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Lawyers for collapsed crypto exchange FTX said on Tuesday, in the company’s first bankruptcy hearing, that regulators from the Bahamas, where FTX was headquartered, have agreed to consolidate proceedings in Delaware.

FTX’s lawyers, who were brought in by new leadership to handle restructuring, filed an emergency motion last week to secure the move to the U.S. The hearing on Tuesday was the initial step in the resolution of the largest cryptocurrency bankruptcy on record.

“What we are dealing with is a different sort of animal,” said FTX counsel James Bromley. “Unfortunately, the FTX debtors were not particularly well run, and that is an understatement.”

Regarding FTX’s founder, this was an organization that was “effectively run as a personal fiefdom of Sam Bankman-Fried,” an FTX attorney told the court.

FTX lawyers confirmed earlier reports that the Southern District of New York’s Cyber Crimes unit has begun an investigation into the matter. FTX lawyers have also made reference to cyberattacks, suggesting there were multiple attacks beyond the $477 million hack that occurred shortly after the company entered bankruptcy on Nov. 11. In that attack, hackers extracted ether out of FTX wallets.

The central challenge for the new team is “working to bring order to disorder,” Bromley told the court. After introducing his fellow counsel, Bromley dove into what FTX has been doing to understand the complex morass of data and finances left behind by FTX and Bankman-Fried, who was replaced by restructuring expert John Ray III.

Bankman-Fried exercised a level of control over the business that “none of us have ever seen,” Bromley said, referring to the bankruptcy experts and attorneys the company has employed as part of the restucturing process.

FTX had been valued by private investors at $32 billion earlier this year, and Bankman-Fried was making himself out to be an industry savior during the crypto winter.

“The FTX situation is the latest and the largest failure in this space,” Bromley said. “There was effectively a run on the bank, both with respect to the international exchange […] as well as the U.S. exchange. At the same time that the run on the bank was occurring, there was a leadership crisis […] The FTX companies were controlled by a very small group of people, led by Mr. Sam-Bankman-Fried. During the run on the bank, Mr. Fried’s leadership frayed, and that led to resignations.”

FTX has just begun to implement “standard” risk and data management practices, he said. As part of the process, lawyers had earlier to approve roughly $1 million in salary expenses for existing FTX employees.

The process is designed to get as much as possible for creditors, Bromley said.

“It is essential that we first maximize the value of the assets we have, whether that means selling assets, selling businesses or restructuring businesses,” he said. “All of that is on the table.”

FTX customers had a global presence, but many were based in tax havens. The largest geographic areas represented included:

  1. Cayman Islands — 22% of registered customers.
  2. U.S. Virgin Islands — 11% of registered customers.
  3. China — 8% of registered customers.

“We will be before you quite quickly with an attempt to sell certain of the business that we understand […] are self-sufficient and robust [with] interest from others,” Bromley added.

FTX lawyers said they’ve established four silos for the company’s assets and various entities. They are:

  • The WRS (West Realm Shires) silo, which controls and encompasses U.S. holdings.
  • The Alameda silo, which includes Alameda Research, Bankman Fried’s now defunct hedge fund.
  • The venture silo, which invested in crypto companies and startups.
  • The dot-com silo, which encompasses the international business, the bulk of FTX’s deposits.

Bromley said the asset recovery and protection efforts encompass not just crypto assets and currency, but “information.” The company has also brought on independent directors for the first time ever.

“A substantial amount of assets have either been stolen or missing,” Bromley said. “Additionally, “substantial funds appear to have been transfered from other silos to Alameda.”

A key aspect of the FTX crisis is around Alameda and the FTT token, a coin issued by FTX. Lawyers have walked through the history of FTX and affiliated companies, pointing at the creation of the FTT token in April 2019 and the foundation of the Alameda entities in November 2017.

Investments were made in the crypto and technology venture space, Bromley said, but almost $300 million was also spent on real estate in the Bahamas. That number is higher than previously reported, and Bromley said most of those purchases were home and vacation properties for senior executives.

Employees have left the company in droves. As of October 2022, the main FTX parent company had 330 employees around the world, with 127 in the U.S. Including the Australian businesses and FTX Digital Markets which had 190 employees, the global headcount was 520.

The best guess for the headcount now, according to FTX attorneys, is “around 260.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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Coinbase steps into consumer market with stablecoin-powered ‘everything app’ that goes beyond trading

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Coinbase steps into consumer market with stablecoin-powered 'everything app' that goes beyond trading

Dominika Zarzycka | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Coinbase unveiled Wednesday an “everything app” designed to bring more people into the crypto economy.

The “Base App,” which replaces Coinbase Wallet, will combine wallet, trading and payment functions as well as social media, messaging and support for mini apps – all running on the company’s homegrown public blockchain network Base, which is built on Ethereum.

So-called super apps like WeChat and Alipay – which bundle several different services and functionalities into a single mobile app – have long been viewed as the holy grail of fintech by the industry. They’re central to everyday life in China but haven’t been successfully replicated in the West. Meta Platforms and X have made attempts to realize that vision, integrating payments, messaging and social content, among other things.

For Coinbase, the intent is to expand its reach to a new subset of consumers who aren’t necessarily interested in buying or trading crypto, the company’s core business. Over-reliance on that revenue stream has been a sticking point for the company, and some analysts view the Base blockchain as a way for it to drive utility in crypto beyond speculative trading.

As part of the Base App launch, Coinbase also rolled out two key functions meant to help power it: an identity verification system called Base Account and an express checkout system for payments with the Circle-issued USDC stablecoin, called Base Pay.

Base Pay is a one-click checkout feature for USDC payments across the web, developed with Shopify. At the end of the year, Coinbase plans to bring Base Pay to brick-and-mortar stores with tap-to-pay support. Alex Danco, product manager at Shopify, said at Coinbase’s unveiling event that the function has been turned on for tens of thousands of its merchants this week, and will roll out to every merchant by the end of the year. Shopify will also offer 1% cash back in the U.S. for users who pay with USDC on Base later this year, he said.

Until now, enthusiasm around the Base network has been confined to builders and developers keen to use the technology. In perhaps the highest profile example, JPMorgan said last month that it’s launching a so-called deposit token on the Base blockchain.

Base is often touted for its ability to settle a payment in less than a second for less than a cent, which its fans expect will help the network grow in a way other crypto-based payments efforts haven’t.

Now, Coinbase hopes to tap into an opportunity to settle payments on the Base network that go beyond trading and payments. With the introduction of the everything app, the company is emphasizing the opportunity for a new economic model for content creators in particular – one that might give them more direct and diverse monetization options for their content as well as more control over their identity and data.

Coinbase will fund creator rewards and waive USDC transaction fees within chats in the app as part of the effort to bring more users on chain. It is not expected to generate significant revenue right away.

The new consumer app comes as the crypto industry and Coinbase, in particular, embrace a boom in product launches and rollouts thanks to the pro-crypto policies of the Trump administration and more clearly defined crypto regulations expected from Congress — perhaps as soon as this week. Last month Coinbase launched its first credit card with American Express and Shopify rolled out USDC-powered payments through Coinbase and Stripe.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said both have a “stretch goal” to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin in the world, a position currently held by Tether’s USDT, and that he aims to make Coinbase “the number one financial services app in the world” in the next five to 10 years.

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OpenAI says it will use Google’s cloud for ChatGPT

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OpenAI says it will use Google's cloud for ChatGPT

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images

OpenAI said Wednesday that it expects to use Google’s cloud infrastructure for its popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence assistant.

The reach for additional capacity aligns with OpenAI’s desire for more computing power to meet heavy demand after initially relying exclusively on Microsoft for cloud capacity. The two companies’ relations have evolved since then, with Microsoft naming OpenAI as a competitor last year.

Both companies sell AI tools for developers and offer subscriptions to companies.

OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle.

The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon‘s and Microsoft‘s. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives.

The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.

Read more CNBC tech news

Last year, Oracle announced that it was partnering with Microsoft and OpenAl “to extend the Microsoft Azure Al platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” to give OpenAI additional computing power. In March, OpenAI committed to a cloud agreement with CoreWeave in a five-year deal worth nearly $12 billion.

Microsoft said in January that it had agreed to move to a model of providing the right of first refusal anytime OpenAI needs more computing resources, rather than being its exclusive vendor across the board. Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive on OpenAI’s programming interfaces.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in April that the startup, which draws on Nvidia graphics processing units to power its large language models, was facing capacity constraints.

“if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!” he wrote in an X post at the time.

Reuters reported in June that OpenAI was planning to bring on cloud capacity from Google.

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Tesla’s change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

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Tesla's change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.

CNBC

In May, Tesla changed its corporate bylaws in a way that would require investors to own 3% of the stock, today worth about $30 billion, in order to file a derivative lawsuit against the company for breach of fiduciary duties. Authorities in New York State are now asking Tesla to delete the bylaw entirely.

Overseers of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owns about 0.1% of Tesla’s shares, submitted a formal proxy proposal and letter to the company on July 11, and shared it with CNBC on Wednesday. They say that Elon Musk’s automaker engaged in a “bait-and-switch” to convince shareholders to approve an incorporation move from Delaware to Texas in June 2024.

Musk made the move after a judge in Delaware voided the $56 billion pay package that the CEO, also the world’s richest person, was granted by Tesla in 2018, the largest compensation plan in public company history. In getting shareholders to approve the change in its state of incorporation, Tesla said that stakeholders’ rights “are substantially equivalent” under the laws of Delaware and Texas.

On May 14, almost a year after Tesla’s move, Texas changed its law to allow corporations in the state to require 3% ownership before being able to carry forth a shareholder derivative suit.

“The very next day, Tesla’s board amended the Company’s bylaws to the maximum allowable 3% ownership threshold, effectively insulating the Company’s directors and officers from accountability to shareholders,” the New York letter says. The letter was signed by Gianna McCarthy, a director of corporate governance with the retirement fund, on behalf of the fund and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

Only three institutions currently own at least 3% of Tesla’s outstanding shares.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The New York fund overseers wrote that derivative actions are “the last resort for shareholders to enforce their rights” when company directors or officers violate their fiduciary obligations, and called Tesla’s decision on the matter “egregious.”

In an email to CNBC, DiNapoli said Tesla “deceived shareholders” in assuring them that their rights would remain the same in Texas.

“These actions violate basic tenets of good corporate governance and must be reversed,” he wrote.

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