We lost the $150 million in cryptocurrencies that we held for customers because our founder died and he was the only one with the passwords to the wallets. Welcome to the financial future! coindesk.com/quadriga-credi…
Nathaniel Popper
4,485 posts
Nathaniel Popper
@nathanielpopper
Editor at Bloomberg News. Previously, reporter at NYT, LAT and the Forward. Wrote: "The Trolls of Wall Street" + "Digital Gold.”
- A mysterious buyer snapped up 67,000 acres in the Nevada desert earlier this year. Last week, the buyer gave me a tour of the property and described his ambitious plans. It involves a town, an e-gaming arena, underground vaults and lots of blockchain.
- In the wake of TD Ameritrade quietly opening Bitcoin trading for some of its customers, I was just told that eTrade is preparing to begin offering both Bitcoin and Ether trading to its 5 million or so customers and is just finalizing a third party to actually hold the coins.
- Just got this slide from a confidential Circle presentation. It does more to explain Circle's acquisition of Poloniex than anything I have seen today.
- Ripple calls its virtual currency, XRP, the 'global liquidity solution for payment providers and banks.' But when the Financial Times asked 16 banks linked to Ripple if they had used XRP, how many had? None. @MAmdorsky writes
- the first lawsuit lands against @bitconnect and its promoters -- it begins with concluding lines from "Welcome to Wonderland"
- real question. are Tesla’s really more shiny than other cars for some reason or do their drivers just clean them more often?
- Replying to @nathanielpopperOver the last day I’ve asked several people close to banks if banks are indeed planning to begin using Ripple’s token, XRP, in a serious way, which is what investors seem to assume when they buy in at the current XRP prices. This is a sampling of what I heard back:
- NEW: We were sent a trove of inside data on what Coinbase pays its employees. We had an economist crunch the numbers. The upshot: women and Black employees across the company earned far less than their colleagues in similar jobs.
- Interesting estimate of how much the biggest Bitcoin mining company, Bitmain, made last year in profits -- $4 billion. For comparison sake, that is the same that Goldman Sachs brought in.
- I've confirmed that the CFTC did subpoena Bitfinex and Tether -- though the subpoena was delivered on December 6, not last week, a source familiar with the matter told me.
- New detail on how the turmoil at Coinbase has hit the company's efforts to secure its Bitcoins. Among the people who resigned this fall - to protest new internal policies - were 4 of the 7 people on the most critical security team, the "key management team," sources told me.
- NEW: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has long styled himself as a Silicon Valley thought leader on management and culture. The culture he built, however, led to a history of complaints about discrimination and racism from Black employees, buried until now.
- Ripple's CEO often talked up the value of XRP by citing the intense interest from the financial industry. The SEC says that today only a few companies are using it and they are only doing so because of big payments from Ripple.
