Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Less than two months after Coinbase’s stock market debut, rival crypto exchange Kraken is bringing its mobile app to the U.S. as retail investors flock to digital currencies. Starting Wednesday, the new Kraken App will allow many users across the U.S. to securely buy and sell more than 50 crypto tokens from their mobile phones.”This consumer app is our first major foray into supporting wider consumer adoption in a much more simplified, easy-to-use interface,” Chief Product Officer Jeremy Welch told CNBC. The app launched in Europe earlier this year.In terms of trading volume, Kraken is the world’s fourth-largest digital currency exchange.In a crowded field of cryptocurrency apps, Kraken claims to offer “the lowest fees in the industry.” It points to its speedy verification and onboarding times as a key benefit. The fastest onboarding and purchase test is under a minute, depending on the user’s bank.Outside the U.S., Kraken is popular because of its margin and futures trading offerings, which are not yet available to U.S. consumers. Launched in 2013, Kraken says it has 7 million clients. It said its May trading volume grew more than sixfold from January.”The last five months have been pretty unreal at Kraken,” said Welch. “We’ve seen a surge in new clients and in all-time highs.”The app does not yet allow credit and debit card payments, but the company says it plans to enhance its offerings in coming weeks and months. The company said it doesn’t offer service to residents of New York and Washington state due to the “cost of maintaining regulatory compliance.”The move into the U.S. market comes at a time of regulatory uncertainty and in the midst of a particularly volatile cycle. While bitcoin has quadrupled in value in the past year, the price has dropped more than 40% from its high in April.Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsOfficials ranging from U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde have raised concerns over the nefarious use of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Kraken CEO Jesse Powell previously told CNBC he thinks there could be a wider crackdown in crypto trading. Powell said the U.S. is more “shortsighted” than other nations and “susceptible” to the pressures of incumbent legacy businesses like banks, which “stand to lose from crypto becoming a big deal.”Whereas balances for U.S. customers with funds held in U.S. banks are FDIC insured up to $250,000, Kraken has taken a different approach. In a note to customers on its website, Kraken said that while the company takes “great care to protect the assets” of clients from loss, exchanges do not qualify for deposit insurance programs, nor should they function as cryptocurrency wallets.Kraken is registered as a money services business with the U.S. Treasury Department’s FinCEN and says it complies “with legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions” where it operates.Before the May sell-off in the crypto market, Powell said the company was considering going public in 2022 via a direct listing, similar to the route taken by Coinbase.Correction: A prior version of this story misstated the types of assets that are insured by the FDIC.WATCH: Here’s what’s happening with bitcoin
Twitter on Thursday said it will roll out a new subscription service — initially in Australia and Canada — which will let paying users edit their tweets before posting and change the color theme of their app.
Details of the feature, called Twitter Blue, were first uncovered last month by software engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who is well-known in the tech industry for reverse engineering apps and discovering new features before they are officially launched.
Twitter Blue is the social media company’s first subscription offering, and a significant move as Twitter works to gain a new consistent source of revenue and expand beyond its core business of selling advertising on the platform.
Avid Twitter users, who for years have demanded an “edit” button to fix typos in their tweets, will now be able to set a timer of up to 30 seconds, giving them a window to click an “undo” button and edit tweets before they are posted.
The new feature will also let users organize their saved tweets into bookmark folders, so they can easily find content later.
Users of Twitter Blue, Twitter’s new subscription service, will have a 30-second window to click an “undo” button and edit tweets before they are posted.Getty Images for Barclays Asia Trophy
Long threads of multiple tweets also will be easier to read through a new “reader mode” on the service, Twitter said.
Twitter Blue will cost C$3.49 ($2.90) or A$4.49 ($3.48) per month in Canada and Australia respectively.
The company did not provide details on when Twitter Blue would be available to US users, but according to app details in Apple’s App Store, the service will cost $2.99 per month in the United States.
Amazon will start requiring law enforcement to publicly request videos captured by its Ring doorbell security system amid growing criticism of its video-sharing agreements with police departments.
In a blog post on Thursday, Amazon’s Ring unit said police and fire departments will be required to request Ring’s home surveillance videos via public posts on its community safety app, called Neighbors, starting next week.
Currently, Ring allows its law enforcement partners to privately message Ring users to access footage from their devices.
But Ring has been stung by criticism over its once-private agreements letting some 600 law enforcement agencies around the country tap into its Neighbors app. Critics say this opens the door to potential civil liberties violations via quiet and expansive surveillance of ordinary citizens at a time of rising concerns over racial profiling.
“If you’re an adult walking your dog or a child playing on the sidewalk, you shouldn’t have to worry that Ring’s products are amassing footage of you and that law enforcement may hold that footage indefinitely or share that footage with any third parties,” Sen. Ed Markey told the Associated Press in 2019.
Police departments have even reportedly raffled off the devices in some communities with the caveat that recipients of the smart doorbells need to hand over footage when requested, according to a 2019 report by tech website CNET.
Amazon’s Neighbors app will require law enforcement to make a public request for Ring doorbell video.Ring
Following that report, Ring said it would start cracking down on these strings-attached freebies.
All law enforcement requests will now be public in the Neighbors app feed.
“This way, anyone interested in knowing more about how their police agency is using Request for Assistance posts can simply visit the agency’s profile and see the post history.”
Ring users also opt in to receive requests for assistance from law enforcement.
Amazon purchased the anti-theft device in 2018 for $1 billion and the associated Neighborhood app allows users to share video footage from their devices.
Social apps focused on safety issues have come under fire recently for encouraging vigilantism and racial profiling.
Crime-tracking app Citizen was recently blasted for putting up a $30,000 reward to find a man it wrongly said was an arson suspect, according to a Reuters report, while Nextdoor has been criticized for failing to quickly address racial profiling and misinformation on the site.
Amazon said its Neighborhood app guidelines will “prevent overly broad requests” from law enforcement.
The head of unprofitable data analytics company Palantir has become one of the highest-paid executives in history, raking in more than $1.1 billion in total compensation last year.
Peter Thiel-founded Palantir — which conducts secretive data-processing work for US government agencies and corporate clients like Morgan Stanley and Airbus — paid CEO Alex Karp $798 million in options, $296 million in restricted stock and $1.1 million in salary, according to the company’s 2020 annual proxy statement.
Karp’s stock-heavy compensation was supercharged by Palantir going public in September of last year with a valuation of nearly $22 billion. The pay represents a roughly ninety-fold increase from his $12.1 million compensation in 2019.
In the proxy statement, Palantir said its sky-high compensation helped to “attract, retain, and motivate our leadership team in a highly competitive technology talent market while simultaneously aligning executive interests with those of our stockholders.”
Palantir went public in September with a valuation of nearly $22 billion.Noam Galai/Getty Images
Karp’s 2020 pay makes him far-and-away the highest-paid CEO of the year, with nearly three times as much compensation as runner-up Tony Xu, who co-founded the also-unprofitable delivery app Doordash. Xu received shares of his company worth more than $400 million shortly before it went public in December, according to December Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Doordash and Palantir did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
The world’s two highest-paid chief executives made far more than any CEO of a S&P 500 company in 2020, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of Doordash.Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Doordash’s Tony Xu received shares of his company worth more than $400 million shortly before it went public in December 2020.Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images
The highest-paid S&P 500 CEO, Chad Richison of payroll and human resource software provider Paycom, took in $211 million in 2020 — less than a quarter of Karp’s compensation. The median S&P 500 CEO made $13.4 million, and 24 CEOs in the group made took in less than $5 million, according to the Journal.
Karp’s 2020 compensation was the third-highest for any CEO since 2007, behind Elon Musk’s $2.3 billion from Tesla in 2018 and Stephen Schwarzman’s $1.4 billion from Blackstone in 2007, the Journal reported.
The NFT craze appears to be fading fast, with sales collapsing by nearly 90 percent over the past month, according to new data.
The market for so-called “non-fungible tokens” — one-of-a-kind, verifiable digital assets that grabbed headlines when Sotheby’s sold an NFT by the artist Beeple for $69 million — peaked on May 3 with $102 million of sales in a single day, according to a Wednesday report.
That was during a frenzied week that racked up $170 million sales in total, according to an analysis published Wednesday by crypto news site Protos.
By contrast, a middling $19.4 million in NFT sales were processed in the entire past week, according to the site. That’s a month-over-month drop of 89 percent — and a big embarrassment for NFTs, which have racked up big price tags for everything from old YouTube videos to tweets, and which auctioneers at Sotheby’s recently said represent “a new flowering of human creativity.”
The number of users buying and selling NFTs has also plummeted by about 70 percent.REUTERS
The number of users buying and selling NFTs has also plummeted by about 70 percent. There were 3,900 active crypto wallets on Tuesday, compared to more than 12,000 in early May, according to the report.
But while NFT art has received the most mass attention, the NFT “collectibles” market has proven more resilient, according to the report. Collectibles like “CryptoPunks” and “Hashmasks” clocked $9.2 million in sales during the last week, compared to $3 million of NFT art.
The news comes on the same day that Sotheby’s begins a weeklong auction of the world’s first known NFT, a simple red, blue and pink image from 2014.
The news represents a dramatic decline for NFTs, which big-wig auctioneers Sotheby’s recently said represent “a new flowering of human creativity.” EPA
Private-sector hiring picked up at its fastest pace in almost a year last month as companies hired almost 980,000 workers, according to a report published Thursday by payroll processing firm ADP.
That’s a leap from the 654,000 workers added on private payrolls in April and marks the country’s largest gain since June.
ADP’s private payroll figures could bode well for the closely watched May employment report, which is slated to be published Friday morning. But the two reports occasionally differ, like in April when the government count reported just 266,000 new jobs, far short of expectations of a million.
“Private payrolls showed a marked improvement from recent months and the strongest gain since the early days of the recovery,” Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist, said in a statement. “Companies of all sizes experienced an uptick in job growth, reflecting the improving nature of the pandemic and economy.”
May growth for non-farm employment.ADP
Graph charting the yearly changes in non-farm employment.ADP
New jobless claims fell below 400,000 for the first time since the pandemic began.SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The leisure and hospitality sector, the industry hardest hit by the pandemic and subsequent government restrictions, saw the most jobs added in a sign of a continued recovery. The sector added 440,000 new jobs in May, ADP reported.
The education and health services sector added 139,000 jobs, with most coming from health care. Trade, transportation and utilities picked up 118,000 new workers. Professional and business services added 68,000 new hires.
Construction added 65,000 new workers while manufacturing saw gains of 52,000 for the month.
For Friday’s employment report, economists surveyed by Dow Jones are expecting to see growth of 671,000 jobs added in May, and a drop in the unemployment rate to 5.9 percent.
The positive ADP data came as the Labor Department released figures that showed new jobless claims fell below 400,000 for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
While the labor market still has a ways to go before it hits pre-pandemic levels, the latest round of data paints a strengthening picture of recovery, Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, said.
The leisure and hospitality sector, the industry hardest-hit by the pandemic, saw the most jobs added.ADP
The latest round of data paints a strengthening picture of economic recovery.ADP
He added that the question going forward will be how long the current spike in prices will last.
“The multi trillion-dollar question is the future fate of inflation,” he said. “The status of wage gains will be something to watch in the coming months as the Federal Reserve prepares to signal that it will eventually dial back on asset purchases as a prelude to a hike in interest rates, the timing of which remains uncertain.”
In this articleAMZNDevin Hance | CNBCAmazon’s Ring will soon begin requiring police departments’ requests for user videos or information collected by the company’s smart doorbells and cameras to be made publicly.In a blog post Thursday, Ring said starting next week public safety agencies will only be able to submit requests for video clips through its community safety app, called Neighbors, via public posts accessible on the app’s main feed. Previously, agencies could privately message users to request videos.Ring has been beset with concerns around privacy and racial profiling as it has formed partnerships with police departments that allow the agencies to request videos and share updates with Ring users. Thousands of police and fire departments in the U.S. have partnered with Ring, according to the company’s active agency tracker.Amazon acquired Ring in February 2018. The company, which operates as a subsidiary of Amazon, offers an array of smart security devices that allow people to remotely check in on their homes, including video doorbells, floodlights, window and door alarms. It’s also releasing a flying security camera drone.Ring’s smart doorbell, one of its most popular products, is equipped with a security camera that automatically starts recording when it detects motion. The user is then notified in the Ring app and they can view the footage.Lawmakers and civil liberties groups have stepped up their scrutiny of how Ring collects and shares user data. Amazon employees have also raised privacy concerns about the technology. At Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting last week, a proposal to audit the company’s impact on civil rights, equity and diversity issues, including whether Ring and the Neighbors app “disproportionally tag people of color as suspicious,” was narrowly defeated.Ring said the new “Request for Assistance” feature will provide greater transparency into what information law enforcement agencies are requesting. Users will be able to view a history of data requests made by specific police departments, and agencies won’t be able to delete posts from the app.
