Sources: Uber shuts down its customer support office in LA, laying off ~80 employees and outsourcing their jobs to a support office in Manila — Uber has closed a customer support office in downtown Los Angeles, laying off about 80 employees, The Times has learned.
Elon Musk is not one to mince words, but he may have just lost a potential customer because of a cutting tweet.
That customer is renowned big deal Bill Gates, who sat down recently with YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who joined the platform in 2009 and has amassed more than 10 million viewers. Gates and Brownlee have met before, and the idea was to have Gates discuss some of what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has planned for this year, which marks the 20-year-anniversary of the organization.
Unsurprisingly, the conversation touched on climate change and in pretty short order sustainable transportation, with Brownlee bringing up Tesla and asking if when “premium” electric cars grow more affordable, they’ll also become more ubiquitous.
Gates didn’t exactly malign Tesla with his answer, telling Brownlee: “The premium today is there, but over the next decade — except that the [mileage] range will still be a little bit less — that premium will come to zero. [When we look at all the sectors addressing climate change] passenger cars is certainly one of the most hopeful, and Tesla, if you had to name one company that’s help drive that, it’s them.”
What Gates did next, however, did not sit well with Musk, apparently. He expressed excitement about his first new electric car, which happens not to be a Tesla.
Said Gates: “Now all the car companies, including some new ones, are moving super fast to do electric cars. The biggest concern is, will the consumers overcome that range anxiety? I jut got a Porsche Taycan, which is an electric car. I have to say, its a premium price car, but it’s very, very cool. That’s my first electric car and I’m enjoying it a lot.”
Musk felt compelled to weigh in with a tweet after learning about the exchange.
Specifically, after a Twitter account associated with an unofficial Tesla newsletter tweeted “a lot of people are going to watch the interview and they are going to trust Bill’s word for it and not even consider EVs. Why? Because Bill Gates is a really smart guy!” Musk responded, “My conversations with Gates have been underwhelming tbh.”
It’s funny, because they are both billionaire geniuses and it’s unexpected.
It’s also nasty enough that you can guess Gates won’t be buying a Tesla or speaking in a positive way about the company any time soon.
Over the last year or so, much-to-most of the cryptocurrency world has pivoted from the failure of “fat tokens” and ICOs, and the faltering growth of “Layer 2” payments like Lightning and the late Plasma Network, to the new hotness known as “DeFi,” which this week was used to … hack? acquire? steal? It’s pretty ambiguous … a cool million dollars.
DeFi stands for Decentralized Finance. It’s supposed to be an entire alternative financial system. One day, its visionaries say, you will be able to use DeFi to borrow and lend, to buy and sell all kinds of exotic securities, and to acquire insurance and make claims, all via completely decentralized networks and protocols, no banks or brokers or trusted third parties required, just irrevocable and implacable software, “code as law,” with no human beings involved except for you and (maybe) your counterparties, while never having to fill out any paperwork or apply for permissions, and trusting your money to no entity except whoever holds your private key(s). One day.
Many people find this a stirring, inspiring vision. However, DeFi today is very few of those things. Today it allows you to borrow crypto using crypto as collateral; use that lending market to earn interest on your crypto holdings; trade crypto via decentralized exchanges, or DEXes; commit your crypto to liquidity pools, in exchange for a percentage of fees; insure yourself against hacks somewhat; and, well, that’s pretty much it.
Some people also call stablecoins, prediction markets like Augur, and security tokens (aka stocks / real estate On The Blockchain) part of DeFi. The first two seem pretty separate to me, though, with the exception of the Dai stablecoin. Security tokens should be DeFi, but are currently an awkward fit because of their strict regulatory requirements, and anyway haven’t exactly taken the world by storm.
I should know; I spent some weeks eighteen months ago coding a security token. I’ve been writing about cryptocurrencies here for nine years. And I have followed the growth of DeFi with … well … eye-watering boredom, along with some dismay, until this week.
DeFi seems to me more like cosplaying a financial system than an actual viable alternative. I don’t see it crossing that divide any time soon, if ever. It even cosplays the De in its name, too, since very few of today’s DeFi offerings (beyond its base layers) are actually decentralized — as in, beyond the control of some kind of centralized administration — or has any real schedule for becoming so.
Technically it’s all pretty cool, I concede. But what is the point of “borrowing money using money as collateral” for the 99.9% of people who aren’t true-believer HODLers loath to even consider simply selling their crypto? Even if you accept the “floating cryptocurrencies are like gold, stablecoins are like money” analogy, this entire system only really benefits the vanishingly small number of whales who own sizable amounts of cryptocurrency already. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that they who hold that gold have made the new rules, but it’s a bit much to ask that the rest of us genuflect in awe and call them the future.
Similarly, it’s nice that you can earn a little interest on your crypto holdings, but for floating cryptocurrencies, that trickle will be drowned out by the rogue-wave-like price swings in their valuations for the foreseeable future. (For instance, much of the credit for the “more than $1 billion locked into DeFi contracts,” much cited across the industry, should go to the recent rise in valuations rather than increasing participation.) Even for stablecoin collateral, no reasonable analyst would consider the interest rates commensurate with the risk —
— because, as the events of this week point out, that risk is immense. Credit where it’s due: those events were made possible because of a genuinely novel innovation, a “flash loan,” wherein an anonymous party can borrow an arbitrary amount of money — yes, you read that correctly — providing that they ensure it’s all paid back by the end of a single smart-contract transaction. Think of it as an ATM giving you all the money you want, but locking the door until you deposit it all back.
That may seem surreal and pointless, but the thing about DeFi is, a single transaction can include many different steps between the borrow and the payback. This week’s two hacks took advantage of that fact. The first used half the flash loan to short the price of bitcoin, and the other half to borrow a lot of bitcoin, which it sold to temporarily lower its price — then claimed the short profits. It also took advantage of a bug in a smart contract intended to catch such transactions.
The second used some of the loan to borrow a lot of a cryptocurrency, then the rest to bid that up in value, then used that increased value as collateral to borrow even more, then paid back the loan and kept the increased value. It didn’t appear to take advantage of any bugs at all. Combined, they reaped roughly a cool million dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency.
Were these thefts? Were these totally legitimate arbitrage plays, using the system(s) as programmed, and, at least in the second case, apparently as designed? You can at least make a reasonable case either way.
The risks certainly do not stop there. People have even floated compelling-sounding theories suggesting how a hacker could extract the entire reserves of MakerDAO, the system behind the Dai stablecoin, which represents more than half of the combined committed value of all DeFi. In fairness, the responsible people involved will cheerfully tell you that these are bleeding-edge systems with fairly broad attack surfaces, and you probably don’t want to commit money to them that you can’t afford to lose.
But all this cosplay, clever as it is, doesn’t help solve any of the hard problems preventing cryptocurrencies from mattering to most. The oracle problem: if you rely on third parties to tell the blockchain what to do, then why not just rely on third parties to manage your money? (While also offering valuable things like a help number and recourse in the case of erroneous transactions.) The identity problem: how can you implement decentralized identity and reputation, so that you can offer credit based on someone’s history and status, rather than current cryptocurrency holdings?
Working on those problems would actually help to “bank the unbanked,” something that many cryptocurrency people used to pretend to care about. They would actually reduce the power that gargantuan centralized financial establishments hold over ordinary people. They could lead to an actual decentralized financial system which, even if only 1% of the population actually use it, would keep the giants honest simply by providing a viable alternative in case they became too draconian.
Please don’t start talking about Venezuela or Zimbabwe. Unlike you, I actually spent time in Zimbabwe during hyperinflation. If we wanted to use cryptocurrencies to help the masses suffering under profligate governments using increasingly worthless fiat currencies — which I absolutely agree is a noble goal — we wouldn’t be spending our time, effort, and intellectual horsepower on the ability to use cryptocurrency A as collateral for loans denominated in cryptocurrency B. They are completely orthogonal.
Instead of tackling the hard problems, or bringing crypto to people who need it, DeFi today seems to be mostly about creating an alternative financial system which makes life mildly more convenient for those whales who happened to wind up holding a big bag of cryptocurrencies after the first few booms. And as this week’s events show, it may not even be good at that. Please can we get back to the important problems?
Mozilla releases its VPN service Firefox Private Network on Android in a closed beta for $4.99/month — Mozilla, the organization behind the much-loved Firefox web browser, has experimented with creating a VPN service for some time. Unlike the VPNs packaged with browsers like Opera …
Last week, we interviewed Brendan Wallace, a real estate-focused venture capitalist whose portfolio companies include Opendoor, which buys and sell homes, and scooter company Lime, which helps building owners navigate around parking requirements by installing docking stations instead.
We first talked with Wallace almost exactly three years ago when he and partner Brad Greiwe took the wraps off their venture firm Fifth Wall Ventures and its $212 million debut fund. What really stood out to us at the time is that it was backed by a long list of real estate heavyweights. They’re understandably eager to get a peek at up-and-coming technologies and, in some cases, deploy them.
Wallace and Greiwe have been awfully busy since that initial conversation. Last year, they closed a second flagship fund with $503 million in capital commitments. Fifth Wall is also working to close two other funds, including a $200 million retail fund focused on matching online brands with real-world real estate and a reported $500 million carbon impact fund whose capital will enable its limited partners to expressly invest in sustainable technology.
Wallace declined to discuss the last two funds, presumably owing to SEC regulations, but he did talk with us about what he says is the biggest thing to shake up the real estate industry in “the last five decades.” We also chatted about how the coronavirus impacted a recent fundraising trip to Singapore and how WeWork’s public retrenching has affected how investors feel about real estate startups right now (he suggests WeWork’s fall definitely made an impression). Some excerpts from our conversation follow, edited lightly for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: We’d read that you were recently in Singapore meeting with new investors.
Brendan Wallace: Yes, I was in Singapore meeting with our existing investors and it was a pretty unique time to be there. When I went, which was about two weeks ago, the outbreak of coronavirus was fairly contained in China. But then as you probably read, it spread pretty rapidly in Singapore, so at the moment, I’m actually kind of self-quarantining myself in my own house.
London-based Concirrus, which builds an AI-based predictive analytics platform to help insurance providers rate customers, raises $20M Series B led by AlbionVC — Concirrus, a London-based insurtech startup, has closed a $20 million Series B funding round led by AlbionVC.
Enlarge (credit: Alberto_VO5 / Flickr)
Even thought it was, in most ways, identical to the present planet, the Earth still looked very different at the bottom of the last ice age 20,000 years ago. The globe was around 4°C cooler on average, and ice sheets covered large portions of the Northern Hemisphere, including Canada and Scandinavia. One thing you might wonder, given how much of the planet was barely habitable, is what migratory species did.
Given the loss of all that habitat to mile-thick glacial ice and a reduced winter-summer contrast courtesy of Earth’s orbital cycles, some researchers have hypothesized that bird migration wasn’t much of a thing then. Is it possible that bird species turned this behavior on and off through the ice ages?
A team led by Yale’s Marius Somveille tested this idea with a model of the factors controlling migratory behavior—and it predicts patterns surprisingly similar to the present day.
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