元宇宙 · 3758

Ali sells his “son” who earns 2 billion dollars a year: All in AI to buy GPUs in exchange for money

Source | Pencil Dao Author | Huang Xiaogui Original title: Ali sells his son who earns 2 billion dollars a year: In exchange for 10.1 billion yuan to buy a GPU, Alibaba sold a “chicken that can lay eggs.” On August 17, Zhou Bingshu, CEO of Lingxi Mutual Entertainment, issued an internal letter stating that Alibaba will sell its shares in Lingxi Mutual Entertainment, Xinchen Capital will become the new shareholder, and the original management team will continue to be responsible for the company's operations. According to the 21st Century Economic Report, Alibaba sold Lingxi Mutual Entertainment for at least 1.5 billion US dollars (about 10.1 billion yuan). Currently, Alibaba and Xinchen Capital have not officially disclosed the transaction amount. Lingxi Mutual Entertainment is a high-quality asset, with an annual net profit of 1.5 billion to 2 billion yuan; with “Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition”, a stable cash cow, the number of global users surpassed 100 million. “Exchange money to buy a card (GPU).” Huang Wei (pseudonym), a person familiar with Alibaba, told Pencil that the sale at this time was to concentrate resources and invest in computing power, and Ali, who is all in AI, has already entered a state of “full agent and model development, and scene access.” - 01 - Sold cash cow and invested in AI Lingxi Mutual Entertainment in Guangzhou. Its predecessor, Jian Yue Technology, was founded by Zhan Zhonghui, a former NetEase executive. In 2017, Ali acquired Jianyue Technology at a valuation of about 1 billion yuan and became a subsidiary. In September 2020, it officially launched the “Lingxi Interactive Entertainment” brand. What really gave this company a foothold in the Chinese game industry was “Three Kingdoms: Strategy Edition”, which was launched in 2019. According to Sensor Tower's previous data, the game's revenue in the first two years of its launch was over 1 billion US dollars. In recent years, Lingxi Mutual Entertainment's annual revenue is about 3 billion yuan to 4 billion yuan, which is roughly equivalent to the revenue scale of game manufacturers in central China. Also, according to industry media estimates such as “Game Grapes”, Lingxi Mutual Entertainment's profit in 2025 will be about 1.5 billion to 2 billion yuan. Ali sells a profitable business to invest in a direction that is still burning money — AI. In fiscal year 2026, Ali's capital expenditure reached 126.063 billion yuan, a record high. Most of this is AI computing power infrastructure and data center expansion. This input is directly reflected in the financial statements. In fiscal year 2026, Ali's revenue reached 1.02 trillion yuan, up 3% year on year, but operating profit fell 64%; adjusted EBITA fell 56%. Free cash flow declined from positive 73.9 billion yuan to negative 466 billion yuan. But this isn't a gamble without a future. Ali CEO Wu Yongming revealed, “(Ali) almost none of the cards are empty.” As of the end of March this year, Alibaba Cloud's revenue reached 41.6 billion yuan, an increase of 38% over the previous year, of which external commercialization revenue increased 40%; revenue from AI-related products was close to 9 billion yuan in a single quarter, accounting for about 30% of external revenue, and has maintained three-digit growth for 11 consecutive quarters. Ali predicts that in about a year, AI-related revenue may account for more than half of cloud business revenue. Today, growth is limited by supply, not demand. The ceiling of demand is far from being reached, but the ceiling of supply is just around the corner. At a time when cash is in high demand, but computing power continues to be exchanged for income, it's like “the family has an emergency, lacks money, and sells something for the family.” Huang Wei described Ali's sale of Lingxi Mutual Entertainment in this way. Lingxi Mutual Entertainment's annual profit is 1.5 to 2 billion yuan. It is a good asset, but it is not a core asset. The game business has a limited strategic relationship with AI, cloud, and e-commerce. Retaining it makes more than 1 billion dollars in profits; selling it will take back more than 10 billion dollars in cash at once and invest in AI. And this isn't the first time. In fiscal year 2026, Ali has successively disposed of many assets such as Gaoxin Retail, Yintai Department Store, and Trendyol Local Lifestyle Services. Each of these businesses has its own situation, but the underlying logic is the same: shrink non-core and concentrate resources on the main line of AI. Lingxi Mutual Entertainment sold 10.1 billion yuan, which is a bit higher than the 7 billion to 9 billion yuan expected by the market. Xinchen Capital's premium bid shows that in the eyes of buyers, this is a high-quality asset. For Ali, being able to sell at a high level is also considered a good time to sell. - 02 - Give me some more cards, I can make more money. The whole industry is buying cards. Overall, the 2026 GPU procurement budget of leading domestic manufacturers was raised from 160 billion yuan at the beginning of the year to about 230 billion yuan, a sharp increase of 44% within half a year. The industry's outlook for 2027 is more aggressive — GPU-related investment is likely to double to 500 billion yuan. The world is more exaggerated. According to data from Jibang Consulting, the total capital expenditure of the world's nine largest cloud vendors will exceed 886.7 billion US dollars in 2026, an increase of nearly 90% over the previous year. Amazon $220 billion, Google...

4d ago铅笔道#AI #GPU #Alibaba

588 days, 300+ Web3 projects fall: who's still at the table?

Source: Foresight News Author: Eric Original title: In 588 days, 300+ Web3 projects sank into the deep sea and sailed a thousand sails by the side of a sinking ship, and the disease tree is ahead of time. On the way to prosperity, any industry must go through a round of “dead bodies are everywhere” of elimination, and Web3 is no exception. According to Foresight News's review of public information, since 2025, at least 78 Web3 projects with a total funding amount of more than 1.5 million US dollars have been announced to be shut down. Of these, 69 projects that can confirm the amount of financing have taken away more than 900 million US dollars in total. If you count the small projects that didn't get financing from institutions and died silently, the total number is far over 300. This means that over the past nearly 600 days, an average Web3 project died every two days, or was famous or unknown. Of the 75 projects counted by Foresight News, 37 were shut down throughout 2025, while 41 were shut down in just half of 2026, and 17 were shut down in a single quarter in the second quarter, setting the highest number in a single quarter since this round of clearance. The “hot” DappRadar, Zapper, and established exchanges including BitMEX and AscendEX (formerly BitMax) in the last round of the bull market have all put an end to their business careers in nearly two years. The reshuffle did not stop as the market picked up; on the contrary, it accelerated. After receiving millions of dollars or even tens of millions of dollars in financing, every team that has stepped into this new world has had the proud ambition of “laughing at the sky and going out. Are our generation people from Fenghao?” But after a few years of being baptized in the market, these cold and cruel numbers are still in front of everyone's eyes. Emerging markets are also markets, and Web3 isn't more gentle than other industries. “Not being able to support myself” is the number one “cause of death”. Looking at the “cause of death” of 75 projects, the first one ranked was “insufficient funding,” with 31 projects falling on this issue, accounting for more than 40%; followed by “insufficient market demand,” and 17 companies shut down as a result. The two added up are close to two-thirds of the total. In other words, the vast majority of projects die for only one reason: they have never been able to support themselves. The expressions used by these projects in the shutdown announcement are similar. Many of them say “after trying our best to find a path to sustainable development, we have not found a path to sustainable development.” The subtext of this sentence is: At the beginning of the project, there was actually no idea how to do it, or the initial idea was very different from the actual situation in the market. Some industry observers rated this wave of bankruptcy as “a direct reflection of the failure of the business model and the breakdown of the capital chain, rather than simply fluctuating market sentiment,” which can be described as hitting the head. The investment logic of the primary market has completely changed in the past two years. The first question investors meet is no longer “how much room do you have for imagination”, but “how to make money.” The first batch of projects whose revenue did not cover operating costs or tell a new story fell after the financing floodgates were tightened. The OSL Institute summarized this shift in its annual report as the industry moving from the “first half” to the “second half”: a growth model driven by rising asset prices and innovative agreements came to an end, and the market moved “from narrative to delivery.” To put it more bluntly, the market and capital are no longer willing to pay for “experiments,” and the project's self-hematopoietic ability has become a necessity. Compared to the reason they wanted to be clear, the five projects that announced that the “model is unsustainable” seemed much more honest. For example, Goldfinch, which made unsecured credit loans, lost blood and shut down due to continued bad loans to emerging market companies; the social game Fantasy.Top, which is a popular social game that relies on tokens to motivate, makes it difficult to sustain the incentive model after the popularity recedes. The “unsustainable model” is a very interesting reason for the collapse. Most unsecured credit loans in traditional financial markets are based on big data or personal past credit records to set reasonable limits. As an emerging “lending company,” Goldfinch dares to provide unsecured credit loans in emerging markets without credit data. This is not a problem that can be solved by cryptocurrency and Web3 alone. Obviously, the reason for the birth of this company with a total financing amount of nearly 40 million is hard to convince. I don't know how top institutions like a16z were fooled into entering the market. Additionally, some companies have died due to regulation. Mango Markets shut down through a community vote after reaching a settlement with the SEC...

10d ago22#WEB3

Who are the Chinese buyers who have invested $100 million in Trump's cryptocurrency?

On July 19, at the World Cup final in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Zhou Guren (top left) appeared in a private room with Zach Witkoff on the right. Vincent Alban for The New York Times saw the World Cup finals in New Jersey last month, Zack Witkoff, the co-founder of President Trump's cryptocurrency company, in a luxurious private room. Also watching the game was a man who brought huge wealth to the president and all of the company's co-founders. Two years ago, this man named Zhou Guren (English name Bobby) was also a failed hardwood flooring retailer in the UK and was investigated there on suspicion of money laundering; he headed a small cryptocurrency startup that eventually directed the broadcast. He then seemed to come out of thin air and became one of the biggest buyers of Trump's “World Free Finance” tokens, investing a total of $100 million through a new company called Aqua 1. For several months, he kept a low profile, speaking only briefly as Aqua 1's “Mr. Bobby” during an audio broadcast on the X platform where almost no one followed. “We are very proud to be a major player in 'world liberty', the Trump family's crypto enterprise,” he said. As much as $75 million of this funding was distributed to a company controlled by the president and his three sons, according to World Free Finance regulations. The money also benefited Steve Vitkov's family, the Trump administration's peace envoy and Zach Vitkov's father. In any era in the past, there was no public evidence that a foreigner with such financial resources offered such a huge amount of money to the US president would necessarily be considered contrary to political practice, and could even lead to congressional investigation. However, Zhou Guren's confusing case just revealed how easy it is for buyers with unknown origins and unclear motives to use the anonymity of cryptocurrencies to send large amounts of money to Trump. According to the president's recent financial disclosure report, he received $1.4 billion in revenue from his cryptocurrency business last year, mostly from anonymous sources. At present, it is unclear how deep the World Free Finance Corporation has investigated Zhou Guren's background, but the UK money laundering investigation is publicly searchable information, and part of Zhou Guren's troubled business history can also be found publicly. A court record filed in November last year accuses Zhou Guren of participating in money laundering activities with five other people starting in 2019. However, he has yet to be prosecuted. British officials said at the end of last month that the investigation was still ongoing. His deal with World Free Finance raised a series of questions: How did he obtain such huge sums of money? Does World Free Finance actually comply with anti-money laundering laws? Under relevant laws, in some cases, businesses must record the origin of customer funds before accepting them. Patrick Prinz, chief operating officer of Recoveris, headquartered in Switzerland, which specializes in investigating digital asset crimes, said that the multiple red flags described to him by the “New York Times” — Zhou Guren's experience of business failure, sudden acquisition of huge wealth, large transactions, and the fact that he is being investigated — should have triggered these record requirements. World Free Finance Corporation spokesman David Waxman said in a statement that the company has complied with all applicable laws and regulations. “World Free Finance has established a compliance system that meets or exceeds industry standards,” he said. Zhou Guren set up a company and paid $100 million to President Trump's main cryptocurrency business, “World Free Finance.” Gabby Jones/Bloomberg Waxman declined to say whether the company was aware of the source of the coin purchase funds. He said that the company did not agree with the “New York Times”'s “description of Mr. Zhou,” but did not specify. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump had no conflicts of interest and “acted only in the best interest of the American public.” Neither Zhou Guren himself nor his company responded to the New York Times's multiple contacts. Reuters was the first to reveal his identity as the person behind Aqua 1 at the helm. To this day, the true origin of the funds Zhou Guren paid to World Free Finance is still a mystery. But through dozens of interviews with former colleagues, reviews of classified documents, and analysis of court records and other public information, the New York Times's in-depth investigation of Zhou Guren's career revealed a bizarre trajectory. Just after his crypto company burned $7.6 million and he left London to move to the UAE in the summer of 2024, the fortune of this man who once seemed to be borrowing money from others took a dramatic turn...

10d agoWendy#Trump #World free finance #Trump

Meta is being sued for $1.4 trillion

Comparatively, according to CCTV news reports, the US metaverse platform company (Meta) will once again stand in federal court this week after two convictions and nearly $1 billion in compensation. On August 12, a lawsuit filed jointly by the four US states will begin a jury screening process in the Oakland federal court. The prosecution alleges that Meta's social media platform's addictive design harms minors and claims $1.4 trillion against it.

12d ago

The “Everything Is Possible World Model”: How can a vague concept support the $10 billion financing narrative?

Author: Motion Detective BeatingOriginal title: Everything Is Possible World Model The term World Model is almost being sold out by investors. Li Feifei's World Labs completed financing of 1 billion US dollars in February this year, with a valuation of 5 billion US dollars. A year ago, it was only valued at 1 billion dollars. Yang Likun's new company, AMI Labs, raised around a billion dollars in seed round, setting the record for the largest seed round in the history of European AI startups. There were 25 cases of financing related to the World Model in the first quarter in China. Some companies took two consecutive rounds of 2.5 billion dollars in a month, and the valuation jumped from 5 billion to 10 billion dollars. What's even more surprising is that don't look at investor FOMO like this. Currently, the entire AI industry has yet to agree on what the four words “world model” actually mean. It's a word that hasn't even been defined, and it's already worth tens of billions. Every day they shouted slogans to find an anti-consensus, and in the end, they invested their money in the absence of consensus, and then called it an outlet. However, I recently heard from a few big VC investors that they could clearly see the bubble in this direction themselves, and it wasn't that no one had taken a picture of the table during the internal rehearsal session and discussed it back and forth. The conclusion was that they still had to vote. If you don't vote, next year's LP will ask you why you missed the world model; if you vote, even if you make a mistake in the end, it will be the whole industry's fault. However, when the money is hot enough, it is time to ask an impolite question. Since no one can say exactly what it is, what exactly is everyone voting for? First of all, let's be fair about the process. There was something really about this concept. In 2018, two researchers published a paper titled “World Models.” They let AI create a dream for themselves in a racing game. First, master the car in the dream, and then run back in the game. At the time, ChatGPT didn't exist, and this paper was only circulating in a small circle of researchers. Yang Likun has actually been adhering to this research direction for a long time. In the years when all of Silicon Valley bet money on the big language model, he repeatedly reiterated his view that by predicting the next word, machines would never be able to touch human intelligence, so it must be made to understand the physical world. I've been saying this for almost ten years, but the wind hasn't blown this way for him. People like him didn't turn away after hearing the wind; in their perception, there really is something about the world model. However, when “something really does” enter the venture capital industry, it usually has to go through a process first. This process will process a research direction into a term that can be wholesale. The venture capital community's favorite has never been a technical concept; it's the franchisability of a technical concept. The world model is a child of choice in this regard. It is more technological than the “metaverse,” sexier than “spatial intelligence,” broader than “embodied intelligence,” and fresher than “multi-modal.” Most importantly, it's very difficult to falsify. In BP, the harder it is to prove falsification, the more valuable it is, because not being able to falsify means that new investors can be found to take over in the next round. What the story earns is money that cannot be falsified. The world model was folded, and it had the current splendor. If you make a game, say you are a model of the world; if you make a short story, you say you are a model of the world; if you make a video tool, you say you are a model of the world; if you make a simulation robot, you say you are a model of the world. Further on, those who make advertising materials, educational courseware, metaphysics fortune-telling, and virtual people to chat with will be able to enter the world model circle as long as they dare to blow it. Earlier, at an event, I heard investors share in a round table. Each field of medicine, finance, and law can be viewed as an independent world. According to this usage, my car repair master downstairs also has a world model in his mind. It specifically predicts when the Third Ring Road will be blocked. The accuracy rate is higher than most assisted drivers I've ever used. Not long ago, I also saw a robotics company announce that it is building a model of the industrial world and a model of the home world at the same time. I realized that the world used to be countable terms; they can be sold individually. It's not that no one has anticipated this grand event; the identity of the person who anticipated it is quite special. In March of this year, on the day AMI Labs funded that billion dollars, the company's CEO told the media that I predict “world model” will be the next buzzword. Within six months, every company will call itself World Model to finance. He was right. The only thing that wasn't accurate was the time; it didn't take six months at all. Habitual narratives Chasing narratives has long been a habitual act of investors and entrepreneurs. On May 10, 2015, a listed company whose main business is floor tiles and real estate issued an announcement saying that it wants to become the first internet finance company in China, it wants to change its name to “Pitumpi”, and the English name is directly registered as P2P Financial Information Ser...

47d agoburnking#AI #financing

Crypto projects' flee 'their old names in bulk: the liquidity reset game behind brand upgrades

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher Original title: Why do crypto projects always like to change their names? In the traditional business world, brand assets are the lifeblood of an enterprise. Frequent name changes are almost tantamount to actively destroying a moat. Nvidia won't change its name every few years, Apple won't give up on Apple because of some kind of business transformation, and Nike won't bring back the brand because of a sluggish market cycle. But in the cryptocurrency world, the rules are often the opposite. According to RootData statistics, more than 16% of encryption projects have changed their names, and many well-known first-line projects have also changed their names in large numbers. Just yesterday, the on-chain IP ecosystem Story Protocol announced that it will change its name to DATA, and IP tokens will migrate 1:1 to new DATA tokens. Within a few months, Xion changed its name to Verona, Matrixport changed its name to BIT, and TON's token symbol to GRAM. Earlier, a number of well-known projects such as Klaytn, EOS, Fantom, MakerDAO, Elrond, and Matic Network changed their names. More extreme projects have even changed their names more than once. For example, MAITRIX used names such as CENTRAL, X Network, and XLD Finance; BitSafe used the names dlcBTC and DLC.Link; Talex used the names Read2N and Metale Protocol; and KGen used the names IndigG and Kratos Gaming Network. The names have changed more and more, but most projects have not gained new life due to the new name; instead, they have gradually fallen silent. This brings up a question that is rarely seriously discussed in the crypto industry: Why do crypto projects always like to change their names? The answer is probably not complicated: because in the crypto industry, brands aren't the most important assets; attention, narrative, token prices, and liquidity are. 1. Crypto brand loyalty is too low. The reason traditional brands are afraid to change their names is because user loyalty comes from long-term consumer experiences. A user has bought an iPhone for many years, drank Starbucks for many years, and worn Nike for many years. His perception of the brand was not formed in a day, nor did it change easily due to a certain marketing campaign. But cryptographic projects have a completely different user structure. Most early users aren't consumers in the traditional sense, but investors, airdrop hunters, liquidity providers, node participants, and narrative traders. They use products not necessarily because they are easy to use, but because they may have air investment, may be profitable, and may have room for growth. This means that crypto brands are naturally less loyal to users. In the traditional industry, users ask “Is this brand worth trusting”; in the crypto industry, users are more often asked “can this coin rise?” As long as prices are sluggish for a long time, the narrative fails, and the ecology is silent, the old name will instead become a negative asset. A name that has experienced a crash, duvet cover, hacking, team controversy, or route failure can hardly inspire the market's imagination. It doesn't carry brand assets, but K-line scars and community grievances. This is the root reason why crypto projects dare to change their names frequently: in many cases, old names have no moats, only historical baggage. 2. Renaming is a marketing strategy. Not every name change should simply be viewed as a “vest change.” The name change of some projects is indeed because the original name cannot carry the new strategic scope. As hot market concepts change, if the name includes old concepts such as “Social” and “DAO,” or if the meaning of the name does not match, changing the name is an inevitable choice. For example, the decentralized social networking protocol OpenSocial changed its name to Eden after transforming AI, the decentralized electronic signature platform EthSign chose to remove “Eth” from its name after expanding its business, and the Ethereum sidechain Matic Network changed its name to Polygon (meaning polygon) after building multiple scaling solutions. When the project's business boundaries fundamentally change, the original brand may limit external perception. The name change is a necessary strategic calibration at this point. Of course, there are also quite a few projects that actively “grab hot spots”, and you can get more attention by naming popular concepts. In the last metaverse boom, Elrond changed its name to MultiversX and directly added “Multiverse” elements to the name, apparently hoping to join Yuanyu...

57d agoburnking#encryption #Exchange coins

After the metaverse burns 90 billion dollars, Meta turned its bets on predicting the market: can the traffic advantage fill the trust gap?

Article: Gino Matos Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News Original title: Can Meta Follow the Trend and Enter the Predictive Market to Avoid the Old Path of Metaverse Failure? TL; DR “The New York Times” reports that Meta formed a small team to develop an internal point-based prediction application codenamed Arena. Users can bet on the results of politics, sports, and global current affairs. The forecast market has shown real demand. With 3.56 billion daily users, Meta is expected to push the niche racetrack to the mass market. But Meta's crisis of trust, combined with elections and disinformation censorship, could make Arena a regulatory target even before it grows in size. The New York Times reported on June 23 that Mark Zuckerberg took the lead in forming a special team to develop the market prediction application Arena. Users can bet on the results of political elections, sporting events, and international events through platform credits. This company, which once lost nearly $90 billion due to the metaverse's name change and its Reality Labs subsidiary, has now turned its head to the forecasting market. This track is actually in high demand and a formed user base, but the regulatory rules are intricate. This transformation is probably Meta's smartest strategic adjustment, or it may be a repetition of past huge costly failures. Huge bills left by the metaverse In October 2021, Facebook officially changed its name to Meta. Zuckerberg wrote that the company's core goal was to “build a metaverse,” and predicted that the metaverse would cover 1 billion users within ten years. Reality Labs, the division that carries this vision, continues to grow in losses: operating losses of $17.7 billion in 2024 and $19.2 billion in 2025, with cumulative losses approaching $90 billion. Meta revealed to investors that the scale of losses in the sector in 2026 may be the same as in 2025. Horizon Worlds, its flagship social VR platform, fell below 200,000 monthly active users in 2022, far below the initial target of 500,000. Meta then lowered its expectations again and plans to gradually shut down the VR version in 2026. Predicting why the market is a completely different track In 2026, Kalshi and Polymarket's two leading platforms have a combined monthly trading volume of about US$24 billion, and industry institutions predict that the market transaction volume will exceed US$130 billion for the whole year. Robinhood launched the Forecast Market Zone in 2025. Yingtou Securities also integrated event contracts into the trading platform, and the Golden Globe Awards ceremony even introduced an interactive prediction market session. Bernstein's April research report estimates that the track's annual transaction scale is expected to impact $1 trillion in 2030. Meta has always been good at replicating popular products and relying on huge traffic to overtake curves: after Snapchat launched limited-time updates, Instagram Stories were launched; Twitter occupied the social graphics circuit for ten years, Meta Threads was launched; after TikTok became popular for short videos, Meta launched Reels. As of April, the daily activity of all Meta products reached 3.56 billion, and the volume of traffic overwhelmed all existing forecasting market platforms. Arena uses a credit design to continue Meta's consistent strategy: capture users' existing behavioral needs, embed its own traffic ecosystem, and rely on mass distribution to make up for the lack of product originality. Building a prediction market requires only software, information flow, account systems, content review, and compliance systems. Some scenarios can be connected to licensed partners; however, the metaverse requires customized hardware, immersive content, virtual images, and an exclusive operating environment, and it will take years to cultivate user usage habits. Reality Labs' huge losses prove that creating a new track model out of thin air is extremely expensive. Comparing the core dimensions of the metaverse and prediction market Arena is not Meta's first test of the prediction market. The last product was shut down as early as the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Meta launched the point-based mass forecasting application Forecast, which focused on predicting current events, but shut down in 2022. At the time, Polymarket had yet to explode in the 2024 US presidential election, Kalshi did not win the Federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) election contract lawsuit, and the industry's annual trading volume had not exceeded 50 billion US dollars. Meta is about to enter...

58d agoburnking#Meta #Predicting the market

Messi has joined the global “billion-dollar billionaire club”: has been involved in NFTs and has invested in soccer chain game companies such as Sorare

According to news, Messi officially joined the global “billion-dollar millionaire club” in June of this year, with a net worth of $1.1 billion. Among them, Messi's investments in the crypto and blockchain fields have also been successful. He has also been involved in the NFT (non-homogenized token) field, issued digital collections, and laid out the metaverse economy. In addition, he also invested in blockchain soccer game companies and tech startups such as Sorare. Since 2014, Messi has never fallen out of the top five on Forbes' list of the world's highest paid athletes, and topped the list in 2019 and 2022. (Forbes) This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

58d agoburnking

A man in Hebei Province, China was jailed for five years and four months for illegally raising funds using the metaverse concept

Comparatively, China's Hebei Provincial High Court released a typical case of cracking down on illegal fund-raising. A man promoted a virtual commodity investment project on the Newmateworks platform under Yishang United Community to the public with a metaverse concept package to induce the public to participate in the investment, and directly introduced 19 investors to invest 15.3936 million yuan, of which 1.1014 million yuan has already been returned, and 14.2922 million yuan has not been returned. The court found that this case used emerging technology concepts such as the metaverse as cover to carry out fraudulent marketing, violating the provisions of national financial management laws and regulations. The amount was huge. The act constituted a crime of illegally absorbing public deposits, and was sentenced to 5 years and 4 months in prison and a fine.

66d ago

From Exit to Occupancy: Why Crypto VCs Target Agent Networks

Author: Zoya Web3 Original title: Water Release is Real Exit: When Cryptographic VC Card Agent Network Effect AI is Nerd's opportunity, Agent is Money's opportunity venture capital, A16Z and other MegaFunds have always told us stories about cycles and exits, but in Solo GP's opinion, it's more like harmonic vibrations of signals and structures. You need to find the real rules they haven't mentioned. In 2021, a16z returned $12.5B of revenue for LPs. The DPI was higher than the sum of the previous ten years. At the same time, 2021 was also the beginning of a disaster in the US VC industry. Leaving aside the actual DPI, it was just a floating profit. In other words, 2021 is a golden time to quit, and LPs can actually get real money, but if LPs get back involved, they will have to experience the pain that continues to this day. Photo caption: Water release is the real exit Image source: @jasonlk @PeterJ_Walker这一切都在讲述相反的叙事, the turmoil in the crypto market is also in sync. The 2022 metaverse concept fueled Web3 and even forced the bull market to continue. Until the beginning of 2025, Binance used the “GirlfriendCoin” farce to put an end to VC Coin. Today, most VCs have fallen into a silent model. Economies of scale are being dragged into a capital model that is heavy on computing power and data. There is no way to recover the costs. There is no way to talk about network effects on the chain, and towards institutionalization and SaaS channels. However, looking at the history of venture capital, with each cycle of interest rate hikes and interest rate cuts, the water released will cultivate a different VC model. We will invent risky valuation logic over and over again, and the relative freedom of the crypto market will also allow interested people in this market to discover the most profitable signal mechanism. When VC stops risking “every passion begins with the impact of external things on the sensory organs, causing the animal spirit to move through nerves. If you still have an impression, in March and April 2021, Roblox and Coinbase chose the Direct Listing model. Unlike regular IPOs, direct listings only sell old shares, no underwriters, and no lock-up period. Interestingly, both are led by A16Z. According to the impressive DPI data, in June 2021, A16Z raised $2.2 billion for the third crypto fund, and in January 2022, A16Z raised $9 billion in new funds. So what's the cost? The cost is that Coinbase's stock price fell 90% from its high in 2023. It can be stated very clearly that A16Z's role in US stocks is no different from that of crypto VC, but the problem is that A16Z can still raise $7.2 billion in 2024 and $151 billion in 2026. Even in May 2026, its fifth crypto fund raised more than $2.2 billion, and its crypto fund's historical amount was close to $10 billion. The market gave the choice between being the LPs of the A16Z, the amazing DPI waiting for the moment the water was released, or the cost of the A16Z and the source of the amazing DPI. However, problems also followed. A16Z was not sensitive to market signals. In other words, the VC kings of every cycle faced the curse of scale. Due to excessive scale, they were not motivated enough to discover ultra-early paradigms, especially revolutions rather than improvement mechanisms. Arthur Rock, the father of modern venture capital, debuted at its peak, and Fairchild and Intel launched the venture capital model in Silicon Valley; KP and Sequoia officially introduced the institutional venture capital model, but alternately took the lead in PC and mobile internet; YC turned venture capital into probability under the big number mechanism and mass-manufactured sub-giant unicorns under the power law; Sun Zhengyi brought SoftBank through Ali's mythology to turn venture capital into a large-scale similar Ponzi game; just like that, when the old giants indulge in their glory, the new ambitious will pass the mechanism to prove innovation through the mechanism Your own unique vision, and in turn, you can get a low price The money opens up a new era of adventure for yourself. Photo Caption: Changes in the VC cycle Image source: @zuoyeweb3甚至, Reputation itself can be exchanged for money. Paradigm founder Matt Huang invested in ByteDance. Although Byte can't be listed, Paradigm chose to use cryptography. The latest news is that they have switched to AI and machines...

75d agoLuxurytracy