Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/07 – Zuck Bucks

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

The crypto dream might have died, but Meta still thinks the metaverse will need some for of currency. Maybe Zuck Bucks? OpenSea adds Solana NFTs. Shein is the world’s latest mega unicorn. Is Bolt pivoting from one-click checkouts to crypto payments instead? Legos in the metaverse. And DALL-E 2. Sponsors: Rocketlawyer.com/workconfidently Links: Facebook owner Meta targets finance with ‘Zuck Bucks’ and creator coins (FT) Google Play will hide and block downloads for outdated apps starting later this year (TechCrunch) Solana NFTs Can Now Be Traded on OpenSea (Decrypt) Facebook won’t hold its F8 developer conference this year after pivoting to Meta (The Verge) Shein Valued at $100 Billion in Funding Round (WSJ) Crypto Startup Wyre Being Acquired by Payments Company Bolt for $1.5 Billion (WSJ) Lego and Epic Games partnership aims for a kid-friendly metaverse (Washington Post) OpenAI’s DALL-E AI image generator can now edit pictures, too (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Thursday, April 7th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. The crypto dream might have died, but Meta still thinks the Metaverse will need some form of currency, maybe Zuckbucks. OpenC adds Solana NFTs. Cheon is the world's latest mega unicorn,

is bolt pivoting from one-click checkouts to crypto payments instead, Legos in the Metaverse, and Doll E2. I'll explain. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. are telling the Financial Times that meta has drawn up plans to add social tokens, as well as lending services and a non-blockchain virtual currency that employees have dubbed Zuckbucks to its suite of apps. The company led by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is seeking alternative revenue streams and new features that can attract and retain users as popularity falls for its main social networking products such as Facebook and Instagram, a trend that threatens its 118 billion a year ad-based business model. Facebook's financial arm, Meta Financial Technologies,

has been exploring the creation of a virtual currency for the Metaverse, which employees internally have dubbed Zuckbucks, according to several people familiar with the efforts. This is unlikely to be a cryptocurrency based on the blockchain, some of the people said. Instead, meta is leaning towards introducing in-app tokens that would be centrally controlled by the company, similar to those used in gaming apps such as the Robux currency in popular children's game Roblox. According to company memos and people close to the plans, meta is also looking into the creation of social tokens or reputation tokens, which could be issued as rewards for meaningful contributions in Facebook groups, for example.

Another effort is to make creator coins that might be associated with particular influencers on its photo sharing app Instagram. Meta has also been exploring more traditional financial services, with a focus on helping to provide small business loans at attractive rates, according to several people familiar with the initiative. While nothing is immediately planned, the company has previously held discussions with potential lending partners, one of the people said. Most of the efforts are in the early stages of being discussed and could change or be dropped,

although its plans to integrate non-fungible tokens into its apps are more developed. Zuckerberg confirmed an earlier Financial Times report that Instagram would soon start to support NFTs. According to one memo shared internally last week, meta plans to launch a pilot for posting and sharing NFTs on Facebook in mid-May. This will be quickly followed by testing of a feature that will allow for membership in Facebook groups based on NFT ownership, and another for minting, a term for creating NFTs. NFTs may be monetized via fees and or ads in the future, according to another internal document, end quote. But hey, back to the whole Zuckbucks thing. I hope they do call them Zuckbucks. They should call them Zuckbucks. The way things are running these days,

falling back on some, you know, focus group tested anodyne name like Diem or Libra or something like that, just makes it feel corporate anyway. So own that. Lean into it. Zuckbucks. Or quoting Harry McCracken on Twitter could also call them Marx, since Germany isn't using that brand anymore, end quote. Speaking of Germans, to paraphrase the great Werner Herzog, come on you cowards. Google is planning to hide and block PlayStore apps that don't target an Android API within two years of the latest major Android release, starting on November 1st. Quoting TechCrunch, Google is preparing to clear its Play Store of outdated apps.

The company warned Android app developers that starting on November 1, 2022, it will hide apps and block their installation to users' devices if developers haven't kept up with the latest Android OS releases. Specifically, Google said apps that don't target an Android API within two years of the latest major Android release will no longer be able to be discovered or installed by new users whose devices run Android OS versions that are higher than the app's target API level. In short, this means that Android users who are keeping up with the latest software or those who've just purchased new Android phones will no longer be able to find or download old, out-of-date apps. This should not be a significant adjustment for any active developers building

for Android, as Google already requires new apps and app updates to target an Android API level within one year of the latest major Android OS version release. And any app updates submitted that also don't meet this requirement can't be published on Google Play. But the change would impact fully abandoned apps or those where the developer is still serving their users but no longer keeps up with the latest Android API updates, end quote. OpenC has added Solana NFT trading support in beta. A marketplace search shows that around 865,000 NFTs have been minted on Solana, quoting Decrypt. OpenC is primarily based around Ethereum and currently dominates the NFT training space by a large margin. With the addition of Solana, OpenC now accommodates

collectibles from the second largest NFT ecosystem outside of Ethereum and its side chain slash layer two scaling solutions. According to the marketplace, Solana's support has been added in beta with limited collection coverage. OpenC says that it currently supports 165 collections, although if you search the marketplace by chain, it shows more than 865,000 total NFTs minted on Solana. Popular Solana NFT collections like Solana Monkey Business, D-goods, Degenerate Ape Academy, Arrory, and shadowy supercoder are currently listed on OpenC. Solana offers significantly lower transaction fees than Ethereum and is a more energy-efficient blockchain network that can handle larger numbers of transactions at a time.

As the leading NFT marketplace, OpenC now regularly handles billions of dollars worth of trading volume each month, Magic Eden is currently the largest NFT marketplace on Solana and generates volumes in the hundreds of millions of dollars each month. Magic Eden confirmed to decrypt this week that it will embrace its Solana native status and let customers spend tokens from projects like Arrory and D-Goods to purchase NFTs, end quote. Meta won't be holding its F8 developer conference in 2022, instead holding what it is calling Conversations, a, quote, business messaging event on May 19th, and an AR-slash-VR event sometime later this year, quoting The Verge.

Similar to years past, we are taking a brief break in programming and will not hold F8 in 2022, while we gear up on new initiatives that are all tailored toward the next chapter of the internet and the next chapter of our company, too, Building the Metaverse. Meta's Diego Duarte Morira said in a blog post, similar to the early stages of the web, building the Metaverse will be a collaborative effort at every stage with other companies, creators, and developers like you, end quote. In lieu of F8, Morira pointed to Meta's inaugural business messaging event dubbed Conversations, which will take place on May 19th.

Marira also said there will be another Connect event later this year, focused on the company's AR, VR, and Metaverse platform offerings. At the October 2021 Connect, Facebook announced its rebrand to Meta, so it seems likely the company will have some big news to share at that event, end quote. Which reminds me, it somehow fell through the cracks in terms of me alerting you that Apple's worldwide developer conference will be June 6th through June 10th. And did I say that Google's I-O is May 11th and 12th. I think I told you about that one, but just in case I didn't, there you go. I do remember that I told you to keep an eye on online fast fashion retailer Sheehan as potentially the next big megacorn or ultracorn. And sure enough, Sheehan has raised between

$1 and $2 billion in a round that closed last week, valuing it at $100 billion. Sheehan was valued at around $15 billion as recently as 2022, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Fast fashion retailer Sheehan was valued at $100 billion in a recent funding round, according to people familiar with the matter, making the China-based apparel seller one of the world's most valuable private companies. Private equity firm General Atlantic participated in the funding round, which included prior Sheehan investors, Tiger Global Management, and Sequoia Capital China. At $100 billion, the startup is worth more than the combined market capitalizations of

European rivals, H&M and Zara owner Inditex. Sheehan has won the hearts of American teens and 20-somethings by offering a seemingly endless and ever-changing assortment of trendy clothes at cheap prices. The company which has no physical stores ships to more than 150 countries worldwide. Although it sources much of its merchandise from Chinese factories, Sheehan doesn't sell in mainland China, where the competition for inexpensive clothes is fierce. Founded in 2008, Sheehan began as a women's wear seller named Sheehan sighed. The online-only seller grew its market share significantly during the pandemic, surpassing H&M, Zara, and Forever 21 to become the biggest fast fashion retailer in the U.S. by sales, according to a June report from earnest research.

Sheehan's success, which relies on a constant flow of fresh, inexpensive styles, points to fast fashions continue to peel among budget-conscious shoppers, end quote. As we've been saying for a while now, one of the hottest startup spaces in terms of VC investment over the last few months, maybe even two years or so, has been the payments sector, and specifically the subset of this sector, which is all the startups chasing the one-click checkout category. And then, poof, one of the biggest players in this space fast, just shut its doors, as I told you about yesterday. So what about other big players in this space? What about, say, Bolt, which just a few months ago raised $1.3 billion in venture capital and was most recently

valued at about $11 billion. What could Bolt be thinking about what's happened too fast? What could Bolt's investors be thinking? Has this category been proven a bust? Or was fast? Just an outlier, just a bad company. Interesting, to say the least, to wake up to this news. Bolt is acquiring crypto payments startup wire. Sources say for around one and a half. billion dollars, so an acquisition worth more than all of the venture capital bolt has raised thus far. That's quite a move, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The acquisition is valued at around $1.5 billion, according to the people. That would make it the largest merger in the crypto sector that didn't involve a blank check company or so-called SPAC, according to data from research firm

Deal Logic. In May 2021, Galaxy Digital Holdings agreed to acquire BitGo for around $1.2 billion. The deal continues what has been a record pace for mergers and acquisitions activity in the U.S. crypto sector since last year. In the first quarter of 2022, M&A deals totaled about $1.25 billion, according to Deal Logic. That would put activity this year on pace to eclipse the record $4.9 billion of deals struck in 2021. Both Bolt and Wire are based in San Francisco. Wire offers services for retail and business customers to exchange national currencies and cryptocurrencies between banks and crypto wallets, as well as trading cryptocurrencies. It has money transmitter licenses in 27 U.S. states, end quote. Well, crypto really seems to be the hottest

investment space now. So is this like, I mean, it kind of feels like jumping lily pads, right? Maybe from one business model to one that is maybe less shaky these days. Or as Darabasancho tweeted, PayPal has millions of customers while Bolt has hundreds. I too would try to use my $1.3 billion in VC funding to buy a better business instead of pushing a boulder uphill, end quote. Is that what is going on here? Honestly, lots of raised eyebrows to this news, quoting Parker Thompson on Twitter. What are other examples of relatively early startups acquiring companies in stock for around 30x their own revenue that worked out well? Seems like a big pill to digest while growing into your own business fast, end quote. Yeah, talk about a pivot. And yes, full disclosely.

I was personally, though not through the ride home fund, an investor, a teeny tiny one in Bolt's most recent round. Epic Games and Lego have formed a long-term partnership to, quote, shape the future of the metaverse by building a safe place for children to play, but offering few details beyond that, quoting the Washington Post. While the companies didn't go into detail about what that would look like in Thursday's announcement, they outlined three principles driving development, to prioritize children's well-being, to protect children's privacy, and to equip both children and adults with the necessary tools to shape their digital experience. The Lego Group has captivated the imagination of children and adults through creative play for nearly a

century, and we are excited to come together to build a space in the metaverse that's fun, entertaining, and made for kids and families, said Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney in a news release. With Epic's Unreal Engine and game development experience, this partnership opens the potential for a sandbox Lego game to compete with popular creation platforms like Roblox and Minecraft. Epic has already seen success among young audiences with Fortnite, a game that brought in more than $9 billion in revenue for the company in 2018 and 2019, end quote. And finally today, you might have heard already, but yesterday OpenAI released Doll E2, a higher resolution and lower latency version of its text-to-image generation program with new capabilities. It's

being released to researchers in preview. Quoting the Verge. Doll E2 features a higher resolution and lower latency version of the original system, which produces pictures depicting descriptions written by users. It also includes new capabilities like editing an existing image. As with previous OpenAI work, the tool isn't being directly released to the public, but researchers can sign up online to preview the system, and OpenAI hopes to later make it available for use in third-party apps. The original Dahl E, a portmanteau of the artist Salvador Dali and the robot Wally debuted in January of 2021. It was a limited but fascinating test of AI's ability to visually represent concepts

from mundane depictions of a mannequin in a flannel shirt to a giraffe made of turtle or an illustration of a radish walking a dog. At the time, OpenAI said it would continue to build on the system while examining potential dangers like bias in image generation or the production of misinformation. It's attempting to address those issues using technical safeguards and a new content policy while also reducing its computing load and pushing forward the basic capabilities of the model. One of the new Dolly II features in painting applies Dolly's text-to-image capabilities on a more granular level. Users can start with an existing picture, select an area, and tell the model to edit it.

You can block out a painting on a living room wall and replace it with a different picture, for instance, or add a vase of flowers on a coffee table. The model can fill or remove objects while accounting for details like the directions of shadows in a room. Another feature, Variations, is sort of like an image search tool for pictures that don't exist. Users can upload a starting image and then create a range of variations similar to it. They can also blend to images generating pictures that have elements of both. Dolly's full model was never released publicly, but other developers have honed their own tools that imitate some of its functions over the past year.

One of the most popular mainstream applications is Wombo's dream mobile app, which generates pictures of whatever users describe in a variety of art styles. OpenAI isn't releasing any new models today, but developers could use its technical findings to update their own work, end quote. That's all for today. Talk to you tomorrow.