Business
Trump’s crypto platform is now open to the public — kind of
The people behind World Liberty Financial — former President Donald Trump, his sons, and his business associates — have made a lot of promises about the cryptocurrency platform’s revolutionary potential. It will liberate “the average American” from “the big banks and financial elites,” Trump posted on Truth Social. It will help unbanked and debanked people, Donald Trump Jr. said in an X Space. What no one involved with the project has said is how this will happen or what, exactly, World Liberty Financial does. Now, the mystery service is accepting signups — but not from everyone.
Despite scant details about World Liberty Financial, its whitelists are now open, the company announced on X and Truth Social on Monday. The platform is now letting US-based accredited investors and non-US persons begin the know-your-customer (KYC) verification process. It’s worth reiterating: neither Trump nor anyone else involved in World Liberty Financial has given an in-depth explanation of what service the platform actually provides.
Here’s what we do know: World Liberty Financial has said its goal is to drive “mass adoption of stable coins and decentralized finance.” Near the end of a two-hour-plus X Space announcing the project, World Liberty Financial adviser Corey Caplan said it would “sell and otherwise distribute governance tokens called WLFI.” CoinDesk previously reported that World Liberty Financial would be built on the Ethereum blockchain and Aave, a decentralized finance platform, and would center around a “credit account system.”
CoinDesk also obtained a whitepaper about the project, which said that 70 percent of WLFI would be held by World Liberty Financial’s founding members, team, and service providers. But during the stream announcing the platform, Caplan said the “fake news media” got the details wrong and that 63 percent of tokens would be sold to the public.
“Additional information about World Liberty Financial is only intended to be available to persons who have been pre-qualified by completing a KYC process,” World Liberty Financial’s website states. In a post on X, World Liberty Financial blamed “outdated policy and regulations in the US” that limited whitelists to accredited investors and non-US persons.
The Securities and Exchange Commission defines accredited investors as individuals with net worths of at least $1 million — excluding the value of their primary residence — either individually or with their spouse or partner. Their annual income must be at least $200,000 individually or $300,000 with a spouse or partner for at least the past two years. There are other requirements for professionals and business entities.
As of 2022, more than 24 million American households qualified as accredited investors, according to the SEC’s estimates. That’s a not insignificant amount of Americans — nearly 20 percent of households in the US, a number that’s attributed partly to recent inflation. But it’s still a far cry from the unbanked and underserved communities Trump and his sons claimed World Liberty Financial is supposed to help. And, to reiterate one final time: we still don’t know what it does.
Business
The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise
Tesla made sure its Optimus robots were a big part of its extravagant, in-person Cybercab reveal last week. The robots mingled with the crowd, served drinks to and played games with guests, and danced inside a gazebo. Seemingly most surprisingly, they could even talk. But it was mostly just a show.
It’s obvious when you watch the videos from the event, of course. If Optimus really was a fully autonomous machine that could immediately react to verbal and visual cues while talking, one-on-one, to human beings in a dimly lit crowd, that would be mind-blowing.
Attendee Robert Scoble posted that he’d learned humans were “remote assisting” the robots, later clarifying that an engineer had told him the robots used AI to walk, spotted Electrek. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote that the robots “relied on tele-ops (human intervention)” in a note, the outlet reports.
There are obvious tells to back those claims up, like the fact that the robots all have different voices or that their responses were immediate, with gesticulation to match.
It doesn’t feel like Tesla was going out of its way to make anyone think the Optimus machines were acting on their own. In another video that Jalopnik pointed to, an Optimus’ voice jokingly told Scoble that “it might be some” when he asked it how much it was controlled by AI.
Another robot — or the human voicing it — told an attendee in a stilted impression of a synthetic voice, “Today, I am assisted by a human,” adding that it’s not fully autonomous. (The voice stumbled on the word “autonomous.”)
Musk first announced Tesla’s humanoid robot by bringing what was very clearly a person in a robot suit on stage, so it’s no surprise that the Optimuses (Optimi? Optimodes?) at last week’s event were hyperbolic in their presentation. And people who went didn’t seem to feel upset or betrayed by that. But if you were hoping to have any sense of how far along Tesla truly is in its humanoid robotics work, the “We, Robot” event wasn’t the place to look.
Business
X blocked hacked JD Vance dossier links after the Trump campaign flagged it
The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump asked X to stop links to a story containing VP nominee JD Vance’s hacked dossier from circulating before X chose to block them, reports The New York Times. X had cited its “rules on posting unredacted private personal information” as its justification for suspending the reporter who first published the dossier in his story.
That’s a markedly different set of actions than those Musk took two years ago after criticizing Twitter’s decision to suppress a 2020 news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He called the choice “a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment” and seeded internal documents related to the decision to certain journalists to report on — which doxxed people in the process.
T…
Business
RedCap, the 5G for wearables and IoT, will get its first devices soon
Both T-Mobile and AT&T have plans to release their first devices soon that run on RedCap, a 5G specification that is tooled for Internet of Things devices, according to Fierce Wireless.
What is RedCap? Great question! Also called “reduced capability” or NR-Light, RedCap is a low-bandwidth version of 5G that’s expected to make certain devices, like wearables, sensors, or surveillance cameras simpler and more power efficient, according to an Oracle document. That could mean cheaper cellular-connected smartwatches, XR glasses, or other portable products that don’t need high-powered antennas and fast throughput last longer on a charge.
AT&T, which began testing the spec on its own network early this year, reportedly plans to release its first NR-Light devices in 2025, Fierce Wireless writes. T-Mobile will launch one of its own before this year is out.
It’s not clear what those devices will be, but AT&T AVP of device architecture Jason Silkes has hinted at what early NR-Light products could look like, telling Fierce in June that the first RedCap devices will probably be cheap mobile hotspots and dongles. Indeed, TCL announced a 5G USB dongle last week, catchily named the TCL Linkport IK511.
Early products could use a modem chipset Qualcomm launched last year called the Snapdragon X35. It listed several companies in its announcement, including T-Mobile and AT&T, that plan to use the modem in future products. Perhaps we’ll hear more during CES early next year. Let the (slow) race to 5G begin.
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