Blockchain cloud infrastructure service provider W3BCloud is set to go public via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) dubbed the Social Leverage Acquisition Corp I (SLAC).
According to the transaction document, the SLAC vehicle is being sponsored by Social Leverage, a leading early-stage VC. The proposed funds to be raised via the SPAC are pegged at about $100 million.
Going public through a special purpose acquisition company is an alternative route designed for startups looking to raise funds and trade on public bourses.
They are generally a faster-track option for promising startups, provided they have a matching business design with their sponsoring SPACs. Per the proposed merger deal, W3BCloud is on track to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
W3BCloud is one of the promising startups that hope to be the go-to cloud infrastructure provider for the emerging Web3.0 ecosystems. Currently, the startup ticks the box for providing a quality supply chain and access delivery through its integration of AMD technology. The startup’s core partnership also extends to ConsenSys, which gives it software and protocol insights.
Over the years, the development of Web3.0 focused on cloud infrastructure providers has progressed in a limiting way. This is because crypto-based startups hardly patronize these decentralized cloud providers as preference remains largely for centralized services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
W3BCloud aims to change the narrative, and it is developing the right data centres, most of which are in the United States. The firm is exploring avenues to bolster its infrastructure with the funds raised and the remaining $345 million cash it has in its trust.
W3BCloud is riding on the strength of both its founders and the expertise of the veterans from Social Leverage. With the clamour for Web3.0 soaring remarkably this period, W3BCloud is hopeful it has a large market potential for its products.
Heather Morgan, pictured, cast herself as an expert in “cold email” – unsolicited communications – and posted dozens of rap videos were she adopted her alter-ego, Razzlekhan.
Eyepress – Newscom
Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein raised money from Mark Cuban and other well-known investors. His wife, Heather Morgan, built a following as a quirky rapper and social media luminary.
By Cyrus Farivar, David Jeans and Thomas Brewster
Heather Morgan and her husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, seemed to lead a successful life as tech entrepreneurs and thought leaders. Lichtenstein invested in startups alongside heavyweights like Marc Benioff and had launched his own company backed by Mark Cuban. Morgan styled herself as a prolific thought leader, posting online articles about women in leadership, and even had an alter ego as a goofy YouTube rapper called Razzlekhan, who talked about success and money.
But they had a secret, according to investigators with the IRS. Morgan, 31, and her husband, Lichtenstein, 34, were arrested in New York on Tuesday and charged with trying to launder $3.6 billion in bitcoin stolen by hackers from the Bitfinex exchange six years ago. If convicted of the charges against them, each could serve up to 25 years in prison. Court documents unsealed this week detail an elaborate scheme to launder and conceal the origins of the stolen bitcoins. Lichtenstein and Morgan are not charged with perpetrating the hack.
Forbes found that as the pair allegedly used a digital wallet to launder the cryptocurrency, they simultaneously styled themselves as self-made entrepreneurs, investing in companies together and, in Morgan’s case, establishing herself as a social media personality.
Illya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31, pictured in mugshots, were arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday Feb 8, 2022.
EPN/Newscom
Since meeting about a decade ago, the two worked hard to gain a foothold in Silicon Valley and New York tech circles. Lichtenstein had proceeded through a series of failed ventures, including running a Ron Paul fan website and setting up a brain-boosting supplements business before co-founding MixRank, now a venture-backed sales and marketing company. Lichtenstein left MixRank abruptly in 2016, the same year that Bitfinex was hacked.
During that time, Morgan cast herself as an expert in “cold email” – unsolicited communications – and parlayed that into writing gigs and appearances at sales conferences.
“She came across as a smooth operator but never in a way that raised suspicions,” said Travis Lybbert, a University of California, Davis economics professor, who hired Morgan as a research assistant in 2011. “She was a very confident young person, professional, who would look for opportunities and create them.”
People who knew the couple said they were shocked by the arrests. Lybbert, in a phone interview with Forbes, said Morgan had been a promising student whose understanding of the Middle East was impressive. She “earned a place” as a co-author on the academic book chapter that they wrote together, he said: “Lessons from the Arab Spring: Food Security and Stability in the Middle East and North Africa.”
The professor said that he had given a guest lecture in one of Morgan’s classes when she was a student at UC Davis, and she approached him later, after her graduation, seeking research opportunities that could aid her “graduate studies in economics, especially in international and developmental economics.”
”She was always looking for the next thing and had really high aspirations for what she wanted to do professionally,” Lybbert said.
Lybbert also said that while he and Morgan were working together in 2011 and 2012, Morgan was ambitious and busy. After graduating from UC Davis, she traveled to Hong Kong, where she worked as an event planner, while also applying to graduate school in economics and starting her own copywriting consulting company, SalesFolk, Lybbert said.
According to Morgan’s LinkedIn page, she moved on from Hong Kong to Cairo, where she completed a masters degree in economics and international development at the American University. Morgan returned to California in 2013 and took a job with a company called Tamatem Inc., an Arabic-language mobile-games publisher, which was incubated in 500 Startups. At about the same time, Morgan launched SalesFolk. Archival copies of her website from June 2013 describe her as an “analytics ninja,” a “published author,” and as having seven years of copywriting experience.
It appears she crossed paths with Lichtenstein around this time. Listed as a testimonial at the bottom of her Salesfolk web page is a comment from Lichtenstein, who gave her services a glowing review, calling her “intense, brilliant, and laser focused,” and adding that “a single hour of brainstorming with Heather pays for itself immediately.”
In 2014, Morgan began blogging on her own site, econgoat.com, where she described herself as a “shameless economist in pearls.” In a post on April 14, 2014, she wrote: “While my risk-loving behavior may have brought me more chaos than most people could handle, mixed with some failures, it also led me to my biggest wins.” A few months later, Morgan interviewed Lichtenstein for her own YouTube channel, asking him about his company, MixRank, in a video entitled “Get your first $1 million in enterprise sales with zero marketing spend.”
By now, Morgan was getting recognition beyond her own websites. In August 2015, she was interviewed online by a sales management software company called Ambition, which described her as someone who was “rewriting the playbook on cold email outreach for [software-as-a-service] companies all over the world.” Brian Trautschold, now Ambition’s COO, who did the interview with Morgan, expressed shock that she had been accused of a federal crime. It’s “crazy,” he told Forbes in a phone interview. “She was speaking at SaaS conferences and there was no indication that the person wasn’t focused on consulting on email…It’s a shock, seven-plus years later, to see the other side of the story kind of come out.”
A few months before the Bitfinex hack in August 2016, Morgan became a freelance columnist at Inc. magazine, which described her as having gone from “sleeping on couches to creating a bootstrapped seven-figure business called SalesFolk.” The following year, she also became a contributor to the ForbesWomen section on Forbes.com, where she posted articles about topics ranging from music to food. In one post, Morgan discussed how she had a speech impediment growing up and was bullied by other students in school.
In that 2019 Forbes post, she hinted at previous legal issues: She wrote that during a business trip to Asia, she received unspecific “legal threats,” learned that her employees were “fudging numbers,” and was bullied by longtime friends. Forbes removed her as a contributor in September 2021 during a routine semiannual review.
It was because of professional setbacks like these, she wrote in the Forbes post, that she decided to become a rapper, adopting the name Razzlekhan. In an Instagram post in January 2019, Morgan is wearing a black leather jacket while another woman stands behind her. “So some people in the tech world are a little bit worried about me rapping and are not sure if I should have a rap song, also some corporate people,” she said. “But you know what, I remember just as many people telling me not to take a risk, not to start a company, not to be an entrepreneur.” Many of Razzlekhan’s YouTube videos have been made private or been removed since Tuesday evening.
Morgan and Lichtenstein appeared in a detention hearing Tuesday before a federal magistrate judge.
The Associated Press
Since the Bitfinex hack in 2016, the couple’s online posts show an extravagant lifestyle. Morgan documented their jet-setting from Panama to Malaysia and Mexico on social media platforms.
The same month the alleged hack took place, Morgan posted a photo to Instagram. She and Lichtenstein are sitting on a blue satin couch, laughing. “I always love getting into trouble w/ this crazy guy,” she wrote. “Thanks for always inspiring me to be a better entrepreneur!”
Lichtenstein, for his part, had established himself as a minor player in the New York tech investment world, where, according to the Justice Department, he was living in an apartment at 75 Wall Street, an exclusive block where a typical condo is valued upward of $1 million.
It was an image of success he had been building for a decade. After graduating with a major in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lichtenstein had sought like-minded entrepreneurs and went to Silicon Valley, where he met other techno-libertarians, according to his trail of now-defunct websites and businesses identified by Forbes. One of his more notable sites was RonPaulFan.com, which contained a stream of news and support for the one-time Republican presidential candidate who became a famous advocate for cryptocurrency. According to the site’s banner, it was the “#1 source for all Ron Paul news.”
Lichtenstein also dabbled in selling brain supplements around this time, claiming to have created one called Instant Focus that promised to “turbocharge your productivity,” which he said helped him “code longer and be more productive” in a post on Hacker News in October 2010. He also launched weight loss sites, including MyNaturalWeightLossDiet.com, which was pushing colon cleanses and acai supplements, and what appeared to be a series of dating websites, adultfriendgrinder.com and findgeekgirls.com.
While those enterprises failed to get off the ground, he found more success as co-founder of MixRank, a data-driven-marketing startup, which was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program in 2011. At the time, Lichtenstein was trying to establish himself as a Silicon Valley thought leader, in a blog entitled Influence Hacks. In one post he wrote, “The amount of money you make has nothing to do with how hard you work … What markets really reward is RISK.”
Among early MixRank backers were billionaire investor Mark Cuban and the 500 Startups venture capital fund, according to Pitchbook, but both sold their stakes to an undisclosed buyer sometime between 2012 and 2015. MixRank’s other founder, Scott Milliken, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment at the time of publication. In an email, Cuban said he “never met” Lichtenstein.
Later, Lichtenstein founded a blockchain-based cybersecurity company called Endpass and an investment business called DemandPath, alongside Morgan. In just over a decade, he was also investing in startups. Those included Routable, where he was an angel investor alongside more than a dozen other investors, including billionaire Bay Area heavyweights like Scott Belsky, Box founder Aaron Levie and Salesforce founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff. There is no indication that Lichtenstein knew or communicated with the other investors.
In one LinkedIn post from 2021, Lichtenstein wrote that he was “proud to have been among the earliest investors in Routable.” Omri Mor, cofounder and CEO of Routable responded, “Proud to have you with us from the start.” Mor didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Lichtenstein has not been nearly as prolific on social media as his wife. Over the past decade, his Twitter account was quiet for nearly seven years, from 2013 until 2020. But in January 2021, he complained about what he called “#BigTechCensorship.” Last month, he took aim at the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, lampooning him over a meme he posted. “How wild that billionaires who can do anything in the world choose to prioritize posting second rate memes on Twitter?”
Reached by phone, Liechtenstein’s father, Yevgeniy Lichtenstein, declined to speak about his son’s predicament. “I don’t want to discuss it, I’m sorry,” the elder Lichtenstein said.
A 20-page affidavit written by Christopher Janczewski, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service, accuses Morgan and Lichtenstein of moving the stolen bitcoins “through thousands of transactions to over a dozen accounts” in their own names and businesses. One of those companies was SalesFolk, Morgan’s copywriting consulting company, according to the affidavit.
In June 2019, Morgan allegedly changed a personal bitcoin account to a business account that she had at a specific virtual currency exchange (identified in court documents as “VCE 7”), “in order to receive less scrutiny from VCE 7 about her transactions as she liquidated her BTC in greater volume,” the affidavit reads.
But it was Lichtenstein’s use of a cloud-storage account that led to the unraveling of the alleged plot. The government decrypted a file there that contained a list of 2,000 virtual currency addresses, along with corresponding private keys. Almost all of those addresses were linked to the Bitfinex heist, according to the Justice Department, which said the crypto also passed through entities owned by Morgan.
Lichtenstein and Morgan’s counsel, Anirudh Bansal, did not respond to Forbes’ requests for comment.
During a detention hearing Tuesday before a federal magistrate judge, Morgan and Lichtenstein were ordered released on bond, over prosecutors’ objections. The objections included the fact that Morgan allegedly “tried to lock her cellular phone to prevent law enforcement examination” and that the pair “engaged in extraordinarily complex laundering” of some of the bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex. In the end, however, Chief Judge Beryl Howell ordered the husband and wife to remain in custody. A hearing has been scheduled for Friday.
In August 2019, Morgan gave a lecture on “How to Social Engineer Your Way Into Anything” to a group in New York City. When asked by an audience where the line should be drawn in social engineering, Morgan responded: “I do believe that the ends justify the means sometimes,” she said. “My end goals aren’t bad or evil. I’m not trying to scam someone out of money or get someone hurt in any way.”
In a report aimed at assessing threats to Cloud users, Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team said that some attackers are exploiting “poorly configured” accounts to mine cryptocurrency.
On Wednesday, the Google team said out of 50 analyzed incidents that compromised the Google Cloud Protocol, 86% were related to crypto mining. The hackers used the compromised Cloud accounts to access resources from individuals’ CPUs or GPUs to mine tokens or take advantage of storage space when mining coins on the Chia Network.
However, Google’s team reported that many of the attacks were not limited to a single malicious action like crypto mining, but also as a staging point to conduct other hacks and identify other vulnerable systems. According to the cybersecurity team, the actors usually gained access to Cloud accounts as a result of “poor customer security practices” or “vulnerable third-party software.”
“While data theft did not appear to be the objective of these compromises, it remains a risk associated with the cloud asset compromises as bad actors start performing multiple forms of abuse,” said the Cybersecurity Action Team. “The public Internet-facing Cloud instances were open to scanning and brute force attacks.”
The speed of the attacks was also noteworthy. According to Google’s analysis, hackers were able to download crypto mining software to the compromised accounts within 22 seconds in the majority of the incidents analyzed. Google suggested that “the initial attacks and subsequent downloads were scripted events not requiring human intervention” and said it would be nearly impossible to manually intervene to stop such incidents once they started.
Related:Google bans 8 ‘deceptive’ crypto apps from Play Store
An attack on multiple users’ Cloud accounts to gain access to additional computing power is not a new approach to illicitly mining crypto. ‘Cryptojacking’, as it is known by many in the space, has had several high-profile incidents including a hack of Capital One in 2019 to allegedly use credit card users’ servers to mine crypto. However, browser-based cryptojacking as well as mining crypto after gaining access through deceptive app downloads is also still a problem for many users.
The first commercial transactions were face-to-face. It was a good way to ensure trust: the other person had to be physically present. And if they ran off, at least you could chase after them. But with the advent of technology, a divide has been created between people. Over the years, products evolved to bridge this gap. Mainframe computers became desktops, laptops and then mobile devices. The more intimate the interface became, the ‘closer’ individuals could become.
While this shift from physical to digital has brought many benefits, it’s also had less welcome consequences. As we’ve moved more and more online, digital platforms and processes have failed to keep up. We can’t trust them to collect, store or share our personal information safely. In fact, consumers’ information is frequently abused and misused without our knowledge or consent.
Businesses are impacted, too. They’ve been forced to add extra safeguards to outdated password-based login systems. We’ve seen the rise of 2FA, SMS, card readers, device IDs, and more – all of which are creating more friction in our everyday lives. Despite this, data breaches and identity fraud are not just commonplace – they’re actually increasing.
In 2021, the average cost of a data breach reached an all-time high of $4.24 million, even though businesses are already spending millions more to combat financial crime and meet their regulatory and compliance responsibilities.
Faced with this, and the fact that we’ve passed the peak of the smartphone era, with market saturation and a lack of real innovation leading to declining sales over the last few years. The obvious question is: what comes next?
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The Need for a New Paradigm
There’s no denying that the ecosystem of modern digital services has made so many things more convenient and personal for a wide variety of users. Social media, open banking and similar platforms are changing the way the average person integrates in the world.
The reality is that, despite connecting us in so many ways, these devices and systems have taken a high degree of both control and data out of the individual’s hands and placed it in the grasp of others. From rogue hackers to data mining service providers, users have never been more at risk of having their well being attacked by forces out of their control. Despite — or really because of — the increased intimacy of these systems, consumers have found themselves potentially more vulnerable than ever before.
On top of this, businesses and developers have become increasingly reliant on the modern mobile device as the primary vector for delivering services. This is not entirely surprising, as it has become both novel and ultimately expected by many customers, but this still limits the potential. Mobile devices really just represent an interface, but the future is breaking the tether to any specific interface, bringing individuals to the forefront.
Beyond The Device
We’re already seeing new innovations that are making the latest systems more personal and powerful, bringing these platforms into a more intimate relationship with users, one that transcends how they are accessed.
This means that soon, customers won’t be locked into a specific phone, tablet, or operating system to access the online world. Their digital identity, just like their physical one, will travel with them wherever they go via the rollout of biometrically enforced digital IDs that live in the cloud and can be cryptographically proven and are tamper-proof.
Latest technological developments provide the means for a brand new combination of wireless communication, biometric identification, and cryptography – with blockchain technology and distributed encrypted cloud storage setting the stage for a new wave of the financial system.
In the current model, a user must interface with a verified phone or tablet for every transaction. But now, as we usher in the next big technological epoch, cryptographically enforced digital sovereign ID will provide ‘verified authentication and authorisation combined with verifiable credentials’ for users to access online services via cloud based solutions that not only work for the consumer, but the business and the compliance team too.
A wide range of emerging technologies and techniques will lead to the creation of a true Self-Sovereign ID, or SSI. These include Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), and Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI). These solutions use cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and blockchain elements to create systems of identification that can be cryptographically proven without the need for centralised certification.
DIDs enable users to prove their credentials independent of any centralised body or without having to give away their personal data. Infrastructure approaches like KERI will allow identity verification with or without accessing a blockchain providing a self certifying root of trust. By combining these techniques with biometrics and unique identifiers, it’s possible to create financial transactions that are secure and tied to an individual’s digital identity in a private and secure manner.
Real-World Benefits
People want a sense of control. They want the confidence that no one can access their data without permission. And they want stronger authentication than a password that’s all too easily forgotten – or compromised. Of course, at the same time they wish to be ever more independent and versatile, all while staying connected and for the experience to be frictionless. All of this has to be delivered in a foolproof manner that doesn’t require them to learn or understand digital safety guidelines or requirements.
This is where digital IDs stand to streamline all the different ways users already interact with the various technologies that enhance our lives today. Such an ID can act as a single, trusted user account that can then access a wide variety of platforms and services. Everything from ordering groceries, accessing special events or locations, and even travel procedures, can all be made private, secure and simple utilizing this technology.
To make things even better, these types of systems can help facilitate online purchases and delivery. In the future deliveries could be made to the person, wherever they may be at that time, rather than just relying on a home or office address.
By being biometrically secure, it will be incredibly difficult for attackers to hack or impersonate legitimate customers. This stands to massively improve the current situation where fraudulent chargebacks and other dishonest activities have become a serious issue for the online service industry, and fixing this could save businesses a significant amount of money.
Even more profoundly, this technology could benefit financial services required to take part in the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) travel rule, enabling AML compliance for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs), such as Exchanges, Banks and other Financial institutions.
An underlying blockchain could support security by handling authentication of credentials as well as providing trusted transactions between users and businesses. This will make transactions cheaper, faster, verifiable and transparent, helping to protect both companies and their clients.
Ultimately, the current shift is one that goes beyond users and businesses needing to have faith in their specific device or even a single interface. This can bring individuals into a new level of intimacy with each other and the various services that they interact with regularly. This represents the latest step forward in bridging the distance that was put between users with the rise of technology. Furthermore, this isn’t some distant vision of tomorrow but is happening right now and could well be what’s needed for the metaverse too.
Resonance’s blockchain-enabled ONE.Code platform allows consumers to track the details of their … [+]garments’ supply chain journeys.
Resonance
Rebecca Minkoff became one of the first American fashion brands to sell NFTs when it launched its “I Love New York” line at New York Fashion Week in September. Now, that same company is using similar technology to give its sustainably minded customers access to their garments’ journeys along the supply chain. For its new RM Green(e) collection, Rebecca Minkoff—helmed by Uri Minkoff, the brother of the designer for whom the brand is named—has teamed up with Resonance, a largely bootstrapped company operating out of New York’s Chelsea Piers that offers cloud-based production alternatives for designers that want to cut back on inventory. As part of a new idea gaining traction in high fashion, no new garment is produced until it’s been purchased by the customer.
“Over the past four of five years [sustainability] has really come to the forefront,” Uri Minkoff tells Forbes about the brand’s decision to invest in a partnership with Resonance: that company is currently responsible for all RM Green(e) products, amounting to less than 5% of Rebecca Minkoff orders. “Technologies evolve. Consumer awareness evolves.” Minkoff says that, less than a year into this partnership, the fractional RM Green(e) sales result in six figures of revenue that he hopes will keep growing. He adds that the flexibility of Resonance’s platform—which uses technology to facilitate real-time ordering and relieves designers of the pressure of committing to particular styles, materials, and quantities before ascertaining how demand for certain fashions will pan out—could help facilitate that growth.
“I don’t have to cut something out if it’s still performing just because I need to make room for something else,” Minkoff says. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have an investment in that from a production capacity until it gets ordered.”
Available only online, RM Green(e) includes tops and dresses, priced between $158 and $298, as well as $38 face mask sets. Because of this unique made-to-order production method, customers can also order extended sizes, something else that isn’t available through Rebecca Minkoff’s brick-and-mortar locations. Orders take 10 to 25 days to complete, which may seem like a lifetime in the post-pandemic world of almost-instant delivery. Patient, planet-friendly shoppers receive their new, sustainably sourced garments tagged with QR codes, which, once scanned by a phone or other device, displays the purchase’s provenance via the portal created by Resonance and named ONE.Code.
ONE.Code relies on the immutable, shared ledger of blockchain technology: the owner of a new $158 Gigi top learns that it took 1.42 yards of certified organic cotton and 21.22 gallons of water to produce (additional metrics abound). According to Resonance, that’s 1.48 fewer yards of material and 81.6% percent less water than goes into making a similar mainstream garment. For comparison, the World Wildlife Foundation estimates that making the average cotton t-shirt uses about 2,700 liters or 713.26 gallons of water.
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Resonance, founded in 2017 by Christian Gheorghe and venture capitalist and Digital Currency Group board member Lawrence Lenihan, is mainly a B2B operation, producing limited clothing lines for designers. In addition to Rebecca Minkoff, the company handles the greener operations of fashion brands including Pyer Moss and Tucker, and does whole of production for JCRT, the newest brand from former Anna Wintour darlings Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra. In 2020, Resonance ran an accelerator program for upstart Black designers, all of whom are still using its platform, according to the company. But the startup’s consumer-facing products, such as the blockchain portal it’s built for RM Green(e), give it a way in the with the ultra-savvy new growth of shoppers, who may notice its tech enabling their favorite brands in the manner of tools furnished by payments companies like Square or Klarna: there, recognizable, though not obtrusive.
The demand for clothing made by designers who are attuned to their environmental impact is here, from both shoppers and regulators. At the ongoing COP26 summit in Glasgow, textile production, a $1.5 trillion market that makes up 1.35% of global oil production by processing more than a hundred million tons of fibers annually, came under fire. Galvanized by the nonprofit Textile Exchange, 50 fashion industry companies including legacy brands like Gap, Ralph Lauren and H&M signed a request to governments to offer tax incentives to organizations using “environmentally preferred materials.” Such materials are defined as “those from certified, verified sources that can be traced from raw material to finished product, and that are connected to data-driven environmental impact reduction” and include Resonance’s.
Whether all this makes a difference depends on whether investing in sustainable fashion will in fact become viable for the average person—a $158 tech-enabled top doesn’t exactly qualify as haute couture, but that’s not chump change either. While the advocacy of companies like H&M, whose “Conscious” line blouses run in the $20-$40, is promising, getting fast-fashion companies to reveal the details of their supply chain operations will be difficult.
“If you’re spending $250 on a shirt, you’re already into that bracket of caring about what you look like, and potentially about where your product comes from. Anyone selling a shirt for $250 can certainly engineer that product in a sustainable way,” says Gianpaolo Vignali, a fashion business professor specializing in the supply chain at the University of Manchester. While Dr. Vignali was quick to laud the opportunities represented by the Rebecca Minkoff and Resonance partnership, he expressed concern about the degree of background knowledge required for the average consumer to make sense of the information contained in the Resonance portal: brands should expect most consumers to spend 30-60 seconds engaging with product information, Dr. Vignali suspects. “Everything that goes on in the background, with blockchain for example, is fantastic. That’s great. That really just acts for auditing purposes for those that want to delve deeper,” he adds.
Gheorghe, Resonance’s CEO, was adamant that despite their lip service to sustainability, brands like H&M will continue to contribute to the problem of environmental degradation until the gamut of their supply chain activities are made transparent, and public; until that happens, consumers shopping at lower price points may be left in the dark. “To reach every customer around the world, it would take retailers like H&M choosing to stop destroying the planet with their current supply chain system and transform their business with the Resonance platform,” Gheorghe wrote in an email. Of course, Resonance is not the only company capable of providing such transparency. That bigger companies can devise their own strategies for doing so without involving Resonance at all is totally within the realm of possibility.
But for consumers who are ready to spend a bit more, and who are already read-up on fashion sustainability efforts—or those who like the cachet that investing in them holds—Rebecca Minkoff’s efforts are a compelling reason to opt for the brand over others that have not as readily invested in attempts at transparency.
“For a company like AllBirds that launches with something like this as their mission statement from the beginning—people are flocking there because from the beginning they’re identifying that brand as such,” Uri Minkoff says. Rebecca Minkoff’s customers, on the other hand, are witnessing a brand in flux, one that is straddling the line between the old guard and the new.
Some traders have said that Filecoin (FIL) has lost its momentum because its current price at $64 is more than 70% below its all-time high at $238. However, this decentralized data-sharing platform is showing signs of increasing adoption and this could cause the FIL token price to accelerate its current uptrend.
The FIL token is used to purchase storage space and retrieve data from the Filecoin Network. At the same time, its users gain rewards for selling their excess storage using this open-source platform. To compete with existing centralized cloud storage services, Filecoin has economic incentives to ensure files are reliably stored over time.
Filecoin (FIL) price at Coinbase in USD. Source: TradingView
Notice how the past three weeks showed a potential reversion to the previous downtrend movement. That upward channel points to a $90 support by mid-November and resistance near $107, which would be a 55% gain from the current pricing.
Related:Bitcoin-related altcoins surge as BTC ETF rumors spread across the sector
Partnerships and adoption could pave the way to $100
On Sept. 14, Filecoin announced a referral program for users who bring members carrying datasets larger than 90 Terabytes. The network reached 9,000,000 Terabytes in August, and according to their website, there are over 3,000 systems and storage providers serving capacity to 400+ applications.
On Oct. 13, Filecoin announced a storage collaboration with Flow Blockchain, which is backed by Dapper Labs. The service will establish decentralized data storage for nonfungible tokens (NFTs), along with the media assets associated with them. Flow’s platforms include Eternal, Starly, Versus and the upcoming multiplayer online game Chainmonsters.
More importantly, on Oct. 15, the daily release of Filecoin tokens will decrease by 23.8% to mark a year since the mainnet launched. Specifically, that affects the 7.5% stake held by early investors, equivalent to 150 million FIL tokens after the three-year issuing period.
Filecoin future gregate open interest. Source: Bybt
Since Sep. 30, Filecoin futures open interest has increased by 45%, signaling that investors’ interest is finally starting to pick up. This metric represents the total number of contracts in play, regardless of whether they have actually been traded on a specific date.
Glass half full: The funding rate has room for buyers’ leverage
To assess whether the market is leaning bullish, one should analyze the perpetual contracts funding rate. Even though buyers and sellers’ open interest is matched at all times, leverage can vary. When buyers (longs) are demanding more leverage, the funding rate turns positive. Thus, they are the ones paying the fees to the sellers (shorts).
However, the opposite situation occurs when shorts require additional leverage, and this causes the funding rate to turn negative.
The above chart shows a brief period of excessive buyers (longs) leverage building in early September as the funding rate reached 0.10% or 2.1% per week. More recently, Filecoin’s funding rate surpassed 0.06% per 8-hour as FIL token struggled with the $80 resistance on Oct. 8 but failed to break through.
Currently, derivatives metrics show few signs that investors have abandoned Filecoin despite its price hanging 70% below the $238 all-time high. The recent partnership with Flow Blockchain, increasing network use and capacity, and the reduced token emission point to a possible continuation of the previous three-week uptrend. Nothing seems to be holding back FIL from reaching the $90 to $107 range in November.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of theauthorand do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Over the first three years of the Forbes Blockchain 50, our list of billion-dollar companies making meaningful use of the technology popularized by bitcoin, has become a bellwether of institutional adoption. Our list shines light on how large corporations—often household names like Walmart and Novartis— are using blockchain tech to improve business processes and become more efficient and profitable. Now is your chance to help us find the best possible honorees for next year.
Each year’s list, which requires that members be valued at $1 billion or more, or generate $1 billion in revenue, has demonstrated the technology’s wide and growing geographic and industry reach. Over time, it has shifted from a focus on early stage proof of concept projects to functioning technology with giant transaction volumes. And it has increasingly featured consumer-facing companies, rather than only B2B players.
In other words, the distributed ledger technology that lets a group of users agree on a single truth, and prove that a digital object is only in one place at a time, is actually being used. And it’s not only being used by nimble startups with little to lose, but also by generations-old enterprises with some of the best known and trusted names in the world: Fidelity, Honeywell, Visa and the NBA.
Forbes Blockchain 50 – Inside The Class Of 2021
With the rapid rise of bitcoin, which this year reached an all time high of $64,000, the number of companies aiming to capitalize on the original digital asset has surged. What began with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which made the first list in 2019 when bitcoin was only worth $5,000 and went public this year with an $86 billion direct listing, has expanded to include companies such as business analytics firm MicroStrategy, which essentially turned itself into bitcoin ETF by holding more than $5 billion worth of bitcoin.
“There is going to be more change in the next 5 years than we have seen in the last 30 years in the financial system,” said Dan Schulman, the CEO of Blockchain 50 lister, PayPal, speaking at last year’s Blockchain 50 Symposium. “And I think digital currencies are going to lead the way.”
Forbes
Know a company whose blockchain innovation is under-appreciated? Let us know now, and help us spread the word using #Blockchain50 on Twitter. Has your company been overlooked in the past, or fallen off the list, but is breaking new ground by making real strides with blockchain? Let us know how. Do you work at one of the nine firms that has been on the list all three years, and is still leading the way? We want to know what the company is doing that merits it remaining on the list.
The nomination deadline is Friday, November 5. Once the nomination period ends, a team of Forbes reporters and editors will sort through the nominees, looking for the most mature blockchain programs run by the most talented teams in the world. Winners will be revealed in a 2022 magazine issue, and online.
Will a boom follow Covid-19? A century ago the 1920s saw creative energies explode after the tragedies of the Spanish Flu and World War I. In big cities such as New York, London, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo, economic growth was palpable. New technologies such as cars and radios became common. So did a risk-on optimism. I think the 2020s will similarly roar. Here are four reasons (with caveats at the end):
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1. Accelerated digital productivity
Back in 2017, Diane Greene, then the Google Cloud CEO, told a Forbes audience that the rate of digital technology progress was accelerating rapidly. She guessed a rate “two to three times faster” than Moore’s Law. Of course, digital technology progress by itself does not guarantee productivity. New business and organizational models are always needed to harness that progress.
Covid-19 did that for us; the pandemic forced rapid business change. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that five years of digital transformation had taken place in six months. Covid-19 forced companies to become smarter, faster, nimbler. The alternative was failure. No company can revert to slower, dumber and stuck. From a business perspective, the 2020s will be the Agile Decade.
2. Scalable AI
There’s now a convergence of digital technologies—cheap cloud computing, ubiquitous mobile computing (billions of sensors and phones) and faster communications such as 5G—simultaneously reaching maturity. Enter AI—the 2020s will be the decade of enterprise AI.
One more step is needed. Previously, deploying AI always meant hard, labor-intensive, expensive work. But what if AI was easy to deploy and use? What if anyone who can use a spreadsheet could also predict supply chain risks in India or maintenance costs for an Indonesian trucking fleet? That is happening. To adopt Apple’s famous 1980s slogan “a computer for the rest of us,” AI for the rest of us will shape the 2020s.
Robots can be used to help moving box files, as demonstrated at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 8, 2021.
Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
3. Capital surplus
The world is awash in capital, making it historically easy for entrepreneurs to get funds for innovative startups. While there’s plenty of hype around cryptocurrencies, meme stocks and SPACs, make no mistake. Global capital knows well that digital technology acceleration and AI are game-changers. These will disrupt business models and markets, and power enormous fortunes.
4. Physical world revolutions
Digital technologies, as noted by Greene, are evolving fast. But in the physical realm, progress is always slower—limited by physics and other forces. Yet here, too, progress is accelerating. Drone cameras raise agricultural yields. Autonomous trucks don’t need to take rest breaks. Gene sequencing plus AI will create personalized medical treatments.
Daniel Wiegand, founder and chief executive officer of the German startup Lilium, speaking in an interview in London in 2019.
Mary Turner/Bloomberg
Take German startup Lilium. It proposes to bring air travel to the masses with an electric-powered aircraft that can take off vertically yet fly like a plane. Using composite materials and AI, it is designed for autonomous piloting, though a real pilot will be used for now. Unlike most aviation startups, Lilium has has plenty of capital. It represents the post-Covid-19 spirit.
Caveats:
The Roaring 1920s had not one, but two awful stock crashes and depressions. The one many people forget occurred in 1921; it almost derailed the decade. Also prosperity was very uneven in the 1920s. Cities boomed. Rural areas much less. Don’t expect the 2020s to be all good news. But it will be thrilling.
TaxBit cofounders Justin Woodward, left, and CEO Austin Woodward have raised $100 million to build the ERP for cryptocurrency.
TaxBit
With Bitcoin’s market capitalization approaching $1 trillion, and hundreds of billions more in value in a host of other coins and projects, boring old taxes are becoming a big headache – not just for consumers, but the exchanges, businesses dabbling in the sector, and governments getting involved.
While others speculate on the coins themselves in the new gold rush, entrepreneur Austin Woodward’s happy to provide the picks and shovels. His startup TaxBit automates all those gains and losses for the customers of exchanges and power users alike. And with Utah’s largest-ever Series A funding round in the bag, he’s on track to build a buzzy business in the process.
“The entire existence of this asset class that can be so disruptive to our financial sector is at risk because of tax and accounting compliance at scale,” Woodward says. “There’s no NetSuite, Oracle or SAP of cryptocurrency.”
Founded in 2018, TaxBit’s raised $100 million in its Series A financing, led by investment firms Paradigm and Tiger Global. PayPal Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, the investment firm of the billionaire Winklevoss twins, and others including Bill Ackman and Qualtrics cofounder Ryan Smith joined the round, which takes the Utah-based startup’s total funding raised to more than $107 million.
Initially a consumer-facing product, today TaxBit offers its software to a mix of individual practitioners and, more lucratively for the startup, the businesses that help them invest and trade: crypto exchanges, wallet providers, lending platforms and the like. TaxBit’s software is white-labeled, meaning that users of those tools will sometimes know they’re working in the startup’s software, sometimes not, often accessing it through the “tax center” sections or pages of the companies’ websites. TaxBit has processed more than one million tax forms to date, the company says.
TaxBit got its start as Woodward and his brother, Justin Woodward, began to explore the emerging crypto category while in their previous jobs. Justin was working in a federal judicial clerkship while attending law school at the University of Chicago; Austin was spending nights researching and dabbling in crypto assets while an early employee at Qualtrics, the customer experience company that is one of Utah’s recent tech breakouts. Austin Woodward says one formative moment was when he was responsible for Qualtrics missing payroll in Australia because he sent a wire 10 minutes late that took 48 hours to clear – a problem, he believed, that crypto could solve, alongside others like transaction fees, cross-border payments and the ability for non-accredited investors to buy small pieces of assets like real estate through tokens.
TaxBit cofounders Justin Woodward (left), Brandon Woodward (center) and CEO Austin Woodward (right) launched their startup from Justin and Austin’s dad’s basement.
TaxBit
When SAP bought Qualtrics in a shock move for $8 billion just days before it was supposed to go public in November 2018, Austin Woodward, who’d worked closely on its S-1 filings for that process, saw his cue to work on a tax solution in crypto full-time. (Qualtrics eventually went public after all in a spin-out this past January.) With a cousin, Brandon Woodward, focused on front-end development and design, the Woodward brothers moved into their dad’s basement; their father was also their first financial supporter, cutting them an initial check to get going.
Soon, Album Ventures backed TaxBit in a pre-seed round, and as the business scaled to “many thousands” of individual users for its consumer-facing tool, it raised a $5 million seed round in December 2019. In January, the venture arms of Coinbase and PayPal invested in a strategic round alongside its previous investor, Winklevoss Capital. Scant weeks later, Paradigm, the crypto-focused venture fund founded by Sequoia veteran Matt Huang and Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam, had come knocking, as did Tiger Global, a leading growth equity investor in the software world.
“They bring a ton of energy to solving crypto tax,” says Huang. “For the pitch, the whole team got on a Zoom call on a Saturday night, and Austin was almost jumping through the Zoom screen.”
Why raise $100 million so fast? Austin Woodward, TaxBit’s CEO, says the money is to invest in the company’s enterprise tools and international expansion, with the United Kingdom coming first. Eventually TaxBit hopes to offer something like a traditional enterprise resource planning tool for corporations, helping them manage crypto transactions for optimal tax results much like other software tools do for foreign currencies. Governments – both the tax collecting agencies and municipalities that offer crypto as payment – could also prove natural clients. That means hiring from about 40 employees to more than 100 by year’s end, Woodward says, and building out a sales and marketing team that was largely the founders and vice president Michelle O’Connor, a veteran of crypto exchange Uphold, until now.
“We were called the TurboTax of crypto really early in this, and that was glamorous to us for what, two weeks?” Woodward says. “And then we realized we don’t want to be your tool you log into on April 14 because you have to, just to file stuff.”
TaxBit’s story so far reminds at least one person of Qualtrics’ own trajectory – its cofounder and chairman, Smith, now the owner of NBA franchise the Utah Jazz and an investor in TaxBit following the raise. Like the Woodwards, Smith built Qualtrics with his brother and father from home for years, only raising capital when the business was well-launched. “This is my way of getting into crypto,” Smith says. “When building a startup like Qualtrics, you wonder how many people are paying attention. Austin was definitely paying attention.”
As the cryptocurrency market enters a period of high volatility, a major cryptocurrency platform, Crypto.com will now leverage Amazon Web Services, Inc (AWS) cloud provider to provide enhanced scalability and security for its 5 million users.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Crypto.com, the world’s first cryptocurrency platform to achieve privacy certification (ISO 27701) and PCI:DSS compliance, has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider.
By leveraging AWS, Crypto.com will be able to quickly scale to offer financial services beyond its existing user base of more than five million customers around the globe. As one of the largest cryptocurrency companies in the world, Crypto.com provides an alternative to traditional financial services through the Crypto.com App, the Crypto.com Visa Card, the Crypto.com Exchange, and Crypto.com DeFi Wallet.
AWS is currently the world’s leading cloud platform, which will allow Crypto.com to benefit from the extensive scalability of AWS’s global infrastructure and services designed to meet the most exacting standards for security and compliance, and provides a seamless experience for its rapidly growing global customer base.
According to Crypto.com, the cryptocurrency firm integrates security practices within its DevSecOps framework to factor security into every element of its applications, platform, and infrastructure. By using AWS Trusted Advisor, a tool that provides real-time guidance to help provide resources following AWS best practices for security and performance, the company should be able to detect potential security gaps and receive recommendations for improvement.
Matthew Chan, CIO at Crypto.com said in the release shared with Blockchain.News:
“We choose to build our products and services on AWS because of its proven operational and security expertise. AWS’s dedication to providing secure and reliable cloud services helps us to deliver stable and secure services to our customers.”
AWS Transit Gateway
Crypto.com is also using AWS Transit Gateway, a service that enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway, to support the company’s inter-region peering to ensure all network traffic is encrypted and to help protect against denial of service (DDoS) attacks and common exploits. Additionally, by leveraging the Amazon cloud provider’s reliable and secure infrastructure, Crypto.com will be better able to address the evolving data residency regulations across the globe.
Crypto.com is scaling on AWS to support rapid growth in its customer base and meet periods of high market volatility when usage can spike eight times larger than the company’s typical peak load. By using AWS Auto Scaling, Crypto.com maintains steady and predictable performance at the lowest possible cost with the ability to automatically adjust capacity and scale instances in minutes.
By building on AWS, Crypto.com manages usage spikes without compromising user safety or security and provides customers with a reliable customer experience. To provide a stable and scalable platform for its customers, Crypto.com uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a highly secure, reliable, and scalable way to run containers, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), the most trusted way to run Kubernetes, to easily launch and scale its new features and services. All of this allows the company’s engineers to focus on developing new offerings for Crypto.com’s customers rather than managing infrastructure.
“Our customers choose AWS because we meet the most stringent security and compliance requirements,” said Robert Wang, Managing Director of AWS Hong Kong and Taiwan. “We look forward to continuing to support Crypto.com with our unmatched breadth and depth of services and the most proven operational and security expertise, enabling them to provide a seamless experience to their millions of users around the globe.”
