Catherine Gu

<EC EOD Brief> - 19 Jul Second Day of 🐻 The overall market cap of EC declined 5.8% DoD to approx. $2.5b (peak at $3.5b). OI also decreased as traders reduced bet sizes towards the end of the week. Except for EC2408, all 2024 contracts dropped by 5%, and 2025 contracts fell more than 10% WoW. According to #Linerlytica, SCFI-EU dropped by 1% to 5,000 points, and the overall SCFI index slid by 3.6%.

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Shared my views with WatersTechnology.com on Deutsche Bank's efforts to develop standardised protocols for asset tokenisation. Benjamin Quinlan, CEO of Quinlan & Associates, says from various project engagements and discussions with asset managers, asset tokenisation has the potential to address numerous pain points, leveraging DLT’s programmability, atomic settlement, and fractionalisation characteristics. However, a challenge that firms running DLT initiatives may face is the lack of standardisation. “Many financial institutions have conducted pilots and proofs-of-concept for digital asset exploration, which yielded a variety of network types and data formats. Private-sector players are building interoperability solutions to solve for the lack of standardisation, but they still cite discrepancies in data and communication protocols as major implementation obstacles,” Quinlan says. Firms also face high integration costs when incorporating DLT into their existing technology stack. Legacy systems, such as EMSs, will need “intensive customisation” and, therefore, significant capital to integrate with on-chain capabilities. Another challenge has to do with throughput and scalability. Quinlan says that compared to traditional trading systems, DLT networks support lower throughput. “For permissionless systems, in particular, throughput is throttled without the use of solutions like ZK-proofs (zero-knowledge proofs) and Layer 2 chains. Even in permissioned systems, many industry players comment that DLT rails may not be suitable to support use cases like high-frequency trading,” he says. That said, Quinlan believes that Singapore’s efforts with Project Guardian encourage the financial industry to explore DLT and invest in digital assets, and it is a “very clear sign” that the regulator sees a role for the still-emerging technology in the financial system. The lack of regulatory clarity on tokenised assets and systems remains a common concern in the industry. For example, Quinlan says the balance sheet treatment of digital assets remains uncertain and most regulators are still in the midst of developing clear and comprehensive guidance for regulated entities to follow DLT adoption. While it is an inevitable part of DLT adoption, as the technology is still in its nascent stages and supporting regulations tend to be more “reactive” than “proactive”, Quinlan says the market faces a “chicken-and-egg” dilemma: solutions tend to thrive in well-regulated environments … but well-regulated environments are derived from extensive testing of solutions. “We see regulators generally adopting a risk-based, ‘same risk, same regulation,’ approach. In other words, change in the underlying technology (in this case, DLT) does not change the inherent risks of financial assets and activities,” he says. https://lnkd.in/gEnRmrSy #tokenisation #dlt #blockchain

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Seed VCs are turning to new ‘pro rata’ funds that help them compete with the big firms Alpha Partners, SignalRank and now SaaS Ventures help seed VCs pay for shares when big VCs try to price — or push — them out Lee Edwards, partner at Root VC, has a saying at his firm that “pro rata rights are earned, not given.” That may be a bit of a stretch since pro rata refers to a term that VCs put in their term sheets that gives them the right to buy more shares in a portfolio company during consequent funding rounds to maintain an ownership percentage and avoid dilution. Still, while these rights are not exactly “earned,” they can be expensive. One of the latest trends in VC investing these days are funds dedicated to helping seed VCs exercise their pro rata rights. https://lnkd.in/dRM3RvdA By Christine Hall

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New post: The big stack game of LLM poker https://lnkd.in/d5mfqgwk I’m sure you read David Cahn’s excellent and provocative piece "AI's $600B Question", in which he argues that, given NVDIA’s projected Q4 2024 revenue run rate of $150B, the amount of AI revenue required to payback the enormous investment being made into NVDIA each year plus the electricity to power GPUs to train and run large language models is now $600B, and we are at least $500B in the hole on that payback. The numbers are certainly staggering… and are just going to get bigger. Unless the scaling hypothesis falters, this is a contest now of “not blinking first”. If you’re a big stack player like META, MSFT, GOOG, or any of the foundation model pure plays, you have no choice but to go all in — the prize and power of “winning” is too great. If you blink, you are left empty handed, watching someone else count your chips. It’s likely hundreds of billions will be destroyed, and trillions earned. For all of us in the startup ecosystem, among many things, it’s going to create a rolling thunder of AI opportunities. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/d5mfqgwk

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London folks! It's starting to become a cliché that there are thousands of AI pilot projects and relatively few that make it to real life. Some of that is because the products just don't deliver. But some is just because founders and sales teams haven't learned how to sell AI yet. Come learn what actually works out there! #ai #aistartups #founder #founders #startupssales #gtm #startupgtm #founderledsales #startup #startups #aistartup

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