Axios

DoorDash and Lyft are the latest companies to show just how much they're benefitting from sustained consumer demand.

Driving the news: Couriers for DoorDash delivered 426 million orders in the second quarter — an all-time high — the company reported on Thursday. Lyft, also on Thursday, reported that ridership rose to its highest point since the pandemic began.

We still don't have Elon Musk's response to Twitter's lawsuit over his efforts to back out of his $44 billion acquisition, but we do now have Twitter's response to Musk's counterclaims.

The big picture: Par for the course in this bizarre situation.

The intense focus on a single franchise can backfire badly, as Activision Blizzard is now demonstrating quarterly in the wake of the unusually poorly received Call of Duty: Vanguard, released last November.

Driving the news: Earlier this week, the publisher announced financial results for the spring quarter that were significantly lower than those of spring 2021 — and blame is squarely on Call of Duty.

Photographers, designers and other creative types turned off by Instagram's pivot to TikTok-like features are tentatively moving to alternative platforms.

Why it matters: Instagram has long been a digital gallery space for artists of all kinds, helping them find an audience, connect with other creatives and land paid gigs.

Online learning platform Varsity Tutors launched Thursday what it calls a first-of-its-kind subscription bundle offering one-on-one tutoring, live classes, self-study programs and more.

• The program, called "Learning Memberships," starts at $249/month.

Google's proposed program to help keep campaign emails out of users' spam folders wouldn't violate campaign finance laws, the Federal Election Commission said Wednesday.

Driving the news: Google in June asked the commission to rule on whether its plan would be considered a sort of contribution to politcial campaigns, as Axios reported.

General Motors' hands-free driving tech will soon work on many more North American roadways.

Why it matters: No one can buy a self-driving car yet — not even from Tesla, which falsely markets its partially automated, assisted-driving beta feature as "full self-driving."

The federal online privacy bill approved by a key House committee last month — which is farther than any such proposal has previously advanced — is still a long shot to become law.

That's thanks to lobbying by companies over details they don't like, disagreements over whether the law should pre-empt state rules, and tensions between the House and the Senate.

Sales of Nintendo games, consoles and other products dropped nearly 5% in the spring compared to the same period a year ago, according to the company's latest financial results.

Why it matters: It's another sign that the game industry has reached choppy waters after surging during the pandemic.

Drive-by regulating usually happens on roads where set rules don't really exist, explaining the steady drumbeat of enforcement action levied against crypto firms. But that style of regulation has now hit New York, where crypto rules are deemed so onerous by the industry that they prompted mass exodus.

What's happening: The New York State Department of Financial Services on Tuesday imposed a $30 million fine on the crypto trading division of Robinhood Markets, citing alleged violations of anti-money-laundering and cybersecurity regulations, among other things.

At the end of the crypto bull market, Curve was solidly the number one place in decentralized finance (DeFi) for investors to tuck away funds to earn more. It has fallen to fifth place today, according to DeFiLlama.

Why it matters: Curve's drop is largely a reflection of falling demand for stablecoins, the efficient trading of which is the focus of its protocol. Investors in decentralized finance (DeFi) make deposits onto different applications to earn passive income. How much they entrust to which projects reflects, in part, which ones they believe have the best prospects.

Crypto venture capital activity has slowed amid price plunges and near-daily hacks. But one of the market's most active players is pledging to "invest even more aggressively."

Driving the news: Crypto exchange Binance tells Axios that it has named co-founder Yi He as head of Binance Labs, its VC and incubator arm.

Thoma Bravo on Wednesday agreed to buy Ping Identity (NYSE: PING), a Denver-based authentication software company, for around $2.8 billion. Sellers would include Vista Equity Partners, which took Ping public in 2019 and currently holds just under a 10% stake.

Why it martters: Expect this to be just the tip of the spear when it comes to private equity carousel deals, in which PE-backed companies that IPO'd during the bull run are returned to private hands.

What would the busiest street in your hometown look like with fewer cars and more people, and bike lanes, and light rail? Urban planning advocate Zach Katz cannot only tell you, he can show you — using the AI image-generation platform DALL-E, Alex Fitzpatrick reports.

• Katz, a 28-year-old Brooklyn-based artist and musician, is all the rage on urbanist Twitter, thanks to his AI-generated images that show real-world, car-dense streets in cities like New York and Boston as pedestrian and public transit utopias.

The federal government is doling out $5 billion to states to build a nationwide network of highway charging stations intended to get more people to buy electric vehicles.

Why it matters: The taxpayer-funded charging network is a cornerstone of President Biden's ambition to electrify America's transportation sector.

With reproductive rights in flux across the U.S., activists on both sides of the issue are using the uncertainty to pressure tech companies to change the way abortion information gets shared and labeled.

The big picture: The absence of a nationwide law means that companies will likely have to interpret a patchwork of competing state rules — as they already do with privacy and other tech issues.

A federal judge has granted a motion to dismiss three wire fraud charges against Joseph Sullivan, Uber's former chief security officer who allegedly tried to conceal a 2016 data breach in which hackers stole the account information of 50 million customers and seven million drivers.

Yes, but: Sullivan still faces charges for obstructing a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proceeding and failing to report a felony.