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In a press conference on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it has arrested Anatoly Legkodymov, founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato, for allegedly processing over $700 million of illicit funds.

“Overnight, the Department worked with key partners here and abroad to disrupt Bitzlato, the China-based money laundering engine that fueled a high-tech axis of cryptocrime, and to arrest its founder, Russian national Anatoly Legkodymov,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “Today’s actions send the clear message: whether you break our laws from China or Europe – or abuse our financial system from a tropical island – you can expect to answer for your crimes inside a United States courtroom.”

According to the DOJ, Bitzlato allowed users to trade cryptocurrencies without verifying their identity. The Hong Kong-registered exchange advertised itself to customers by saying that “neither selfies nor passports [are] required.” The government said that this lack of know-your-customer procedures turned Bitzlato into a hotbed for criminal activity.

U.S. government regulators have been cracking down on the crypto space. Coinbase, one of the most popular crypto exchanges, was recently fined $50 million by New York state regulators for failing to conduct adequate background checks. According to a government filing, Coinbase employed third-party contractors to handle a backlog of over 100,000 unreviewed transaction monitoring alerts, but Coinbase failed to conduct quality control measures, so it turned out that much of this contracted work was riddled with errors. As a result of these errors, regulators wrote that Coinbase failed to report potential instances of money laundering, narcotics trafficking and CSAM-related activity to authorities.

Meanwhile, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested on federal charges of defrauding investors after his $32 billion company imploded and filed for bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried continues to assert he is not guilty and even started a Substack to defend himself, though his former associates like FTX co-founder Gary Wang and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison have pled guilty to federal charges.

Events like FTX’s bankruptcy shook the crypto industry, but longtime crypto insiders didn’t seem to know what Bitzlato was before the DOJ’s announcement. According to data of known wallets from Arkham, a crypto intelligence tool, wallets associated with Bitzlato contain just over $11,000; at its peak, they contained over $6 million, making Bitzlato a very small player in the industry.

If convicted, Legkodymov could face up to five years in prison.

“The FBI and our partners remain steadfast in our commitment to keeping cryptocurrency markets – as with any financial market – free from illicit activity,” said Michael J. Driscoll, an assistant director with the FBI’s New York field office. “Today’s action should serve as an example of this commitment as Legkodymov will now face the consequences of his actions in our criminal justice system.”

DOJ charges founder of crypto exchange Bitzlato for processing $700M of illegal funds by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Decodable, the well-funded real-time data engineering and stream processing platform based, in part, on the Apache Flink open-source project, is launching a major update today that aims to make the service more attractive to large enterprises. In addition to expanding its library of connectors to enable data ingestion from more sources and a new enterprise support option, the marquee feature here is the launch of its automated task-sizing capabilities. Thanks to this, Decodable can now dynamically configure workloads as needed to optimize performance and cost.

As Decodable founder and CEO Eric Sammer told me, he believes that while stream processing itself is quickly becoming mainstream — with Apache Flink becoming the de facto standard — what happens around that isn’t quite mainstream yet, in part because until now, only businesses with highly sophisticated engineering teams were able to build on top of this technology.

“The analogy I think about is networking switches,” he explained. “We can move packets back and forth. The next iteration of that — the part that I don’t think is fully mainstream yet — is the processing capability on top of that — the ability to transform and aggregate. What I think we would have called streaming analytics 10 years ago.”

The likes of Lyft, Uber or Stripe are able to create this enterprise-grade layer of abstractions on top of these real-time data streams. Others, he argues, need a tool like Decodable to do so, especially if they want to build consumer-facing applications.

“Streaming is one piece of technology,” he also noted. “It’s a collection of Debezium plus Kafka or Redpanda or whatever — plus Flink, plus API’s and all these other kinds of things. And it’s cost prohibitive to stand up a team and operationalize that. That’s where we add value. And that’s why we focus on developer experience and self-service and enterprise features.”

As for the new task sizing feature, Sammer noted that users can tell the service how many tasks they want to dedicate to a given workload. Decodable will then scale up to this maximum number of tasks — or scale down, if warranted. For a lot of users, this may result in lower spending overall. And while that may also mean they won’t spend as much on Decodable, Sammer believes that if the company can make stream processing easier and more cost effective for its users, these users will bring more workloads to the service. “There are very few cases where you wouldn’t want fresher, more accurate data — or be able to make a better decision in real time,” he said. “So from that perspective, every time we make it cheaper for someone to run a workload on Decodable, they add more workloads.”

Decodable wants to take real-time stream processing mainstream by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

As the crypto developer ecosystem expands, major ecosystems outside of the top two cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin and Ethereum — are growing, according to a new report.

About 72% of monthly active developers (devs) are working on blockchains that are not part of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, according to the 2022 Electric Capital Developer Report, which trawled code commits across open source repositories.

Solana saw the highest number of new developers contributing to the ecosystem, with its developer count rising by 83%, the fastest of any major blockchain. Compared to that, Polygon saw a 40% rise in developer count, Cosmos saw 25% and Polkadot saw 2%, the report showed.

“Developers will build where they see technology advantages, and Solana delivers faster transactions and lower costs than alternatives,” Solana co-founder Raj Gokal told TechCrunch. “But they will also build where they see other kinds of advantages, such as an active community.”

The growth of the developer ecosystem on Solana can be attributed to a mix of education efforts and resources, community engagement, technical advantages and business opportunities, Gokal said.

Even with around 2,000 total developers as of December 2022, Solana is still about 3,500 developers short of Ethereum’s count, which had a total of about 5,700 developers. It’s important to note, though, that Ethereum launched in 2013 and Solana launched in 2018, so the former has enjoyed a five-year head start.

These Solana developers are working on “a range of use cases,” from evolving the NFT and DeFi spaces to getting retailers to experiment with decentralized payment rails like Solana Pay, Gokal said. “Right now, game devs on Solana are very active and innovating heavily to create games that are both fun to play and rewarding for players to participate.”

Solana co-founder sees potential for devs to lead its network in 2023 by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

YouTube TV announced today that it’s rolling out updates to its Live Guide and Library. The updated Live Guide, which offers a more traditional grid showing what’s on now and what’s upcoming, has already reached some users, offering both a new design and recommendations of what to watch. Meanwhile, updates to the Library will roll out starting today and will continue over the next few months.

The updated Live Guide now includes a row of curated recommendations at the top, a condensed grid that displays more channels and programming on the screen and an overall simpler design. Users also get more information about each live show or movie from the new guide.

The condensed grid was mainly done so viewers could scroll less and take in information more quickly, Esther Ahn, Head of Design for YouTube TV and Primetime Channels, wrote in today’s blog post.

Ahn also claims that it’s easier to record content from the new guide since it requires fewer steps. The Live Guide makes it more obvious to users if a show or movie is already saved to the DVR or not, the post noted.

Meanwhile, the updated Library now lets users manage their content better thanks to improved filters and organizational tools. YouTube TV removed the side navigation, and instead, there’s a row of filters for more specific content categories, such as daily shows. There’s also a new “Catch up on your favorites” shelf, so users can easily find the content that they enjoy the most.

Ahn noted that users with large libraries were frustrated with how difficult it was to find a title they wanted to watch. “Members have built up their libraries over time, but programs they were interested in several years ago might no longer be relevant to them,” Ahn said. “The more their libraries grew, the less usable they became due to the lack of tools to organize their shows, movies and sports.”

YouTube TV wanted to focus on upgrading its Live Guide and Library since they are the most used pages by YouTube TV watchers, the company said. For both features, YouTube designed new side panels with shortcuts, like “Add to Library.” A “Set Reminder” shortcut is in the works as well.

These changes aim to give YouTube users more control over how they explore and find content.

“Decision fatigue is real when you turn on your TV with even more apps and channels than ever before. Viewers are looking for easier ways to find the content most relevant to them, whether it’s jumping into a live game or seeing what’s trending right now,” Ahn wrote.

While overall, these are minor design tweaks and changes, making the product simpler to use is a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting new cord-cutters to the YouTube TV service over rivals, like Hulu with Live TV or Sling TV.

The company said more changes were on the way including those that would bring more flexibility and interactivity during live playback and make it easier to switch between user profiles, but did not offer an ETA as to when those features would launch.

YouTube TV upgrades its live TV guide and library to give users more control by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Open source password management platform Bitwarden has made its first known acquisition, snapping up a fledgling Sweden-based startup called Passwordless.dev, which specializes in helping developers integrate passwordless authentication technology into their software.

The news comes shortly after 1Password and LastPass rival Bitwarden announced its first outside funding since its inception in 2015, securing $100 million from PSG and Battery Ventures. The company also revealed at the time that it had raised a previously undisclosed Series A round in 2019.

The password problem

Similar to other password management services, Bitwarden is designed to make it easier for individuals and enterprises to automatically create hard-to-guess passwords, and store them all in a secure vault. It’s all about helping people to not re-use the same predictable password across all their online services. Bitwarden’s key selling point, though, is that it’s open source — or, at least, it’s source available, meaning that it promises full transparency into the codebase, while also allowing the community to contribute and help develop new features.

Now, Bitwarden is looking to capitalize on a burgeoning trend in the online security sphere, one that is looking to consign passwords to the history books — compromised passwords, after all, are responsible for most business security breaches.

Indeed, there has been a concerted push toward passwordless authentication across the technology landscape. Last year, Apple, Google and Microsoft partnered in support of a new password-free sign-in standard called WebAuthn, while separately Apple introduced a new feature called Passkey that allows people to use their Apple device to log-in to online services without passwords.

Elsewhere, passwordless-focused startups such as Hypr, Magic, and Stytch have attracted VC dollars to bolster their respective efforts.

Bitwarden, for its part, already offers some support for passwordless authentication, such as biometric logins for Bitwarden’s own apps, while it also supports physical two-factor authentication (2FA) security keys such as YubiKey. But by bringing Passwordless.dev under its wing, Bitwarden wants to make it easier for developers to bake native biometric sign-in smarts into their software, while allowing enterprises to modernize their existing applications that currently rely on passwords.

Founded out of Sweden in 2020, Passwordless.dev has largely flown under the radar since its inception. But the company provides APIs built on WebAuthn, a web standard developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to support secure password logins. Passwordless.dev essentially makes it easier for developers to bring WebAuthn to software with a few lines of code, reducing many of the costs and complexities involved in introducing passwordless authentication to software.

From today, Bitwarden has launched a new beta service called Passwordless.dev by Bitwarden, which allows any third-party developer to embed biometric sign-in technology such as Touch ID, Face ID, and Windows Hello into their apps.

“This saves weeks of coding do-it-yourself passkey implementations,” Bitwarden CEO Michael Crandell explained to TechCrunch in an email. “Enterprises also have business applications that still rely on passwords for authentication and want to provide users with passwordless experiences. Bitwarden Passwordless.dev helps them quickly add WebAuthn and passwordless authentication features into these applications.”

Passwordless.dev by Bitwarden will be free through its initial beta period in Q1 2023, after which the company said it will offer paid plans that cover certain levels of usage and features.

While Bitwarden isn’t disclosing how much it paid for the startup or how many employees it’s taking on as part of the deal, it did confirm that Passwordless.dev hasn’t raised any external funding in its two-plus years in existence, meaning it likely didn’t break the bank for the acquisition.

Bitwarden also confirmed to TechCrunch that Passwordless.dev will continue to be offered to developers independently of other Bitwarden products.

Bitwarden acquires Passwordless.dev to help companies authenticate users without passwords by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

There are no guarantees in this world. Nothing lasts forever — especially those things made by Google. In September, the company announced that it would be pulling the plug on its ambitious, but oft-forgotten, cloud gaming service. Stadia’s servers are officially shutting down today, two months shy of its third birthday.

The dream of cloud gaming is long-lived and often fraught. Given all of the strides that have been made by services like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, it seemed like streaming technology might have finally caught up with the dream. But while services like Amazon Luna and Xbox Cloud gaming will live to stream another day, Stadia’s road ends here.

Over the summer, Google took to social media to insist that the service would not be shutting down, only to dramatically reverse course within months.

“[W]hile Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison said in a post at the time. We see clear opportunities to apply this technology across other parts of Google like YouTube, Google Play, and our Augmented Reality (AR) efforts — as well as make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed.”

He went on to add that Google remains committed to gaming, but Stadia’s death represents a sizable setback, both for those who invested considerable money into developing for the platform and for general consumer confidence about the category’s future. Devoting all that time and resources into a service, only to shut it down just shy of three years after launch, isn’t a great example of commitment.

Google does deserve some props with regard to its handling of the whole thing, however. For starters, the company announced that it would be refunding all hardware and add-on content purchases made through its purchases by right around this time. Earlier this week, the company began rolling out a software update via Chrome that adds a Bluetooth mode to make the controller usable with other platforms once Stadia shuts down.

There’s no great way to shut down a much hyped service less than three years after launch, but it’s a start.

So long, Stadia by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

DNV, a Norwegian shipping classification society, has confirmed its systems were hit by a ransomware attack, affecting around 1,000 ships that rely on its technology.

The Oslo-based DNV said in a statement on Wednesday that its ShipManager software was targeted by file-encrypting malware on January 7, forcing the organization to shut down its servers. ShipManager is a fleet management software that allows DNV shipping customers to monitor the operational, technical, and compliance features of a shipping fleet, and is used by more than 7,000 vessels owned by 300 customers, according to the company’s website.

DNV said that 70 customers operating around 1,000 vessels were affected by the attack, close to 15% of its total fleet.

In a statement given to TechCrunch, DNV spokesperson Margrethe Andersen confirmed that all impacted vessels can still use the onboard, offline functionalities of the ShipManager software. “The cyber-attack does not affect the vessels’ ability to operate,” said Andersen.

DNV also says it’s confident that other DNV servers have not been affected. However, when asked whether any data was compromised as a result of the attack, the company declined to comment. DNV also declined to say whether the attack would result in any delays for ships and their onboard cargo.

The company said it is cooperating with the police. “We cannot release information that could harm or delay the investigation,” the spokesperson said.

It is unclear how DNV was compromised, if the company received a ransom demand, or who was behind the attack. TechCrunch checked the websites of several major ransomware groups but found no mention of DNV.

“DNV is working closely with global IT security partners to analyze the incident and ensure secure online operations as soon as possible,” the company said. “All affected customers have been advised to consider relevant mitigating measures depending on the types of data they have uploaded to the system.

The ransomware attack on DNV is one of many to have impacted the shipping industry in recent weeks. The Port of Lisbon, the third-largest shipping port in Portugal, was the target of a LockBit ransomware attack on Christmas Day.

Maritime giant DNV says 1,000 ships affected by ransomware attack by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Conventional wisdom suggests that a Series B company should be hunkering down right now, cutting costs, weathering the storm, but Israeli startup Quantum Machines is defying this approach as it continues to grow in spite of the economic uncertainty swirling around the world.

The company announced that it got an additional $20 million tacked onto its $50 million Series B originally announced in September 2021. While co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan wasn’t ready to talk specifics when it came to growth metrics, he suggested that unlike a lot of other startups in 2022, his company was meeting its growth and revenue goals.

“It’s funny, I met with one of our investors a couple of days ago, and they said, ours might actually be the only company they met recently that was on target for 2022,” Sivans told TechCrunch. The company actually doubled its revenue last year and is expected to do so again in 2023. While he wouldn’t share an exact number, he indicated that it reached at least $10 million last year. “I cannot speak to sales or anything like that, but I can say that it has two digits in millions of dollars. So it still leaves a broad range between 10 and 99,” he said

While customers may be cutting back on some tech, Sivans sees quantum research at a critical juncture, and he believes that’s why his company is adding customers. That means external economic conditions are having little impact on his startup, especially as countries around the world jockey for position around building quantum computers.

“I believe that quantum computing in this regard is a safer field to be in in this environment because countries cannot afford to lose this race. So if a country slows down for a couple of years [because of economic concerns]…this might be an irreversible process,” he said.

Because of the sensitive nature of quantum computing research, Sivans can’t name any of his customers directly, but did say that the company now has 280 customers across government, universities and corporations in 20 countries around the world. The company lists testimonial blurbs from a variety of institutions on its website including Harvard University, Weizmann Institute of Science, Seoul National University, ENS Lyon, USC and CEA Saclay, and it’s probably safe to guess that these testimonials are from customers.

It also made its first acquisition last year when it acquired QDevil, a Danish company that has built tooling to help control parts of the quantum process. The new company should dovetail well with the existing Quantum Machines platform. The company has split into two divisions as a result of this: Quantum Control and Quantum Electronics.

As we wrote at the time of the $50 million funding, the original platform looks at the role of classical computing in the quantum process:

As Sivan explains, the classical computer has a software and hardware layer, but quantum machines have three layers: “The quantum hardware, which is the heart, and on top of that you have classical hardware […] and then on top of that you have software,” he said.

“We focus on the two latter layers. So classical hardware and the software that drives it. Now at the heart of our hardware is in fact a classical processor. So this is I think one of the most interesting parts of the quantum stack,” he explained.

The startup, which had 60 employees when we spoke in September 2021, has grown to over 140 now and is continuing to hire.

The $20 million investment infusion, which closed late last year, came from a variety of unnamed institutional investors, along with existing investors Qualcomm Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, Samsung NEXT, Meron Capital and Alumni Ventures. The company has now raised $100 million.

Quantum Machines continues to grow in spite of economic uncertainity by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter announced an annual Blue subscription plan for hardcore users who want to commit for a year. The revamped Twitter Blue subscription was launched last December at a rate of $8 per month (or $11 per month for iOS users). Now, users have a chance to get a discount and be all in for a year for $84 if they get it on the web.

Twitter Blue is currently available in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand with the company expanding the plan to Japan-based users earlier this month. The annual plan is available for all users in all these countries.

Elon Musk’s version of Twitter Blue includes features likethe blue verification mark,60-minute video uploads, and priority ranking in conversation replies. Users also get features from the older version of Twitter’s paid plan like a thread reader and an edit tweet feature along with custom icons and themes.

Since taking over the social media company, Musk has pushed on the fact that the company needs to make money and he is heavily relying on the new subscription plan to bring in a ton of revenue. Earlier this week, Financial Times reported that Twitter will be soon due for interest payment on the loans worth nearly $13 billion Musk took to purchase the company.

There have been a lot of indications of Twitter’s financial struggle. The company has had to vacate multiple international offices reportedly due to nonpayment of the rent. To cut costs, Musk has also had to shut down a data center in the US.

Twitter now offers an annual Blue subscription for hardcore users by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft today announced details of a much-rumored round of layoffs, confirming in afiling with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that 10,000 employees will be impacted as part of “workforce reduction” measures the company is taking in response to “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities.”

The news comes as major redundancies continue to permeate the tech industry, with Salesforce recently announcing that it was cutting its workforce by 10% impacting some 7,000 workers, while Amazon is in the midst of cutting 18,000 from its headcount.

While Microsoft underwent at least a couple of smaller round of layoffs last year, the latest reduction represents a sizable chunk of its workforce — nearly 5% of its 221,000 employees globally. The company said that the layoffs will run from now through to the end of Q3 2023, while it also plans to consolidate some of its office leases to “create higher density across our workspaces.”

In terms of severance, Microsoft said that U.S.-based employees will receive “above-market severance pay,” though it didn’t specify what that means. It also said that those impacted will continue to receive healthcare for six months, career transition services, and 60 days’ notice prior to termination.

Headwinds

In an email memo sent to employees, CEO Satya Nadella’s words followed a similar theme to that of other technology companies that have announced big layoffs over the past year. Essentially, as its customers increased their digital spending during the pandemic, they’re now reducing their spending, in part due to global economic downturn.

“As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less,” Nadella wrote. “We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one.”

It’s worth noting that while Microsoft is cutting some roles, it still plans to hire in other “key strategic areas.”

“We will continue to invest in strategic areas for our future, meaning we are allocating both our capital and talent to areas of
secular growth and long-term competitiveness for the company, while divesting in other areas,” Nadella continued. “These are the kinds of hard choices we have made throughout our 47-year history to remain a consequential company in this industry that is unforgiving to anyone who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts.”

Microsoft said that its cost-cutting measures will lead to costs of around $1.2 billion in Q2, resulting from severance pay, changes to its hardware portfolio, and its “lease consolidation” efforts.

Microsoft announces 10,000 job cuts, nearly 5% of its global workforce by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch