Lifeboat Foundation

What follows is one of the most fascinating and eye-opening conversations I’ve had about crypto. We cover America’s casino mindset, the echoes of the financial crisis she’s sensing right now, how to regulate crypto, and how to innovate without exploiting others. Allen offers a lacerating but level-headed criticism of the space that is well worth your time.

Charlie Warzel: Your essay is about DeFi, or decentralized finance. Like a lot of terminology in the crypto space, DeFi is pretty broad and vague but also very much accepted in the lexicon. How do you define it?

Hilary J. Allen: Like any evolving space, the terminology is hard to pin down. People inside the crypto world have different definitions for DeFi and would probably argue with mine. But the way I think of DeFi is as a way to describe any analogue of traditional financial-service transactions—loans, deposits, etc.—that are provided using technological tools like the blockchain or facilitated through smart contracts or stablecoins. The technology is what is different, but the financial transactions are very much similar to traditional finance.

Continue reading “Is Crypto Re-Creating the 2008 Financial Crisis?” »

Although NFTs are literally just images on the internet, they rack up a lot of emissions. In fact, the average NFT generates 211 kg of CO₂, compared to an avera… See more.

NFTs have exploded in popularity in the past year, with sales increasing by 1,700% between December 2020 and February 2021 alone (Nonfungible.com, 2021).

This uptake in digital art has led some artists around the world to earn millions of pounds just from selling one single image.

Continue reading “Are NFTs Bad for the Environment?” »

As an investor in emerging technology and a nascent observer of Web3, I’ve spent some time researching this phenomena that has brought many skeptics to the fore, in the midst of whales, and dare I say, a handful Crypto and NFT Kool-Aid drinkers, who have amassed fortunes in the process.

I get that the current web needs some serious fixing. If anything, Web2 has continued to tighten and centralize more control in the hands of Big Tech, governments, and financial institutions. The publishing industry is dying as FB and Google have all but severed the revenue streams for the Guardian, now Buzzfeed and New York Times, relegating these once-giants to plead for monthly donations to stay afloat.

The mortgage crash of 2008 gave rise to Bitcoin, with the promise to separate the financial system from the powers of a sovereign nation, effectively democratizing wealth and financial control for each individual on the planet. And while the last decade has seen an explosive growth in Bitcoin valuation, the extreme volatility within its expensive financial system has kept the mainstream at bay.

Parcels on Satoshi Island will be sold as NFTs.

Over 50,000 people have applied to live there so far.

1. No capital gains tax.
2. No withholding tax.
3. No death tax.

A group of crypto enthusiasts bought a 1.1-square-mile private island between Australia and Fiji which is part of the republic of Vanuatu — to be renamed Satoshi Island. Parcels on Satoshi Island will be sold as NFTs.

Over 50,000 people have applied to live there so far.

1. No capital gains tax.
2. No withholding tax.
3. No death tax.

For self-driving cars and other applications developed using AI, you need what’s known as “deep learning”, the core concepts of which emerged in the ’50s. This requires training models based on similar patterns as seen in the human brain. This, in turn, requires a large amount of compute power, as afforded by TPUs (tensor processing units) or GPUs (graphics processing units) running for lengthy periods. However, cost of this compute power is out of reach of most AI developers, who largely rent it from cloud computing platforms such as AWS or Azure. What is to be done?

Well, one approach is that taken by U.K. startup Gensyn. It’s taken the idea of the distributed computing power of older projects such as [email protected] and the COVID-19 focussed [email protected] and applied it in the direction of this desire for deep learning amongst AI developers. The result is a way to get high-performance compute power from a distributed network of computers.

Gensyn has now raised a $6.5 million seed led by Eden Block, a web3 VC. Also participating in the round is Galaxy Digital, Maven 11, Coinfund, Hypersphere, Zee Prime and founders from some blockchain protocols. This adds to a previously unannounced pre-seed investment of $1.1 millionin 2021 — led by 7percent Ventures and Counterview Capital, with participation from Entrepreneur First and id4 Ventures.

Continue reading “Gensyn applies a token to distributed computing for AI developers, raises $6.5M” »

Decentralizing talent

More than 50 million creators are driving their own economy of talent, attracting in excess of $800 million in venture capital. Such figures are but a shadow of what they can become later, as new venues are rapidly becoming available.

The development of blockchain technologies has resulted in a sweeping revolution across financial markets, empowering individuals instead of institutions and channeling ownership of data and funds to their holders. The qualities of the blockchain — immutability, full transparency and the trustless nature of operations — have permeated many industries, swooning the balance of business orientation from centralized corporate reliance to decentralization. This shift in the basic concepts that govern relations between participants to transactions, facilitated by smart contracts, has not gone unnoticed in the creator economy.