FBI Investigating Santos' Role In Dog Charity Scam

You'd think that it's only a matter of time before George Santos ends up in prison, wouldn't you? But then there's this weird example where the American public deigned fit to put Donald Trump in the White House and then authorities refuse to prosecute him as his myriad list of crimes and his obvious transgressions became public. So...we'll see how it goes with Santos.

Source: Politico

NEW YORK — FBI agents are investigating Rep. George Santos’ role in an alleged GoFundMe scheme involving a disabled U.S. Navy veteran’s dying service dog.

Two agents contacted former service member Richard Osthoff Wednesday on behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, he told POLITICO.

Osthoff gave the agents text messages from 2016 with Santos, who he says used his plight to raise $3,000 for life-saving surgery for the pit bull mix, Sapphire — then ghosted with the funds, as first reported by Patch.

“I’m glad to get the ball rolling with the big-wigs,” Osthoff said in an interview Wednesday. “I was worried that what happened to me was too long ago to be prosecuted.”

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New month, new crypto market moves?

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important crypto stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT, subscribe here.

Welcome back to Chain Reaction.

Seems like just yesterday we were ringing in the New Year, but we’ve coasted into February and all seems to be somewhat relaxed (for once) in the crypto world.

Last month was filled with crypto companies laying off staff, developments around the existing and new Chapter 11 bankruptcies in the space, partnerships and conversations about potential recovery in 2023.

Even with a range of bad news flooding the industry, some cryptocurrencies had a bull run in January, amid the market turmoil.

Bitcoin rallied 40% on the month, while ether rose about 32% during the same period. Solana also saw serious recovery, from about $10 in the beginning of the year, near its lowest level since February 2021, up 146% to about $24.3 by the end of January, CoinMarketCap data showed.

These market movements could potentially spark more retail and institutional investors alike to dive in. But whether or not this seemingly random market rally will continue into February is to be determined.

This week in web3

Lost your crypto amid Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings? You’re probably not getting it back (TC+)

As Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings move forward for several big-name crypto companies, those who lost funds are surely hoping to get all — or at least some — of their money back. Lawyers and experts shared their thoughts with TechCrunch on what these cases could mean for creditors and what may happen to those who saw their money disappear overnight.

VC funding to Black web3 founders popped last year, bucking trends (TC+)

Black people who invested in crypto were hit disproportionately hard during the most recent crypto winter, though many Black founders and investors who spoke to TechCrunch remain optimistic about the sector’s potential for the community, and society overall. If anything, last year’s economic correction was necessary, they told TechCrunch. “Bubble had to pop,” People of Crypto co-founder Simone Berry said. “It wasn’t sustainable and economic correction was needed.

Sorare teams up with the Premier League for its NFT fantasy football game

French startup Sorare has signed a four-year licensing partnership with the Premier League. This deal marks an important move for the company as the English football league is one of the most-watched sports leagues in the world. As for sports fans who don’t particularly enjoy soccer (or football as Europeans call it), Sorare also teamed up with the NBA and MLB over the past few months.

Bitcoin-based app Strike expands in Philippines to grow cross-border payment solutions

Strike, a Bitcoin-based payment network and financial app, is expanding to the Philippines to grow cross-border payments and remittance markets. Aside from the Philippines, Strike plans on expanding further in the Latin American and African regions as well due to the “extreme amount of demand,” its CEO Jack Mallers shared. In general, the company’s partnerships and announcement point to its focus on growing the remittance market through its application and other alternative avenues, like Clover.

Enterprise blockchain adoption may grow as hybrid use cases evolve (TC+)

While crypto markets remain volatile, enterprise blockchain adoption is continuing to grow as businesses find new use cases for the technology, according to Daniela Barbosa, executive director of Hyperledger Foundation. One of the biggest demands over the past two years has been “hybrid use cases” and the technology doesn’t just help big companies, but smaller businesses, too, she shared.

The latest pod

ICYMI: For last week’s episode, Jacquelyn talked with Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of the layer-1 blockchain Aptos. Shaikh is a three-time founder with over a decade of experience in financial services as well as blockchain technology and crypto. He also worked on blockchain strategic partnerships for Novi, Facebook’s wallet and was the strategy director at ConsenSys.

“When we’re thinking about Aptos, we certainly thought that the people need a new form of sharing information digitally and being able to share that information and economic value digitally in more efficient, more fair ways,” Shaikh said during the podcast. “That’s the mission that we’re on.”

Last year was huge for Aptos — as the blockchain launched publicly and raised about $400 million in funding, amid a bear market. The new layer-1 got backing from major investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Circle Ventures and the now-defunct FTX Ventures, to name a few. And even though the market is down, its token, APT, rose 380% during the month of January, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Looking forward to 2023, Aptos plans to make it a “year of intention,” Shaikh said. “I think it’s a year of intention for the entire industry.”

We also discussed:

• What it’s like to launch in a bear market
• Builders on the blockchain
• Business development plans for 2023
• Onboarding people not in the space
• The future of interoperability and the multichain world

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

Follow the money

1. Haun Ventures leads Sovereign Labs’ $7.4 million seed round to help scale blockchains
2. Crypto security startup Hypernative raised $9 milllion to help prevent web3 cyberattacks
3. BlockJoy raised $12 million to help cut operating costs for businesses running blockchain nodes
4. Web3 marketing startup Addressable raised $7.5 million in a seed round
5. Everscale raised $5 million to help scale blockchains

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.

New month, new crypto market moves? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

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Onehouse is building a neutral data lake integration layer on top of Apache Hudi

Onehouse emerged last year with a cloud data lake product built on top of the open source Apache Hudi project. The startup wants to act as an integration layer to move data between different repositories, rather than competing directly with larger data lake vendors like Snowflake and Databricks.

Today the company announced a $25 million Series A.

Company founder and CEO Vinoth Chandar came up with the idea for Hudi while he was an engineer at Uber in 2016, and eventually decided to start a company based on the open source project. He says that today his idea is to be a neutral, complementary layer between these other data lake products and interoperate with multiple formats, whatever they may be.

“Our thesis is that we live in a multi-engine world where there are many, many engines that are going to evolve and sit on top of the same data. We want to help organizations avoid migrating every time there is a new engine,” Chandar told TechCrunch.

The open source project has been gaining traction with 2200 pull requests on GitHub last year and more than 600 engaged users on the GitHub platform, according to the company.

Some percentage of those open source users will eventually want to move to the managed cloud service, and the company is working with paying customers today in production. For now though, product head Kyle Weller says the cloud product remains in preview mode to keep the number of paying customers at a manageable level.

“We’re still in a preview mode where we want to throttle how many people come in the door while we build up and and train our full global support team and some of these other building blocks and pieces,” Weller explained.

With the new cash, the company has been able to double the team, growing from 15 at the time of last year’s seed announcement to 30 today. The startup has been mostly focused on hiring engineering talent to this point, but Chandar says that the emphasis is  changing. “We hired more on the  product and engineering side in the last year, but given the current stage of our business, we will focus a lot more on hiring and expanding our go-to market team,” he said.

The $25 million Series A closed in the second half of last year, and was co-led by Addition and Greylock, the same firms that co-led the seed round. The new money brings the total raised $33 million.

Onehouse is building a neutral data lake integration layer on top of Apache Hudi by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Schiff: 'Do Not Insult Our Intelligence By Suggesting This Is About Anti-Semitism'

Rep. Adam Schiff and other Democratic lawmakers defended Rep. Ilhan Omar during today's debate as Republicans seek to remove her from House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Schiff explained that it was Republicans in the House who promoted violence against their own colleagues.

"But do not, do not insult our intelligence by suggesting this is about anti-Semitism!" Schiff said. "You want to introduce a resolution against someone guilty of anti-Semitism? Introduce a resolution against someone dining with anti-Semites, someone dining with white nationalists, members of your conference who are speaking at white nationalist rallies."

"Introduce a resolution against Donald J Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and others, but do not insult our intelligence by saying this is about anti-Semitism," Rep. Schiff said.

In 2019, Rep Omar apologized for some of her remarks about Israel.

Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes,” Omar said. “My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans. We have to always be willing to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity. This is why I unequivocally apologize.”

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NO Classified Docs Found At Biden's Beach House

The FBI conducted a *planned* search of President Joe Biden's Rehoboth Beach home and found ZERO documents with classified markings. Let me repeat myself - this was PLANNED (meaning NO subpoena) and NOTHING was found with even one classified marking. In the entire house. Biden's attorney, Bob Bauer, did say that the FBI took a few handwritten notes for further review, but they did not have classified markings on them. The search lasted approximately 3 1/2 hours.

Mr. Bauer told the media "the DOJ’s planned search of the President’s Rehoboth residences, conducted in coordination and cooperation with the President’s attorneys, has concluded. The search was conducted from 8:30 AM to noon. No documents with classified markings were found." He added that the search was planned and had the “full support and cooperation” of President Biden.

None of the searches by the FBI required a warrant or subpoena, unlike the case of Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lago search warrant case.

Even though nothing was found, Kristen Welker had to be the Chuck Todd of daytime cable television, adding: "That last line is significant, Chris, because they wouldn't have taken these notebooks and other items if they weren't of some interest. So we'll have to see what, if anything, comes of that."

SHUT UP, Kristen.

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Daily Crunch: Netflix’s new sharing restrictions force subscribers to select a primary viewing location

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.

Why, hello there, wonderful humans, wherever you are! Come to think of it, we bet there’s probably a bunch of AIs reading this newsletter too. So, hello, you kindhearted and beautiful AIs as well.

We’re kicking off Black History Month in style by reading Oprah’s 31 Black History facts today and committing to (re-)reading Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy. It’s a hell of a read. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Caring is not sharing: We all know by now that Netflix doesn’t want you sharing your account outside of your household, and now the company has some rules and exemptions to prevent account sharing, including defining where each person is, Ivan reports. Meanwhile, the streaming giant’s premium members get improved benefits, including more download devices and spatial audio on over 700 titles. Lauren has more.
• Really give ’em something to ChatGPT about: We teased you last month that this would be happening, but OpenAI officially launched ChatGPT Plus, which starts at $20 per month, Kyle writes. It’s only available in the U.S. for now, but there is a waitlist. Also, he reports OpenAI released a tool to detect AI-generated text.
• Land value: Property appraisal time is a fun one at the Christine Hall household — we wait with bated breath to see if this year’s property taxes will be thousands or tens of thousands. ValueBase, backed by Sam Altman’s Hydrazine, seeks to turn property appraisal on its head, bringing technology to a process long been done with pen and paper and valuing the land it sits on first. Connie writes on the company’s $1.6 million seed round.

Startups and VC

Bringing us a reminder that a company’s services may be at the mercy of state governments from time to time, Pakistan has “degraded” Wikipedia in the country for 48 hours for not removing “sacrilegious contents” and warned of fully blocking the site if the online encyclopedia fails to comply with the directions, Manish reports. The nation’s telecom regulator said that it had approached Wikipedia to block or remove certain “blasphemous” content by issuing court orders, but said the online encyclopedia neither complied nor appeared before the authority.

And now for something completely different:

• Once more Indo(nesia) the breach: MUFG, Japan’s largest bank, launches a $100 million fund for Indonesian startup, reports Catherine.
• Acquisition Within reach: Amanda writes that Meta wins a ruling against the FTC to move forward with purchase of VR startup Within.
• Hvadafornoe?: Ivan reports that Waverly Labs launches a translation app called Forum with support for 20 languages.
• Ashes to ashes: Empathy’s new tool uses AI to generate obituaries, and Kyle reports that it’s not half bad.
• Climate, meet risk: Paul reports that climate analytics and risk assessment platform for enterprises, Risilience, raises $26 million.

Teach yourself growth marketing: Which metrics really matter?

Image Credits: Rittikrai_PIX (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In the final article of a five-part series, growth marketing expert Jonathan Martinez shares the key metrics he tracked at Coinbase and Uber, along with a framework for activating and retaining early adopters who drive revenue.

Tracking KPIs like lifetime value and customer acquisition cost are obvious, so the article includes a framework that will identify which channels and customers drive the most revenue.

“Find the reasons that make your product or service ‘sticky,’ and you will save a lot of time,” writes Martinez.

Teach yourself growth marketing: Which metrics really matter?

Three more from the TC+ team:

• Not blocking this enterprise chain: Jacquelyn writes that hybrid use cases for enterprise blockchain could lead to increased adoption.
• This will send you into orbit: Paul provides a lengthy look at which open source startups rocketed in 2022.
• All charged up with capital: Battery startup Our Next Energy grabs $300 million to build gigafactory, Tim reports.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Back in 2021, Tesla invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin with the belief in longevity of cryptocurrency. In fact, it was all set to accept bitcoin as payment for its vehicles. Fast-forward to today, and the company not only shelved the acceptance of bitcoin, but also set about selling its holdings. Tesla has now recorded a $204 million loss from bitcoin in 2022, Rebecca reports. Meanwhile, Coinbase’s asset recovery tool “saved Haje’s bacon” after he spent years trying to recover some of his coins, he writes.

And we have five more for you:

• Worth the wait: “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is now streaming on Disney+, Lauren reports.
• More layoffs for Rivian: The electric vehicle maker is cutting another 6% of its workforce, Kirsten writes.
• I wear my AR glasses at night: Snap teases us with future AR glasses powered by generative AI, Sarah writes.
• That’s got a “Bing” to it: Microsoft plans to update Bing with a faster version of ChatGPT, Aisha reports.
• Deliveries that don’t deliver: Natasha L writes that a Poland watchdog group is looking into Amazon’s sales terms and delivery times to see if it is intentionally misleading consumers about when their package will actually be delivered.

Daily Crunch: Netflix’s new sharing restrictions force subscribers to select a primary viewing location by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

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Car-sharing platform Getaround gets delisting warning from NYSE

The New York Stock Exchange has issued a delisting warning to peer-to-peer car rental company Getaround for trading too low, according to the company.

Getaround debuted on the public markets in December after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The combined company’s stock began trading at around $10 per share and promptly lost 65% of its value. Today, Getaround’s shares dropped 1.3% and are going for $0.64.

Getaround has six months to cure its stock price deficiency and regain compliance with the NYSE’s continued listing standards. The stock exchange issues such warnings to companies whose stock prices are less than $1 over a consecutive 30 trading-day period.

EV-maker Arrival gets delisting warning from Nasdaq

It seems a bit early in Getaround’s time on the public markets for the company to be dancing with a potential delisting, but the warning isn’t entirely unsurprising if you look at Getaround’s balance sheet. The company has scaled somewhat aggressively over the past couple of years and claims to have a network 20x larger than its nearest competitor. That scale has come at the cost of negative growth and rising losses. In fact, revenue declined and operating costs increased in the first three quarters of 2022 compared to the year prior. By September 30, 2022, Getaround’s operating cash burn was $63.2 million, compared to $53.3 million in the same period in 2021.

Getaround closed out Q3 2022 with free cash flow of $27.2 million. Merging with InterPrivate II Acquisition Corp. brought the company $228 million of gross proceeds to help keep it afloat, but that money came with a sharp reduction in its value that may partially explain the tanking stock price.

The somewhat beleaguered company will report its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings soon — Getaround has yet to set a date — which should shed some light on whether Getaround can turnaround and bring itself back up to compliance.

Why the SPAC route makes sense for Getaround

Car-sharing platform Getaround gets delisting warning from NYSE by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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