Koch Industries and C3.ai, whose leaders are supporters of conservative causes, are working together even more closely.

Under the expanded agreement, Koch Industries employees will be able to use C3.ai's no-code AI tools.

Koch Industries and C3.ai are getting cozier. The companies announced a deal on Tuesday to extend their work together, allowing Koch Industries employees to use no-code AI tools.

A prominent donor to Republicans and conservative causes, Koch Industries and its subsidiaries in the oil, gas, paper and financial services industries will get access for another five years to AI-fueled machine-learning models and software from C3.ai. The companies first partnered in 2020.

C3.ai promises to “democratize AI” by making it easy for non-coders to create and use machine learning and predictive analytics tools for things like energy management, supply chain logistics and detecting faulty equipment. The company’s CEO, Thomas Siebel, is one of the enterprise AI industry’s most vocal proponents of using AI in support of “democratic values” and has actively sought U.S. military contracts for the company as a means of achieving that goal.

Koch Industries has been under the spotlight recently for fresh political contributions that could influence lawmakers in supporting the company as it continues its glass manufacturing subsidiary’s operations in Russia, despite the country’s attacks on Ukraine.

In a statement about the extended agreement, C3.ai said Koch’s employees will get access to its no-code AI Ex Machina software. Low- and no-code AI tools have been criticized for making potentially risky AI easier for people to use without proper training on data privacy and security or the implications of automating faulty, inaccurate or biased decision-making tech.

Himself a philanthropic donor, Siebel has supported controversial causes. Earlier this year he contributed $90,000 to the so-called "Freedom Convoy" of truckers who shut down large parts of Canada's capital as well as a key border crossing to protest pandemic protections.

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Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

AMD expects to become a chipmaker that banks $40 billion in annual sales in the next three years. In 2021, AMD reported record revenue of $16.4 billion. Let that sink in.

On Thursday, at the company’s first financial state of the union in two years, AMD CEO Lisa Su unpacked how the business plans to achieve the $40 billion revenue target by 2025: in large part, through data center chips. Company-wide, AMD is targeting a $300 billion slice of the overall chip market, and it thinks $125 billion of that target will go to chips that power servers, AI, networking infrastructure and graphics.

“So, what’s happened in the data centers?” Su said. “First, we've seen a tremendous increase in cloud demand and everything that's going on in the data center. We've seen a tremendous increase in AI and sort of the demand for AI workloads. We've added [total market size] when we think about the networking and telco and other opportunities.”

Underlying the message is a seemingly undeniable reality. The world needs more computing horsepower, and the demand for silicon is only going to get more intense as tools such as AI become commonplace. Inside the Santa Clara, California conference room populated by Wall Street’s sell-side analysts seated in white, leather chairs, AMD executives made the case that the company was going to ride that computing wave.

“We still are underrepresented in the market,” Su said of the data center processor market. According to Mercury Research, in the first quarter of 2022, AMD had 11.6% of the market for x86 data center chips, up from 8.9% last year.

AMD made a big show of its forthcoming data center chips, talking up the performance gains resulting from the company’s (in its own eyes) superior designs. Its partnership with TSMC is part of that success, and AMD must develop its latest designs together with the manufacturer in order to ensure it can take advantage of the latest fabrication techniques to eke the most performance out of each piece of silicon.

Part of AMD’s plans for the data center and AI include its $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx. The addition of the programmable chipmaker added billions of dollars of new sales and new markets in cars, wireless tech and embedded chips used by the military and in health care. But Xilinx also brought technology that will help broaden AMD’s efforts in the data center.

AMD was once a clear second-class citizen next to Intel, and that appears dead. Gone are the days of the disastrous Barcelona server chip rollout and the tumultuous period following its critical decision to get out of the chip-manufacturing business, which in the end served it well. If the company manages to achieve its projections, it will have cemented the decade-long effort by Su to transform the company.

Employees are pushing Coinbase to remove three top leaders over actions "that have led to questionable results," according to a now-deleted petition that was first published on Mirror.xyz. CEO Brian Armstrong said the public petition with those demands is "really dumb on multiple levels."

The petition, titled "Operation Revive COIN," called for Chief Operating Officer Emilie Choi, Chief Product Officer Surojit Chatterjee and Chief People Officer LJ Brock to be fired from Coinbase. Employees listed eight plans they said were carried out under those executives' direction, including Coinbase's struggling NFT marketplace; the decision to rescind new job offers; and a since-reversed push to hire for thousands of roles "despite the fact that it is an unsustainable plan and is contrary to the wisdom of the crypto industry."

Employees also alleged a "generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude" from the three executives and wrote that the company has been unable to put out "any higher or better quality products and services" despite hiring more employees.

A screenshot of the petition was posted on Blind, and the original petition from Mirror.xyz was archived on the Wayback Machine. The screenshot indicates that the petition was first posted Thursday evening.

The petition stated that the executives' actions have hurt employees, company shareholders who have seen Coinbase's stock fall and the company itself. Coinbase's "plummeting stock value and bad workplace management led to low morale and the threats of losing top talent," it said. The employees are asking for the executives to be ousted in a "vote of no confidence."

"We hope to find people who have had experience in the crypto space and can run such a company more responsibly," employees wrote in the petition. CEO Brian Armstrong was not mentioned in the petition.

In a series of tweets posted hours after the petition was first posted, Armstrong said the vote of no confidence should be on him and not other executives. "Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)," he wrote.

Armstrong added that if employees aren't confident in their leaders, they should quit. He criticized those who publicly shared the petition, saying it harms fellow co-workers, shareholders and customers. "It's also dumb because if you get caught you will be fired, and it's just not an effective way to get what you claim to want," he wrote.

"There is probably lots we can be doing better, but if you're at a place where you want to leak stuff externally then it's time for you to go. You're hurting yourself and those around you," Armstrong added.

Coinbase has been slowly letting out tough news over the past few weeks. In its first-quarter earnings call, Armstrong stood by plans to triple its workforce, saying Coinbase was "greedy when others are fearful." But as crypto asset prices continued to tumble and trading volumes fell, the company announced a hiring freeze. At first, Coinbase assured incoming hires that they would not be affected, but plans changed again last week when Coinbase took back some offers, giving those who lost jobs before they even started a month's worth of severance.

A representative for Coinbase did not answer a request for comment. Chatterjee and Choi did not respond to requests for comment, and Brock could not be reached for comment.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misquoted a tweet. This story was updated on June 10, 2022.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is looking into consumer debt incurred at work to pay for required gear and training — a trend known as "employer-driven debt."

In some cases, employees must sign up for “debt products” they have to pay back if they leave “before a certain date,” the CFPB said in a statement.

“For example, a company may provide training to a new hire, and require that the training’s cost be paid back if the employee leaves or is fired within a set period,” the CFPB said.

The CFPB said these financial arrangements could lead to serious consumer risks, including “overextension of household finances, errors in servicing and collection, default, and inaccurate credit reporting.”

It could also make it difficult for an employee to move to another workplace. “The labor market operates at its best when workers are able to move freely within it,” CFPB director Rohit Chopra said. “Our inquiry is about studying the effects of an emerging form of debt that may have the potential to trap employees in place.”

The inquiry comes at a time when employers, often in partnership with fintech companies, are offering different financing products to their employees.

The CFPB is soliciting comments and information from the public on the impact of “employer-driven debt,” particularly from employers, consumers, worker organizations and labor unions.

Kabbage co-founders Kathryn Petralia and Rob Frohwein recently launched Keep Financial, which enables employers to offer cash bonuses in the form of loans to employees. Keep is the lender, which may differentiate its product from those the CFPB described as the subject of its inquiry. Another company, Salary Finance, works with employers to offer financing products, including short-term loans, to their employees.

Bolt, an ecommerce software company, has drawn attention for directly offering employees loans to buy stock options, a program co-founder Ryan Breslow has touted on Twitter. One employee told Business Insider he borrowed tens of thousands of dollars to buy shares, only to lose his job in recent layoffs. Such loans are optional, unlike the required gear or training described in the CFPB's announcement.

When it comes to responsibility for the spread of climate misinformation, the White House has its eyes on Big Tech.

During an Axios event on Thursday, Gina McCarthy, the White House's climate adviser, said tech companies need to crack down on the spread of false and misleading information about the climate crisis. While flat-out climate denial has waned, McCarthy said misinformation on major social media platforms persists in a different but “equally dangerous” form.

“The dark money is still there,” she said. “The fossil fuel companies are still basically trying their best to make sure that people don't understand the challenge of climate.”

Specifically, she said a small but vocal group of users are repeatedly using tech and social media platforms to sow doubt about the feasibility of the energy transition. The transition to zero-carbon technologies isn't just doable; it's necessary. And most importantly, it's happening. Yet McCarthy said the entrenched fossil fuel interests are "seeding, basically, doubt about the costs" of the clean energy.

"We need the tech companies to really jump in," she added.

Major tech companies — including, mostly recently, Twitter and Pinterest — have tried to tackle some forms of misinformation. In the case of Twitter, the company said it would block advertisements that “contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.”

However, the stripe of misinformation that McCarthy is most worried about continues to be insidious and widespread. A recent Media Matters study on the spread of climate and energy misinformation on Facebook found that a large portion of posts use “energy independence” as a justification for drilling for more fossil fuels, amid a lot of hand-wringing about our dependence on foreign energy. These kinds of posts are replete with inaccuracies and lies, but are rarely labeled as misinformation nor are they fact-checked.

Another report out this week from a coalition of advocacy groups shows misinformation tends to tick up around major events, such as last year's climate conference in Glasgow. Similar to McCarthy, the report's authors called for more concerted action by tech companies to ensure lie-laden posts don't spread, including potentially working together to prevent falsehoods from moving across platforms. Giving researchers and regulators more access to data could also help, as could coming up with common definitions of misinformation. It's clear from McCarthy's comments that the Biden administration is acutely aware of what's happening on social media, and it's watching what tech companies are — and aren't — doing to help stop the spread of misinformation.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly probing Terraform Labs on whether its marketing of the TerraUSD stablecoin before it crashed last month violated federal investor-protection regulations, according to a Bloomberg report. The SEC is also looking into whether the company broke any securities and investment products rules.

On top of the new investigation, Terraform is also battling an ongoing investigation from the SEC relating to whether the crypto company was involved in selling unregistered securities through the Mirror Protocol.

Terraform argued in the ongoing investigation that the SEC lacked jurisdiction over the company and founder Do Kwon, since the company is based in Singapore and Kwon is a South Korean national residing in Singapore. An appeals court ruled that Terraform would have to comply with the SEC's requests, as the company was in business with U.S.-based consumers, investors, employees and entities.

Terraform doesn’t look like it's getting off scot-free elsewhere either. South Korean law enforcement agencies are investigating Terraform Labs and its ecosystem, including its founders, alleging that an estimated 280,000 citizens were affected by the stablecoin collapse.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency is also investigating a Terraform employee for allegedly embezzling bitcoin from the company’s treasury.

Singapore's Straits Times noted last month that a police report had been filed against Terraform Labs in connection with the collapse of UST but reported that police were not investigating the company. The Monetary Authority of Singapore's list of enforcement actions did not show any actions against Kwon or Terraform as of Thursday.

Meta is moving away from its goal to establish its Portal smart display as a consumer product, Protocol has been able to confirm. The company will not make any future versions of Portal geared toward consumers, and will instead focus on selling Portal to businesses.

The shift was first reported by The Information Thursday, which also said that the company was switching up its road map for AR glasses and postponing the launch of a consumer-ready AR product by a few years. All of this is part of efforts to control costs of Reality Labs, Meta’s unit focused on metaverse software and hardware.

Meta first introduced Portal as a video calling-centric smart display in 2018, and has since released a number of iterations of the hardware, including a version that uses TVs as displays and a portable Portal Go. Portal sales went up during the pandemic, but the company hasn’t been able to compete with similar products from Google and Amazon.

As a result, Meta is now looking to more specifically target businesses that are looking for ways to keep their hybrid workforce connected. Meta is expected to continue to sell its existing devices to consumers, and provide buyers with support for some time to come.

Notion is acquiring calendar app Cron, the note-taking platform announced Thursday. Notion already allowed for a two-way sync with Google Calendar, but now Notion will have a scheduling app of its own.

"Time is a fundamental layer of software and our daily workflows," co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao wrote in a Notion blog post.

Digital calendaring is a hot space, with startups like Calendly, Clockwise and Fantastical competing to make time-tracking and scheduling less of a headache. Cron is fresh on the scene, raising a seed round of $3.5 million in 2020 and rolling out its beta in 2021. It looks like your standard calendar app, but leverages keyboard shortcuts to quickly create and schedule events. Cron was ranked product of the month in November 2021 on Product Hunt.

It's not uncommon for bigger tech companies to buy popular startup calendar apps. Who can forget Sunrise, an early geek favorite until it was swallowed up by Microsoft in 2015.

Notion's influence in the productivity space exploded in 2020 and has since been growing steadily. It reached $10 billion valuation after raising $275 million in October of last year, led by Sequoia and Coatue. In September, the company acquired Indian startup Automate.io to expand its integration efforts. The acquisition of Cron shows Notion's ambitions to become even more of an all-in-one workspace.

"The first thing many people do in the morning is check their calendar," Notion's blog post reads. "It anchors the day, paints a picture of what’s ahead, and keeps track of how we spend our most precious resource: time."

Cron co-founder and CEO Raphael Schaad expressed his excitement to be partnering with Notion, though he reassured Cron fans that the calendar will still exist as a separate app. "We’ll work with Notion to bring the two products closer together to unlock powerful workflows," he wrote in a blog post. "The two apps side by side is already a common sight among our users."

Salesforce employees have asked the company to end its relationship with the National Rifle Association. But during an all-hands Wednesday, co-CEOs Bret Taylor and Marc Benioff said that the company wouldn’t bar specific customers from using its services, according to a recording obtained by Protocol.

During the meeting, Taylor said that after Salesforce updated its acceptable use policy to ban the sale of firearms like automatic and some semi-automatic firearms, “a number” of Commerce Cloud customers left the platform. He said those policies reflect which companies can use Salesforce’s tools, but “we are not going to litigate which organizations are allowed to be a customer of Salesforce.”

“I don't want to get into the business position where we're deciding which customers are allowed to use our platform,” Taylor said in a recording of the all-hands. “I think that would violate our principles and violate our principles of trust.”

The remarks follow calls from thousands of Salesforce employees to end its relationship with the NRA, which uses Salesforce’s products for marketing and fundraising purposes. Employees sent a letter to Salesforce leaders with their demand after the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two adults dead.

Benioff said he’s called for a ban on assault weapons before and supports organizations that advocate for gun control, such as March For Our Lives. “But I also realized that guns are a very personal issue for a lot of people, especially in this country,” Benioff said.

“We have a gun culture that is built around guns in many cases,” he said at the meeting. “If we were in Japan, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because nobody has guns.”

A Salesforce employee, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said reactions from workers have been mixed. Some applauded the company’s conversations around the topic, while others still stood by the demands in the letter. Salesforce is also not the only company that’s been asked to cut ties with the NRA: Apple, Roku and others have been pressed to stop working with the association in years past, and the sale of firearms on Facebook and eBay have come under increased scrutiny in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting.

The tension at Salesforce over the company’s relationship with the NRA is also just the latest example of tech company leadership butting heads with employees. Amazon leadership recently fended off several employee-led shareholder proposals, and a number of tech workers have turned to unionizing in an effort to extract concessions from companies, including better pay and working conditions.

A representative for Salesforce did not return a request for comment.

The national charging network of electric vehicle lovers' dreams is getting closer to reality. On Thursday, the Biden administration proposed a set of standards for a charging program that will ensure EV drivers have access to fast, reliable juice anywhere in the country.

The Biden administration is giving states $7.5 billion — money that comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law — to help build an electric vehicle charging network. But while each state gets to propose how it would use the money, the new standards would help ensure that drivers looking for a charge have, in the words of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, an "experience [that] is the same no matter where you are."

Right now, charging is relatively piecemeal. There are different apps, proprietary charging networks such as Tesla's Superchargers and decidedly varying quality in how fast and reliable chargers are. The proposed standards would make it so that states using the federal funds would have to meet minimum charging requirements.

Electric vehicles are hot commodities due to rising gas prices and the plummeting cost of ownership compared to internal combustion engine vehicles. Interest in EVs is outpacing supply, but range anxiety is still a very real thing. Building out a standardized charging network is a way to ensure that anxiety is replaced by sweet relief that you can get a charge and grab a bag of Sunchips while you wait to top up. (TBD on whether Sunchips are included once the standards are finalized … but they should be.)

The administration has set a goal of building out 500,000 charging stations across the country, which makes the standards all the more important. But a nice charging network alone does not an EV future make. On a call with reporters, Granholm stressed the administration was looking for Congress to pass "additional tax credits for EVs and batteries and other clean technologies." While research indicates that would indeed help spur EV adoption, the fate of new tax credits hinges on Sen. Joe Manchin. And that means — at least based on his most recent statements — that the administration is out of luck for the moment. Without those tax credits and other policies, it's unlikely the U.S. will get on track to meet the Biden administration's goal of 50% of all vehicle sales being EVs by 2030. (That goal itself is already a relatively weak one from a climate perspective.)

There are other avenues to clean up transportation's carbon footprint, ways that would pay even greater dividends than getting everyone in EVs. That includes investing in public transit as well as walking and micromobility infrastructure. But those would require an even more radical shift in thinking by the West Virginia senator and other policymakers. That's not a reason to write them off out of hand, of course, particularly since winding down carbon pollution is a zero-sum game. But the tensions over something as simple as EV tax credits show addressing transportation emissions could be a rough ride.

Apple will be offering lending services for its new "buy now, pay later" service itself instead of relying on banking partners, according to Bloomberg, in a major move into financial services for the tech giant.

Apple Financing LLC, a wholly owned Apple subsidiary that has state lending licenses, will do credit checks and make loan decisions.

Previously Apple has relied on partners for financial products. Its Apple Card credit card uses Goldman Sachs for lending and credit. Goldman is issuing the Mastercard credential that will be used for Apple's Pay Later service.

Apple is also working on its own payment-processing service, among other services, Bloomberg reports, in an effort to reduce its dependence on outside vendors.

The move brings Apple more directly into competition with a variety of fintech and financial companies.

Apple has been looking for more ways to increase its business for services that do not rely on hardware sales.

The phone maker has also pushed heavily into expanding the usefulness of Apple Wallet, which stores card credentials for Apple Pay but has been broadening to include other digital items like drivers' licenses, airline boarding passes, baseball tickets and local transit tickets.

Multiverse just raised $220 million to expand its apprenticeship programs, making it the U.K’.s first ed tech unicorn, according to a release.

The company, led by Euan Blair, has become known for its tech apprenticeship partnerships at some of the largest companies across the globe. It launched its first U.S. partnership in 2021 with Verizon and has since expanded to work with Cisco and Box. Its latest round of funding was co-led by StepStone Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst, and brings the company’s valuation to $1.7 billion.

According to the release by Multiverse, the company plans to use the funding as a way to introduce more people without traditional or technical degrees into the tech industry and create a more diverse pool of talent. Apprenticeships have become widely considered as an effective way to diversify the tech talent pipeline. A recent report from the Kapor Center in partnership with the NAACP found that according to federal registered apprenticeship data, 17% of apprentices from 2016 to 2021 were Black.

Currently, Multiverse has trained over 8,000 apprentices globally, and of that number 56% reportedly identify as people of color and over half are women. The company’s apprenticeships are tuition-free programs in areas ranging from software engineering and digital marketing to data analysis. Participants earn a salary while completing on-the-job training and educational courses related to the field. Software engineering has remained one of its most in-demand programs. In the past year, Multiverse experienced a 260% increase in enrollment.

New York's top financial regulator has issued new guidance for stablecoins weeks after the dramatic collapse of TerraUSD.

The state's Department of Financial Services, which has long been a first mover in crypto regulations, said Wednesday it is the first in the U.S. to set comprehensive standards around stablecoins, an asset class that has caught the attention of regulators worldwide.

“Leveraging our years of expertise in the space, our regulatory guidance today creates clear criteria for virtual currency companies looking to issue [U.S. dollar]-backed stablecoins in New York," said DFS Superintendent Adrienne Harris in a press release.

The department has been licensing and setting minimum disclosure requirements for dollar-backed stablecoins since 2018. The guidance published Wednesday offers more comprehensive standards, according to the state DFS.

New York-licensed crypto entities can only offer stablecoins that are fully backed by a reserve of assets and redeemable by holders within two business days. The guidance also set rules around what types of assets can be used to back stablecoins, including U.S. Treasury bills less than three months from maturity and deposits in state and federally charted accounts. The coins can also be backed by reverse repurchase agreements fully collateralized by U.S. Treasury bills, notes or bonds on an overnight basis, subject to the regulator's approval.

The reserves must be audited once per month by an independent accountant, with that report released to the public within 30 days.

The guidance applies to any U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins issued by cryptocurrency firms holding a New York BitLicense or limited purpose trust charter that allows digital asset transactions. The regulatory scheme wouldn't embrace an algorithmic stablecoin like TerraUSD, which makes the state's move emblematic of the challenge regulators face in addressing decentralized finance.

Institutions behind asset-backed stablecoins have sought in recent weeks to clarify the difference between their offerings and the risk of algorithmic stablecoins.

Nonetheless, the collapse of the Terra ecosystem clearly has accelerated efforts to regulate stablecoins as a whole. DFS said in the announcement that it has been "in close contact with New York State-regulated virtual currency entities in light of recent events in the stablecoin market and the virtual currency space."

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Wednesday that the TerraUSD collapse "absolutely" influenced the approach her crypto regulation bill with Sen. Cynthia Lummis took toward stablecoins.

"This bill is a comprehensive approach to how to create safety and soundness in this industry, how to create transparency, accountability and how to create consumer protections, because of everything that's happened in the last several weeks," Gillibrand said at an event hosted by the Washington Post.

The Lummis-Gillibrand bill, filed Tuesday, requires all issuers of payment stablecoins to publicly disclose the assets backing them and to be completely backed and redeemable by high-quality liquid assets.

New York launched its BitLicense for firms that facilitate crypto transactions in 2015, placing it as a leading regulator for the industry. Harris, who took over DFS last fall, has promised to address some industry grievances with the BitLicense, including its lengthy review process. But she has insisted New York can maintain strong consumer safeguards while still attracting investment in the industry, often citing how New York startups attracted more crypto venture capital dollars than those of any state last year.

The New York DFS guidance would apply to any newly issued stablecoins from state-regulated entities and four active coins: Pax Dollar (USDP) and Binance USD (BUSD), issued by Paxos; Gemini dollar (GUSD), issued by Gemini; and Zytara (ZUSD) issued by GMO-Z.

In a statement Wednesday, Paxos general counsel Dan Burstein said the company believes "these guidelines provide a strong foundation for the regulatory oversight of stablecoin issuers and tokens moving forward."

Ben Brody and Tomio Geron contributed to this report.

On Wednesday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler suggested the need for auctions to ensure the best prices for stock trading, in what would be a major change to the way U.S. equities markets operate.

The idea, along with several other big changes that the SEC is considering, could mean retail equities orders executing in auctions instead of directly with wholesalers that currently control the vast majority of retail order execution.

"I've asked staff to make recommendations for the Commission's consideration around: How do we enhance order by order competition? Now this may be through open and transparent auctions, or other means," Gensler said. "It may be segment investors get the midpoint or better, and then there might be this auction mechanism."

Gensler said the market needs greater "order by order competition" — better prices for each individual trade. This auction system could address that. He noted that U.S. options markets have an auction system and that could be used to help guide changes.

Currently, retail orders are executed mainly by wholesalers, while stock exchanges such as the NYSE or Nasdaq handle large institutional orders. Analysts have argued that this segmentation results in worse prices for both retail and institutional trading.

"The vast majority of retail marketable orders are flowing to wholesalers — 90% plus to a small handful of wholesalers that pay for order flow," Gensler said. "And what's more, this segmentation means that institutional investors, such as pension funds and others, don't get to interact directly with that order flow. This segmentation, which isolates retail market orders, may not benefit the retail public as much as orders being exposed to order by order competition."

Meanwhile, information about what trades are getting better prices is not always clear. Gensler suggested that more disclosure is needed — particularly from brokers, who currently do not need to disclose as much information about pricing quality as wholesalers and exchanges in so-called Rule 605 forms.

Gensler, in a speech at a Piper Sandler conference, also discussed several other areas that he is interested in changing in financial markets. In particular, he reiterated his view that payment for order flow is a conflict of interest, and said he has asked his staff for a proposal to address this.

"Payment for order flow can distort routing decisions — certain principal trading firms seeking to attract Robinhood's order flow told them that there was a trade-off between payment order flow and price improvement for customers," Gensler said.

He also noted that not all brokers pay for order flow and that some with zero commission do not — perhaps seeking to address criticisms that banning PFOF would result in the end of zero-commission trading.

Gensler also suggested potential changes to rules limiting tick sizes to a penny, which are in effect with stock exchanges and disadvantages them compared to wholesalers, which can offer sub-penny pricing. He also suggested potential changes to the National Best Bid and Offer, a system that firms use to measure their pricing for customers. Odd lots of less than 100 shares are not included in the NBBO, he noted, but now make up 55% of trading as of March 2022 — compared to 15% in 2014. That's the result of more retail trading and larger stock share prices.

Robinhood Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher criticized the SEC's potential changes before Gensler spoke Wednesday, an indicator of much more debate to come on these issues.

The SEC could begin proposing these various rules this fall, according to the Wall Street Journal, and public comment would follow.

Twitter is giving Elon Musk what he wants. The company will hand over access to its internal firehose of data so Musk can figure out once and for all what the deal is with bots on the platform. The question is: What will he do now?

According to The Washington Post, Musk could get access to the company's firehose, or a massive stream of data with more than 500 million tweets, as soon as this week. The move may finally end the impasse between Musk and Twitter, a person familiar told The Post. The firehose is a real-time record of tweets that are sent, the devices they're sent from and information about the accounts sending them.

Musk's legal team has claimed that he needs access to this data in order to accurately see how many users on the platform are bots or spam accounts. Musk previously said the deal is "on hold" until he gained access to this information, and threatened to pull out of the deal on Monday if Twitter didn't cough up information about its bot situation in the following weeks. Some have speculated that Musk doesn't actually want to buy Twitter anymore, and that the bot issue gives him cover to back out.

As it stands, Musk doesn't have a way out of the deal unless it's held up by regulatory processes or he simply doesn't have the money to pay. Though Musk has demanded to see this data to come up with his own conclusion about Twitter's bot situation, he also waived his right to dive into Twitter’s finances and internal workings when he signed the purchase agreement in April, according to the Post. He may have to pay $1 billion to walk away from the deal if gaining access to the firehose doesn't solve his issues with the platform.

But this is Elon Musk we're talking about. Anything could happen.

Rostin Behnam said Wednesday that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission won't be weak on crypto — and added that anyone who thinks otherwise is confused.

"We are one of the toughest cops on the beat," Behnam, chairman of the CFTC, said at an event hosted by the Washington Post. "We have a strong enforcement program, and we are very, very strong in terms of our market oversight and surveillance."

Behnam defended the agency against the notion that the Securities and Exchange Commission would be tougher in overseeing cryptocurrencies and pushed back on the view that the emphasis on CFTC regulation in the major new bill in Congress amounts to a win for the industry.

"It's just a misunderstanding of the securities laws and the commodities laws," Behnam said, saying that the kinds of regular disclosures that securities issuers make through the SEC aren't useful for many cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis, the bipartisan duo behind the bill, also rejected the idea that their approach sidelines the SEC.

"The majority of the digital assets ... have characteristics of securities that will require the SEC's disclosure capabilities," Lummis said at the event. The agency "has most of the small tokens that are going to be the larger perpetrators of fraud, so the SEC's role in this is absolutely critical."

She also cheered SEC Chair Gary Gensler's recent statement that many cryptocurrencies are securities but bitcoin may not be.

"I agree with him," Lummis said. She added that she'd spoken with Gensler on Tuesday, when the proposal was released, but said he hadn't read it yet at the time.

Gillibrand also said SEC staff had given "a lot of verbal feedback" on the draft, but had declined to give written thoughts. She said she hoped the bill "could move forward, maybe even by the end of the year."

Better.com and its chief executive Vishal Garg, who infamously fired 900 employees on a Zoom call, are facing a whistleblower complaint that he misled investors.

Sarah Pierce, former executive vice president for Sales and Operations at the online mortgage lender, said she was pushed out of her role after raising issues with the statements Garg made to investors in his "zeal to close" a SPAC deal. The SoftBank-backed company planned to go public through a SPAC transaction that valued the firm near $8 billion as of May 2021.

That deal is still yet to close, as Better.com has been hurt by rising interest rates and engulfed in controversy, in no small part due to the actions of its chief executive.

Garg took a one-month leave from his role late last year amid global backlash for firing employees by videoconference. Pierce, in a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, said she warned Garg that his layoff plan violated California's Warn Act and confronted him for lying about the terminated employees stealing from the company.

“We have reviewed the claims in the complaint and strongly believe them to be without merit,” Better.com said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the lawsuit. “The company is confident in our financial and accounting practices, and we will vigorously defend this lawsuit.”

Better.com grew quickly during the early months of the pandemic, as low interest rates and a hot housing market boosted demand both for new mortgages and for refinancing existing loans. But the firm lost over $300 million in 2021, according to filings from Aurora Acquisition Corp., the SPAC that agreed to merge with Better last year.

The lawsuit says Garg told investors that Better.com could achieve profitability in the first quarter of this year, despite internal projections that saw the back half of the year as the best-case scenario. Garg allegedly said he believed interest rates would fall because "President Biden will die of covid," according to the lawsuit.

Pierce said she was pushed out of her role in February in retaliation for pushing back against Garg. She has also filed a retaliation complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, according to the lawsuit.

Alex Kipman, who helped lead Microsoft's mixed-reality efforts with the AR headset HoloLens and Xbox Kinect, is resigning from the company following Insider's investigation into allegations of harassment and misconduct toward female employees.

Kipman told his team on Tuesday, according to Insider, and Microsoft Cloud leader Scott Guthrie is planning a reorganization of the mixed-reality department. GeekWire published the full text of Guthrie's email, which does not mention the allegations but does detail the personnel changes within the cloud and artificial intelligence divisions.

"We have mutually decided that this is the right time for [Kipman] to leave the company to pursue other opportunities," Guthrie wrote. "I appreciate the tremendous vision Alex has provided to Microsoft over the years, and all that he has done to advance our Metaverse offerings. Alex is committed to helping the teams with the transition process over the next two months and ensuring success before pursuing what is next for him."

Microsoft did not immediately respond to Protocol's request for confirmation.

Dozens of Microsoft employees told Insider that Kipman allegedly got away with misconduct, including unwanted touching of female employees. One person alleged Kipman watched "VR porn" in front of a room of employees, and Microsoft employees were warned not to leave women alone around Kipman. A former executive who had worked with Kipman told Insider: "The best thing that happened, sadly, was the pandemic. So we never had to interact with him in person."

Eventually, more than 25 employees shared their allegations in a report about Kipman. Microsoft did not confirm or deny specific allegations when Insider asked for comment.

"Lord of the Rings" was a documentary. At least, if the ring was a USB-C charger and Middle-earth was the European Union. On Tuesday, EU lawmakers agreed to make USB-C charging the standard for the 27-nation bloc, a move that will cut down on e-waste. It could also have a notable impact on Apple.

The provisionally passed law will require USB-C charging ports to be standard by 2024 for small- and medium-sized electronic devices sold in the EU. The decision will help consumers collectively save an estimated $268 million a year, which is great for people. The decision will also avoid 11,000 tons of e-waste annually, which is great for the planet.

"We gave industry plenty of time to come up with their own solutions, now time is ripe for legislative action for a common charger," Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, said last year when the law was being crafted.

A 2021 analysis by the European Commission found that 44% of smartphones sold in 2019 in the EU used USB-C charging while 38% still rely on micro-USB (those devices tend to be older and cheaper). The former is expected to completely overtake the latter by 2026. But a pesky 18% of mobile devices use Apple's Lightning connector, a share the commission found was likely to stay the same absent legislation. Apple had previously pushed back on the law, saying it would stifle charging innovation. The company's laptops support USB-C charging, so it's not like Apple can't adapt. (Yes, that's a charger joke.)

E-waste is a growing global problem. An analysis by the United Nations and the International Telecommunication Union found that nearly 54 million tons of e-waste accumulated in 2020, the last year with global data available. The EU USB-C decision is a relative drop in the bucket at that scale. But it's one of a number of policies that could be coming to force the tech industry to stop using the planet as a toxic waste dump.

Right-to-repair laws have sprung up, which could give new life to aging electronics. Finding ways to cut down on the number of new devices going into circulation every year won't just reduce the amount of landfill space going to e-waste. It could also be a major climate boon; an estimated 68% of electronic devices' carbon emissions are tied to the manufacturing process.

Some tech companies have. Notably, eBay recently opened up its accounting books to show how re-commerce on the site is helping avoid emissions, particularly when it comes to electronics.

Businesses would need a license to offer crypto financial services in California under a bill introduced Tuesday.

The bill, titled the Digital Financial Assets Law, would require companies “engaging in digital financial asset business activity,” including investing, lending or trading cryptocurrencies, to register with the state’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

“While the newness of cryptocurrency is part of what makes investing exciting, it also makes it riskier for consumers because cryptocurrency businesses are not adequately regulated and do not have to follow many of the same rules that apply to everyone else,” said Assemblymember Timothy Grayson in a statement.

The proposal would offer consumers “basic but necessary protections” and “promote a healthy cryptocurrency market by making it safer for everyone,” added Grayson, who introduced the bill and is chair of the Assembly Banking and Finance Committee.

DFPI Commissioner Suzanne Martindale, who leads the state’s Consumer Financial Protection Division, said the proposal would “by and large, create a new licensing regime for crypto finance” and set up “minimum standards for various crypto related products and services.”

Martindale said California has been “trying to take a measured approach” to crypto which she said has led to an “explosion in offerings.”

“We know we need to act, but we want to do it right,” she told Protocol. “We are getting complaints where people are just straight up being defrauded. I mean, we know that there are people that are just outright just getting scammed, and so we don't want to move too slow either.”

The proposal underlines growing interest in regulating the fast-growing crypto industry. On Tuesday, Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand filed a bipartisan bill for regulating and defining cryptocurrencies and digital assets which would give the CFTC broad oversight powers.

California has taken a more hands-off approach to regulating cryptocurrencies than other states. It legalized bitcoin in 2014 and regulates the fiat-currency money-transmission activities of some cryptocurrency businesses but doesn't have an equivalent to New York's BitLicense, for example.

PayPal users can now transfer their cryptocurrency from PayPal to and from other wallets and exchanges, making the payments giant one of a growing number of fintech companies adding crypto capabilities. The company said the feature would be available Tuesday to some U.S. users and the rest of eligible U.S. users in coming weeks.

PayPal customers could already buy and sell bitcoin, ethereum, bitcoin cash and litecoin in the app, including using the crypto at checkout on some purchases.

But now customers can send coins in to PayPal, move their crypto from PayPal to third-party crypto hardware wallets or exchanges, and send crypto to other PayPal users in "seconds" with no fees. PayPal doesn't charge fees to transfer crypto into or out of PayPal, but network or gas fees may apply.

The crypto wallet world is roughly divided into custodial and self-custody wallets, with PayPal's new offering falling in the former camp. Coinbase offers both, the Coinbase.com custodial wallet and Coinbase Wallet for a self-custody option. Block's Cash App is a custodial wallet, broadly similar to PayPal, though it only supports bitcoin; Block is also working on a self-custody hardware wallet. Robinhood recently added crypto wallets for its users.

Because PayPal's wallet is custodial, users don't have access to private keys. (PayPal positions this as a benefit, telling users they won't have to worry about losing keys, and promises to replace crypto if accounts are hacked.) With the new feature, when PayPal users want to receive a crypto transfer, PayPal creates a new "receive" address for each transaction.

Google, Uber, Amazon and other tech giants have asked the Department of Homeland Security to change its policies so that the children of highly skilled foreign workers can stay in the United States after age 21.

Under the current rules, children of H1-B visa holders — many of whom work in tech — have to leave the U.S. after their 21st birthday, even if they've grown up in the U.S. and the rest of their family remains in the country. These children of foreign workers can apply for a green card, but that process is notorious for delays and complexity.

The appeal from tech companies comes at a time of labor shortages in highly technical fields. The companies urged the administration “to establish more robust aging out policies” in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

“Policymakers have recognized the plight of the Dreamers – children brought to the U.S. by their parents, who know no other country and were left without legal status – and have provided interim relief through the DACA program,” the firms wrote in their letter. “Now, we urge policymakers to also address the needs of the more than 200,000 children of high-skilled immigrants who risk falling through the cracks of the immigration system.”

These children are sometimes referred to as “documented Dreamers,” and lawmakers have introduced legislation that would provide them a path to citizenship. In their letter, the companies called on Congress to pass that legislation.

In an interview with Axios, Google’s vice president of Government Affairs and Public Policy, Karan Bhatia, said the current policy doesn't just hurt those families, but it also harms American competitiveness. “The prospect of having their children having to self-deport when they turn 21 deters potential employees from coming to the United States, and also makes it harder to retain employees who have been here for a while," Bhatia said.

It's not just the children of H-1B visa holders who have struggled under U.S. policies. In previous years, their spouses on H-4 visas have also faced significant delays in receiving work authorizations as part of a broader strategy by the Trump administration to stall the program started by the Obama administration. Hundreds of lawsuits around the country were filed, and while many were successful in getting work permits before their cases were heard, some faced job losses, loss of health insurance and other basic freedoms.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly opening an investigation into Binance over the 2017 initial coin offering of its BNB token, according to a Bloomberg report. The agency's said to be examining whether the token’s offering constitutes a security sale, which would have needed to be registered with the agency.

This isn’t the first time that Binance has found itself in hot waters with U.S. regulators, with an ongoing SEC probe over CEO Changpeng Zhao’s links to two firms trading on Binance.US. Other investigations include a joint investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice over tax and money laundering concerns, and a Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigation into insider trading and market manipulation.

Binance has recently continued to win regulatory approvals in Europe and the Middle East, most recently in France, Italy, and Dubai.

On the latest SEC probe, Binance said that “it would not be appropriate for us to comment on our ongoing conversations with regulators, which include education, assistance, and voluntary responses to information requests” in a statement to Bloomberg, and that it “will continue to meet all requirements set by regulators.”

Elon Musk doesn’t want to own a company with a spam bot problem. And now, he’s claiming that he has the right to bail on his Twitter takeover because the company won’t give him the data he wants on the issue, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

But finance and securities law experts said the claim won't actually get him out of the Twitter deal — and may set him up for a legal battle.

Musk claims Twitter denied him information about the number of spam bots on the platform, which would violate the terms of the merger agreement that entitles him to information for "any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction." His letter states that Twitter needs to give Musk data about Twitter’s bot and spam accounts so he can conduct his own analysis of the issue.

"As Twitter’s prospective owner, Mr. Musk is clearly entitled to the requested data to enable him to prepare for transitioning Twitter’s business to his ownership and to facilitate his transaction financing," the letter, signed by Skadden attorney Mike Ringler, states. "To do both, he must have a complete and accurate understanding of the very core of Twitter’s business model — its active user base."

Now, Twitter has 30 days to cure breach, meaning the company can give Musk the information he's requesting about spam bots. But experts said no matter what, Musk's letter won't actually get him out of the deal.

“Musk does not have any ground to stand on to void the agreement that he signed,” David Kass, a finance professor at University of Maryland's business school, told Protocol.

Kass said Musk has two ways out of the acquisition: One would be a regulatory holdup, which doesn’t look likely now that the FTC’s window to intervene has closed. The other would be if Musk doesn’t gather enough debt funding for the deal to happen, in which case he’d pay Twitter $1 billion and break up with the company once and for all.

So if the letter won’t help him end the deal, Musk could be setting himself up for a court battle, in which case Musk could try to lower the price of the deal, according to Adam Pritchard, a securities law professor at University of Michigan’s law school. Tech stocks overall have plunged, and Musk has likely realized that $44 billion is a lot more than Twitter is actually worth right now.

“It's not like the understanding of the business has changed,” Pritchard told Protocol. “It's just that stock market valuations have gone south and he’s just paying way too much for this company now.”

Musk is digging himself into a hole. It would take a lot to get Twitter to lower the price of the deal, and it's already reiterated that his new letter won't change anything.

"Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement," the company said in a statement Monday. "We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms."

President Biden invoked his emergency authority on Monday to give Southeast Asian solar suppliers a two-year reprieve from any new tariffs. Southeast Asian nations including Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam produced around 75% of imported solar modules in 2020, according to the White House statement.

The Solar Energy Industries Association warned of dire consequences from the investigation, alleging that the Commerce Department would consider tariffs of up to 250%. In March, SEIA President Abigail Ross Hopper said the investigation would have “a chilling effect on the solar industry.”

As the investigation plodded along, securing solar imports became a higher political priority. In May, a group of 85 House Democrats sent a letter to the White House expressing “grave concern” about the investigation, which they said had already devastated the domestic solar industry. The group cited a survey in which 83% of solar companies reported delays or cancellations from crystalline silicon photovoltaic (CSPV) cell suppliers. The White House provided more recent data that suggests around half of domestic solar deployments are in jeopardy due to the supply crunch.

In the executive order, Biden said the two-year tariff exemption would give the domestic solar industry time to ramp up output capacity while the U.S. continued to pursue its overall solar capacity goals. Half of new domestic electric capacity in 2022 and 2023 was expected to come from solar capacity and batteries, but those forecasts look shaky given the ongoing supply crunch.

China heavily subsidizes its own solar industry. Policies such as feed-in tariffs for solar projects — which guarantee above-market electricity rates — have allowed China to grow solar production capacity well beyond that of any other country.

If Auxin’s allegations are true, then U.S.-based solar manufacturers still face an uphill battle to boost domestic supply since their competitors would likely be more heavily subsidized. The White House seeks to counter such concerns with its own subsidy pledge: The emergency order outlined plans to boost domestic production capacity through targeted federal procurement programs and the deployment of the Defense Production Act.

Apple is joining the BNPL craze.

The tech giant announced Monday a new Apple Pay feature that would let users make purchases with its digital wallet and pay for them in four installments over six weeks. Apple Pay users won’t have to pay any fees.

The company said Apple Pay Later, which was introduced at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, will work “using standard Apple Pay implementation” and will also allow users to monitor and manage upcoming payments through the digital wallet.

The announcement underlines the growth of "buy now, pay later" services, which have emerged as a major consumer credit financing trend.

Despite worries that it’s a passing fad that could be derailed by rising interest rates, major BNPL companies have moved aggressively to strengthen their market positions.

Last week, Affirm announced a partnership with payments technology giant Stripe. Klarna also signed a similar deal with Stripe late last year. In January, Square, Block’s payments division, finalized its purchase of the Australian BNPL provider Afterpay.