Nathaniel Popper
@nathanielpopper
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Editor at Bloomberg News. Previously, reporter at NYT, LAT and the Forward. Wrote: "The Trolls of Wall Street" + "Digital Gold.”
Joined June 2009
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!
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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.
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One fringe benefit of leaving the NYT is that I have been able to play around w/ owning and trading crypto for the first time. I’ve still got plenty of unanswered questions, but the big thing I hadn’t anticipated was just how compelling and fun NFTs would be. A thread:.
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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.
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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.
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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
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the first lawsuit lands against @bitconnect and its promoters -- it begins with concluding lines from "Welcome to Wonderland"
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real question. are Tesla’s really more shiny than other cars for some reason or do their drivers just clean them more often?.
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Over 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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has been looking at setting up a new exchange that would allow big banks and investors to buy and hold Bitcoin -- a significant step beyond the Bitcoin futures contracts that exchanges have so far offered.
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Perhaps the single most damning details from the Ripple complaint:. The main financial company using XRP, a money transmitter, told Ripple it was much more expensive than alternatives and only agreed to use it because Ripple was paying it to do so.
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Bitcoin is easy to hold and secure -- all you have to do is follow these 78 simple steps!
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key takeaway from a dive into ICO data and success rates: 81% of ICO’s were Scams, ~6% Failed, ~5% had Gone Dead, and ~8% went on to trade on a exchange
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Bitcoin hits a new all-time high with a very different feeling to it than the last time around.
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The SEC has sent subpoenas to as many as 80 companies involved with initial coin offerings in recent months, including lawyers who advised the projects. Is the long-awaited crackdown coming?
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My take on the 10 most influential people in blockchain/crypto today, in today's @Dealbook special section.Amber Baldet.Brian Behlendorf.Vitalik Buterin.Chris Dixon.Daniel Larimer.Jed McCaleb .Michael Novogratz.Elizabeth Stark .Valerie Szczepanik.Jihan Wu.
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Fraudsters bought over $1000 of stuff from Supreme on my credit card. But then had it shipped to my house. Am I missing something or is the worst criminal ever?.
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The co-founders of the Centra initial coin offering were just arrested and the project is being taken down by the SEC. You may recall some of the details in the SEC complaint from a story in the NY Times last fall.
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On the rise of Ripple. If this is a tulip fever, the fever has spread to chrysanthemums and poppies.
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One of the biggest selling points of Facebook's cryptocurrency project, Libra, was the 27 partners they brought on board. Behind the scenes, though, a number of those partners are approaching the project warily and haven't committed to much yet.
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Bitfinex has been fined, lost its bank accounts, been hacked 2 (now 3) times and provides little info about its operations. That hasn't stopped it from becoming the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world
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Academics found evidence that Bitcoin's big run in 2013 was artificially driven by a single actor on Mt. Gox. Traders worry something similar has been happening recently on the largest exchange today.
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Jack runs two public companies but he is going to have his new bitcoin engineers reporting directly to him. In case you were wondering whether he is really into this.
#BitcoinTwitter and #CryptoTwitter! Square is hiring 3-4 crypto engineers and 1 designer to work full-time on open source contributions to the bitcoin/crypto ecosystem. Work from anywhere, report directly to me, and we can even pay you in bitcoin! Introducing @SqCrypto. Why?.
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Since leaving prison, Charlie Shrem has purchased two Maseratis, two powerboats and a $2 million house in Florida. The Winklevoss twins think Shrem used money he stole from them. They are suing to get it back.
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Walmart is planning to be the first big company to take a blockchain into everyday use, tracking leafy greens. It is requiring all suppliers to get on board. Blockchain critics wonder how different Walmart's blockchain is from an old-fashioned database.
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In today's Senate hearing the chair of the CFTC, Giancarlo, came across as the guy who learned about virtual currencies from his kids, who think it is cool, while the chair of the SEC, Clayton, is the guy who learned about it from Wall Street lawyers, who think it is silly.
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Update on Facebook's cryptocurrency: Sources tell me that Facebook is now looking to get VC firms to invest in the Facebook cryptocurrency project we reported on earlier this year. I hear they are targeting big sums -- as much as $1b.
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It's too bad Facebook doesn't have the resources to hire someone like @kevinroose to find and flag these sorts of things. But I guess it's understandable given the resource constraints on the company relative to a money-printing behemoth like the NY Times.
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The price of Bitcoin may have fallen, but the mania hasn't cooled off on campus where all the elite universities are racing to create Bitcoin and blockchain classes
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4/But at the most simple level, NFTs have given me, for the first time, a visceral understanding of the most basic innovation of crypto: What it means to digitally own a unique digital object.
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Our story on PayPal's decision to stop processing payments for Infowars and all its subsidiaries. PayPal cited its company values rather than any violation of policy to explain the decision.
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Earlier this year, Ripple's CEO said he knew of banks planning to use the XRP cryptocurrency. Today, Ripple execs are quoted in Reuters saying that banks aren't interested in using XRP or cryptocurrencies. A misquote somewhere or did something change? .
@nathanielpopper Over the last few months I’ve spoken with ACTUAL banks and payment providers. They are indeed planning to use xRapid (our XRP liquidity product) in a serious way. This is a sampling of what I heard:
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I've been chasing this story for months. Hope you'll take a virus break and read it — a high-stakes cryptocurrency tale about an idealist who agreed to create a digital coin for the dictator of Venezuela.
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This is the most concise, comprehensive and clearheaded critique of blockchain and cryptocurrencies that I’ve seen. Most of it isn’t new, but it puts it all in one place, in plain English and comes from someone who is an authority on all of this.
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More people invested in cryptocurrencies over the last year than in the preceding nine years according to many metrics. Most of them are unlikely to have warm feelings about the technology right now. Consider Kim Hyon-jeong.
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NEW: The Roaring Kitty Rally . The story of the young day trader from Massachusetts who, over the course of some two years, helped turn GameStop into a global phenomenon from his basement office, the Kitty Room. W @Kellen_Browning .
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The virtual currency boom last year papered over many of the problems in the nascent industry. The scale of those problems is now becoming clear
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The SEC seems to be saying here that it's okay if you broke the rules, as long as you get acquired by a legitimate player before we crack down on you.
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“Look, the internet belongs to the Americans — but blockchain will belong to us," a Russian member of the FSB told delegates to an international body trying to create blockchain standards.
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the giant of cryptocurrency mining, bitmain, is planning to go public and is targeting a valuation - $40-50b - that would make it worth more than all but two of the tech unicorns of the last decade, and as much as wework and spacex put together @1024YB
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Facebook's new digital token is far enough along that they are talking to cryptocurrency exchanges about listing it, we heard. The current plan is for each coin to be pegged to a basket of foreign currencies, to keep the value stable.
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A new paper from 7 American and Israeli economists identified 4818 pump and dump schemes involving 300 different cryptocurrencies during one 6 month period. The economists found that the schemes were "widespread" and "often quite profitable."
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Many Bitcoin advocates took umbrage at the suggestion, in out story yesterday, that Bitcoin had, as of now, failed to get mainstream consumer adoption. I'm curious how many crypto advocates really believe that Bitcoin or any other crypto has gotten mainstream consumer adoption.
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PayPal has indeed told Infowars they will need to get a new payment processors -- the latest tech company to cut Infowars off. A PayPal spox says "we undertook an extensive review of the Infowars sites, and found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance.".
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One point that didn't fit in the story: After getting hacked in 2016, Bitfinex said it gave every customer a 36% haircut to cover losses. But at least one customer, Coinbase, got a better deal after threatening to sue, multiple sources told me.
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We believe Ether is not a security, SEC official William Hinman says at the Yahoo summit.
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I spent the last few days talking to a number of the hackers involved in the Twitter breach on Wednesday. Here's a first version of my story with @kateconger . More details coming shortly .
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There is a lot of talk about how the stepped up presence of regulators is pushing down virtual currencies. But that explanation glosses over the bad behavior and fraud that has drawn the regulators in, and that is probably just as much a reason for investors losing confidence.
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A mysterious group just paid $1 billion for 67,000 acres in Nevada for some sort of unexplained Ethereum business. Does anyone know anything about Blockchains LLC or Jeffrey Berns?
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Takeaway: the SEC did indeed informally indicate to Circle that regulators would "not pursue any enforcement action for prior activity" at Poloniex as long as Circle cleans up Poloniex and turns it into a regulated exchange.
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The SEC comments this morning seem to have been worded to strongly suggest, without saying it outright, that Ripple's cryptocurrency, XRP should be categorized as a security. Do lawyers out there disagree? And why not just come out and answer this lingering question?.
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The Venture Capital Working Group led by Andreessen Horowitz quietly met with the S.E.C. and suggested that some virtual currencies be protected from the dreaded status of being a security
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Pretty amazing to watch the Telegram group of an ICO after its founders are arrested. Supporters call it FUD and fake news and the admin takes down links to the SEC complaint -- saying that he is awaiting 'official' word from the project's founders.
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Last week, several banks told me they had no plans to widely use Ripple's XRP currency. Today, Ripple announced MoneyGram will trial XRP. MoneyGram isn't a bank and they aren't widely using XRP -- just testing it -- but it's a step toward what Ripple has predicted.
More on today's announcement here:
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CryptoKitties were described as the beginning of a new industry of digital collectibles. The company raised $12 million from top VCs. Then this happened .
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I have found It is very easy to find computer scientists and law professors interested in Bitcoin and blockchain -- and very hard (not impossible!) to find university economists. Thoughts on why?
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NEW: Robinhood has become a Silicon Valley success with a mantra of “democratizing finance.” We used new data and analysis to look at what it looks like under the hood. The picture is one of unusually big risks and technology failures.
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Why is my big bank charging me fees and not paying any interest on my savings? These sorts of questions are finally giving some momentum to the customer-friendly neo-banks taking on Wells Fargo and Bank of America.
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Bitcoin is not a great way to pay for a cup of coffee or an airline ticket, but investors don't care. A look at Bitcoin's shift from electronic cash to digital gold
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A former SEC commissioner calls ICOs the 'the most pervasive, open and notorious violation of federal securities laws since the Code of Hammurabi'
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@bgarlinghouse I wasn’t able to reach the two names you sent me yesterday until now. Just to close the loop, here’s what I heard from them:
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“We’ve tried to convince the world to go vegan, and it has not worked,” Bruce Friedrich says. These days, he is hoping capitalism might work where activism and persuasion fell short. My latest on the new industry trying to replace meat.
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Infowars will now have to rely on its storefronts on Amazon and eBay, where PayPal does not handle the payments. Will those companies take action next?.
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Regulators have indicated in private meetings that they are considering whether even the second largest virtual currency, Ether, should be categorized as a security.
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While some big names on Wall Street have been talking about trading Bitcoin, one firm, Susquehanna, has quietly been building up a sizable trading desk and is now opening up to clients
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Twitter bans virtual currency advertising but creates loophole so that the ban doesn't apply to the boss's other company, Square
That means Jack Dorsey's other company, Square, could still advertise for its crypto wallet on Twitter. But private companies like Robinhood or Coinbase cannot.
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The JPM Coin makes it possible to move dollars between JPMorgan bank accounts instantly. That raises the question: Why was it not already possible to move dollars between two JPMorgan bank accounts instantly?.
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An inside look at how a company doing an initial coin offering can use the money they raise to buy the coin they are selling to push the price up, thereby attracting more buyers and giving themselves more wealth (at least on paper)
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Many people currently assume that if a cryptocurrency is widely used for payments it will become valuable. But what if that's not true? According to Ben's math, if Visa had a coin, with its current volumes it would likely only be worth around $3 billion.
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It appears that JPMorgan's new cryptocurrency, JPM Coin, is just like all the other cryptocurrencies tied to the value of a dollar, but less useful, because it can't move anywhere beyond the walls of JPMorgan.
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The SEC told Ripple on Monday that when it sold XRP it was selling unregistered securities. The SEC plans to bring a suit this week. Ripple's CEO Brad Garlinghouse is not backing down. "It’s frankly preposterous and not grounded in fact," he told me.
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It's interesting that these crypto experts, with such specialized technical expertise, were among the most willing to protest the new no-politics policy that the company's CEO, Brian Armstrong, put out in September.
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Facebook unveiled the plans for its new cryptocurrency, Libra, on Tuesday morning. The utopian/dystopian goal is to create a new global currency and the foundation for an alternative financial system. Here is what they told me and @MikeIsaac.
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Coinbase spent months raising $100m from vc's.it took Filecoin less than an hour to raise $200m in it's ICO .
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5/With NFT’s you can own a digital item, carry it around between different online ecosystems and do interesting things with the item when you prove you own it. No company can deny me access to the item.
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"Do you have the cryptologists?" - Senator Reed asks the head of the SEC and CFTC.
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Women at Coinbase were paid 8% - or $13,000 - less than male colleagues in similar jobs. The few Black salaried employees were paid 7% less than similarly-placed white colleagues, a number that went up when bonuses were included.
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Coinbase is the most downloaded iPhone app, ahead of Facebook and YouTube. Pretty amazing under any circumstances, but especially when you consider that the service hasn't even been working for significant chunks of the week
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New: Robinhood is raising $1 billion for an emergency cash infusion after the GameStop drama put the company in peril and forced it to shut down some trading for customers earlier today. W @katekelly @eringriffith and @andrewrsorkin .
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In Gaza it is not just terrorist groups who are using Bitcoin. It is also freelance programmers who have trouble getting paid from abroad, @La__Cuen reports in a smart followup to our piece earlier this week.
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Along with all the other news about virtual currency exchanges, I've heard from numerous sources that one of the oldest exchanges, Bitstamp, is in the final stages of being sold to South Korean investors for ~$400m. Neither the exchange nor the buyers are commenting.
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9/Sometimes an NFT is indeed just a JPEG, but it turns out a JPEG is a lot easier to get attached to, and care about, than a stock ticker that you can easily buy back if you sell (even if the ticker is backed by an actual company).
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I am moving on from the @nytimes to see if I can stretch my wings a bit. First up: finishing a book on WallStreetBets + the rise of retail investing, and a doc on the same theme I'm co-producing w @OptimistFilms . Should have more fun projects + collaborations to announce soon.
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NEW: Two guesses left to figure out a lost password that is now worth $230 million. I wrote a story about the people who have Bitcoin fortunes locked behind lost passwords.
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Bitcoin nears $10,000. My best effort to summarize what got it here
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Ordinary people are plunging into Bitcoin everywhere, but nowhere is the frenzy more feverish than South Korea. We took a glimpse at what it looks like on the ground
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Goldman is opening what appears to be the first Bitcoin trading operation at a Wall Street bank
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The "key management team" is responsible for securing the cryptographic keys to Coinbase's cold wallets, where most of the company's crypto tokens are held -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion I was told. No job is more fundamental to the company's success.
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This week, I'm joining a media company I have long admired, @business. I'll be working as an editor, helping to handle their impressive and wide-ranging coverage of financial markets.
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Sure there's the fight with Trump, but the real news here: this is the first time the CEO of a cryptocurrency company has joined the US Senate.
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The first question for Zuckerberg from Waters: "How did cryptocurrency go from being misleading and deceptive last year to becoming a means for financial inclusion this year?" pointing to Facebook's policy banning crypto ads last year, which was later rescinded.
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In the civil war over whether Bitcoin should be digital gold or the new PayPal, the PayPal folks just conceded defeat. Digital gold it is.
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3/Yes, the space is rife with scams and I assume 95-99% will go to zero. A good thread from an insider on the fakery and scamming tactics that have become widespread:.
few days ago i asked what to look out for in nft projects. here is the crowd sourced version. 👇.
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All I have to do is promote this ICO and I will get 20% of the money they raise. What a deal!
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