Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 5 minutes and 5 seconds.

Yesterday, Binance got sued big-time, Tesla pushed to pump their sales up, and SVB found it’s savior. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Confidence is mounting over the banking crisis after SVB found itself an acquirer. Bank stocks are slowly inching back and things might be well. Operative word: might. 😅

• Saudi Arabia went heavy into the oil market. Within two days, they secured 2 deals with Chinese suppliers for almost 800k barrels per day.

• Indonesia had their 2nd biggest IPO in history. Crazy stuff.

Story Roundup

1 - Binance gets into some hot water. 🥵

Crypto bros have taken yet another beating. And it looks like this one is gonna hurt.

Binance and it’s CEO were just sued by a top US financial regulator for operating illegally in America and using shifty techniques to acquire clients.

They apparently never had a license to operate in the US and the C-suite “chose to ignore all requirements” of US law.

If you dig through the complaint, there’s some pretty hilarious stuff.

In 2019, Binance received a report of Hamas (a terrorist group) using their services to buy and sell weapons.

They dug through the transactions and found tons of transfers of small amounts of money, and ended up binning it.

The report was apparently dismissed “because $600 can barely get you an AK-47” - in a Binance manager’s words.

Scary stuff. 💀

2 - Tesla tries revving up it’s sales engine. 📈

There’s no better way to build a brand than to turn your customers into your salespeople.

And that is exactly what Elon Musk wants to do.

Tesla is bringing back its referral program to Europe just before the end of Q1.

New Tesla buyers that get referred now receive up to 10k kilometers of free charging and credit for software upgrades.

It seems like an irrelevant piece of tech news, but there could be a darker side.

Tesla’s sales are starting to get throttled, and Elon baba knows it.

He’s trying to get some points on the scoreboard after a horrible 2 years.

Price cuts, mass layoffs, and rocketing competition are all gonna make it harder to put food on the table for Elon.

Turns out Tesla isn’t the only king in town. 🤷🏻

3 - SVB’s loans get scooped up by a no-name. 🤔

It’s a milestone moment in the banking crisis - a company you’ve never heard of has purchased a good chunk of the bank that started this meltdown.

First Citizens Bank just bought up all the remaining loans, deposits, and assets of SVB.

A deal like this was basically impossible just 3 weeks back.

If we wind back the clock, we’ll find that -
- FCB had assets of $109bn, but SVB had assets of $210bn
- FCB was the 30th largest bank in the US but SVB was the 16th largest
- FCB had 150 branches, but SVB had over 400

In short, this is like a kitten managing to beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match.

First Citizens will now be slightly larger than SVB had been before its collapse, with an estimated $219 billion in assets.

Oh, and don’t think they’re dumb.

As part of the deal, they are not buying up the $90bn in US Treasuries that SVB was holding (which started the drama).

Sign of the times. 🤣

4 - Apple takes an acquisition-sized AI bite. 🧠

Without making any noise or causing any uproar, Apple sneakily purchased a startup over the weekend.

The company is called WaveOne, and it is developing AI algorithms for compressing video.

WaveOne’s main innovation was a “content-aware” video compression and decompression algorithm.

If you run that through a tech-bro translator, it means that they genuinely analyse the video and pick out faces and objects and compress them.

The AI then puts these faces back where they should be once the video needs to be played.

They haven’t disclosed the price, but WaveOne previously raised $9 million.

So it’s safe to say that Apple paid around $70-90mn for this baby.

Looks solid. ✈️

5 - Ashneer Grover sheds some light on the “Third Unicorn”. 🦄

After unsettling the world with his “market-shaking business” - which turned out to be a regular, run of the mill fantasy app - Ashneer is telling the world about what he has in store.

His sports app CrickPe has already raised $5mn at a $36mn valuation and has backers like the Haldiram’s family office and Badshah (yep, the rapper).

He’s also told us all that CrickPe will be profitable by the end of this year’s IPL season - giving him just about 2 months.

They make money by charging 50 INR per user per contest.

80% of this goes to players who win contests, 10% toward the actual cricket players, and 10% toward CrickPe (because Ashneer baba has to run his home too).

Sixer… or hit wicket? 💀

Hope you enjoyed this issue of Market Munch. If you’ve got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email and I'll get a ping in my inbox. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

- Aryaansh ⚡