Yep, it uses ChatGPT. It only raised $5 million of the $10 million it wanted earlier this year so it seems like I’m not the only who’s a little skeptical of this.
Of course, that means the entirety of Gen Z is cringe...
[embedded.substack.com]
In most normal markets, market making and prop trading are done by independent companies. One of the reasons the SEC is mad at Binance is that they allege Binance’s entities may have manipulated crypto markets.
Also:
One of the people with direct knowledge about the teams said that Crypto.com executives gave other, external trading houses “absolutely dramatic sworn statements that Crypto.com was in no way involved in trading”, while another said that employees were asked to “say there is no internal market maker type operation.”
In response to questions from the Financial Times, Crypto.com said that employees had not been asked to lie to other market participants.
[FinancialTimes]
...but for passport shenanigans, not Terra / Luna. He’s been found guilty of forgery by a Montenegro court. The time he’s served since being arrested in March will count toward the sentence.
A fun update on how badly the Twitter deal is going:
Last time I checked, if a company has more than 12 creditors — as Twitter does — then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. And Elon is in danger here. At some point, the creditors he is mindlessly stiffing on a regular basis are going to get sufficiently pissed to throw Twitter into bankruptcy.
It’s about the restraining order, not the larger case. Last night, a judge approved the deal to make sure that only US employees have access to Binance.US funds:
According to the proposed agreement, Binance.US will take steps to make sure that no officials from Binance Holdings, the global exchange, have access to private keys for wallets or hardware wallets, or root access to Binance.US’s Amazon Web Services tools. The U.S.-based crypto trading platform will share detailed information about its business expenses, including estimated costs, in the coming weeks.
So, remember how Duke and Duchess of Sussex were supposed to do some podcasting for Spotify? They did a rumored $20 million deal for... one podcast?
Now I, for one, respect the hustle here. (I will also do one podcast for $20 million. Or even $10 million.) Bill Simmons, the head of podcast innovation (?) at Spotify, however, feels differently.
Our sister pub does a deep dive on Jim Cramer’s whole... thing:
In the business of Jim Cramer, there is the man and the character. Where one ends and the other begins isn’t really clear. In one sense, he is CNBC’s Mickey Mouse, probably the cable channel’s most recognizable piece of IP. That comes in handy when it wants to upsell to its most loyal viewers. The channel’s investing club, in which Cramer talks more about his picks, costs nearly $400 a year. The CNBC Pro subscription has a slightly more affordable $300 annual fee. Then there are all of Cramer’s books (including Jim Cramer’s Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich) and a $20 “United States of Cramerica” shirt.
[Intelligencer]
Remember when we talked about how the SEC has showed up on a horse, guns blazing, to regulate crypto? Here’s a nice report on how they’re also coming for the VC firms that poured money into crypto with a new rule change:
Legal executives at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote that “absent a suitable self-custodial exception, the proposed Rule would effectively ban RIAs from holding and transacting in crypto assets for clients,” while Paradigm wrote that the rule could result in an effective “shadow ban” of crypto.
a16z could be particularly hard-hit by this change.
[The Information]
Bloomberg has some details on the stablecoin. Highlights include: a “sizeable loan” to the Celsius Network, extensive third party loans, and its banking network which, whew buddy. Tether made loans to parties such as Bitfinex — and lent $5.1 billion at one point, a significant amount of Tether!
I wonder how much Tether has cleaned up their act! Perhaps the team will release recent details to — ahahahahaha just kidding. Let’s see what else comes out.