The new feature, which will start rolling out “over the coming weeks starting in May 2023,” will let you use Venmo to send crypto to others. You can already buy, store, and sell cryptocurrency in the app.
[PayPal Newsroom]
Celsius promised to unbank its users, and boy did it ever. The now-bankrupt crypto lender’s court proceedings — as well as those of Voyager — are a circus.
Alah Shehadeh, who invested $80,000 on the Voyager platform, was thrown out of a key hearing in March after repeatedly interrupting the judge, lawyers and witnesses. At one point he shouted, “You are a terrible judge. You are robbing us. This is a crime.”
[Bloomberg.com]
The fine folks at Protos had a little talk with Binance’s AI bot and... listen, parting chumps from their money is a novel way to monetize AI.
The US government’s criminal case against the former product leader of OpenSea, Nate Chastain, kicks off this week. Chastain is accused of buying up NFTs that he knew would be featured on OpenSea’s homepage, then selling them shortly thereafter as their value spiked.
The question isn’t so much whether Chastain did this, it’s whether doing this is illegal. As a former SEC enforcement lawyer told Reuters, “Is it insider trading of anything?”
When presented with a $100 million sponsorship deal for FTX, Swift was apparently one of the only celebrities who questioned whether it was selling unregistered securities.
That’s according to an interview The Block did with Adam Moskowitz, a lawyer who’s suing over a dozen celebrities, including Larry David and Tom Brady, for promoting the fallen exchange. He says Swift never ended up going through with the deal.
Bittrex, one of the exchanges to allow trading in Dennis Rodman’s Potcoin crypto, has been charged by the SEC with operating an unregistered national securities exchange.
Why does the SEC think Bittrex was knowingly trading securities? According to the complaint (PDF), former CEO William Shihara said so to other co-founders in a 2017 message:
the problem is that its going to be seen by the SEC as a security. im meeting with these guys face to face to get specifics on how much they want to raise, who they are raising it from, and what they expect the after market to be. its a big enough opportunity that we might want to roll the dice on the sec investigation
It also alleges Bittrex spent the last few years trying to erase old social media messages about token ownership, price predictions, and interest.
Fans don’t seem interested, but that isn’t stopping some notable brands.
David Marcus left Facebook in 2021 after the company failed to launch the cryptocurrency project he oversaw. Now he’s back with a startup called Lightspark that wants to make it easy for developers to facilitate payments through the Lighting Network, a layer-two protocol for enabling fast transactions with fractions of Bitcoins.
It’s interesting to see someone of Marcus’s stature (he was the president of PayPal before joining Facebook) launching a crypto company right now, especially one that is focused exclusively on Bitcoin. I’ll have more from my interview with him in Thursday’s edition of Command Line —you can subscribe at the link below to get it in your inbox — and a future episode of Decoder.
[The Verge]
Crypto exchange Gemini has failed to raise money, so the twin sea gods who founded the exchange have dipped into their store of shipwreck treasure to loan the company $100 million.
[Bloomberg.com]
