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decentralized finance digital transformation Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects

·Oct. 16, 2020

Virtual communities and digital worlds are the difference between Finance Incumbents, Fintech, and DeFi

This week, we look at:

How the medical reality is accelerating remote work and digital commerce, including the success of buy-now-pay-later companies like Affirm and Klarna
The emergence of virtual worlds and video game environments that generate $ billions in revenue and have millions of participants, with examples of Zwift, Fortnite, Tomorrowland, Roblox, Genshin Impact
How to connect digital environments to digital communities and their economic activity, including through mechanisms like non-fungible-tokens in Rarible and Async Art
Advice for shifting thinking from manufacturing financial product, to starting with the customer, to leveraging the community

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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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artificial intelligence civilization and politics Metaverse / xR philosophy visual art

·Jul. 3, 2020

White Obama made by Artificial Intelligence

What we know intuitively, and what the software shows, is that the pixelated image can be expanded into a cone of multiple probable outcomes. The same pixelated face can yield millions of various, uncanny permutations. These mathematical permutations of our human flesh exit in an area which is called “latent space”. The way to pick one out of the many is called “gradient descent”.

Imagine you are standing in an open field, and see many beautiful hills nearby. Or alternately, imagine you are standing on a hill, looking across the rolling valleys. You decide to pick one of these valleys, based on how popular or how close it is. This is gradient descent, and the valley is the generated face. Which way would you go?

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artificial intelligence augmented reality Crypto decentralized finance enterprise blockchain Metaverse / xR narrative zeitgeist NFTs and digital objects regulation & compliance venture capital

·Nov. 27, 2020

Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures on DeFi and NFT investing and acceleration

In this conversation, we talk with Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures. This is a fascinating and educational conversation that covers frontier technology companies and protocols in blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence, and the convergence of these themes in the future. Jamie walks us through the core investment thesis, as well as the commercial model behind shifting from incubation to acceleration of 30+ companies. We pick up on wisdom about marketing timing and fund structure along the way.

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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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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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exchanges / cap mkts gaming & sports governance identity and privacy Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects regulation & compliance Social / Community

·Sep. 6, 2021

Financial Mythmaking with $200MM of Loot NFTs and their growing world

We discuss the top-down and bottoms-up approaches to innovation and project building. For the former, we reference Australia’s draconian surveillance laws, and the integration of US driver’s licenses into Apple’s wallet. For the latter, we dive into the Ethereum-based Loot project and its incredible derivatives, $500MM token, and $200MM of volume. Last, we conclude by highlighting the role of creators on the coming wave of Fintech.

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artificial intelligence Metaverse / xR

·Aug. 7, 2020

How should Fintech react to Epic raising $2B on Fortnite’s 350MM users, NY Times photogrammetric environments, and Apple’s AR glasses

Within a decade, the form factor for computing will radically change from staring at screens with flat imagery, to participating in embedded virtual worlds with fully navigable, hyper-realistic environments. Those environments will be filled with software agents, some hybrid human and others entirely AI, that are entirely unrecognizable as anything but real to 90% of the population.

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artificial intelligence big tech China civilization and politics Metaverse / xR visual art

·Jul. 27, 2020

OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction

This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.

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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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