Weekend 🔗 Digest - Slow down Porsche 🚗
[7 min read] In your inbox every Saturday morning, best enjoyed with coffee and brunch ☕. This week we walk interest rates, BTC dominance, Visa & Amazon making crypto moves, & Porsche NFT launch fail.
Good morning!
Hope you are all safe with the flooding around New Zealand. Living in West Auckland there is water everywhere but we are safe and dry.
This weeks Weekend 🔗 Digest has a bit of everything, I’m testing Audio Notes feature to offer option extra explanation, let me know what you think.
As always, if you are new be sure to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Hope you all have a good weekend and stay safe!
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
Market update: NZ inflation news and another great week for crypto
Interesting news: Amazon and Visa signal big moves this year in crypto, and Porsche hits brakes on NFT launch.
Video of the week: What went wrong with Porsche NFT launch, lessons for other brands
This weeks AI creation: I use Midjourney to generate something beautiful 🐦
Market update 📈
🥝 New Zealand inflation figures for Q4 last year still high but not as bad as our central bank expected. Annual inflation was 7.2%, below the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s forecast of 7.5%. Kiwibank economists said “The downtrend in inflation is encouraging, but it remains unacceptably high. We see inflation slightly above the top end of the RBNZ’s 1-3% target band by the end of this year”.
This gives some hope that interest rates will be able to be lowered sooner than expected, a relief to anyone with mortgage. Time will tell, inflation can be a tricky beast.
₿ In the crypto markets, the fun continues with another cracker of a week. The overall marketcap of the space has remained above 1 trillion, undoing the damage from FTX collapse in November. Also Bitcoin dominance up, suggesting many believe BTC to be the safer bet. (click to expand images below)
Audio note below with some more info on BTC dominance if you are interested:
The Crypto Market Heatmap shows what another great week it has been (size of the blocks are market share, colour & % show the change over the last week)
Sentiment has remained high over the last week as well:
Interesting news from the week 🗞️
📦 Amazon is launching a digital assets enterprise around April this year. Lots of buzz as they broker deals with layer-1 blockchains, blockchain-based gaming startups, developers, digital asset exchanges. The consensus is that Amazon customers will be able to play crypto games and claim free NFTs in the process. I’m exciting to see how they onboard customers with simple wallet interfaces, etc. No doubt it will be huge for crypto adoption numbers.
💳 Visa embraces digital currencies despite “crypto winter”, announcing that the company had taken no hits or credit losses related to the crypto space turmoil “Visa looks forward to investing in the payment ecosystem”. Visa has long standing partnerships with manu global crypto companies and is also enabling the ability to turn stablecoins and cryptocurrency into fiat currency (via Visa cards) for use by over 100 m merchants around the world.
🚗 Porsche NFT Collection Fails to Gain Traction as Mint Kicks Into Gear. The launch was a a bit of a fail, with a subpar minting website and only 1198/7500 selling for 0.911 Eth before the plug was pulled. Floor price on the the secondary market has since gone up (1.92 Eth currently - 2,472.58 NZD).
Lessons to be learned for brands looking to enter the NFT/Web3 space (see video of the week), but its all moving in the right direction. Not every brand is going to nail it like Nike has.
Another interesting take as big brands legal teams get involved:
Video of the week 🎥
Great video with some lessons to be learned for brands looking to enter the NFT/Web3 space. Porsche will come back for round 2 better prepared I’m sure.
This week’s AI creation 🎨🤖
Each week I showcase something amazing generated by an AI-based tool.
Midjourney is an AI image generation tool that takes inputs through text prompts and parameters. Behind the scenes, the system takes your prompts and parameters and creates unique images using a machine learning algorithm trained on a huge amount of image data - over 100 million images, controversially without copyright consent.
I asked the bot to generate “a beautiful image of a tui bird feeding from a Harakeke flax plant, with the sun setting in the background”
It created 4 images, not exactly Tuis or harakeke but still pretty nice:
I liked the top right image so I asked for some more variations of that one:
I chose my favourite and had it “upscaled” with more detail and high resolution:
Imagine the process of searching 100s or millions of images to extract and blend “beautiful”+“Tui bird feeding”+“Harakeke flax plant” +“sun setting in the background” into a unique image that has never existed before. Amzing stuff, and we are so early!