Cryptocurrency startup Bakkt LLC, founded by New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc. finally debuted its much-anticipated bitcoin futures offering Sunday with a decidedly underwhelming response. It its first 24 hours of trading, Bakkt managed to sell only two daily futures contracts and 71 monthly futures contracts. As Coindesk noted today, the first daily contract didn’t even ...

Troubled startup Kik Interactive Inc. is shutting down its core messaging service as it battles the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its $98 million initial coin offering in 2017. The SEC sued Kik over its Kin token raise in June, claiming that the company illegally sold the tokens to U.S. investors without registering the ...

Social networking giant Facebook Inc. has acquired neural interface startup CTRL-labs, an East Coast startup that reads brain signals, for an undisclosed price. Bloomberg, quoting people familiar with the matter, today pegged the acquisition price as $500 million to $1 billion. At either end of the estimated price, it’s a nice cash-out for investors, which ...

About 20,000 payment card records from eight cities across the U.S. have been compromised through a breach of Click2Gov, a popular municipal payments system last compromised in 2018. Discovered by security researchers at Gemini Advisory LLC, which revealed the details late last week, the breach involved some of the same cities compromised the last time: Pocatello, Idaho, and ...

Israeli chatbot startup Servicefriend has been acquired by Facebook Inc. to help it provide customer service for its forthcoming Libra cryptocurrency and related Calibra digital wallet service. The news was first reported Saturday by TechCrunch. Facebook neither confirmed nor denied the acquisition, saying in a canned statement reminiscent of Apple Inc. that “we acquire smaller tech companies ...

Controversial WeWork Chief Executive Officer Adam Neumann may be on his way out of the company he co-founded amid reports that the directors of parent company We Co. are meeting Monday to discuss his future. Dismay around Neumann’s tenure is said to be widespread. Support to oust him comes from leading investors, according to CNBC, which reported that SoftBank Group CEO ...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today filed a lawsuit against ICOBox, a company that provides services to other companies undertaking initial coin offerings, and founder Nikolay Evdokimov for breaching securities laws. The lawsuit claims that ICOBox breached securities law when it raised $14.6 million in its own ICO in 2017 by failing to register the offering ...

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. launched its flagship Mate 30 phones today at an event in Munich, Germany, and as expected the phones are the first releases from the company that don’t include official Google LLC apps. The ban on Google apps was revealed in August when Google executives said that the latest 90-day reprieve on U.S. ...

Airbnb Inc. is finally going public. The online accommodation marketplace said today it expects to become a publicly traded company during 2020. The press release was made pursuant to securities law and gave no details about the exact timing of the IPO or its size. But it came a day after the company published an update on its ...

Payment technology company Stripe Inc. said today it has raised $250 million in new funding to accelerate its international expansion, grow its product suite and extend its enterprise capabilities. The Series G round included Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, along with a number of other unnamed investors. The round was raised on a valuation of ...