CTech:
Plano, Texas-based Tapcheck, which works with companies to let workers access their earnings before payday, raised a $25M Series A extension and $200M in debt  —  Hilton, Taco Bell, and McDonald's among companies using the fintech's on-demand pay service.  —  Tapcheck  —  Funding  —  Fintech

Allie Garfinkle / Fortune:
Revel, which builds software for controlling critical hardware like rockets, emerges from stealth with $30M in funding, including a ~$23M Series A led by Thrive  —  Revel founder Scott Morton.  —  Revel  —  Scott Morton's heart rate spiked at the same time, every time.

I've been working on my MFA, and my most recent project required two things: 1. a collaboration and 2. a public outcome. Oh, and do it all in 10 weeks.

I ended up reaching out to Tali Caspi, who is an urban ecologist who studies the coyotes that live in San Francisco. So, being completely self-interested, I hoped she would work with me to put something together so that I could learn more about the animals and get to nosey a bit more into her research.

A couple weeks ago, we put on my public event. It was a gallery that consisted of 10 paintings of the coyotes, based on photographs she'd taken of the animals during her field research, and they also incorporated data from her most recent paper, plus she gave a really fantastic educational and myth-busting talk. It was pretty cool, honestly, and I'm incredibly thankful that she was up for the collab.

We might try and show the paintings again and have another educational day this summer, once she's done turning in her PhD. so TBD on that. I'll upload the full gallery soon, and I think I'll sell them for a local wildlife rehab hospital, if anyone wants to give buy one.

We also made some booklets for the show that San Francisco Animal Care will also be distributing soon, and you can email me and ask for one, too. More details about the show and such are over here.

Ben Weiss / Fortune:
Coinbase faces pump-and-dump accusations after its subsidiary Base launched a “content coin” on Zora; Coinbase clarifies that Base will never sell the tokens  —  Jesse Pollak is the creator of Base, a new blockchain from Coinbase.  —  Winni Wintermeyer for Fortune

Synology is preparing to roll out new restrictions on third-party hard drives in its future network attached storage (NAS) devices later this year, the company confirmed to Ars Technica. The changes could make it much harder to use third-party drives in Synology’s devices for typical use cases, like backing up household computers or as local […]