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The market is currently driven by a few prominent narratives, including new L1s like Berachain and Monad, the TON ecosystem, stablecoins, and institutional adoption. Emerging trends like progressive web apps, DeFi blue chips, and ETH restaking are gaining momentum and could become dominant soon. Dormant narratives, like GameFi, SocialFi, and NFTs, are slow right now but could revive eventually.
This thread highlights some interesting technical papers and reads about topics like ZK Machine Learning, verifiable sequencing, and DeFi exploits. It also recommends “Thinking in Systems: A Primer” as a quick read to help understand crypto protocols.
Bitcoin is becoming increasingly attractive as a simple, gold-like asset, even with all its flaws and areas for improvement. It staying as the #1 asset is critically important, as it simplifies the pitch to investors about how to choose a winning digital asset. Ethereum has been a loser this cycle as value has been extracted by VCs, hence why money has been flowing into memecoins. Going forward, AI will become a bigger problem for crypto as it outcompetes in mindshare and developer talent.
Stablecoins face a trilemma around scalability, decentralization, and stability. Payments have been Crypto's first killer app, becoming a global payment system, especially in countries with unstable fiat currencies. AI agents can improve scalability by dynamically minting and redeeming. Agentic payments, where AI pays for goods on users' behalf, are the future of payments.
Aerodrome, a newer DEX, has generated more revenue over the last week than Ethereum, Solana, and UniSwap.
TON Network was down for 2+ hours yesterday, with major exchanges like Binance suspending withdrawals to TON.
San Francisco maintains its role as a tech and VC hub despite the crypto industry's shift towards global markets, with Asia leading in retail crypto adoption.
Sony is launching a public testnet and a developer incubation program for its Soneium blockchain, an L2 based on Optimism.
Robinhood Wallet has added support for Solana so users can self custody their tokens.
Tech giants OpenAI, Adobe, and Microsoft now support California's AB 3211, which mandates watermarks on AI-generated content. A trade group representing these companies initially opposed the bill, but recent amendments have gained their backing. The bill aims to ensure AI content is clearly labeled for public understanding.
Known for its AI-driven video generation service, Viggle AI secured $19 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The Toronto-based startup will use the investment to enhance its AI capabilities and expand its market presence. Viggle AI's unique JST-1 model offers realistic character movements, setting it apart from competitors.
Instagram's latest update allows users to add text directly to photos from the post editor, eliminating the need for third-party apps. Users can also layer another image on top as a sticker, which can be reshaped into various forms like a square, circle, heart, or star. Reels and stories also benefit from new fonts, effects, and animations for text, adding more creativity to posts. These features follow other recent updates, such as a Snap Map-like feature, songs on profiles, and the ability to share up to 20 slides in one post.
James Cuda, CEO of Procreate, has declared that the company will not use generative artificial intelligence in its products, which has polarized the tech and creative communities. Creatives overwhelmingly support this stance, seeing it as a commitment to human-driven artistic processes, while some in the tech world predict it will not age well. Cuda emphasizes that Procreate aims to support genuine human creativity rather than instant AI-generated outputs, which he feels do not align with the creative journey.
When thinking of a startup founder, one often imagines a coding expert or an energetic marketer, but UX designers are emerging as influential founders. UX designers possess a deep understanding of user behavior and needs, ensuring a product that not only looks good, but functions optimally. They emphasize the significance of user feedback throughout development, helping to build something beneficial from the start. With their focus on usability and aesthetics, they can make even MVPs attractive and ensure user-centered, adaptable product development.
Prioritizing customer feedback over competitor actions when designing products is critical. While industry trends and competitor analysis provide valuable insights, the most successful designs stem from understanding and addressing customers' needs. By following a user-centered design process, you can create relevant, customer-centric products that build loyalty and meet user expectations, ensuring long-term success.
A curated collection of website section designs to streamline your creative inspiration process.
This vector collection features over 100 free, high-quality shapes, with new additions weekly, organized into categories like circles, squares, and complex forms.
Design Champs is a design community that offers workshops, personalized mentorship, and resources. Members can enhance their skills, advance their careers, and connect with industry professionals through live events and exclusive content.
The Empathy in Design Scale is a tool that measures empathy in design. It assesses three dimensions — Emotional Interest, Personal Experience, and Self-awareness — and has proven reliable for use in organizations and professional development. However, since it relies on self-reports, there may be bias due to social desirability.
Designers often conflict with product managers and engineers, but building strong collaboration is critical instead of seeing them as enemies. By understanding each team's priorities — business for PMs, technical feasibility for engineers, and user experience for designers — and communicating effectively, designers can foster better partnerships and solve more significant problems.
Sound in UX design goes beyond alerts - it enhances accessibility, builds emotional connections, guides interactions, and creates immersive experiences. Thoughtful sound design can elevate user engagement, support brand identity, and improve usability. By integrating sound strategically and considering user needs, designers can craft multisensory experiences that resonate deeply with users.
Midjourney excels at creating lifelike images with reliable content moderation, making it ideal for most users, while Grok offers more creative freedom but comes with ethical risks.
Collaborations with auction houses like Sotheby's are legitimizing NFTs, driving growth in the digital art market despite ongoing skepticism.
Stakeholders can undervalue UX design, but aligning UX efforts with business goals is crucial for impact.
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AI is everywhere, but getting it off the ground isn't easy — especially for smaller companies that can't dedicate a team of developers for fine tuning, RAG, and implementation.
After a decline in 2023, the median size of funding rounds for startups in the US has begun to increase again, particularly for seed and Series A rounds. This growth is largely driven by investments in artificial intelligence (AI) companies, which have seen valuations and round sizes increase significantly. The trend suggests a renewed optimism in the venture capital market, with investors seeking to back high-growth and efficient companies, especially in the AI sector.
A new generation of companies, known as Vertical Integrators, are emerging in the tech industry. These companies are succeeding by integrating multiple cutting-edge technologies and developing significant in-house capabilities, rather than relying on aggregation or software-only solutions. By embracing vertical integration, these companies are able to create innovative systems that can compete with incumbents and solve complex physical problems.
The field of robotics is experiencing a surge in talent, capital, and research, which could lead to the development of a horizontal robotics platform that enables more developers to innovate in this field. This platform would provide a common foundation for robotic intelligence, allowing for the creation of more general and adaptable robots that can perform a wide range of tasks. The emergence of such a platform could revolutionize the field of robotics and enable the development of intelligent machines that can interact with the physical world in a more sophisticated way.
Recent changes in Google's indexing approach have been influenced by the shrinking open web and the rise of content platforms built on complex frameworks. Google's increased focus on domain quality means that domains must demonstrate high-quality content to be indexed, as low-quality content can lead to reduced visibility or indexing. This shift requires SEOs to prioritize quality over quantity, implement robust monitoring systems, and optimize existing content to maintain or improve organic traffic.
Revenue Growth Endurance is a metric used to evaluate how well a company maintains its growth rate from year to year, despite an increasing revenue base. It is calculated as the ratio of this year's growth to last year's growth, with a higher percentage indicating better endurance. Maintaining a high growth endurance is crucial for reaching long-term revenue milestones and attracting investors, as it reflects sustained market interest and customer retention.
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Josh Reeves, the founder of Gusto, shares valuable insights on raising venture capital, emphasizing the importance of building strong relationships with investors. He suggests treating fundraising like hiring, and viewing investors as part of your team, and recommends getting to know potential investors even when not actively seeking funding. Additionally, Reeves advises entrepreneurs to consider raising their seed round from strategic angels who can provide valuable advice and connections.
Some companies prioritize their mission over financial gain, which can lead to increased variance in their performance. This approach can result in both significant losses and extraordinary successes, especially when paired with economies of scale. By focusing on their mission, these companies can attract better talent and create innovative products, but they also face unique challenges and risks that more conventional businesses do not.
Cohere, an AI company founded in 2019, is making a name for itself in the rapidly growing AI market by focusing exclusively on enterprise clients and collaborating with major companies. The company's platform is designed to address the challenges businesses face when adopting AI technology, such as data privacy, customization, and secure deployment across multiple environments. Cohere's CEO, Aidan Gomez, believes that the next frontier in AI will be agents that can integrate into enterprise systems and automate work.
Leaders can erode trust in various ways, such as failing to follow through on promises, not practicing what they preach, frequently changing priorities, engaging in gossip, avoiding difficult conversations, and prioritizing their own team over the company.
Hiring the right VP is crucial for a company's success, but many VCs who haven't been founders themselves may not know the right questions to ask during interviews.
AI-driven coding has revolutionized data analysis.
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A critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-6386) in the WPML WordPress plugin could allow remote code execution on over one million websites. The flaw stems from improper input sanitization in Twig templates. A proof-of-concept is available for the vulnerability. Users should update to WPML version 4.6.13 immediately.
Texas Dow Employees Credit Union has reported a data breach stemming from compromised MOVEit file transfer software that affected over 500,000 members. The breach, which was discovered in July 2024 but occurred a year earlier, exposed sensitive personal and financial information.
Microsoft's GRUB patch to fix CVE-2022-2601 has led to errors when trying to boot Linux partitions in dual-boot systems due to incompatible EFI boot loaders. The workaround for users on affected distros is to either disable Secure Boot or delete the Microsoft SBAT. Microsoft maintains that the update should only be installed on systems without a Linux boot option and has stated that it's working with Linux partners to address the issue.
This post introduces a novel AWS attack in which an attacker can utilize Terraform Cloud to gain AdministratorAccess on an AWS account by only knowing (or guessing) the Terraform OIDC role and AWS account ID of a victim. This attack is possible when an OIDC's role is created with a trust relationship that does not specify a subject key, which previously was the default when creating a Federated Identity using the GUI. AWS has addressed this vulnerability by adding a mandatory Organization field that becomes the subject field when creating a Federated Identity using the GUI. This post suggests a Lambda strategy that defenders can use to periodically scan for this vulnerability.
This post examines the AWS DFIR process in a fictional scenario where an organization suffered a ransomware attack that encrypted all files on all of its EC2 instances. The analyst first investigated Sysmon logs on a Windows EC2 instance and identified that the AWS SSM Run Command was used to download malicious scripts from a GitHub repo which were then executed as SYSTEM. They then analyzed CloudTrail logs to identify the role that was used to run the SSM commands, but since it was a commonly used role to execute SSM Commands, the analyst also needed to track down the user that assumed the role in the given timeframe. Upon identifying the compromised user, the analyst also identified that the attacker moved laterally from the initially compromised account by creating access keys for the account that had permissions to assume the SSM commands role.