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."
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."
Doubtful that will make it less of scam. (Score:1)
We need a car analogy ... (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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Digital signatures have been around since the 1980s ...
The tech is in who is verifying data and signing it.
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You're thinking about "Bitcoin", not "Blockchain".
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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.
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Re: We need a car analogy ... (Score:2)
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.
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Re: We need a car analogy ... (Score:2)
Secure usernames, emails, etc. (Score:2)
I've seen blockchain do things like secure usernames, emails, etc.
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I've seen blockchain do things like secure usernames, emails, etc.
I've seen non-blockchain setups doing that too. For decades.
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Yep. With a lot less hand waving, false promises, and general fru-fru.
But using a central authority. That is the difference here.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The use case is defining who owns something.
Well, fuck me, i give up.
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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.
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I'll just put your username in some random shitcoin blockchain, just to remember i own you.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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."
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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.
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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.
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Not seeing it (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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)
Blockchain is not crypto (Score:2)
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Name one thing that's not crypto which requires blockchains to function.
I'll wait.
I've seen blockchain do things like secure usernames, emails, etc. Whatever data you wanted secured, using a distributed community rather than a centralized authority, can be an application for blockchain.
Do they know something about crypto that we don't? (Score:2)
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?
Re: Do they know something about crypto that we do (Score:1)
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.
Yes, they know blockchain is independent of crypto (Score:2)
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.
This is bad news for us all (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: This is bad news for us all (Score:1)
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I presume.... (Score:2)
... that these investments will be tracked and made publicly available via some form of cryptographically signed secure record? :)
Very bizarre (Score:2)
TerraLabs and Adam Neuman might be interesting (Score:2)
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.