David Balland, co-founder of cryptocurrency wallet developer Ledger, was rescued in a police operation after being kidnapped in a ransom attack in France, according to reports, putting an end to days of swirling rumors.

Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said that Ballard and his wife were kidnapped on early Tuesday from their home in Central France and held captive at two separate addresses, Reuters reported on Friday. The prosecutor said that the kidnappers contacted another Ledger co-founder to demand ransom paid in cryptocurrencies.

A police operation involving French elite forces GIGN freed Ballard on Wednesday and his wife was found on Thursday, the prosecutor said. Ballard was taken to hospital to receive treatment to one of his hands, which was mutilated, Beccuau said, without revealing further details, according to Reuters. Local newspaper Le Parisien reported that the attackers severed Ballard’s finger and sent it to associates to extort a ransom.

“We are deeply relieved that David and his wife have been released, and are now safe,” Pascal Gauthier, chairman and CEO of Ledger, said in a statement shared with CoinDesk.

Rumors circulated on social media earlier this week that one of the co-founders of Ledger had been kidnapped. Reports alleging that Eric Larchevêque, another co-founder of the company, was the victim turned out to be false. CoinDesk reached out to Ledger for confirmation at the time, but the company didn’t comment.

“Our top priority was always to allow law enforcement to do their jobs and protect the integrity of the investigation,” CEO Gauthier said. “We respected law enforcement requests around safeguarding critical details of the ongoing investigation and appreciated members of the press who did the same.”

The incident was another example of an alarming trend of robberies and crime targeting crypto traders and industry figures as the crypto bull market marches on creating riches to investors. For example, Dean Skurka, the CEO of WonderFi, a publicly listed crypto holding company that owns one of Canada’s largest crypto exchanges, was kidnapped for a ransom in Toronto last year.

“Have seen an uptick in irl [real life] robberies targeting crypto traders located in Western Europe over the past few months,” popular blockchain sleuth ZachXBT posted on Telegram. “The cases all involve known people in the crypto community where they were held at gunpoint. As the rest of the cycle continues, be extra mindful of who you share your wins with and meet up with [in real life].”

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Donald Trump insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland in a fiery telephone call with Denmark’s prime minister, according to senior European officials.

The US president spoke to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish premier, for 45 minutes last week. The White House has not commented on the call but Frederiksen said she had emphasised that the vast Arctic island — an autonomous part of the kingdom of Denmark — was not for sale, while noting America’s “big interest” in it.

Five current and former senior European officials briefed on the call said the conversation had gone very badly.

They added that Trump had been aggressive and confrontational following the Danish prime minister’s comments that the island was not for sale, despite her offer of more co-operation on military bases and mineral exploitation.

“It was horrendous,” said one of the people. Another added: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous.”

The details of the call are likely to deepen European concerns that Trump’s return to power will strain transatlantic ties more than ever, as the US president heaps pressure on allies to give up territory.

Trump has started his second term musing about potentially taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada.

Many European officials had hoped his comments about seeking control of Greenland for “national security” reasons were a negotiating ploy to gain more influence over the Nato territory. Russia and China are both also jostling for position in the Arctic.

But the call with Frederiksen has crushed such hopes, deepening the foreign policy crisis between the Nato allies.

“The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode,” said one person briefed on the call. Another said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”

A former Danish official added: “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs.”

The Danish prime minister’s office said it did “not recognise the interpretation of the conversation given by anonymous sources”.

Greenland, home to just 57,000 people, is an entry point to new shipping routes gradually opening up through the Arctic; it also boasts abundant but hard to access minerals.

“President Trump has been clear that the safety and security of Greenland is important to the United States as China and Russia make significant investments throughout the Arctic region,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson said.

“The President is committed to not only protecting US interests in the Arctic but also working with Greenland to ensure mutual prosperity for both nations.”

Trump threatened in early January to impose duties on Denmark if it opposed him on Greenland. He also declined to rule out using military force to take control of the island.

“People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it but, if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security,” Trump said at a press conference days before taking office.

“I’m talking about protecting the free world,” he added. “You have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”

Múte Egede, Greenland’s prime minister, has repeatedly stressed that the island’s inhabitants want independence rather than US — or Danish — citizenship. But he has welcomed US business interest in mining and tourism.

Frederiksen held a meeting with chief executives of large Danish companies including Novo Nordisk and Carlsberg last week to discuss Trump’s threats, including potential tariffs against her country.

On the day of the Trump call, she told Denmark’s TV2: “There is no doubt that there is great interest in and around Greenland. Based on the conversation I had today, there is no reason to believe that it should be less than what we have heard in the public debate.”

• QNAP said it addressed six flaws in its Hybrid Backup Sync tool
• The flaws stemmed from rsync, an open-source file syncing tool
• Users are advised to update their HBS immediately

QNAP has addressed half a dozen vulnerabilities affecting its Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) software.

In a security advisory, the company noted the vulnerabilities were discovered in rsync, an open source file synchronization tool used to transfer and sync files between systems. It supports local and remote operations via SSH, and minimizes data transfer with incremental updates. Many backup solutions use rsync, including Duplicity, Bacula, Rclone, and others.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expects to spend as much as $65 billion on AI in 2025 as part of a “massive effort” to further the company’s AI ambitions. Part of the plan includes a Louisiana data center that Zuckerberg says “is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” he wrote on Threads today.

The announcement reads like a response to the big AI data center news touted by competitors earlier this week. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump joined OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison as they announced Project Stargate, a $500 billion joint venture that will build sprawling AI data centers in Texas and other parts of the country. City documents seen by Bloomberg suggest the Texas data center will be as big as New York’s Central Park.

Zuckerberg said he expects to end the year with over 1.3 million GPUs, while “significantly” growing the company’s AI team. “This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg wrote. “In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D [research and development] efforts.”

In the days leading up to the TikTok ban in the U.S. on Sunday, U.S. users flooded the Chinese app RedNote, which offered a similar experience to their favorite short-form video app. The app, which is listed in the U.S. App Store under its Chinese name Xiaohongshu, quickly became the No. 1 free app in the U.S. But after Trump paused the ban, use of RedNote in the U.S. rapidly declined. By Monday, RedNote had lost over half its daily active users in the U.S. after reaching a high of 32.5 million daily actives on the day of the ban.

According to digital market intelligence company Similarweb, RedNote’s daily active users in the U.S. declined by 54% on Monday when enforcement of the ban was put on hold. President Trump offered TikTok a 75-day extension of the deadline, allowing TikTok more time to negotiate a deal that would keep it alive in the U.S.

App intelligence provider Sensor Tower saw a similar trend as the week continued. Per its estimates, the average U.S. mobile daily active users for RedNote from January 20 to 22 declined by roughly 17% compared with the week prior (January 13 to 19).

TikTok users had originally joined RedNote en masse to send a message to lawmakers and Meta alike. According to one report, also citing Sensor Tower data, some 700,000 U.S. users flocked to RedNote within two days as the ban deadline approached. By Thursday, Similarweb said that RedNote had reached 3.4 million daily active users across iOS and Android in the U.S., a 133.8% week-over-week increase.

The U.S. users joining RedNote were signaling that the government’s fears of the “national security threat” poised by a Chinese-owned app with access to U.S. users’ personal data was not a concern to them. In addition, they wanted to demonstrate that would rather join another Chinese app than return to Instagram to use Reels.

There were several reasons why so many U.S. TikTok users made this decision. Some found the ban hypocritical, given that Meta had profited off their user data for years, many said in their videos, while others simply didn’t care if China had their data or not.

As one popular TikTok sound put it, “You’re telling me the Chinese government has access to all of my personal data and what they chose to do with that information is psychologically manipulate me via algorithmic content into reading smutty books about fairies.”

(The sound references the fantasy books loved by the readers in TikTok’s sizable “BookTok” community, such as Sarah J. Maas’s “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series. In other words, they didn’t see TikTok as any sort of threat.)

As the TikTokers engaged on RedNote, surprising cultural exchanges began to occur.

Users asked each other about the cost of living in their area, while Chinese and U.S. users alike wanted to know if their government had characterized the other society accurately. U.S. users, for instance, asked about China’s social credit system, while RedNote’s Chinese users asked if it was true that many Americans had to work two jobs to pay their bills. Food, healthcare, and the accuracy of U.S. TV movies and shows, like “Friends,” were among the numerous topics discussed.

However, RedNote’s position as a top app in the U.S. was a trend that isn’t likely to last, at least as long as TikTok is available. For one, RedNote is localized in Mandarin, prompting many to turn to Duolingo to study the language. The language-learning app saw a 216% spike in U.S. usage, it said. However, learning a new language is challenging — and many users may have given up in time.

In addition, unlike TikTok, RedNote is focused on the Chinese market. TikTok benefitted from being a global app — something TikTok itself pointed out when arguing in the Supreme Court about why it would no longer be the same if forced to sell.

Ahead of the ban, TikTok’s U.S. daily active users surged to a record high for the past year, as 106.8 million users on iOS and Android engaged with the app on Sunday.