Those gains leveled out some by mid-afternoon US Central Time. Worldcoin’s WLD tokens were the tallest green candle for the day on Wednesday, with a 12% daily surge.

Hyperliquid’s HYPE (8.6% gains) and Raydium’s RAY (8% gains) were the second and third most bullish tokens for the day. A few places down on the leaderboard was Fartcoin. Traders probably don’t want their Hyperliquid anywhere near that.

So why was the Worldcoin price pumping on Wednesday?

Why Did Worldcoin Price Pump on Wednesday?

President Donald Trump announced in a press conference on Tuesday that he wants the government to make a $500 billion grant in an AI project led by OpenAI.

Of course, OpenAI is doing more than large language models with ChatGPT. In fact, its Worldcoin project may be more ambitious. OpenAI founder Sam Altman plans to dominate biometrics with cryptographically secured iris scans. The project pays participants in WLD tokens.

On Tuesday, Trump announced he wants the government to invest $500 billion in a new OpenAI project called Stargate, so the artificial intelligence sector can go on a hiring spree.

That statement probably had something to do with this cryptocurrency’s big moves on Tuesday and Wednesday. But investors should be wary about a thing or two related to this trade.

DOGE-Loving Musk Opposes Gov Grant

To begin with, Stargate and Worldcoin are not exactly the same thing, and they are only loosely related through OpenAI. So, an investment in Worldcoin at this time may be more based on the recent news cycle than long-term market leverage.

Moreover, Elon Musk, the key influence in the new White House other than the president himself, opposes the newly announced plans to invest $500 billion in a project led by OpenAI. So, these plans may not come to fruition.

“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.” A grant from the White House of that size to a single private company would certainly be questionable on the grounds of government efficiency.

Worldcoin isn’t the only splash the White House has made in cryptocurrency this week. Dogecoin’s price erupted 15% within minutes Tuesday after the website for the Department of Government Efficiency went live. Meanwhile, analysts are rife with bullish Dogecoin predictions.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

Crypto trading and lending platform Nexo is set to introduce a $5,000 minimum limit to use its services as the firm evolves into a digital assets wealth manager targeting the mass affluent market.

The move, which comes into effect in February, is part of the firm’s 2025 growth strategy and recent rebranding, according to a press release on Tuesday.

“Guided by principles rooted in traditional finance and the personalized excellence of private white-glove services, we are committed to delivering sustainable wealth solutions for generations to come,” Nexo co-founder Kosta Kantchev said in a statement.

Nexo is one of the few crypto borrow and lend platforms to have survived the bear market of 2022-23, and collapse of many centralized crypto finance firms at that time. Looking ahead, Nexo won an initial approval to operate as a licensed entity in Dubai in March of last year.

Nexo has over $11 billion in assets under management, has issued $8 billion in crypto credit, and paid out over $1 billion in interest, the company said.

[Update: date in story changed to February]

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Brussels has promised to help Europe’s embattled car industry potentially by using pan-EU subsidies to boost demand for electric vehicles.

Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president of the European Commission, told the Financial Times at the World Economic Forum in Davos that officials were still “shaping” options for an incentive programme.

“It makes sense to see how we could figure out in a pan-European perspective, how to facilitate the measures instead of going through national subsidies,” Ribera said. She warned against a “race where we could be confronting one national model versus another one”.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Tuesday divulged that the commission was considering an EU subsidy programme that he had proposed. The German government scrapped its own scheme abruptly in 2023, leading to a plunge in EV sales.

Many EU member states offer incentives for EVs, but the terms vary widely and several member states offer no purchase subsidies at all, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

One challenge for Brussels would be designing a scheme that would conform with WTO rules while avoiding the subsidies flowing to Chinese carmakers, whose share of the market is fast growing.

Ribera admitted there was a “complicated balance” to be struck between rapid electrification and “a mismatch with the capacity of the European brands to provide in terms of quantity and quality what we would like to see moving on our roads”.

The commissioner, who is responsible for the EU’s “green industry” strategy, said a possible incentive scheme would be one of several measures to support a sector deemed vital for Europe’s economy. Europe’s carmakers “needed a comprehensive view on how to update their capacities and to catch up in what is already being demanded worldwide,” Ribera said. By contrast, US President Donald Trump vowed this week to end “unfair subsidies” for EVs.

Ribera, a socialist and former deputy prime minister of Spain, ruled out delaying the 2035 deadline for ending new sales of internal combustion engines because the car industry wanted “predictability and clarity”.

“It doesn’t make sense to open again the discussion when that provides some certainty and would punish the first movers that took it seriously without any potential advantages to those that still need to move,” she said.

But she said she was open to flexibility on the annual EV sales targets and the fines carmakers face for missing them. Ribera said there was an “open conversation” with carmakers about alternative commitments they could make in terms of investment.

Carmakers have complained that paying fines will only hamper their EV investment plans while buying credits from Chinese EV makers helps Chinese competitors.

Ribera said it was important to “ensure that this legislation is being applied in such a way that facilitates what is the main goal” of phasing out petrol and diesel engines.

She also said she was open to extending technology transfer requirements for foreign carmakers who wish to establish manufacturing facilities inside the EU. Brussels said last year it would require foreign companies that received EU grants for battery development to share some technology with local partners.

There is a “good lesson to be drawn” from China, which set strict joint venture and tech-sharing requirements when European carmakers set up factories there 30 years ago.

Beyond the car sector, Ribera said she was willing to broaden the available measures the commission could take to benefit European industry.

Ribera said she would look at local content requirements to shield European turbine manufacturers which are facing fierce competition from Chinese companies.

Shares in European wind turbine makers took a battering from Trump’s first policy announcements, including suspending new offshore project leasing.

Ribera insisted the EU would stay the course on decarbonisation, despite Trump’s move to abandon the 2015 Paris agreement on emissions reductions, of which she was one of the architects.

The devastating fires in Los Angeles showed that the US was already suffering the effects of climate change at great cost, she said.

“The world is much larger [than the US] and there are many other partners and players that do understand why it is important to remain united,” she said.

Stockholm startup Neko Health has made a big bet on consumers wanting to learn about their state of health and how to prevent things going wrong. Now, investors are making a big bet on Neko. 

The startup has raised a fresh $260 million in funding, a Series B that values Neko at $1.8 billion post-money, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.

Neko will be using the capital to break into new markets like the U.S.; continue developing its diagnostics, potentially with acquisitions; and to open more clinics in response to demand. With its waitlist now at over 100,000 people – up from 40,000 just a few months ago – Neko has scanned and evaluated 10,000 patients to date in clinics in Stockholm and its newer market of London.

“It’s very clear that there’s incredible demand for a different way of thinking about health care,” Hjalmar Nilsonne, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. He spoke to TechCrunch over a video link from New York, where he is working on laying the groundwork for setting up clinics in the U.S. market. 

The U.S. is a priority, he said, because right now it accounts for the most people on its waitlist outside of Europe. “Of course, we want to come to the U.S. We think there’s a lot we could contribute to the ecosystem here, made possible by this funding round,” he added.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series B, with General Catalyst, O.G. Venture Partners, Rosello, Lakestar and Atomico participating. The round follows a Series A of $65 million in 2023 from Lakestar, Atomico, General Catalyst and Prima Materia, the investment firm co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who happens to be the other co-founder of Neko. Prima Materia also seeded Neko with its initial funding but is not an investor in this latest round.

The funding and Neko’s growth are coming at a time when demands are shifting in the world of healthcare. 

Around the world, whether healthcare systems are state-backed or privatized, there’s been a rising focus on preventative healthcare to spot signs before they develop into problems, including to offset the costs of handling chronic and complex conditions in populations that are living longer than before. 

Alongside that, there has been a massive injection of technology into the worlds of medicine and health: new devices, new insights, and applications powered by, for example, artificial intelligence are changing how doctors are interacting with patients, what they are able to diagnose, and what patients are looking for in a medical environment. 

Not all of these advances are evolving seamlessly — very far from it — but they show few signs of going away, and Neko is playing into all of these changes.

The Neko Health experience involves a visit to a clinic — calm, futuristic, minimalist — where, for £300, a customer gets an hour-long exam based around proprietary hardware and software. That exam generates “millions of health data points,” Neko says.

Moles and other marks on your skin are detected and counted as part of a check for skin cancer; waist circumference, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, heart rate, grip strength and other parameters are measured and used to determine whether you are at risk of metabolic syndrome, stroke, heart attack, diabetes and more. The visit includes a consultation with a doctor and recommendations for follow-ups if needed.  

Those follow-ups might come shortly after the initial visit — for example, further monitoring of blood pressure or heart activity — or it might be another full appointment the following year. Nilsonne said that currently 80% of its customers have rebooked and paid in advance for appointments in a year’s time.

Considering Neko is a company that has staked its whole ethos on the power of data and advance planning, it had a fairly random start in life. 

It was co-founded back in 2018 after Ek reached out to Nilsonne over Twitter to chat about the state of the healthcare market in response to a tweet of Nilsonne’s. Neither have backgrounds in the field – Nilsson’s previous startup was in climate tech – but through ongoing conversations, early ideas for Neko began to form. 

It took six years to bring together a team and work out Neko’s vertically-integrated approach. Even so, Nilsonne said that Neko went into the market hoping for the best but unsure if their idea would resonate; now, according to the company, demand exceeds capacity. 

Looking ahead, along with building more clinics to take in more users, Neko is focused on R&D around its medical hardware and software. 

It’s starting from a fairly low-tech baseline because of the costs until recently of building and owning medical devices. “The average ECG machine in primary care is 15 years old, meaning the software is 15 years old,” Nilsonne said. “We have a completely different model where we’re vertically integrated, meaning we make these devices, we make the software, and we have the clinic.” 

He added that Neko’s aim is to have updates on a yearly cadence, bringing in more parameters to measure, and likely different tiers of service at different price points.

“The body scan today is kind of the iPod moment for Neko,” he said. “The iPod was an iconic product that people loved, and that was exciting. But no one today is using an iPod. It enabled Apple to invest in this incredible paradigm of hand held computational devices. So we very much see this as the beginning of a journey where we’re trying to contribute, you know, incredibly affordable, high quality preventative diagnostics, and every year we’re going to be able to do more and more with less and less.”

The funding round, he said, will “allow us to double down and really increase our investments in making the product better, which is ultimately about solving some of the core problems in health care.”

It will also give Neko a chance to put more space between itself and others looking at preventative healthcare opportunities, such as Zoi in France and Aware in Germany. The capital could also set it apart from efforts from public health services, such as the Health Check provided by the NHS in the U.K., which covers many of the same areas that Neko does.

Some weeks ago, I heard from one of Neko’s early backers that some of the most insistent waitlisters were investors who wanted to check out the company first-hand for the health of their bodies and of their funds. 

It seems that getting Lightspeed off the waitlist quickly yielded a strong result. As part of this funding round, Lightspeed partner Bejul Somaia will join Neko’s board.