Euro stablecoin launched in Finland, claims to be first approved in the EU

USDC issuer Circle Inc. previously released a euro-backed stablecoin that is regulated in the United States.

The company is licensed by the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority (Fin-FSA) and claims that the new ”EUROe” coin is “the first and only EU-regulated crypto stablecoin.”

Japanese prime minister says DAOs and NFTs help support government’s ‘Cool Japan’ strategy

Fumio Kishida said there were “various possibilities for using Web3” in Japan and has previously supported blockchain-based initiatives for authorities using digital solutions.

Kishida said there were “various possibilities for using Web3” in Japan. He added that the Japanese government could use aspects including nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) in efforts to revitalize regions and promote “Cool Japan” — a national strategy aimed at showing off the country’s innovations and culture to the rest of the world.

Taira chairs the government’s task force on Web3 policy. He pointed to coordination with tax authorities in Japan as well as research into releasing a digital yen. The country’s central bank announced in November it planned to start a pilot program for a digital currency starting in spring 2023.
“I think that these types of blockchain technology and technology using Web3 are effective in solving the various problems we have,” said Taira.
“If you consider DAOs, people who are interested in the same social issues can form a new community,” said Kishida. “NFTs can also be used to diversify the income of creators and maintain highly loyal fans.”

⚡️ Google invests $300 million in Anthropic as race to compete with ChatGPT heats up

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by the team behind AI breakthroughs such as GPT-3 and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

“We're partnering with Google Cloud to support the next phase of Anthropic, where we're going to deploy our AI systems to a larger set of people,” said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “This partnership gives us the cloud infrastructure performance and scale we need.”

Anthropic is focused on developing and deploying Claude, an AI assistant based on the company's research into building safe, steerable AI. Anthropic has created safety techniques like Constitutional AI to create AI technologies that are easier to rely on and understand.

a16z voted 15 million UNI against the final proposal to deploy Uniswap V3 on BNB Chain proposed by 0xPlasma Labs.

The proposal uses Wormhole as a cross-chain bridge. a16z opposes the use of Wormhole and supports the use of LayerZero.

Interesting

“We are not going to stop at replicating ChatGPT. We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information, and be personalized.”

Fun fact, ChatGPT runs on 8xA100 systems which contain 9x 200GbE Nvidia ConnectX-6 NICs in them.

Likely, Anthropic switches their stack from PyTorch + Nvidia GPUs to Jax + TPU like Cohere and C3

Stanford Researcher develops a simple prompting strategy that enables open-source LLMs with 30x fewer parameters to exceed the few-shot performance of GPT3-175B - MarkTechPost

What's the difference between Web3 and the Metaverse? And where do they overlap? Here's one attempt to clarify things from PwC

The Metaverse is still early in its forming as a 'domain' - we've had the technology capabilities that enable it for decades now, but only recently are we starting to see the convergence towards a specific domain of practice

Web3 is a lot of things, but still isn't clear to many. Which is a problem. The ideas of decentralisation, of censor-resistant platforms, and of shared digital economies are hugely powerful but somewhat abstract. And when you overlay the technical implementations (Blockchains, Nodes, Cryptography, Wallets, Oracles, Governance) it doesn't get any easier. But we can be confident there is value in both the principles and the technology.

We are entering an age of increased technical, philosophical, ethical and commercial complexity. And this will not gel well with the 'TL;DR' movement or society's increasing desire for simplification of concepts.

Today, Generative AI takes its next big step forward.

Gen-1 is a new AI model that uses language and images to generate new videos out of existing ones.

Visa is testing stablecoin payments on Ethereum

According to reports, Visa is already testing how to accept payments and payout on Ethereum via stablecoin USDC. Cuy Sheffield, Vice President, Head of Crypto at Visa highlighted that the transactions were “large value settlement payments.”

He reportedly added,
“That’s been one of the areas where we want to build muscle memory. The same way that we can convert between dollars in euros on a cross-border transaction, we should be able to convert between digital tokenized dollars and traditional dollars.”

Additionally, a team of researchers and engineers across Visa has been working to evaluate the foundations of various blockchains.

The focus areas include security, scalability, interoperability, privacy, and use cases of different protocols

In fact, the company started exploring options to allow auto payments via Ethereum wallets a couple of months back. In the latter half of December 2022, the credit card giant released a proposal outlining how users could set up automatic payments. It allowed users to eliminate banks and other centralized entities from the equation.

Why stablecoin payments?

At the moment, Visa uses “SWIFT” for settlements. The said system reportedly facilitates trillions of dollars of cross-border payments between 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. Elaborating on the drawbacks and explaining why Visa has started treading on the stablecoin payment route, Sheffield said,
“We set all over Swift, so we can’t move money as frequently as we’d like because there are a number of limitations that exist in those networks. And so, we’ve been experimenting, we publicly announced. We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments [with stablecoins].”
Visa’s recent proposal highlighted that by using Ethereum crypto wallets, users can “pull” funds without the need to manually sign off every transaction. So, this means, with support from Visa, users can schedule auto-payments sent from self-custodial crypto wallets.
Such capability is not yet possible on the Ethereum mainnet, but would be fostered by a proposal called “Account Abstraction.” As a result, it would allow Ethereum user accounts to work like smart contracts and feature pre-scheduled execution functions.

Google is back in the game, here we go! Google takes on ChatGPT with Bard and shows off AI in search

Its not ChatGPT vs Bard
Its GPUs vs TPUs

...and who can multiply matrices at a lower cost.

OKX web3 wallet has integrated with Curve one of the best Swap. OKX Web3 wallet supports almost 50 most popular chains and embeds multi-chain swap,yield farming,NFT marketplace.

Crypto firms must obtain authorization and relevant licenses to operate in Dubai


The extensive rules published Tuesday detail requirements for companies from cyber security norms to compliance and risk-management standards.

A separate set of rulebooks address specific activities like issuance, advisory, custody and exchange services.

All activities and firms fall under the supervision of the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), set up last year, to oversee the sector as Dubai aims to attract crypto and blockchain companies.

Must Read: The Blockchain and Web3 landscape in China

A fascinating report that covers:

- Overview of what is encouraged, regulated and forbidden
- Intro to the key players in the ecosystem
- Overview of key use cases in Agriculture, Finance, Logistics, IP Protection, Energy, Public Service, Charity and many more
- How Blockchain start-ups can receive funding in China
- City-specific overviews for Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and. Hangzhou
- A forecast for the future adoption and evolution of Blockchain and Web3 in China

Shanghai has been successfully implemented on the Zhejiang testnet

Full and partial withdrawals are now being processed.

Microsoft’s ChatGPT event live blog / Microsoft is holding a surprise in-person event where it’s likely to demo a version of Bing with ChatGPT integrated and much more.

MIT researchers found that massive neural nets (e.g. large language models) are capable of storing and simulating other neural networks inside their hidden layers, which enables LLM to adapt to a new task without external training

Google's AI-powered "multisearch" goes global. You can now search using text and images at the same time.

It is based on Multitask Unified Model (MUM), which can understand information across text, photos, videos, and draw insights and connections between topics/ideas.