Aurelia Butler

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    in Economy

    Nasdaq, S&P 500 set to open higher ahead of Powell testimony

    (Reuters) -Wall Street was set to open higher on Tuesday, supported by new gains in semiconductor and megacap technology stocks, as investors awaited comments from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell for clues on the central bank’s monetary policy path.The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq looked on track to set fresh intraday records after both indexes edged up to close at record highs on Monday, lifted by gains in chip stocks and as the Philadelphia semiconductor index rose to a more than two-week high. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) shares leapt 2.6% in premarket trading, while AI-chip favorite Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL) Technology gained 1.6% and 0.6%, respectively. Monday marked the 35th time this year the S&P 500 has set a fresh closing record, as sharp gains in AI-linked and other tech shares have kept equity sentiment bright, offsetting the uncertainty around the Fed’s rate-cut plans. Investors will scrutinize Powell’s Congressional testimony later in the day to gauge the central bank’s response to recent economic data pointing to a slowdown in the labor market, amid other signs of potential economic weakness.The testimony, followed by questions from lawmakers, is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. ET. Powell will also testify at a House committee hearing on Wednesday. “The ability for Powell to change the thinking of the market has been proved over the last six months as the market shifted from six rate cuts to one, and after the weaker data in the last two weeks, back to two,” said Bob Savage, head of markets strategy and insights at BNY Mellon (NYSE:BK). The last set of economic projections from the central bank’s policymakers showed an expectation of just one rate cut this year. But markets have stuck to pricing in 50 basis points of easing, seeing a nearly 74% chance for a 25 bps cut at the Fed’s September meeting, according to CME’s FedWatch. Those bets were at under 50% a month ago. Meanwhile, rate-sensitive megacap stocks Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) , Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) were up between 0.1% and 0.4%.”The market is continuing on a bull run and, with the prospects of rate cuts, I believe may continue for a while,” said WisdomTree senior economist Jeremy Siegel. Crucial inflation data is also due this week, including Thursday’s consumer price index and the producer price index reading on Friday.Investors are also awaiting the start of the second-quarter corporate earnings season this week. PepsiCo (NASDAQ:PEP) edged 0.2% higher ahead of its results on Thursday. Analysts, on average, see S&P 500 companies increasing their aggregate earnings per share by 10.1% in the second quarter, up from an 8.2% increase in the first quarter, according to LSEG I/B/E/S data. At 8:43 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were down 4 points, or 0.01%, S&P 500 e-minis were up 8.5 points, or 0.15%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 53 points, or 0.26%.Among single movers, Tempus AI jumped 3.2% after multiple brokerages including J.P.Morgan and Morgan Stanley initiated coverage of the stock with bullish ratings. Eli Lilly (N:LLY) gained 1.4% after a data analysis report published on Monday showed its treatment Mounjaro leads to faster and greater weight loss than Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO)’s obesity drug, Wegovy. More

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    in Economy

    ECB can continue to gradually lower rates, Panetta says

    The ECB cut rates for the first time in June from their record highs, but has made no explicit commitment on a follow-up move.”The reduction of official rates can proceed gradually, accompanying the return of inflation towards the objective, if macroeconomic trends remain in line with the ECB’s expectations,” Panetta, who is governor of the Bank of Italy, told bankers at a conference in Rome.Panetta is widely considered a monetary policy dove.He played down concerns over persistently high service sector prices, saying it was normal their decline should lag that of goods prices, and said wage growth can also be expected to moderate.”Past interest rate hikes are still dampening demand, output and inflation and will continue to do so in the months to come,” Panetta said.At the same conference, Italy’s Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti reiterated his call for an acceleration of interest rate cuts.”A further contraction in demand could prove unsustainable and in any case difficult to bear for economies like Italy’s that need to breathe,” Giorgetti said. More

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    in Cryptocurrency

    Bitcoin price today: flat at $57k amid Mt Gox fears, Ether up on ETF hopes

    The world’s largest cryptocurrency was nursing steep losses over the past two weeks, having hit an over four-month low last week amid concerns over token distributions by defunct crypto exchange Mt Gox. But losses in the token appeared to have paused, at least for now.Bitcoin rose 0.4% in the past 24 hours to $57,386.4 by 08:32 ET (12:32 GMT). World no.2 token Ether outpaced Bitcoin, rising 0.7% to $3,074.46Bitcoin slid as low as $53,000 last week after the trustees of Mt Gox said they had begun distributing tokens stolen during a 2014 hack, although they did not specify what the overall value of the distribution would be.But the news saw traders further dump Bitcoin on concerns that receivers of the token will also be inclined to sell, given Bitcoin’s massive price jump over the past 10 years.Several major Bitcoin “whale” wallets were seen dumping the token, while sales of Bitcoin confiscated by the German government from a piracy website also added to the selling pressure. Still, Bitcoin now appeared to have stabilized, as recent data showing strong capital inflows into crypto investment products helped improve sentiment.Data from digital assets manager Coinshares showed on Monday that crypto investment products saw inflows totaling $441 million in the week to July 8, attributing the trend to bargain hunting as concerns of a token dump battered crypto prices.Bitcoin continued to control a bulk of the inflows, but other major altcoins also saw inflows. Ether products saw about $10 million in inflows. Broader crypto prices saw mixed performance on Tuesday, despite Bitcoin and Ether’s rebound.The Securities and Exchange Commission is widely expected to approve form S-1 filings from several major issuers for the listing of spot ETFs later in July, with the reduction of a price discount on Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) to Binance reflecting some improved confidence in the token. But Ether, like the broader crypto industry, was grappling with decreased retail interest this year. Sluggish trading volumes in spot Bitcoin ETFs also reflected this trend.Meanwhile, XRP and Cardano fell 1.5% and 1.2%, respectively, while Solana added 0.4% as exchange operator CBOE filed for approval to list spot Solana ETFs.Among meme tokens, DOGE and SHIB dropped 0.9% and 1.4%, respectively. After a series of bitcoin transfers on Monday, the German government has moved an additional $339.2 million worth of bitcoin to addresses linked to centralized crypto exchanges and market makers as of Tuesday.According to data from the on-chain analytics platform Arkham, the German government sent 800 bitcoins ($45.9 million) to the crypto exchange Kraken, 5,000 bitcoins ($287.1 million) to an address associated with the market maker B2C2 Group, and nearly 107 bitcoins ($6.2 million) to market maker Cumberland DRW. An additional 400 bitcoins ($23 million) were sent to an unlabeled address.Moreover, the government received 1,692 bitcoins ($96.9 million) back from the crypto exchange Bitstamp on Tuesday.These movements follow the German government’s seizure of 50,000 bitcoins from the film piracy site Movie2k in January and the subsequent transfer of bitcoin to exchanges, which began last month.Government-labeled addresses on Monday transferred more than 15,000 bitcoins ($866 million) to addresses identified by Arkham as belonging to market makers and exchanges. Later in the day, 3,623 bitcoins ($203.7 million) were transferred back to the German government from Bitstamp, Coinbase, and Kraken. More

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    in Economy

    Ireland to break spending rule again in pre-election budget

    That was far ahead of the 5.7 billion euro package of tax cuts and spending increases assumed a year ago. The government said it was adjusting its strategy to accommodate higher capital spending and to provide more public services for a larger-than-assumed population.That will allow ministers to introduce 6.9 billion euros worth of new spending measures and 1.4 billion euros of tax cuts in October, one month before analysts expect an election to be held. The election must be called by March 2025.The plans are supported by one of healthiest public finances in Europe. Ireland expects to run a budget surplus this year of 8.6 billion euros, or 2.8% of national income, most of which will be put into a new sovereign wealth fund.The surplus is entirely driven by booming corporate tax receipts paid by Ireland’s hub of large multinationals.The government introduced the budget rule in 2021 but will now break it for the third successive year, having put previous breaches down to the need to help ease a cost of living crunch. Inflation fell to a more than three-year low of 1.5% last month.The almost 7 billion euros of permanent expenditure comes on top of 4.5 billion euros already set aside for next year to assist with costs such as accommodating Ukrainian refugees that the government says may not repeat fully into the future.Ireland’s Central Bank and independent fiscal watchdog have warned against breaking the budget rule again. Central Bank Governor Gabriel Makhlouf said last month that continued breaches would lead to higher inflation, significantly add to the risk of the economy overheating, damage competitiveness and long-term prospects for growth in living standards. ($1 = 0.9244 euros) More

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    in Cryptocurrency

    Masa Launches LLM-Powered AI Data Subnet on Bittensor, Bringing Hundreds of Developers into the Ecosystem

    Masa also becomes the first live token in the Bittensor Subnet Ecosystem, introducing a new dual-token reward structure to incentivize contributors and democratize AI development.Masa, a decentralized AI network where people earn by contributing data, today announced the launch of an AI Data Subnet on Bittensor, a protocol pioneering the decentralized production of artificial intelligence. Masa will leverage Bittensor’s peer-to-peer machine intelligence network to supercharge AI data aggregation, transformation, and access. Together, this empowers a world of Fair AI powered by the people, where AI developers can build anything, anywhere with the world’s data.The AI sector of the crypto industry is projected to reach $10.2 billion in revenue by 2030, according to a research report from VanEck, while centralized AI has a projected market share value of $1.8 trillion by 2030. However, there is a clear demand for decentralized players, as the essential components of AI including compute, models, and data, should not be monopolized by centralized entities. Value Proposition of the Masa Bittensor SubnetBittensor has amassed a $10 billion AI ecosystem since its launch in March 2023. Institutional validators, such as DCG subsidiary Foundry and Polychain, collectively staked a total of 5.7 million – or $1.8 billion worth of – $TAO. Bittensor operates through a central network consisting of smaller, specialized sub-networks, each dedicated to different areas of AI. With its sophisticated TAO economic model that incentivizes the production of high-value AI subnets, Bittensor is a significant player in the DeAI space.Masa enables people from all over the world to contribute data and compute to AI development, without centralized control. Masa allows AI developers to build anything, anywhere with the world’s data. It facilitates the fair, open, and permissionless contribution of AI training data, compute, and bandwidth. Similar to Bittensor’s incentive mechanism, Masa contributors – validators and workers – are rewarded based on the value of their contribution to the network, using game-theoretical frameworks that optimize a contributor’s utility on the network. This ensures an effective system that uses economic incentives to drive growth and the equitable expansion of Fair AI. The Masa Bittensor Subnet provides real-time and static, structured, annotated, and vectorized data from a variety of data sources critical for AI development, such as X (Twitter), Discord, diarized speech (e.g. podcasts, YouTube, TikTok), gated web data (e.g. New York Times), and public web data (e.g. Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Search). Real-time data can be used to build robust datasets or directly in system prompts for current context. Static data sets are constantly updated and stored by subnet workers for further processing into vectors to fuel Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in AI agents. These data sets are processed and annotated using agentic data pipelines that employ fine-tuned LLMs trained on JSON and other formats to deliver high-quality outputs from volatile data inputs. AI developers have been using Masa data for a wide range of use cases, such as capturing trading signals and building hyper-personalized AI companions.The Masa and Bittensor communities can participate using low-power devices to run a Masa worker node from laptops, servers, or future mobile devices by contributing compute and bandwidth from anywhere in the world.$MASA Joins Bittensor Subnet Ecosystem as First and Only Live TokenMasa’s token, $MASA, now becomes the only live token for any subnet in the Bittensor ecosystem. In addition, Masa Protocol and Masa Bittensor Subnet validators and workers can earn dual-token staking rewards in $MASA and $TAO. Masa Foundation-owned TAO from operating the subnet will be used to support $MASA through buybacks or distributions as part of the emissions schedule. Masa was the first AI project to debut on CoinList in 2024 via a 17-minute public sale in March. Over the last 2 years, Masa has grown to over 1.6 million contributors and over 100 developers in its network, where individuals earn by contributing data. Masa’s ecosystem of contributors, developers, and validators is expected to significantly enhance Bittensor’s performance and utility.About MasaMasa is a decentralized AI network, where people earn by contributing data. AI developers can build anything, anywhere with the world’s data. Users are welcome to join Masa’s mission to create Fair AI, powered by the people.ContactPR ManagerLauren [email protected] article was originally published on Chainwire More

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    in Cryptocurrency

    ShardLab Launches Innovative AA and zk based App for Digital Identity and Voucher Distribution

    ShardLab, the innovation arm of the leading global Web3 venture capital firm Hashed, is announcing the launch of its web application powered by account abstraction(AA) and zero-knowledge (zk) technology. This app introduces a transformative way to utilize decentralized identity (DiD) and distribute vouchers seamlessly.Building on the success of the Southeast Asia Blockchain Week (SEABW) 2024, where ShardLab showcased the potential of NFTs for practical applications, this new app extends the utility of blockchain technology into everyday use. During the event, attendees experienced firsthand the convenience of blockchain-powered transactions with NFT vouchers at ICONSIAM, demonstrating the efficiency and security these technologies bring to real-world retail environments.The user experience was further enhanced by the smooth integration of the NFT vouchers with the point-of-sale (POS) systems at over 60 restaurants and shops at ICONSIAM. Attendees could easily redeem their vouchers by scanning a QR code, which automatically deducted the voucher amount from the bill. This implementation demonstrated the practicality and efficiency of blockchain technology in a real-world retail environment.See full videoFeatures of the official SEABW Application:- Digital Identity Verification: Leveraging zero-knowledge proofs (“ZKP”), the app allows users to confirm their identity without sharing private information, enhancing privacy and security.- Web3 Digital Voucher Payment: Users can receive and redeem vouchers in QR code minted in NFT, directly through the app, which are easily managed and used at participating venues, simplifying the transaction process.The app also incorporates account abstraction (“AA”), making it user-friendly and accessible to a broad audience. Account abstraction simplifies the crypto wallet experience, allowing users to interact with blockchain applications with the ease of traditional digital wallets.About ShardLabShardLab is dedicated to fostering mass adoption of Web3 technologies in Southeast Asia. As an innovation arm of Hashed, ShardLab builds ecosystems and collaborations that bring innovative disruptions using Web3 technology, making it accessible and empowering communities in this dynamic digital frontier.About HashedHashed, a team of blockchain experts and builders based in multiple global locations, invests in and supports the development of decentralized and blockchain technologies. By participating as core technical contributors, Hashed accelerates the mass adoption of blockchain, transforming the global economy and the internet’s fabric.ContactMr [email protected] article was originally published on Chainwire More

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    in Cryptocurrency

    Sovereign Nature Initiative Launches DOTphin on Polkadot to Create Positive Environmental Impact

    Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI) has announced a collaboration with Unique Network and WalletConnect on Polkadot. Officially launching at Polkadot Decoded 2024, DOTphin will leverage NFTs to effect positive environmental change. This initiative was approved by strong community support through Polkadot OpenGov.Powered by dynamic NFTs, DOTphin is designed to enhance event engagement and deliver real-world ecological impact. The project transforms event participation into an interactive journey, aligning digital evolution with sustainability. As a result, events are more rewarding and user engagement is higher.DOTphin is an eco-linked dynamic multi-pass that supports biodiversity restoration. The avatar attached to each pass, represented as an NFT, evolves through a series of physical and digital events while bringing community engagement and sustainability support to the Polkadot ecosystem.The official launch of DOTphin will commence with the distribution of eco-badges to attendees at Polkadot Decoded 2024 on July 11. These serve as keys to claiming unique DOTphin NFTs. EthCC ticket holders can claim a free Decoded ticket and their first POAP which will unlock a multi-event, multi-month journey that will support marine conservation efforts.. As a project focused on sustainability, DOTphin aligns with Polkadot’s credentials as a green blockchain with a low carbon footprint. Targeted at environmentally-conscious users and investors, DOTphin demonstrates another use case for Polkadot technology while showcasing blockchain’s ability to have a positive environmental impact.Thanks to the dynamic design of DOTphin NFTs, each token evolves based on user engagement, creating a personalized and interactive experience. With funds channeled towards marine conservation, every digital interaction has a tangible ecological benefit. DOTphin holders can use the purpose-built REAL Portal to check the status of their NFT and follow activities.By integrating real-world species data with evolving NFTs, DOTphin aims to showcase how blockchain can drive positive ecological impact. In combining web3 technology with ecological stewardship, DOTphin is pioneering new use cases for NFTs and uniting like-minded individuals who can collaborate to achieve shared goals.DOTphin will officially launch at Decoded on July 11 and will continue through eight additional blockchain gatherings including sub0, Token 2049, and DevCon.About DOTphinDeveloped by Sovereign Nature Initiative (SNI) with the support of Unique Network and WalletConnect, DOTphin makes use of dynamic NFTs on Polkadot. This supports ecological conservation while rewarding engagement, allowing communities to collaborate to achieve positive real-world change.ContactCEOCatherine BischoffSovereign Nature [email protected] article was originally published on Chainwire More

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    in Economy

    After election, French sovereign ratings at risk, Generali Asset Management says

    MUMBAI (Reuters) – France’s ‘AA’ sovereign status could be at risk after Sunday’s election delivered a hung parliament, though ratings agencies will probably wait until September before assessing their current stance, Generali (BIT:GASI) Asset Management’s fixed income head said.”We have to see how rating agencies will judge France in the next months, reminding that (its) ‘AA’ status is at risk, in our opinion,” Mauro Valle, head of fixed income at Generali Asset Management, told the Reuters Global Markets Forum on Tuesday.Valle said choosing a new prime minister might take some time, expecting a delay during the Paris Olympic Games from July 26 through Aug. 11.The French leftist alliance unexpectedly took the top spot in the run-off vote, thwarting Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally’s quest for power, but conceded that talks to form a government would be tough.Valle says there is a risk to markets from France’s large fiscal deficit, which a hung parliament is likely to “manage with difficulties”.”Debt risk is worrying in France,” he said, and the country will now have to reduce it, with no clear leadership in place.Valle expected the OAT-Bund spread to widen again, saying: “In absolute terms, the 10-year OAT can decline, as bund rates are expected to move downwards from 2.5%.””After the result of the second round (vote on Sunday), OAT-bund spreads are consolidating around 65 basis points, but we believe this should be the lower part of the range,” he said.More broadly, as central banks cut rates amid declining inflation, Valle prefers to “stay long-duration in rates” in Europe, and “neutral-to-positive” in the U.S.He expects two cuts from the Federal Reserve this year, in September and December, adding that if the Fed were to delay cuts until the end of the year, it might be problematic for ECB President Christine Lagarde to deliver two more cuts in 2024.”For the moment, we continue to expect Fed cuts, and ECB can continue to be data dependent and cut two times if consumer inflation will decline as expected,” Valle said.(Join the Global Market Forum’s chat room hosted on LSEG Messenger: ) More