THE PRIVATE equity backers of Scottish technology business FanDuel have completed their boardroom coup by ensuring that none of the firm’s founders or employees will be able to share in the proceeds of its impending sale to Paddy Power Betfair.

The London-listed bookmaker is close to finalising a takeover of the daily fantasy sports business, in a deal that was expected to deliver a significant cash windfall to the five-strong team that founded the firm in Edinburgh almost a decade ago. Current and former staff members with shares and options in the business were also due to receive a payout.

However, US private equity houses Shamrock Capital Advisers and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which in 2014 and 2015 respectively led $70 million and $275m fundraising rounds for FanDuel, have been able to exclude ordinary shareholders from the deal by exercising their majority shareholder drag-along rights.

Drag-along clauses, which form part of companies’ articles of association, are designed to protect majority shareholders by enabling them to force minority shareholders to participate in a sale.

While dragging shareholders are supposed to offer minority shareholders the same terms as any other seller, KKR and Shamrock have told the firm’s founders – who each hold ordinary shares – that there will not be enough cash generated from the transaction for them to be paid.

In a document outlining the terms of the deal, the investors said that the aggregate value being paid for FanDuel “is approximately $465m”.

“As this consideration is not sufficient to satisfy the aggregate preference payable on the A preference shares, no part of the consideration payable in the offer will be payable on FanDuel’s ordinary shares or options to purchase FanDuel’s ordinary shares,” it said.

The move has been made possible because changes made to FanDuel’s articles of association in the past few years have strengthened the hand of dragging shareholders.

In August 2014 a clause was added that said drag-along rights would “prevail over any contrary provisions” in the document. A month later Shamrock completed its investment in the firm.

In June 2017 a clause was inserted to allow “the transfer of shares to the company for nil consideration”, with a further article added two weeks ago noting that no objections could be raised if “no consideration is payable” for shares being transferred as part of a sale of the business.

“It shall be no impediment to registration of shares under this article that no share certificate (or lost share certificate indemnity) has been produced,” the June 20 update added.

The founders’ shareholdings in the business were already watered down last year after a merger-termination clause relating to FanDuel’s ultimately unsuccessful combination with rival DraftKings kicked in.

Shortly afterwards KKR and Shamrock took control of FanDuel’s board, which was slimmed down from 10 to five seats.

As part of that FanDuel co-founders Lesley Eccles, who had been head of marketing at the firm, and Tom Griffiths, who was at that point the company’s chief product officer, resigned from the board. They have both now left the business, as have cofounders Rob Jones and Chris Stafford, who were head of design and head of technology respectively.

After the reshuffle fellow founder Nigel Eccles remained on the board as chief executive but left the firm in November 2017 to be replaced by Matt King, a former KKR executive who had served as FanDuel’s chief financial officer between 2014 and 2016.

Mr King is expected to receive a payment of up to $11.3m as a result of the Paddy Power Betfair deal. The firm’s current chief technology officer Robin Spira is due to make up to $3.5m, its legal officer Christian Genetski stands to make up to $6.2m, and it chief financial officer Andy Giancamilli is due to receive up to $5m.

FanDuel declined to comment.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/business_hq/16333124.fanduel-founders-to-receive-no-cash-from-sale-to-paddy-power-betfair/

Countries around the world continue to wage their not so subtle war on the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) and encryption. In Russia, the government has all but banned the use of VPNs by layering all manner of obnoxious restrictions and caveats on VPN operators. The goal, as we've seen in China and countless other countries, is to ban VPN use without making it explicitly clear you're banning VPN use. The deeper goal is always the same: less privacy and online freedom for users who use such tools to dodge surveillance or other, even dumber government policies.

Case in point: Uganda recently decided it would be a great idea to impose a new 200 Uganda shilling ($0.05) tax on the use of social networking websites. President Yoweri Museveni pushed for the changes to combat what he calls "gossip," and now users have to pay the 200 shilling fee each day just to access websites and services like Facebook, Whatsapp, and Twitter. $20 more per year is not an insubstantial sum in a country where the average income is around $600, and the average Ugandan survives on usually less than a dollar per day.

The tax is, not surprisingly, not being received well:



The nation's wireless carriers were quick to comply, informing users they should use mobile payment services to pay the government tax:



Shockingly, VPN use has soared in the country as users try to dodge the new tax. Predicting this, Uganda's government has doubled down on bad ideas, and has been pressuring ISPs to ban VPN use. In a statement posted at Facebook (200 Uganda shillings, please), the Ugandan government tries to deter VPN use by trying to claim using VPNs will cost more than the cost of bandwidth and the social media tax, since VPN encryption utilizes slightly more bandwidth and most user connections have caps and overage fees:


https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180702/12431840157/uganda-bans-vpns-to-prevent-users-dodging-absurd-new-social-media-tax.shtml

Hydroden is wrong about the EU taking advantage over the US,when it comes to crypto trading regulations.The situation in the European Union is almost the same.Nobody will let this company trade ETNs in the long term.

If Cormier will slug it out with Miocic, Cormier will be in a disadvantageous situation since Miocic is 5 inches taller than Cormier, Miocic have the height advantage. In terms of Reach, again its Miocic who has the advantage with 80 inch reach compared to Cormier's 72 inch. If Cormier will go to the ground then I guess Cormier have the advantage since he has a wrestling back ground.

Daniel Cormier also fell after a press conference and he was saw limping. What will Dana do? His original story board for UFC 226 was supposed to be the biggest card of the year.

Europe's largest trader of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is now entering the crypto world.

Amsterdam-based speed trader Flow Traders NV co-CEO Dennis Dijkstra told Bloomberg Thursday that his firm was expanding its trading products to exchange-traded notes (ETNs) based on bitcoin and ether.

XBT Provider, a Stockholm-based firm that offers ETFs based on bitcoin and ether, confirmed that Flow Traders NV has "dramatically increased" its securities trading over the last few months.

According to Bloomberg, unlike the major U.S. trading firms currently offering cryptocurrency futures, Flow Traders is the first one to "disclose it's buying and selling crypto notes listed on regulated stock exchanges."

In the interview, Dijkstra said:

"People underestimate crypto. It's big, and it is to be regulated very soon. The market participants are much more professional than people think. Institutional investors are interested -- we know they are because we get requests."

While the Dutch company is moving forward in crypto trading, the country's regulators are wary of the move.

Nienke Torensma, a spokeswoman for the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), said in a statement that "We discourage activities in cryptos both by consumers and professional license holders."

"By virtue of its newness and the anonymity it potentially offers, it is very prone to abuse. Given its inability to serve the promised purpose as a currency, we don't regard it to be an asset class," she continued.

CoinDesk reported in March that the country's finance minister, Wopke Hoekstra, issued a letter to Parliament to urge for "an international approach" to regulate cryptocurrency.

https://www.coindesk.com/the-eus-biggest-etf-firm-expands-into-crypto-products/

Every weekend during soccer season in Britain, security personnel find them in stadiums, tapping furiously at their phones or talking nonstop into a mic — mysterious customers often wearing hoodies to conceal earpieces and their identity. While focused with unwavering intensity on the action of the game, they show none of the engagement and excitement of the ordinary fans around them.

The unofficial data scouts — or data thieves, depending on who is describing them — are quickly ejected once they are discovered.

The fleeting data they are collecting — the minutia of what is happening in the game — is the lifeblood of sports betting, perhaps the most crucial and valuable element of the entire industry. If gambling operators are to monetize sports betting fully, they have to offer wagers on far more than the outcomes of games. Data on the second-by-second action — exactly when a goal is scored, where it landed in the net, who had the assist — creates manifold betting opportunities.

In Britain, this so-called in-play betting market is robust. In the United States, it may be the greatest hope for betting operators after the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting and as states scramble to accept wagers. That means accurate and reliable data must get to betting operators like casinos, websites and phone apps fast, usually in a second or two — well ahead of the roughly five-to-10-second delay baked into television broadcasts.

“For betting, it’s the difference between having value and having no value at all,” Steven Burton, a veteran lawyer in the rarefied field of collecting, using and protecting sports data, said about the necessity of rapid data distribution.

The sudden premium on sports data is likely to set up an array of conflicts in the betting industry that have been mostly unknown in the United States. Adrian Ford, general manager of Football DataCo, the official handler of data for the English Premier League and others in Britain, said that in dozens of stadiums each weekend, the hooded scouts show up for companies aiming to collect the data and sell it to betting operators without buying rights to the league-approved stream originating in the press box.

“It goes to the heart of this issue, the data debate,” Mr. Ford said. “Clearly the data from the source, a stadium, it’s valuable. Some people believe it’s appropriate to cheat.”

That shadowy cat-and-mouse game in Britain gives a small preview of battles to come in the United States over how the data should be collected and whether the gambling industry should be required to use “official data,” a league-approved tabulation of what happened in a sports competition.

The debate over official data is one facet of a still broader set of questions: How should sports data from any source, official or unofficial, be regulated, monitored and purchased? Who should settle a dispute over whether an in-play bet was won or lost? Does real-time data from a sporting event, like the sounds of a musical performance, have a claim to royalties and copyright protection for those who produce it? By creating a sort of monopoly, could a mandate for official data actually do more harm than good?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/sports/sports-betting.html

In what now seems like a point equidistant between today and the Trojan War, James Carville, then a strategist for candidate Bill Clinton, noted that the economy was the seminal issue in the 1992 Presidential Election.

Carville created a simple phrase to share with his staffers, ‘it’s the economy, stupid,’ to keep the seminal issue front and center. Yesterday, at roughly noon Eastern Standard Time, Bitcoin (BTC) dropped to nearly $5800, marking one of its lowest prices of 2018 and likely prompting some in the BTC community to self-evaluate and reflect. One are of reflection must be that BTC has a complex series of messaging problems that will have an effect on any significant price increase. For example, Tom Lee, from FundStrat, has a very bullish prediction for 2018.

CNBC reported that Lee wrote to investors, “We believe the regulatory picture is now improving — best evidenced by Coinbase and Circle ‘running towards’ regulation. We are basing this on the notion that Coinbase and Circle would only take these actions if such was the case.” Lee, in his bullishness, often plays the role of evangelist, not fully discussing the issues that are blocking BTC adoption. As with many BTC bulls, Lee’s stance is that BTC has only one place to go: up; yet this stance mostly abstains from addressing the coin’s messaging problems.

Before Sunday’s low, some in the crypto-ecosphere were already contemplating the complexities that BTC faces. Charles Hoskinson, at the Crypto ICO Summit held in Zürich during March, noted that BTC speculators shared a ‘collective delusion’ compelling the community forward. Although there are a multitude of reasons for the BTC community’s shared ‘delusion,’ Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK and the lead developer of the Cardono project, underscored how the community actually overcame the ‘delusion stage’ when liquid markets developed for the currency, yet he details that the next stage for BTC to conquer is utility.

Hoskinson noted, “Then, suddenly, 2013 came around, and BTC got valuable, and we had liquidity and had real markets. There was over a billion dollar valuation…Here is what happens when the delusion sets-in: Then you have differences of opinion; then you have a desire for utility and use. We liked the delusion but don’t like the implementation.” By conjoining Nathaniel Popper’s title from his well regarded book on BTC, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money (2016) with a quote from John Steinbeck’s of Mice and Men (1937), it may be said ‘that the best laid BTC plans, both from misfits and millionaires, often go astray.’ Below, decoupled from the ephemeral dips or dramatic price rallies, three messaging concerns need to be addressed to assist BTC in regaining the counter-narrative monetary framework that put it on the currency map.

In Laura Shin’s podcast, Unconfirmed, from March 30, 2018, Ari Paul, CIO of BlockTower Capital, contended that BTC requires a professional team to handle the core business. Paul continued by noting that the early contributors, such as Gavin Andresen and Nick Szabo, needed to be transitioned out from central roles, similar to how start-up teams are replaced by more established industry veterans once a project is profitable. Paul’s rhetoric mirrors traditional hedge-fund language that does not fully cohere with the ideologies of the early BTC community and the cypherpunk movement, which remain foundational to cryptocurrency.

Paul is not alone framing the next stage of BTC in this traditional manner. In fact, the dramatic price increase in late 2017 was complexly interwoven with tropes of professionalization and their enactment in the form of a futures markets.

However, Andreas Antonopoulos, as seen in a December 2017 Bitcoin.com article, stressed that a futures market could dramatically impact the price of BTC. Although Antonopoulos did outline a scenario for BTC price stabilization due to the futures market, this scenario did not materialize. Antonopoulos, likely the most respected person in crypto, actually sits on the CME’s board that oversee BTC’s futures. However, this move toward professionalization, dating back to the first ETF attempts, connotes a wooing of the legacy financial system, which would have been anathema only a few years ago. And, as seen by the CME and CBOE adoption, BTC has not launched to the moon, or stabilized, indicating that full-fledged strategies need to be vetted prior engaging in complicated markets. If not carefully reviewed, complex commodity trading strategies could cause further volatility instead of stabilization.   

Censorship
Roger Ver had consistently lamented, prior to his Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork in August of 2017, that BTC was strongly deviating from the core vision of the BTC Whitepaper. Ikye Aru, in a fall article on Coin Telegraph, highlighted Ver’s emphasis that BCH aligned more closely with the original vision of BTC. In the article, Ver continued,  “Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin and will have the bigger market cap, trade volume and user base in the future.” Beyond the topic of entangling alliances in the form of BTC’s professionalization, the BTC community’s tolerance of censorship stands in direct opposition to any notion of decentralization. Post-BCH fork, it is understandable that Ver is not unabashedly welcomed on BTC Forums; yet it seems that BTC Forums would benefit from a level of tolerance for disagreement.

In early fall of 2017, Ver tweeted, “Without the censorship by Theymos and it being tolerated by Blockstream and Core, would any thinking person actually support these ideas?” In this tweet, Ver noted the hypocrisy that BTC supporters would tolerate censorship and not speak out about the growing influence of Blocksteam. Although Ver’s tweet was months after the BCH hard fork, the continued censorship seemingly signaled that the BTC community may have been too focused on short term valuation of the coin rather than on appraising the long-term impact of censorship.

The Theymos censoring was decried by many outside of the BTC community too. Amanda B. Johnson, well-known for her 2016-2017 Dash Detailed YouTube show, also spoke candidly against Theymos’s censorship, noting that the BTC community should have a platform on which to engage in open discussion. Additionally, Medium blogger John Block chronicled a history of  Theymos’s censorship dating back to 2013, highlighting how the moderator removed posts. CCN, in a spring 2017 article, discussed how Reddit BTC moderator “Jratcliff63367” had resigned due to censorship. This type of censorship may deserves more scrutiny, and it is likely doing the BTC brand harm. Bitcoin maximalists may have been frustrated by Ver’s advocacy of Bitcoin Cash, but Ver was not the only one who complained of censorship, and the BTC community’s tolerance of such impoverished exchange appears to signal a new Zeitgeist for BTC.

Following a Different Path
Last week, in Wired, Gideon Lewis-Kraus detailed one way that the decentralized utopian vision could end badly, vividly depicting how one of the largest Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) of 2017 is seemingly pleading for a coup de grâce. Equating BTC to Tezos is a fallacious in at least the scale; nonetheless, Lewis-Kraus’s retelling of the Tezos debacle is a cautionary tale in that it highlights how even the best intentioned projects can wildy go awry. Above, we have underscored how BTC, regardless of the price fluctuations, faces complicated, but not intractable, problems. In particular, zealous appeals for corporatization are seemingly antithetical to BTC’s core technology and the ethos of decentralization. When a salient contribution of the BTC White Paper is the ability to run uncensorable, permissionless transactions, this self-contradiction and, to a degree, paradoxical absurdity—as seen by the widely practiced censorship of some BTC SubReddits—cannot be overlooked.

https://www.ccn.com/three-ways-bitcoin-price-could-reach-20000-by-december-its-the-messaging-stupid/

Please feel free to chime in if you've had any businesses accounts closed due to Bitcoin.

Brent crude futures fell $ 1.50 a barrel, or 2 percent, to settle at $ 75.29 a barrel. US crude prices ended down $ 1.06, or 1.6 percent, at $ 64.75 a barrel, after earlier touching $ 64.57, the lowest since April 10.
whether the consequences will impact to mature virtual money?

Today, a person can send money to anyone in the world immediately without having to go through the hassle of what I experienced. It has happened in many parts of the world. You can transfer money via WeChat, Whatsapp, and even Facebook Messenger right now.