The feature will roll out starting in May, according to a statement from PayPal, which acquired Venmo in 2013. Users can also transfer crypto to their PayPal wallets, which released a similar ability for users in 2022.

Crypto transfers on Venmo will be irreversible, just like crypto transactions more broadlya function of cryptocurrencys use of blockchains, or immutable public ledgers.

Were excited to connect Venmos customers to the community, other wallets and exchanges, and we intend to continue to roll out additional crypto products and services in the year ahead, PayPal said in its statement.

The announcement from PayPal is one of the first drips of crypto updates from the payments giant since February, when it was reported that the publicly traded company was pausing work on its own stablecoin after reports that Paxos, its partner in the effort, was under investigation from the New York Department of Financial Services, a key player among U.S. cryptocurrency regulators.

At the time, a spokesperson for PayPay told Fortune that the company was exploring a stablecoin and that if and when the payments giant moves forward, it will work closely with relevant regulators. 

Before the onset of Crypto Winter and the recent regulatory crackdown on the industry, PayPal was one of the more public crypto boosters among legacy fintech firms. 

In October 2020, the company announced that U.S. users of PayPal would be able to buy, hold, and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. One year later, the payments giant expanded the feature to Venmo customers.

Amid the crypto bull market of 2021, PayPal continued to build out crypto offerings. It let users pay merchants with cryptocurrency, partnered with Coinbase to allow those with PayPal-linked debit cards and bank accounts to buy tokens on the exchange, and it expanded its crypto service beyond the U.S. to other countries, including the U.K.

After the collapse of several prominent crypto firms in 2022, PayPal noticeably rolled back its public rhetoric on cryptocurrencies. In February, longtime CEO Dan Schulman announced his intention to step down at the end of 2023.

Its about the beauty of design and the seduction of marketing. Its about power suits, purple Porsches and Rolexes. Its about white men languishing through midlife crises who salivate over the branding potential of a star basketball player.

As for Jordan? Audiences just see his back as he strolls into the Nike offices and his hands as he admires the Air Jordan prototype but never his face. In the entire film, he utters only three words.

Much has been made about Michael Jordans representation or lack thereof in Air.

How could a film about one of the most famous Black men in the world obscure his presence?

The films true power is its ability to convey an unnerving truth about the sneakers mystique: Jordans athletic ability was crucial to the success of Nike and Air Jordan; not so much his face and definitely not his words.

In this way, Air becomes the story of how a struggling company created one of the most successful brands in the world on the back of a Black body, a tale as old as the nation itself.

Liftoff

In 1983, Nikes marketing director, Rob Strasser, wrote an internal memo explaining the importance of using star athletes to sell their products: Individual athletes, even more than teams, will be the heroes; symbols more and more of what real people cant do anymore risk and win.

This memo appeared during a turbulent period for Nike. The company had gone public in 1980 with a listless opening. In 1984, the company posted its first losing quarter and initiated a monthlong wave of layoffs employees called the St. Valentines Day Massacre.

Who would be that hero? The ailing shoe company sought a body brimming with transcendent talent, a superhuman athlete.

Enter the Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan, of whom Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird once said, I think hes God disguised as Michael Jordan.

During the summer of 1984, Nike shoe designer Peter Moore and Strasser gathered in the Washington, D.C., office of Jordans agent, David Falk.

In a scene authors Rodrigo Corral, Alex French and Howie Kahn detail in their 2017 book, Sneakers, Falk, after exchanging pleasantries, looked to Strasser and said, Rob, Ive got an idea. I want to marry Michael to your airbag technology.

Nike had developed its air cushions in 1977. It involved infusing the midsoles of shoes with pockets of pressurized gas to absorb shock, but the company was having a difficult time marketing it.

Falk then paused for dramatic effect, before uttering, Air Jordan.

In 1985, Nike released the first Air Jordan sneaker. A year later, Nike sold US$100 million worth of Air Jordan shoes and apparel, boosting the companys profits to $59 million from only $10 million the year before.

After 38 years and 37 iterations of their flagship line of basketball shoes, Jordans have become a transcendent cultural talisman memorializing Michael Jordans career and basketballs influence on American life but also, his labor.

Today, Nike is worth a staggering $200 billion. Meanwhile, the Jordan brand, which was spun off into its own company in 1997, brings in billions of dollars per year, of which Jordan pockets 5%.

Buying a piece of Blackness

Im writing a book that explores the intimate connections between sneakers and Blackness. In it, I argue that the Black bodys long history of objectification and commodification undergirds the branding, mass consumption and culture of sneakers.

What Air does better than anything else is to unbox a provocative, sobering truth about Jordans meteoric rise: They are cast as literal extensions of Black bodies. They represent the literal molding of a Black mans feet, with their vulcanized rubber, leather and laces encapsulating Black athletic greatness and cool.

Finally figuring out how to sell Nikes airbag technology was the other side of Airs recipe for success.

In truth, Nike Air was a curiosity. It was unstable and unreliable. But runners became enamored with the idea of a cushioning technology they couldnt see and much less understand. People knew they loved the sensation of Air even though the how remained a mystery.

The seemingly simple concept of explaining Air had eluded the company. In an interview with journalist Scoop Jackson, Bruce Kilgore, Nike designer responsible for the Air Force 1, articulated the difficulty of taking the air midsole from idea to execution to market: How do you take something inherently unstable and put [it] into [a basketball shoe] that is all about stability?

But six years after the development of the air midsole, David Falk cracked the code of Nikes transparent, little black box: Dont market the technology. Market the body that wears it. https://www.youtube.com/embed/QpWFtG07MME?wmode=transparent&start=0 The first TV ad for Air Jordans features the iconic line, Who says man was not meant to fly?

This marketing ploy to shift the attention of consumers from mundane pockets of polyurethane to on-court performances, while indeed innovative, centers an incredibly old tradition of Americans seeing Black bodies as being spectacularly convertible to profit.

Air Jordans romanticize an American wistfulness for the stoic and branded Black workhorse. John Henry, the legendary steel driver, was a hero, and so, too, is Jordan. For Black bodies Jordan and Henry, but also athletes like Damar Hamlin, who suffered a near-fatal injury during an NFL game in early 2023 heroism is articulated through the hypnotizing anthem of toil and exhaustion.

Sports provide an easy cover for the perpetuation of this myth. Disgraced sports commentator Jimmy The Greek Snyder once said, The Black is a better athlete to begin with They can jump higher and run faster.

How far removed is the marketing of Air Jordans from the words of Jimmy the Greek?

As the voiceover in the first Air Jordan television ad proclaims, Who says man was not meant to fly?

Bodies ripe for the picking

Before Nikes dominance, brands like Pony, Converse and Adidas were popular on street corners and basketball courts around the country a history told by DJ and author Bobbito Garcia in his 2003 book, Whered You Get Those?

Nike and the Air Jordan, however, represented a watershed moment in which this bubbling market of sneaker fiends, as Garcia calls them, went mainstream. Through artful placement in Black films specifically Spike Lees Do the Right Thing with an assist from Michael Jackson and hip-hop culture and music, the Air Jordan line transformed sneakers into one of the most important footwear items and fashion brands the world has ever witnessed.

Nike would go on to feature scores of other Black athletes in its ad campaigns, and the names of these heroes ring off the tongue sharp and proud like a trumpets blare: Bo Jackson, Penny Hardaway, Kobe Bryant, Venus and Serena Williams, Lebron James. https://www.youtube.com/embed/9sz6xhPkGJ4?wmode=transparent&start=0 An ad from Nikes iconic Bo Knows campaign, featuring star athlete Bo Jackson.

None of this would be possible without Nikes big bet on Jordan.

So why does a film give Michael Jordan, the man who had so much to do with Nikes success, so little to say?

I believe the answer is as uncomfortable as it is simple: Michael Jordan isnt the films subject, but its object.

In one of the films more memorable scenes, Nike marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, played by Matt Damon, goes to visit the Jordan family in Wilmington, North Carolina.

When he arrives, he greets James, Michaels father, before being passed off to the real decision-maker: Deloris Jordan, the matriarch of the Jordan clan. Viola Davis portrays Deloris with a drowning depth. Every utterance and glance simmers.

Five generations of Jordans are buried in these forests, she announces as she sits with Vaccaro in their backyard. Shes polite but distant. Her piercing eyes know to be wary of unannounced visits from white men in shiny cars. Everyone wants a piece of her son, and its her job to keep him whole.

In the film, before unveiling the Air Jordan 1 to Vaccaro and Strasser, Peter Moore, played by Matthew Maher, describes the shoe: It has the logic of water, like shoe was always here, like it always existed.

What Moore cannot know is how right he really is. Deloris Jordan and those five buried generations have always been here.

The Black body, from Americas inception, has always been there, as cotton and as sugar, ripe for the picking.

A. Joseph Dial is Disco Network Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Purdue University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The report, authored by Federal Reserve staff and Michael Barr, the Feds vice chair for supervision, takes a critical look at what the Fed missed as Silicon Valley Bank grew quickly in size in the years leading up to its collapse. The report also points out underlying cultural issues at the Fed, where supervisors were unwilling to be hard on bank management when they saw growing problems.

The Federal Reserve did not appreciate the seriousness of critical deficiencies in the firms governance, liquidity, and interest rate risk management. These judgments meant that Silicon Valley Bank remained well-rated, even as conditions deteriorated and significant risk to the firms safety and soundness emerged, the report said.

The Fed also said, based on its own report, it plans to reexamine how it regulates banks the size of Silicon Valley Bank, which had more than $200 billion in assets when it failed. One criticism that has arisen from Silicon Valley Banks failure is that the Fed and other regulators took a lighter approach to supervision for midsize banks following the passage of a 2018 banking law that eased some of the tougher restrictions on the industry after the 2008 financial crisis.

While higher supervisory and regulatory requirements may not have prevented the firms failure, they would likely have bolstered the resilience of Silicon Valley Bank, the report said.

The Fed is also critical of how the bank managed executive compensation. The report indicates that executive compensation at the bank was geared toward short-term profits and the stock price. There were no incentives tied to risk management. Silicon Valley Bank notably had no chief risk officer at the firm for roughly a year, during a time when the bank was growing quickly.

The nations banks are regulated by a troika of regulators: the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. All have been criticized for potentially missing signs that Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank might be in trouble.

The Feds report, which includes the release of internal reports and Fed communications, is a rare look into how the central bank supervises individual banks as one of the nations bank regulators. Typically such processes are confidential, and rarely seen by the public, but the Fed chose to release these reports to show how the bank was managed up to its failure.

Silicon Valley Bank was the go-to bank for venture capital firms and technology start-ups for years, but failed spectacularly in March, setting off a crisis of confidence for the banking industry. Federal regulators seized Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 after customers withdrew tens of billions of dollars in deposits in a matter of hours.

Two days later, they seized Signature Bank of New York. Although regulators guaranteed all the banks deposits, customers at other midsize regional banks rushed to pull out their money often with a few taps on a mobile device and move it to the perceived safety of big money center banks such as JPMorgan Chase.

The report also looks at the role social media and technology played in the banks last days. While the banks management was poor and ultimately that was the reason the bank failed, the report also notes that social media caused a bank run that happened in just hours, compared to days for earlier bank runs like those seen in 2008.

Although the withdrawals have abated at many banks, First Republic Bank in San Francisco appears to be in peril, even after receiving a $30 billion infusion of deposits from 11 major banks in March. The banks shares have plunged 57% this week after it revealed the extent to which customers pulled their deposits in the days after Silicon Valley Bank failed.

Barr appeared at two hearings in Congress last month and acknowledged that Federal Reserve bank supervisors had warned Silicon Valley management as early as the fall of 2021 of risks stemming from its business model, but the banks managers failed to take the steps necessary to fix the problems.

Republicans at both hearings had criticized federal regulators for failing to act with the proper sense of urgency.