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BlockBeats News, July 1st, according to the New York Post, Microsoft is reportedly planning a new round of layoffs, set to cut thousands of jobs next week to reduce costs, while concerns about its runaway AI-related spending are on the rise.Sources said the layoffs will be less than 2.5% of the company's 220,000 employees, meaning fewer than 5,500 people will be affected, involving the sales and consulting departments, as well as the Xbox gaming division.Against the backdrop of rapid development in artificial intelligence, Microsoft is facing dual pressures: on the one hand, the market is concerned about its high investment in new technologies, with the company pledging to invest about $190 billion over the next few years in new infrastructure construction; on the other hand, there is also a view that AI "robots" may gradually replace traditional software tools.Meanwhile, Microsoft's stock price plummeted 19% in June, marking its worst single-month performance since the early 2000s dot-com bubble.

BlockBeats News, July 1st - According to official sources, the perpetual contract trading platform Drift has announced today that it is officially rebranding to Velocity. The team stated that this brand upgrade aims to reflect the new generation trading platform architecture they are building. The team pointed out that in the perpetual contract market, execution speed and directional judgment are crucial, and the name "Velocity" is intended to embody trading speed and market momentum, while signaling the platform's entry into a reboot phase.The officials stated that this renaming also represents a clear delineation of the product roadmap: the new platform will adopt a clearer system architecture, a stronger security infrastructure, and a more defined product positioning. Currently, Velocity is advancing the rebuilding work and plans to open a beta version to some partners and traders in the coming days to validate the stability and performance of the new generation Solana-based perpetual contract trading system.

BlockBeats News, July 1st, according to Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg said during a shareholder conference call in May, "Almost every week, a different company comes to us, either wanting us to build an API service or asking if we have computing power to sell to them at a higher price than what we bought it for. We haven't done this yet because we have our own need for this computing power," Zuckerberg said at the time. "But obviously, if we realize we've built too much, that is an option, and it partly gives us the confidence to invest in expanding our infrastructure."In the rapidly evolving AI competition, Zuckerberg has repeatedly stated that he believes the entire industry is facing a bottleneck in computing power, and Meta should accumulate as much computing power as possible before deciding how to use it. Despite facing many complex challenges, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has sent a signal to investors: he is willing to sell excess computing infrastructure, and even launch the so-called API service, allowing customers to pay based on AI usage -- a business that is usually measured in "tokens" (the amount of data generated and consumed by customer queries).In the discussion surrounding the potential commercialization of part of Meta Platforms' AI computing power, the market was once concerned about a possible computing power "surplus." However, analysts believe this assessment is oversimplified; Meta does not currently have a significant surplus of computing power available for sale overall. On the one hand, it is still continuously expanding its investment in AI infrastructure and signing large-scale computing agreements with companies such as Crusoe. On the other hand, the existing H100/H200 resources are still mainly used for internal recommendation systems and AI model training, and the demand remains high. Therefore, the so-called "selling of computing power" is more of a future optional asset utilization method rather than a current reality, reflecting more the transition of AI computing power from a single scarcity to multi-generational layered use and long-term capacity planning.

BlockBeats News, July 1st, according to Reuters, Oxmiq announced the completion of a $35 million financing round to develop a chip architecture aimed at reducing the cost of artificial intelligence. The company stated that it will use this round of funding to advance its chip design and system architecture for AI computing optimization, in order to improve computational efficiency and reduce the overall cost of AI training and inference.Typically, artificial intelligence systems' computations are handled by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Central Processing Units (CPUs). However, Oxmiq plans to integrate these two with a third component—the Tensor Engine—into a single chip design.The company aims to become the "Arm of the next-generation computing ecosystem." Co-founder Raja Koduri mentioned that Arm provides chip architecture and intellectual property licensing for almost all smartphones worldwide.Oxmiq also plans to develop a "Compute Fabric" architecture that integrates multiple chiplets (multiple specialized chips combined into a complete system through modular design) and memory into a single package.Click on the original article link below to join the BlockBeats · Feishu AI News Channel, monitoring global AI hotspots and news 24/7.

BlockBeats News, July 1st, according to GMGN market data, the market cap of Venice (VVV) has exceeded $680 million, with a 1-hour price increase of 17.58%, currently trading at $14.54.Earlier reports indicated that Venice AI completed a $65 million Series A funding round with lead investment from Dragonfly Capital.

BlockBeats News, July 1st, Venice AI announced on Wednesday that it has completed a $65 million Series A funding round, valuing the company at $1 billion, marking its first external financing. The round was led by crypto venture firm Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others.Venice AI provides access to over 200 AI models while allowing users to preserve privacy, thus benefiting from strong market demand. Founded just two years ago, the company's website has attracted over 850,000 unique visitors, serving more than 3 million active users, with an average of 1.7 million daily API calls.The startup hosts "unaudited" open-source models in its proprietary data centers and can also route calls to closed-source models such as OpenAI or Anthropic. All user inputs are encrypted, decrypted client-side, forwarded to the models via external proxies, and Venice's system itself does not store any user data. Some models also offer end-to-end encryption functionality, but this feature requires a paid subscription to use. The company is already profitable, with an annual revenue exceeding $70 million.Click on the original article link below to join the BlockBeats · Feishu AI News Channel, which monitors global AI trends and news 24/7.

BlockBeats News, July 1st, according to Coinglass data, if Bitcoin breaks through $62,000, the cumulative short liquidation intensity of mainstream CEXs will reach $4.42 billion.Conversely, if Bitcoin falls below $58,000, the cumulative long liquidation intensity of mainstream CEXs will reach $8.18 billion.BlockBeats Note: The liquidation chart does not show the exact number of contracts to be liquidated or the exact value of contracts to be liquidated. The bars on the liquidation chart actually represent the importance of each liquidation cluster relative to neighboring liquidation clusters, i.e., intensity.Therefore, the liquidation chart shows to what extent the price of the underlying asset will be affected when it reaches a certain level. Higher "liquidation bars" indicate that the price will experience a stronger reaction due to a liquidity cascade.

BlockBeats News, July 1st. Due to the U.S. Independence Day holiday on July 3rd, the U.S. June non-farm payroll data will be released early on July 2nd (Thursday) at 20:30 Beijing time. The U.S. stock market will be closed on July 3rd (Friday).Trading of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) precious metals, energy, forex, U.S. Treasury, and stock index futures contracts will close early on July 4th at 01:00 Beijing time.Trading of the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Brent crude oil futures contract will close early on July 4th at 01:30 Beijing time.

BlockBeats News, July 1st, according to BIT (bit.com) market data, the Kurv Memory Select ETF (ticker: KMEM) officially started trading today. This ETF aims to provide investors with a more targeted exposure to the storage chip industry, focusing on leading global memory manufacturers.The fund's holdings are mainly concentrated in core storage chip manufacturers, including SK Hynix accounting for approximately 41.53%, Micron Technology accounting for approximately 19.85%, Samsung Electronics accounting for approximately 18.81%, SanDisk accounting for 3.64%, Western Digital accounting for 3.4%, among others. By strategically allocating to industry leaders, this ETF strengthens its structural exposure to the storage chip cycle and demand growth.KMEM is currently trading at $23.61, a 13.36% decrease from the listing opening price, with a trading volume of $2.417 million.

BlockBeats News, July 1st. An analysis by Serenity suggested that there is a significant market debate surrounding whether Meta Platforms has reduced its capital expenditure (capex) due to "excess hashpower." Some believe that the related assertions have been overinterpreted, as the current situation is closer to "hashpower scarcity" rather than "capacity surplus." Large-scale cloud service providers like Google even adjusted their resource allocation to Meta in March of this year due to their own hashpower constraints, and Meta's internal AI projects have further intensified the supply-demand pressure.In this context, Meta is believed to have had to accelerate the signing of large, long-term contracts with emerging cloud infrastructure providers, such as CoreWeave and Nebius, with contract sizes reportedly exceeding $48 billion. Even if Meta has some "redundant hashpower," it is more likely to commercialize through a "take-or-pay" model for deployment, rather than simply cutting investments. Overall, its AI infrastructure investment may continue to expand.

BlockBeats News, July 1st, according to on-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa), a savvy trader who previously made $4.15 million by longing Micron, Micron, and Intel, has turned bearish for the first time.Around 5:30 PM today, the trader opened a short position on Micron (MU), Micron (SKHX), SanDisk (SNDK), Intel (INTC), and BTC, with a total position of over $34.9 million. As the US stock market opened with a sharp decline, the position was already showing a profit of $1.742 million just four hours after opening.