bizbuildermike

Feb 03 2023

Big Tech: Powell has put pep back in their step

Tech stocks apparently just needed the combination therapy of job cuts and Jay Powell.

On Thursday afternoon, Big Tech’s earnings season concluded with fourth-quarter numbers for Apple, Alphabet and Amazon. The numbers were uninspiring. Apple recorded its first quarterly revenue drop in nearly four years following supply chain challenges in China. Alphabet’s advertising business showed further signs of slowing. So did Amazon’s cloud computing unit.

But so far in 2023 shares of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Netflix have soared between 10 and 57 per cent. Apple aside, the rest have typically cut about 10 per cent of jobs to show Wall Street some cursory commitment to cost control. Even so, headcount exceeds 2019 levels for these giants.

More importantly, moderating inflation figures have encouraged hopes that the Fed’s tightening cycle will soon be over. That has prompted investors to pile back into growth companies after the 2022 rout. The enthusiasm may be overdone. It is unclear that the acceleration of prices has been vanquished for good. With rates to stay well above zero where they hovered for a decade, steady-state valuations must retreat from 2021 levels regardless.

In 2022, the shares of Facebook owner Meta fell by almost two-thirds, driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on spending tens of billions on his vision for the metaverse. Earlier this week, after showing proper contrition and announcing a $40bn stock buyback, shares rose by more than a fifth. They are up nearly 60 per cent for the year. Still, the consensus forward 12 months earnings estimate for Meta remains down 36 per cent from the end of 2021.

As such, Meta’s price/earnings multiple of 22 times is not far off the 25 times it hit at the end of 2021. That snapback is far sharper than the rest of Big Tech.

Tech stock prices are only modestly cheaper than in the heady days of the pandemic. Investors should note that redundancies and a bounce related to monetary policy are one-off phenomena.

Big Tech: Powell has put pep back in their step Republished from Source https://www.ft.com/content/f851ec6f-4095-4864-a93b-b70758ac890f via https://www.ft.com/companies/technology?format=rss

Feb 02 2023

Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida Comes Out in Support

The current Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, has expressed his support for blockchain technology as a possible answer to the technical challenges that Japan is now experiencing.

Kishida said that there were “different possibilities for adopting Web3” in Japan in answer to a line of inquiry that was posed by a member of the Liberal Democratic Party named Masaaki Taira on February 1 in front of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives in Japan. He went on to say that the Japanese government could use aspects such as nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) in their efforts to revitalise regions and promote ‘Cool Japan,’ which is a national strategy aimed at showing off the country’s innovations and culture to the rest of the world.

According to Kishida, “a new community may be formed by individuals who have an interest in the same social concerns if you take DAOs into consideration.” “Creators may also utilise NFTs to diversify their revenue, which can help them keep very committed followers,”

Taira serves as the government’s task force chairperson for the Web3 policy task force. He pointed to coordination with tax authorities in Japan as well as research into the release of a digital yen. The central bank of the country announced in November that it planned to start a pilot programme for a digital currency beginning in the spring of 2023. He pointed to these two things as evidence.

Taira was quoted as saying, “I believe that the different forms of blockchain technology and technology that uses Web3 are useful in fixing the numerous challenges that we face.”

Since he took office in October 2021, Kishida has made sporadic remarks on the Japanese government’s plans to invest in Web3 services as a component of the digital transformation that is going place in the country. His cabinet approved, in the month of September, the distribution of NFTs as a prize for regional authorities that had used digital technology to find solutions to difficulties.

The deputy director-general of the Strategy Development and Management Bureau of Japan’s Financial Services Agency has advocated for more strict regulations on cryptocurrencies, similar to those that are in place for banks. Amidst the recent downturn in the cryptocurrency market, a number of exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken, have ceased operations in Japan. Additionally, the Japanese affiliate of the insolvent company FTX has until March 9 to cease operations.

Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida Comes Out in Support Republished from Source https://blockchain.news/news/prime-minister-of-japan-fumio-kishida-comes-out-in-support via https://blockchain.news/RSS/

Feb 02 2023

Despite the attacker borrowing 100 million BEUR

The blockchain security company CertiK suggests that the amount of harm that was done to the decentralised protocol BonqDAO on February 1 may have been far less than what was previously believed.

According to information provided by CertiK, the attacker started by taking out a loan for 100 million BEUR, which is a euro stablecoin, using less than $1,000 as collateral since there were no limitations on the ratio of collateralization. If users set the parameter to zero, then the platform will provide the “largest value of uint256” as the default action. This will make it possible for an incredible number of loans to be distributed.

However, according to CertiK, the hacker was only able to withdraw approximately one million dollars due to a lack of liquidity on the platform. This is despite the fact that the attacker borrowed a total of one hundred million BEUR (approximately one hundred twenty million dollars at the time of the attack). Earlier reports from blockchain security companies such as PeckSheild suggested that the hack resulted in losses of about 120 million dollars.

The Liquity Protocol was forked into Bonq, and both blockchains employ Troves to represent discrete debt positions. Bonq is a fork of the Liquity Protocol. On the other hand, reports indicate that Bonq has introduced a Community Liquidation Feature, which resulted in the liquidation of 45 Troves that had exposure to BEUR. CertiK reports that the hack also affected Troves, each of which had around 110 million Alliance Block tokens (ALBT). However, none of the Alliance Block smart contracts were compromised during the event, and the team behind the project has promised to distribute replacement tokens through an airdrop as a form of compensation to the holders of tokens who were harmed.

Although it looks that BonqDAO suffered less loss as a result of the occurrences due to a lack of liquidity, other participants were not as fortunate. On October 12, DeFi protocol Mango Markets suffered an initial loss of $116 million as a result of hacker Avraham Eisenberg’s manipulation of the price of the MNGO token price. Eisenberg drove the price up 30 times using huge perpetual future contracts in a short amount of time. Because of the limited liquidity, this was feasible since the amount of initial cash needed to control MNGO was only somewhat significant.

After that, Eisenberg obtained a loan for $116 million using the $423 million of his inflated MNGO holdings as security and stole cash from the platform. He did this simultaneously. On December 28th, Eisenberg was taken into custody in Puerto Rico on suspicion of manipulating the value of commodities and committing commodities fraud.

Despite the attacker borrowing 100 million BEUR Republished from Source https://blockchain.news/news/despite-the-attacker-borrowing-100-million-beur via https://blockchain.news/RSS/

Feb 02 2023

Kraken Closes Abu Dhabi Office

A cryptocurrency exchange known as Kraken has decided to close its headquarters in Abu Dhabi less than a year after receiving approval from local authorities to do business there.

According to an article that was published by Bloomberg on February 2, it was announced that Kraken had shuttered its office in Abu Dhabi, which resulted in the dismissal of around eight members of the team that specialised in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Since April 2022, when the licence to operate in the Abu Dhabi international financial hub and the Abu Dhabi Global Market was granted, the exchange has been permitted to perform services there. This occurred before the market drop that caused a lot of crypto firms to suffer losses.

The rumoured move in the Middle East occurred after Kraken said in November that it planned to downsize its workforce by more than 30 percent, which is equivalent to more than 1,000 people, in an effort to survive the crypto winter. According to Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell, the layoffs are returning the size of the exchange back to where it was in 2021, before it witnessed considerable growth. Powell came to the conclusion that he should step aside from his post as CEO, but he will continue to serve as board chair, as he indicated back in September.

As of the 31st of January, Kraken withdrew entirely from the Japanese market. This is the second time since April 2018 that the exchange has abandoned a major economy in Asia. The firm said in December that the decision had been reached as part of the process of resource allocation, citing “current market conditions in Japan” and a “weak crypto market globally” as the reasons for the move.

This page was revised on February 2 to reflect a statement that was issued by Kraken. The revision can be seen here.

Kraken Closes Abu Dhabi Office Republished from Source https://blockchain.news/news/kraken-closes-abu-dhabi-office via https://blockchain.news/RSS/

Feb 02 2023

Local Officials Set Ambitious Targets for Digital Yuan Transactions

Local news site JS China reports that top Communist Party officials were present in the City of Suzhou on February 1 for an annual conference discussing the testing of the digital yuan central bank digital currency (e-CNY CBDC). As part of the outcomes of the meeting, party officials have established a provisional key performance indicator (KPI) of 2 trillion CNY ($300 billion) for e-CNY CBDC transactions in the city by the end of 2023. This KPI is intended to be implemented by municipal administrators through promotional efforts.

A goal of processing $30 billion in e-CNY loans for small and medium-sized firms in Suzhou by the end of the year has been established by the relevant authorities. With over 30.54 million digital wallet downloads in 2022, the total value of e-CNY transactions in the city topped 340 billion CNY, which is equivalent to $50.5 billion. These transactions took place at 930,000 local companies and government agencies. The total amount of financial incentives connected to the e-CNY amounted to 40 billion CNY ($5.9 billion), while the total amount of e-CNY loans granted was 18.7 billion ($2.78 billion).

Concurrently with the e-CNY Key Performance Indicators, the local administrators in Suzhou are required to oversee the development of at least 1,000 firms in the digital financial technology sector within the city by the year 2025. These firms are required to specialise in the areas of artificial intelligence, data, cloud computing, blockchain, and machine learning. Currently, there are only 371 such firms. An excerpt from the plan for the City of Suzhou reads, when translated: “By the year 2025, the People’s Bank of China will have established a digital assets data monitoring platform, a blockchain-powered exchange for finance and commodities, a payment solution for internet of things, and a fintech lab, all of which will have produced tangible results. This would encourage the growth of the ecosystem for digital finance, which would synergize nicely with the current financial industry in the City of Suzhou.”

Local Officials Set Ambitious Targets for Digital Yuan Transactions Republished from Source https://blockchain.news/news/local-officials-set-ambitious-targets-for-digital-yuan-transactions via https://blockchain.news/RSS/

Big Tech: Powell has put pep back in their step

DON’T MISS A BEAT

Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida Comes Out in Support

DON’T MISS A BEAT

Despite the attacker borrowing 100 million BEUR

DON’T MISS A BEAT

Kraken Closes Abu Dhabi Office

DON’T MISS A BEAT

Local Officials Set Ambitious Targets for Digital Yuan Transactions

DON’T MISS A BEAT