Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 12/29 – Coinbase To Suspend Trading of XRP

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

Coinbase is suspending trading of XRP. Ant Group tries to appease the CCP. Will we soon see immunity passports on our phones? We now know the identity of the first tech IPO of the new year. And why, if you’re doing to do some dirt, you might want to know that your car is probably going to bust your alibi. Sponsors: CalderaLab.com code: TECHMEME (all caps, one word) Tovala.com/ride Links: Coinbase to Suspend XRP Trading Following SEC Suit Against Ripple (CoinDesk) Ant Considers Holding Company With Regulation Similar to Bank, Sources Say (Bloomberg) Los Angeles Vaccine Recipients Can Put the Proof in Apple Wallet (Bloomberg) Qualtrics Files for U.S. IPO Two Years After Sale to SAP (Bloomberg) Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects' alibis (NBC News) TV Ratings: First Streaming-Only NFL Game Scores Solid Numbers for Amazon (Variety) Link to the AMA Auction with Andrew Wilkinson and Chris Sparling:  https://lu.ma/tinyama Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Techmeme ride home for Tuesday, December 29th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Coinbase is suspending trading of XRP. Ant Group tries to appease the CCP. Will we soon see immunity passports on our phones? We now know the identity of the first tech IPO of the new year and why, if you're going to do some dirt, you might want to know that your car is probably the thing that's going to bust your alibi. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, this was exactly the fear, right? Coinbase has announced that it will suspend trading of XRP on January 19th following the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple, quoting CoinDesk.

Coinbase first listed XRP on its retail-facing platforms in February 2019. Starting now, XRP trading, quote, will move into limit only, Coinbase wrote. It will be fully suspended on Tuesday, January 19th, 2021 at 1 p.m. Eastern time, quote, we will continue to monitor legal developments related to XRP and update our customers as more information becomes available. Paul Gruel. Coinbase's chief legal officer wrote in a blog post shared in advance with CoinDisc. Coinbase said users' exrp wallets will, quote, remain available for receive and withdrawal functionality after the trading suspension, end quote. Notably, the exchange said it will still support an upcoming air drop of Spark tokens to XRP holders. XRP will still be

be supported by Coinbase custody and in the self-custodial Coinbase wallet. Coinbase declined to comment beyond its written statement, end quote. So the reason in exchange wouldn't want to touch XRP right now is because if the government has its way with a lawsuit and XRP is found to be a security, then there would be a lot more paperwork and regulation involved to create a market and platform to trade for it. Coinbase might be in exchange, but from a legalistic perspective, it's not the same sort of exchange as, say, e-trade or Robin Hood is. Might seem like I'm splitting hairs, but these are important legalistic hairs, especially for just one single cryptocurrency.

Easier if you're a platform just to drop that one currency. Alex Kruger, a trader and analyst said, quote, crypto exchanges are unregistered with the SEC by choice, as registering carries on many burdens and increased costs, and thus it is in their best interest to not offer trading of securities. It is for their protection, not their customers, end quote. In Coinbase's case, it has the added pressure that it hopes to IPO soon, so, you know, they're in take-no-chances mode. The question now is whether or not Coinbase will be a bellwether. Will other exchanges soon drop XRP as well? And this story continues to roll on. Sources are telling Bloomberg that

Ant Group is planning to fold its financial operations into a separate holding company that could possibly be more easily regulated like a bank, quoting. The operations that Ant is looking to fold into the holding company include wealth management services, consumer lending, insurance, payments, and MyBank, an online lender in which Ant is the largest shareholder, the people said. Under the financial holding company structure, Ant's businesses would likely be subject to more capital restrictions potentially curbing its ability to lend more and expand at the pace of the last few years. That said, the proposals suggest Ant would still be able to operate in financial

services beyond its payments business, quelling investor concern about how to interpret the central bank's Sunday message when it asked Ant to return to its roots as a payments provider. This means China is still trying to encourage domestic consumption, and they need platforms like Ant to help with consumer loans, said Wang Zhen, a Shanghai-based analyst with UOBK-Hine holdings. The key is that consumer lending shouldn't be over leveraged, end quote. On this news, SoftBank Group rose 4.5% the most of more than two weeks. Alibaba Group holding rose 5.7% in Hong Kong, the most since November 5th. The Japanese company is the largest shareholder in Alibaba, a major backer of Ant, end quote.

To underline what's going on here again, quoting at Bloomberg Quint on Twitter, two months ago, investors were on the cusp of a massive windfall from what would have been the world's largest IPO. Now the hundreds of millions of dollars invested with Ant Group are in jeopardy, end quote. And quoting Taisu Zhang on Twitter, quote, Thing is, Ant never would have become so overwhelmingly large in the first place without years of government support. And now that it's starting to grow out of, of control, the government has to take apart its own creation. A real modern-day Frankenstein story, end quote. It feels like a whole lifetime ago now, but remember earlier just this year,

when it briefly seemed like Apple and Google had teamed up to maybe help us all beat the coronavirus by offering contact tracing APIs? Yeah, that didn't exactly take off like some of us thought. Like, I just this morning got my monthly update from the exposure notification service on my iPhone. It's locked in through the New York State tracing app, but it hasn't exactly been the tool that I had been imagining back in April or whenever that was. Well, will there be a bigger uptake for something like this? As we hopefully head toward the light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel, Los Angeles County has announced it is partnering with Health Vana to allow COVID-19 vaccine recipients to be able to show their vaccine status in services like Apple Wallet. Quoting Bloomberg. It's initially geared toward ensuring people receive both doses of the two-shot regimens that have been authorized in the U.S., including through follow-up notifications before a second appointment.

It will also give recipients a way to verify that they have been vaccinated, which they can put into an Apple wallet or competing Google platform, quote, to prove to airlines, to prove to schools, to prove to whoever needs it, said HealthVana Chief Executive Officer Rahman Bastani. Los Angeles-based Health Vana, founded in late 2014, runs a software platform that delivers test results to patients for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. It began working with the county earlier this year to provide COVID-19 test results to patients. While the immunizations are being tracked in registries, public health officials there also saw a need to give patients ownership of their own records, Jara Shos said. They will receive a paper card tracking which vaccine they received and when, but that could be

easily lost. Healthvana is also in discussions with concert venues, employers, universities, and schools about applying this technology, quote, anyone who has a large number of people interacting with them, Bistani said. But he believes it's unlikely anyone such service will become the standard, end quote. So back when I was doing that daily coronavirus briefing podcast in the mornings, we early on talked about this idea of immunity passports. This is maybe a step in that direction, as Avery Truffleman said recently on Twitter, quote, Will there be a stretch of time when nurses and doctors and teachers get to take over our cities and have all the bars and clubs and movie theaters to themselves while the rest of us wait for the vaccine?

I am here for this, end quote. I think we now know what will be the first tech IPO of the new year. Qualtricks has filed for a public offering, planning to sell shares that could value the company as high as $14.4 billion. They're looking to price in the $20 to $24 range, so keep that in mind, since they're a software company, this could be the first test as to whether or not the whole IPO tech mania is going to continue into the new year, quoting Bloomberg. SAP agreed to pay $8 billion for Qualtricks, which makes customer survey software in November

2018 in its biggest ever deal in an effort to compete with rivals such as Salesforce, taking Qualtrix public marks a shift in SAP strategy under CEO Christian Klein, who secured the top job at the company in April. When former CEO Bill McDermott announced the purchase, topping off a $26 billion acquisition spree to push SAP into cloud-based software and services, investors sent its shares down 4.7 percent as they balked at the price tag. SAP is seeking to maintain ownership of at least three quarters of Qualtricks after the IPO, Bloomberg News reported in July. Qualtrix reported a net loss of $258 million on total revenue of $550 million for the nine months through September compared to a net loss of $860 million on revenue of $418 million in the same period

a year earlier. The loss in 2019 is partly attributable to the one-time cost of paying employees for their shares in cash at the time of the acquisition, according to people familiar with the matter, end quote. We've talked at length many times in the past about the ability of authorities to track your location using your cell phone. There are fairly defined laws now around what can and cannot be used from your phone without a warrant. But a warning. For those of you looking to get your crime on, be aware that police have come to rely more heavily on car sensor and information system data, including GPS and call records when they want to challenge people's alibis. Why? There are currently looser privacy standards for cars.

quoting NBC News. In recent years, investigators have realized that automobiles, particularly newer models, can be a treasure trove of digital evidence. Their onboard computers generate and store data that can be used to reconstruct where a vehicle has been and what its passengers were doing. They reveal everything from location, speed, and acceleration to when doors were opened and closed, whether texts and calls were made while the cell phone was plugged into the infotainment system, as well as voice commands and web histories. But that boon, from the phone for forensic investigators creates fear for privacy activists who warned that the lack of information security baked into vehicles, computers, poses a risk to consumers and who call for safeguards to be put

in place. Quote, I hear a lot of analogies of cars being smartphones on wheels, but that's vastly reductive, said Andrea Amico, founder of privacy for cars, which makes a free app that helps people delete their data from automobiles and makes its money by offering the service to rental companies and dealerships. If you think about the amount of sensors in a car, the smartphone is a toy. A car has GPS, an accelerometer, a camera, a car will know how much you weigh. Most people don't realize this is happening, end quote. Law enforcement agencies have been focusing their investigative efforts on two main information sources, the telemetrics system, which is like the black box, and the infotainment system. The telematics system stores a vehicle's turn-by-turn navigation,

speed, acceleration, and deceleration information, as well as more granular clues such as when and where the lights were switched on, the doors were open, seatbelts were put on, and airbags were deployed. The infotainment system records recent destinations, call logs, contact lists, text messages, emails, pictures, videos, web histories, voice commands, and social media feeds. It can also keep track of the phones that have been connected to the vehicle via USB cable or Bluetooth, as well as all the apps installed on the device. together the data allows investigators to reconstruct the vehicle's journey and paint a picture of driver and passenger behavior. In a criminal case, the sequence of doors opening and seatbelts being inserted could help show that a suspect had an accomplice, say.

But compared with the security on smartphones, the security on the systems is much flimsyer, digital forensic and privacy experts say. Drivers typically don't have to unlock a vehicle's infotainment system with a passcode or a fingerprint as they do with smartphones. That means that with a warrant, law enforcement officials can sometimes extract incriminating text messages, calls, or files from an automobile far more easily than they could from a suspect's cell phone. Quote, if you've committed some heinous crime and we can't get into your phone, we can get peripheral data that has been synced to your car, an expert said. The contact list, calls made, text messages, and almost any criminal investigation, communication with the victim or co-conspirators is hugely important. taking that with the telemetrics you get, how many people were in the car, how many doors open, and it all paints a strong picture, end quote. Startups have arisen to sell toolkits to authorities to harvest the data from cars.

There are currently zero federal laws regulating what automakers can collect or do with the data your car generates. A hacker known as Green the Only recently showed how he could access personal details and passwords from buying used infotainment computers for Tesla cars on eBay. And think about it. As cars become even more automated going forward with self-driving parking and all sorts of other smart features coming down the pike, even more sensors will be added to cars and thus even more data. Finally today, the first ever NFL game streamed exclusively happened recently. If you wanted to watch Saturday's match between the 49ers and the Cardinals, your only option to do so,

was to stream it, either on Amazon, Twitch, Verizon, the NFL, or the two teams' individual platforms. And the numbers were encouraging, at least if you're a fan of streaming. The game saw an average minute audience of 4.8 million, almost as much as traditional TV viewership, quoting variety. For comparison, games which aired only on the NFL network have averaged around 5.6 million viewers so far this season, meaning the potential streaming drop-off doesn't seem to be all that big. The NFL is touting that $4.8 million as the largest ever average-minute audience, which represents the closest streaming metric to traditional ratings measurements for an NFL

regular season game. The league estimated that a total of 11.2 million viewers tuned in to see Kyler Murray and the Cardinals failed to make a push for the playoffs, following 20 to 12 to a 49ers team led by C.J. Bethard. With local stations in San Francisco and Phoenix factored in, the average minute audience rose to 5.9 million viewers. Along with the news that the December 26 matchup would become the first streaming-only game in NFL history, Amazon also announced plans back in late November to stream CBS's broadcast of the NFL Wildcard playoff game on January 10th of next year to Prime members in the U.S. That will be the first post-season NFL game to be simulcast on Prime Video.

Earlier this year, the streamer signed an expanded digital rights deal for the league's Thursday night football package. The pact included a three-year extension through 2022 that includes one additional exclusive late-season NFL game for each season that won't be on traditional TV networks in the U.S., end quote. So if you've been listening to this show for any period of time, I'm sure you know Tiny. They've been a sponsor of the show from basically day one. But also, full disclosure, Tiny was the lead investor when we raised our seed round for Ride Home Media almost exactly a year ago now. If you don't know more about Tiny, they're led by Andrew Wilkinson and Chris Sparling to amazing investors who just teamed up this month with hedge fund guru Bill Ackman to spin out their own SPAC as a holding company for their investments. I'm telling you all of this because Andrew and Chris are hosting a two-hour Ask Us Anything session this Thursday, Thursday, December 31st at 1 p.m. Eastern 10 a.m. Pacific Time. They're doing this for charity. There are 25 tickets available to the highest bidders.

If you want to pick the brains of two of the smartest up-and-coming investors in the world, I've got a link at the bottom of the show notes that will allow you to bid for tickets. quoting from the event description. Grill us like grilled cheese on how we built tiny from flailing digital agency to a family of 30-plus profitable internet companies worth over a billion dollars over the past 15 years. Tickets go to the highest bidders and all proceeds will be donated to One Up Victoria. We will also be opening up a few seats for students. Please tweet at us on Twitter for access, end quote. Good guys, Andrew and Chris.

smart guys worth picking their brains for sure. Andrew and Chris apparently first met Bill Ackman when they won a similar charity auction for lunch with Ackman to pick his brains. So, you know, circle of life kind of stuff. Look into this. It should definitely be worth your while. Talk to you tomorrow.