Techmeme
July 15, 2022, 2:50 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 considered 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%▲ …
Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News:
Investment in VC-backed crypto companies fell from a record $12.5B in H1 2021 to about $9.3B in H1 2022, while the number of deals 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
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 subpar  —  Nothing claims its new Phone 1 can “Bring us back.  To us" with “deeper interactions” and “brave simplicity.”
CoinDesk:
How Voyager Digital, which generated interest on deposits by loaning crypto assets, collapsed after one of its largest borrowers 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.
Andrew Tarantola / Engadget:
Meta unveils Make-A-Scene, an exploratory AI research project that combines text-to-image generation and hand-drawn sketch inputs to output 2,048 x 2,048 images  —  Text-to-image generation is the hot algorithmic process right now, with OpenAI's Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) …
Christine Hall / TechCrunch:
Sydney-based Okendo, which offers e-commerce brands customer review tools, 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.
Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Disney's ESPN+ plans to raise its monthly subscription fee by $3 per month to $9.99, a 43% increase, starting August 23, 2022  —  The Disney-backed streaming-video sports service intends to raise its monthly subscription fee by $3 a month — a 43% price hike that outstrips even the current rate …
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk:
Circle releases a detailed, but unaudited, breakdown of its reserve assets for USDC, showing $42.1B in short-term US government bonds and $13.6B in cash  —  The asset breakdown comes at a time when crypto firms and their finances are under increasing scrutiny in the ongoing crypto credit crisis.

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More News

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

Earlier Picks

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