Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/10 – Binance Lets FTX Dangle

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

More twists and turns in the FTX, SBF, CZ saga as the entire crypto sector continues to get rocked. I’d love to tell you what is going on with Twitter’s whole checkmark saga, but I don’t know, Elon doesn’t know, and frankly, by the time you hear this, it’s likely to have changed anyway. GitHub is getting into the voice assistant game. And Amazon becomes the first company to LOSE a Trillion dollars in valuation. Sponsors: Akamai.com/techmeme Storyblok.com/ridehome Links: Binance Walks Away From Deal to Rescue FTX (WSJ) SBF Tweet Storm This Morning FTX’s Collapse Spurs $10 Billion Drop in Decentralized Finance (Bloomberg) Twitter begins to roll out, then kills, grey checkmarks for high-profile accounts (TechCrunch) Apple will spend $450 million with Globalstar and others to enable emergency satellite texting (CNBC) ‘Hey, GitHub!’ will let programmers code with just their voice (The Verge) Amazon Becomes World’s First Public Company to Lose $1 Trillion in Market Value (Bloomberg) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Thursday, November 10th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. More twists and turns in the FTX-SPS saga as the entire crypto sector continue to get rocked. I'd love to tell you what's going on with Twitter's whole checkmark saga, but I don't know. Elon doesn't know, and frankly, by the time you hear this, it's likely to have changed anyway. GitHub is getting into the voice assistant game and Amazon becomes the first company to lose a trillion dollars in valuation. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Welp, Binance has abandoned its rescue acquisition offer for FTX, after apparently reviewing FTX's finances, saying the issues with FTX were beyond

their ability to help. Quoting the Wall Street Journal, Binance chose not to go ahead with the non-binding offer following a review of the company's finances, the exchange said, quote, in the beginning, our hope was to be able to support FTX's customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help, Binance said in a statement. In an internal FTX Slack channel, Sam Bankman-Fried on Wednesday wrote, quote, we obviously just saw Binance's statement. They relayed that to the media first, not to us,

and had not previously informed us or expressed those reservations, according to a copy of the message reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Bankman-Fried wrote that he was working on next steps and doing what he could to protect customers, employees, and investors. I'm deeply sorry that we're we got into this place and for my role in it. That's on me and me alone and it sucks and I'm sorry, not that that makes it any better, end quote. Besides the firm and Mr. Bankman-Fried, well-known institutions that invested in the exchange are on the hook for potentially big losses among investors in a $900 million fundraising last year where SoftBank, Sequoia, hedge fund third point,

and tech-oriented private equity firm Toma Bravo. In a letter to its investors late Wednesday, Sequoia said it is writing off the $150 million that one of its funds invested in FTCS because of solvency risk for the crypto company. The full nature and extent of this risk is not known at this time, the letter said, based on our current understanding, we are marking our investment down to $0, end quote. Shares in Coinbase Global fell almost 10% despite assurances from its chief executive on Twitter that the company has sufficient assets for customer withdrawals and doesn't have any material exposure to FTX. Coinbase closed at its lowest level since going public last year when it fetched an $85 billion valuation. Its market value Wednesday was around $10 billion.

Shares of Silvergate Capital. The closest U.S. Bank to the crypto world dropped 12% and have shed some 75% of their value this year. Shares of micro strategy, which pivoted from business software to largely a buy-and-hold vehicle for Bitcoin, fell nearly 20%. Brokerage app Robin Hood Markets, which offers trading in more than just crypto was burned by fears that one of its biggest shareholders, Mr. Bankman Freed, would have to dump his shares. Robin Hood shares dropped nearly 14% on Wednesday, bringing losses for the week to more than 30%, end quote. I've also seen more fear in crypto folks than I've seen in years over the last 24 hours. Folks are keeping an eye on tether, watching if it can hold its dollar peg. If tether were to buckle, woo, Katie bar the door.

And just as I've been writing this, Sam Bankman-Fried broke his silence on Twitter with a thread apologizing, saying he effed up, claiming his priority is doing right by users, and saying he plans to raise funds and shutter Alameda over the coming days. We'll see. Add this to the contagion concerns around FTX. The entire defy space is getting rocked. According to Defy Lama, the total value locked in Defy Projects has dropped. by more than 12% in the past day after hovering around $50 to $60 billion since June. That would be down from highs of more than $180 billion back in December 2021. Quoting Bloomberg, the total value of all cryptocurrencies on Solana blockchain and projects built on Solana

plummeted by more than 47% in the past 24 hours, and its native token sold tumbled nearly 40% on Wednesday. I think we've re-learned a few valuable lessons. This is the result of opaque financial relationships and hidden leverage in the system, said Mark Weinstein, partner at Venture Fund Mechanism Capital. They'll say crypto is dead, but these types of collapses highlight the need for transparent financial infrastructure where users custody their own assets, end quote. In the past, Defi has also suffered billions of dollars worth of hacks, as the scammers have been quick to take advantage of the open source code of some prominent projects, end quote. So I guess at this point, on the one hand, as you heard, lots of crypto diehards are saying the collapse of FTX proves once again

that centralized projects are the problem. Whereas this year, we've also seen that decentralized projects seem to be endlessly susceptible to hacks and exploits. So pick your poison, I guess, hubris and personal failings on one side, self-dealing, inside baseball, and then, On the other side, nothing but outside attacks and vulnerabilities. Twitter's whole subscription product thing continues to be a Schrodinger's cat-like experience. After Twitter labeled select accounts as official, within hours yesterday, Elon Musk said he killed it. And an executive later said the label is still going out as part of the new blue product rollout. So that's directly contradictory.

so who knows. Whatever I tell you the current status is right now isn't likely to be accurate information by the time you hear these words. Quoting TechCrunch. The new badges, a gray checkmark beneath the old blue verification checkmark, designate accounts as official in line with what app researcher Nemo Algae revealed less than a week ago in Twitter's code. Accounts including tech crunches, and several government officials, among them U.S. senators Amy Klobuchar and Mitt Romney, show the gray check as of this morning. But from a cursory search, there doesn't appear to be much rhyme or reason to how the new badges are being applied. For example, the Wall Street Journal's account initially didn't have a badge. The information still doesn't, nor does musks. As of publication

time, there's no obvious way to petition Twitter support to rectify verification oversights. Twitter previously allowed users to request to be publicly verified but did away with the system, which was admittedly problematic in its own right with the introduction of the new Twitter Blue. Some of the issues around gray badges will be addressed in the coming days, presumably. Twitter, no doubt, has thousands, if not millions of high-profile accounts to comb through and vet. Its work it made for itself. As alluded to earlier, the recently launched Twitter Blue Plan that grants subscribers a blue checkmark doesn't include ID verification or a review step. A flaw Twitter users, including comedian Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin, exploited in the past week

to show how easy it is to pose as another account. quote. And, as folks warned, fake Twitter accounts of athletes and other celebrities, some now suspended, are spreading fake announcements and chaos as paid blue checkmarks become available. Again, all you got to do to get a blue check mark and impersonate someone famous is pay Elon eight bucks, quoting TechCrunch again. We've lost count of how many times Musk has changed his mind or offered contradictory claims about what a new paid $8 verification badge would do, but after pushing the feature live, fake accounts are seizing on the chaos. Twitter's bot blue check marks are now available for some paying subscribers, injecting the timeline with tweets that appear to be from official accounts. And apparently Musk's Twitter skeleton crew

made no meaningful changes to the visual language of the blue check. So right now, it signals that you're either really who you say you are at Coca-Cola, for instance, or you're somebody random who just coughed up $8 and got a stamp of approval. when tweets appear in Twitter's timeline, it's impossible to visually distinguish the two categories of blue check accounts from one another. Doing so would require clicking through to examine a user's follower account, which isn't necessarily a reliable way to tell, or searching for whatever clues might be found in their other tweets. Clicking on the checkmark itself from a profile page apparently displays different copy two, but like everything on Twitter right now, that is subject to

change. So far, this has resulted in some quick attention for an account impersonating LeBron James, which announced that the basketball star was requesting a trade away from the Los Angeles Lakers. A few other athletes got the same treatment, including baseball pitcher Ardollos Chapman and NHL player Connor McDavid. The implications for Twitter as a reliable news source and the potential for abuse here is massive. Musk held off on his haphazard plan until the day after the U.S. elections. But with many races not yet called, we can definitely expect to see confusion. That's orders of magnitude more consequential than a fake basketball trade. Misinformation potential aside, Musk's plan also undermines the presence of celebrities, one of the things that makes Twitter

interesting for the average user. If Twitter users can't even reliably find prominent people like athletes, politicians, and movie stars to follow, the platform's value is going to fall off a cliff pretty fast, with its advertising revenue not far behind, end quote. Apple plans to launch its emergency SOS with satellite features. in November and invest $450 million in U.S. companies to support the infrastructure required for this new service, with most of that money going to U.S. Company Global Star, quoting CNBC. Apple isn't taking an equity stake in Global Star, but it is committing to spend money for equipment and the services operations. The funds will pay for satellites, as well as equipping

ground stations with a new kind of antenna designed by Apple. In September, Apple announced emergency SOS with satellite as a banner feature on new iPhone 14 models. If users are out of range of a cellular tower, such as in a remote area while camping, they can still connect to emergency services by pointing their phone into the sky and connecting to one of 24 global star satellites in low Earth orbit. It will launch later this month through an iPhone software update. Thursday's announcement underscores the significant cost of operating the service. The feature is free for two years, but Apple has left open the possibility of charging for it after. that. The service is not entirely automated, and it requires human-staffed call centers.

Over 300 Global Star employees will work on the service, Apple said. Apple's payment to Global Star will come from Apple's Advanced Manufacturing Fund, a pool of money the company uses to support U.S.-based suppliers. Since the Advanced Manufacturing Fund was created in 2017, it has paid $450 million to Corning for iPhone glass production, $390 million to Finistar to outfit a factory to make laser components needed for Face ID, 100 million to XPO logistics and 10 million to copan diagnostics for COVID-19 test kit parts, end quote. GitHub is experimenting with, hey, GitHub, a voice-based interaction system that lets programmers code with just their voice in its $10 a month copilot tool. Quoting TechCrunch.

The new experiment will be available in co-pilot a $10 per month AI tool that GitHub launched earlier this year to help developers write code. Copilot suggests lines of code to developers inside their code editor, and it's capable of suggesting the next line of code as developers type in an integrated development environment IDE, like Visual Studio Code, NeoVim, and JetBrains IDEs. Co-Pilot can even suggest complete methods and complex algorithms alongside boilerplate code and assistance with unit testing. With the power of your voice, we're excited about the potential to bring the benefits of GitHub co-pilot to even more developers, including developers,

who have difficulty typing using their hands, explains GitHub in a blog post today. Hey, GitHub only reduces the need for a keyboard when coding within VS code for now, but we hope to expand its capabilities through further research and testing, end quote. The addition of voice-powered code creation will be particularly helpful for accessibility scenarios.

You'll be able to ask co-pilot to do things like move to different lines of code or navigate to methods or blocks with just your voice. You can even control Visual Studio code with commands like run the program or toggle Zen mode. If you want a summary of what a chunk of code does, you can even ask for a code summarization. This new voice system is being developed by GitHub Next, a team of researchers and engineers that, quote, investigates the future of software development. There's no guarantee it will

eventually launch as a full product, but the experiment certainly feels like an easy way of combining transcription, which is effectively white-label AI, into GitHub's co-pilot service. You can sign up to join the waitlist for, Hey, GitHub, today. GitHub is also planning to let businesses purchase and manage seat licenses for GitHub co-pilot. This will include admin controls for co-pilot that can manage the various settings across an organization. GitHub is opening up a waitlist for businesses to sign up today as well, end quote. Finally today from the Not Great Bob file, remember, it wasn't that long ago that we first talked about tech companies passing a trillion dollars in market cap for the first time. well, Amazon has become the world's first public company to lose a trillion dollars in market value,

going from a market cap of $1.88 trillion back in July of 2021 to around $879 billion today. Microsoft is actually close behind, having lost $889 billion itself since November 2021, quoting Bloomberg. Shares in the e-commerce and cloud company fell 4.3% on Wednesday, pushing its market value to about $879 billion from a record close at $1.88 trillion on July 2021. Amazon and Microsoft were neck and neck in the race to breach the unwelcome milestone. The world's largest online retailer has spent this year adjusting to a sharp slowdown and e-commerce growth as shoppers resumed pre-pandemic habits.

Its shares have fallen almost 50% amid slowing sales, soaring costs, and a jump in interest rates. Since the start of the year, co-founder Jeff Bezos has seen his fortune dwindle by about $83 billion, to a mere $109 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Last month, Amazon projected the slowest revenue growth for a holiday quarter in the company's history as shoppers reduce their spending in the face of economic uncertainty. That sent its market value below $1 trillion for the first time since the pandemic-fueled rally in tech stocks more than two years ago, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.