Launched in 2018 by crypto firm Circle, USDC is now the second-biggest stablecoin globally, with more than $30 billion worth of tokens in circulation.
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Cryptocurrency firm Circle said Monday it’s now registered as an electronic money institution, or EMI, in France, granting the firm a key license to become a compliant stablecoin issuer under the European Union’s tough crypto laws.
Circle, which is primarily known for its USD Coin, or USDC, stablecoin, said in a statement that it was granted an e-money license by France’s banking industry regulator, Autorite de Controle Prudentiel et de Resolution, or ACPR.
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The license makes Circle the first global stablecoin issuer to achieve compliance with the European Union’s landmark Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA, regulatory framework, the company said.
Circle added that the approval will mean that both its USDC and Euro Coin, or EURC, tokens are now being issued in the EU in compliance with MiCA’s stablecoin regulatory obligations. The company said it is also opening up its Circle Mint, which allows businesses to mint and redeem Circle stablecoins, in France.
“Since our founding, Circle has sought to build durable, compliant, and well-regulated infrastructure for stablecoins,” Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, said in a statement Monday.
“Our adherence to MiCA, which represents one of the most comprehensive crypto regulatory regimes in the world, is a huge milestone in bringing digital currency into mainstream scale and acceptance,” Allaire added.
Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency pegged to traditional assets, typically government-issued currencies such as the U.S. dollar. Investors hold them to avoid volatility seen in other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
They’re also a key way to trade in and out of cryptocurrencies quickly that allows users to avoid having to rely on fiat currencies stored in bank accounts.
EU ushers in stablecoin rules
EU regulators last year passed the world’s first comprehensive law that governs how cryptocurrency companies should operate. The law outlines rules specifying ways companies should establish investor protections and make sure their platforms aren’t vulnerable to manipulation.
The law, known as MiCA, officially entered into force in May 2023.
However, provisions governing stablecoins were approved only last week. These measures were viewed as particularly stringent, as they imposed limitations on how much trading could be done in certain stablecoins, particularly U.S.-denominated ones.
Under the rules, companies must stop issuing non-euro-denominated stablecoins used as a “means of exchange” if they cross a threshold of more than 1 million transactions or a value of over 200 million euros (US$215.2 million) per day, according to Article 23 of MiCA.
As a France-registered EMI, Circle said it is now able to offer its services — which includes the ability to mint and redeem USDC via Circle Mint — to customers not just in France, but throughout the European Union.
That’s because according to MiCA, crypto businesses can offer their services in one EU country and “passport” them out into other markets within the bloc.
The remaining obligations set out under MiCA, which concern crypto asset service providers, will become applicable by December 30, 2024. After that point, crypto companies will have until July 2026 to become fully compliant with MiCA.
Launched in September 2018 by Circle and crypto exchange Coinbase, USDC is now the second-biggest stablecoin globally, with $32.4 billion worth of tokens in circulation, according to CoinGecko data. It is second only to Tether’s USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin with $112.7 billion in circulation, according to CoinGecko.
The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
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Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
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Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.
Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.
The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.
“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.
In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.