Siddharth Menon | PayRam

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon. We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.

USDT used to trade at a 5% to 8% premium in India a few years back. And then, some interesting services came up where they offered remittances from other countries into India, cheaper and faster. They would take dollars from NRIs, buy USDT abroad, and transfer the USDT to an Indian crypto exchange in the name of an Indian company (likely a subsidiary). The Indian co would then sell the bitcoin on the exchange, withdraw the money and transfer it to the beneficiaries. Costs were lower than using the banking system. This, apparently, is illegal under FEMA. I don't know why. But it's apparently a way to do "hawala", where an NRI would connect with a foreign based hawala broker, who took the dollars, and his indian counterpart would give rupees in cash to the Indian beneficiaries. This would usually benefit some Indian people who had cash, and needed it taken out of India as cash can't really be used for that much here. So they'd be happy to hand over rupees to someone here, for USD in Dubai or wherever in their own/relatives' accounts. This hawala is illegal because, again, I don't know why. Perhaps because the RBI thinks the NRIs should have sent the dollars here and it would help our forex situation. Or the tax folks think Indians shouldn't get to launder cash outside the country that easily. It is illegal though, even if it's cheaper and faster. Given that USDT was being heck for an effective hawala - and indeed, some of those "remittance" services even said they did the USDT thingy - there was an easy ED crackdown on many of them. That's shut down the flow of USDT to India, and therefore, not enough sellers of USDT here. Meaning: there's no way to arbitrage the price of an actual US Dollar and USDT. So USDT now trades at Rs. 102 to a dollar. If Indian banks (who can own US dollars) were allowed to trade USDT, the price would immediately fall back to 94.5 or such. But they can't. And RBI can enable them to trade it, and it would work even though there's a 30% profit tax on any crypto profits. Until such time, expect this USDT "premium" to survive. Any of you might be thinking could do this too, if you are an NRI - buy abroad, and sell in India, redeeming the rupees to your Indian rupee accounts, paying Indian tax on these profits and still come out quite heavily up. But beware of the Indian ED and FEMA.

your phone number is personal and sometimes you want to connect without handing it over. that's why we're introducing usernames for WhatsApp. starting this week, you can reserve a username to use later this year when we launch the feature. It takes just a few seconds, make sure you have the latest version of WhatsApp and then go to Settings > Account > Username.

A technical dive inside our new "Midjourney Scanner"