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Crypto Allows Ukraine to ‘Operate Internationally,’ Official Says

Amid ongoing hostilities with advancing Russian forces, Ukraine has been increasingly relying on cryptocurrency donations to solve humanitarian problems and finance its defense efforts. Crypto helps the country to receive and quickly distribute money and operate internationally, a high-ranking government official has indicated.

Ukraine Accepts, Spends Millions in Crypto, Deputy Minister Reveals

Since the Russian military assault started, Ukraine has been actively seeking financial support in the form of crypto donations. “It’s a very rapid way to get a payment — in times like that you can’t just wait for days to get money and then you have to distribute them,” the country’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov said in an interview.

Hackers attack train network to stop Putin’s troops moving to Ukraine

The hackers claimed that the attack was to “slow down the transfer” of troops moving from Belarus to northern Ukraine, saying that they had put the trains in “manual control” mode which would “significantly slow down the movement of trains, but will not create emergency situations.”

An ideological aversion to high-stakes situations has been expressed by other hacking groups. Anonymous, which has claimed a number of attacks on Russia’s banks and services, the websites of the President of the Russian Federation and Russia’s Ministry of Defence, has said that critical infrastructure is a “no-go” due to the risk of exacerbating the already tumultuous situation in eastern Europe.

Sergei Voitehowich, a former employee of Belarus’s state-owned Belarus Railway company, said that the Cyber Partisans had damaged the train traffic control system and that while it has been restored, other systems were experiencing issues and making it “impossible to buy tickets”, according to Bloomberg.

How the tech industry is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

The invasion was met with sharp rebuke from the United States, the European Union and NATO allies, with broad, unprecedented financial and diplomatic sanctions promised against Russia, sanctions that are likely to affect business, trade and finance across the region.

The impacts of the invasion are also, undoubtedly, being felt across Ukraine’s wider tech ecosystem, which includes not only hundreds of startups and larger tech firms, but also research and development offices for some of the world’s biggest technology brands.

As the situation on the ground changes rapidly over the next few hours and days, TechCrunch will continue to bring news and analysis on how the conflict unfolds across the tech and startup community.

Crypto companies are tempting top talent away from Big Tech to build ‘Web3’

There’s another thing that’s attracting talent at Big Tech companies to Web3: money.

According to data from Blind, a social network for tech professionals, bitcoin exchange Coinbase offers as much as $900,000 a year for software engineers.

Investment into crypto companies has surged, meaning they’ve got much more cash to spare on lucrative compensation packages for big hires. Blockchain start-ups raised a record $25 billion in venture capital last year, according to CB Insight figures.

DARPA Goals To Preserve Moore’s Regulation Going — Right here’s How

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Some say that Moore’s Regulation, which tracks the exponential progress electronics during the last six a long time has stalled, and technological stagnation threatens. Mark Rosker, director of DARPA’s Microsystems Know-how Workplace (MTO), sees issues very in another way. In a new interview with Samuele Lilliu, he explains how the expansion described by Moore’s Regulation has been sustained by waves of innovation from DARPA and the way the following stage, what he calls the Fourth Wave, might be carried ahead by applied sciences his workplace is now creating.

The best model of Moore’s Regulation says that the variety of transistors on a silicon chip roughly doubles each two years. This was an commentary made by Gordon Moore – who later co-founded Intel – in 1965, and it proved to be remarkably correct. Yearly since then, an increasing number of highly effective computer systems and, later, laptops and smartphones have appeared in the marketplace. Low-cost chips have now grow to be important for vehicles, televisions, cameras and different units, which beforehand functioned with out electronics. They’re important throughout the financial system.

Describing the progress as a “Regulation” could also be deceptive. Moore’s Regulation is an outline of the development in semiconductor manufacturing, pushed by advances in science and know-how which requires fixed innovation to maintain going, not a pure course of.

Founder of collapsed $1.7 billion mutual fund charged with fraud

In addition to securities fraud and obstruction of justice, James Velissaris has been charged with wire fraud and lying to auditors.


The founder and manager of a $1.7 billion mutual fund that collapsed last year has been charged by federal prosecutors with securities fraud and obstruction of justice for allegedly inflating fund asset values to keep investor money flowing, then falsifying records to conceal the improprieties.

The Infinity Q Diversified Alpha Fund halted investor redemptions in February 2021, roughly seven years after it was co-founded by James Velissaris, 37, its chief investment officer. A government inquiry began, Velissaris stepped down and the mutual fund and a parallel hedge fund he oversaw began liquidating.

It was a rare example of a big mutual fund failure amid a roaring bull market. And the collapse ensnared billionaire investor David Bonderman, co-founder of TPG, a huge private-equity firm that went public this year. The Bonderman Family was a major investor in Infinity Q Capital Management, the investment company overseen by Velissaris, regulatory documents show. Velissaris had worked for the Bonderman family before he co-founded Infinity Q Capital Management.

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