Hello Everyone

Technically I’m on break until May, but yet another Paris based ex-Google DeepMind startup has gotten considerable funding. We talked about them earlier in the year as part of the rising Paris Generative AI scene for startups, especially those formerly at Google DeepMind.

Insider and others report that Holistic AI has gotten over $200 million in funding. This company operates in a really emerging and important niche. This is not the same Holistic AI that does AI risk and safety products based in the UK, but a startup working primarily on agentic AI foundational models.

Back in January, 2024 it was reported that a pair of scientists at Google DeepMind, Laurent Sifre and Karl Tuyls, are reportedly in discussions with potential investors to establish their own artificial intelligence (AI) startup in Paris. It seems those talks are about to conclude nearing May, 2024 and it means they will become a major AI startup in Paris, bolstering already a good lineup of new companies there.

This also signals yet another team within Google DeepMind that have gone their own way, as Bloomberg has signaled the move around 5 months ago.

They are like the Mistral of AI regulation in a sense. Mistral also got huge funding out of the blue and have made a name for themselves in the Generative AI open-source (open-weight) space.

The team at Holistic have two co-CEOs, Charles Kantor and Karl Tuyls. Besides the scoop by Insider, they have not official come out of stealth or done PR on the raise, so it may not be fully finalized.

Holistic will also be focused on new multi-agent AGI, according to investor sources. That is they want to build and generate frontier multi-agent and multi-modal foundational models. Agentic AI is one of the buzzwords without much to show from the likes of Cognitive Labs, Magic AI d others who are also flirting with the AGI terminology. It’s not yet clear what agentic AI properties OpenAI’s GPT-5 might have.

This $200 million Series A is large enough to allow them to scale to become a leader in this nascent industry. More details on the funding round should emerge soon.

The round should reach closer to $220 million. Both scientists are considered leaders in the field, the report said. Sifre co-authored groundbreaking 2016 DeepMind research on the capabilities of AI systems in the game of Go. Tuyls has researched game theory and multi-agent reinforcement learning. 

Holistic is in a position where they could collaborate with Mistral, Kyuntai and others to build France’s overall Generative AI competitiveness and for the EU. The UK and Germany are not exactly thriving in this new nascent space so far in the early 2020s. Will Holistic become the ‘Mistral of Agentic AI’ is the question?

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Hey Guys,

I’m an accountability journalist with regards to the fraud, pump and dumps, NFT scams and moreover the failed promised that is most of crypto and blockchain. Web3 and crypto media is extremely skewed and not what I would consider real journalism.

Typically its foreign actors like North Korea who are blamed for these “Bridge” hacks.

So what’s going on?

Cross-chain token bridge Nomad fell victim to a series of exploits that drained almost all funds on Monday August, 1st, 2022.

In a matter of two hours on Monday evening, the total value of crypto assets held on Nomad dropped from $190.3 million to $11,815 as of early Tuesday morning New York time.

The first sign of trouble began at about 9:23 pm UTC.

The Nomad bridge allowed token transfer between Ethereum (ETH), Avalanche (AVAX), Evmos (EVMOS), Moonbeam (GLMR), and Milkomeda C1 blockchains.

The Harmony hack is being blamed on the Lazarus Group (North Korea) according to preliminary analysis. That was $100 million in June, 2022.

This is even bigger!

samczsun — a researcher at the crypto and Web3 investment firm Paradigm explains:

Nomad.xyz

In an unprecedented event, a hacker attacked the bridge and was followed by hundreds of other addresses replicating the attack systematically.

This is Nomad’s website:

Sorry bro, we’re not so optimistic right now!

Nomad's hack marks at least the third prominent bridge protocol to be hacked so far this year.

I thought blockchain tech was supposed to help with security?

Crowd-Looting in Web3

A further post-mortem from blockchain security auditing firm CertiK noted that this dynamic created its own momentum, where people who saw funds being stolen using the above method were able to substitute their own addresses to replicate the attack. This led to what one Twitter user described as “the first decentralized crowd-looting of a 9-figure bridge in history.”

Those not chaos, it’s decentralized theft!

This angers me! Crypto was once portrayed as a way to democratize finance. These brotherhoods of young people and often fraudulent founders exploit and raid each other.

I guess we’re all just nomads on the way to dystopia, huh?

a16z’s Ideological Warfare

In a more optimistic take, Nassim Eddequiouaq, crypto CISO at Andreessen Horowitz, suggested the funds could be reclaimed from the “whitehats that drained preventively,” though the identities of those that obtained the funds from Nomad appear to be largely unknown.

That’s called damage control on the PR.

Would you Steal from a Brother?

Apparently if you hang out in Crypto Discords, you were motivated to share in the looting! This is despicable conduct.

Over the following hours, the attacks took $190.7 million worth of WBTC, USD Coin (USDC), Wrapped Ether (WETH), and several other tokens.

Decentralized Crowd-Looting

Crypto has such fine ethics. Unlike other crypto exploits where only a few addresses are directly tied to the hack, hundreds of addresses were responsible for draining the Nomad bridge of almost all the $190.7 million locked in it.

I don’t know guys, this is sort of sketchy.

What is Nomad Bridge?

Nomad is a bridge, a protocol that allows you to move tokens between blockchains, in this case, Avalanche, Ethereum, Moonbeam, Evmos, and Milkomeda C1.

A few days before the hack, Nomad announced that several major investors like Coinbase Ventures and Polychain Capital participated in the seed round that raised $22 million.

More than $1 Billion Stolen in 2022

Bridges are software that enable different types of blockchains and their respective tokens to interoperate, rather than work in silos.

They have become frequent victims of hacks in recent years, with more than $1 billion stolen from bridges in 2022, according to a June report by forensics firm Elliptic.

According to the Rekt database, $1.2 billion in crypto assets were stolen in the first quarter of 2022 – 80% of which came from bridges.

It’s not just toy money, real people are losing their life savings in these things.

Full of bad endings.

This year, just two hacks alone have accounted for almost a billion dollars of stolen funds: in February, the Wormhole bridge platform was hacked for $325 million after a hacker spotted an error in open-source code uploaded to GitHub and exploited it. Then, in March, a hacker stole around $625 million from the Ronin blockchain, which underlies the Axie Infinity crypto game.

They sounds like places from Lord of the Rings. But it’s all part of the Web3 Decentralized wonderland where people go to YOLO and FOMO.

Then in Harmony’s Horizon was drained of $100 million in June and now this in August. Not a great year for crypto-security crypto-punks.

Long live the Bitcoin Elite and the blockchained.

But is it even worth covering crypto fraud? It’s so pervasive now. Babel Finance, the Hong Kong-based crypto lender that froze withdrawals last month, incurred “massive” losses while using customer funds for its own proprietary trading, according to a restructuring plan seen by Bloomberg. 

You cannot make this stuff up.

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Steam is by far one of the best platforms for gamers. Now with Steam Deck and a Tesla integration it could be even easier.

I had no idea about the Tesla connection until recently.

Tesla’s apparently looking to expand its collection of in-car games... by adding Steam. In a reply to a tweet, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company’s “making progress with Steam integration” and that we can expect a demo “probably next month.”

I honestly don’t care about Netflix in a car, but Steam makes my head turn.

Elon Musk says that Tesla is getting closer to integrating Valve’s Steam, which would take its in-car gaming platform to a whole new level.

We still don’t know if the integration will go so far as to allow users to make purchases on Steam while sitting in their cars, or if there will be any games Teslas can’t support.

While Valve isn’t a public company, I would invest in its stock if it were. Steam and the SteamDeck are incredible digital products in the fastly growing gaming sector.

I don’t see myself using Microsoft’s Game pass, I’m a PC gamer not a console gamer. The only exception might be Starfield in 2023, if I’m forced to do so.

Tesla vehicles are high-end and expensive items, and come packed with gadgets and gizmos both trivial and non-trivial (you can make your car do a 'dance', for example). One of the features is the integration of certain videogames on the car's internal screens, which was shown off by an account dedicated to, well, showing off Teslas(opens in new tab).

Valve is as close to a decentralized gaming virm that’s extremely innovative as there is. While today half of China EV exports are Teslas, that won’t last. Tesla will be in tough vs. established car firms and the new breed of EV startups in China and maybe even one day the likes of Rivian, Lucid and Apple, though as things are going today I wouldn’t bet on it.

At a time when Microsoft could one day acquire Netflix, and car software is changing in the 2020s, it’s a bit exciting to witness the real innovation.

Sublink

Why Microsoft Will Acquire Netflix

I’m calling it, there’s a 45% chance in the future Netflix will be acquired by Microsoft. As the stock of Netflix tanks, I agree with analysts that are hinting it could be a match for a future acquisition. Last week, Netflix named Microsoft as its partner for its ad-supported…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · Michael Spencer

So will Tesla itself be getting into gaming? Could even Tesla acquire Netflix instead? It really is food for thought.

Tesla is going into the video game business

As we previously reported, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle, and they recently started building a similar team in Austin. The automaker has been building a video game platform called Tesla Arcade (Electrek) inside its vehicles, and it has been working with video game studios to port games to it.

Tesla will be in tough to compete with Apple car software, even if Project Titan doesn’t end up going anywhere. AppleCar tech could be another cash cow for Apple, and it’s really evolving now.

New Tesla gaming computer

With the unveiling of the new Model S and Model X, Tesla has announced a new gaming computer inside the vehicles:

Up to 10 teraflops of processing power enables in-car gaming on-par with today’s newest consoles via Tesla Arcade. Wireless controller compatibility allows gaming from any seat.

Tesla getting into gaming is good PR for the gaming industry which is growing very fast in the 2020s already. Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are taking the future of gaming very seriously now and want their own walled gardens within it.

Netflix needs to improve in gaming just to survive a few more years on its own.

Car software could be a way for brands to differentiate themselves in a new more ambient computing ecosystem of software alive everywhere.

As people spend less time actually driving with Robo-taxis what will they want to do on their trips? Gaming will be one of those options.

If Elon Musk is behind it, it will be good for Valve.

Musk promises don’t mean much though historically speaking. Musk still hasn’t followed through on promises to bring Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher to newer Model S and X vehicles, which come outfitted with an AMD Ryzen processor and a discrete AMD RDNA 2 GPU. But a potential Steam integration could be an indication that Tesla’s inching closer to its goal, according to Verge.

Tesla came under fire last year after flip-flopping on its policies, first allowing drivers to play games only while in park, and then letting drivers play games when the vehicle is in motion by bypassing a safety confirmation. It’s very weird, but the future of gaming is gaming everywhere, whether you like it or not.

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Hey Guys,

Just a little not on some breaking news.

I recently tried to survey some NFT professionals around me on LinkedIn about how they say the future of NFTs going. You can see and vote on the poll here.

It turns out my timing was a bit spot on, as even Solana has been down for the past 7 hours due to NFT spill over.

Largest NFT mint in History

Yuga Labs, the web3 company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, disrupted the entire Ethereum blockchain as a flood of users rushed to purchase NFTs representing virtual plots of land in its upcoming metaverse project, Otherside. This weekend.

A total of 55,000 Otherdeeds sold at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin, or around $5,800 at the time of purchase (via CoinTelegraph), raising about $320 million in what was considered the “largest NFT mint in history.”

Yuga Lands is hacking the internet and breaking Ethereum and Solana while they are at it.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club crashed Ethereum on Saturday night. As part of the upcoming Bored Ape metaverse called Otherside, developers Yuga Labs on Saturday launched a new NFT collection which consists of 100,000 land deeds for the virtual world.

It’s truly quite bizarre and shows you the extent of the FOMO. Yuga Labs is yet another a16z backed NFT heist.

Their absurd seed round funding recently pegged them to have a market cap of $4 Billion. How? Some Venture Capitalists must have a lot of money behind creating and keeping up the hype for NFT platforms.

Yuga Labs, maker of the multimillion dollar monkey JPEGs that plenty of NFT skeptics love to hate, just raised a $450 million round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $4 billion valuation in late March, 2022.

Ethereum as it turns out is still pretty broken when it comes to scalability. Otherdeeds are minted in BAYC’s native ApeCoin, but still require Ethereum for gas fees. A gas fee is the cost associated with a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Fees typically increase as the network gets more congested, as it becomes more work to process a transaction.

A Microsoft director Raphael Brown recently posted on LinkedIn:

The decentralization movement continues to look both increasingly centralized in its philosophy and heavily inefficient in its technology. High gas (transaction) fees, failed transactions, struggling network traffic, paying more in fees than the transaction cost. Now they're talking about building their own walled garden. This is still an investor space and not a consumer space.

Keep in mind the total users involved were not high. 55k users. Traffic from 55k users brought parts of ethereum to a standstill as speculative retail investor, not gamers, not players, shelled out thousands to tens of thousands apiece all in the hopes that other people will leave social media, and gamers will leave games, and they will all magically come to this unbuilt web world to rent from the 55k early adopters all who hope to grow their investment. How is this sustainable?

I sort of see his point. Microsoft with their acquired Gaming Empire must be seeing this NFT hype as potentially a threat as the future of the Gaming Metaverse and Web3 collides.

• Not cool crypto bros

• Such a large volume of transactions during the Otherdeed mint caused gas fees to soar. As noted by CoinTelegraph, Reddit user u/johnfintech pointed out that some buyers shelled out anywhere from 2.6 ETH ($6,500) to 5 ETH ($14,000) in gas fees alone — more than the cost of an Otherdeed NFT (and in some cases, more than twice the cost).

• How is this a sustainable trend?

The Hype of Otherside

Otherside is Yuga Labs' take on the metaverse. It'll be a virtual world made up of 200,000 plots of land, which will be purchased, owned and traded as NFTs. Land being sold as NFTs is a confusing concept, but traders are hoping land in heavily frequented metaverses will prove ultra valuable; imagine owning a building in the center of a game like Fortnite and being able to do what you like with it.

Meanwhile every manner of digital twin, Metaverse, gaming ecosystem and DeFi startup is trying to hitch a ride with the NFT hype.

Yuga Labs is yet another a16z backed NFT platform to hit the jackpot of FOMO. OpenSea and Coinbase both also are major NFT gateways. Chris Dixon, one of the key evangelists and VCs of Web3 must be laughing his way to the bank.

Yuga Labs issued an apology on Twitter shortly after the mint ended. “We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” Yuga Labs said. “It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale.

We’d like to encourage the DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] to start thinking in this direction.” The ApeCoin DAO, the entity responsible for making decisions within the ApeCoin community, exists separately from Yuga Labs. The DAO’s decisions are carried out by the Ape Foundation’s Board, consisting of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Animoca co-founder Yat Siu, and others.

Maybe Substack who share the same backers should allow writers to have NFT integration to help us monetize. Support an artist or Creator crypt bros!

As outlined in a post days before the mint, Yuga Lab’s original goal was to avoid an “apocalyptic” gas war, or a sudden spike in gas fees due to high demand. But when you feed the FOMO of the peasants with too much VC oil, it gets a bit hot on the blockchain that is barely scalable yet. The Metaverse frenzy is embarrassing for many reasons. That so much of the hype is VC money generated is pretty transparent, and getting every more centralized.

Yuga Lab's ApeCoin hit record highs just days before the "Otherside" metaverse opens its doors for sale on Saturday April 30th, 2022 at 9:00 PM ET. What resulted isn’t exactly surprising but shows you how immature the space truly is thus far.

We all seem quite willing to go through crypto hoops to get what they tell us we should have.

• To get in on this much-anticipated metaverse and mint Otherside NFTs requires purchasing ApeCoin ($APE), the governance and utility token for the entire Ape ecosystem, and the legal tender in this new, exclusive metaverse.

• While crypto markets have been in the red over the past week, the price of $APE has been going green in anticipation of BAYC's metaverse ((as the saying goes, the grass is always greener on the otherside (I saw what you did there!)).

It said it would ditch the popular Dutch auction style of minting, in which an NFT goes up for sale at a certain ceiling price and is then incrementally lowered over time. It employed an alternate method instead, selling NFTs at a flat price and opting to gradually allow more mints to occur over time.

The Road to Otherside

In March, Yuga Labs raised $450 million in funding to build the Otherside, a decentralized metaverse with elements of gamification.

While it’s supposed to encompass Yuga Lab’s NFT brands, such as the newly-acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits, the company has goals to extend support to NFTs from other entities. A lot is still unknown about the prospective Otherside, but that clearly hasn’t stopped its enthusiastic community from investing in the project.

Otherside is the biggest product launch yet from the company best known for creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT (non-fungible token) collection. During last night's sale, traders snapped up a limited supply of 55,000 “Otherdeeds” NFTs, which represent titles to plots of virtual land in a forthcoming 3D social space.

This means BAYC team raised about $285M with otherside NFTs.

While the resulting land rush generated roughly $285 million for the company, it also created some of the highest gas fees in the history of the Ethereum network that is making us question the current system at large.

They cost about $7000 each, and were only available for purchase in ApeCoin (APE), Yuga Labs’ official cryptocurrency. On secondary marketplaces like OpenSea, the cheapest listed price for an Otherdeed was around 7 ETH (roughly $19,000). All of this is getting quite expensive for investors and lucrative for the NFT landlords and not so decentralized companies.

What do you make of it all?

If you value my work consider supporting me, I cannot continue to write without community support.

Edit:

The Final 24-hour Tally

💎🔮 Those are some big numbers from Yuga Labs and The Otherside.

55,000 NFTs were minted at 305 APE each, which means each "Otherdeed" cost about $5,800 given Apecoin’s price at time of mint.

Yuga Labs raked in over $318.7 million from this mint alone.

Otherdeed already has seen over $242 million in total secondary volume traded.

Of that figure, over $190 million was on OpenSea.

In all, that’s $561 million.

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