The crypto lender BlockFi has become the sector’s latest big operator to declare bankruptcy, as the fallout of the collapse of offshore cryptocurrency exchange FTX continues to spread.
BlockFi, which operates in a similar fashion to a conventional bank, paying interest on savings and using customer deposits to fund lending, says it has $256.9m cash in hand. According to court documents, its creditors include FTX itself, to which it owes $275m, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to which it owes $30m.
In a statement announcing its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, BlockFi said: “This action follows the shocking events surrounding FTX and associated corporate entities and the difficult but necessary decision we made as a result to pause most activities on our platform.
“Since the pause, our team has explored every strategic option and alternative available to us, and has remained laser-focused on our primary objective of doing the best we can for our clients.
“These Chapter 11 cases will enable BlockFi to stabilise the business and provide BlockFi with the opportunity to consummate a reorganisation plan that maximises value for all stakeholders, including our valued clients.”
The SEC levied a $100m fine on the company in February for violating securities laws, arguing that the investment products the company offered qualified as unregistered securities. The outstanding $30m debt is apparently the unpaid portion of that fine.
BlockFi has already stumbled close to bankruptcy once already this year, in the wake of spring’s crypto crash.
After chief executive Zac Prince said the company needed an injection of capital to stave off a liquidity crisis, it signed a deal with none other than FTX, which gave the company access to $400m in loans. The price of the deal was an option from FTX to buy the lender for about $240m, a sharp decline from a peak valuation of $3bn.
That option was never exercised, and the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange sparked a bank run at BlockFi, seen by customers as dangerously entangled with Sam Bankman-Fried’s company, that proved terminal. Without the ability to draw on the credit line, nor access its own funds stored on the FTX platform, BlockFi was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Facebook’s owner (aka: Mark Zuckerberg) has been fined €265m by the Irish data watchdog after a breach that resulted in the details of more than 500 million users being published online.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) said Meta had infringed the EU’s data protection laws after details of Facebook users from around the world were scraped from public profiles in 2018 and 2019.
The data appeared on a hacking website last year, prompting an investigation by the DPC, which is responsible for regulating Meta across the EU. The watchdog said a “significant” number of the users were from the EU.
In addition to the fine, it “imposed a reprimand and an order” requiring Meta to “bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular timeframe”.
In a statement Meta said: “We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers. Unauthorised data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules.”
The punishment brings the total amount of fines imposed on Meta by the DPC to nearly €1bn since September last year. In September Meta was fined €405m for letting teenagers set up Instagram accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses, while in March the watchdog fined Meta €17m for further GDPR breaches and in September last year it fined Meta’s WhatsApp €225m over “severe” and “serious” infringements of GDPR.
However, one legal expert questioned whether strong enforcement of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation would have the deterrent effect that it intended.
“By any measure, these are significant fines,” said David Hackett, head of data protection in the Ireland office of law firm Addleshaw Goddard. “GDPR envisaged the imposition of such fines in part to serve as a deterrent to other companies which might consider breaching the law. We are likely to see increased debate about whether such fines actually influence corporate behaviour or if some companies simply see them as an added cost of doing business.”
The DPC regulates Apple, Google, TikTok and other technology platforms owing to the location of their EU headquarters in Ireland. It currently has 40 inquiries open into such companies, including 13 involving Meta.

Fidelity isn’t the first company to give 401(k) participants access to cryptocurrency assets. Another industry provider, ForUsAll Inc., has linked workers with cryptocurrency exchanges through brokerage windows for several years. Fidelity takes a different approach with its Digital Asset Accounts product, which doesn’t rely on outside exchanges or brokerage windows.

DOL provides a clear and definite warning to plan fiduciaries:

The plan fiduciaries responsible for overseeing such investment options or allowing such investments through brokerage windows should expect to be questioned about how they can square their actions with their duties of prudence and loyalty in light of the risks described above.

While the focus of this guidance is on 401(k) plans, the DOL’s warnings also extend to plans and plan fiduciaries responsible for allowing cryptocurrency investments through self-directed brokerage windows.

Update: A Partisan Divide

The Department of Labor's cryptocurrency guidance has provoked contrasting responses on Capital [sic] Hill.

On May 5, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. introduced legislation that would prohibit the DOL from limiting the kinds of products workplace retirement savers can invest in through self-directed brokerage accounts.
A day earlier, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., criticized Fidelity Investments for its decision to launch a new 401(k) cryptocurrency product, in a May 4 letter to Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson.

I have not owned BRUFX for a while, either; however, I do not recall such a high cash allocation, low bond stake, and such a big commitment to utilities (32%). The latter might be bond substitutes.

Intrigued by an Ars Technica post about Amazon’s Alexa that suggested all was not well in the tech company’s division that looks after its smart home devices, I went rooting in a drawer where the Echo Dot I bought years ago had been gathering dust. Having found it, and set it up to join the upgraded wifi network that hadn’t existed when I first got it, I asked it a question: “Alexa, why are you such a loss-maker?” To which she calmly replied: “This might answer your question: mustard gas, also known as Lost, is manufactured by the United States.” At which point, I solemnly thanked her, pulled the power cable and returned her to the drawer, where she will continue to gather dust until I can think of an ecologically responsible way of recycling her.
Initially, it looked like a shrewd beachhead for the invasion of our homes. Alexa became a kind of hub for other IoT (internet of things) gizmos – lights, thermostats, heaters, doorbells and so on. Clearly, other tech giants also thought it was significant – Apple, Google and Facebook raced to get their home hubs over our thresholds. And people seemed to like using Alexa: children loved conning her into saying stupid things, while their elders used her to set timers for cooking, compiling shopping lists, playing music, requesting definitions of words or information from Wikipedia and so on. But since it was of no real use to me, I switched it off and put it away, assuming that Amazon’s big bet had really paid off.
How wrong can you be? “Amazon Alexa is a ‘colossal failure’,” ran Ars Technica’s headline, “on pace to lose $10bn this year.” It was picking up on a long piece by Business Insider reporting that during the first quarter of this year Amazon’s worldwide digital unit, which includes everything from the Echo smart speakers and Alexa voice technology to the Prime Video streaming service, had an operating loss of more than $3bn, the “vast majority” of which was accounted for by Alexa and related devices and was the largest among all of Amazon’s business units.
So what went wrong? Basically, the business model underpinning Alexa failed to deliver. The company thought that the Echo device (which apparently was sold at cost) would lead people to buy more stuff on Amazon. And when more than 5m of the devices were sold in its first two years, that must have looked like a plausible idea, especially when it transpired Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week!
Sadly, it seems that most of those “conversations” with the device were rather like mine had been: trivial and inconsequential. And, as time went on, the “smart assistants” offered by the other tech giants muscled in on the market. Alexa, with 71.6 million users, now occupies third place but even the thought that the other two are also losing money on their gizmos will not provide much consolation for the Alexa team as its unit is slimmed down.
Amazon, which went on a hiring spree during the pandemic, is now, like all the big tech outfits, shedding jobs on an industrial scale; beginning this month, it plans to lay off 10,000 workers, quite a few of whom will probably be in its hardware division. So maybe the industry is about to discover that invasions – of homes as well as countries – don’t always work out as well as you hoped.

Can I depreciate the cost of land?
Land can never be depreciated. Since land cannot be depreciated, you need to allocate the original purchase price between land and building. You can use the property tax assessor's values to compute a ratio of the value of the land to the building.
Example:
Ryan bought an office building for $100,000. The property tax statement shows:
Improvements $60,000 75%
Land                $20,000 25%
Total Value      $80,000 100%
Multiply the purchase price ($100,000) by 25% to get a land value of $25,000. You can depreciate your $75,000 basis in the building using the mid-month MACRS tables