AI up in down market, 19-year-old NFT pop star, fentanyl takes down 66 in SF, naughty TikTok, young Murdoch goes Web3, green building in fashion, walk and stay alive...
NFT artists still standing (and thriving)
NFT sales are down 92% since their peak in January 2022. Yet, NFT daily sales still hover around $15 million in 2023, with over 27,000 active daily traders on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. Presumably, hidden in the rubble and keeping the NFT market breathing is some art of perceived value.
There are many forms of non-fungible tokens, but what we are talking about here are blockchain-minted artworks with unique encryption codes that verify authenticity and ownership. This form of potentially tradable NFT can be anything from a digital art piece to a song or whole album. Here are a few we like from the top-selling NFT artist list.
Fewocious is a pop star who has taken the NFT and the crypto world by storm, having sold a total of 3,189 NFTs representing his work.
London-based digital artist XCOPY sold $23M worth of Ethereum NFTs in 10 minutes. His work often depicts death and dystopian worlds.
Creating both physical and digital art pieces, Hackatao’s art often involve issues of society, environment, humanity, and crypto.
This Major League Baseball player-turned-artist entered the NFT space with Aku: The Moon God, a series of sculptures and digital art depicting a young black boy wearing an astronaut's hat.
The Canadian-born artist who goes by the name Mad Dog Jones is dynamic, adaptive, and surreal, combining music and art.
Mixing geometry and unsettling realism, Rich Lord's work features a semicircle rolling continuously forward in vibrant colors.
Interested in investing in some NFT art but don’t know where to start? Cryptoart.io keeps a handy running list, ranking artists by total value sold.
Apocalypse Now—Let’s end the body count!
Over 800 dead people will be picked up off the streets of San Francisco this year due to fentanyl abuse, yet we will send over $10 billion to Colombia to fight the ‘War on Drugs.’
San Francisco hit another drug overdose record high with almost 85 deaths last month—66 involving fentanyl. More than 560 users have died this year, and 300 more are projected to die by the end of the year. Police have seized 100 pounds of fentanyl between June and September. In addition, more than 1,000 people were arrested in August for the use or sale of narcotics, according to police.
We can stop this madness and bring down the deathly body count to damn near zero. But it requires letting go of highly ingrained attitudes and turning our focus on curing the drug demand rather than spending billions fighting its supply.
People in the US get high from a range of drugs, from sugar to fentanyl, and everyone draws their own line on how much they are willing to abuse their bodies and trouble their lives. By criminalizing a random selection of substances, we artificially boost the price of cocaine, meth, heroin, fentanyl, etc., drive the afflicted underground, and fund the rise of violent street gangs and drug cartels. We can end this cycle of death and violence by looking at it in reverse.
We can break the cycle and win
Let’s carve out a few small sections of Califonia’s millions of acres of beautiful open public land and create self-sustainable, monastic-style, permaculture-oriented communities whose mission would be the state’s conservation. Homeless people gravitate toward cities, so they more easily beg, borrow, and steal to support their drug addictions. We could invite the afflicted out of the cities and into nature to be part of the ‘Conservation Corps.’
Much like the military corps, volunteers must agree to community dress, behavior, and individual responsibility standards. In addition to growing much of their food, like religious communities of all faiths, each community could choose a passion to pursue to create income, such as producing honey and jams, plant-based medicines, bakery goods, and cheese.
And yes, in addition to health, life, and family counseling, we should provide some members with fentanyl-free, government-developed drugs in a supervised, safe, and clean environment. We must end their daily terror of how and where they are going to get their next high so they do not have to steal or prostitute themselves, risk death by fentanyl, and contend with and fund violent drug dealers. This is how we get the body count to zero.
As part of our ‘War on Drugs,’ the US spent $11.6 billion this year in Colombian aid to ‘eradicate, fumigate, and other security operations against traffickers to reduce processed cocaine reaching US shores,’ yet coca crops have reached record highs. These programs are just one big racket and a waste of taxpayers’ dinero. Ironically, the Colombians do what we should do and tolerate recreational cocaine use by locals. Legalizing pot in California has dramatically lowered prices and turned selling weed into a bad business for the bad guys.
The Federal government owns 48 percent of California land, which is used primarily for the conservation and development of natural resources, grazing, and recreation. It’s a reasonable request to share some of our glorious public lands, redirect some ‘War on Drugs’ money, and give the homeless and forgotten in our cities a chance to have a home, till the earth, work as a community, rejoin society, and rise and shine. Creating a self-sustainable community would be the best remedy for a homeless person’s self-esteem and mental health. Our cities could also once again flourish, experience a Renaissance, and feel safe again. We would all be better off—don’t you think?
Did you know?
(Overheard on the streets of the global Silicon Valley. Got any hot insider tips? Email us at editor@cryptoniteventures.com)
Family-owned businesses
As the 72-year reign of Rupert Murdoch at News Corp is over, and the baton passes to his eldest son, Austalia-based Lachlan Murdoch, the media empire faces a contracting industry. The power corporate media has over content creation and distribution is dwindling. It’s ‘power to the people’ time, and Lachlan seems to be one of the few media titans that genuinely gets it.
“Our challenge is to survive Web3. We are moving into a trustless, permissionless, creator economy where content is disintermediated, tokenized, and instantly distributed. All barriers to entry are obliterated. Blockchain, crypto, and the metaverse must be at the top of our agenda.”
— Lachlan Murdoch, Chairman, News Corporation & CEO of Fox Corp.
News Corp still has the advantage of being a family-controlled business that can move faster than the corporate media into Web3. They are also only one of the four major US broadcast networks not tied to a streaming play, so they can leapfrog into Web3 unencumbered.
To stay out front, News Corp is the only one of its peers to create a Web3/NFT division. Fox also created a technology research and development arm—Blockchain Creative Labs (BCL)— three years ago to ‘forge the future of content creation, distribution, and monetization by connecting creators and communities using innovative technology.’ Lachlan might harness all of these initiatives and keep News Corp treading water—but is it still possible to grow the business? We shall see.
Social Networking
In a chat with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon casually announced that the way to prevent bot-driven hate speech was for X members to make a ‘lower-tier monthly payment.’ The reasoning is bots would then each need to register with a new credit card and potentially expose themselves.
Irish regulators fined Chinese-owned TikTok €345m over children’s data privacy. Violations included making accounts for 13 and 17-year-olds public by default and not being transparent enough with children about its privacy settings. The Irish also raised questions about how young people’s data is stored and used.
VC Whispers
SoftBank—a Japanese VC fund with a $66B market capitalization—had a big hit with UK chip designer ARM’s recent IPO and is now ready to make substantial investments in the AI sector. SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Sonwith has a particular interest in OpenAI as he says he utilizes ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool almost daily.
Despite foreboding macroeconomic indicators that point to a high recession probability in the next 18 months, NASDAQ is up over 17 percent in the past year, and US VC exit activity is slowly picking up with cautious optimism.
Pitchbook’s IPO backlog estimates that 77 US startups are waiting to go public, which could return $800 billion in gains for VC funds and inspire them to open up their pockets again to the 51,000 private companies hungry for cash. An exit rebound might turn the tide on down rounds and startup closures.
AI Tracker
Writer, a generative AI startup focused on selling to large enterprises, closed a $100M early-stage round led by Iconiq Growth, valuing the company at a whopping $500M. The round also saw participation from a number of Writer’s customers, including Accenture and Vanguard Group.
Meet your AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant, an OpenAI GPT-4-based tool that gives financial advisors speedy access to the bank’s ‘intellectual capital,’ including a database of 100,000 research reports. Morgan Stanley is the first major Wall Street firm to put a GPT-4 solution in employees’ hands.
Best on the Block
The real blockchain boom is happening on Wall Street and with leading consumer brands looking to operate faster, cheaper, and with more security. The global blockchain tech market size valued at $11B in 2022 is projected to grow from $17.5B in 2023 to $1.2T by 2030—a compound AGR of 82.8%.
Forbes's top blockchain-implementing US corps: Apollo, BlackRock, Block, BNY Mellon, Estée Lauder, Exxon Mobile, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Genentech, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, KKR, Mastercard, National Basketball Association, Nike, PayPal, Ticketmaster, Visa, Walmart, and Warner Music.
Forbes's top blockchain-implementing non-US corps: Baidu, China Construction Bank, Fujitsu, HSBC (Hong Kong), Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Kakao (South Korea), Repsol (Spain), Samsung, Société Générale, Tech Mahindra (India), and Tencent.
On Hollywood
Let’s get to work. Disney’s Bob Iger, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and David Zaslav of Warner Bros are on their fourth day of face-to-face talks with the CEO Gang of Four, AMPTP chief Carol Lombardini, and the WGA’s Ellen Stutzman, David Goodman and Chris Keyser.
‘Latest updates I heard they are truly on the one-yard line. Won’t get done tonight, but it will by Sunday evening or earlier. Down to two points.”
—Message just in on the showrunner’s 500-member WhatsApp group
Going Green
Green building startups—from green cement to waterproof wood—closed more than $1.8 billion in the first half of 2023, nearly double the raised in 2021, according to PitchBook.
Half of all food and cosmetic products on shelves contain palm oil, and this demand has led to deforestation near the equator where oil palm trees grow. Scottish researchers have produced the ‘holy grail’ alternative—PALM-ALT— that is 100% plant-based, healthier, and 70% better for the environment.
Berlin-based PlanA.Earth, a carbon accounting, decarbonization, and ESG reporting software company, raised $27M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Visa, Deutsche Bank, and Opera Tech Ventures also in the deal. PlanA has demonstrated significant customer growth (1,500+ clients) and revenues (>600% YoY).
The Science of Life
The Department of Defense and Google are building an AI-powered Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM) to help doctors in small labs more efficiently identify cancer and flag the most aggressive part of the tumor. Health systems will pay between $90,000 to $100,000 per ARM.
Follow the Crypto
Citigroup stepped up its Web3 offering by announcing Citi Token Services (CTS)—a private blockchain-based platform their institutional clients can use to send money across borders in real-time. CTS also automates trade finance by digitizing bank guarantees and letters of credit 24/7.
Hate when that happens. After not logging into his MetaMask crypto wallet for months, Mark Cuban speculates he had been phished into downloading a fake application that mimics the original and subsequently lost nearly $1M in a crypto scam.
Venmo, the popular peer-to-peer payment platform subsidiary of PayPal, will offer the PayPal ERC-20 stablecoin (PYUSD), which launched last month. PYUSD is backed by US dollar deposits, short-term Treasuries and cash equivalents., and it the first to enable wallet interoperability free to users.
Into the Metaverse
Mythic Protocol, which has launched over 250 game titles since 2009, raised $6.5M led by Shima Capital to finish Riftstorm, an action-shooter, and its Decentralised Universal Meta. Mythic founder Arief Widhiyasa says, “I believe that the next 25-year gaming cycle driven by blockchain and AI is upon us.’
Entrepreneurial (Non) Huddle
X battles. ‘Neo has as many mentors as YC, except we’re serving 20 startups instead of 250,’ says Neo CEO Ali Partovi. Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, fired back by saying YC partners are ‘unicorn whisperers’ 🤔 and questioned whether Neo’s partners would be there in a startup’s time of need.
Straight outta Silicon Valley
Google slowed hiring and laid off hundreds of recruiters as a follow-on to cutting 12,000 employees—6% of staff—last January. ‘We continue to invest in top engineering talent,’ says Google. Just as with X, Google’s core digital ad business has taken a big hit as recession-sensitive advertisers have pulled back.
Meanwhile, over at X, Boss Lady Linda Yaccarino must be feeling a little more bullish as she hired a quartet of former colleagues from her days at NBCUniversal and Turner. Ms. Yaccarino and her team now confront an ad sales turnaround challenge after a 60% slump in ad sales at X since Elon took over.
Chaos & Complexity
Elon Musk calls for San Francisco lawmaker Dean Preston to be fired for blaming vehicle break-ins on tourists leaving their stuff in cars. Mr. Preston said visitors should be 'pounded' with the message not to leave things in cars and likened it to the ‘buckle up' campaign of the 1980s. 🤔
The bankruptcy estate of FTX sued the parents of former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, seeking to claw back millions from Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried for allegedly ‘exploiting their access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves.’ FTX has so far recovered roughly $7 billion in assets.
What the Math Says
International researchers found that a child’s life satisfaction decreases between the ages of 9 and 16 before rising up and peaking at the age of 70! The study focused on changes in subjective well-being, life satisfaction, positive emotional states, and negative emotional states.
In a Fox News survey, 60% of GOP primary voters back Trump, 13% for DeSantis, and Ramaswamy with 11%— giving the ‘populist wing’ 84% of the primary voter base. If you throw in RFK, Jr. and the Bern Man into the populist mix, a huge percentage of Americans don’t like war or trust the government. 😎✌🏼
Compared to boomers, Gen Z Americans have reported higher rates (16% compared to 5%) of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying. Social Catfish’s 2023 report on online scams found that Gen Z’s losses shot up from $8.2M in 2017 to $210M in 2022.
Know Thy Enemy
Starting with the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, North Korean hackers have stolen $3.4B in crypto, including the $35M Atomic Wallet heist this year. Digital thugs trick people with recruitment ads on LinkedIn, asking applicants to download a PDF that deploys an executable file.
Revive Thyself (or not)
A new study is a wake-up call that household cleaning products emit hundreds of hazardous chemicals into the air for months. Choosing ‘green’ cleaning products, particularly those labeled as ‘fragrance-free,’ can substantially reduce exposure to these harmful compounds.
Walking at least 3967 steps a day can reduce the risk of death, with each additional 500-1000 steps further lowering the risk. Benefits increase even up to 20,000 steps a day, with no identified upper limit for health improvements.
Current Wisdom
"Populist movement showed the way forward in everything from race relations to currency, reformed votes for women to railroad regulation. They were the good guys of history."
—Thomas Frank, Author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism