Lifeboat Foundation

Although the crypto ecosystem has faced its fair share of bumps, venture capitalists are still bullish about the space and continue to look at decentralized finance (DeFi) as a promising opportunity.

TechCrunch surveyed six crypto-focused investors about the road ahead for crypto adoption, their sentiment toward DeFi and how the focus in that subsector (by both investors and founders) is growing.

The total value locked (TVL) on DeFi protocols has fallen roughly 77% from all-time highs around $180 billion in December 2021 to about $41 billion on Wednesday, according to DeFiLlama data. But that hasn’t stopped founders, developers and investors from diving into the space.

As we enter 2023, these were the big stories in self-driving cars for 2022. You an also check out my summary of early 2022 for more details on that quarter, but these are the game-changers for this year. There’s no doubt this was a year of huge ups and downs. A year where some gave up and others doubled down. A year where the stock market and VC funding took a massive nosedive and companies mostly shrunk, but also a year of great technical progress.

Usually I do this as a countdown to the biggest story, but I’ll spoil it right now and say the big story was the incredible contrast of the good and bad news. So I’m instead going to tell you the good, the bad and the not particularly ugly.

We wrap up the year with the biggest stories in robocars, from the very bad to the very good, of which 2022 had lots of both. Includes video of the stories.

Continue reading “Top Self-Driving Car Stories Of 2022 In Review” »

Year 2021 This also another use for air pollution into diamonds.

Mining diamonds is a notoriously destructive and exploitative process, both socially and environmentally. On a mission to produce diamonds sustainably and ethically, one company discovered a way to—quite literally—pull diamonds out of thin air.

According to the International Gem Society, 250 tons of soil are moved for each carat of mined diamond, wreaking havoc on ecosystems, wildlife, and the water table. Nearly 20 years have passed since the United Nations established the Kimberley Process, a certification to address human rights abuses in the mining industry and eradicate conflict diamonds from the global market. Also known as “blood diamonds,” conflict diamonds are mined in rebel-controlled areas and sold to help finance armed conflicts. The Human Rights Watch says that rebel rule, forced labor, and violence are still rampant in the industry.

Continue reading “How to Turn Air Pollution into Gleaming Diamonds” »

Who has the best odds of winning?

In October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Keep in mind that Musk founded X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal.

For context, China’s WeChat launched as a messaging service in 2011 and has since become a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak and Healthcare.gov — as well as more than 3.5 million partner “mini programs” that operate inside the app. PayPal and Walmart have been teasing their own versions of financial super apps since at least September 2021 but with much less fanfare.

Roger Spitz is co-author of the forthcoming book The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption; President of Techistential (Global Foresight Strategy); and Chairman of the Disruptive Futures Institute. He has given over 100 keynote talks globally, and he has two decades of experience leading investment banking and venture capital (VC) businesses, advising CEOs, founders, boards, and shareholders, evaluating their competitiveness, strategic investments, and disruptions ahead. Roger’s expertise lies at the intersection of futures studies, systems thinking, and sustainable value creation.

#futurism #disruption #innovation

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers meets PayPal Co founder David Sacks.

Read the accompanying article:
https://unherd.com/thepost/david-sacks-the-tech-purge/

Continue reading “David Sacks: The tech reset has only just begun” »

Mastercard, one of the biggest financial payments providers in the world, is launching a web3-focused incubator to help artists connect with fans through a new medium, the company shared at CES 2023 on Friday.

“The core of this program is providing emerging artists with the web3 tools and skills they need to excel and advance their music careers in this digital economy,” Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, said to TechCrunch. “By providing access to experts and innovators in the space, the artists will be guided on how to incorporate web3 into their work throughout the entire program and then beyond.”

Mastercard partnered with Polygon, a scaling blockchain built on top of Ethereum, which has been making huge strides in the Web 2.0 ecosystem lately. In the past year, Polygon partnered with a number of other big brands like Starbucks for its Odyssey digital collectible rewards program and Disney for its accelerator program, while also having major clothing brands like Prada and Adidas launch NFT projects through its blockchain.

Quantum computers hold the promise of performing certain tasks that are intractable even on the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In the future, scientists anticipate using quantum computing to emulate materials systems, simulate quantum chemistry, and optimize hard tasks, with impacts potentially spanning finance to pharmaceuticals.

However, realizing this promise requires resilient and extensible hardware. One challenge in building a large-scale quantum computer is that researchers must find an effective way to interconnect quantum information nodes—smaller-scale processing nodes separated across a computer chip. Because quantum computers are fundamentally different from classical computers, conventional techniques used to communicate electronic information do not directly translate to quantum devices. However, one requirement is certain: Whether via a classical or a quantum interconnect, the carried information must be transmitted and received.

To this end, MIT researchers have developed a quantum computing architecture that will enable extensible, high-fidelity communication between superconducting quantum processors. In work published in Nature Physics, MIT researchers demonstrate step one, the deterministic emission of single photons—information carriers—in a user-specified direction. Their method ensures quantum information flows in the correct direction more than 96 percent of the time.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Over the last half-decade, quantum computing has attracted tremendous media attention. Why?

After all, we have computers already, which have been around since the 1940s. Is the interest because of the use cases? Better AI? Faster and more accurate pricing for financial services firms and hedge funds? Better medicines once quantum computers get a thousand times bigger?