Category: money

“After months of prayers and cues from God, he was going to start selling cryptocurrency, he announced in a YouTube video last April.”

The Signature and Silvergate banks had collapsed weeks earlier, signaling the need to look into other investment options beyond financial institutions, he said. With divine wisdom, he said, he was “setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.” Shortly afterward, Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, launched a cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, and began selling it to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area. They sold it through the Kingdom Wealth Exchange, an online cryptocurrency marketplace he created, controlled and operated.

The Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors, Tung Chang, Securities Commissioner for Colorado, said in a civil complaint. The couple’s sales pitches were filled with “prayer and quotes from the Bible, encouraging investors to have faith that their investment … would lead to ‘abundance’ and ‘blessings,'” the complaint said. But Colorado state regulators say that INDXcoin was “essentially worthless.” Instead of helping investors acquire wealth, the Regalados used around $1.3 million of the investment funds to bankroll lavish expenditures, including a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and extravagant vacations, the complaint said. The money also paid for renovations to the Regalados’ Denver home, the complaint said.

In a stunning video statement posted online on January 19 — several days after the civil charges were filed — Eli Regalado did not dispute that he and his wife profited from the crypto venture. “The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed 1.3 million dollars, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true,” he said, adding, “A few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do….”

Regalado also said that he and his wife used about half a million dollars of their investors’ funds to pay taxes to the IRS.

CNN reports that in videos Regalado explains how God “convinced him that it was a safe and profitable investment venture.” (“You read it correctly. God’s hand is on INDXcoin and we are launching!” explains the launch video’s description.)

“The Regalados used technical terms to confuse investors and misled them into believing that the coins were valued at between $10-$12 even though they were purchased for $1.50 or, at times, given away, the complaint said.”

Over his 54 years as a financial analyst, Richard X. Bove perfected the art of grabbing attention… American Banker once called him “the country’s most quotable bank analyst.” Last week, a few hours after completing a spot on Bloomberg television, the 83-year-old announced his retirement. He took that weekend off — and then jumped right back in. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bove (pronounced “boe-VAY”), who goes by Dick, shared a dire outlook on the U.S. economy and his former profession.

“The dollar is finished as the world’s reserve currency,” Mr. Bove said matter-of-factly, perched in an armchair outside his home office just north of Tampa, from which he predicted that China will overtake the U.S. economy. No other analysts will say the same because they are, as he put it, “monks praying to money,” unwilling to speak out on the mainstream financial system that employs them…

As he spoke, a technician was trying to restore his home internet after his final employer, the boutique brokerage Odeon Capital, pulled the plug on his last day…

He sees the offshoring of American manufacturing as the ultimate threat to the financial sector and the dollar, because “the people making the goods elsewhere are getting greater and greater control of the means of production and therefore greater and greater control of the world economy and therefore greater and greater control of money.”

The article notes that Bove was once called “The Loneliest Analyst.”

“One way that’s still true is that he endorses cryptocurrency — an area that few other financial analysts will touch — which he sees as a natural beneficiary of the decline of the dollar.”

According to the company, the new payment service will “showcas[e] the power of living more of your life in one place,” as owner Elon Musk continues to promote X as a future “everything app” capable of handling social media, video and other original content on the same site. X Payments has registered to do business in at least 32 states, according to public records, and has acquired a money transmitter license needed to process payments in 10, TechCrunch reported in December.

Social media giant Meta, which pivoted its focus on building metaverse technologies in 2021, has forecast the tech would eventually replace mobile as the main computing platform. In a separate report, Meta said the European Union may see an increased economic opportunity of up to 489 billion euros ($538.29 billion) in annual GDP by 2035 or about 1.3%-2.4% of its total GDP. The metaverse could contribute between C$45.3 billion ($33.88 billion) and C$85.5 billion to Canada’s annual GDP by 2035, Deloitte said. Last year, a Meta-funded report estimated that metaverse adoption would contribute $3.01 trillion by 2031.

Last August, Joshua Sigel held a “groundbreaking” event at what he said would be the future home of Sho Restaurant, located atop Salesforce Park in San Francisco. He told the gathered media that construction of the proposed Japanese fine dining restaurant would begin in less than two months, once some permitting issues were resolved, with a targeted opening date of September or October of 2023.

Sigel maintained that he’d soon be offering 3,275 Sho Club NFT (non-fungible token) memberships — first via a private sale, then a larger public sale in late September — which would serve as the backbone of Sho Restaurant’s clientele. (Sigel is the CEO of Sho Group, which encapsulates Sho Restaurant and Sho Club.) There were to be 2,878 “Earth” NFT memberships, priced at $7,500 each; 377 “Water” NFT memberships, priced at $15,000 each; and 20 “Fire” NFT memberships; priced at $300,000 each. The NFTs are basically membership cards for the restaurant, spruced up with Web3 jargon…. Each membership tier comes with increasingly luxurious benefits, though restaurant reservations would also be available for nonmembers.

Seven months later, things don’t seem to be going very well for Sho Club or for Sho Restaurant. I recently walked over to Salesforce Park and peered inside the shell of the building that’s supposed to become a restaurant; I saw an empty space that looks almost exactly the same as it did in August. The mock-up design photos that journalists looked at during the “groundbreaking” in August remain strewn about on the floor. Permits for Sho Restaurant haven’t been issued, the result of Sho Restaurant designers not yet responding to a number of San Francisco Department of Building Inspection notes, among a host of permitting steps that haven’t been completed. Sho Club social media accounts have been radio silent since late September….

Sho Club appears to have sold around 100 NFT memberships, rather than 3,275, as Sigel originally projected. I repeatedly reached out to Sigel, to Sho Club, and its public relations representatives. No one replied to my questions.

NFC terminal adoption was also low in retail stores in South Korea around when Apple Pay first launched, which continues to be an issue. There are more NFC terminals than there were six years ago, but The Korea Times suggests Apple Pay will face “significant challenges” in Korea due to the limited number of NFC terminals. At the current time, Apple Pay is limited to Hyundai Card users, which could see South Koreans interested in using the service picking up a Hyundai Card. No other card companies are participating in Apple Pay as of yet.

The judge, Martin Glenn, found that Celsius’s terms of use — the lengthy contracts that many websites publish but few consumers read — meant “the cryptocurrency assets became Celsius’s property.”

The ruling underscores the Wild West nature of the unregulated crypto industry. On Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James moved to impose a kind of order, or at least legal repercussions, on Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky, whom she accused in a lawsuit of defrauding hundreds of thousands of consumers…. And while Glenn’s ruling won’t affect FTX, whose terms of use were different, some analysts saw the ruling as spreading beyond Celsius.

“There are many other platforms that feature terms of use that are similar to Celsius’s,” said Aaron Kaplan, a lawyer with the financial-focused firm of Gusrae Kaplan Nusbaum and co-founder of his own crypto company. Customers need to “understand the risks that they are taking when depositing their assets onto insufficiently regulated platforms,” he said.

The cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes creditors $3.1 billion, according to court documents filed late Saturday night….

Creditors’ names were not listed on the court filing, but the largest is owed $226,280,579, .

As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, FTX was required to list to the court its 50 largest creditors — either individuals or corporations — who are owed money. The second largest entity is owed $203,292,504, the court filing shows.

A video at the top of the article from ABC News adds that several celebrities “are being sued by a man who invested in the now-bankrupt crypto exchange… The lawyer behind the class claims that FTX was a massive ponzi scheme, only successful because it had a boost from celebrities.”

Meanwhile CNN adds that FTX “owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.”

The crypto exchange said on Saturday it has launched a strategic review of its global assets and is preparing for the sale or reorganization of some businesses. A hearing on FTX’s so-called first-day motions is set for Tuesday morning before a US bankruptcy judge, according to a separate court filing….

There could be more than 1 million creditors in the US cases that are already filed, FTX Group said, adding that it has been in touch with “dozens” of US and international regulatory agencies including the US Attorney’s Office, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Meanwhile, authorities in the Bahamas — where FTX is based — are investigating whether any criminal misconduct occurred related to the company’s implosion, the Royal Bahamas Police Force said in a statement last Sunday. The Bahamian authorities have also taken control of cryptocurrency assets held by FTX Digital Markets, The Bahamas-based FTX unit that filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection Tuesday.

“MyFitnessPal is obviously looking to maximize profits, but if the popular r/loseit subreddit is any indication, many users may consider switching to competing apps like Cronometer, Loseit, or Macros over this loss.”