While early-stage crypto companies may still find willing investors, late-stage tech investors have largely exited the space.
The crypto industry, which once thrived on investor exuberance and rapid growth, has recently hit a rough patch as venture funding for crypto startups in the third quarter of this year plungedto its lowest level since 2020.
According to data from research firm PitchBook, Venture Capitalists (VCs) invested just $2 billion in crypto space during the quarter, marking a staggering 63% decline from the same period in the previous year.
The Decline in Crypto Funding
The dramatic decline in venture funding for crypto startups in Q3 2023 has many factors at play. One of the key reasons, as highlighted by PitchBook analyst Robert Le, is the notable absence of the “big deals” that were once common in the crypto space. The deals have become smaller in scale, leading to a decrease in overall investment volume.
During the crypto bull market, companies like the FTX Derivatives Exchange, OpenSea, and Yuga Labs enjoyed the benefits of mega fundraisers, attracting substantial investments from venture capitalists eager to ride the wave of digital assets and blockchain technology. However, as the crypto industry faces increasing scrutiny and regulatory challenges, the tide seems to be turning, with venture capitalists pulling back significantly.
The declining interest of VCs in the crypto industry poses a critical challenge for startups. Le expressed his concern, saying, “If they’re not able to raise a round, even a down round, they’re either going to go out of business or get acquired at a valuation that’s much, much lower.” This dilemma leaves startups with limited options, making survival a daunting task.
While early-stage crypto companies may still find willing investors, late-stage tech investors have largely exited the space. This shift reflects a broader trend of investors becoming more cautious and discerning in their crypto investments.
SBF’s Trial and the Impact on Venture Capitalists
Adding to the complexity of the situation is the continuing fallout from the FTX scandal. FTX, once a rising star, has faced legal troubles, with its former CEO Sam Bankman-Friedand other executives facing criminal fraud charges. This has raised questions about the role of VCs in the crypto industry and their investments in companies like FTX.
Sequoia Capital, a prestigious VC firm, was among those that had invested heavily in FTX. However, the scandal has forced VCs to reevaluate their involvement in the crypto space. FTX and its trading arm, Alameda Research, had also made their own venture bets and built a diverse portfolio of companies, including stablecoin providers Circle and Paxos, blockchain developer Aptos Labs, and crypto bank Anchorage Digital.
The startup stakes held by FTX and Alameda are now being closely watched as FTX navigates bankruptcy proceedings. The presence of a new funding roundfor AI startup Anthropic, in which FTX invested, has provided some hope that creditors might be compensated through the sale of equity.
However, there is a significant concern that a massive liquidation sale of these startup stakes could lead to a further devaluation of crypto startups.
nextBusiness News, Cryptocurrency News, Investors News, News
Author Benjamin Godfrey
Benjamin Godfrey is a blockchain enthusiast and journalist who relishes writing about the real life applications of blockchain technology and innovations to drive general acceptance and worldwide integration of the emerging technology. His desire to educate people about cryptocurrencies inspires his contributions to renowned blockchain media and sites.
Share:
Newsletter
Your e-mail *
subscribe
Thank you!
You have successfully joined our subscriber list.
Doctors will be able to access the information by asking tool-specific questions instead of going through notes and electronic health records.
Google Cloud has announced that it has added new AI-powered search capabilities aimed at helping clinicians access accurate information across various types of medical records.
While the healthcare industry has a wealth of valuable and potentially useful information, clinicians are sometimes faced with the challenge of lack of access as it is stored in different formats across multiple systems. Google Cloud’s latest search tool seeks to remedy this by allowing healthcare workers to access clinical notes, scanned documents, and electronic health records all in one place. The new capabilities build on Google’s existing Healthcare API and Healthcare Data Engine products.
The company believes that the tool will save clinicians a great amount of time and energy. Speaking to CNBC, senior director of product management for Cloud AI at Google Cloud, Lisa O’Malley said:
“While it should save time to be able to do that search, it should also prevent frustration on behalf of clinicians and [make] sure that they get to an answer easier.”
Doctors will be able to access all the information they need on a patient by asking tool-specific questions instead of going through notes and electronic health records. The tool can also be used to make sure that the correct billing codes are applied and to determine whether patients meet the requirements to join a clinical trial.
To create trust and dispel concerns that the technology might be generating inaccurate responses, the search tool will cite and provide links to the original source of information from within the organization’s internal data.
A 2016 study funded by the American Medical Association found that physicians spent an average of two hours on administrative work for every hour spent with a patient. This, coupled with working in understaffed facilities, has been a cause of burnout for many clinicians. The number of physicians reporting feeling burned out increased from 42% in 2018 to 53% in 2022 according to a Medscape survey.
With the new search capabilities, Googlehopes to reduce the amount of time clinicians spend looking through records.
“Anything that Google can do by applying our search technologies, our health-care technologies and research capabilities to make the journey of the clinicians and health-care providers and payers more quick, more efficient, saving them cost, I think ultimately benefits us as patients,” O’Malley said.
The tech giant will make the new features available to health and life sciences organizations through its Vertex AI Search platform which is already used by companies in other industries to sift through public websites, documents, and other databases.
nextArtificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, News, Technology News
Author Mercy Tukiya Mutanya
Mercy Mutanya is a Tech enthusiast, Digital Marketer, Writer and IT Business Management Student. She enjoys reading, writing, doing crosswords and binge-watching her favourite TV series.
Share:
Newsletter
Your e-mail *
subscribe
Thank you!
You have successfully joined our subscriber list.
Predictions for the upcoming Bitcoin halving are still pouring it, with most of them bullish on Bitcoin’s chance of a parabolic rise.
The upcoming Bitcoinhalving expected next year is already creating quite a bit of buzz as the market anticipates a reduction in Bitcoin block rewards. With a little over six months left till the halving, analysts are now offering predictions about Bitcoin’s chances.
While the specific count might not be the same across analysts, Rekt Capital postedon X that the halving is 189 days from Monday. Rekt Capital has offered an analysis of Bitcoin’s price behavior during the 189 days before the second halving in July 2016.
The analyst noted that Bitcoin fell 25% about 189 days before the second halving, in a re-accumulated range that lasted until two months pre-halving. According to CoinMarketCap data, Bitcoin is trading at $27,522. A similar plunge, as seen during the 2015 re-accumulation phase, could see the king coin plunge well below $22,000.
After this ended, Rekt Capital notes that Bitcoin then began its pre-halving rally and hit $776 at the time. Unfortunately, the analyst stated a pre-halving trace of 40%, which led to a post-halving re-accumulation period that put Bitcoin in the $566 – $776 range. Rekt Capital then noted that this re-accumulation phase lasted 6 months until December 2016 when a parabolic uptrend began.
Bitcoin Halving Predictions
As part of the buzz, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao made a postincluding careful predictions about Bitcoin halving based on past events. Zhao stated that there will be a lot more news, chatter, hype, anxiety, and expectations in the few months leading up to the halving. Furthermore, CZ said that Bitcoin’s price will not double immediately after the halving and predicts people will wonder why. He then added:
“The year after the halving, Bitcoin price hits multiple ATH (all time highs). And people ask why. People have short memories.”
The Binance boss however added a disclaimer that there is no proven causation and that history does not predict the future. Previous halvings have seen Bitcoin’s price become bullish months after the halving. Following this logic, a parabolic bull market may not come until 2025.
Another analyst known as Bluntz believes that the Bitcoin cycle has already bottomed. However, Bluntz said another dip is possible.
“We are in the 2019-2020 part of the cycle where we can still easily come down to $19-20k and put in a higher low and continue higher throughout 2024,” stated he.
Bullish on Bitcoin
There have been a few other bullish pre- and post-halving predictions. For instance, three Pantera Capital execs notedin a Blockchain Letterthat Bitcoin would likely spike before and after the event. Pantera Capital pointed out that each halving will now significantly affect the Bitcoin market since most Bitcoins are already in circulation. The execs then predicted that Bitcoin would hit $35,000 before the halving and pump to $148,000 sometime after. Bitcoin’s current circulating supply is over 19.5 million, about 93% of Bitcoin’s total possible supply.
The next halving event will reduce mining rewards from 6.25 per block to 3.125. Halving events happen every four years or after every 210,000 blocks.
nextBlockchain News, Business News, Cryptocurrency News, News
Author Tolu Ajiboye
Tolu is a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast based in Lagos. He likes to demystify crypto stories to the bare basics so that anyone anywhere can understand without too much background knowledge. When he's not neck-deep in crypto stories, Tolu enjoys music, loves to sing and is an avid movie lover.
Share:
Newsletter
Your e-mail *
subscribe
Thank you!
You have successfully joined our subscriber list.
OPEC strongly criticized the IEA’s forecast of peak fossil fuel demand before the decade’s end, labeling the IEA’s narrative as “extremely risky”, “impractical”, and “ideologically driven”.
OPEC has revised its medium- and long-term projections for global oil demand upward. The oil-producing consortium stated that meeting this increased demand would necessitate a substantial $14 trillion investment in the crude sector. This development comes even in the face of a rapid expansion of renewable energy technologies.
However, this long-term oil demand projection from OPEC differs from that of the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world’s primary energy watchdog. Currently, OPEC and the IEA, two prominent entities in the energy industry, are engaged in a debate over the concept of peak oil demand.
According to OPEC’s 2023 World Oil Outlook, the organization anticipates global demand to reach 116 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2045. This is an increase from 99.6 million bpd in 2022 and approximately 6 million bpd more than its prediction in the previous year’s report.
OPEC also emphasized the potential for even higher growth, primarily driven by nations such as India, China, other Asian countries, Africa, and the Middle East. As said, OPEC predicts an investment requirement of $14 trillion to meet the long-term oil demand. This translates to $610 billion on average per year. The group also added that it’s important to meet these investment requirements. This would be ultimately beneficial to both consumers and producers.
For the medium term, OPEC also predicts the oil demand to reach 110.2 million bpd in 2028. Speaking on the development, OPEC Secretary General Haitham al-Ghais said:
“Recent developments have led the OPEC team to reassess just what each energy can deliver, with a focus on pragmatic and realistic options and solutions. Calls to stop investments in new oil projects are misguided and could lead to energy and economic chaos.”
OPEC and IEA at Odds
OPEC’s predictions stand in stark contrast to those of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which declared last month that the world was at the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. In an op-ed featured in the Financial Times, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, for the first time, assertedthat the demand for coal, oil, and gas would all peak before 2030, followed by a decline in fossil fuel consumption as climate policies come into effect.
Birol’s assessment is rooted in the IEA’s forthcoming World Energy Outlook report, a highly influential publication set to be released in October.
Birol celebrated this forecast as a “historic turning point” but cautioned that the projected declines would fall “far short” of the necessary steps to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a critical threshold in the fight against climate change, with fossil fuel use being the primary driver of this crisis.
OPEC strongly criticized the IEA’s forecast of peak fossil fuel demand before the decade’s end, labeling the IEA’s narrative as “extremely risky”, “impractical”, and “ideologically driven”. OPEC had previously urged the IEA to exercise caution in undermining investments in the industry.
Even before Birol’s recent op-ed, the IEA had hinted at the possibility of peak oil demand. The relationship between OPEC and the IEA has become increasingly strained in recent years, with Birol criticizing the pace at which the producer alliance increased output rates as it unwound the drastic production cuts implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Read other market newson Coinspeaker.
nextBusiness News, Commodities & Futures, Market News, News
Author Bhushan Akolkar
Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.
Share:
Newsletter
Your e-mail *
subscribe
Thank you!
You have successfully joined our subscriber list.
