To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Is it Friday again? All week we long for this day, and when it’s here, you remember all the stuff you didn’t get done while you were busy daydreaming about Friday. Oh well, we hope this bag of goodies gets to you after you’ve cleared out the to-do list and are ready for happy hour. If you’re going to TTITD next week, safety third but try to stay alive. If you fail at that, make sure you die in a more interesting way than dehydration so your camp mates at leaast get a good story out of it. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Virtual reality, Meta style: Meta’s new virtual reality headset technology is going to focus on face-tracking and eye-tracking, features the company calls “social presence,” Ivan writes. It doesn’t come out until October, so you have roughly two months to pull together the $400 we think it is going to cost.

• Mo’ Twilio, mo’ problems: The hits from Twilio’s data breach earlier this month keep coming. Carly writes that this time the breach affected Authy two-factor app users. Authy is a company Twilio acquired in 2015. Oh, and the number of customers affected is now over 160. More about this below in Big Tech.

• Predatory lending takes a turn: Though the nature of the article is not a happy one, we think Jagmeet did a great job describing the lengths that some lending apps will take to get repayment from users in India.

Startups and VC

Asia’s crypto games and web3 investment powerhouse Animoca Brands is making inroads into Japan as its local unit picks up $45 million in financing at a $500 million pre-money valuation. The investment comes at a time when the country is tightening regulations around the crypto industry, writes Rita.

Staying in Asia, Anna and Alex take the pulse on China’s venture capital scene. From near-zero growth in the second quarter and abandoned economic targets to continued COVID-19 lockdowns, a power crunch, a housing crisis, concerns about the strength of its domestic currency, water shortages, high youth unemployment, and more, it’s a tough mix for the world’s second-largest economy — even without mentioning a background loaded with geopolitical tensions. This is a TechCrunch+ story, but if you don’t have a subscription, use the Daily Crunch discount code "DC" for 15% off.