Unfettered froth and chaos hit Wall Street this week. What started as a Reddit group of retail investors pitching money into “meme stocks” like GameStop quickly snowballed into a David-and-Goliath story involving multibillion-dollar hedge funds, financial government agencies, and even U.S. senators. On Thursday, investment app Robinhood abruptly delisted stocks with high volatility, preventing millions of people from trading in the likes of GameStop and AMC — and prompting rapper Ja Rule to wade into the conversation. “Yo this is a fucking CRIME what @RobinhoodApp is doing,” the rapper tweeted. “DO NOT SELL!!! HOLD THE LINE… WTF.” Ja Rule, whose real name is Jeff Atkins, spoke with Rolling Stone in a video chat on his new app Iconn — which he developed in tandem with the Fyre Media engineering team and plans to launch out of beta in the coming weeks — about market volatility, cryptocurrency, and his personal stock picks. … [Read more...] about Ja Rule, a Robinhood User Since 2014, Calls GameStop an ‘Uprising’
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A Field Guide to Music’s Potential Crypto Boom
In a huge labyrinthine ecosystem of labels, publishers, distributors, and royalty collectors, the idea of artists getting paid quickly may sound like a revolutionary concept. What if it wasn’t? What if the music industry’s hundreds of thousands of artists — who are especially cash-strapped when they can’t tour, like right now in the Covid-19 pandemic — didn’t have to wait a cripplingly long time to get their royalties, but rather could receive streaming money instantaneously? Broaden that thought experiment: What if there was a “merch royalty,” so that the artist got a cut every time a branded hoodie or piece of art was resold, or a system to ensure accurate paychecks for musicians? All these things are possible, according to music’s cryptocurrency enthusiasts — a growing group of tech-obsessed entrepreneurs who want to apply the technology of blockchain and bitcoin to the multibillion-dollar global business of selling albums. … [Read more...] about A Field Guide to Music’s Potential Crypto Boom