CRYPTO

Crypto market tanks

Over the last week, the collective cryptocurrency market has shed tens of billion of fiat dollars in value. Yesterday, bitcoin briefly turned negative on the year, before rallying later in the day. As of press time, the leading cryptocurrency’s price stands at ~$34,000, while ether is ~ $2,000. The coins are down ~13% and 18%, respectively, on the week. 

The catalyst/culprit (choose your fighter)

Driving the news (and, ostensibly, the sell-off) is a fresh set of anti-crypto measures in China. On Sunday, authorities in the regions of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Inner Mongolia cracked down on crypto miners by ordering them to cease operations. In some cases, officials told utility operators to cut the power supply to mining farms. 

The next day, the People’s Bank of China directed payment processors and other financial institutions to restrict services on anyone trading, using, or hodling cryptocurrencies. This isn’t exactly new news, but rather the continuation of a trend already underway. Why the crackdown? 

• It’s difficult for the state to exert control over decentralized blockchain technology. 
• China is rolling out the digital yuan, its own CBDC (central bank digital currency). 

And that’s not all 

The crypto market has been flashing warning lights of exuberation and market excess for some time. These signs include, but are not limited to: 

1. A dog cryptocurrency with no utility rocketing to a $3+ billion market cap. We’re talking, of course, about Shiba Inu. Dogecoin, the OG dog meme crypto, is down by roughly 67% from its all-time high (but it’s up 40% over the last 24 hours). 
2. QB Tom Brady changing his Twitter avatar to the crypto in-crowd signifier, laser eyes 
3. Nasty technical indicators, like the “death cross,” that have appeared in trading patterns 

We know better than to try and predict what comes next, but as we wrote earlier this month, a crypto winter may be coming. These cyclical phases tend to shake out less serious blockchain development projects, while more dedicated teams keep on building. 

Zoom out: One in five US adults say they own crypto, per Morning Consult data published yesterday. That number may have dropped since the survey was conducted, since not everyone has diamond hands. 

Still, familiarity with crypto is on the rise. From January to June of this year, the amount of US adults who say they’re familiar with crypto rose from 30% to 37%, per Morning Consult.—RD 

AUTOMATION

Unleashing the no coders

Unqork is a $2 billion no-code company based out of NYC. While it’s only four years old, the unicorn has moved quickly to boost its roster of enterprise clients. 

• The primary tool (as you can see above) is a visual drag-and-drop interface that lets companies build complete apps without coding. 

Yesterday, Unqork announced a marketplace with a smorgasbord of pre-built apps, third-party services, and integrations with tools like SendGrid, Twilio, and DocuSign.

The traditional coding process feels broken, Unqork CEO Gary Hoberman told us. “It’s old communication. It’s hieroglyphics.” Especially among non-tech companies, there’s already a shortage of experts who can read and write these hieroglyphics.

Big picture: The low/no-code market—broadly defined as automating development workflows—could be worth $13+ billion this year, according to a Gartner forecast. 

Read more about the Unqork Marketplace here.—RD

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AV

Self-driving supercomputer

Tesla has gone public with what it claims will be the world’s fifth-most powerful supercomputer (pending a benchmark test). 

On Monday, Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s AI lead, showed off a prototype of Dojo—Tesla’s supercomputer-in-training, which Elon Musk has been tweeting about since 2019. 

What it’s for: Tesla’s ultimate goal is to rely on cameras alone in lieu of other sensors like radar and lidar—and make vision-only autonomous driving a reality. The action plan: run immense amounts of video data through Dojo, training Tesla’s autonomous driving technology by way of training the neural networks it runs on. 

• For Tesla to adequately process all of that video data, it needs a supercomputer. That’s not necessary when using lidar. 

Big picture: Tesla is banking on cameras because of their speed and ability to operate even in regions with less-detailed maps. As of last month, Tesla’s North American Model 3 and Model Y vehicles began shipping with no radar sensors—“the first Tesla vehicles to rely on camera vision and neural net processing,” according to the company.—HF 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: For a brief time on Tuesday, Microsoft was a $2 trillion company—the only tech company besides Apple to ever make it there. 

Quote: “Starting today, online users have a new independent option for search which gives them unmatched privacy.”—Brave, which has launched its privacy-oriented search engine in global beta 

Read: The trials and tribulations of an autonomous ship. 

One-stop crypto: Bitwise equips long-term investors with the products, education, and relationships they need to access crypto opportunities. Bitwise’s product suite includes the world’s largest crypto index fund (OTCQX: BITW) and the index behind the first crypto industry ETF. Risk disclosures at bitwiseinvestments.com.*

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WEIB

• Bird is getting into e-bikes. 
• Amazon is getting into renewable power, specifically solar and wind. 
• SpaceX’s Starlink may be able to provide global internet coverage by September. 
• WeRide, the Chinese robotaxi unicorn, raised $600M+ in five months.
• Google built a tool for its remote workers to calculate salary shifts if they were to move cities. 
• Embark, a self-driving trucking startup, will SPAC with a post-merger valuation of $5.2 billion.
• The EU opened an antitrust probe into Google’s dominant ad-tech stack. 

TRIVIA

TECH THINGAMAOBS

For doodle beautification: Nvidia released an app that uses AI to flesh out sketches.

For ID’ing dark patterns: Take The Markup’s dark pattern quiz. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• A Q&A with Twitter's ethical AI lead, Rumman Chowdhury
• Why the US' digital divide is about more than just access
• How Airbnb failed its own anti-discrimination team