number of users they refer when they sign up.
It comes as several major U.S. crypto firms are turning to the European Union for growth after facing a tough time from regulators stateside. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has targeted several crypto firms, including Coinbase and Binance, with lawsuits alleging they violated securities laws.
The EU, meanwhile, has proposed a comprehensive set of regulation, called the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, that would bring in stricter rules for crypto trading platforms and issuers of so-called stablecoins — tokens pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar or euro.
Johann Kerbrat, general manager for Robinhood Crypto, said the firm chose the EU as the first international target market for its crypto product due to the region’s development of the world’s first comprehensive set of laws specifically tailored for the crypto industry.
“The EU has developed one of the world’s most comprehensive policies for crypto asset regulation, which is why we chose the region to anchor Robinhood Crypto’s international expansion plans,” Kerbrat said in a statement Thursday.
Robinhood also touted transparency and security features in its European crypto offering to convince users to trade with its service. The company said it would transparently display spreads on trades, including the rebate the firm receives from sell and trade orders.
Robinhood said it never commingles customer coins with business funds other than for operating purposes, such as payment of blockchain network fees, and stores all its customers’ coins in cold wallets disconnected from the internet.
Robinhood said it also has a crime insurance policy in place to ensure a portion of assets held across its storage systems are protected against losses from theft, including cybersecurity breaches. The policy is underwritten by underwriters at Lloyd’s, the insurance marketplace.
Theft of crypto has been a big problem for the industry over the past couple of years, with major hacks of blockchain networks resulting in millions’ worth of digital coins being drained from users’ wallets. Just last month, the HTX exchange and Heco bridge, two platforms linked to high-profile entrepreneur Justin Sun were hacked for an estimated $115 million.
The blurring of lines between trading venues and custodians became a big problem last year when FTX, the disgraced former $32 billion crypto exchange, collapsed after revelations that its sister market-making firm Alameda Research used customer funds to make risky bets on certain tokens.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a roundtable on “Antifa,” an anti-fascist movement he designated a domestic “terrorist organization” via executive order on September 22, at the White House in Washington, D.C., Oct. 8, 2025.
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Meta removed a Facebook group page on Tuesday that was allegedly used to “dox and target” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Chicago after being contacted by the Department of Justice.
Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed the Facebook takedown in an X post, and said that the DOJ “will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.”
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the tech giant removed the Facebook group page, but declined to comment about its size and the specific details that warranted its removal.
“This Group was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm,” the Meta spokesperson said in a statement that also referred to the company’s policies pertaining to “Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime.”
Meta’s removal of the Facebook group page follows similar moves from rivals like Apple and Google, which have recently removed apps that could be used to anonymously report sightings of ICE agents and other law enforcement.
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Apple took down the ICEBlock app nearly two weeks ago following pressure from Bondi, who said at the time that the app was “designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs.”
Apple said at the time in a statement that it removed the ICEBlock app based on information provided by law enforcement about alleged “safety risks.”
Google, which did not maintain the ICEBlock app on its app store, said in October that while the DOJ never contacted the search giant, the company removed “similar apps for violations of our policies.”
ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron criticized both Apple and the White House in an interview with CNBC, and compared his app to others like Waze, which let drivers report when they see law enforcement officers in order to avoid getting ticketed for speeding.
“This is about our fundamental constitutional rights in this country being stripped away by this administration, and the powers that be who are capitulating to their requests,” Aaron said.
OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.
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OpenAI on Tuesday announced a council of eight experts who will advise the company and provide insight into how artificial intelligence could affect users’ mental health, emotions and motivation.
The group, which is called the Expert Council on Well-Being and AI, will initially guide OpenAI’s work on its chatbot ChatGPT and its short-form video app Sora, the company said. Through check-ins and recurring meetings, OpenAI said the council will help it define what healthy AI interactions look like.
OpenAI has been expanding its safety controls in recent months as the company has faced mounting scrutiny over how it protects users, particularly minors.
In September, the Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into several tech companies, including OpenAI, over how chatbots like ChatGPT could negatively affect children and teenagers. OpenAI is also embroiled in a wrongful death lawsuit from a family who blames ChatGPT for their teenage son’s death by suicide.
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The company is building an age prediction system that will automatically apply teen-appropriate settings for users under 18, and it launched a series of parental controls late last month. Parents can now get notified if their child is showing signs of acute distress, for instance.
OpenAI said it began informally consulting with members of its new expert council as it was building its parental controls. The company brought on additional experts in psychiatry. psychology and human-computer interaction as it formalized the council, which officially launched with an in-person session last week.
In addition to its expert council, OpenAI said it is also working with researchers and mental health clinicians within the Global Physician Network who will help test ChatGPT and establish company policies.
Here are the members of OpenAI’s Expert Council on Well-Being and AI:
Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford.
David Bickham, a research scientist in the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.
David Mohr, the director of Northwestern University’s Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies.
Mathilde Cerioli, the chief scientist at Everyone.AI, a nonprofit that explores the risks and benefits of AI for children.
Munmun De Choudhury, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.
Dr. Robert Ross, a pediatrician by training and the former CEO of The California Endowment, a nonprofit that aims to expand access to affordable health care.
Dr. Sara Johansen, a clinical assistant professor at Stanford University who founded its Digital Mental Health Clinic.
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, a professor of psychology at Hunter College.
If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on Tuesday announced it will deploy 50,000 Advanced Micro Devices graphics processors starting in the second half of 2026.
AMD shares climbed about 2%. Oracle shares sank 4% while Nvidia was more than 3% lower.
The move is the latest sign that cloud companies are increasingly offering AMD’s graphics processing units as an alternative to Nvidia’s market-leading GPUs for artificial intelligence.
“We feel like customers are going to take up AMD very, very well — especially in the inferencing space,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Oracle will use AMD’s Instinct MI450 chips, which were announced earlier this year.
They are AMD’s first AI chips that can be assembled into a larger rack-sized system that enables 72 of the chips to work as one, which is needed to create and deploy the most advanced AI algorithms.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared with AMD CEO Lisa Su at a company event in June to announce the product.
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Earlier this month, OpenAI announced a deal with AMD for processors requiring 6 gigawatts of power over multiple years, with a 1-gigawatt rollout starting in 2026. As part of the deal, and if the deployment goes well, OpenAI may end up owning as many as 160 million shares of AMD, or about 10% of the company.
OpenAI has historically been closely linked with Nvidia, whose chips were used to develop ChatGPT. Nvidia’s chips dominate the market for data center GPUs with more than 90% market share. Nvidia also invested in OpenAI in September.
But OpenAI leaders say the company needs as much computing power as possible, which means it needs AI chips from multiple suppliers. OpenAI also has plans to design its own AI chips with Broadcom.
“I think AMD has done a really fantastic job, just like Nvidia, and I think both of them have their place,” Batta said.
Tuesday at Oracle AI World, founder and Chairman Larry Ellison is set to take the stage and share his views on the latest OpenAI deal and what his company is doing to stay ahead of its main cloud competitors – Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
“Oracle has already shown it is willing to place big bets and go all in to meet the AI moment. The company must now prove that beyond capacity, it can capitalize on its massive underlying data and enterprise capabilities … to add meaningful value to the enterprise AI wave,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, on the sidelines of Oracle’s conference.