Oil and gas isn’t the only source of energy lurking under our feet. Drill deep enough and the Earth’s temperature stays consistent enough that it can be a source of heating and cooling for homes, offices, and data centers.

But in many regions, geothermal wells today bottom out at around 500 feet, a limitation that is largely dictated by the sort of drilling equipment that’s typically used. 

“It’s pretty shallow, and you’re going to need two or three times the amount of space if you only go to those depths,” Joselyn Lai, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Energy, told TechCrunch. 

To minimize geothermal’s footprint, Bedrock drills deeper.

“In a cooling dominant location that can very well be 800 to 1,000 feet, which is three times more space efficient. And in a heating dominant location, that can very well be 1,000 to 1,200 feet or even more, which is two times more space efficient,” Lai said.

Because it doesn’t need as much land, Bedrock has been targeting commercial buildings where land tends to be at a premium. It completed its first two installations last year, one at an office building in Austin, Texas, and another at a resort in Utah. For installations like these, Lai said that the company expects to be profitable on a project basis in the next year.

Bedrock has also started to explore applying geothermal cooling to data centers. Last fall, the startup partnered with Dominion Energy to study the space.

One of the main challenges is that data centers are one-way users of geothermal energy. Since servers generate heat 24/7, data centers would be dumping heat into the ground year round. Contrast that with other users like office buildings, which tend to cool in the summer and heat in the winter, leading to a more balanced annual energy budget.

Still, it’s looking promising, Lai said. What’s underground can make a difference: fast flowing ground water, for example, can cool things off more quickly. The boreholes would need to be spread out compared with other installations, raising overall costs. But Bedrock’s data analysis, developed with experience gleaned from the oil and gas sector, suggests that geothermal would be a good fit for data centers, especially when paired with solar farms, which also need large tracts of land.

“Broadly speaking, cooling with geothermal is about twice as efficient as cooling with water and air, especially at the hottest times of the day when it’s very, very humid, which is what happens in a lot of states that have data centers,” Lai said.

Geothermal’s other benefit is how consistently it uses electricity. Because the Earth’s temperature is relatively stable, the heat pumps that transfer energy to or from a geothermal reservoir don’t have to ramp up or down to compensate for changes in air temperature, as air-source heat pumps do. For large electricity users like office buildings and data centers, that can be a boon to the bottom line since utilities typically charge heavy users more when their demand spikes.

Lai said that the outlook for geothermal remains promising enough that the company continues to invest in expanding operations and research and development, focusing on automation to speed installations. To support that growth, Bedrock recently raised a $12 million Series A led by Titanium Ventures. Energy Impact Partners, and Sustainable Future Ventures with participation from Cantos, Elemental Capital, First Star Ventures, Overture Ventures, Toba Capital, and Wireframe Ventures.

Stablecoin issuer Circle has introduced a new feature called Circle Paymaster, enabling users to pay gas fees using the USDC stablecoin.

The USDC (USDC) issuer said in an announcement that the on-chain utility solution Circle Paymaster was now live on Arbitrum and Base, two leading Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 solutions. 

With this product, users on the L2s can now use USDC rather than ETH when paying for transaction fees.

In the crypto market, blockchain users need transaction fees often paid via a chain’s native token. This gas fees requirement has typically meant users must hold tokens such as Ether and others on-chain, with transaction failures likely when one has no funds to cover gas fees.

Paymaster removes this challenge by allowing users to pay with USDC, removing the need for one to have the required native token.‍ The feature is permissionless and composable, which means developers can work with any wallet compatible with the ERC-4337 token standard.

Circle’s launch of Paymaster adds to the company’s Gas Station offering.

While Paymaster users utilize their USDC to pay for gas fees, Gas Station allows developers to pay for gas costs for users. Developers who sign up for the Gas Station feature offer a gasless experience for users across their decentralized applications. 

Gas Station works with Circle’s programmable wallets and requires developers to create a Circle Console account.

Circle will expand access to Paymaster beyond Arbitrum and Base in coming months, with additional networks including Ethereum, Solana and Polygon PoS.

Transaction charges across Paymaster will be 10% of gas fees per transaction. However, Circle is waiving this charge until June 30, 2025 to incentivize adoption.

The number of phishing emails received by Australians surged by 30% last year, new research by security firm Abnormal Security has found. Cybercriminals have increasingly targeted the Asia-Pacific region, partly because it is becoming a larger player in critical industries like data centres and telecoms.

For APAC as a whole, credential phishing attacks rose by 30.5% between 2023 and 2024, according to the research. New Zealand saw a 30% rise, while for Japan and Singapore, it was 37%. Out of all the types of advanced email attacks, including business email compromise and malware deployment, phishing saw the biggest increase.

“The surge in attack volume across the APAC region can likely be attributed to several factors, including the strategic significance of its countries as epicentres for trade, finance, and defence,” said Tim Bentley, Vice President of APJ at Abnormal Security said in a press release.

“This makes organisations in the region attractive targets for complex email campaigns designed to exploit economic dynamics, disrupt essential industries, and steal sensitive data.”

SEE: 80% of Critical National Infrastructure Companies Experienced an Email Security Breach in Last Year

Between 2023 and 2024, the median monthly rate of all advanced email attacks rose by 26.9% across all of APAC, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore. This encompassed a 16% increase from Q1 to Q2 2024, and a 20% increase from Q2 to Q3.

While phishing was the dominant attack type, BEC attacks — including executive impersonation and payment fraud — also grew by 6% year-over-year in APAC. According to Abnormal Security, the average cost associated with one successful BEC attack exceeded USD $137,000 in 2023.

Australia’s cyber immaturity and the AI boom are causing a perfect storm

The news that Australia is prone to cyber attack is not entirely new. A Rubrik survey from last year found that Australian organisations reported the highest rate of data breaches compared with global markets in 2023.

Antoine Le Tard, vice president – of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Rubrik, said at the time that Australia was a favourite target partly because the country “is a mature market and early adopter of cloud and enterprise security technologies,” and therefore may have prioritised rapid deployment over comprehensive security.

At a national level, the approach to cyber security has been a bit slow off the mark. The Australian Signals Directorate reported that only 15% of government agencies achieved the minimum level of cyber security in 2024 — a sharp decline from 25% in 2023. Such entities have also proven reluctant to adopt passkey authentication methods, stemming from cyber security maturity in the public sector and the perception that implementing it is complex.

There is also the AI factor, which is influencing the security landscape globally. The ease of access to chatbots, both regular and jailbroken for nefarious purposes, makes it faster to generate material for phishing emails and lowers the barrier to entry, as no technical knowledge is required to use them. AI-powered chatbots were named one of 2025’s top AI threats for Australian cyber professionals, for that reason.

SEE: Impacts of AI on Cyber Security Landscape

The number of BEC attacks detected by security firm Vipre in the second quarter of 2024 was 20% higher than the same period in 2023 — and two-fifths of them were generated by AI. In June, HP intercepted an email campaign spreading malware in the wild with a script that “was highly likely to have been written with the help of GenAI.”

Furthermore, adversaries have begun using AI chatbots to build trust with victims and ultimately scam them. The technique mimics how an enterprise may use AI to combine human-driven interaction with the AI chatbot to engage and “convert” a person.

US President Donald Trump’s surprising launch of the Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin fueled a frenzy as fans and day traders pushed billions of dollars in trading volume. A day later, First Lady Melania Trump joined the trend with her own meme coin, Official Melania (MELANIA), which added to the cryptocurrency craze.

But the result was damaging. Both the meme coins crashed soon. In fact, TRUMP and MELANIA coins were still down by over 50% and 80% since their peaks, respectively.

TRUMP, MELANIA On-Chain Activity

Recent findings from Chainalysis reveal a sharp contrast in the distribution and profitability of TRUMP and MELANIA token holders. While the majority of wallets containing TRUMP are retail buyers with small holdings, a select group of whales has seen significant gains. Approximately 50 wallets have realized profits of more than $10 million at the wallet level, which essentially depicted the outsized influence of these early or high-volume investors.

On-chain data from Chainalysis Reactor shows that after the minting of 1 billion TRUMP tokens, four wallets received the majority of the supply. This stash was either for direct holding or to provide liquidity on exchanges. Despite the concentrated distributions, the broader holder base largely consists of retail investors.

As of January 21, most wallets holding TRUMP or MELANIA contained less than $100 in tokens, which is indicative of widespread but modest retail interest. Over 80% of these investors hold under $1,000 in assets on the Solana blockchain, and half are new to Solana altcoins, creating wallets specifically to purchase TRUMP or MELANIA.

While retail participation is high, profits remain modest for most. Over 77% of wallets holding TRUMP have realized gains of less than $100. However, the dominance of whales continues, with 40 wallets holding over $10 million in TRUMP or MELANIA tokens, accounting for 94% of the total supply.

Increased Scrutiny

Despite the popularity of the two tokens, the move by the President and his wife has attracted significant criticism.

James Thurber, the founder and former director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, accused Trump of using his pro-cryptocurrency advocacy as a personal profit-making strategy. In a statement to the Guardian, Thurber said,

“There are shameful and major conflicts of interest with respect to his family business benefiting from his cryptocurrency policies. (Trump) does not seem to worry about the public interest with respect to cryptocurrency. He seems to be driven by profit and wanting to be a major part of the billionaire class in the US.”

Meanwhile, FinTAX’s comprehensive analysis observed that there are legal, tax, and political risks for the TRUMP meme coin. Key concerns include SEC regulatory scrutiny (using the Howey Test), tax compliance challenges with 80% token ownership, and potential political finance violations. Risks include possible security classification, tax complications from token unlocking, and potential disruption of political donation norms.

Pity the 3,000 Sainsbury’s employees whose roles are set to be eliminated because of today’s big jobs announcement from the UK’s number two supermarket retailer.

Not only are they potentially going to lose their jobs, just as the bills from Christmas are rolling in, but they also now face becoming a political football in an unedifying debate.

For it is almost inevitable that Rachel Reeves‘s political rivals are going to cite the chancellor’s Halloween budget as the main reason why these roles are being removed.

They will point out that, just days after the chancellor hit businesses with a hike in employer’s national insurance contributions (NICs), Sainsbury’s was among the first of the big-name employers to warn of the potential consequences.

Simon Roberts, the Sainsbury’s chief executive, said: “There will be difficult decisions to take as a result.”

They will further point out that, earlier this month while unveiling the company’s Christmas trading update, Mr Roberts repeated that warning and said the way the increase was announced gave businesses insufficient time to prepare for the hike in taxes.

However, before the chancellor’s critics get too carried away, it is worth remembering that Mr Roberts and his peers at employers like Tesco, Next and Marks & Spencer were chiefly warning that the rise in NICs would be inflationary and lead to higher shop prices.

Rather less was said explicitly about job losses.

The wider business context

These job losses must be seen in the wider context of how Mr Roberts is reshaping Sainsbury’s.

Profit margins in the grocery sector are wafer-thin and, with the traditional big four of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons all running campaigns to price match Aldi, that means being as efficient as possible and keeping operating costs down.

Money blog: Could Santander really walk away from UK?

It was as long ago as November 2020, at the height of the pandemic, that Mr Roberts announced plans to cut 3,500 jobs as part of a move to close permanently the supermarket’s meat, fish and deli counters.

There have been regular waves of job reductions ever since, most notably in February 2023, when 1,400 roles were put at risk with the closure of two Argos warehouses. A further 1,500 jobs were put at risk in February last year when Sainsbury’s announced plans to close in-store bakeries and a call centre.

That same month, Mr Roberts announced plans to reduce costs by £1bn over the next three years at a strategy update in which he declared that the grocer would be focusing on “food first”.

Noting that just 15% of Sainsbury’s supermarkets offered its full range of food products – some 30,000 individual lines – he said Sainsbury’s would be devoting less floor space in the company’s biggest supermarkets to general merchandise and clothing and devoting more of it to selling groceries.

With Sainsbury’s also closing more stand-alone Argos outlets, it did not take much of a leap of imagination to work out that the company’s remaining in-store cafes were an obvious target to cull. The company, notably, did not rule out job losses at the time.

So today’s news has to be seen in the context of what Sainsbury’s has been doing for nearly five years.

Rachel Reeves not absolved of blame

That is not to say Ms Reeves’s budget should not be completely absolved of blame for these job losses.

Sainsbury’s, like other retailers, is facing a huge increase in costs as a result not only of the increase in the rate at which employer’s NICs are levied but also, crucially, in the chancellor’s lowering of the threshold at which they kick in from £9,100 to £5,000.

Read more:
Primark sales woes underline the challenges facing retail
Barclays to slash CEO’s fixed pay as package capped at £14m

That is going to make it more costly, in particular, to employ the kinds of part-time workers – mainly women – that retailers rely on.

It is no surprise to see job cuts as a consequence of both this and the coming rise in the national living wage. These measures, along with a rise in business rates, are estimated to be adding £7bn in costs for the retail sector this year.

Retailers are responding by accelerating cost reduction plans.

To that end, the response of the Unite union to these job losses felt like a denial of reality.

The experience of the last decade, during which Aldi and Lidl have won an increased share of the UK grocery market at the expense of some incumbents, has shown there is a sizeable element of the UK population – presumably many of them Unite members – who respond positively to ultra-low prices.

What are Sainsbury’s and its competitors supposed to do in response – stand idly by?

Further cuts to come

Unite says that Sainsbury’s has been “profiteering” on the backs of its workers. Perhaps the union should have been listening harder to what Ms Reeves and her ministerial colleagues have been saying this week in Davos as they have sought to drum up interest in Britain as an investment destination.

Investors will only deploy capital where they can be sure of making a return on their investment that exceeds their cost of capital.

It is therefore entirely reasonable of Sainsbury’s, when confronted with a higher tax bill, to seek to protect its returns by cutting costs.

Expect other retailers to announce similar cost-reduction programmes in the weeks and months ahead.

A day on from Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked, I’m genuinely impressed with a Samsung event for the first time in my life. You see, I’ve been an iPhone user since 2010, when I was 15 years old, and while I write about tech for a living, the most I’ve come to using Android daily is a week or so for an experiment.

After watching Galaxy Unpacked and the unveiling of Samsung’s Galaxy S25 lineup of smartphones, I’m not only intrigued by the Android phones on offer, but I’m starting to think I should really give the South Korean tech giant’s flagship a try.

Bitcoin, XRP, and Solana have held their support levels even when the global crypto market fell by 1.7%, now sitting at a market cap of $3.5T.

Bitcoin ETFs have seen four consecutive inflow days led by BlackRock. The investment giant has gobbled up $3.2B worth of BTC. CEO Larry Fink suggests that BTC can reach $700,000 if funds increase allocation to 5% from 2%.

This ETF influx stems from the hopes of Solana ETF getting approvals in 2025. Market data suggests a 97% probability of that happening, too. Solana has also seen a significant surge since 15th January. It currently stands at 34% gains from the lows of $181.88 on 14th Jan.

During this time, it reached a high of $295.83, gaining almost 60% in 5 days. The price has since stabilized at around $240.

XRP also saw a similar price boost as it rose from $2.3545 on January 1 to a high of $3.4 on 16th Jan – a gain of almost 62%. XRP’s price has also since been steady and is now trading at around $3.0886.

Ever since Trump won the presidential elections, the crypto market has seen quite a significant boom. Bitcoin reached an all-time high, crossing the $109,000 mark.

Trump’s pro-crypto approach and promises to bring in crypto-friendly legislation have kept the hopes of crypto enthusiasts high.

There are already early signs of that happening. For instance, Trump’s decision to pardon Ross Ulbricht is being viewed as good news for privacy-preserving technology advancement in the crypto field.

The launch of $TRUMP, the US president’s official meme coin, has also drawn the attention of investors. Soon after its launch last week, $TRUMP quickly shot up by over 12,000% overnight.

With the influx of various projects, the meme coin market looks bullish for the next year. If you’re looking to ride this upcoming bull run, we’ve got a project you can invest in – Solaxy ($SOLX).

What is Solaxy?

Solaxy ($SOLX) is Solana’s first Layer-2 solution that looks to solve the issues of failed transactions, congestion, and scalability bottlenecks in the Solana Layer-1 chains.

With time, Solana has become slow as the traffic has increased, leading to longer wait times. Solaxy looks to solve this through bundling transactions.

Another unique thing about $SOLX is that it’s a one-of-a-kind multi-chain solution that works on both Solana and Ethereum networks.

This way, $SOLX combines the best of both networks – Ethereum’s liquidity and Solana’s transaction speeds, easily making it one of the best meme coins.

Having already raised over $13M, the $SOLX presale is off to a flier; here’s a guide on how to buy $SOLX if you want to grab some for $0.001612 per token. The next price increase is set to take place within 2 days from now.

So, this is the lowest you may get $SOLX for — a coin that could potentially make you a crypto millionaire in 2025.

Why Can Solaxy Be the Next 100X Meme Coin?

For starters, Solaxy isn’t just another hype-based meme coin. It solves a very important issue faced by crypto investors.

By sharing the burden of Solana 1 layer, it batch processes transactions, leading to lower costs and quick turnaround time. This utility puts it in a unique position, making it one of the hottest meme coin presales in January.

Also, a new Bitwise report has predicted that the price of Solana ($SOL) can reach $6,636 by 2030 – a massive 3,000% increase. The same report states that Solana’s Layer 1 is far more efficient than the Layer 2 Ethereum chain.

Going by the indications, if Solana is able to draw a price prediction this huge, Solaxy soaring by 100x doesn’t look a far stretch.

With 30% of the token supply reserved for development and 10% for listing, the developers have shown signs of long-term commitment.

Solaxy’s official X page currently has 62.5K followers, which is in line with its aim of building a strong investor community. If you’re looking to take advantage of the crypto and meme coin bull run that’s to come, buy $SOLX now from its official website.

However, please note that investments in crypto assets are subject to market conditions. It’s important to do your own research and only consider the above as our well-calculated opinion (and not financial advice).

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The UK government has approached consultancies about taking the role of special administrator in a sign that ministers are bracing themselves for the imminent renationalisation of Thames Water. 

Consultancies including Teneo, Interpath and EY are among the potential candidates to run a so-called special administration regime, according to people familiar with the process. A SAR is a temporary measure designed to keep services running, and suppliers and staff paid, in the event of a corporate collapse. 

“We are ready now, we could do one [SAR} today, if we had to,” said one official. “Incidentally, being ready for a SAR is also the strongest lever that we as government can have to make sure that another market-led, private-led solution is found.”

Thames Water is struggling under its £19bn debt pile and has warned that it will run out of cash in March unless the High Court signs off a controversial £3bn loan at a hearing in early February.

Another government official said that there had been “informal engagement” with certain consultancies over a special administrator role but no formal interview process.

The government’s move to approach administrators is in marked difference to its public stance as recently as October, when Steve Reed, the environment secretary, said that he had “ruled out nationalisation” as “it would not resolve the problems we face”.

But plunging Thames Water into special administration may be unavoidable if the court blocks the loan agreed with its senior creditors, or if the company runs out of cash earlier than expected. The £3bn loan is controversial because it would carry an interest rate of 9.75 per cent as well as fees and incentives for the existing Thames Water management. 

The agreement is being challenged by a separate group of Thames Water’s junior creditors — which have proposed a cheaper deal — and by environmental campaigners who argue that the company would be better off in special administration.

The loan would buy the company time to raise at least £3bn of equity in a parallel process. Companies including Castle Water, Covalis and CKI Infrastructure are among investment groups lining up to put in potential bids for the utility.

Bidders and creditors are waiting to see if the company appeals to the Competition and Markets Authority over regulator Ofwat’s decision last month on the level by which water companies can hike customer bills over the next five years. Thames Water has not yet made a decision whether to appeal Ofwat’s decision to the CMA, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ofwat has said that Thames will be allowed to raise bills 35 per cent — much lower than the 59 per cent increase it had sought — taking average bills from around £436 now to £588 between now and 2030. 

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Thames Water and Ofwat did not respond to requests seeking comment.

EY, Teneo and Interpath declined to comment. 

In an update to the market on Wednesday, the company’s chief restructuring officer, Julian Gething, said: “Our plan delivers for customers and stakeholders by unlocking up to £3bn of new money and securing a total of £3.5bn of debt maturity extensions over the next two years and cash releases, so we can continue investing the billions of pounds required to improve our network’s resilience.

“We believe it is the only implementable solution to enable the equity investment required to provide stability and certainty in the longer term and will not impact customer bills.”

The government’s choice of administrator may be complicated by potential conflicts of interest. Teneo is already an adviser to Thames Water and has received £5mn in fees since August 2023. It had also received at least £60mn from running the special administration of collapsed energy supplier Bulb, according to the National Audit Office.

It has also written a report to the High Court supporting the senior creditors’ £3bn loan, while Interpath has written a separate report on behalf of the junior creditors.

Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford university, has argued that a SAR would enable Thames Water to focus on a restructuring and on delivering improvements, rather than on negotiating a deal with creditors.