Monero, Samourai, Wasabi, OpenBazaar were cited as threats in a Europol report.
Read more Bitcoin’s price has remained remarkably resilient despite recent dispiriting news; Ethereum fees dip.
Read more As the European Union gets more serious about a digital euro, most central bank digital currencies intend to remove the anonymity of cash.
Read more The credit card industry in India appears to be stuck. According to industry estimates, between 30 million to 35 million people in the country today have at least one credit card, with up to 58 million being in circulation. Compare this to almost 1 billion debit cards.
One reason the vast majority of the population has not made the cut is because they don’t have a credit score. And so few people have a credit score because banks and credit card companies still rely on age-old methodologies to determine someone’s creditworthiness. For example most banks in India are only comfortable issuing credit cards to individuals who have full-time employment with one of a few hundred companies listed in dated spreadsheets the banks maintain.
Nitin Gupta, a veteran in the financial services business, has co-founded Uni
Nitin Gupta, through his new startup Uni, wants to address some of these issues. And he is one of the few individuals in the country who is positioned to do it. He co-founded PayU India, and then ran ride-hailing firm Ola’s financial services business.
During his tenure at PayU, the startup established a dominance in the payments processing business in the country. And at Ola, he launched Olamoney Postpaid, a service that allows customers to pay for their rides at a later stage. Olamoney, which was valued at $250 million last year, is now one of the largest financial services businesses in the country.
Serious VCs are now willing to bet on Gupta’s new venture.
On Tuesday, Uni announced it has raised $18.5 million in its seed financing round led by Lightspeed and Accel . The startup currently does not have a product, but it took Gupta only two months in the middle of a global pandemic to raise what is one of the largest seed financing rounds in India.
Jayanth Kolla, founder and chief analyst at consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst, said, an “$18.5 million seed funding for a two-month old startup without even a product or an MVP yet — basis purely on the founder’s credentials and history — is the first instance of a pure-play Silicon Valley type funding in India.”
In an interview with TechCrunch, Gupta said at Uni he is joined by two more senior executives — Laxmikant Vyas and Prateek Jindal — who have stellar records in the financial services business.
He declined to reveal what exactly Uni’s product — or line of products — would look like, but suggested that Uni is building the modern age consumer credit card.
“It would seem very obvious when it comes out, and people will wonder why nobody else thought of it,” he said, adding that he is working with multiple banks on partnerships.
The adoption of digital payments has grown exponentially in the country in the last five years, but the credit card business is still struggling to make inroads, he said, adding that he sees an opportunity to expand the credit card base to 200 million over the next five years.
“Nitin and Uni’s team are passionate about unlocking the power of financial services for millions of Indian consumers using new tech-powered solutions,” Bejul Somaia, a partner at Lightspeed India, said. “We are excited about their mission and proud to support them from day one.”
Cybersecurity entrepreneur and crypto personality John McAfee’s wild ride could be coming to an end after he was arrested in Spain today, and now faces extradition to the U.S. over charges spanning tax evasion and fraud.
The SEC accuses McAfee of being paid more than $23.1 million worth of cryptocurrency assets for promoting a number of ICO token sales without disclosing that he was being paid to do so. Furthermore the DOJ has levied a number of counts of tax evasion against McAfee, saying that he “willfully attempted to evade” payment of income taxes owed to the federal government.
In a brief announcing the arrest and unsealing of indictment documents, the DOJ also details that the charges are confined to McAfee the individual and that they did not find any connection with the “anti-virus company bearing his name.”
The DOJ’s charges against McAfee are a bit dry, but detail 10 counts against the entrepreneur. McAfee faced five counts of tax evasion, which each carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison, as well as five counts of “willful failure to file a tax return,” each carrying a maximum penalty of one year in prison.
The SEC filing is a much more interesting read, with 55 pages detailing a lengthy investigation into McAfee’s alleged fraudulent activity promoting a number of ICOs throughout 2017 and 2018. The report specifically notes that McAfee allegedly received more than $11.6 million worth of BTC and ETH tokens for promoting seven ICOs. Unfortunately, those offerings were not named in the suit. He additionally received $11.5 million worth of the promoted tokens, the suit alleges.
We have reached out to John McAfee for comment.
Venmo’s first credit card is here, a former Amazon employee is arrested for fraud and we review the Nest Audio smart speaker. This is your Daily Crunch for October 5, 2020.
The big story: Venmo launches a credit card
PayPal -owned mobile payment app Venmo already offers a Mastercard-branded debit card, and it announced a year ago that it was planning to launch its first credit card as well. Today, it made good on that promise.
The Venmo Credit Card is a Visa card that offers personalized rewards and 3% cash back on eligible purchases. The cards come in five colors and include the user’s own Venmo QR code on the front.
Naturally, it also integrates with Venmo, allowing customers to track their spending and make payments from the mobile app. The card is currently available to select Venmo users, with plans to launch for the rest of the U.S. in the coming months.
The tech giants
Feds arrest former Amazon employee after company reported him to FBI for fraud — The company says it reported Vu Anh Nguyen to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2020 over allegations of falsely issuing refunds for products ordered on Amazon .com to himself and his associates.
Nest Audio review — Brian Heater says it’s a welcome update to the Google Home.
Instagram expands shopping on IGTV, plans test of shopping on Reels — The product lets you watch a video, then purchase the featured product with a few taps.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Ola fails to get ride-hailing license renewed in London, says it will appeal and continues to operate — The India-based ride-hailing startup is not getting its Transport for London ride-hailing license renewed after failing to meet public safety requirements around licensing for drivers and vehicles.
Cooler Screens raises $80M to bring interactive screens into cooler aisles — Cooler Screens is led by co-founder and CEO Arsen Avakian, who previously was founder and CEO of Argo Tea.
GrubMarket raises $60M as food delivery stays center stage — The startup provides a platform for consumers to order produce and other food and home items for delivery, as well as a service supplying grocery stores, meal-kit companies and other food tech startups with products for resale.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Accel VCs Sonali De Rycker and Andrew Braccia say European deal pace is ‘incredibly active’ — De Rycker’s comments point to a future where there is no single center of startup gravity.
Two Kindred Capital partners discuss the firm’s focus and equitable venture model — The London-based VC, which backs early-stage founders in Europe and Israel, recently closed its second seed fund at £81 million.
(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Camera that will film a spacewalk in VR delivered to the International Space Station — The camera will be used to film a spacewalk in immersive, cinematic VR for the first time ever on an upcoming ISS astronaut mission.
Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Away’ deftly balances space exploration and human drama — I worried that the show might be a bit too weepy and melodramatic, but I was wrong.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
With the president hospitalized, his doctors evading basic questions and an election 29 days away, chaos reigned after Trump tested positive for the virus that’s killed more than 200,000 Americans. Now, after a four-day stay at Walter Reed medical center, the president said he will return to the White House. But more questions than answers remain.
Unlike a normal residence, the White House has its own medical unit, offering “full-time” care and facilities for emergency surgery, including the ability to administer supplemental oxygen — which he previously received at the White House — and even a crash cart for resuscitation.
If the president leaves the hospital Monday evening, the situation could become even more opaque. Trump is eager to return to an image of normalcy, but he’s still a high-risk patient in the throes of a wildly unpredictable and deadly virus that seldom charts a linear course to recovery. And because it’s clear that Trump is eager to feign normalcy at any cost with less than a month to go before the election, his return to the White House is not a reliable sign that he’s anywhere near being in the clear.
One result of obfuscating the president’s health? The internet is left to eagerly fill in the gaps.
Top-down misinformation
Doctors provided the first update about the status of Trump’s health on Saturday, but that event backfired, with White House Physician Dr. Sean Conley later admitting that he omitted information in order to keep the president’s spirits high. Conley also threw the timeline of Trump’s diagnosis into question — confusion that’s only been partially resolved since.
The White House’s coronavirus outbreak is a big opening for opportunists, according to Yonder, an AI company that monitors online conversations and tracks disinformation. In an online info ecosystem the company says is “broken,” a fresh crisis is rocket fuel for false claims and conspiracies.
“From groups suggesting the diagnosis was a hoax for political gain to QAnon supporters suggesting it was all part of a plan to isolate and protect the President from his adversaries in the ‘deep state,’ social media continues to act as a weaponized rumor mill,” Yonder CEO Jonathon Morgan said.
“In every case, agenda-driven groups on social media are using another national crisis to their advantage, and obscuring the truth in the process.”
On Friday, left-leaning conspiracy theories like #TrumpCovidHoax posited that the president wasn’t actually sick with COVID at all, suggesting he might have been malingering to elicit sympathy or avoid facing off with Joe Biden after a disastrous debate performance just days earlier.
Those beliefs are still rampant on social media even as the White House’s COVID-19 outbreak sidelines Trump’s own press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and campaign manager Bill Stepien, with the chaos threatening to take Trump’s reelection campaign completely off the rails.
‘Dire’ real-world effects
Hubris about the basic facts of the virus is undeniably what got the White House into this mess to begin with. Last week, a study by Cornell University found that President Trump is indeed the nexus of misinformation about the pandemic, with mentions of his name driving 38% of the broader COVID-19 misinformation ecosystem.
“The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid,” the study’s lead author Sarah Evanega said of the results. “That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”
Those dire real-world implications took root over the weekend, as the virus threatened the president’s health seriously enough that his treatment team administered at least three powerful experimental treatments: the monoclonal antibody therapy Regeneron, which is still in clinical trials and not broadly available, the antiviral drug Remdesivir and the steroid Dexamethasone, which is prescribed in severe COVID-19 cases.
Hydroxychloroquine isn’t part of his current drug cocktail, but the unproven COVID treatment the president touted — and took — earlier this year is again making the rounds online among some of the his supporters who are urging doctors to throw it into the mix.
Stella Immanuel, who was central to the “America’s Frontline Doctors” viral video that pushed false claims about COVID-19 treatments earlier this year, tweeted Friday that “Whoever told the president to stop taking HCQ should be punched in the face.”
In July, Trump called Immanuel an “important voice” who had “tremendous success” treating the virus before claiming that he is not familiar with her moments later.
Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs also tweeted his support for hydroxychloroquine in the president’s treatment, in spite of the fact that the drug has not been shown to effectively fight the virus.
Circles promoting the pervasive pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon have their own ideas about the president’s condition, even viewing Trump’s announcement that he had the virus as a “breadcrumb” encoding a secret message about Hillary Clinton. On Friday, 17 Republicans refused to support a bipartisan House measure condemning QAnon.
QAnon supporter DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, who ran a failed bid for Congress, suggested that Trump actually contracted the virus from a microphone at Tuesday’s debate rather than from his open disregard for mask-wearing and social distancing, two measures the CDC and global health experts say effectively reduce transmission.
I’m just going to say what we’re all thinking.
Trump was fine until the debate, where they set up microphones & podiums for him.
Incubation period is usually 2-3 days.
He tests positive a couple of days after the debate.
I put nothing past the left. NOTHING.#TrumpHasCOVID
— DeAnna Lorraine
(@DeAnna4Congress) October 2, 2020
While misinformation is thriving in the absence of answers about the president’s health, factual medical advice emerged in at least one place amidst the chaos. After initially publishing — and then removing — facts about airborne transmission of the virus, the CDC added that information back to its website on Monday.
According to the CDC’s new guidance, which reflects scientific consensus, the virus can linger in the air for “minutes to hours” and infect people more than six feet away.
The fintech industry is on a tear. Popular consumer services like Robinhood to Coinbase and Revolut have managed to attract millions of customers, but the most interesting trend right now is embedded finance.
Tech companies that don’t necessarily provide financial services can embed services from fintech companies directly in their products. At the same time, fintech companies can find a new distribution channel by providing financial products outside of their main product. They don’t necessarily need a consumer product anymore.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, we talked about this trend and the most important changes in the fintech industry with three experts — Hope Cochran, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group (and former King CFO), Ruth Foxe Blader, a partner at Anthemis, and John Locke, a partner at Accel.
Banking as a service: Every tech company is potentially a fintech company
We started the conversation by talking about banking as a service. For entrepreneurs hoping to launch a fintech company, there are many regulatory requirements and it can take a while to set up the infrastructure.
“If the intention is to offer something else and it happens that you need fintech infrastructure, then it makes no sense to build it yourself,” Cochran said. “They should utilize the banking-as-a-service model. But maybe their intention is to create a true fintech and the secret sauce is to build it.”
Even in the latter case, it doesn’t mean that founders shouldn’t consider banking as a service for the very beginning of their company, as it can serve as a bridge before switching to their own infrastructure.
“But the problem with building it yourself is that it takes years to get it out there and get through the regulatory hurdles and you can’t see if your product and idea are actually working. So if you want to get to market much faster and iterate and see if you’ve hit upon something that will work on the market, I think banking as a service is a really important tool,” Cochran said.
Locke doubled down on that idea and described banking as a service as a massive opportunity for an entire wave of entrepreneurs, but if you don’t launch your product fast enough, another entrepreneur will find a way to enter the market more quickly.
US President Donald Trump tweeted today that he’ll leave Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at 6:30 p.m. after a three-day stay.
The question now: With the campaign in full swing, will Trump remain isolated in the White House as government scientists advise, or will he exempt himself from the rules?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a covid-19 patient should remain in “isolation” until he or she has met all of the following criteria:
- At least 10 days have passed since symptom onset
- At least 24 hours have passed since resolution of fever without the use of fever-reducing medications
- Other symptoms have improved
Isolation means minimum contact with anyone else—and in Trump’s case that would mean no in-person meetings, no donor events, and no rallies, for at least another week. The reason is simple: doctors think people recovering from covid-19 could continue shedding the virus and infecting others for some time.
“Yes, he should isolate,” says Walid Gellad, a professor of medicine, health policy, and management at the University of Pittsburgh.
If Trump follows scientific advice, he’ll have to stay largely alone until at least October 12, just three weeks before the general election. If he doesn’t, the president could be open to accusations that he’s putting others at risk.
Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, told Fox News that the president “is ready to get back to a normal working schedule.” The President later tweeted “Will be back on the Campaign Trail soon!!!”
But even 10 days away from the campaign trail might not be enough to eliminate risk to other people. The World Health Organization says isolation in symptomatic patients should last at least 13 days and mandates at least three entirely symptom-free days before normal activities resume.
Another criterion sometimes used for ending isolation is two negative PCR tests, taken one day apart. It’s not known whether Trump has yet tested negative.
“Remember, ‘isolation’ does not mean ‘locked down,’ ” says Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of Emory University School of Medicine. “The president will need to follow the CDC guidance on coming out of isolation, [but] he can be isolated at home or in the hospital. Isolation simply means that you separate the ill person.”
The White House is equipped to provide medical care and private space, but isolation is still easier to achieve in a hospital, where doctors and nurses working on covid wards wear masks, goggles, and fluid-proof gowns.
“One reason to stay in the hospital would be to ensure proper isolation and control of who and how people come into contact with him, which presumably would be much less feasible at the White House,” says Gellad. “They could ‘send him to stay in his room,’ but [I] doubt that would happen.”
The administration has been eager to show Trump in charge and at work, distributing photos of him at a big desk while in the hospital.
So it’s easy to imagine the White House disregarding isolation recommendations, just as it dispensed with wearing masks. The building is now the center of a super-cluster of coronavirus cases that’s affecting a widening circle of staff, advisors, Republican officials, and journalists.
After he tested positive on Thursday, Trump’s doctors threw the most powerful drugs they had at him, including an advanced antibody drug still in trials and a steroid usually reserved for the most severe covid-19 cases.
By Sunday, Trump was already breaking quarantine by jumping into a motorcade to wave to supporters gathered outside the hospital. Today he tweeted, “I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
Outside observers can’t say whether Trump is returning to the White House because he’s actually recovering quickly or eager to project strength for the public. Conflicting statements from the administration and Trump’s doctors have added to doubts about when the president first tested positive, when he began feeling ill, how serious his illness is, and whether the White House moved quickly enough to stop his schedule of appearances.
If the White House and his doctors strictly do adhere to CDC recommendations, however, it could provide a clue to the actual timeline. “If they tell us when those 10 days [of isolation] end, that also means they tell us when symptoms really started,” Gellad says.
Space exploration is a long-term endeavor. It takes many years and boatloads of money to get a single spacecraft off the ground and out of Earth’s atmosphere. Getting it to destinations outside the planet’s orbit is even trickier. And if the plan is to send humans along for the ride, you can expect development to take longer than most US presidential terms.
That’s a problem, given that the executive office is in charge of shaping the US space program and its overall goals: when different administrations have different ideas on what to prioritize, the space program faces whiplash that creates chaos and slows projects down. In just this century, NASA has seen its focus shift from the moon to Mars and back to the moon. In 2005, President Bush said we were gearing up to go to the moon with the Constellation program. In 2010, President Obama said we were headed to Mars. In 2017, President Trump decided it was actually the moon again.
With less than a month to go until an election that could lead to a new administration under Joe Biden, the space community is bracing itself for yet another possible pivot. The circumstances once again highlight the need to stabilize the US space program so it has the support it needs to pursue projects and achieve goals, secure that they won’t be abruptly upended by the whims of a new president.
The next four years are critical. Under Artemis, NASA’s program to return humans to the moon, we’re seeing the development of technologies like lunar spacesuits, lunar habitation modules, landers, rovers, Gateway (a lunar space station designed to enable human exploration in deep space), and tons of other new technologies meant to make moon missions work. Only some would be immediately suitable for a Martian environment, and others that are adaptable would need time to redevelop and test. A new shift would be a disruption worse than any NASA has faced in recent memory.
The Biden campaign has released almost no details about space policies—hardly a surprise given all the calamities affecting the country at the moment. “So we’re completely left to speculate here,” says Casey Dreier, a space policy expert with the Planetary Society. “Nothing is technically off the table.”
Biden was vice president under Obama, so one might reason he’d want to see NASA shift its focus back to Mars. But the Democratic Party platform released during the party’s convention in August stated: “We support NASA’s work to return Americans to the moon and go beyond to Mars, taking the next step in exploring our solar system.”
With this explicit endorsement for a crewed mission to the moon, it seems highly unlikely that a Biden administration would cancel Artemis. And at this point, it might not be able to even if it wanted. “A lot of hard work has been done to build a coalition and orient NASA toward this goal,” says Dreier. When Bush’s Constellation program was nixed, it was still in a very early stage of development, marred by many technical and logistical problems. With Artemis “you don’t have a ton of similar problems,” says Dreier. The Orion deep-space capsule and the Space Launch System (the biggest rocket ever to be built by humans) originated under the Obama-era Journey to Mars program, but they are much more mature in their development at this point, and they fit neatly into a lunar exploration program.
Still, that doesn’t mean Artemis would stay totally intact under Joe Biden. The 2024 deadline to return to the moon seems very unrealistic for even the most vocal lunar exploration advocates. SLS is still unfinished. Gateway won’t be ready for human habitation until after 2024. NASA still doesn’t know what lander would actually ferry its astronauts to the lunar surface, with several different companies vying to have their proposed concepts selected. The winner would have less than four years to build and prepare the technology for a 2024 moon landing.
What we might see from a Biden administration is not so much a shift away from the moon as a decision to push the timeline back a few years, with a more specific eye toward Mars later on. The Democratic leadership for the House Science Committee wanted to propose exactly that. In January the committee put forward a bill for the 2020 NASA Authorization Act that would reschedule an Artemis crewed landing for no later than 2028. It would direct NASA to develop its own lunar lander instead of using one built and developed privately, and would require the lander to run through at least two flight tests before being used for a human mission, putting NASA back into a classic aerospace development process and limiting the role of public-private partnerships for Artemis. It would also call for a less extensive exploration program, deemphasizing activities like lunar resource mining in favor of activities that would enable missions to Mars. The bill calls for NASA to follow up with a crewed Mars orbit mission as early as 2033.
“Let me be crystal clear: this bill is not about rejecting the Artemis program or delaying humans on the moon until 2028,” Congresswoman Kendra Horn, chair of the subcommittee and lead sponsor of the bill, said in January. “NASA can still work to safely get there sooner.” Horn was arguing for a more “fiscally responsible approach” to getting NASA back to the moon given the lack of many specific details that are needed for a crewed landing. She also sought to provide more specific wording tying a lunar exploration program to a bigger effort to make a Mars journey possible.
The bill is not without criticism, especially since it doesn’t really put forward any new funding to explicitly enable a Mars mission so soon after a 2028 lunar landing.
“After years of me and so many others urging NASA to get out of [low Earth orbit] and go back to the moon and this time to stay, it would be too much to bear to now watch at close range it being ruined by a Mars fantasy, probably while other nations make a lunar land rush,” former NASA engineer and current National Space Council User Advisory Group member Homer Hickam commented online in January. And NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has raised concerns that shrinking the role of public-private partnerships would restrict the sort of flexibility that could actually allow NASA to find technologies necessary for returning to the moon and going to Mars.
In spite of those disagreements, the bill shows that “fundamentally, the moon seems to be accepted by both Democratic and Republican apparatuses for being a step toward Mars,” Dreier says. For a couple of years after Trump was elected, there was a sense that Mars was a Democratic destination and the moon was a Republican one. Being pro-Mars or pro-moon felt like a partisan issue.
That’s not the case anymore. “I’ve been surprised at how quickly the moon became accepted by even pro-Mars folks,” says Dreier. “It may have been an acknowledgment of the political realities.” Many now seem to concede that Obama’s ambitious direct-to-Mars plan was inadequately prepared or funded. A moon program can build momentum that could be applied later to Mars.
As usual, money is the issue. The lack of secure, long-term funding means NASA has never been able to plan well in advance how to run a proposed program for deep-space exploration. “The policy decision on how much money to give to the space program has been inconsistent with the ambitions stated for the space program,” says John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University. “We’ve consistently underfunded our space goals. What we’ve been wanting to do since Apollo, in my view, is wanting a program that we’re not willing to pay for.”
But the solution isn’t rocket science. “The trick is to get everybody to recognize what the overarching long-term goals are, and think about what programs contribute to those,” says James Vedda, a policy analyst at the Aerospace Corporation. “If you agree on what the endgame should be, that will bring more stability to the US space program.”
NASA’s budget is subject to instability year after year, in spite of the fact that its programs require several years’ worth of work. “Even five years is short-term,” says Vedda. Creating multi-year appropriations that provide funding for more than just a single fiscal year could help those programs survive changes in government. To keep Congress from feeling overwhelmed, Vedda suggests splitting NASA’s budget between year-to-year items checked annually, and long-term programs that are revisited once every two years or so.
There have been numerous proposals over the decades to make reforms like these. “And they always get shot down,” says Vedda. People in Congress, he says, are afraid of losing control and oversight of the agency through multi-year budgets. As a result, NASA personnel are left in a precarious situation of figuring out how to make programs like Artemis work without proper financial and political security.
Whether it’s Biden or Trump in the White House next year, neither the moon nor Mars will be achievable anytime soon unless the US space program is firmly insulated from partisan debates and changing administrations. “Of course the space community would love that—wouldn’t anybody,” says Logsdon. “But that’s not the way the system works.” Not yet, anyway.