The White House Takes On Cryptocurrencies

immediate cease fire. Well it's Bitcoin bounces back as President Biden signs an executive order on digital assets. Will break down what's in that plan and what it means for the future of cryptocurrency and Amazon soaring after hours the company order proves the f one starts with what it means. Later this hour, thousands are trapped in towns surrounding Kiev as Russian forces continue to encroach on the capitol. They running out of food and other essential items as they

wait days upon days for a safe exit. Take a listen, he was Tomula occupied by Russian forces. A problem of yeah,

willis first of value? Yeah Colonna's Octobos is makeing otomos VILLIAI and me it's gonnaia Utriona Tonga stylist umb it was European previously NA treaty per center for you and me uht I's and history relied Premier what yes, uh Napa nouas coca uh chickensly uh sources History lied and you talked not going to give the bates a week time schiptrigic Catama schools Astrilio it's uhpapartsch Brisney And as more people attempt to leave Ukraine or find shelter within

the country, it is of the essence to keep communication channels open so you, manager and aid can get to those who need it most. Message Bird is helping keep businesses connected across Ukraine and is now being used to coordinate and meet a broad range of needs from getting sin cards to people, along with supplies like medicine, blankets and even transportation from place to place. Founder and CEO Robert this with me now for more on how his

company is doing all of this work. Now as I understand it, Robert, you work with all of the major social channels what'sapp, Instagram, Telegram, what kinds of communications are you seeing between businesses, between customers and businesses in Ukraine specifically Emily and thank you for having me on the show. UM. Look before message worker is being used primarily for omni channel B two be communicate atients. UM. Today we're seeing a lot of NGOs communities UM using us for all

sorts of help. As you said, it can be simple things from organizing, coordinating medicines, blankets, transportation. UM. We're just trying to provide our services to as many businesses as possible at the moment to help out. So what does that mean? How are you supporting these businesses who have these flood, this flood of requests at this time. Well,

several different ways, UM. I mean one we're just I mean, as a company, we provide customer service toolings, different ways for for people to coordinate on top of our platforms. So we're obviously providing that for three now to to to to those companies businesses. But this isn't just businesses, to be honest, it's just as much just people trying to help out. I mean, if you think about it's

about two million refugees have now come into Europe. UM, so a lot of people are trying to help out in different ways that we're trying to to coordinate as quickly as possible. UM. At the same time, we we launched our own fund um UH to help out. So our employees are helping out on trying to organize other tech founders to come together and and all of us use our UH knowledge companies um UM to to try

to lend a hand and a stair whole situation. So there's ten million dollar and GEO fund that you mentioned. What's your hope about how this will help? Look, the fund is broader um UM. We're looking to to to deploy the capital in the next two years UM. But you know, right now it's needed as much as ever UM. So we're trying to do anything we can um uh for for the for the community. I think more broadly UH pending money, what we're really trying to do is

just stand up. I think it's important for CEO's founders to speak up. UM. I think the technology sector is uniquely positioned to help out. We've all built amazing companies

that we can do stuff with. UM. You know, I'm working together with, for example, one of the fend the Netherlands, the founder of Bunk, which is an online bank, UM, he's doing amazing work trying to get refugees now bank accounts so so that we can coordinate money something simple because obviously their bank accounts in Ukraine don't actually work anymore. Or the founder of Picnic, which is an online supermarket, who has you know, all sorts of supply chain and

legis sticks to to to coordinate funds. I think it's initiatives like that that where we're really focused UM to try to help out. Well. Speaking of standing standing up this clampdown that we've seen on services across Russia, we've seen a number of companies take a stand. You have any exposure in Russia? Are you cutting off any of your services to Russian businesses and users? Yeah? We have UM pretty much immediately. Uh UM. Look, I'll be honest,

it's it's four percent of our revenues. So it's it's you know, it's uh, we're five in a million to our company. It's significant, but it's not UM. It's not going to kill our our killer business. UM. But I think anything that we can do UM globally to to say no UM and to stand for peace, I think it's important Um. Obviously, I would say that the Russian people inside the country have absolutely nothing to do with this, um,

so it's sad for them to UM. At the same time, it's I guess the only peaceful protest that we can do is by stopping services to to to the Russian community right now. I know you're joining us from Amsterdam. Do have a team in Ukraine? How big is that team? How are they doing? What is the situation there and how are you helping them? We didn't have a very big team in Ukraine. UM. Luckily all of our employees are outside of the country. UM. We were able to

get them out pretty quickly. UM. But they still have family there. UM. So uh so far as far as I know, everybody is doing okay considering the circumstances. UM. But it's it's it's horrifying. I mean, we have families who are like you. Literally here the air alarms go off. I don't know how you call it an English but the and you know, it's just it's it's two and we're having a war on the borders of Europe. It's crazy.

Air sirens common sound now across the country. All right, Founder and CEO of Message for Robert Vis, thank you for joining us and sharing the work that you're doing there. Coming up, Amazon soaring in late trading after the company says the board approved one stock split. Details on that. Next, this is Bloomberg. Amazon splits its stocks, sending shares sharing this as the e commerce joint announced it will stop sending products to Russia and cut off Prime video to

Russian customers. I want to bring in Bloomberg's Bradstone for more on this. Brad, I want to start with the stock splitz here. Obviously, we just saw Alphabet do something like this earlier this year. Unlike Amazon, though, to do a stock split. Why are they doing this and what does it mean? Well, it's interesting. Jeff Pazos, for fifteen years seemed to really resist this kind of financial engineering.

It shouldn't mean anything, right, One share of Amazon stock at three thousand is equal to twenty shares at one fifty. But in practice a lower stock price makes the stock

more attractive to retail investors and also employees. You know, you've got a million warehouse workers who have an option of of including equity and their compensation, and this instead of a fractional share, they get a whole share, So there are lots of reasons to do it, and the and the fact that the stock is down by eight percent over the last twelve months, and the fact that investors are responding favorably they did today and to Google's

announcement last month. It's it's uh, you know, it's evidence for y Andy Dassey maybe wants to rethink because some of that orthodoxy at Amazon right, improving that accessibility at least psychologically. I also want to ask you about Amazon's moves in Russia, stopping sending products to Russia, cutting off Prime video. How significant is this for Amazon? How big a business do they have there and and who will this really impact? Yeah, I mean not to call it

a nothing burger, but to put it in perspective. No data center it is in the country, no offices in the country. There's no such thing as Amazon dot Ru. If you're an Amazon customer in Russia, you're probably ordering from the website in Germany and products are getting shipped to you from the fulfillment centers in Poland. So you know, it's limited. Amazon's taking a stand here like a lot of other companies, and to to the extent that it's

impacting Amazon customers. It's probably upper middle class Russian consumers who are who were using the foreign Amazon website. Okay, now, third story, big Amazon story today, Amazon being accused of lying to Congress about how they use third party data and have now been referred to the Department of Justice.

What does this mean? It was sort of an open secret that Amazon, which is very decentralized, you had employees who are breaking basically breaking Amazon policy and you know, using internal data tools to promote private label Amazon products. And when Bezos and and some other Amazon executives were hauled in front of the Congressional subcommittee investigating anti trust, they did wouldn't really own up to it. You know, Amazon so secretive. They talked around it, they talked about

studying the issue. They were being very Amazon like. And then they've never released any subsequent reports. So, you know, the church here, you know, is that they lied. They clearly weren't a front with what was happening, you know, with the employees who were kind of sticking their hands in the data cookie jar. And now congressional investigators want some accountability for that. All right, Well, we'll be following

that story again. Amazon chairs way up after hours on the back of that stock split announcement are Brad Stone, who of course wrote a couple of books on Amazon. Brad, thank you, welcome back to Bloomberg Technology, and Emily Chang. In San Francisco, Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company majority owned by General Motors, named co founder Kyle Vote it's full time CEO. He's back in the top spot since Dan Ammon left Cruise back in December after disagreements with GM

CEO Mary Bara. Kyle with this now for his first interview since taking back the helm. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us so in light of Dan's departure, and of course you're very long history with this company. What is your vision and is there anything that you plan to do differently? Well, thanks for having me Emily. Fortunately, you know, our vision remains unchanged. We're still working on bringing driverless cars to deployment at scale and it's been

a really exciting years for year for us. Just in the last few months, we did our first driver less rides on a on public roads in a major US city. It's a first for any company. We've got really ambitious plans to excale from here to be in you know, more locations, more cities and make a really great product for people. And given the context of Dan's departure, how would you say, how would you describe your relationship with Mary Bara and whether you know you both are on

the same page. Well, the GM leadership team, including Mary, have been really supportive and we share this vision. UM. You know, it's obvious if you look at the status quo were not in a great place when it comes to car accidents in the US and UM, you know, basically transitioning to an electric vehicle fleet across UM across both personally on vehicles and red chair and we all believe that autonomous ride chair is the way to get

there in a way to get there really quickly. It's also a really big business opportunity for company like GM or really any major company who's looking to get into the transportation space. Talk to us about Cruise Origin, how production is going, and is there any sense of when we'll see Origin on US roads. Yeah, the Cruise Origin

is an amazing vehicle. It's it's meant for rideshare. So you sit in it, You've got tons of leg room, the seeds face each other, lots of cabin space and so it's optimal for things like shared rides where you might be in there with another person, but we can really drive the cost down when you do those kind

of rides. So it's an awesome vehicle. UM. We're doing testing with prototypes right now, UM on closed courses, and early next year I think you may start to see the first production vehicle's wall off the line and hopefully go into deployment. Why in your view, is Cruise Cruises technology better than what Waymou has to offer, or Tesla

or zooks. You know, it's really hard to compare different avy companies, And I think the answer is just you know, when you can pull out your phone and use one of these products, first of all, we'll know who's a head in terms of deployment. But then um, also the thing is right now, you can't really compare them side by side. And I do think when you experience this technology, if it's anything like what our first users have seen, they're blown away. It feels like magic. They want to

use it again and again. And we intend to differentiate both on the product experience, creating a really great experience that's that's potentially better than our competitors, but much better than the status quo using rideshare services, and I think that'll be really compelling. I think people are gonna like it. Now as I understand it, Cruise has at least five permits from the d m V and the CPUC. You can transport passengers without a driver behind the wheel, but

you can't charge a fair. Or you can transport passengers and charge a fair, but you need to have a safety driver. Are the regulations just too complicated right now to make a lot of progress. We did a good job on winding the California permit process right there, but you know, we're one permanent way from being able to charge fares and do commercial operators operation. But as of today, we have people using the app, using the service, um, you know, so we're getting a sense for what those

customers are going to do and what they like. UM And I think, well, today we're we're kind of hung up on this permitting process. That's a very ephemeral problem and going to go away. We're gonna work with the regulators and get through these things and then you're just gonna see, you know this, this products start to appear in more places and starts something that people use, you know, in their daily lives and just going to become normal.

I think the discussion about permiting is important today since the first time any company has tried to go through this and get permits from California regulators. But I think that's going to be behind us pretty soon. What's the next big market for cruise after the United States? Well, we'll see. I think that the priority for US is you know, look, you know, even in San Francisco, a Texas tric city, people have never seen a car driving

around without anyone behind the wheel. You know, there's people on the sidewalk that look at these vehicles and they're like, they're taking pictures, they're looking at them, they're they're they're excited, I think about the future, but it's also, you know, a little bit unusual, and so I think for us, we really want to make sure we kneel this in San Francisco, not only in a way that works for the city, but works for writers and it's really compelling

and they want to come back again and again. And then we're really gonna put a lot of AMMO into this and try to scale it out in a lot of places really quickly. But our goal is to make it work really well and make it really well here in San Francisco. First, any updates on Dubai. The World Expo in Dubai wraps at the end of the months, and one of the big themes is mobility. Yeah, Dubai has been the r T and Dubai has been a great partner, and we're still on track for employment there.

I think it's a great opportunity to introduce, um, you know, the future of of transportation to you know, a city and government that's really excited about doing that, so we can't wait. So look, I think the big question regular consumers have is when will self driving car ours, When will self driving cruises for example, be on the road and I can take advantage of it. How far out is that more mainstream reality? How many years? Um, Well,

we're starting small. I think an important thing is to get this working, make sure everyone is responding well to it and the product itself meets expectations. But right now, if you live in San Francisco, you can go to get cruise dot com and jump on the waitlist. We've already done hundreds of rides with members of the public and these a v is actually dozens of them. Are out every single night now carrying passengers around San Francisco.

So it's here. It's not, uh, you know, universally distributed or equally distributed, but it's here in small bits and pieces. And I think it's going to surprise people how quickly that becomes generally available and that many people who live or work in San Francisco get a chance to use it. All Right, cal vote, CEO of Cruise once again, and also, of course the co founder, thanks for bringing your vision

to us. Kyle. Coming up, President Biden and crypto, the fine in his executive order and what it means for the broader industry. Next, this is Bloomberg more now in President BYD's executive order on crypto, which sent Bitcoin bouncing right back up. I want to get into it all with our crypto contributor Sanali Bossi Shanale. This could be kind of a big deal. Yeah, it could be a big deal. And if you see bitcoin prices, certainly the

market things it is. If you take a look, you having more than nine percent jump in bitcoin over the last twenty four hours. It is still down on the seven day period, but a significant lift here, more than the other assets. If you flip up the board and take a look at the theoryum for example, also getting a lift about six percent or so. But the one interesting thing to me is while those assets have gotten the lift, heather and stable coins more largely have not

seen as much of a lift. Are pretty stable on the day, but again stable on the week as well. So what are the safe havens here? Let's get someone else's take here. We're going to bring in Marty Chavez on this. He is a vice chairman at six three Partners, really a pioneer when it comes to technology and money. Marty, thank you so much for joining us. There's a lot of criticism about the Executive Order that came out of

the White House. On one hand, it's been hailed as a watershed moment, but on the other hand, it has also been criticized a short on details. What's your take, Soinale, I've we've talked about this topic before. I've been saying for a long time the best thing that could possibly happen to digital regulation digital assets is the appropriate amount of regulation. Sure the Executive Order to not give us

a lot of detail. It mostly directed a variety of organizations in the government to do more work and do more study, and that's great. There is um We expect a Treasury paper forthcoming later this year that's going to have a lot more detail. But I would say that at the root of my concerns, and you and I have talked about this before, are really the stable coins? Right? The stable coins are a form of currency peg, and

currency pegs have not been successful. They work right up until the moment that they don't work, and there's certainly not a lot of detail. I don't I'm not sure there's any in the Executive Order about stable coins. Into my mind, uh, the appropriate regulation stable coins, which I would see as a kind of narrow bank, so we actually know what are the assets backing them and what are the mechanisms for those assets. I think that's gonna

be hugely important. And until we have that, I don't know how investable the whole space of digital assets is from my perspective. But once we have a foundation for the stable coins that looks like narrow banking and appropriate regulation, I think it's going to be a part of an immensely important long secular trend, the deeperalization of everything. Marty, what about what we're seeing are in terms of investment

into things like the Ukraine. Doubt the way that investors have really been able to mobilize and raise money at scale when people have not been able to access currency in the traditional way. Well, first, that's not that's a start by just acknowledging, acknowledging pure horror of what's going on in Ukraine. Uh and and the sympathy and the sympathy isn't even the word for the suffering that's happening

over there. And to the extent that cryptocurrency can partially mitigate some aspects of that suffering, I think it's huge. It does show you that that there's ways to move money internationally with cryptocurrency which we've all known, that are interesting, that don't require intermediaries. Of course, it brings up all kinds of concerns about the enforceability of sanctions, and there's all kinds of discussions about Russian wallets and the exchanges,

and that's complicated. Yeah, I'm really curious about what you think about that and the role that crypto plays here. Are when there are sanctions and really lots of governments around the world trying to restrict the flow of capital, is crypto going to fix or make that worse, so restricting the flow of capital sanctions. But this is this is, this is something that governments do uh personally to my mind. Put like, we have heard commentators say the US is

not playing fair with the dollar. Well, I don't know that playing fair is really what the discussion is about. When Russia and provoked invaded, invaded Ukraine, and so cryptocurrencies do provide this mechanism. I think it's important as a matter of sovereignty to have the right amount of regulation. Um, I don't like using the term cryptocurrencies. I don't think their currencies. I think they're digital assets. The currency is a different thing. And this is something else that I've

been saying for a long time. Digitizing the US dollar in an appropriate way that respects identity, privacy, know your client, anti money laundering, sanctions, regimes, regimes that bolsters the Fed's tools for macroeconomic policy and the United States tools for geopolitical policy. Those are that's hard and getting that right is really important. But to me, it's not an option. You know, do we want to digitize the US dollar?

That de materialization journey has to continue. It's important for US leadership it's important as a matter of innovation, and getting it right is extremely hard. To what cent is it a question of national security? You have millions of people who are flocking to China's central bank digital currency as we speak, and I'm wondering if the US doesn't catch up and do the same, to what extent does that start to shift global financial powers over to China.

I worry about this a lot, Sonali. The dollar status is the global global reserve asset is not written in stone. It has persisted for a hundred years. Not that the historical pattern needs to repeat, but about every hundred years there's a different global reserve asset. And and I've been saying for a few years now, digitizing the US dollar

in an appropriate way it's not is essential. It's not just another form factor right to me, That's like saying a starship and a bicycle are just two different forms of transportation, no big difference between the two. Write a digital dollar, potentially programmable dollar is a completely different thing than the inert paper dollar that we currently have. The only forms of the central BANKMO we have today are

the notes and FED funds in Fed master accounts. Introducing another form that is just like the dollar, but it's digital. We don't need the paper symbolizing it anymore. That's really important. But getting the details right, like to know your client anti money laundering, what are the right amounts ending moved? And you apply sanctions if so, what's the process like designing all of this. It has to be thoughtful, Marty, and it's hard and it's essential. We have just about

another minute thirty seconds here. What about the investibility of digital assets until we get to that regulatory point that you're talking about. Are you comfortable? Are your clients and rivals comfortable with getting into them? Many many clients and rivals are comfortable. But when I am thinking about it from from the sixth Street point of view, um, it's uh. We see the right amount of regulation as essential. I'll

give you an analogy. Before airplanes were regulated and the safety of airplanes were regulated, you were taking your life into your hands every time you got onto commercial flight, and so having all the rules that we currently have about rebuilding the airplanes every so long often, how they

have to be maintained in the checklist and all. Yes, it was expensive and cumbersome to comply with that, but it was game changing it right is the condition precedent for the industry to really grow and to be what it needs to be. And so I would say the executive order is a great step along this journey of creating the appropriate regulatory framework. Once we get that right, and we get it right for stable coins, which are the underpairing of the current crypto ecosystem, that's going to

be a golden age. We're gonna have to leave it there. But we want to have you back as we finally see those regulations. That's Marty Chavez, the part vice chairman of Six Street Partners. Emily back to you, Thank you, Hinale Shnali Bossi there. Mark had just released its fourth quarter earnings, beating even the highest estimates and sending shares jumping in postmarket trade. This as the payments company also announced a new partnership with City Group to help move

commercial cards to mobile wallets more easily. But of course there's big changes happening in the global payments land escape as Russia's war on Ukraine escalates. I want to talk about all of this with Marcattes, EO and founder Jason Gardner. Jason, good to have you back with us. So of course, we've seen Visa, MasterCard, PayPal halting their operations in Russia. What is Marcatta's exposure in Russia and do you have any plans to do the same. Good seeing you, Emily

and thank you for your continued interest in Marcatta. Actually, Russia is not on our roadmap, has never been on our roadmap. In fact, we announced our partnership with City today uh in forty markets in Russia is not one of them, So our exposure is pretty pretty limited. We have diminimus volume within the Ukraine. However, you know we we operate in thirty nine countries today and a number of those countries throughout Europe, but but no exposure today.

What do you see though, as the impact of global uncertainty, rising inflation, rising gas prices, prices of jet fuel on consumer spending? How does that impacting your outlook ahead? Yeah? There there's a lot of pressure on consumers and consumers pay for things, whether using bin out pay later, using

cash app, using Lydia and France coin base. So so we make money when companies are when consumers or businesses spend cards at the point of sale, whether on line or offlines, through different modalities could be a physical plastic card or a tokenized card or virtual card. Uh. They still have to buy things. So our exposure is really, you know, will consumers continue to use bind Out pay later, Will they continue to use on demand delivery services or

expense management services. We have a strong base of revenue. We ended the year at seventeen million dollars in net revenue. Uh, and we have that strong base of customers, and let's see if they continue to spend despite all of the head winds for them. I'm curious what you observed when it came to spending in the fourth quarter and how

that is shaping your thoughts on the outlook. Obviously, you know we're we're hopefully coming out of a pandemic, but now you know, what's going on in Ukraine has cast a whole another cloud of uncertainty over the future. Yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty. The fourth quarter by Now pay Later really was well beyond our expectations. It was a growth from even the Q three, which we would kind of expect because we see consumers wanted to use new payment types like why now pay later in the

in the fourth quarter. We actually get a survey last year of surveying people in both the U s UK and Australia, and we found that of people that actually used the payment modality before, we don't know if it's going to change. I mean, you're you're seeing a lot of the same things you know, unfold every minute of every day in regards to Ukraine and the war, also what's happening in Europe. We're heading into a lot of uncertainty,

especially this summer. But again, we have this strong base of revenue, a strong base of customers who are looking to grow their businesses. Using our technology and our tools. We're gonna help them go into even more and more geographies and we're excited about doing that. But again there's there's a lot of headwinds for not only consumers but businesses as well. This new City Group partnership. How much

could this impact revenue? So as we focused as a company, So our strategy was to start with commerce disruptors, companies like door Dash and instat Card in a firm in Clarina, uh That's where we had the DNA match with developers who are building on top of our platform. We then went into large tech giants, digital banks, and then large financial institutions, they're very slow to make decisions and rin

roll out. We would expect over time they would take more and more advantage of our platform, but this is just our foot in the door. Tokenizations of service is something we're doing with JP Morgan today. UH. Now we've announced with City within forty markets and that takes time to go build, But again this is a foot in the door. We want to do more and more with arge financial institutions UH and building that trust through us working with them directly, and our technology is going to

help us go and do that. Well, speaking of a foot in the door, how are you looking at web three and how do you see that driving growth in your business? Well, we have been doing a lot in crypto, as we've talked about in the past, especially with our partnership with coin base. UM. That's really our first step on this idea of decentralized finance or defy or you know, for years I've been talking to companies about using things like blockchain to move transactions, and I actually talked about

this in my remarks. I just made in our our Q four of one earnings called decent master card of Interconnected the world for companies whether online or offline that I wanted to accept payment cards. UM, that is very very significant. That's a very very deep moat and a very tall wall for companies that want to go in and build that crossworder capability that they have. So I think this technology is here to stay. We believe in it.

I believe in it personally. I spent a lot of time with companies in the crypto web three space, Essentialized financed. How we're gonna go and build it. It's just gonna take time. Uh, and then that could be you know, it may be a decade from now. We'll see the changes. Jason Gardner, founder and CEO of Marcatta, thank you as always for stopping by getting off that call. That does it.

For the edition of Bloomberg Technology Thursday, we're gonna speak to Flex Sports CEO Ryan Peterson as his company partners with international aid agencies to deliver critical supplies to refugees fleeing Ukraine. I don't want to miss it. This is Bloomberg