Category: Business

Crypto.com is everywhere. Its name is plastered on the home of arguably the most famous NBA franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers. It's sponsoring Formula 1 races and UFC matches. It's ads are back on the airwaves, with Eminem declaring during the NBA playoffs that "fortune favors the brave."

Crypto.com is also nowhere. It doesn't have a flashy CEO like FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried (who is currently in prison) or Binance's CZ (who is headed to prison). Unlike with Coinbase, regulators don't seem to be sniffing around. Sure, the company has high-profile marketing efforts, but day to day, Crypto.com doesn't really come up much at all.

Crypto.com is one of those things I've long placed in my "I wonder what the deal is" column, along with Jojo Siwa, bird flu, and the difference between F1 and NASCAR. It seems impossible to watch a sporting event without seeing its name somewhere, and yet I rarely chat with someone who uses it or come across its name in headlines. Part of the issue is that I live in New York, where its services aren't allowed. (That's not a knock on the company — for a lot of crypto exchanges, the Empire State is a tough nut to crack.) But it's also a rather nebulous entity in the American market. It says it's got 100 million users globally, but it still seems to fly a little under the radar.

Often, when I mention Crypto.com to someone who works in the crypto industry, they tell me they know about it, of course. When I ask exactly what they know about it, they come up pretty empty. Maybe it's mainly popular abroad, they speculate, or only for novices. Google data indicates that while a good chunk of the search interest does come from America, more comes from outside the US, notably from Singapore, Nigeria, and Bulgaria.

"Huh, I guess bigger than I thought," one crypto evangelist remarked after looking up its trading volume.

"They own the Lakers' arena? I've always been so confused on how they did that," another crypto entrepreneur said. (To be fair, the company doesn't own the arena; it just bought the naming rights.) He'd set up a Crypto.com account during the 2021-2022 market cycle to do a specific maneuver not allowed on Coinbase at the time, but he hasn't really used it since then.

When I asked Nic Carter, a general partner at Castle Island Ventures, about the company, he replied in an email, "It's kind of a mystery, yes."He added that, like me, he doesn't know anyone who uses it. "But I think that reflects the user base — it's not necessarily crypto-natives but rather retail that wants a casual and accessible experience (is my understanding)," he said.

Crypto.com is positioning itself as the new face of crypto, even as it remains rather faceless itself. It might prove to be a smart move — it's boosting its brand and, in turn, its consumer base while avoiding much of the scrutiny other exchanges have faced. For the time being, Crypto.com is balancing between notability and infamy. It's walking softly but carrying a big ad budget.

While Crypto.com only really burst onto the American scene over the past four years or so, it's been around for a while. Originally named Monaco, the exchange was founded in 2016 in Hong Kong by Kris Marszalek, a Polish-born entrepreneur with a colorful past, and a handful of others. Amid the 2017 crypto run, it raised money from the public via an initial coin offering — creating and selling a digital token of its own, similar to a stock-market IPO. In 2018, the company landed the coveted Crypto.com domain name, purchasing it for an undisclosed amount from an academic who had long refused to sell it. (Even more confusingly, Crypto.com is technically operated by Foris DAX Asia, which, according to a scan of Reddit, can befuddle many users when their tax paperwork comes in. It's also the name Crypto.com lobbies under.) Crypto.com's primary business is its cryptocurrency exchange, which works as a middleman for people buying and selling crypto, but it also offers other products, including crypto Visa cards.

The 2021-22 market cycle is when Crypto.com, now headquartered in Singapore, made its big splash. In late 2021, it bought the naming rights to what was then the Staples Center in Los Angeles as part of a 20-year, $700 million deal. It signed sponsorship deals with UFC and F1 while also rolling its "fortune favors the brave" ad campaign, which originally featured Matt Damon. Crypto.com was seeking brand awareness, and it was willing to spend millions upon millions for it.

"This is one brick in a bigger wall of introducing Crypto.com as a brand to the world and communicating what our core values are," Steven Kalifowitz, Crypto.com's chief marketing officer, told Business Insider at the time.

A lot of crypto's mini-emperors turned out to have no clothes.

In the moment, it all sort of made sense. FTX was flying high and had paid $135 million to slap its name on the Miami Heat's stadium. Its founder, SBF, was running around with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the Bahamas and suggesting he'd spend $1 billion on the 2024 election. Binance's CZ was talking about investing $200 million in Forbes, saying it would push media companies toward adopting crypto and lead to the decentralization of the industry. But we know how the story ends: FTX imploded, along with some other high-profile crypto projects, and crypto winter set in. A lot of crypto's mini-emperors turned out to have no clothes.

Crypto.com, however, managed to weather the storm, though not perfectly. The company accidentally sent some $400 million to the wrong account in November 2022, prompting some users to pull their money out of the platform. At the start of 2023, it laid off 20% of its workforce, blaming economic headwinds and FTX's collapse. The Financial Times reported last June that Crypto.com was operating internal proprietary trading teams, which US regulators had dinged Binance for, even though Crypto.com insisted it was fine. The regulatory environment in the US appears to have made the company a little nervous — it shut down its American institutional exchange in the middle of last year.

In the US, Crypto.com has managed to avoid much of the blowback its competitors have faced. (This isn't the case in other countries — in the Netherlands, for example, it was fined for operating without registration.) While the Securities and Exchange Commission has gone after Coinbase and Kraken for operating unregistered securities exchanges, it hasn't made a peep about Crypto.com. Crypto.com has so far ducked notice, even though it's running a lot of the same playbook. In April, the company's chief operating officer acknowledged in an interview with Decrypt that its big-budget marketing efforts could put a target on its back but said the trade-off was worth it.

Crypto.com's determination to push ahead, both loudly and quietly, has set it up to try to capitalize on the market's recent run. Bitcoin is once again on the up and up, and so too is Crypto.com. The company is hiring again, it's advertising aggressively again, and it's talking a big game about its business prospects — its CEO, Marszalek, told Bloomberg in April that it was looking to triple its number of registered users.

Data from the marketing-intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicates crypto advertisers' digital spending in the US increased by 185% year over year in the first quarter of 2024. Crypto.com spent eight times as much as Coinbase on digital advertising during that period. (It's worth noting that back in the first quarter of 2022, Crypto.com actually outspent FTX on digital ads by a bit.)

But the thing about all Crypto.com's advertising dollars is that they seem to be only effective-ish. Data compiled by CCData shows that Crypto.com has a 2.3% market share by trading volumes on the spot market globally, which is about half of Coinbase, which has 4%, and only slightly above Kraken, which has 1.4%. (Globally, Binance is still dominant.) According to Sensor Tower, Crypto.com saw a 140% increase in downloads in March from the prior month, though it fell slightly behind Coinbase, which had a 160% increase.

All that buying of stadiums and renaming stuff, it's just kind of viewed as lame by most people in crypto.

Crypto.com didn't respond to multiple requests for interviews or comments for this story. Most of the people I did speak to gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug when I asked what they thought of the company.

One crypto executive said part of the issue was that Crypto.com, being an upstart from Asia, is a little outside Silicon Valley's mainstream crypto circles. Similar to the clubby "PayPal Mafia" that dominated software in the 2010s, a sort of Coinbase crew has its hold on the crypto industry of the 2020s. The exec wasn't too keen on Crypto.com's flashy advertising either, describing it as "decadent" and irresponsible.

"All that buying of stadiums and renaming stuff, it's just kind of viewed as lame by most people in crypto," they said. "I think the tackiest thing and frankly irresponsible thing to do is to roll out FOMO ads. 'Buy crypto or get left behind' is a really irresponsible message. JPMorgan doesn't do that."

And despite the company's ability to dodge serious regulatory scrutiny, it hasn't engendered a lot of goodwill among some crypto evangelists.

"I'm supportive of bitcoin, but I think Crypto.com is overall a big negative for the American public. It's very confusing. It's a casino," said Alex Gladstein, who as the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation has argued that bitcoin is important for advancing human rights and freedom. "When you go to the website, they encourage you to try and bet on these coins that go to zero. I don't think it's anything to do with financial empowerment for people or any sort of alternative wealth building."

To be sure, the casino thing could be said about most crypto exchanges — and sports-betting apps, and many regular trading apps. Crypto.com seems to be careful about coloring within the regulatory lines. The head of its legal department in the Americas just put out a "crypto legal handbook," which, OK.

Crypto.com is embedded in our culture, and it isn't. It's sort of taken on the FTX mantle but with a more anonymous bent. For the company, it's a pretty savvy space in which to operate: ubiquitous but relatively anonymous. For everyone else, mileage may vary on how you feel about the whole thing. It's a good reminder that, whatever the company, it's better to use exchanges only for trading your crypto assets, not for storing them.

Maybe Eminem won't come to regret voicing those ads like Matt Damon did. Or maybe in five years we'll be looking back at this moment and saying: "Remember that one crypto company? Is it still where the Lakers play? Or is it now something else?"

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Tucked beneath a 48-story San Francisco skyscraper, at the far end of the parking lot on the first subbasement level, is a door with a keypad lock. An unimposing sign reads "Utility Meter Room." Behind the door is a tangled clot of pipes: yellow, blue, and orange, each one as wide as a 100-pound barbell plate. The pipes — along with thousands more just like them, winding their way under more than 600 American cities, campuses, hospitals, and airports — are more than a blast from our industrial past. They're a steampunk vision of the future.

I've come to 345 California Center, a postmodern hexagon that towers over San Francisco's financial district, to get a look at the hottest new idea for how to break the urban doom loop — the post-pandemic, remote-work apocalypse that is hollowing out America's cities. And when I say "hottest," I don't mean it metaphorically. It's like a sauna down here. Because the Utility Meter Room doesn't run on a self-contained, industrial-sized boiler, like most big buildings. Instead, it's drawing a feed of blistering, high-pressure, vaporized water from a century-old loop of steam pipes that runs beneath the city's streets. The steam loops are a relic of the 19th century, as forgotten as the pneumatic tubes that used to shoot mail all over American cities. But unlike the pneumatic tubes, the steam loops are still there — and they can provide enough heat to keep a building like 345 California Center nice and toasty, even on the coldest of days.

The steam loops are part of an antiquated system known as "district energy." It was basically a shared-services model: a utility would make steam at a central location and then pipe it out to every building in the city. Nobody had to provide their own heat — it was way more convenient, and cheaper, to get it from a common source. 

But then cities began to abandon district energy. Buildings, businesses, and homes started making their own hot water in boilers fueled by coal, then oil, then natural gas. Sometimes it was cheaper, and maybe it was more convenient. But it also set the planet on fire. More heating meant more greenhouse gases, and more global warming. 

Which brings me back to our steampunk future. Today, cities are starting to price the looming climate catastrophe into their energy costs. Starting this year, commercial buildings in New York City will be slapped with steep fines if they're emitting too much carbon. Boston and Washington have similar "decarbonization" laws in place, and San Francisco isn't allowing natural gas in any new construction. That means businesses need to find a cleaner, cheaper source of heat. And those ancient steam loops beneath the streets are starting to seem like a ready-made solution.

"The real benefit of a district-energy system, especially in cities, is the distribution system," says Kevin Hagerty, the CEO of Vicinity Energy. "If a city wants to decarbonize, and they have a district-energy system, it's much easier. They don't have to change things on a building-by-building basis."

In July, Vicinity is installing what will be the nation's first zero-carbon urban steam loop. Drawing electricity from the increasingly decarbonized New England grid, powered by solar and offshore wind, the utility will use the energy to boil water and then deliver steam directly to Boston office buildings and restaurants and storefronts through the city's antiquated maze of pipes. It's a remnant of the Industrial Revolution being used to forestall a lethal climate evolution.

District energy could also be a godsend to businesses struggling to survive the current landscape of empty offices and boarded-up shops. By taking steam right out of the street beneath them, commercial landlords can pay less for their utilities and avoid carbon fines — which means they can lower their rents and hold on to tenants who might otherwise bail. District-energy loops also eliminate the need for boilers and other cumbersome building infrastructure, freeing up space for tenant-grabbing amenities like gyms, roof-decks, and golf simulators. (Yep. That's a real thing.)

The other choice? Spend thousands to upgrade a building's energy systems — cash that landlords don't have on hand, and an expense they can't pass along to tenants. "If you're a building owner, district energy allows you to pay a small premium on your service to get that type of steam," says Blake Ellis, a principal at the engineering firm Burns & McDonnell. "Then you don't have that big capital outlay you probably don't want right now." Especially if, as in many downtowns, your building is only 70% occupied.

About a third of the cost of running a commercial building is energy. And according to one major study, a building as energy-efficient as 345 California Center can charge 20% more for rent than a comparable, inefficient building. Every dollar saved in energy costs, the study found, equates to 3.5% higher rent. And it's a lot easier to be energy efficient if all you have to do is plug into a carbon-free steam loop. 

"This building is 40 years old," Tim Danz, the chief engineer for 345 Cal, tells me. "But we're using the latest technology to manage our energy." He points to the gnarl of pipes that shoots the steam up to the 36th floor, where it's used to cook a water supply large enough to heat the entire building. Having a boiler, Danz explains, "would be another system we would have to provide care and feeding for." District energy, by contrast, is just there for the taking, right beneath our feet.

The most convincing evidence that steam loops make economic sense comes from who's getting into the district-energy game. Vicinity, the nation's biggest clean-steam provider, is owned by Antin Infrastructure Partners, a leading private-equity firm. Cordia, an energy provider operating in 10 cities, is partially owned by the private-equity giant KKR. Everyone needs heat — which makes it a highly bankable investment. "These private-equity funds come in and find areas where they can put capital into a business and get a nice steady rate of return," Hagerty says. "Decarbonizing takes capital, and private equity is a great source of capital." 

From AI startups to biotech companies, steampunk-heated buildings could become the cool new place to be. 

In the long run, of course, private equity may decide to do what it always does and load up these new energy businesses with massive amounts of debt before dismantling them for parts. But for now, the big money sees big profits to be made from America's forgotten infrastructure. Outside of places like airports and college campuses, the idea of district energy fell out of favor long ago. We let the systems go fallow — but fortunately, all the accumulated infrastructure we buried on top of the old steam loops made it impossible to dig their little-used pipes out of the ground. So the whole thing was still down there, waiting, when COVID drove millions of city dwellers to head for the countryside. Now, by drawing heat from their old steam loops, America's cities have an opportunity to jump-start all the downtown commerce that was crippled by the pandemic. 

And it could happen all over the place! Dozens and dozens of cities have steam loops they can use, from New York and Chicago to Miami to San Diego and Portland and Milwaukee. What's more, lots of companies these days are looking for greener buildings, both to save money and to burnish their environmental bona fides. From AI startups to biotech companies, steampunk-heated buildings could become the cool new place to be. 

"Forward-minded companies want to be in a building that doesn't have any on-site fossil-fuel combustion," says Costa Samaras, the director of the Scott Institute for Energy and Innovation at Carnegie Mellon. "The best, greenest buildings will be net-zero buildings. They'll be considered a premium asset. The challenge is, are we going to get enough premium assets in time?" Meaning: Can we use steam loops to fix the urban doom loop before the climate doom loop dooms us all?

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

• These tech billionaires ran meetings to avoid wasting time, groupthink, and compromise.
• Their different techniques mostly focus on brevity and decision-making.
• Jeff Bezos would get employees to respond to memos, and Bill Gates would grill people for details.

Billionaires are known to be ruthless with their time.

But even people running the world's biggest tech companies have to endure meetings, which have a bad reputation for wasting time and money. Mark Cuban even said they were a "last resort."

The rest of us have to do our best to use them to generate ideas, investigate details, and focus on a single issue.

These are some of the tips household names in business have had for stopping unproductive meetings.

Jeff Bezos began his with 30 minutes of silent study

Meetings with Amazon cofounder Jeff Bezos started with employees studying a memo.

One employee might spend two weeks pulling together a six-page memo for a specific meeting.

After 30 minutes of silent reading, attendees were invited to ask questions and start a discussion about the memo. "I like a crisp document and a messy meeting," Bezos said in a conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman in December.

Allowing attendees time to read a memo and prepare their thoughts enables employees to ask more productive questions in the meeting, he said.

Bezos said he didn't like slideshow presentations, which can hide "sloppy thinking" in bullet points.

He also maintained a "two-pizza" rule: If two pizzas can't feed everyone in the room, there are too many people.

Bill Gates dug for answers

Microsoft founder Bill Gates would use meetings to quiz attendees, said Chris Williams, the former VP of HR at Microsoft, who worked closely with Gates for eight years.

Williams said he'd never forget his first meeting with Gates in 1992. Microsoft had just bought the company Williams worked at. Gates wanted to meet its employees to find out why one of its products ran faster than Microsoft's equivalent.

He grilled a developer with "rapid fire" and "detailed" questions, Williams recalled. By the end, the pair were discussing "the movement of single bits and the size of the Intel 80386 instruction cache," he added.

Gates "was always curious, always wanted to understand, always drilling for more detail," Williams wrote for BI in 2023.

"As he got older, his passion for detail never left, just his method for getting there mellowed," Williams added.

Steve Jobs ensured only key staff were in the room

Steve Jobs was meticulous about keeping meetings small, according to Ken Segall, who worked closely with Jobs as creative director of Apple's ad agency.

After Jobs died in 2011, Segall wrote a book about Apple's work culture, "Insanely Simple." In it, he described how Jobs once noticed someone new had joined a weekly meeting.

"He stopped cold," Segall wrote. "His eyes locked on to the one thing in the room that didn't look right. Pointing to Lorrie, he said, 'Who are you?'"

After she explained who she was and that she was working on related marketing projects, Jobs said, "I don't think we need you in this meeting, Lorrie. Thanks," Segall recalled.

Eric Schmidt made sure meetings had a hierarchy

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said meetings need leaders to make decisions.

In "How Google Works," the 2014 book Schmidt wrote with former SVP of products Jonathan Rosenberg, the pair said each meeting needed a designated "decision-maker" to have the final say.

They wrote that when companies have meetings where everyone present is equal, there's a risk of compromising instead of finding a clear resolution.

Schmidt and Rosenberg added that this person should set the purpose and structure of the meeting and summarize decisions and tasks for participants afterward.

• Even celebrities and ultrawealthy homeowners can face challenges selling their homes.
• Take socialite Sonja Morgan — the starting bid for her NYC home is a fraction of its purchase price.
• She's one of many homeowners resorting to auctioning or renting out pricy homes to offload them.

The world of luxury real estate might seem like a place where deals are plentiful, transactions are swift, and satisfaction is guaranteed.

But that isn't always true, especially in New York City, where a slowdown in demand has made selling multimillion-dollar condos and townhouses more challenging, StreetEasy Senior Economist Kenny Lee told Business Insider.

In many of NYC's upscale neighborhoods, homes are lingering on the market longer and sales are falling, signaling that when it comes to a slump in the real-estate market — not even the nation's wealthiest Americans can walk away unscathed.

Consider the case of Sonja Morgan, the ex-wife of John Adams Morgan, a great-grandson of the founder of J.P. Morgan Chase. Despite Morgan's socialite status and her home's location on the posh Upper East Side, she has struggled to sell the five-story, six-bathroom brownstone.

Morgan, a star of Bravo's "Real Housewives of New York," has owned the home at 162 E. 63rd St. for 27 years, living there on and off. Since around 2008, she has made numerous attempts to sell it, but has failed to attract any serious buyers.

Now, after years of listing and delisting the property, she has opted to auction it with a starting bid of $1.75 million, far below its reported purchase price of $9.1 million in 1997, according to Curbed's Bridget Read.

"I wanna be free to garden and travel and not have to worry about the house — but I'm not taking nothing," Morgan told Curbed.

Bidding opened with Concierge Auctions on May 16 and will remain open until May 29. As of May 24, the current highest bid is $4.25 million, according to the company.

Even the ultrawealthy lose in the game of real estate market

Luxury real estate shows like "Million Dollar Listing" or "Buying Beverly Hills" often portray the selling of high-end homes as effortless. However, even with an elite ZIP code and the pedigree of a famous or rich seller, sealing the deal can still prove difficult. Michael Jordan, for example, has been unable to sell his mansion outside Chicago for more than 11 years.

There's also the 105,000-square-foot megamansion in Los Angeles, developed by former film producer Nile Niami. Following ten years of construction, the home languished on the market without attracting a buyer. It was later placed into court-ordered receivership and subsequently entered bankruptcy proceedings. Finally, it was auctioned off for $126 million to the billionaire CEO of Fashion Nova, Richard Saghian, in 2022.

The crux of the issue is that, the more expensive a home is, the fewer potential buyers it has — it's a troublesome scenario amid slowing buyer demand and growing economic uncertainty. The lack of demand from traditional buyers has led to an increasing number of ultrawealthy homeowners, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, renting out their homes or auctioning them off rather than waiting around for buyers.

"A lot of luxury buyers may already have a primary home, so maybe they're looking for a new investment," StreetEasy Senior Economist Lee said. "For that reason, even though they are generally less affected by high mortgage rates, they are heavily influenced by the general economic outlook."

That's partly why more luxury buyers are increasingly considering renting out their homes rather than selling them, he added.

Custom features added by sellers and maintenance costs canalso put off buyers

One person's dream renovation could be the next person's nightmare.

Lee pointed out another obstacle for luxury homeowners: their inclination to elaborately customize their homes with features that may or may not be appealing to the average buyer.

"A lot of houses and apartments in New York City were built before the war," Lee said. "It's also for that reason, it's common for a lot of owners to go through renovations, to make it more livable and more to their own taste."

In addition to a koi pond in the garden, the Morgans also installed a large nautical star in the entryway on the ground floor during a $3 million renovation, according to Curbed.

Lee noted another factor contributing to the difficulty of selling luxury properties: the high costs associated with their maintenance and upkeep.

Morgan's townhouse carries estimated monthly property taxes of $6,003, per the StreetEasy listing. This figure doesn't include additional expenses that come with owning a townhouse such as insurance, repairs, upgrades, landscaping, and more.

Morgan told Curbed she's ready to be rid of it all.

"I don't want anyone to think, 'New York is done and that's why she's leaving,'" Morgan said. "I'll always be a New Yorker. I just don't need all this."

• Meta's AI chief Yann LeCun is an award-winning computer scientist. 
• But Elon Musk says he isn't impressed with LeCun's scientific work.
• LeCun seemed entertained by the exchange, which he says he engaged in while on a transatlantic flight.

Meta's AI chief, Yann LeCun, might have won a Turing Award for his contributions to computer science, but Elon Musk doesn't seem too impressed with his work.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO spent a chunk of his Memorial Day holiday volleying jibes at LeCun after the latter mocked Musk's attempt to recruit workers for his AI startup, xAI.

"What 'science' have you done in the past 5 years?" Musk asked LeCun in an X post on Monday.

"Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?" LeCun replied with a link to his Google Scholar profile.

"That's nothing, you're going soft. Try harder!" Musk said in response.

LeCun joined Meta in December 2013 and has worked for the social media giant for over a decade. The 63-year-old French-American is also a computer science professor at New York University.

But Musk didn't seem to believe that LeCun was involved in any scientific work at Meta.

"Yann is 'just following orders,'" Musk wrote when LeCun clarified that he's "a scientist, not a business or product person."

"You don't seem to understand how research works," LeCun replied.

Interestingly, LeCun didn't seem too fussed by his exchange with Musk. In fact, he even told an X user named Alvin Wang that he found the conversation "entertaining."

"You'd think they'd have more important things to do with their time than have a pissing contest," Wang wrote.

"On a holiday? During which I was stuck on an 8 hour transatlantic flight with free wifi? Pretty entertaining, I'd say," LeCun replied.

This exchange with LeCun is one of many times that Musk has butted heads with his tech rivals. The mercurial billionaire once challenged Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match — which has yet to take place. Musk also filed a lawsuit against his OpenAI cofounder, Sam Altman, in February.

LeCun, however, wasn't raring for a cage fight like Zuckerberg.

"I'd settle for a sailing race," he said in a subsequent X post on Monday night.

Representatives for Musk and LeCun didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

• The BRICS bloc could pick up its de-dollarization agenda at its October summit in Kazan, Russia.
• Expect more trade in alternative currencies, wrote one analyst.
• Central bank digital currencies could weaken the greenback's role in payments.

The BRICS group of emerging nations has been agitating for a move away from US dollar dominance.

Last year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for a BRICS common currency. The economist who first gave the bloc its name called that idea "embarrassing."

While the set-up of a common currency is practically challenging, the bloc — which comprises the countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that make up its acronym, and new members Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates — has called for more trade and lending in local currencies as a way to break up with the dollar.

There may be more traction in ditching the dollar this year when the BRICS bloc meets in the Russian city of Kazan from October 22 to October 24, wrote Christopher Granville, the managing director of global political research at GlobalData.TS Lombard, in a Friday report.

The summit would take place in the context of the US and its allies' increasingly aggressive stance toward Chinese exports, which they say are over capacity. And Washington is imposing secondary sanctions against banks processing payments to and from Russia, even if they are in local currencies, such as the Chinese yuan.

Central banks eye digital currency transfers

A more systemic solution is in the works: a Bank of International Settlement Central Bank Digital Currency platform that allows for the direct, peer-to-peer settlement of commercial invoices and foreign exchange trades in the central bank digital currencies of participating countries, wrote Granville. These currencies are similar to cryptocurrencies but are issued and backed by central banks.

The central banks of China, Hong Kong, the UAE, and Thailand participated in a BIS trial of the digital currency system in 2022, but it's not live yet.

Still, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov also touted a digital currency-based settlement system to local media recently — a signal that central banks are eyeing the "US-insulated" solution, wrote Granville.

"That Lavrov signal was unsurprising given Russia's own pressing need," wrote Granville. "While other countries outside the US alliance system will not feel the same urgency, this US-insulated CBDC solution still looks to be in their interests."

Specifically, it would make sense for China amid its trade war with the US. China's central bank already has one of the most developed digital currencies, the digital Chinese yuan, that is used domestically, including to pay some public-sector salaries.

The BIS suspended the Russian central bank's membership following the country's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so it's unclear how the central bank-to-central bank digital currency-based platform and infrastructure would work for Russia.

Central bank digital currencies could weaken the USD's role in international payments

Even so, Granville wrote that the participation of other central banks in the CBDC system could weaken a key pillar of the US dollar's global reserve currency status: international payments outside the eurozone.

The greenback accounted for 60% of international payments ex-eurozone in 2023, according to Granville's analysis. This is in contrast to its 80% share in trade finance — which covers a wide range of products banks and companies use for trade — and 60% of global foreign exchange reserves.

As Business Insider reported recently, the West can't afford to totally isolate Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging network due to the disastrous knock-on impact on trade finance — a key pillar of international trade. As for global FX reserves, the greenback is still king.

But, chipping away at the US dollar's share in international payments through a non-dollar CBDC platform "would weaken one of three planks of the US dollar's global reserve currency status," Granville wrote. The effect would hold even though the currency of choice for cross-border payments is less systemically important than the dollar's role in trade finance and FX reserves, Granville added.

Despite the discussion over central bank digital currencies, there would inevitably be challenges in any implementation.

Even China, which has one of the world's most advanced digital currencies, relies on a "two-tier" system involving banks as wallet-holding agents. That setup avoids excessively disrupting the financial institution's business model and creating financial instability, wrote Granville.

• North Korea's latest satellite launch failed in a fireball in the sky on Monday evening.
• That comes after South Korean media reported that Russia was helping Pyongyang's space program.
• Yonhap reported that a "large number" of Russian experts entered North Korea ahead of the launch.

North Korea announced on Monday that its latest spy satellite launch ended in the explosion of its rocket just minutes after liftoff — a third failure in its last four attempts to put a satellite into orbit.

And that was despite Russian space experts recently arriving to guide North Korea's space program, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported a day before the failed launch, citing a senior defense official who was not named.

Yonhap wrote that a "large number" of Russian technicians had entered North Korea after Russian leader Vladimir Putin last year offered to support Pyongyang with its satellite launches.

It's unclear exactly how many technicians were sent to North Korea, when they might have arrived, or how they might have advised Pyongyang.

The senior South Korean defense official told the agency that the Russian experts likely had high standards, causing a delay between North Korea's last satellite launch and preparations for Monday's attempt.

Yonhap reported that North Korea's space rockets also likely face issues with their second and third-stage engines.

That could forewarn even deeper problems in Pyongyang's space program; the explosion at Monday's launch occurred during the rocket's first stage of flight.

North Korean state media cited a space official saying that preliminary investigations showed the rocket's new liquid oxygen and petroleum engine was to blame. However, he also said there may have been other reasons for the launch failure.

Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

Russia and North Korea's relationship has come under scrutiny in the past year after the US accused them of trading arms and materials deployed in the war in Ukraine.

Per the accusations from the US and its allies, Moscow has been sending raw materials, food, and technical expertise to Pyongyang in exchange for shipments of artillery ammunition and missiles that Ukraine reports seeing on the battlefield.

South Korea has for months said that North Korea's sole successful satellite launch of 2023 came off the back of Russian assistance.

Pyongyang launched the Malligyong-1 in November and claims it is still functioning, though Seoul said in February that it detected the satellite is no longer communicating with the ground.

Some international experts, however, said that month that they've seen signs of activity from the Malligyong-1.

North Korea's repeated satellite launches come as a concern for the US and its allies, who have tried to limit its nuclear weapons and space programs through sweeping sanctions. Pyongyang's repeated testing of ballistics and space launches indicates that it's been able to persist despite the global restrictions.

The US Indo-Pacific Command noted that Pyongyang's Monday launch appeared to use technology related to North Korea's ballistic missile program. It condemned the launch as a "brazen violation" of United Nations resolutions that could destabilize regional security.

• Golden Goose eyes a public listing in Milan this week, aiming for a $3.3 billion valuation.
• The luxury sneaker brand is popular with celebrities and starts at about $364 per pair.
• The IPO would help a weak European IPO market poised to bounce back this year.

Luxury sneaker maker Golden Goose plans to go public in Milan as soon as this week.

Golden Goose may start working on its initial public offering this week following positive feedback from potential investors, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

The Italian brand of pre-distressed sneakers is a hit with celebrities including Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and Hilary Duff. Investors are expected to value Golden Goose at about 11 times this year's estimated earnings. That would value the shoemaker at about $3.3 billion, according to Bloomberg.

On its official web store, a pair of sneakers starts at about $364 and can go up to $2,598. The brand also sells clothing, beachwear, and accessories.

The people told Bloomberg that discussions are ongoing, and details of the offering, including its size and timeline, are still flexible.

The company is owned by European private equity firm Permira. The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Talks of the listing come as Europe's lackluster IPO market looks for reinvigoration. Potential stock listings this year include Luxembourg-based private equity firm CVC Capital, Spanish fashion giant Puig Brands, and Swiss dermatological brand Galderma.

However, Golden Goose's IPO could be hurt by slowing demand for luxury goods.

Kering, the luxury retailer that owns brands including Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, saw overall revenue decline by 10% in the first quarter of the year. Gucci saw a troubling 18% decline in sales, largely from decreased sales in China.

The two other sneaker companies to go public in recent years are performance footwear brands On Holding and Allbirds, which both target a much lower price point than Golden Goose. Last month, Allbirds, which once held the title for "most comfortable shoe," received notice from Nasdaq that it risks delisting because its stock was trading below $1 for 30 consecutive days. On's stock, meanwhile, is up 47% in the past year.

• Tesla is courting its Chinese customers aggressively. 
• Besides price cuts, the EV giant says it's holding a lucky draw for customers. 
• The company says it will fly winners to the US, where they will tour its Fremont factory. 

Tesla is pulling out all the stops when it comes to courting Chinese consumers.

The EV giant said in a Weibo post on Sunday that Chinese customers who take delivery of their Teslas between May 25 and June 30 will stand a chance to win a factory tour in Fremont, California.

According to the company's poster, Tesla will cover the winner's air tickets, transportation costs, and insurance. In addition to the trip, Tesla said its customers could also win 10,000 kilometers in free mileage on the company's Supercharger network.

The promotion comes just a day after it said customers could win a free two-day, one-night trip for two to Gigafactory Shanghai if they took a test drive in any Tesla store in China before June 30.

Tesla said the winners would be chosen via a lucky draw but didn't specify how many would be picked.

Representatives for Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

The company's shift toward aggressive promotional tactics comes as it struggles with slowing sales and heightened competition in the Chinese market.

EV makers hoping to conquer the lucrative Chinese market have been locked in a brutal price war over market share.

In March, Chinese automaker BYD launched a cheaper version of its Yuan Plus car. BYD priced the vehicle at 120,000 yuan, about 12% cheaper than its predecessor.

In April, Tesla announced a 14,000 yuan or $1,930 price cut for its Model 3, S, X, and Y cars in China. The company also introduced similar price cuts in the US and Germany.

"Other cars change prices constantly and often by wide margins via dealer markups and manufacturer/dealer incentives," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an X post on April 21. "Tesla prices must change frequently in order to match production with demand."

• North Korea's latest spy satellite exploded midair, Pyongyang admitted on Monday.
• Its state media reported that the problem was likely due to its new liquid oxygen and oil engine.
• North Korea has repeatedly been trying to launch satellites in the last year, but almost all have failed.

North Korea said on Monday that its latest spy satellite launch failed, with its rocket exploding during the first stage of flight that evening.

State media Korean Central News Agency cited an unnamed vice director of the country's National Aerospace Technology Administration, who said preliminary analysis pointed to problems with the rocket's new engine.

The vice director said the mishap was caused by the "reliability of operation of the newly developed liquid oxygen and petroleum engine," per a translation by KCNA Watch, a US- and Seoul-based website that tracks North Korea's state media.

The space official said his team would investigate other possible reasons for the failure.

Pyongyang has attempted three other satellite launches in the last year, though two were confirmed to have failed. All were condemned by the US, Japan, and South Korea as provocations and are signs that North Korea has been able to circumvent sanctions to build its space program.

In November, North Korea successfully launched its Malligyong-1 satellite and claims it still functions in orbit.

South Korea assessed in February that the satellite is no longer communicating with the ground. However, several international space experts said that they observed signs of activity on the Malligyong-1 days later.

Monday's failed launch was an attempt to put the Malligyong-1-1 in space.

Seoul said it detected fragments in North Korean waters about two minutes after the rocket was launched toward the Yellow Sea, national broadcaster KBS reported.

South Korean officials released a black-and-white video of the scuppered launch showing what appears to be a fireball in the sky. They said the footage was taken from an observation boat.

The attempted space launch has been blasted by South Korea, which they said North Korea warned them about. Seoul scrambled 20 jet fighters, including F-35As, as a precaution.

Japan also condemned the launch, saying it lodged a strong complaint to North Korea through its embassy in Beijing.

"A few minutes after launch, it disappeared over the Yellow Sea," Japanese Defense Minister Minoru Kihara said of the rocket. "Therefore, we presume that no object was launched into space."

Kihara added that North Korea has said it intends to launch three more satellites this year.

The US Indo-Pacific Command called the launch "a brazen violation of multiple unanimous UN Security Council resolutions, raises tensions, and risks destabilizing the security situation in the region and beyond."

It further warned that North Korea appeared to have launched the satellite using technology from its international ballistics missile programs.

North Korea is sanctioned by the US and its allies, with a focus on limiting its nuclear weapons and space programs. But South Korea has been warning that Pyongyang is still able to pull off satellite launches with Russia's help.

The US and Ukraine have accused North Korea of supplying Russia with artillery ammunition and say Pyongyang has been receiving raw materials, food, and assistance from Russian experts. North Korea has denied its participation in any arms exchange with Moscow.