📔 Weekly Journal: Apple's Fintech moves🍎🏦
Your guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier (& the weekend!). Today, the usual market news & treats plus all about Apple's latest Fintech disruption and EU regulation
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in digital assets, emerging technology, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 20 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Enjoy your weekend! 😎
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
📈 Market update: Crypto market pullback but still bullish on BTC
🗞️ Interesting news: Apple’s new venture into fintech products, EU regulation passes, and is the Metaverse dead?
👓 Read of the week: A summary of a16z 2023 State of Crypto report and a new index tool for you to try
🎥 Video of the week: Introducing Metamask Learn, for beginners to Web3
🤖 This week’s AI showcase: Bloomberg GPT, the latest innovation from the finance titan
✅ Weekly poll: Vote for the topic of next weeks Wednesday W.O.W
Market update 📈
🥝NZ
🏡 In NZ we look to the housing market for signals on the health of the economy. According to the latest data from the Real Estate Institute of NZ and Realestate.co.nz, the difference between the average asking price and the median selling price for residential properties in New Zealand is over $100,000. In March 2023, the average asking price on Realestate.co.nz was $883,823, while the REINZ's national median selling price for the same month was $775,000, representing a difference of 12%. This gap has been above $100,000 in the first three months of this year, the percentage difference has been in double digits since July 2022. More signs of a slowing economy which should reduce our inflation problems.
₿ Crypto Market
According to a research report by brokerage firm Bernstein on Monday, the collapse of FTX triggered a new bullish cycle in cryptocurrency markets. The report mentioned that FTX's downfall cleared the final portion of "toxic crypto leverage" and emphasized the importance of decentralization and self-custody wallets for digital-asset investors. The note added that macro catalysts are aligning for Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market cap, with continued weaknesses in U.S. regional banks and further deposit outflows toward money-market funds reflecting concerns about the centralization of money. The report also stated that Ethereum's highly anticipated Shapella hard fork has lifted the broader market higher.
Heatmap below - a healthy pullback this week after many weeks of green (size of the blocks are market share, colour & % show the change over the last week)
🎭 Sentiment levels have pulled back slightly (healthy!) with Market Cap steady above $1.2 Trillion.
Interesting news
🍎 This week Apple announced a new high-yield savings account, available for Apple Card holders (US only!), which is aimed at helping users to lead healthier financial lives. The savings account is a partnership with Goldman Sachs and pays an annual percentage yield (APY) of 4.15% (10x better than most banks) with no fees or minimums. A fully digital experience and industry-leading rates, could make the account appealing to customers looking to switch from their current banks. Apple's previous fintech developments include the introduction of Passbook in 2012, and Apple Pay in 2014, and in March, Apple entered the BNPL (buy now, pay later) space with Apple Pay Later.
🇪🇺 The European Parliament has passed landmark cryptocurrency legislation, Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA), which will establish new rules for the industry across all 27 member states of the European Union. The legislation means that firms approved in one country can now "passport" their business into others with minimal additional paperwork. The rules also require firms to face higher standards of disclosure and prepare a detailed white paper for each asset offered. Stablecoin issuers are subject to even tighter rules, including holding sufficient cash to back up customer funds. MiCA will come into force on stablecoins in July 2024, while other requirements will not be enforced until January 2025.
The Parliament also passed a separate law this week, the Transfer of Funds regulation, with 529 in favour, 29 against and 14 abstentions. The regulation will require crypto operators to identify customers in a bid to curb money laundering
🤖 Elon Musk announced the launch of an artificial intelligence (AI) platform called "TruthGPT" to compete against Microsoft and Google. Musk criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of "training the AI to lie" and accused Google co-founder Larry Page of not taking AI safety seriously. Musk plans to launch a maximum truth-seeking AI to understand the nature of the universe and create a third option for AI development. Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI. Musk and a group of AI experts called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.
Ⓜ️ The use of “Metaverse” as a buzzword is losing its hype as generative AI becomes the flavour of the month according to VC funding data from Q1 2023 vs 2022.
This is all a normal part of the emerging tech hype cycle and predicted in my core investment thesis. Despite media headlines, the emerging Metaverse is still a long-term focus for Mata/Facebook, and while some brands have retreated due to uncertainty and lack of immediate practical use cases, the Metaverse can be an active component of a brand's overall long-term strategy.
Despite challenges such as device costs and privacy concerns, the Metaverse is not disappearing but evolving towards more practical use cases. Gradually, then suddenly.
👓Read of the Week
a16z Crypto (Part of Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm) has introduced a new tool, called the State of Crypto Index, this year to track the health of the crypto industry from a technological perspective. The index represents the weighted average monthly growth of 14 industry metrics, such as verified smart contracts and transacting wallets, to offer a more nuanced measure of the state of crypto. Essentially, the index displays the rate of technological innovation and adoption of web3 in a single chart. Additionally, the tool is interactive, allowing users to customize and form their own views by tweaking the parameters. Try it here.
This was released as part of their State of Crypto 2023 report, a quick 7 point summary of which is below in case you don’t have time to read the full version:
Blockchains have more active users and more ways to engage, with 15 million active addresses hitting an all-time high last month, doubling over the last two years.
DeFi and NFT activity are rising again, with more people buying NFTs in recent months and over $100 billion traded on decentralized exchanges last month, marking the third consecutive month of positive growth in trading volume.
The number of active developers in the crypto industry has held steady, with almost 30K developers contributing to or building on crypto projects last month, increasing over 60% in the last three years.
Blockchains are scaling through promising new paths, with a proliferation of protocols and projects working to scale blockchains and Layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions accounting for 7% of total fees paid on Ethereum today.
New technologies such as "zero knowledge" systems are becoming very real, with positive trends in ZK-related research, developer activity, and usage.
The U.S. is losing its lead in web3, with the proportion of crypto developers based in the U.S. vs. the rest of the world falling 26% between 2018 and 2022.
Progress across key indicators, including market cap, developer activity, and funding activity, has increased steadily over the last decade, with a price-innovation cycle where price swings propel new ideas forward.
Below is one of my fav images from the report capturing the 4 waves so far. A good reminder to zoom out!
Video of the week 🎥
Metamask is the benchmark digital wallet that we all start with in this space. They recently launched a series of interactive lessons called “MetaMask Learn” that will show you what Web3 is, why it’s important to you, and how to use MetaMask along the way. Try it yourself at: learn.metamask.io
This week’s AI showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
Each week I showcase something amazing generated by an AI-based tool. AI is disruptive, challenging industries and driving innovation. My vision of the emerging Metaverse predicts the use of many AI tools to enhance how we work, learn, play and socialise.
This week’s example comes from the world of finance. Bloomberg has created its own AI model, called Bloomberg GPT, which is based on the same technology as OpenAI's GPT. Bloomberg GPT can perform a range of tasks such as answering questions, assessing whether headlines are positive or negative for investors, and even writing headlines based on short blurbs. It has been specifically trained on a large number of financial documents collected by the company to create a model that's especially fluent in money and business. The model's performance was enhanced by adding over 100 billion words from a proprietary dataset called FinPile. Bloomberg plans to integrate its GPT into its Terminal product, although not as a chatbot. The move by Bloomberg illustrates how developers across various industries see state-of-the-art AI like GPT as a technological advancement that can automate tasks that used to require human involvement.
You can read the full Cornell scientific paper here.
Weekly Poll ✅
Help choose what you would like to learn about on Wednesday
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.