THE BIG STORY

EDX Markets Makes Its Debut

A much-awaited new cryptocurrency exchange backed by Citadel Securities, Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab this week announced its launch.

The arrival of EDX Markets shows that some Wall Street firms remain interested in crypto despite tough regulatory scrutiny and a market that has cooled off substantially, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Unlike other crypto exchanges, EDX Markets doesn’t custody customers’ digital assets. Instead, users need to go through financial intermediaries to buy and sell crypto assets, similar to how trades are executed on stock exchanges—an approach that regulators favor, CEO Jamil Nazarali told CoinDesk.

EDX Markets currently offers support for only four crypto assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

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BUSINESS

Amazon Guilty of 'Tricking' Prime Customers, FTC Alleges

The Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon, alleging the company has enrolled customers in its Prime program without consent and made it difficult for them to cancel subscriptions, Axios reports. The complaint charges that Amazon has "used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as 'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions."

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DESIGN

An App Designed to Be Addictively Simple

It is the vehicle for a revolutionary piece of technology, but the interface for ChatGPT’s app is strikingly simple, Fast Company reports. No bells, no whistles. A single mantra guided OpenAI’s user experience team as they worked through hundreds of interface iterations of the ChatGPT app for iOS: Kill any complications, avoid distractions, and keep it simple. 

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INTERNET

What's Behind the Reddit Blackout

Thousands of Reddit forums, or subreddits, went private on June 12, primarily to protest the company’s decision to start charging third-party developers for access to its data starting in July. The blackout was supposed to end on the morning of June 14, but many subreddits have decided to stay down indefinitely, pitting the people who moderate the platform’s many subreddits against co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman. Vox explains what's fueling the blackout.

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SPONSORED

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QUICK HITS

• Federal regulators on Thursday launched a legal attack on Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion takeover of video game maker Activision Blizzard, describing it as anticompetitive while Microsoft touted the deal as a way to make popular games more widely available at cheaper prices.
• Privacy-focused firm DuckDuckGo has released a public beta of its browser for Windows, offering an array of default privacy protections and Duck-made browsing tools.
• Vice Media has declared Fortress Investment Group’s stalking horse bid of $225 million the winning offer for the company as it emerges from bankruptcy.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field.”

—The most common “basic joke” generated by ChatGPT, according to German researchers

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