Weekend 🔗 Digest - Feat. Dj NiK Tesl-AI 🎧
[7 min read] In your inbox every Saturday morning, best enjoyed with coffee and brunch ☕. This week we talk market updates, HSBC's crypto U-turn, and disruptors to the music & social media industry
Good morning everyone.
It has been a week of wild weather, I hope you are all safe after round 2 of flooding.
The Weekend 🔗 Digest this week is jam-packed with goodness, with an emphasis on disruptors to the music and social media industry. I hope you enjoy.
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!
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
Market update: US interest rate increases, but end in sight?
Interesting news: HSBC u-turn, a decentralised twitter alternative, and ChatGPT breaks records
Video of the week: All you need to know about Nostr - the growing decentralized Twitter alternative
This weeks AI creation: Debut single release by DJ Nik Tesl-AI 🎧
Market update 📈
🌎 The US Federal Reserve lifted the benchmark interest rate by a 0.25% to 4.75%. The smaller move followed a 0.5% increase in December and four massive 0.75% hikes prior to that. The latest change was what the markets expected and a small rally ensued. Remember that the purpose of these hikes it slows the economy to suppress inflation. Any sign that these hikes are slowing makes markets hopeful about a “pivot” to lowering rates which would likely see asset prices surge.
₿ Bitcoin Recorded Its Best January in 10 years with a near 40% monthly surge. Despite the highly bearish 2022 and the negative predictions for the new year, bitcoin prove all the critics wrong in January. Historically February has been a good month but always remember the golden mantra “past performance is not indicative of future results”.
The Crypto Market Heatmap shows another positive week (size of the blocks are market share, colour & % show the change over the last week)
Sentiment has risen to the point where taking some profits might be suggested if you were swing trading, as a pullback over the next few weeks is likely - but nothing is certain.
Interesting news from the week 🗞️
💱 HSBC has a change of heart and finds new interest in crypto. On Monday, after taking an anti-crypto stance in Sept last year, the banking powerhouse posted a job ad for a Product Director for “tokenization use” and Web3. The listing hints at offering a wide array of bitcoin-related services. In December they also filed patent applications for a variety of digital currency products and services. Better late than never!
🍎 Damus was finally approved by the App Store after three failed attempts. Damus is a “client” for Nostr, which is a decentralised social media protocol (stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.”). Nostr is a set of rules that servers and clients use to communicate (just like Bitcoin, email or Bittorrent). Nostr is not an app or a “platform” (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), but many applications can be built on top of Nostr.
You can learn all about it in the featured video below. If you sign up, make sure to add me: npub1f8fzmw82agmgp8kywxc6j8sm6p8x8l52de95p57gawnz7alfxmyq24fyc2
🦾 ChatGPT smashs records for fastest growing user base. The popular chatbot from OpenAI is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January (just two months after launch!) making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.
🎧 Royal, a music industry disruptor, announced its Jan royalty payouts on Tuesday. Fans/investors own a piece of a song or album’s streaming royalty rights. Through collective ownership, artists have the opportunity to power their career, maintain control of their work, and connect with their biggest supporters.
You can see that pays outs for leading artists like Diplo returned an annualised return of 6-25%. Interesting!
Video of the week 🎥
In this Rhett Reisman explains Nostr, a decentralized Twitter alternative. He talks about how Nostr works and how it achieves decentralization without using a blockchain. He discusses how to get started with Nostr and what the most popular clients are, and covers what problems Nostr is hoping to solve.
This week’s AI creation 🎨🤖🎵
Each week I showcase something amazing generated by an AI-based tool.
Boomy.com uses advanced AI music generation techniques to compose unique mood-based music for most commercial and non-commercial uses, including in your videos, podcasts, or other media.
In about 5 min I made this LoFi electronic track using a sample of Nikola Tesla’s voice because I think he would be excited by how far we have come.
Have a listen to DJ Nik Tesl-AI below:
I have submitted it for free as a release that will be published on digital music platforms (spotify etc) for the public to listen to, where I will earn (tiny) royalties. Its a new world!
Some use cases are: video production, youtube creators, podcast creators, indie game developers, audiobooks & VR experiences.
The proliferation of low-cost/free media is forcing us to rethink aspects of the creative economy, what value does “human-made” bring? How does copyright law need to evolve, and how can we use blockchain verification to confirm who has made what? These are big questions for 2023 and beyond.