Bitcoin Daily: Galaxy Digital Buys BitGo; Blockchain.com Acquires AiX

Financial services and investment manager Galaxy Digital has agreed to acquire BitGo, which works in digital asset infrastructure, according to a press release.

With the acquisition, Galaxy Digital will be positioned as a global full-service platform for institutions looking to access the cryptocurrency economy, the release stated. It will offer a range of industry-leading products.

BitGo was the first independent regulated custodian purposefully built for digital assets. Some of the benefits of the acquisition will be allowing those services to reach more people, according to the release.

In other news, Blockchain.com has acquired AiX as the company is looking at expanding its institutional offering, according to a Medium blog post.

AiX is a company known for building an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered negotiation and matching engine for institutional over-the-counter (OTC) traders, the post stated. The AiX team brings “deep engineering, trading and operational expertise from some of the world’s most respected financial institutions, including J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs.”

AiX CEO Joe Evans spent 15 years trading and booking in derivatives markets, according to the post. He also previously launched a brokerage and sold it, and that brokerage ended up a pioneer in crafting new commodity derivatives.

Lastly, Latin America’s largest crypto platform Bitso has completed a Series C funding round and come away with $250 million, according to a press release.

The company plans to use the money “to expand our capabilities, our product offering and to continue making crypto useful across Latin America,” said Bitso Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Vogel in the release.

He added that the company also launched its new retail operation in Brazil, which will help it expand its crypto operations into more areas later, per the release.

Bitso has an upcoming product offering, too, which will be focused on serving customers around Latin America, and the company also plans to debut a crypto derivatives platform and interest bearing accounts for crypto, according to the release.

Wayfair Deploys Google AI to Scale and Enrich Product Catalogs

Google, Wayfair, AI, retail, partnerships

Wayfair has reduced the time needed to curate product listings by 67%, saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved some conversion rates by 2% by deploying Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

The online retailer shared these results in a Sunday (Jan. 10) press release emailed to PYMNTS announcing that it is using Google’s Gemini models on Vertex AI to enhance its product catalog and unlock “the next generation of retail experiences.”

“With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to efficiently scale and enrich our product catalogs, enabling us to support a more seamless and engaging shopping experience for our customers,” Wayfair Chief Technology Officer Fiona Tan said in the release.

Gemini on Google Cloud improved Wayfair’s time-to-market by automatically categorizing products across its 30 million product portfolio, delivered cost savings by eliminating the need to manually tag attributes like color and style, and improved conversion rates by increasing the accuracy of product attributes and improving the coverage of attribute tags in the retailer’s catalog, according to the release.

The technology also automatically catches errors in product dimensions and flags inappropriate materials, per the release.

Wayfair is also using Gemini for Google Workspace to boost employees’ productivity, according to the release.

The retailer is using AI features in this suite of productivity apps to draft and respond to emails, summarize and proofread documents, build presentation templates and gain expertise in new areas, per the release.

“By harnessing the power of Gemini and Google Workspace, Wayfair is not only automating complex tasks and boosting employee collaboration, but also creating more personalized and engaging experiences for every shopper,” Matt Renner, president, global revenue at Google Cloud, said in the release.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has thrust generative AI into the driver’s seat of retail technologies, prompting brands to reassess their strategies, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration, “What Generative AI Has in Store for the Retail Industry.”

The report found that 92% of companies are using AI-driven personalization to drive growth and that 77% of business leaders rank generative AI as the most impactful emerging technology.