Author: Forbes
Since its inception in 2018 Forbes Blockchain 50 has chronicled the usage of blockchain technology at some 114 companies around the world. Last year 169 companies sent in applications. An analysis of our results over the last four years compiling the list has revealed interesting trends that you can see in the tables and charts below. Click here to read the list. Magnificent Seven In 2022 several notable stalwarts fell off of our Blockchain 50 including Microsoft, Cargill, and IBM. While there is a growing diversity of list member–from Sotheby’s and Breitling to Boeing and Andreesen Horowitz– there has been a significant shift in this year’s Blockchain 50 towards those engaging in public…
“I can’t change the fact that my paintings don’t sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.” – Vincent Van Gogh In his short but very prolific lifetime Van Gogh created over 2000 works of art, but is said to have sold only one painting for 400 francs ($70). This past November his watercolor Meules de blé (Wheat Stacks), sold at auction at Christie’s for $35.86 million. Despite his posthumous success, when he died at 37, Van Gogh was penniless. Vincent Van Gogh…
If you want to see the future of cryptocurrencies, look at Turkey. Its currency, the lira, is plunging in value, down 40% against the dollar since September. The official inflation rate—which the Turks don’t trust—is 36% and rising. That’s why desperate people there are diving into cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is highly volatile and has taken a hit recently, but Turkish buyers feel its long-term value is upward, as it has been since its inception. What’s really interesting—and what should give central bankers everywhere pause—is that the favorite crypto in Turkey currently is Tether. Why? Because Tether is a “stablecoin,” a class of…
Social networks are really the ultimate middlemen. We yearn for communication; they orchestrate it, reaping hefty profits—a situation ripe for disruption by blockchain, the kind of distributed, shared networks that rose to fame by letting cryptocurrency owners exchange value without banks and other traditional financial intermediaries. It took blockchain believers just over a decade to convince the world, or at least enough venture capital investors, that the internet requires a major makeover, one which could potentially wrest the power away from its feudal lords, a.k.a. Big Tech, and put it back in the users’ hands. The makeover is called Web3.…
OLAF CARLSON-WEE rode 2017’s “initial coin offering” craze to become one of crypto’s top venture investors. Now he’s raking in hundreds of millions, from a blockchain rage called DeFi, which promotes the fantasy of democratized financial services. On a frigid, windy day in January, Olaf Carlson-Wee is settling in for a long Zoom call from his $10 million Soho loft in Manhattan, reflecting on how far he has come in the four and a half years since Forbes featured him on its cover, labeling him the poster child for the cryptocurrency bubble of 2017. Back then, a speculative frenzy of hundreds of initial coin…
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a historic hit this week when its stock crashed by 26% in the wake of its first ever Facebook user loss, and poor ad revenue performance, likely due to iOS 15 targeting changes. But there’s also the fact that Meta took a loss spending $10 billion on its metaverse division as it attempts to realize Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of becoming “a metaverse company.” Whatever that means. While currently the main issue with Facebook is this problem with ad revenue, it shows how vulnerable Facebook is to changes in the ad market, much…
On Friday, the makers behind the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) were revealed by BuzzFeed as two men in their 30s from Florida, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, using the pseudonyms Gargamel and Gordon Goner, respectively. The report triggered an outcry from the crypto community who see this as “doxing,” (including Solano and Aronow) with many claiming there’s no journalistic or public interest need for the pair’s real-world identities to be known. Sleuthing: However, BuzzFeed claims it merely reported information that was already public and found the pair by searching public business records for Yuga Labs, the company behind the BAYC. It discovered that Yuga Labs had…
Last Thursday, the public learned that Joshua and Jessica Jarrett, on behalf of the Attorney General of the United States, had been offered a full refund of $3,793, plus statutory interest, for the 2019 tax year in response to their complaint concerning the taxation treatment of cryptocurrency tokens they obtained. According to the court documents, a trial meeting is set for next Thursday, February 10, between the judge, the Department of Justice attorneys representing the Defendant and attorneys for the Jarretts, to discuss next steps in the case. Jarrett, the President and CEO of Quantify Fitness, a gym in Nashville, Tennessee…
Wormhole Portal, a platform that helps users transfer cryptocurrency between the Solana and Ethereum blockchains, said Thursday morning that more than $325 million worth of tokens allegedly stolen less than a day earlier were safe. But that didn’t stop the prices of ether and sol from plummeting after the hack—one of the biggest ever in the booming and largely unregulated decentralized finance space. KEY FACTS Blockchain platform Wormhole, which launched last August and holds roughly $1 billion in deposited funds, confirmed on Twitter early Thursday that funds involved in the hack had been “restored,” a few hours after the firm said “all…
It’s summer 2017. Muneeb Ali, a PhD candidate in computer science at Princeton, is finishing his thesis, detailing his experience of building Blockstack—a decentralized blockchain-based internet, enabling users to own their data. Inspired by the founding father of modern computers and fellow Princeton graduate, Alan Turing, and the work of Bitcoin’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Ali was exploring applications beyond financial use cases that could be built atop the largest decentralized payments network. Fast forward to the present day. Dr. Ali has just raised $150 million to build New York-based Trust Machines, a company he co-founded with Princeton computer science…