According to the Wall Street Journal, Elliott Management, a $50B hedge fund, is considering an activist-investor takeover of PayPal. PayPal’s valuation has slid from $350B to $89B over the past year.
Read MoreFidelity Investments announced that it’s launching employer-sponsored 401(k) plans that invest in Bitcoin. Fidelity administers retirement plans for approximately 23,000 businesses and manages over $11T in assets.
Read MoreCryptocurrency trading firms Celsius and Voyager Digital crashed earlier this month, trapping clients' funds within their platforms. Voyager’s financials are unknown, but Celsius has $167M in cash on hand to repay over $4.7B in customer deposits.
Read MoreOn July 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law that bans the use of digital assets like NFTs and cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services within the country. It is still legal to trade, buy, and sell those assets.
Read MoreGoldman Sachs announced a $233M loan to Latin American e-commerce giant MercadoLibre. Similarly, Citigroup lent $375M to them last year.
Read MoreERCOT, which operates Texas’s power grid, has requested that bitcoin miners suspend operations during the state’s current heat wave, which has caused a surge in residential and commercial energy demand. Bitcoin miners complied, freeing up to 1,000 megawatts by turning off their machines.
Read MoreCrypto firm Voyager Digital, which filed for bankruptcy last week, previously told customers that their deposits were FDIC insured through a partnership with Metropolitan Commercial Bank. However, customer funds are only protected if Metropolitan Bank fails, not if Voyager fails; the FDIC is now investigating Voyager’s false claims.
Read MoreNexo, a crypto-lending platform with over 4 million users, has offered to acquire Singapore-based crypto services firm Vauld. Vauld management said in a blog post that Terra-Luna’s coin crash and Three Arrows Capital’s loan default sparked its financial difficulties.
Read MoreThe US Supreme Court ruled last week against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), limiting its powers to interpret or enforce laws without explicit Congressional authority. Two top Republican lawmakers told the Financial Times that the ruling will soon affect financial regulators as well.
Read MoreMeta, Facebook’s parent company, announced it would reduce its engineer hiring goals by 30% this year. It will recruit between 6,000 and 7,000 engineers, down from an envisioned 10,000.
Read MoreCryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) has failed to make payment on a loan issued by crypto broker Voyager Digital. This marks the largest institutional crash of the current “crypto winter.”
Read MoreA recession is defined as a “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” The uncertainty of the term, as well as improving supply-chain conditions in the auto industry, suggest a slump isn’t inevitable.
Read MoreAxie Infinity, a “play-to-earn” video game in which users receive tokens for playing on the platform and trading characters as NFTs, has seen the value of its tokens decline by more than 90%. Hackers also robbed Axie’s creators of more than $620M in cryptocurrencies.
Read MoreBitcoin’s value dropped as much as 17% after crypto lending platform Celsius froze withdrawals on its platform. Bitcoin fell to its lowest value since December 2020, contributing to crypto’s aggregate value sliding from a high of $3T to below $1T.
Read MoreInvestigative work by Reuters suggests Binance has processed more than $2.35B in crypto originating from hacks, fraud, and illegal drug sales. The volume of illicit crypto processed by Binance has plummeted since it established KYC/AML protocols, but the crypto exchange has still failed to cooperate with cybercrime investigators on several occasions since then.
Read MoreThe Financial Revolutionist is weekly newsletter and blog focused on the torrid pace of financial innovation. Today, thanks to the exponential rate of technological change, explosion in global trade and new regulations ushered in by the Great Financial Crisis, a new financial revolution is under way. In this battle, virtually every aspect of the greater financial services sector is subject to rigorous challenge. With the Financial Revolutionist, we are aspiring to create a boots-on-the-ground and highly opinionated assessment of important financial innovation developments in the past week.
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