FINRA Slaps Robinhood 🏹

DiDi Global (the ‘Uber of China’) went public today, and it’s the largest Chinese IPO since Alibaba went public in 2014. The company was worth $62B in its most recent funding round. 

The stock opened well above its $13-14 price range set earlier this week, then rallied to an intraday high of $18.01 before tumbling.

At the close, the rideshare company was just over a dime above its IPO price. What a ride. 🎢

All things considered, DiDi still managed to finish the day green. The company sold 316.8M shares and raised $4.4B in its market debut. 

$DIDI rose 1% today and ended the day valued at over $70B.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wants crypto maxis to know about his plan to lead the US crypto industry. 💪

In a new blog post, Armstrong revealed plans for Coinbase’s future. The company, which has been challenged lately by industry-wide competition, shared ideas for staying above the cut. 

Coinbase said it will bring more assets faster, push into new countries, experiment with NFT and DeFi asset types, and launch an app store dedicated to decentralized apps. 🏆

Coinbase has played with the idea of a “dApp App Store” in its Coinbase wallet, but this proposal would extend self-custody features to even more dApps and use-cases. 🤔

It’s an ambitious plan to push Coinbase into crypto’s first place spot— it might even be possible. Some competitors aren’t exactly in great regulatory standing. 

Robinhood paid FINRA’s largest penalty ever today— a whopping $70M.  FINRA accused Robinhood of “systemic supervisory failures” and causing “significant harm” to millions of customers.

The fine covers restitution for users affected by outages during the stock market crash in March 2020. It’s also a slap on the wrist for approving thousands of users’ options trading, even though it was “not appropriate for the customers to do so.” 

Robinhood supposedly set aside $26.6M for settlements, but the $70M fine is over 2.6x bigger. That probably hurts. 😬

The broker is nonetheless marching forward with its future IPO plans. Robinhood reportedly had a $30B valuation in May 2021. 

China’s crackdown has turned the crypto world upside down, but there’s one way the country is pushing crypto convention— digital yuan. 

The digital yuan is the first Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). It’s like crypto in the digital sense, but it’s centralized (unlike regular crypto). 🙅‍♂️

The Chinese government has been trialing the digital yuan for a few months. Now, it’s preparing the currency for use during Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics. ⛷️

Some advantages of the digital yuan/CBDCs include zero transaction fees, faster settlement times, and high security. On the flip side, it’s kinda scary the government will likely have control over everyone’s money. Oof. 

For some emerging Asian economies, banking systems are undeveloped, so the digital yuan offers a strong value proposition. International adoption of the yuan poses a widespread threat to the US Dollar, and the Federal Reserve is skeptical of the proposed benefits of a Fed-backed digital currency. 

Amidst all this debate, everyone’s forgetting about… privacy. Privacy is the basis of decentralized finance. Discussion of regulating and adopting CBDCs contradicts the idea of ‘free currency.’ 

Chinese officials claim there’s a need to reinterpret privacy, calling it “controlled anonymity.” Hmm…