Month: March 2021

Social media executives will be answering to Congress directly for their role in January’s deadly attacks on the U.S. Capitol this week. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all appear virtually before a joint House committee Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

The hearing, held by the House’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology and the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, will focus on social media’s role in spreading disinformation, extremism and misinformation. The Energy and Commerce Committee previously held a parallel hearing reckoning with traditional media’s role in promoting those same social ills.

Earlier this month, Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone Jr., joined by more than 20 other Democrats, sent a letter to Zuckerberg pressing the Facebook CEO for answers about why tactical gear ads showed up next to posts promoting the Capitol riot. “Targeting ads in this way is dangerous and has the potential to encourage acts of violence,” the letter’s authors wrote. In late January, Facebook said that it would pause ads showing weapon accessories and related equipment.

While the subcommittee has signaled its interest in Facebook’s ad practices, organic content on the site has historically presented a much bigger problem. In the uncertain period following the election last year, the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement swelled to massive proportions on social media, particularly in Facebook groups. The company took incremental measures at the time, but that same movement, born of political misinformation, is what propelled the Capitol rioters to disrupt vote counting and enact deadly violence on January 6.

The hearing is likely to go deep on extremists organizing through Facebook groups too. Chairs from both subcommittees that will question the tech CEOs this week previously questioned Facebook about reports that the company was well aware that its algorithmic group recommendations were funneling users toward extremism. In spite of warnings from experts, Facebook continued to allow armed anti-government militias to openly organize on the platform until late 2020. And in spite of bans, some continued to do so.

The Justice Department is reportedly considering charging members of the Oath Keepers, one prominent armed U.S. militia group involved in the Capitol attack, with sedition.

Facebook plays a huge role in distributing extremist content and ferrying it to the mainstream, but it isn’t alone. Misinformation that undermines the integrity of the U.S. election results is generally just as easy to find on YouTube and Twitter, though those social networks aren’t designed to connect and mobilize people in the same way that Facebook groups do.

Facebook began to course-correct its own rules around extremism, slowly through 2020 and then quickly this January when the company removed former President Trump from the platform. Facebook’s external policy oversight board continues to review that decision and could reverse it in the coming weeks.

Over the course of the last year, Twitter made an effort to demystify some of its own policy decisions, transparently communicating changes and introducing ideas it was considering. Under Dorsey’s guidance the company treated its platform rules like a living document — one it’s begun to tinker around with in an effort to shape user behavior for the better.

If Twitter’s recent policy decision making is akin to thinking out loud, YouTube took the opposite approach. The company wasn’t as proactive in shoring up its defenses ahead of the 2020 elections and rarely responded in real-time to events. YouTube waited a full month after Biden’s victory to articulate rules that would rid the platform of disinformation declaring that the election was stolen from Trump.

Hopefully the joint hearing can dig a bit more into why that was, but we’re not counting on it. The subcommittees’ decision to bring Google CEO Sundar Pichai to testify is a bit strange considering that YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki — who has yet to be called to Congress for one of these high profile tech hearings — would make the better witness. Pichai is ultimately accountable for what YouTube does too, but in past hearings he’s proven a very polished witness who’s deft at neutralizing big picture criticism with technical detail.

Ultimately Wojcicki would have more insight into YouTube’s misinformation and extremism policies and the reason the platform has dragged its feet on matters of hate and misinformation, enforcing its own policies unevenly when it chooses to do so at all.

Source: Tech Crunch

In what looks like both an endorsement of its Premier Access streaming strategy and a tacit acknowledgement that theatrical moviegoing won’t be returning to normal anytime soon, Disney just announced that its movies “Black Widow” and “Cruella” will be coming to Disney+ at the same time that they’re released in theaters.

That means Disney+ subscribers will have the option to pay an additional, one-time $29.99 fee to watch the live action remake of “Cruella” at home on May 28, or to do the same for “Black Widow” on July 9. (The movies will later become available to all Disney+ subscribers at no extra charge.)

Disney first tested out this strategy with the release of the live action “Mulan” last fall, followed by the animated “Raya and the Last Dragon” earlier this month. The studio has released other movies, like Pixar’s “Soul,” directly to Disney+ without an extra fee, and it says it will do the same for Pixar’s “Luca” on June 18.

Other big Disney releases have been pushed back repeatedly — “Black Widow,” for example, was originally supposed to be released on May 1 of last year, and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has reportedly resisted sending it straight to Disney+. (This will be the first Marvel Studios film released since the beginning of the pandemic.)

However, Disney executives may only be willing to wait for so long. And because Marvel’s movies and new Disney+ shows are often interconnected, delaying one release can also require pushing back several others at the same time.

As vaccinations continue and COVID-19 case numbers decline from their peaks, movie theaters are reopening in major markets like Los Angeles and New York — but at reduced capacity, with box office numbers still far below what they were pre-pandemic.

In the face of this uncertainty (as well as a general shift to streaming), other Hollywood studios have adopted a variety of hybrid strategies for their 2021 theatrical slates. All Warner Bros. movies will be released simultaneously on HBO Max this year, while Paramount will be bringing its films to Paramount+ in an accelerated fashion, 30 to 45 days after the theatrical release.

Source: Tech Crunch

As exciting as the entire Perseverance mission to Mars is, one of the events most looked forward to by us Earthlings must be the first flight of Ingenuity. After conducting numerous checks and double-checks, the Perseverance team has set April 8 as the date on which they hope to attempt the first controlled powered flight on another planet.

If all goes well, then in about two weeks Ingenuity will make its first hovering flight about 10 feet above the Martian soil. But the meantime will be chock full of preparation.

In the first place the team had to identify an “airfield,” a ten-meter-square space of flat ground close at hand to Perseverance’s landing zone. Having done so, the rover will soon make its way to the exact center and confirm its location.

Then the helicopter itself must be detached from the belly of the rover, to which it is apparently locked, bolted, and cabled. These are meant to keep it secure during the chaotic landing process, and are irreversible — so the team has to be 100 percent sure this is the spot and the conditions are right. The process should take about five days.

Once Ingenuity has been detached from Perseverance and rotated to flight-ready position, it will hang just five inches above the surface and use its few remaining connections with the rover to charge its batteries. Perseverance will then set it down and quickly drive away.

“Every step we have taken since this journey began six years ago has been uncharted territory in the history of aircraft,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer of the project at JPL, in a NASA news release. “And while getting deployed to the surface will be a big challenge, surviving that first night on Mars alone, without the rover protecting it and keeping it powered, will be an even bigger one. Once we cut the cord with Perseverance and drop those final five inches to the surface, we want to have our big friend drive away as quickly as possible so we can get the Sun’s rays on our solar panel and begin recharging our batteries.”

Once the helicopter detaches, it has 30 Martian days, or sols, in which it is sure to have enough power to work — beyond that they can’t be sure.

The next couple days will involve tests of Ingenuity’s systems and a test spin-up of its rotors to 2,537 RPM. The atmosphere of Mars is only a tiny fraction of that on Earth, making flight considerably more difficult in many ways. But that’s what makes it so fun to try!

If all the tests and checks are green, then on April 8 at the earliest Ingenuity will attempt to lift off, going up to 3 meters and staying for 30 seconds. The team should know if the flight was a success within a couple hours — and maybe even get some black and white imagery from the Ingenuity’s on-board cameras. Color imagery will come a few days later.

The team will evaluate what to do next based on this first flight, and the next weeks may bring more — and farther — forays around the airfield. We’ll know more after the data comes back.

A touching inclusion on Ingenuity’s chassis is a tiny scrap of the material from the Wright brothers’ first aircraft, the Flyer. So the machine that flew first on Earth will be present in a small way at the first on another planet.

Source: Tech Crunch

Alexandr Wang has spent the last five years looking to accelerate the development of AI and machine learning algorithms with Scale AI. The company has raised upward of $270 million since inception and doesn’t show any signs of slowing.

That’s why we’re thrilled to hang out with Wang and Scale AI investor Dan Levine (Accel) on Wednesday, April 7 on Extra Crunch Live.

Extra Crunch Live is free to everyone and focuses on the relationships between founders and investors that have led to successful business building. We talk about what made them choose each other, hear about the initial pitch meetings and learn about how they make decisions about the future together.

ECL also features the Pitch Deck Teardown, wherein our esteemed guests give their live feedback on decks submitted by the audience. If you’d like to send us your deck to be featured on a future episode of Extra Crunch Live, hit up this link.

Dan Levine worked on the platform team at Dropbox before getting into venture, and before that was an entrepreneur himself, founding YC-backed Chartio. His current portfolio includes Gem, Mux, Numeracy (acquired by Snowflake), ReadMe, Scale, Searchlight, Sentry and Vercel.

Wang, for his part, was a technical lead at Quora before founding Scale. He also worked as an algorithm developer at Hudson River Trading and as a software engineer at Addepar after attending, and ultimately dropping out from, MIT, where he studied artificial intelligence.

Between the two of them, these speakers have plenty of wisdom to impart about how to ideate, fund and scale (ha!) businesses.

The episode goes down on April 7 at 12 p.m. PDT/3 p.m. EDT and is free to attend live. Only Extra Crunch members will have access to the episode on demand so be sure to register now and hang out with us.

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Techstars NYC just announced the 10 startups participating in this year’s program, making up what Managing Director Jenny Fielding described as the accelerator’s most global class yet.

“We’ve always had applications from around the world and I was always able to take companies from anywhere,” Fielding said. “But the truth is, when you run Techstars New York, if you don’t have five companies from New York, there’s a feeling that you’re letting the ecosystem down a little bit.”

Now that the program is almost entirely virtual, Fielding said she felt free to “open up the geos.” In fact, not a single one of the startups is based in New York — instead, there are multiple San Francisco and Washington, D.C. companies, as well as others based in the France, Israel, Kenya, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Fielding argued that even without New York startups, the accelerator still has a New York identity, because it connects global startups with the New York ecosystem.

After conducting last year’s accelerator virtually, Fielding said the hardest element to recreate has been the in-person camaraderie between the founders. So she’s hoping to have an in-person meetup here at the end of May, although the logistics of that meetup will depend on what’s safe and legal at that time (and what the entrepreneurs are comfortable with).

Other aspects of the virtual experience are likely to stick around post-pandemic. After all, Techstars hosts around 200 mentors per class, and Fielding said the virtual program marked the first time “nobody was late.” Similarly, she suggested that demo day remains an “open question,” as an extended period of investor meetings seems to be driving more fundraising for the startups.

Meanwhile, here are the startups:

• Dash (Nairobi, Kenya) — An alternative, cross-currency payment network for African consumers.
• Detach.ai (Lisbon, Portugal) — An AI operations platform focused on resolving issues proactively.
• Elanza Wellness (San Francisco and London, U.K.) — A fertility platform that brings together medical, lifestyle and mental health data.
• Gable (San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel) — A “workspace as a service” company helping businesses find neighborhood workspaces for their employees.
• Hiitide (Chicago) — A marketplace that turns books into virtual book clubs and courses.
• OneVillage (Washington, D.C.) — An online wishlist, planning tool and retailer for cancer patients and their supporters.
• Paerpay (Boston) — A contactless payment platform that doesn’t require additional hardware or app downloads.
• Phalanx (Washington, D.C.) — A company that secures AI systems using data, model validation and vulnerability scanning.
• Phood (Boulder) — A startup digitizing university student cards so they can be used payments in various online services.
• Prediko (London, U.K. and Paris, France) — A startup focused on e-commerce inventory planning.

Source: Tech Crunch

The pandemic-induced growth of e-commerce is, by now, now well documented.

What is happening in the app ecosystem that supports e-commerce? Is it growing? Are we likely to see consolidations or IPOs? Are there superapps that will emerge?

This post is less about conclusions and more about taking you along while I go through the rabbit hole to satiate my own curiosity.

I see all three trends forming:

1. Superapps are likely to emerge. I think companies like Bold Commerce will be among the earliest superapps.
2. There will be consolidations anchored around large SaaS players and roll-ups powered by private equity funds.
3. There are players like Tiny that acquire early-stage firms and let them run independently.

The closest match to the growing e-commerce stack is the marketing automation stack. While there are significant overlaps, it’s fascinating to compare and contrast the growth of these ecosystems and what drives consolidation.

Between 2015 and 2021, the martech stack grew from 1,800 to 8,000, meaning it roughly doubles every three years.

The explosion of the martech stack is common knowledge and is well documented by Scott Brinker and his famous supergraphics. What’s worth noting is that the consolidation we expected to happen is happening, and yet the pace of new companies coming up in the space makes up for the consolidation — and some more.

According to Brinker, the martech landscape grew 5,233% between 2011 and 2020. The fastest-growing category within martech in 2020 is data and governance, which grew in numbers by 25%. The martech app ecosystem more than tripled between 2015 to 2018, powered by the growth of SaaS and e-commerce industries.

I am an avid tracker of this space, but I am also interested in how we can apply martech’s evolution to the e-commerce stack. The e-commerce stack also grew 3.5 times between 2017 and 2020. But much of the growth is ahead, and so is the upcoming consolidation.

Source: Tech Crunch

BMW Group and California utility Pacific Gas & Electric are rolling out the next phase of a pilot that aims to test — and learn — how electric vehicles could support the integration of renewable energy on the electric grid.

The ChargeForward program, now entering its third phase, is open to PG&E customers who drive a BMW electric or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. Around 3,000 drivers can sign up to voluntarily allow their vehicle to be “smart charged” when electricity demand is low and renewable energy availability is high. Drivers will earn incentives for participating in the program, including $150 at sign-up and an additional $250 per year.

The program is one of the longest-running partnerships between an electric utility and an automaker. The first two phases had only 100 and 400 participants respectively, so this latest phase presents a marked expansion for the collaboration. It’s a sensible alliance for two industries that are preparing for the gradual decline in sales of internal combustion engines. For electric utilities, this means planning for a drastic increase in customer demand on a grid that is increasingly powered by renewable resources like solar and wind.   

Image Credits: BMW

“Let’s assume someone plugs in at home on a Saturday morning at 9 a.m. and sets their departure time for 4 p.m. that day,” Adam Langton, BMW’s Energy Services manager who oversees the ChargeForward program, explained. “The ChargeForward software system communicates with the vehicle and determines that the vehicle is more than half full, needing two hours of charging to fill up the battery. The system then evaluates the person’s home electricity rate, renewable energy availability and congestion on the grid in their neighborhood. On this day, there is no congestion on the grid and solar energy will be very high in the afternoon. The ChargeForward system directs the vehicle to start charging at 1 p.m. and complete charging by 3 p.m. This allows the driver to get a full battery prior to their departure time.” 

Electricity demand tends to follow a “duck curve” shape, peaking in the early evening as people return home from work — right as solar energy resources go offline. And people tend to charge their EVs overnight. To meet this demand, fossil-fuel-emitting resources like natural gas ramp up.

The result? More greenhouse gas emissions. A study published by MIT researchers in “Environmental Science and Technology” found that in California overnight EV charging produces around 74% more GHGs than midday charging. (Variations in the grid mix matter here — in wind-heavy regions in the Midwest or Texas, overnight EV charging may make the most sense as lots of wind tend to be generated overnight.)  

The ChargePoint program aims to take advantage of the ample renewable resources available during the day and reduce GHG emissions in the process. Participating customers will enter their charging preferences and departure times on a BMW ChargeForward mobile app. BMW will also receive real-time information about the grid, such as the availability of renewable energy relative to the customer’s location, and it will use this data to calculate an optimal charging window and send it automatically to the vehicle. Customers will be able to opt-out of the charging shift at any point through the app.

While California is known for pursuing ambitious clean energy goals — including codifying into law a landmark target of achieving 100% renewable and zero-carbon electricity by 2045 — the state has also set a goal of getting 5 million EVs on the road by 2030. And that’s no surprise, considering that transportation is the single largest source of GHG emissions in the state. 

BMW and PG&E will also collaborate in a lab setting to explore vehicle-to-grid technologies that enable EVs to discharge electricity to the power grid. Such bidirectional functionality could allow EVs to be used as big backup generators in the case of emergencies or as distributed nano power plants to help balance the grid throughout the day.

The third phase of the ChargeForward program begins in mid-April and runs through March 2023. 

Source: Tech Crunch

Energy consumption has become the latest flashpoint for cryptocurrency. Critics decry it as an energy hog while proponents hail it for being less intensive than the current global economy. 

One such critic, DigiEconomist founder Alex de Vries, said he’s “never seen anything that is as inefficient as bitcoin.” 

On the other side of the debate, research by ARK Investment Management found the Bitcoin ecosystem consumes less than 10% of the energy required for the traditional banking system. While it’s true the banking system serves far more people, cryptocurrency is still maturing and, like any industry, the early infrastructure stage is particularly intensive.

The cryptocurrency mining industry, which garnered almost $1.4 billion in February 2021 alone, is not yet unusually terrible for the environment compared to other aspects of modern life in an industrialized society. Even de Vries told TechCrunch that if eco-conscious regulators “took all possible actions against Bitcoin, it’s unlikely you’d get all governments to go along with that” mining regulation.

“Ideally, change comes from within,” de Vries said, adding he hopes Bitcoin Core developers will alter the software to require less computational energy. “I think Bitcoin consumes half as much energy as all the world’s data centers at the moment.”    

According to the University of Cambridge’s bitcoin electricity consumption index, bitcoin miners are expected to consume roughly 130 Terawatt-hours of energy (TWh), which is roughly 0.6% of global electricity consumption. This puts the bitcoin economy on par with the carbon dioxide emissions of a small, developing nation like Sri Lanka or Jordan. Jordan, in particular, is home to 10 million people. It’s impossible to say how many people use bitcoin every month, and they certainly use it less often than residents in Amman use Jordanian dinars. But CoinMetrics data indicates more than 1 million bitcoin addresses are active, daily, out of up to 106 million accounts active in the past decade, as tallied by the exchange Crypto.com. 

“We get the total population of unique bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) users by counting the total number of addresses from listed exchanges, subtracting addresses owned by the same users on multiple exchanges,” said a Crypto.com spokesperson. “We then further reduce this number by accounting for users who own both ETH and BTC.”

That’s a lot of people using these financial networks. Plus, many bitcoin mining businesses rely on environmentally friendly energy sources like hydropower and capturing natural gas leaks from oil fields. A mining industry veteran, Compass Mining COO Thomas Heller, said Chinese hydropower mines in Sichuan and Yunnan get cheaper electricity during the wet season. They continue to use hydropower all year, he added, although it’s less profitable during the annual dry season. 

“The electricity price outside of May to October [wet season] is much more expensive,” Heller said. “However, some farms do have water supply in other parts of the year.”

Basically, cryptocurrency mining doesn’t inherently produce extra carbon emissions because computers can use power from any source. In 2019, the digital asset investing firm CoinShares released a study estimating up to 73% of bitcoin miners use at least some renewable energy as part of their power supply, including hydropower from China’s massive dams. All of the top five bitcoin mining pools, consortiums for miners to cooperate for better profit margins, rely heavily on hydropower. This statistic doesn’t impress de Vries, who pointed out that Cambridge researchers found renewable energy makes up 39% of miners’ total energy consumption. 

“I put one solar panel on my power plant, I also have a mixture of renewable energy,” de Vries said. 

In terms of geographic distribution, Cambridge data indicates Chinese bitcoin mining operations represent around 65% of the network’s power, called hashrate. In some regions, like China’s Xinjiang province, bitcoin miners also burn coal for electricity. Beyond cryptocurrency mining, this province is known for human rights abuses against the Uighur population, which China is violently suppressing as part of a broader struggle to capitalize on the region’s natural resources. When critics sound the alarm about cryptocurrency mining and energy consumption, this is often the dynamic they’re concerned about. 

On the other hand, North American miners make up roughly 8% of the global hashrate, followed closely by miners in Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Iran. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for the creation of a national bitcoin mining strategy in 2020, aiming to grow the Islamic nation’s influence over this financial system despite banking sanctions imposed by the United States. 

Wherever nations and organizations offer the most profitable mining regulations, those are the places where bitcoin mining will proliferate. Chinese dominance, to date, can be at least partially attributed to government subsidies for the mining industry. As such, nations like China and Norway offer subsidies that incentivize bitcoin miners to use local hydropower sources. 

As the Seetee research report by Aker ASA, a $6 billion public company based in Norway, said: “The financiers of min­ing op­er­a­tions will in­sist on us­ing the cheap­est en­er­gy and so by de­f­i­n­i­tion it will be elec­tric­i­ty that has no bet­ter eco­nom­ic use.”

The best way to make cryptocurrency mining more eco-friendly is to support lawmakers that want to encourage mining in regions that already have underutilized energy sources. 

When it comes to North America, Blockstream CEO Adam Back says his company’s mining facilities, with 300 megawatts in mining capacity, rely on a mix of industrial power sources like hydropower. He added Blockstream is exploring solar-powered bitcoin mining options as a sort of “retirement home” for outdated machines. 

“With solar energy, if you’re only online 50% of the time, that’s something to consider in terms of the cost analysis,” Back said. “That’s a better option for older machines, after you’ve already recouped the costs of the equipment.”

Due to surging cryptocurrency prices, there’s now a global shortage of bitcoin mining equipment, Back added, with demand outpacing supply and production taking up to six months per machine. Emma Todd, founder of the consultancy MMH Blockchain Group, said the shortage is driving up the price of mining machines. 

“For example, a Bitmain Antminer S9 mining machine that used to cost $35 – $55 in July 2020 on the secondary market, now costs about $275 – $300,” Todd said. “This means that most, if not all mining companies looking to purchase new or secondary equipment, are all experiencing the same challenges. As a result of the global chip shortage, most new mining equipment that is scheduled to come out in the next few months, will almost certainly be delayed.”

Critics like de Vries point out that, due to market forces, industrial miners are unlikely to reduce their power consumption with new machines, which are more efficient. 

“If you have more efficient machines but earn the same money, then people just run two machines instead of one,” de Vries said. 

And yet, because cryptocurrency prices are rising faster than new miners can be constructed, Back said “retiring” old machines with renewable energy sources becomes more profitable than simply abandoning them for new equipment. In addition, Back said, robust bitcoin mining infrastructure can support communities rather than draining resources. This is because bitcoin miners can help store and arbitrage energy flows. 

“You can turn miners on and off if you get to a surge prices situation, you can use the power for people to heat their homes if that’s more urgent or more profitable,” Back said. “Bitcoin could actually support power grids.” 

Meanwhile, just north of the Canadian border, Upstream Data president Steve Barbour said a growing number of traditional oil and gas companies are quietly ramping up their own bitcoin mining operations. 

“Right now it’s hydro and coal. That’s the majority of the big industrial mining. But on the global scale, that’s going to shift more toward any cheap power, including natural gas,” Barbour said. “Oil fields already have cheap energy with the venting flares, the waste gas, there’s potential for approximately 160 gigawatts [of mining power] this year.”

Upstream Data helps oil companies set up and operate bitcoin miners in a way that captures waste and low quality gas, which they couldn’t sell before, totaling 100 deployments across North America. These companies rarely go public with their bitcoin mining operations, Barbour said, because they’re concerned about attracting negative press from Bitcoin critics. 

“They are definitely concerned about reputational risk, but I think that’s going to change soon because you have big, credible companies like Tesla involved with Bitcoin,” Barbour said. 

Even within the cryptocurrency industry, there are many people who dislike how power-intensive bitcoin mining is and are experimenting with different mining methods. For example, the Ethereum community is trying to switch to a “proof-of-stake” (PoS) mining model, powering the network with locked up coins instead of Bitcoin’s intensive “proof-of-work” (PoW) model. 

As the name might suggest, PoW requires a lot of computational “work.” That’s what miners do, lots and lots of math problems that are so difficult the computers require a lot of electricity. With regards to Ethereum, which currently runs on PoW but will theoretically run on PoS in a few years, there are hundreds of thousands of daily active addresses, sometimes half as many as Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin, a few industrial mining projects with facilities in China generate more than half of the Ethereum network’s power. Each Ethereum transaction requires nearly as much energy as two American households use per day. 

“What I like about the Ethereum community is at least they are thinking about how to solve the problem,” de Vries said. “What I don’t like is they’ve been talking about it for a few years and haven’t been able to actually do it.”

The Ethereum ecosystem uses enough energy every year to power the nation of Panama. Like Bitcoin, each Ethereum transaction costs enough for electricity costs that the money could also buy a nice lunch. Both of these networks require enough power to fuel small countries, although Ethereum usually has less than half of the million daily users that Bitcoin has. It’s clear cryptocurrency transactions require more power than Visa transactions. However, a cryptocurrency isn’t just a payments company. It is a whole currency system. 

If the bitcoin market cap were ranked as a country, by the value of the money supply, Bitcoin would come in fifth place behind Japan. And that’s not even considering adjacent ecosystems like Ethereum. In short, power consumption in the global Bitcoin economy is comparable to that of some other industrialized financial systems. It is inefficient, as de Vries points out, as are many of the systems used in emerging economies. Out of millions of users, thousands of people around the world rely on cryptocurrency for income. They are generally optimistic about the cryptocurrency ecosystem, believing it will become more efficient as the technology matures. 

“I see Bitcoin mining increasingly playing a role in the transition to a clean, modern and more decentralized energy system,” said one such Canadian business consultant, Magdalena Gronowska. “Miners can provide grid balancing and flexible demand-response services and improve renewables integration.”  

Source: Tech Crunch

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

This week we caught up with Yext CEO Howard Lerman and Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader. Yext builds data products for small businesses, and is betting its future on search products. Smartsheet is a software company that works in the collaboration, no-code and future-of-work spaces.

They are pretty different companies, really. But what they did share this time ’round the earnings cycle were macro notes, or details regarding their forward financial guidance and what economic conditions they anticipate. As a macro-nerd, it piqued my interest.

Yext cited a number of macroeconomic headwinds when it reported its Q4 results. And tying its future results somewhat to an uncertain macro picture, the company said that it is “basing [its] guidance on the business conditions [it sees for itself] and [its] customers currently, with the macro economy, which remains sluggish, and customers who remain cautious,” per a transcript.

Lerman told The Exchange that it was not clear when the world would open — something that matters for Yext’s location-focused products — so the company was guiding for the year as if nothing would change. Wall Street didn’t love it, but if the economy improves Yext won’t have high hurdles to jump over. This is one tack that a company can take when it talks guidance.

Smartsheet took a slightly different approach, saying in its earnings call that its “fiscal year ’22 guidance contemplates a gradual improvement in the macro environment in the second half of the year.” Mader said in an interview that his company wasn’t hiring economists, but was instead simply listening to what others were saying.

He also said that the macro climate matters more in saturated markets, which he doesn’t think that Smartsheet is in; so, its results should be more impacted by things more like “the secular shift to the cloud and digital transformation,” to quote its earnings call.

What the economy will do this year matters quite a lot for startups. An improving economy could boost interest rates, making money a bit more expensive and bonds more attractive. Valuations could see modest downward pressure in that case. And venture capital could slow fractionally. But with Yext forecasting as if it was facing a flat road and Smartsheet only expecting things to pick up pace from Q3 on, it’s likely that what we have now is mostly what we’ll get.

And things are pretty damn good for startups and late-stage liquidity at the moment. So, smooth sailing ahead for startup-land? At least as far as our current perspective can discern.

We still have a grip of notes from Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt on how to take an old-school software company and turn it into a cloud-first company, and Jamf CEO Dean Hager about packaging discrete software products. More to come from them in fits.

Various and sundry

There were rounds big and small this week. Companies like Squarespace raised $300 million, while Airtable raised $277 million. On the smaller-end of the spectrum, my favorite round of the week was a modest $2.9 million raise from Copy.ai.

But there were other rounds that TechCrunch didn’t get to that are still worth our time. So, here are a few more for you to dig into this weekend:

• A so-called pre-Series A round for Lilli, a U.K.-based startup that uses sensors and other tech to track the well-being of folks who might need help to live on their own. Using tech to take care of folks is always good by me. The deal was worth £4.5 million, per UKTN.
• An IPO for Tuya, a Chinese software company that raised $915 million in its American debut. Chinese IPOs on American indices were once a big deal. They are less frequent now. Surprised that I missed this one, but, hey, there’s been a lot going on.
• And the Republic round, worth $36 million, that is banking on the recently-expanded American crowdfunding regulations. Some startups have seen success with the approach, including Juked.gg.

Upcoming attractions

Next week is Y Combinator Demo Day week, so expect a lot of early-stage coverage on the blog. Here’s a preview. From The Exchange we’re looking back into insurtech (with data from WeFox and Insurify), and talking about Austin-based software startup AlertMedia’s decision to sell itself to private-equity instead of raising more traditional capital.

And to leave you with some reading material, make sure you’ve picked through our look at the valuations of free-trading apps, the issues with dual-class shares, the recent IPO win for the New York scene and how unequal the global venture capital market really is.

Closing, this BigTechnology piece was good, as was this Not Boring essay. Hugs, and have a lovely respite,

Alex

Source: Tech Crunch