The 29th of April. As the week comes to an end, we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.
Robinhood sacked 9% of its full-time employees as shares plummeted by 75% after IPO
Robinhood, an online brokerage, slimmed down the workforce by 9%. Vlad Tenev, CEO of the company, justified this step due to the urgent need to increase profitability after the loss of $2 billion in the previous two quarters.
Over the course of 2020 and the first half of 2021, the startup underwent a period of hyper growth as the number of non-zero accounts skyrocketed from 5 million to 22 million while revenue spiked from $278 million in 2019 to $1.8 billion in 2021. Such dynamics of key indicators caused an upsurge in the number of employees from 700 to almost 3,800.
He promised that streamlining the state will ensure the further progress of the financial democratization mission. During 2022, Robinhood will feature new products in the areas of brokerage, cryptocurrencies, as well as expenditures/savings, continuing its international expansion. The basis for this will be $6 billion on the balance sheet.
Last July the online broker entered the IPO in 2021. Robinhood stock has collapsed 88.8% from its peak. Since the beginning of this year, its capitalization has sagged 46.5%.
Riot Blockchain unveiled a 1GW boost in bitcoin mining capacity
NASDAQ-listed mining company Riot Blockchain has reported plans to build a 1GW bitcoin mining facility in Navarro County, Texas.
The firm has just embarked on the first phase. On a site of more than 107 hectares, a 400 MW capacity plant will be erected. It is estimated that mining operations using immersion-cooled equipment will kick off in July 2023.
According to Riot’s estimations, this phase will cost $333 million on a piecemeal basis to be invested by the late first quarter of 2024.
Later on, the facility’s capacity will be increased by 600 MW.
One of the partners in the project was the Priority Power infrastructure firm, which will manage the development of the facility, provide utilities and power supply.
Both companies collaborated while developing the Whinstone US data center. Located in Rockdale, Texas, the mining-oriented firm took over the business in 2021.
Open source code not a solution for problems with Twitter’s algorithms, experts say
Disclosing the source code of Twitter’s recommendation engines will not resolve the problem that Twitter faces. Various experts on data privacy and Internet security said so, according to Wired.
As David Karger, a professor and computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out, it is not the algorithms but the data that matter in the machine-learning era. As he sees it, Elon Musk has the potential to enhance Twitter by making the platform more transparent, so that others could use it from a new perspective.
Alex Engler, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the impact of AI on society, shares a similar view. The crucial point in the transparency of the platform, he said, could be to figure out the decision-making processes that the algorithms are trained to use.
What an unnamed Twitter employee said is that Twitter’s machine-learning models are merely the tip of the iceberg. In a complex way, the entire system has to respond to the behavior of visitors in real time. Once users are highly motivated by a particular piece of news, the relevant tweets will appear more frequently.
MetaMask introduced a new feature to buy crypto for fiat using MoonPay
MetaMask developers and MoonPay, a platform for buying cryptocurrencies and NFTs, negotiated a partnership. Non-custodial wallet users will be able to purchase digital assets for fiat.
Possible options include bank cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, SEPA and UK FP.
The MoonPay has been integrated into the v4.4 mobile version of the wallet. It will soon be added to the desktop version in v10.13.
This new feature will not be available to people living in New York, Texas, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, or the Virgin Islands.
As you may remember, in January 2022 MoonPay launched a service for the purchase of NFT by means of debit cards. A month before, the startup created a concierge service for the purchase of NFTs and crypto.
Active monthly users of MetaMask outnumbered 30 million in March.