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Metaverse / xR

DAOs decentralized finance Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects Social / Community

·Nov. 12, 2021

DAOs 101, with SharkDAO, PartyDAO, and Juicebox contributor Nicholas

In this conversation, we chat with Nicholas – an NFT developer and a contributor to Juicebox, which is an awesome DAO enablement software, as well as SharkDAO and PartyDAO. He is very active in the ecosystems, got a solidity podcast called Solidity Galaxy Brain, a collaborator with multiple NFT artists, but I could go on and on. Let me welcome Nicholas to the podcast.

More specifically, we touch on the philosophy behind programming and coding, what a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) truly is and what it is comprised of, various successful examples of DAOs that Nicholas has been involved in, the concept of community and the value that DAOs serve in this respect, how DAOs leverage tools to achieve their purpose, and so so much more!

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artificial intelligence Metaverse / xR music industry visual art

·May. 8, 2020

Artificial Intelligence that writes pop songs and paints portraits

The image is taken from an AI paper which explains how to use generative adversarial networks (i.e., GANs) to hallucinate hyper realistic-imagery. By training on hundreds of thousands of samples, the model is able to create candidates representing things like “just a normal dude holding a normal fish nothing to see here”, and then edit out the ones that are too egregious.

The reason the stuff above is so scary is actually that you can mathematically transition in the space between images. So for example, you could move between “a normal dude” and “just a normal fish” and have nightmare fish people. Or you could create a DNA root for an image which is part dog, part car, and part jellyfish. Check out the video below and the very accessible https://www.artbreeder.com/ website to see what I mean.

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China digital lending eCommerce Metaverse / xR neobank small business Social / Community super app supply chain / trade

·Jun. 13, 2021

The links between tech, commerce, and finance behind Klarna’s $45B valuation and Pinduoduo’s $150B marketcap

This week, we cover these ideas:

Klarna’s $640 million raise and its $45 billion valuation, and how its business model arbitrages the payments revenue pool to build a lending business
Pinduoduo’s growth path to a $150B marketcap, and the links between shopping, media, and financial mechanisms that help it compete with Alibaba
A comparison of approaches to growth and economics
Implications for crypto assets for capturing “the real economy”

Klarna is raising $640 million on a $45 billion private valuation, with over $1 billion in net operating income. The buy-now-pay-later company has over 90 million active customers and 250,000 merchants. It was founded in Sweden in 2005.

On the other side of the ocean, Chinese ecommerce company Pinduoduo is beating Alibaba with 820 million active buyers, generates over $3 billion in revenue per quarter, connects buyers to 12 million farmers, and has a market capitalization of $150 billion. It was founded in China in 2015.

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exchanges / cap mkts identity and privacy marketing Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects Social / Community visual art

·Oct. 6, 2021

User-Generated Finance and Cultural Financial Instruments, via Snoop Dogg, Dapper Labs, and $1.5B Decentralized Social

The structure of capital markets precedes the innovations that come from it. High frequency trading, passive ETF investing, SPACs, and crypto assets all telegraphed their value proposition before becoming large and meaningful in scale. We are now seeing a new market shape emerge, one that starts with community and builds up into financial instruments that are cultural and social. This analysis looks at the most recent developments in the overlap between decentralized social and cultural work and related financial features.

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credit unions/small banks marketing Metaverse / xR music industry neobank Social / Community

·Oct. 21, 2019

Double Standards — Fortnite game praised for black-out, neobank Chime upsets 5 million customers

Let’s look at the recent Fortnite blackout and compare it to neobank Chime's embarassing down time, as well as explore the business model implication of what it means to be the social square where people hang out. Does Finance have such an equivalent? Maybe it is Venmo, crypto Twitter, or the credit unions. We also look at statistics behind influencer marketing, and how influencers have usurped the position of music labels. Perhaps banks should get ahead of this game too.

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augmented reality Metaverse / xR real estate tech

·Aug. 12, 2019

Real Estate Tech brokerage Compass earns its $6.4 billion valuation from smart arbitrage

I examine how $6.4 billion real estate brokerage Compass stacks up against the digital wealth and lending companies with a similar go-to-market strategy, and provide some ideas as to why it is successful. Compelling questions also emerge when looking on how technologies like AR/VR are commoditizing the property brokerage experience. Compass, a residential real estate startup that built out a platform for brokers -- proprietary and external -- and has recently raised $370 million at a $6.4 billion valuation. I found the language and positioning sort of eery, in how similar it was to the story in industries I closely follow. It even bought a CRM earlier this year, not unlike AdvisorEngine buying Junxure, or Salesforce getting into financial verticals. What I did find unusual, was the absolutely massive valuation.

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Crypto DAOs gaming & sports Metaverse / xR neobank NFTs and digital objects Social / Community visual art

·Aug. 23, 2021

Creating, Transacting, and Storing Value in the Financial Metaverse of NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi

The evolution towards a financial metaverse is rapidly accelerating, with the growth in generative assets, profile picture avatars, the emerging derivative structures that build on their foundation, and DAOs that govern them. This article highlights the most novel developments, and builds the case for what a digital wallet / bank will need to be able to do in order to succeed on the way to this alien destination.

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Crypto DAOs decentralized finance Investing Metaverse / xR paytech

·Dec. 3, 2021

Origins of Metamask’s 20 million Web3 users, with co-founder Dan Finlay

In this conversation, we chat with Daniel Finlay – a former Apple software developer, co-founder and co-lead developer on MetaMask – a non-custodial Ethereum wallet, allowing users to store Ether and other ERC-20 tokens and make transactions. Further. With the growth of DeFi and NFTs over the past year, MetaMask has increased in prominence as an entry point for novice users. So much so that its user base is now over 20 million monthly active users.

More specifically, we touch on how Dan went from teaching kids to code to having an app rejected by the Apple App Store to MetaMask, the philosophy behind e-government, questioning the role and job of software engineers, how crypto wallets compare to neobanks, and so so much more!

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artificial intelligence augmented reality Crypto decentralized finance Metaverse / xR

·Oct. 19, 2020

From Fintech to Augmented Reality Commerce to Artificially Intelligent Agents

I presented earlier this week at the Ally Invest virtual conference, and the prompt asked for a description of what happens to finance from Fintech to Crypto / Blockchain to Augmented Reality / Virtual Worlds and finally to Artificial Intelligence.

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big tech central bank / CBDC decentralized finance Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects

·Nov. 3, 2021

Why Facebook is domain squatting on the Metaverse

We discuss the Facebook pivot into the metaverse and its rebrand into Meta. Our analysis touches on the competitive pressures faced by the company from big tech players, other ecosystem builders, and limits to growth for a $1 trillion business that likely motivated this refocus. We further dive into network effects around platforms, and why super apps and financial features are attractive, and how owning the hardware is a required defensive strategy. Lastly, we discuss these development through the crypto and Web3 lens, deeply disappointed with Facebook trying to domain park a generational opportunity with a centralized solution.

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