Hello, and welcome to 2025!

🇭🇰 I see big things coming for Crypto in Hong Kong — I was interviewed by Coindesk last week on my thoughts on Crypto and Hong Kong.

Here are some of my key points:

• HK trading platforms need to focus on liquidity Hong Kong has 7 SFC-licensed virtual asset trading platforms, but licensing alone isn’t enough. Liquidity is the other critical piece of the puzzle.

• Hong Kong is the New York of Asia. Exchange Square is Wall Street. This is where you’ll find TradFi talents (traders, market makers, etc.)

• Asia has 50% of the Top 10 Countries in the world ranked by crypto adoption. This is where the growth will come from.

• Difficult to say when China will open up for crypto, even with its 220 million retail investors sitting on almost $21 trillion worth of savings.

• Traditional finance players like Fidelity, Citi and PayPal are building on Solana validates its future for the masses.

• Read More on Coindesk. See you next month at Consensus Hong Kong 2025.

🎧 My Top 3 Podcast episodes on 2025 predictions — I listened to many podcasts over the holidays and found some fun, but really enjoyed contradicting viewpoints from these three podcasts. A few key takeaways:

• Nvidia is capturing 15% shares of all capital spend on the economy. The only time a company we can compare this to was IBM in the mainframe era. (via Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management. Watch The Alchemists here.)

• AI goes nuclear or not? - The AI industry is bringing the nuclear sector back to life. But can US build these power plants fast enough and capture all the value in 2025? Scott Galloway said yes on Pivot, but not Chamath on All-In.

• Will China make a come back in 2025? Michael Cembalest said China is in a liquidity trap similar to what happened to Japan in the 1980s, but David Friedberg thinks there may be a chance for a come back.

• Crypto is Real or Not Real? Michael Cembalest thinks it’s all hype but he did miss the fact that Stablecoin transactions built on Crypto really found its product market fit in 2024 with $1.41 trillion transacted for in December alone.

♨️ Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano Super came out of Jensen’s oven - The new NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit, fits in the palm of a hand. This device supports 70 trillion operations per second! And it’s tiny. It was funny to watch Jenson pull this out of the oven. Read more on the Nvidia blog.

💰 Hello DeepSeek - The Six Million Dollar Model — It’s amazing to see a Chinese company able to rival OpenAI! DeepSeek V3 comes with 671 billion parameters and was trained in around two months at a cost of $5.58M, and using China-tailored H800 GPUs, plus significantly fewer computing resources than models developed by Meta and OpenAI. Read more on SCMP.

🤓 The Top 10 companies with the most employees working on H1B Visas — The tech industry has long pushed to expand the number H-1B visas granted by the government to bring skilled workers to the U.S. from India, China, Canada, Korea and other countries. The program is capped at 65,000 new visas each year, although an additional 20,000 can be issued for employees with a master’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Here’s a rundown of the top 10 companies as listed by the number of H-1B petitions for initial employment that U.S. approved in fiscal-year 2024, according to NFAP. I am surprised Google or Microsoft don’t have more H-1B workers.

• Amazon: 3,871

• Cognizant: 2,837

• infosys: 2,504

• Tats Consultancy: 1,452

• IBM: 1,348

• Microsoft: 1,264

• HCL: 1,248

• Google: 1,058

• Gapgemini: 1,041

(Source: CBS News)

Last week a total of 1 startup raised $23M in funding, 1 M&As:

• $23M goes to 1 Enterprise startup

If you love this newsletter, forward it to someone who would also enjoy it and have them subscribe.

Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

• Rembrand (AI-powered media and virtual product placement technology) raised $23M Series A led by super{set}

IPO & M&A (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)  

• N/A