Eric Newcomer reviews the track record of the SPAC king of SIlicon Valley. (Read our explainer on SPACs here.) Newcomer reviews Palihapitiya’s involvement in the craze and concludes:
You swapped your reputation for SPAC sponsor fees. You should have done some diligence on what you were getting yourself into. How were you underwriting the damage to your reputation?
[www.newcomer.co]
They are made by Novo Nordisk, and its market value “has risen by more than a third so far this year to about $419 billion, bigger than the country’s gross domestic product of about $406 billion,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Because the pharmaceutical industry’s exports have grown so much, it’s creating a big influx of currency into the Danish economy,” Danske Bank director Jens Naervig Pedersen tells WSJ.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Regulatory actions and concerns about money laundering were among the reasons for the contract termination, which was effective as of yesterday.
Binance was once Checkout.com’s largest client — with more than $2 billion in transactions in one month in 2021. Here’s an interesting tidbit about the relationship:
Shortly after the launch, Visa alerted Checkout.com to a flood of fraudulent transactions on Binance — approximately $10 million, according to two people familiar with the incident. (Checkout said this figure is “inflated and inaccurate.”) Binance’s refusal to deploy Checkout’s 3D-secure measures had left the platform vulnerable to credit card fraud, and a European organized crime syndicate had taken full advantage.
This Is Not Financial Advice and Easy Money attempt to explain the extremely online financial mania. Their very divergent takes show how difficult it is to fully understand.
Look, I’m willing to admit that credit cards are convenient, but payment by QR codes seems miserable. Here’s Jaya Saxena at Eater on the experience:
At one restaurant, I realized I didn’t have the information of the credit card I wanted to use stored in my phone, so I had to sit there and upload it before I could double tap to pay. A coworker mentioned he had to hold up a line at a cash register while he waited for his phone to update the preferred app. At another, the Wi-Fi was spotty and it just took too long. And after time spent interacting with a server, a person who is asking about your preferences, dietary restrictions, and checking in on your meal, it feels weirdly impersonal. Don’t I get to say goodbye?
[Eater]
Over at his newsletter, The Diff, Byrne Hobart observes that Stack Exchange is shrinking. Hobart attributes the declined to ChatGPT:
When someone’s asking a question because they want to be in a position to independently produce the answer and to fully understand the principles behind it, a good Stack Overflow answer will beat what ChatGPT produces. But even though that’s the most socially-valuable service Stack Overflow offers, it’s not a good description of the typical user interaction, where the task at hand is less “I want to finally understand the Rust borrow checker” and more like “I want to fix this bug so I can finally log off.” And LLMs are a better way to access Stack Overflow’s knowledge base in order to provide that answer—it’s visible right there in the data.
[The Diff]
CoinDesk, the publication that set off the chain of events that led to Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall, is cutting almost half its editorial staff to make itself more attractive to buyers. It’s a damn shame — those are fine journalists who deserve better than this unceremonious dumping.
