Global tech investor SoftBank Group Corp. reported a record quarterly loss of more than $23 billion Monday after an investment spree that Chief Executive Masayoshi Son described as delirious turned sour.

FTX bringing crypto swaps to reddit

FTX global partnership with with Reddit Community Points.

Users need Eth for gas fees to transact with their Points on-chain, and FTX Pay allows them to do that.

FTX believe that the best web3 products have thoughtful utility. Reddit Community Points represent reputation in the community. Users can take their reputation anywhere they want on the Internet.

The number of open channels observable on the Bitcoin base layer has risen 38% over the last year, climbing from 65.5K to 90.3K today. The amount of bitcoin held in these channels has also increased by 103% YoY from 2.2K to 4.5K

Why investors think value of a BeReal user is worth double that of Snap

The French social app, which once a day urges users to take and share a photo—wherever they are, regardless of what they’re doing—has become a breakout hit.

Daily active users reached 7.9 million in July, up from 2 million in January and 10,000 in March 2021, according to a person familiar with the app.

That’s attracted investors at a time when many are passing on deals. This spring, BeReal raised a Series B funding at a pre-money valuation of $600 million in a round led by DST Global, the person said.

That price valued BeReal at roughly $100 per daily active user at the time, even before it had generated so much as a penny of revenue. This valuation is less than for digital ad goliath Meta Platforms, where each person using at least one of its apps— Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger—every day is worth about $149, according to The Information’s analysis. But it’s more than two times as much as for Snap and Pinterest, likely reflecting BeReal investors’ anticipation of future growth.

The company last year raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz,
Accel and New Wave.

BeReal aims to reach 100 million users by an undisclosed date, according to ajojobpostitining. It could get there in about nine months if it maintains its recent growth pace: The social media app grew 30% from 6 million daily active users at the end of June to 7.9 million by the end of July, according to the person with direct knowledge of the matter.

So far the app does not generate revenue. But investors for years have shown they’re willing to pay steep prices for user growth, on the bet that a social network will be able to
make money—usually from advertising—once it reaches a critical mass of users.

Anti-Instagram

Like users of Clubhouse in its early days, BeReal’s users have faced problems during this period of fast growth. Many complain that the app often glitches when it sends out its daily notification.

Despite its growth, BeReal has not revealed its plans to make money. Given its success as a counterpoint to Instagram, it’s unlikely that BeReal will settle on an advertising model. In the future, BeReal could test a subscription model similar to that of gaming chat app Discord rather than relying on the digital ads that drive Snap, Meta and Twitter revenue, said a person familiar with the business. BeReal could also charge for bonus features—for example, allowing a user to hide how many times they took a photo or to receive a notification before everyone else.

Discord, valued by investors last September at nearly $15 billion, had about 150 million monthly active users at the time. That means it could have just over 100 million daily active users, according to The Information’s analysis, valuing the company at $146 per user.

The number of Discord users has continued to rise, reaching 183 million monthly active users in the first quarter.

To come up with an estimate of daily active users for companies that only report monthly active users, The Information looked at one of the biggest—Facebook—which reports both metrics. Meta’s Facebook unit has disclosed that its daily active users (1.97 billion) are about 67% of its monthly active users (2.93 billion). Using Facebook’s DAU/MAU ratio, we estimated daily active users for Pinterest, Discord and Clubhouse and compared that estimate to their most recent valuations.

AppLovin proposes $17.5 billion deal to buy Unity Software

The all-stock offer would create a one-stop shop of tools for mobile-game and other app developers. AppLovin makes tools for app developers to improve marketing and revenue generation. Unity Software operates a platform for developing mobile, console and computer videogames as well as other interactive software applications.

Game over? 

Videogaming became life for many in 2020 and 2021 with a worldwide pandemic keeping people inside and both Sony and Microsoft releasing new gaming consoles. Now the videogame industry is seeing a sharp slowdown. Experts blame the drop on a variety of factors, from the lack of blockbuster titles (and new consoles), to the war in Russia and the fact that people feel more free to leave the couch. “The new normal is better than prepandemic, but it’s also softer than we would’ve liked,” Take-Two Chief Executive Strauss Zelnick. “It’s a slower year.”

How will brain-monitoring technology influence the practice of law?

Neurotechnology is used to interact directly with the brain by monitoring and recording brain activity or acting to influence it.

Advances in decades to come could lead to lawyers grappling with the human rights implications of brain monitoring and manipulation.

Neurotechnology can be implanted in the brain but it may also be external to the body in the form of a headset, wristband or helmet.

Latest horizon scanning report, Neurotechnology, law and the legal profession, sets out the:

challenges and opportunities that developments in neurotechnology may bring for the profession, and
impact it may have on cognitive performance and the way lawyers work
How could neurotechnology affect you?

Report unpacks:

1. what neurotechnology is
its emerging ripples of impact in society

2. the potential challenges, opportunities and questions facing the legal profession and the practice of law

3. legal implications of neurotechnology developments including:


Moving further into the future, it might be worth considering the possibility of lawyer and technology becoming less distinct than they are now.

South Korea's semiconductor exports fell 5.1% year-on-year in the first 10-days of August (chips are about 20% of South Korea's exports).

While overall exports to China fell 2.8%, and those to the United States rose 17.5%

An Ethereum Hard Fork is coming. You might want to:

• Maximize on-chain ETH for when it happens (withdraw from CEXes)
• Take an ETH loan
• Dump all PoW assets for ETHPoW
• Have a ready-to-go account on the greedy exchanges supporting the chain

When the merge happens and ETH transitions to POS, there will be two chains. POW and POS. Miners will try and get the last breath of value before selling their hardware. They will keep the POW Ethereum alive, effectively hard-forking the blockchain.

Everything you had before the chain split will now be in the new POS chain, and in the existing POW chain:

• NFTs and assets in wallets
• Liquidity provided (Uniswap, etc)
• Lending and borrowing (Aave, Compound positions)

Your on-chain assets will duplicate

Think of USDC, which is 1-1 backed with US dollars and with a market cap of 54B.

After Ethereum splits, there will be 54B USDC on each chain (108B) and only 54B of backing in Circle

All the USDC in one of the chains will tend to →0, can you imagine which one will be?

Users will most likely sell everything on the proof of work chain (USDC, USDT, DeFi tokens, meme tokens, NFTs) for ETHPoW, which will be the only token with some speculative "value"

AND this will probably happen within the first block. Gas wars, MEV, bribes, you name it.

In the first minutes of the fork, everyone will want ETHPoW. Price might even briefly surpass ETH

Everyone will:
• dump everything they got for ETHPoW
• send ETHPoW to one of the supporting CEXes
• lastly, trade it for other assets, like ETH.

Airdrop money for bots!

How to be ready NFA?

• Withdraw all your ETH from centralized exchanges to on-chain ETH

• If you hold stETH (one of the fastest assets to dump) lend it on Aave and borrow ETH or other assets. Monitor APY closely, it will skyrocket

• Don't buy the token, it will dump

• Research how to connect to the PoW chain once the merge happens (MM and other wallets will probably NOT automatically connect)

• Cancel any Opensea bids you made, they will be accepted on the PoW chain and your WETHPoW will be taken from you

• Remove your liquidity from pools before the merge. You are better off having ETH/USDC in proof of work chain than a PoW UNI-v2 position of ETH/USDC.

• You will not be able to remove liquidity on time (lots of bots) and will be left with no ETHPoW

• Open accounts in the usual suspects: they will support ETHPoW so you can insta-dump.

• Take an ETH Loan (Aave, Compound). If you have other assets, you might want to take an ETH loan to maximize your ETHPoW

Will be easier to dump ETHPoW in a CEX instead of USDCPoW in a DEX with all the chaos.

Careful with APYs, they will skyrocket.

BlackRock is offering its first-ever investment product directly in Bitcoin as a response to demand from large institutional clients seeking exposure to the asset

OFFICIAL: The Ethereum Merge has been scheduled for ≈ September 15th/16th

LinkedIn profiles indicate that hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok employees used to work for Chinese state media publications, raising concerns that China could use TikTok’s broad cultural influence in the US for its own ends.

The terminal total difficulty has been set to 58750000000000000000000.

This means the ethereum PoW network now has a (roughly) fixed number of hashes left to mine.

bordel.wtf predicts the merge will happen around Sep 15, though the exact date depends on hashrate

Polkadot-based stablecoin aUSD depegs after Acala Network breach

Acala Network, the decentralized finance hub of Polkadot, has been breached and its stablecoin depegged from the dollar mark.
Early this morning, Acala's Twitter page posted that it noticed configuration issues regarding the Honzon protocol, which affects its stablecoin aUSD, leading to a vote to pause operations on Acala while it investigated the issue. 

According to Coinmarket cap, the stablecoin is currently below the $1 dollar mark, at one point dropping to a low of $0.58. Acala's aUSD is "a decentralized, multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets" according to its website. 

"We have identified the issue as a misconfiguration of the iBTC/aUSD liquidity pool (which went live earlier today) that resulted in error mints of a significant amount of aUSD," said Acala in a Twitter statement.

“The misconfiguration has since been rectified and wallet addresses that received the errorneously minted aUSD have been identified, with on-chain activity tracing in respect of these addresses underway." 

While Acala has yet to confirm the amount that was involved in the breach, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao reacted to the news by saying it was possible that "over a billion $AUSD" was obtained by the attacker. 

The future of hand gesture powered electronics

Shenzhen: driverless cars have be legal on the road from August.
Statistics show that there are 800 companies involved in autonomous driving in Shenzhen, of which 415 have been established in the past five years

⚡️Revolut Receives Nod From Cyprus Regulator to Offer Crypto Services

The authorization will enable Revolut to offer crypto services to its 17 million customers in the EEA ahead of MiCA becoming law

Many NFT projects are feeling stuck. But they’re sitting on a bigger opportunity than they realize. How teams should be thinking about the future of their communities

Thousands have shown up in support of communities they believe in. Some bought in, some minted at no cost. Either way, members are there because they’re excited about the potential. In return, teams have delivered on some promise of utility—airdrops, merch, events & more.

Founders obsess over:

What new utility can we offer?

What communities will give us allowlist spots?

Can we find a corporate sponsor that makes sense?

What if we did a free airdrop?

Many are buying time until their big break—but they don’t even know what that means for them.

First, let’s establish that not every NFT project can, or should, evolve into a media company or fashion brand, or be turned into a Netflix series. Very few will make it here.

But a lot of community founders get overwhelmed thinking this is the only way.

So if you’re not on track to become the next Disney, and traditional forms of utility are falling flat, where do you go from here?

The team needs to think hard about how they can:

1. Continue delivering REAL value to their members
2. Sustain as an innovative & profitable brand

Begin by asking yourself two important questions:

• What is the common interest of our members?

• What is this team uniquely positioned and qualified to do?

You’ll need to go deep:

Start with your mission—why was your community created in the first place? What makes it different? Why are you the right team to be building it?

How does the mission align with the affinities of your members—why are they here? What do they care about?

Now think, is there a sustainable membership model and business plan that can provide tangible and ongoing value to this community?

How can it be monetized in a scalable way that will bring reliable working capital?

What’s the potential in partnerships and brand expansion?

Consider this:

The community has already shown up. They are invested. And they are READY.

This puts you lightyears ahead of most startups.

While some projects will lose steam, those committed to putting in the work will create legacy brands with healthy, happy communities.

But we need to allow one another the time and space to get there.

It’s a privilege to be building in web3.

It could be said that wearables are like a gateway to the broader digital health ecosystem

It’s easy enough to understand their appeal and function, they’re widely adopted, come in both D2C and B2B flavors, and have opened the door to many a model focused on remote patient monitoring, hospital-at-home, and virtual clinical trials.

Recent headlines show key players investing to get this sector into the next phase of the hype cycle.

In addition to the intriguing news that the Space Force would forgo fitness tests in favor of wearable technology, Oura is rolling out new features that enable blood oxygen monitoring and compatibility with digital birth control.

There’s also the battle of the smartwatches, with Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 unveiling temperature sensors just ahead of the same expected update to the Apple Watch 8.

But fancy features and big name partnerships don’t mean much without robust outcomes, so we were even more encouraged to see this meta-study that found trackers improved physical activity and body composition.

That said, more work is needed—accurate blood pressure monitoring is just one challenge that has yet to be solved.

The rise of robot furniture

The promise of robotic furniture is that it can turn single rooms into multipurpose spaces. To the extent that they work, they could help blunt the rise in what Americans pay for housing, and alter where they are able and willing to live.

Former researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ex-Apple and Tesla engineers toiling in San Francisco and a design and architectural firm in Spain are among those devising what can only be described as robotic furniture.

And it’s already rolling off the factory floor and into the domiciles of students, church program directors and celebrity couples like Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis.

These systems include beds that, on voice command, float into the ceiling to reveal couches, and artificial-intelligence enabled cameras to track where your belongings are stored.

For now, most of these playthings are for the rich, with some of these installations costing $40,000 for a single room. But the goal of many of the people involved is to make this technology ubiquitous.

Some of these home systems can cost as little as $5,000 apiece and are already installed in apartments with rents as low as $1,000 a month, in places like Durham, N.C. and Buffalo, N.Y.

The promise of robotic furniture is that it can turn single rooms into multipurpose spaces. To the extent that they work, they could help blunt the rise in what Americans pay for housing, and alter where they are able and willing to live.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this technology is breaking into the mainstream at a time that is not unlike the early 1900s, when America also faced housing problems. That era inspired William Murphy, who was living in cramped quarters in San Francisco, to invent the bed that shares his name and tucks away into a cabinet or wall.

Federal Reserve opens up master account access to banks with 'novel charters,' in win for crypto and fintech

New chainalysis report for YTD (until end of July):

- scammers are scamming less: total scam revenue is $1.6B, down 65% from the year-ago period

- hackers are hacking more: $1.9B of crypto was exploited, up 58% from the year-ago period