Goldman Sachs and Citadel back crypto firm Digital Asset in $135 million funding round
Nurphoto | Getty Images
Crypto company Digital Asset said Tuesday that it’s netted $135 million in funding from a raft of major names in banking and finance.
The firm, which touts itself as a regulated crypto player, said it raised the fresh cash in a funding round co-led by DRW and Tradeweb, with Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities also investing.
The investment highlights how large financial institutions are embedding themselves in the once murky world of cryptocurrencies.
Previously associated with fraud, money laundering and other illicit activities, digital assets have become a more mainstream asset class over the years as big names like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley warmed to the space.
Just last week, JPMorgan launched its own version of a stablecoin, a deposit token called “JPMD.”
“With growing participation from global financial institutions and market participants, we expect this funding round to help us solidify our role as the backbone of digital finance,” Yuval Rooz, Digital Asset’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC.
Digital Asset sells a number of digital asset services to its clients, which include major Wall Street players like Goldman Sachs, Citadel and Virtu. Co-founded in 2014 by Rooz, a trader turned entrepreneur, the firm competes with the likes of Ripple, R3 and Consensys.
The firm will use the new funding to advance adoption of the Canton Network. Initially developed by Digital Asset but now open-source, Canton is a public blockchain designed for financial institutions to move assets and data around while meeting regulatory and privacy requirements.
Banks and trading firms are using Canton to tokenize real-world assets such as bonds, commodities and money market funds.
“This raise will allow us to build upon the continuing momentum around the Canton Network and accelerate the onboarding of more high-quality assets, finally making blockchain’s transformative promise an institutional-scale reality,” Rooz told CNBC.
The network now supports trillions of dollars in tokenized assets, according to Digital Asset’s CEO.
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 CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.
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