EquityNet's blog

Colorado is now the newest state to approve intrastate crowdfunding allowing the state’s residents to be able to purchase stock in local, private companies without becoming an accredited investor. At this point, 24 states have passed laws or rules allowing for intrastate equity crowdfunding.

Elio Motors announced earlier this week that it has received “non-binding indications of interest” valued over $25MM through its initial crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine. To date, the company has received $25,436,650 from 6,773 people, averaging $3,755 per person, and will continue to take additional expressions of interest while working with the SEC on next steps. It will eventually proceed with filing an offering statement and will begin to make a formal stock offer to interested investors after approval. 

A bill that would allow non-accredited New Jersey residents to invest businesses within the state recently passed the Assembly 75-0. The bill now sits on Governor Chris Christie’s desk, ready for him to sign.

On Monday, the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Smithsonian launched its first crowdfunding campaign they’re calling “Reboot the Suit” to conserve, digitize, and display Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit that he wore on the moon. The museum has raised over 86 percent of its $500,000 goal since the launch of the campaign. 

Yesterday, the London Times reported Barclays plans to cut 30,000 jobs within two years as part of an effort to cut costs after the recent firing of CEO, Antony Jenkins. An unidentified source went on to claim that the bank has set no new targets to cut jobs beyond the 19,000 (7,000 at Barclay’s investment bank) announced in May of 2014. If implemented, however, the cuts could reduce the bank’s global workforce to below 100,000. Barclays cut 14,000 jobs last year and is expected to axe 5,000 more staffers by the end of 2016.

Patrick Liu Chunning, the head of Alibaba Digital Entertainment Group, has been arrested over bribery allegations during his tenure as vice president of digital entertainment at Tencent Holdings.  Five other former employees of Tencent are being held by authorities as part of the investigation.

The DOL recently proposed raising the overtime threshold from $23,600 to $50,400 making this only the second time they’ve addressed the issue since 1975. According to the department, 62 percent of workers qualified for overtime back then, whereas today, only eight percent do. At the current overtime threshold, Americans would have to live below the poverty threshold ($24,008 for a family of four) before a jobholder could qualify for overtime. 

Earlier this week the FISA court ruled the NSA can continue the bulk collection of phone metadata until November 29. This comes after Congressional gridlock allowed for Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the legal cover for the collection program, to expire on June 1. 

Tomorrow at 8pm, we’re adding an extra second to the day. Over the past 200 years, the length of a day has increased by two milliseconds, which is all well and good, but the insane accuracy of the atomic clocks we’ve been using since 1967 doesn’t account for that, so we’ve had to add leap seconds 25 times since 1972. Tomorrow, however, is the first time a leap second will be added during trading hours since markets went electronic. 

In a first, the SEC has proactively approached several businesses to investigate failures in cybersecurity that may have created a new method of insider trading. The Commission’s investigation, along with a probe by the Secret Service, is focused on a group they’re calling FIN4 which they suspect to have broken into corporate email accounts to steal confidential information about mergers and acquisitions. Naturally, the SEC declined to comment exactly how broad their investigation is, or really anything else on the matter.

Arguably, labor markets are stronger today than they have been in the past 20 years, but expectations of financial security for many of us are virtually non-existent. As ZH readers are no doubt aware, despite job numbers being “up” 280,000 last May, and average annual wages increasing 2.3 percent, Americans are still having a difficult time finding full-time work that pays a livable wage.

The government is prepared to finally enact one of the remaining (and arguably most important) two titles of the US JOBS Act. Regulation A+, as it’s colloquially known, is an amendment to the existing, albeit anemic, Regulation A exemption. A+ increases the total amount of capital a company can raise from $5 million to $50 million in a 12 month period, but comes with several caveats that won’t make it a feasible fundraising method for most startups.  

Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods, announced yesterday a pilot program, called Fund on Etsy, to crowdfund new products. From June 16 to August 16, a select number of sellers can use the site to raise capital for the manufacture of their new products as part of a pilot program.