📔 Weekly Journal: Walmart Realm goes Live 🛍🛒🌐
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Today, the usual market news as well as Walmart's virtual hub offering gamified shopping experiences for Gen Z & Gen Alpha
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 77 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
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️ 7-day heatmap below, showing the current share of the market for the top cryptocurrencies, and their change in price over the last week. Notice Ethereum pumping >20% on US Spot ETF news 🚀
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is based on volatility, social media sentiments, surveys, market momentum, and a few other bits and pieces.
🗞️ Interesting news from this week
Walmart has launched Walmart Realm, a virtual hub offering gamified shopping experiences, targeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Partnering with influencers, Walmart Realm features three immersive worlds inspired by social media trends:
'So Jelly', 'Y’allternative', and 'Go Chromatic'. These worlds provide 360-degree environments with custom soundtracks and high-fidelity visuals, where users can explore and shop for Walmart products tailored to each theme. Users can collect 'Sparks', tokens exchangeable for rewards.
I think this initiative reflects Walmart's strategy to engage younger consumers through innovative, immersive commerce, aligning with their preference for social and gaming platforms. They have indicated that future expansions will include more digital storefronts and seasonal shops. Looking forward to seeing them!
Huge celebrations this week after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved eight spot Ethereum ETFs on Thursday. Lawmakers across party lines have been advocating for the approval of spot Ethereum ETFs, arguing they deserve the same consideration as Bitcoin ETFs. The crypto community reacted swiftly, with the majority expressing excitement, while some maintained a cautious outlook:
Ondo Finance’s governance token surged 16% following the approval, highlighting the market's positive reaction. Ondo specialises in institutional financial products, like tokens offering US dollar yield or exposure to US Treasuries. Backed by a $20 million investment from Pantera Capital and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Ondo plans to shift $95 million to BlackRock’s tokenised BUIDL fund for efficiency. Advocates of tokenisation make the case that that this shift improves control over underlying assets, enhancing issuance, redemption, and on-chain visibility. With BlackRock's endorsement, the move signifies broader acceptance and potential growth for tokenisation in traditional finance.
👓 Read of the Week
This week’s read is “Ethereum ETF Approvals Mean Tokenizing Assets Now 'Completely Safe': Securitize CEO”
The article makes the case that the spot Ethereum ETFs has significant implications for real-world asset (RWA) tokenisation. The regulatory endorsement affirms Ethereum's status as a commodity, making it a secure option for institutional use.
🎥 Watch of the week
Check out Walmart’s promo video for Realm
AI 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions:
Google made another AI fumble this week. Their new "AI Overview" search feature, which provides natural language answers to queries using AI, has been drawing criticism for serving up incorrect, dangerous, and even satirical information as fact. Many of the problematic responses seem to be sourced from online forums like Reddit, where Google has a deal to incorporate user-generated content to “improve” search results.
While some of the absurd examples are humorous, like the AI recommending children eat rocks daily or confirming cartoon physics, others are deeply concerning. The AI has suggested suicide as a coping method for depression and failed to properly identify poisonous mushrooms, potentially putting lives at risk.
This issue highlights the challenges of large language models like the ones powering Google's AI search. These models are trained on vast datasets scraped from the internet, incorporating not just factual information but also misinformation, jokes, and satire. Without the ability to distinguish fiction from reality, the AI can regurgitate falsehoods with unwarranted confidence. As AI is increasingly integrated into critical systems like search engines, safeguards must be put in place to prevent harmful hallucinations and faulty outputs. Failing to do so could have disastrous real-world consequences ☠️
That’s all for the free version 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.
DCA With Me 🤑
Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy in which an investor regularly invests a fixed amount of money into a particular asset/asset class at regular intervals, regardless of its current market cycle. By doing so, the investor can reduce the impact of market volatility and potentially earn a better return over time. Motto = time IN the market beats trying to time the market
To experiment with this, I invest $50 NZD into a Digital Asset every week. Each week I will choose an asset that seems underpriced in the short term and has positive long-term potential. My timeframe is 3-5 years. I don’t give financial advice but if you want to follow along with me you can use my easycrypto.co.nz referral link to support this newsletter. Let’s dive into this week’s pick:
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