Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter Inc. and Square Inc., speaks during the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Friday, June 4, 2021.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of Jack Dorsey‘s Block plunged 19% after short seller Hindenburg Research announced Thursday that the payment company was its latest short position, alleging that Block allowed criminal activity to operate with lax controls and “highly” inflates Cash App’s transacting user base, a key metric of performance.
Hindenburg described Block’s internal systems as a “‘Wild West’ approach to compliance.”
“Our 2-year investigation has concluded that Block has systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping,” Hindenburg said in its report. The research firm said Block’s Cash App thrived on serving “unbanked” customers.
The report alleges those unbanked customers were involved in criminal or illicit activity. Hindenburg also alleged that Cash App’s compliance programs were deficient.
As part of its two-year investigation, Hindenburg spoke with multiple former employees who described how internal concerns were suppressed and user concerns were ignored, even as alleged “criminal activity and fraud ran rampant on its platform.”
The firm’s extensive report includes screenshots of internal systems and employee messages. It also highlighted alleged financial misreporting.
Up to 35% of Cash App’s revenue is derived from interchange fees, Hindenburg alleged. That’s around $892 million in revenue that the short seller said should be capped by law.
But Block, formerly known as Square, avoids that regulatory cap imposed on large financial institutions by routing the revenue through a small bank, Hindenburg alleged.
The small-bank routing method is one employed by Block rival PayPal, Hindenburg claimed, and which prompted a Securities and Exchange Commission probe.
“A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed with the SEC indicates that Block may be part of a similar investigation,” Hindenburg wrote.
PayPal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hindenburg took issue with Cash App’s practices during the Covid pandemic, when the government issued stimulus checks to qualified American adults. The report alleges that the lockdowns “posed an existential threat” to Block’s critical merchant services business.
“CEO Jack Dorsey Tweeted that users could get government payments through Cash App ‘immediately’ with ‘no bank account needed’ due to its frictionless technology,” the report said.
Just a few weeks into Cash App’s delivery of the first round of government payments, states were apparently trying to claw back suspected fraudulent payments — “Washington State wanted more than $200 million back from payment processors while Arizona sought to recover $500 million,” said Hindenburg, citing multiple former employees.
Citing interviews with former employees, Hindenburg alleged that “pressure from management has resulted in a pattern of disregard for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) laws.”
The report notes that “this appeared to be an effort to grow Cash App’s user base by strategically disregarding Anti Money Laundering (AML) rules.”
To test the theory, the short seller opened accounts in the name of former President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and then obtained a Cash App card, called the Cash Card, under the “obviously fake Donald Trump account,” the report said.
The card bearing Trump’s name arrived “promptly” in the mail.
“Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual,” the report said.
Representatives for Block did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“In sum, we think Block has misled investors on key metrics, and embraced predatory offerings and compliance worst-practices in order to fuel growth and profit from facilitation of fraud against consumers and the government,” Hindenburg wrote.
The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:
Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.
Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.
The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.
“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.
In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.