Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, August 8

• Airbnb raising a reported $850M at a $30B valuation: Almost a year after its last raise of $1.6 billion, the company is said to be adding $850 million to its coffers, according to information obtained by Equidate. While $850 million is a ton of cash, it is not the largest round the company has raised. Last year, the company raised $1.5 billion in one of the largest VC rounds in history. The additional capital would only move Airbnb from the fifth to the forth most valuable tech unicorn at a potential valuation of $30 billion (tear).  Even as a late-stage company, Airbnb has to be increasingly conscious of the capital it takes on. Too much equity dilutes early investors, while too much debt could put investors at risk if valuations were to suddenly tank. Debt as an asset class is paid off before equity. Airbnb has notoriously taken actions to strategically prolong an IPO, bringing on a $1 billion credit faculty last year to support growth without diluting investors. The company previously had an approximate valuation of $27 billion, so while the round is large, it doesn’t deviate from prior anti-dilution strategies. With respect to deals that Airbnb reportedly walked away from, the $850 million dollar deal is tame. The Wall Street Journalreported that Airbnb left money on the table, rejecting a deal that would have valued the company at $34 billion.

• Google keeps finding new and creative ways to piss off Yelp and TripAdvisor: There’s no love lost between Yelp and Google. And, more recently, between TripAdvisor and Google, too. Now, Google is giving those companies a new reason to believe that the search giant is intentionally pushing listings from their review sites way down in search rankings. The most recent brouhaha centers on a new search feature that highlights critic reviews of restaurants from sites like Zagat, which Google owns, as well as “best of” lists from publishers. The end result, as shown below in a tweet from Yelp’s CEO, is that Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews don’t show up even if you scroll down to the second screen of results on a phone. In this instance, you would have to scroll to the third screen to see Yelp reviews.Both Yelp and TripAdvisor have been complainants in the European Union’s case against Google for anticompetitive practices. These companies continue to believe that Google intentionally promotes its own products — like local reviews of restaurants and hotels — over others, including theirs. Google denies this. Google has historically been a large source of traffic for both review companies, so it’s been critical for them to get people to frequent their apps on mobile phones rather than search for local spots through Google. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

• Bitfinex exchange customers to get 36 percent haircut, debt token: Crypto-currency exchange Bitfinex, which lost $72 million to hackers last week, told customers on Sunday they would lose just over 36 percent of the assets they had on the platform but would be compensated for these losses with tokens of credit. The Hong Kong-based exchange said losses from the theft would be shared, or "generalized", across all the company's clients and assets, widening the group of those affected announced last week. "This is the closest approximation to what would happen in a liquidation context," Bitfinex said on its website early on Sunday. "Upon logging into the platform, customers will see that they have experienced a generalized loss percentage of 36.067 percent." The company said it would also give all affected clients a "BFX" token crediting their losses that could be redeemed by the exchange or for shares in iFinex, the exchange's parent company. Bitfinex said it would explain its methodology in a later update and that it was talking to investors about how to fully compensate its customers. Hackers stole 119,756 bitcoin from Bitfinex last week in the second-biggest breach of a crypto-currency exchange ever, in U.S. dollar terms. The hack accounted for about 0.75 percent of all bitcoins in circulation. The exchange is the world's largest for trading digital currencies such as bitcoin, litecoin and ether, and is used for its deep liquidity in U.S. dollar/bitcoin trades. It is still not clear how the hackers gained access to the company's customer accounts. However, both Bitfinex and outside experts have dismissed suggestions the breach was due to the security of the blockchain, the decentralized ledger that tracks every bitcoin transaction, and which traditional banks are considering adopting to increase the speed and transparency of their transactions.