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The Almighty Buck Businesses

Google's Investing Arms Are Pumping $1.56 Billion Into Blockchain Companies (gizmodo.com) 60

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Blockdata, a crypto research firm, released an updated blog post Tuesday showing who's been the most active investors in the crypto scene from September 2021 through June 2022. Researchers noted big tech firms including the likes of Tencent, Microsoft, PayPal, Samsung, and Alphabet (Google) are putting big money into crypto companies and startups. Some of these companies, like PayPal, have been a longtime and verbal supporter of blockchain tech (thanks in part to its co-founder Peter Thiel). Still others, like Google, have been much more subdued. [...] What Google chooses to invest in may help answer where the company wants to see blockchain tech go, or what it may want to incorporate into its own tech infrastructure. In the report, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, sat at the top of the pile showing it had put over $1.5 billion into crypto companies over four rounds of investment. Some of the company's overall funds went to the likes of Dapper Labs, the company that was behind the NBA's Top Shot and UFC Strike licensed video NFTs. The company was also behind CryptoKitties, a NFT-based game that's seen the price of its products tank.

What makes this more complicated is there are actually two of Google's investing arms involved in this fundraising. GV (Google's investing arm once called Google Ventures) helped fund Dapper Labs and another crypto infrastructure company Voltage, which got $6 million in total investments at the start of 2022. CapitalG, the company's independent private equity firm, had a hand in the $550 million raised by Fireblock, a crypto custody firm, as well as investments with digital currency venture capital company Digital Currency Group Of course, this was all before the most recent crypto crash, which has seen a multitude of once-strong crypto companies layoff thousands of workers. Though it's not like this is the first time we've heard about Google's parent company Alphabet with their big financial interest in blockchain companies. They've been investing in this tech since 2016, according to the Blockdata report. Previous reports showed they had put money into crypto companies like Ripple (which just like many small altcoins since the recent crypto crash, isn't doing too hot). Google had previously made much wider investments across a wider variety of blockchain-based companies. That was then, and this is now. Blockdata analysts said this limited slate of investments is an attempt to make concentrated bets on a small set of companies, but even with executive's stated hopes for blockchain tech, it's hard to see all investments truly panning out.

Though it was fourth in the size of its contributions, Samsung was leading the pack in the number -- and eye-twitching variety -- of crypto ventures it was making it rain on over an incredible 13 rounds of investing. A total of $979.26 million went to the likes of Dank Bank, a NFT platform for trying to monetize "memes and other iconic moments in internet history." They put more of their funds behind Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTS. They put down their investment in March, but in April, users on the group's official Instagram and Discord were scammed of nearly $13.7 million worth of NFTs. Still, founders said many of BAYC's rather strange initiatives like a Bored Ape "Metaverse" are still moving full steam ahead. They also put money into Sky Mavis, the makers of the crypto-based "play-to-earn" game Axie Infinity. That investment probably didn't do them any wonders considering its token bridge suffered one of the biggest hacks in crypto history earlier this year. The game has struggled to recover after that blow, though players had already been leaving the platform before hackers snatched away bridge funds.
"Blockdata's research shows that 81 of the top 100 public companies have made some kind of past or present crypto investment," adds Gizmodo. "2021 showed the absolute highest amount of overall investment in blockchain companies. Funding totals have increased by a factor of 14 from 2019 to last year."
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Google's Investing Arms Are Pumping $1.56 Billion Into Blockchain Companies

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  • Invest all the money you want. The market cap at one time was a notional $3T. It won't make it any less of a pump and dump, nor will it make governments any more friendly toward allowing people to actually use crypto.
    • You falsely conflate blockchain and crypto. Crypto is merely a user of blockchain. Blockchain can help secure public data, whatever the nature of that data.

      Oh, the promised car analogy, blockchain is like the electric motor. It can be used in a car, and it can be used in many other things.
      • Oh, the promised car analogy, blockchain is like the electric motor. It can be used in a car, and it can be used in many other things.

        Sure, but where's the "tech"? Blockchain is just a digital signature applied to sequential blocks of data.

        Digital signatures have been around since the 1980s, maybe even longer. Why do people feel the need to invest billions in them? It smells of bullshit to me.

        If it was a car analogy it would be like people investing billions in hood ornaments or something.

        • by drnb ( 2434720 )

          Digital signatures have been around since the 1980s ...

          The tech is in who is verifying data and signing it.

          • You're thinking about "Bitcoin", not "Blockchain".

            • by drnb ( 2434720 )

              You're thinking about "Bitcoin", not "Blockchain".

              No, the distributed nature of blockchain maintenance is a part of blockchain design. Bitcoin merely adds an economic incentive to this to encourage participation.

      • Fair enough technical point. Blockchain is not crypto. However, it's used in crypto and, so far, that's kinda sucked and been full of false promises and scammy weirdos. Maybe some totally new use for blockchain will be oh-so-helpful, but color me skeptical AF.
        • Once i heard NFT's i thought fianlly a good use for crypto. Making digital goods actually scarce and able to prove ownership.

          Yhen i got past the marketing bullshit. And realized you pay for a link pn a host you dont own and have no control over. And once thr host destroys the link your goods are gone forever. A hacker with aean dtreak can destory millions of dollars of NFT by corrupting the backups and then ransomware the server.

          • Good point. Add to those any sort of real neglect or disaster and NFTs are only as good as the infrastructure behind them. What I learned watching the 1990's unfold into the current shithole the Internet has become is that people can promise you an anarchist paradise, but all you will get in the end is a highly policed strip mall. It's like an unbreakable principle of the universe apparently.
        • Henry for popularized the internal combustion engine, as bitcoin popularized the blockchain. If you focus on the first user to go mainstream you miss the bigger and longer term picture.

          I've seen blockchain do things like secure usernames, emails, etc.
          • I've seen blockchain do things like secure usernames, emails, etc.

            I've seen non-blockchain setups doing that too. For decades.

            • Yep. With a lot less hand waving, false promises, and general fru-fru.
              • by drnb ( 2434720 )

                Yep. With a lot less hand waving, false promises, and general fru-fru.

                But using a central authority. That is the difference here.

            • by drnb ( 2434720 )

              I've seen blockchain do things like secure usernames, emails, etc.

              I've seen non-blockchain setups doing that too. For decades.

              The difference is that there is no central authority, blockchain innovates in the area of decentralizing the maintenance of the data and it security.

              • The difference is that there is no central authority, blockchain innovates in the area of decentralizing the maintenance of the data and it security.

                The fuck?

                How? Be specific.

                • by drnb ( 2434720 )

                  The difference is that there is no central authority, blockchain innovates in the area of decentralizing the maintenance of the data and it security.

                  The fuck?

                  How? Be specific.

                  If decentralization doesn't ring a bell with you. Please go do a bit of homework on blockchain and get back to me afterwards

                  • If decentralization doesn't ring a bell with you. Please go do a bit of homework on blockchain and get back to me afterwards

                    You want to dump emails and usernames on a blockchain, and call it "descentralized"?

                    Do you even know how these work?

                    • by drnb ( 2434720 )
                      Yes, I've seen it work. A username, an email, some number of virtual coins ... its all the same, just a bit of data. Something unique attacked to a blockchain address.
                    • Yes. And dumping information into a blockchain doesn't make it inherently secure - not decentralized. Possibly quite the opposite, in fact.

                      Again, please explain me how this would work, as if i were 5. Be specific.

                    • by drnb ( 2434720 )
                      It works exactly like associating virtual currency to a block chain. Data is data.
                    • Yeah, and emails are emails. An aphorisim is not an usecase.

                      Give me one end-to-end example of how blockchains would be used for, say, "secure emails" - which is one of your proposed usecases. This shouldn't be hard.

                    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

                      Yeah, and emails are emails. An aphorisim is not an usecase.

                      Give me one end-to-end example of how blockchains would be used for, say, "secure emails" - which is one of your proposed usecases. This shouldn't be hard.

                      The use case is defining who owns something. That something may be particular virtual coins, an email, or many other things. I am merely offering a use case I have seen. Your rejection of a use case is irrelevant.

                    • The use case is defining who owns something.

                      Well, fuck me, i give up.

                    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

                      The use case is defining who owns something.

                      Well, fuck me, i give up.

                      When you ask for use cases, reject real world examples, and demand different use cases. What do you expect? You are free to live in willful denial. The fact remains that blockchain is not limited to crypto. Data is data.

                    • I'll just put your username in some random shitcoin blockchain, just to remember i own you.

                    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

                      I'll just put your username in some random shitcoin blockchain, just to remember i own you.

                      Glad to see you are beginning to understand. Keep at it. Especially work on comprehending that virtual coins are not a necessary component.

                    • Glad to see you are beginning to understand. Keep at it.

                      Sure. Then i'll put your username on three other blockchains, and owe you x3.

      • Closed blockchains are useful. They're also technology from the 90's and are more commonly known as "signed databases". Open blockchains are all useless because of the intense overhead they demand for the sole purposes of being "decentralized" for the sake of enabling bad actors to act badly without a central authority to stop their bad acts. In practice, such systems tend to defacto centralize incredibly fast for purely reasons of network effects. This makes the overhead incurred by open blockchains both s

        • by drnb ( 2434720 )
          If by "intense overhead" you are referring to proof-of-work, that problem has solutions. If you mean something else, blockchain research is in its beginnings.
          • Again, blockchain has been around for thirty years. Open blockchains are 15 years old. Closed blockchains are already used in a bunch of applications. In literally every proposed use for an open blockchain, there is already an actual closed blockchain solution that has been deployed and is much more efficient. The overhead from open blockchains is always going to be higher than closed ones because closed ones just have a trusted central authority while open blockchains have to try and figure out how to crea

            • by drnb ( 2434720 )
              A central authority is not alway a feature. its sometimes a thing to avoid. Hence the decentralized consensus based blockchain concept.
              • It's almost never a thing to avoid. And even open blockchains just end up recreating one, just with excessive overhead to show for it. There's effectively one NFT marketplace. There are effectively two major exchanges for crypto. There are two, maybe three, stablecoins. For that matter, there are only three basic cryptocurrencies with any real market cap. When DAO was... I can't even call it being hacked as it followed all the rules of the protocol, Etherium just forked the whole protocol to undo it. That's

                • by drnb ( 2434720 )
                  No that is not a central authority. That is a development team. The network of users are free to go with the developer or fork and due something different.
                  • That's called innocence through redefinition. "He's not a thief. He just sometimes takes things that aren't his an doesn't give them back."

                    "There's no central authority. There's just an unaccountable development team that control the protocol everything runs on."

                    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

                      That's called innocence through redefinition. "He's not a thief. He just sometimes takes things that aren't his an doesn't give them back."

                      "There's no central authority. There's just an unaccountable development team that control the protocol everything runs on."

                      That is what is called a straw man, one built on a misrepresentation. "everything runs on" is obviously false when the user base chooses to fork away.

                      When the user base can form an alternative development team and fork from the original development team, and the original development team can do nothing to stop them, then the original development team is not much of an authority in terms of control.

    • Keep in mind that what's commonly reported as "market cap" in the cryptoverse is little more than a made up number: tokens x current avg price. It reflects nothing about the value that can actually be extracted from it - unlike companies.

      • Yes, I agree. That's why I used the word "notional" because it's just a fucking notion that it was ever worth that much, lol.
  • Not seeing it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @04:41PM (#62798523)
    I was hoping these big investments would be in interesting applications for blockchains - that somebody would identify some sort of killer app for a distributed ledger. At last something with the impact on the scale of, say, bittorrent.

    But this all sounds like more meme NFT's, that are all about getting people to trade money for nothing instead of doing something new and useful.

    • I was hoping these big investments would be in interesting applications for blockchains - that somebody would identify some sort of killer app for a distributed ledger.

      The sad reality is that all blockchains are good for is cryptocurrencies. Every other proposed usecase is just shoehorning a round peg into a square hole.

  • So (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kremmy ( 793693 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @05:00PM (#62798571)
    How much more money needs to be poured into the cryptocurrency ecosystem before it starts generating any value of its own?
    • Blockchain is not crypto. Blockchain is a technology that crypto uses, but it is not limited to crypto. It can be used with any sort of public data.
  • So, is there some application that would make decentralized, trustless information dumps worth something?

    Or is it just that they started the slow movement to join the crypto bandwagon and only now are the results of those decisions emerging, well after no one wants them anymore?

    • The crypto market dumped right before the rest of the market went into recession. Itâ(TM)s slowly recovering.

      The dotcom bubble didnâ(TM)t get rid of the Internet, as much as retailers were clutching their pearls that it would, it just was the beginning of the end for brick and mortar retail, a lot of things were tried and a lot of things failed but for every pets.com there was a Google or Amazon that survived and thrived.

    • Do they know something about crypto that we don't?

      Yes, they know that blockchain technology is independent of crypto. That crypto is just one area that could use it. Other areas that need to provide trusted public data can use it as well.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @05:42PM (#62798647)
    crypto companies are defacto ponzi schemes. Mathematically they need more money coming in constantly in order for the "investment" to pay off, and people at the top (early FOMO adopters) make the most money while folk beneath them need a constant stream of new people to make money. There's no product there, as crypto only has value as long as people are exchanging real money for it.

    So why's this bad news for you and me? Because eventually this whole house of cards is going to collapse. Either when gov't regulation makes the money laundering and illegal securities trading the form the backbone of crypto untenable or when we have a real recession on all those loans get called in.

    When that happens you and me are gonna bail out Google and every one of these gamblers because if we don't they're gonna crash the entire global finance system and we all lose our homes and savings.

    This is why you regulate these bastards. Because if you don't they do risk free gambling with your money and your jobs.
    • Much as we'd like such scams to fail let's not forget what crapto does well: Hacker ransom payoffs Kidnap payment Buying drugs, kiddie porn and weapons Fake ugly 'art scams Evading taxes. And #1, vast investment riches for all. This time for sure. No more collapses, we promise. So, far from seeing the collapse of crapto from its basic grifty ponzi fraudulent nature, the giant corps are predicting big profits from the use cases above. Money to be made. Wanna buy a jpeg of a yawning chimpanzee in a boat hat?
      • That accounts for about $10K just bitcoins 24,000 value currently. The rest of the ecosphere is surviving off of Ponzi schemes and illegal securities trading that will eventually bite us all in the ass
  • ... that these investments will be tracked and made publicly available via some form of cryptographically signed secure record? :)

  • The reality is that corporations and governments don't actually want what crypto/defi offers. Computationally expensive, ungovernable distributed systems? What's in it for Google? Not much. The fact that 81 of the top 100 public companies invested in this just shows that they are run by clueless cargo cult followers who only want to look good at the next quarterly meeting.
  • Adam Neumann has a new multibillion startup with a website and of course the support of his beloved Rebekah!
    TerraLabs might also be a bargain right now.

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