Techmeme
July 15, 2022, 2:40 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 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
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.
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 average  —  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 …
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.
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.

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Zoho:
The crossroads of AI and SaaS  —  Enabling businesses of all sizes to build products in-house and disqualifying SaaS tools that are not AI-powered.  In a span of just two years, AI has made a name for itself as the key driver for innovation.
Genesys:
Executive Insights: The Era of Contact Center AI Copilots  —  How AI copilots are transforming customer experience and agent performance.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Fri. 12/20 - Gemini Flash Thinking
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:40 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: