Techmeme
July 15, 2022, 2:20 PM

Top News

Kadhim Shubber / Financial Times:
In a court filing, CEO Alex Mashinsky said Celsius was owed $439M by a “private lending platform”, which sources say is specialist finance company EquitiesFirst  —  Specialist finance group owes $439mn to digital assets lender  —  A mysterious debtor to Celsius Network referenced …
Bloomberg:
Celsius' Chapter 11 filing shows that its biggest creditor, to which it owes $81.1M, is obscure fund Pharos, which has staff with links to Sam Bankman-Fried  —  Among the more than 100,000 creditors of Celsius Network Ltd., the crypto lender that filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday, one entity stands out: Pharos USD Fund SP.
Yueqi Yang / Bloomberg:
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Chainalysis: the 30-day moving average of crypto sent to mixers hit a record $51.8M in April 2022, as funds from sanctioned and criminal groups almost doubled  —  Despite a significant Achilles' heel, mixers are seeing unprecedented demand.  —  The amount of cryptocurrency flowing …
Dana Mattioli / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Amazon has reduced its white label product selection and mulled exiting the business altogether, amid weak sales and mounting regulatory pressure  —  Executives also have discussed exiting the business entirely to address regulatory pressure  —  Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 0.21%▲ …
CoinDesk:
How crypto broker Voyager, which generated interest on deposits by loaning crypto assets, collapsed after its largest borrower Three Arrows Capital defaulted  —  In an industry where counterparties are tightly bound together by a weave of debt and leverage, dominoes can fall fast and hard.
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Nothing phone (1) review: a good midrange phone with snappy performance but the glyph notification system is mostly gimmicky and battery performance is not good  —  Nothing claims its new Phone 1 can “Bring us back.  To us" with “deeper interactions” and “brave simplicity.”
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget:
Meta unveils Make-A-Scene, an exploratory AI research project that turns a user's sketches and text descriptions into 2,048 x 2,048-pixel images  —  Text-to-image generation is the hot algorithmic process right now, with OpenAI's Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) and Google's Imagen AIs unleashing tidal waves …
Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News:
Investment in VC-backed crypto companies fell to $9.3B in H1 2022, down from a record $12.5B invested during H1 2021; deal flow increased from 456 to 534  —  The crypto winter is not descending upon just holders of digital currency—but also those startups looking for funding.
More: CoinDesk
Christine Hall / TechCrunch:
Okendo, which provides customer review tools to e-commerce brands, has raised a $26M Series A led by Base10 Partners, bringing its total funding to $33.5M  —  No merchant likes a bad customer review and Okendo, a customer marketing platform, announced $26 million in Series A funding today …
Kate Park / TechCrunch:
SmartBank, which offers a prepaid card and finance app in Japan, has raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $30M  —  Shota Horii, his twin brother Yuta Horii and Jun Taketani co-founded SmartBank in 2019 after selling their previous startup Fablic, a Japanese online secondhand marketplace, to Rakuten in 2016.

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
The Zoho Sign app for Microsoft Windows  —  Zoho Sign is a trusted platform for digital signatures, helping businesses of every size send, sign, and manage documents with speed, security, and legal confidence.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
The Sales Framework Every Founder Needs | Mark Roberge
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI Finally Ships Its Superapp, Meta's AI Price War, ChatGPT Cheating At Brown
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The 'Waymo' Lab For New Materials
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Hard Fork:
Do Social Media Bans Work? + A Conversation About A.I. Consciousness + Tool Time
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:20 PM ET, July 15, 2022.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Paul Krugman / New York Times:
Uday Sampath / Reuters:

Earlier Picks

Michael McSweeney / The Block:
Queenie Wong / CNET:
Lucy Harley-McKeown / The Block:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Katie Paul / Reuters:
Cho Mu-Hyun / ZDNet: