The last crypto bank standing is Customers Bank Corp, a “super community” bank that would prefer we’d all stop calling it a crypto bank, please.
Jack Dorsey — he of the Radiohead posts — has logged on to Threads, it seems. Anyway, a defensive posting 101 lesson for the rest of you: never give your enemies content.
It’s already started:
“There is a wave of consolidation coming in tech and particularly software,” said Ryan Nolan, global co-head of software investment banking at Goldman Sachs. He said many of the approximately 1,000 unicorns — tech start-ups valued at more than $1bn — are “stuck without a clear path to liquidity”.
[FinancialTimes]
But this time by Ripple, not Elon Musk. (I now get a personal notification every time his vacations are interrupted.) Levine writes:
I am not sure that it is actually all that good for crypto in the long run. The message of this decision is that crypto companies can freely sell tokens to retail investors as long as those retail investors are uninformed and the companies are secretive about it; only if they sell tokens openly to sophisticated investors will they get in trouble. That’s bad.
[Bloomberg.com]
So today’s ruling — using the much-contested Howey test — may be appealed by both sides, says Ann Lipton.
What about future crypto cases? Well, the thing about crypto is, the facts are different in every case. Assuming the Ripple decision is followed in other cases, some would involve ongoing obligations of some kind between the issuer and the token holder, and in those cases, courts may be more likely to find there was an expectation of profit from the promoter’s efforts.
[lawprofessors.typepad.com]
Enjoyed this Bloomberg story about the possibility that we are all old and tired, sick of seeing each other’s bad posts, and hoping to touch grass:
In 2022, according to GWI’s latest report, daily time spent [online] fell by 13 minutes. It’s now six hours and 43 minutes a day, slightly lower than it was in 2017. The drop was the biggest since the company started tracking the topic and suggested, as GWI’s report put it, “that we’ve reached a kind of internet saturation point.”
I guess I’m not the only one who’s been seasoning their cast iron!
After the algorithm rings the alarm, a human team makes a choice. But the incentives for the financial institutions are skewed, according to The New York Times: it’s easier to close a customer’s account, even if they’ve done nothing wrong, than to risk penalties for bad transactions. That means a lot of innocent people are getting left in the lurch, with no access to their money.
[The New York Times]
Just one thing to keep in mind if you’re using Affirm or Klarna: their structure may not be to your benefit.
By making the service “pay in four,” allowing users to pay in four installments, the companies don’t have to abide by the Fair Lending Act, which mandates certain consumer protections. Most BNPL companies also only do negative reporting, Di Maggio said, meaning the only credit information they make public is when a customer misses a payment.