The Brazilian digital banking startup Nubank will launch its own cryptocurrency in the country next year, marking the latest move into digital assets by a large financial institution.
Nubank said Wednesday it will launch the token, called Nucoin, in the first half of 2023. In a press release, the company touts Nucoin as “a new way to recognize customer loyalty and encourage engagement with Nubank products.” Nubank said it plans to offer discounts and other perks to holders of the token.
“The project is another step ahead in our belief in the transformative potential of blockchain technology and to democratize it even more, going beyond the purchase, sale and maintenance of cryptocurrencies in the Nu app,” Fernando Czapski, general manager for Nucoin at Nubank, said in a statement.
Nubank said it would invite 2,000 customers to take part in a forum group for guiding the development of Nucoin, “adhering to common practices in blockchain projects,” according to the firm. “In this phase, more than feedback, the proposal is to explore a decentralized process of product creation, characteristic of Web3,” Nubank said.
The cryptocurrency was built on the Polygon network, a so-called “Layer 2” protocol that aims to alleviate congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, where transactions can often be costly and take long to process. Polygon says its platform is able to support thousands of transactions per second.
Nubank isn’t the first bank to launch its own cryptocurrency. JPMorgan rolled out its own token, JPMCoin, a so-called stablecoin that maintains a one-to-one peg to the U.S. dollar. Unlike that coin, Nucoin’s price fluctuates in value based on supply and demand, similar to coins like bitcoin and ether.
It follows other steps from banking and payment companies into the crypto market. In October, Mastercard launched a new tool, Crypto Secure, aimed at helping card issuers prevent fraud involving crypto exchanges. Firms like PayPal and Robinhood also offer trading in cryptocurrencies. The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, has its own internal crypto trading desk.
The new token offering comes against a bleak backdrop for cryptocurrencies. The market is currently in a deep downturn investors are calling “crypto winter,” with many digital coins — including the world’s largest, bitcoin — having lost over half of their value since the start of 2022.
Regulators have since gotten more wary about digital currencies and the potential harms they pose to consumers, with governments in the U.S., European Union and elsewhere introducing frameworks for regulating the industry.
Asked whether Nubank had sought regulatory approval in Brazil before launching its token, a spokesperson for the company said it “constantly evaluates the regulatory framework as an important part of our product development process.”
Nubank launched in 2013 with a purple no-fee credit card in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a country notorious for its high-fee, low-tech banking system. Since its launch nine years ago, the company has amassed 70 million users across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
Nubank, which went public late last year, counts famed investor Warren Buffett among its roster of backers. Buffett’s firm Berkshire Hathaway took a $500 million stake in Nubank in June 2021. The company is valued by the stock market at $20.4 billion, roughly half what it was worth in its December 2021 debut.
Nubank has previously gotten into the crypto game through its Nucripto platform, which offers trading in a range of tokens including bitcoin and ether. The exchange, which relies on tech from blockchain infrastructure startup Paxos, reached 1 million users in July a month after launching.
A sign is posted in front of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.
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Shares of eBay soared 8% Wednesday as Meta said it will allow some listings to show up on Facebook Marketplace, its popular platform connecting consumers for local item pickups and more.
EBay stock reached its highest level since November 2021.
The rollout will begin with a test in Germany, France and the United States, where buyers will be able to view listings directly on Marketplace and complete the rest of their transactions on eBay, Meta said in a release.
The partnership could provide a boost to eBay’s marketplace business, which has struggled to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, Walmart, Temu and even Facebook’s own marketplace platform that lets users buy and sell items.
EBay has recently embraced niche categories like collectibles and luxury goods to try and keep buyers and sellers returning to its site. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC in an October interview that shoppers were coming to the site, known for its used and refurbished goods, as they sought out discounts amid a rocky macroeconomic environment.
Meta’s move is an attempt to appease the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, after the regulator fined the company 797 million euros ($821 million) in November for tying its Marketplace product to the main Facebook app.
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At the time, the Commission said that Meta’s bundling of Marketplace with Facebook could mean competitors are effectively “foreclosed” given the distribution reach of the platform. Facebook counts more than 3 billion users globally.
The Commission also said that Meta imposes “unfair trading conditions” on other online classified ads service providers who advertise on its platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram. It added that these conditions allow Meta to use data generated from other advertisers to benefit Marketplace.
Meta appealed the ruling at the time, saying that it “ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services.”
“While we disagree with and continue to appeal the European Commission’s decision on Facebook Marketplace, we are working quickly and constructively to build a solution which addresses the points raised,” the company said Wednesday.
EBay touted its integration with Facebook Marketplace as a way for the e-commerce site to “increase exposure to our sellers’ listings, on and off eBay, as part of our strategy to engage buyers and deepen customer loyalty.”
Facebook in 2023 announced a similar partnership with Amazon that lets users browse and purchase products without leaving the app.
An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days, at an Amazon fulfillment center in Orlando, Florida, on Dec. 2, 2024.
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Amazon warehouse workers at a site in North Carolina will vote next month on whether to join a union, setting the stage for the company’s latest labor battle.
Workers at the Garner, North Carolina, facility will cast their ballots from Feb. 10 to Feb. 15, according to a Tuesday post on X by Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, the group seeking to organize staffers. Representatives from Amazon and the National Labor Relations Board didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Known as CAUSE, the grassroots group led by current and former employees has been working to organize Amazon employees at the warehouse, which is located in a suburb about 10 miles south of Raleigh, for the past three years.
If the election is successful, the warehouse, known as RDU1, would be only the second Amazon site in the U.S. to unionize. Workers at Amazon’s largest warehouse in New York City voted to join the Amazon Labor Union in 2022, but the group struggled to negotiate a contract with Amazon, and last June, the ALU voted to affiliate with the Teamsters.
A handful of union elections were held at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. in recent years but employees have either rejected unionization or the results continue to be disputed in lengthy court battles. Last November, a federal labor judge ordered a third rerun election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, after ruling the company improperly interfered in the vote.
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CAUSE filed for a union election last month, saying in a press release that 30% of workers at the North Carolina site signed union authorization cards, which is the necessary threshold to trigger an NLRB vote. Organizers are seeking to boost wages and improve working conditions.
The union filing comes after Amazon delivery and warehouse workers went on strike at nine facilities last month to push the company to come to the bargaining table, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the employees. The action was intended to snarl Amazon’s operations during the busiest holiday shopping period of the year, referred to as peak season. An Amazon representative told Reuters the company expected to see a limited impact on deliveries from the strike.
An artificial intelligence feature on iPhones is generating fake news alerts, stoking concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.
Last week, a feature recently launched by Apple that summarizes users’ notifications using AI, pushed out inaccurately summarized BBC News app notifications on the broadcaster’s story about the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final, falsely claiming British darts player Luke Littler had won the championship.
The incident happened a day before the actual tournament’s final, which Littler did go on to win.
Then, just hours after that incident occurred, a separate notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s AI system, falsely claimed that Tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
The BBC has been trying for about a month to get Apple to fix the problem. The British state broadcaster complained to Apple in December after its AI feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself — which never happened.
Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it’s working on an update to resolve the problem by adding a clarification that shows when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in the notifications. Currently, generated news notifications show up as coming directly from the source.
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement shared with the BBC. Apple added that it’s encouraging users to report a concern if they view an “unexpected notification summary.”
The mistake was flagged on the social media app Bluesky by Ken Schwencke, a senior editor at investigative journalism site ProPublica.
CNBC has reached out to the BBC and New York Times for comment on Apple’s proposed solution to its AI feature’s misinformation issue.
AI’s misinformation problem
Apple touts its AI-generated notification summaries as an effective way to group and rewrite previews of news app notifications into a single alert on a users’ lock screen.
It’s a feature Apple says is designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and cut down on the overwhelming barrage of updates many smartphone users are familiar with.
However, this has resulted in what AI experts refer to as “hallucinations” — responses generated by AI that contain false or misleading information.
“I suspect that Apple will not be alone in having challenges with AI-generated content. We’ve already seen numerous examples of AI services confidently telling mistruths, so-called ‘hallucinations’,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at tech-focused market research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC.
In Apple’s case, because the AI is trying to consolidate notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of information, it’s mashed the words together in a way that’s inaccurately characterized the events — but confidently presenting them as facts.
“Apple had the added complexity of trying to compress content into very short summaries, which ended up delivering erroneous messages,” Wood added. “Apple will undoubtedly seek to address this as soon as possible, and I’m sure rivals will be watching closely to see how it responds.”
Generative AI works by trying to figure out the best possible answer to a question or prompt inserted by a user, relying on vast quantities of data which its underlying large language models are trained on.
Sometimes the AI might not know the answer. But because it’s been programmed to always present a response to user prompts, this can result in cases where the AI effectively lies.
It’s not clear exactly when Apple’s resolution to the bug in its notification summarization feature will be fixed. The iPhone maker said to expect one to arrive in “the coming weeks.”