Abra to Let Users Invest in Traditional Stocks with Cryptocurrency
*By Tanaya Macheel*
Abra, a five-year-old crypto company that has historically been focused on remittances, is starting to look like a fintech app itself; it will soon give users the ability to use their bitcoin to invest in traditional assets “like Apple, Amazon, gold and the S&P 500," according to a customer email it sent late Tuesday. The minimum investment is five dollars and Abra will waive fees on traditional stocks and ETF investing for the rest of 2019.
If successful, Abra might actually succeed in truly “democratizing financial services” — the mantra of fintech startups that once sought to disrupt the old guard of the banking industry that maintained its wealth and power on consumers’ reliance on them. Abra, a crypto exchange and digital wallet startup, is available in at least 155 countries and supports the buying, storing and now investing of 30 cryptocurrencies and 50 fiat currencies.
Bill Barhydt, Abra’s CEO, has been vocal about his vision for Abra to become a sort of crypto bank, where users can act as custodians of their own money, whether it’s bitcoin or dollars or other crypto and fiat currencies, and whether it’s investing, credit or simply transferring money between two people. Traditional and even upstart digital banks haven’t figured out how to be a truly global, borderless bank in that sense, thanks in large part to regulatory requirements that vary from market to market and can sometimes be burdensome for the banks. Abra is particularly innovative among crypto and fintech startups because it allows users to store bitcoin as their currency of choice. And as bitcoin as of now isn’t considered “real money” Abra [isn’t subject to the same regulations] (https://cheddar.com/videos/abra-ceo-aims-to-upend-banking-sector-with-crypto-backed-synthetic-money) or licensing requirements as banks.
There’s no shortage of investing apps in fintech. CommonBond, Swell, and Invstr are just a few variations of the hugely successful Robinhood app. Even Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets, has introduced YouInvest as its answer to the popular trend.
Robinhood and Square’s Cash App both have crypto buying and selling services, but neither app has enabled users to use their crypto funds for other services. For example, Robinhood requires users to connect a bank account to trade stocks or cryptocurrency, and Cash App users can’t yet use their crypto funds to pay for purchases using their Cash Card.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
