In 2022, capital is being deployed into crypto at a less noteworthy pace month over month, but in the grand scheme of things, levels are significantly higher than last year, showing that the space has matured significantly and the bar is now much higher.

Total venture capital funding in the crypto space fell 38% from $6.829 billion in April to $4.219 billion in May, according to Dove Metrics data. Even though the amount of capital deployed into crypto is down in the short term, it’s significantly higher than levels from a year ago: The amount of capital invested in the space last month increased 89% from $2.233 billion in May 2021.

Funding may have dropped on the month due to the growing chasm between private and public market valuations for equities and decentralized networks, Will Nuelle, an investor at Galaxy Digital Principal Investments, said to TechCrunch. “[It] has caused venture investors to be tighter on valuations and has caused increasingly wide spreads between founders’ asks and investors’ bids.”

There’s definitely a valuation reset going on right now, according to Stan Miroshnik, partner and co-founder of 10T Holdings.

“For investors like us, it’s time to buy,” Miroshnik told TechCrunch. “Valuations have come in and great companies are now available at a more reasonable price.”

“Generally, there is a big difference between people who are at the surface of understanding this space — those funds might take a backseat — but true crypto-native funds with conviction will continue to invest heavily,” Saurabh Sharma, head of investments at Jump Crypto, said to TechCrunch. “This time is where we find the best long-term-thinking entrepreneurs.”

As for where funding is going, blockchain infrastructure is seeing the most capital at 21%, followed by decentralized finance, centralized finance, NFTs and other web3 categories, Dove Metrics data showed. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) had the least investments at 2%, it said.

A shift to an investor-friendly market

“Private and public market valuations are both taking a hit,” Gabe Frank, CEO and co-founder of Arcade, said to TechCrunch. “Crypto is a risk-on asset class and funding can dry up quickly.”

The market was founder-friendly for the past two years, but now it’s shifting into an investor-friendly market, Frank said.

“Financing for smaller projects that depend on token subsidies and early liquidity events is starting to fade. VC capital is mainly on the sidelines but will continue to deploy to tier-1 projects with clear market opportunities and sound fundamentals.”

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/vc-funding-for-crypto-projects-fell-in-may-but-many-investors-remain-bullish/

Not everyone is on board with the idea of remote work. But for those who are, Slack’s new profile features released today should make some workday tasks, particularly onboarding, a bit easier.

Slack now supports pronunciation guides for profiles, allowing users to add name pronunciations in the form of phonetic spellings or audio recordings. They’ll begin appearing today for some users under the Display Name and Pronounce sections across Slack clients, with a full rollout to start in the coming weeks.

Name pronunciations build on Slack’s other inclusivity efforts, including a field for pronouns in profiles.

In a related development, Hover Cards — essentially pop-ups — have arrived in Slack. Moving a cursor over a person’s name will reveal a condensed Hover Card version of their profile, along with links to start a “huddle” (i.e., audio conversation), call or direct message.

Lastly, Slack profiles now include three new fields: Contact Information, People and About Me. Contact Information shows email and phone details, while People lists the teams the person works with and their place in the organization’s hierarchy. About Me is more dynamic in nature, but can contain things like start date, languages spoken and even pets and birthdays, depending on what the user chooses to share.

Other Slack upgrades pertain to Atlas, Slack’s premium add-on for its Business+ and Enterprise Grid plans. A new data type called Smart Tags lets admins create custom fields that convert into searchable, filterable tags like “expertise,” “focus area” and “languages.” Flexible Text, another upgrade, enables profile fields to support up to 5,000 rich text characters including bullet points, links, line breaks, code blocks, emoji and more.

Image Credits: Slack

“By helping people understand who their colleagues are as humans, our redesigned profiles make it easier for teammates to collaborate, feel connected and do their best work together,” Maxwell Hayman, director of product at Slack, said in a statement.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/slack-now-supports-pronunciation-guides-in-profiles/

LA-born startup TRIPP doesn’t want the metaverse to be a mere “shopping mall for virtual consumers,” its founder Nanea Reeves told TechCrunch.

Instead, Reeves’ company is envisioning a metaverse experience that can “deepen connection to self, facilitate mental well-being and enable personal and collective transformation.”

TRIPP’s vision for a mindful metaverse is already a (virtual) reality: Its wellness-centered experience can be accessed through multiple platforms and devices. This includes AR smartglasses and VR headsets, but also smartphone apps — collectively referred to as XR, or extended reality. Reeves expects mobile, AR and VR to eventually converge, “in the same way as lots of devices came together into our phones.”

If this sounds a bit abstract, look no further than EvolVR, the VR meditation community whose acquisition TRIPP disclosed last February. TRIPP/EvolVR’s group meditations can be experienced live on several platforms, such as Microsoft’s AltspaceVR and Meta’s Horizon Worlds.

TRIPP’s product itself offers a range of experiences, from breathing exercises and binaural audio to guided visualizations and worldscapes, some of which users can customize through TRIPP’s Composer feature.

TRIPP has recently acquired another company, cross-service worldbuilding platform Eden. “The acquisition will enable users to further customize their TRIPP experience, explore artworks and soundscapes while connecting with users from across the globe,” the company said.

Reeves worked in several senior roles in the video gaming industry before founding TRIPP, and is focused on creating a full experience that goes beyond watching and listening. She surrounded herself with talent that also shares this vision, including the employee who was originally working on Eden as a side project.

Eden’s acquisition is funded by an $11.2 million Series A extension led by gaming-focused investment firm BITKRAFT, Reeves said. Other participants include Qualcomm, Amazon Alexa Fund, HTC and Pokémon GO maker Niantic, as well as existing investor Mayfield, which has been backing TRIPP for a while. Indeed, the firm had participated in a $4 million capital injection into the startup in 2017, before co-leading its Series A round in mid-2021 alongside Vine Ventures.

The genesis of this round was a LinkedIn message from BITKRAFT, followed by an offer she couldn’t say no to, Reeves said. Talking to TechCrunch, she also emphasized how excited she was about having new investors willing to support TRIPP in broadening its reach across multiple platforms. It didn’t hurt either that they came from gaming, immersive technology and web3, as the company hopes to further engage with creators.

Reeves’ decision to take this extension capital despite still having money left from its last round is also in line with a lot of the advice we have been hearing from investors lately. For instance, Y Combinator told its startups that in the current downturn, extending the runway should be a priority.

TRIPP isn’t in a position where it needs to cut costs, and it is still hiring, but not at the pace it originally planned. “We do want to be cautious with the current …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/why-more-funding-equates-more-peace-of-mind-for-tripp-and-its-users/

Who will be liable for harmful speech generated by large language models? As advanced AIs such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being cheered for impressive breakthroughs in natural language processing and generation — and all sorts of (productive) applications for the tech are envisaged from slicker copywriting to more capable customer service chatbots — the risks of such powerful text-generating tools inadvertently automating abuse and spreading smears can’t be ignored. Nor can the risk of bad actors intentionally weaponizing the tech to spread chaos, scale harm and watch the world burn.

Indeed, OpenAI is concerned enough about the risks of its models going “totally off the rails”, as its documentation puts it at one point (in reference to a response example in which an abusive customer input is met with a very troll-esque AI reply), to offer a free content filter that “aims to detect generated text that could be sensitive or unsafe coming from the API” — and to recommend that users don’t return any generated text that the filter deems “unsafe”. (To be clear, its documentation defines “unsafe” to mean “the text contains profane language, prejudiced or hateful language, something that could be NSFW, or text that portrays certain groups/people in a harmful manner”).

But, given the novel nature of the technology, there are no clear legal requirements that content filters must be applied. So OpenAI is either acting out of concern to avoid its models causing generative harms to people — and/or reputational concern — because if the technology gets associated with instant toxicity that could derail development.

Just recall Microsoft’s ill-fated Tay AI Twitter chatbot — which launched back in March 2016 to plenty of fanfare, with the company’s research team calling it an experiment in “conversational understanding”. Yet it took less than a day to have its plug yanked by Microsoft after web users ‘taught’ the bot to spout racist, antisemitic and misogynistic hate tropes. So it ended up a different kind of experiment: In how online culture can conduct and amplify the worst impulses humans can have.

The same sorts of bottomfeeding Internet content has been sucked into today’s large language models — because AI model builders have crawled all over the Internet to obtain the massive corpuses of free text they need to train and dial up their language generating capabilities. (For example, per Wikipedia, 60% of the weighted pre-training data-set for OpenAI’s GPT-3 came from a filtered version of Common Crawl — aka a free data-set comprised of scraped web data.) Which means these far more powerful large language models can, nonetheless, slip into sarcastic trolling and worse.

European policymakers are barely grappling with how to regulate online harms in current contexts like algorithmically sorted social media platforms, where most of the speech can at least be traced back to a human — let alone considering how AI-powered text generation could supercharge the problem of online toxicity while creating novel quandaries around liability.

And without clear …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/whos-liable-for-ai-generated-lies/

A top former executive at the highly valued NFT startup OpenSea was arrested Wednesday and charged “with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with a scheme to commit insider trading,” according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York (SDNY).

TechCrunch previously covered the firing of former OpenSea Head of Product Nate Chastain. Chastain was accused of front-running purchases of NFT collections that he knew were about to be featured prominently on the homepage of OpenSea. His actions were discovered by other NFT buyers who analyzed his transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

OpenSea soon fired Chastain after they determined the allegations were legitimate, though Chastain has continued to be active in the NFT community, especially on Twitter. The startup has noted that it didn’t have specific policies in place prohibiting this type of behavior beforehand but has since enacted new employee rules.

OpenSea was most recently valued at $13.3 billion by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm and Coatue.

The Justice Department and SDNY U.S. Attorney’s Office have begun getting more active in prosecuting crypto crimes, but the NFT space has largely evaded much action, which made the announcement a bit of a shock to those in the crypto space.

“NFTs might be new, but this type of criminal scheme is not.  As alleged, Nathaniel Chastain betrayed OpenSea by using its confidential business information to make money for himself.  Today’s charges demonstrate the commitment of this Office to stamping out insider trading – whether it occurs on the stock market or the blockchain,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in the press release.

We’ve reached out to OpenSea for comment.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/former-opensea-exec-arrested-and-charged-with-insider-trading-of-nfts/

If you’ve ever spent time writing beat poetry about container ships chugging their way into and out of harbors, “nimble” or “fast” will be unlikely to make it into your finely crafted written words. And if your (admittedly increasingly esoteric) poetic bent is more of an air freight persuasion, it’s likely that “affordable” was not in your lexicon. Boundary Layer is working on a series of electrically propulsed hydrofoiling vessels and wants to rewrite the book of transportation-focused verse, one stanza at a time, with nimble, fast-to-load, container-ship standard high-speed shipping vessels, with the goal of halving the cost of traditional air freight, at comparable speeds.

The company raised $4.8 million from Lower Carbon Capital, Fifty Years and Soma Capital, and already has $90 million in pre-orders from ferry operators for their 220-seat electric passenger vessels. The passenger ships are but a launchpad before the company goes after its real goal: the freight market. I spoke with Boundary Layer’s CEO and founder, Ed Kearney, who told me that these early vessels are a launchpad to enter the $100 billion air freight market with a high-speed hydrogen-powered container ship.

“We applied to Y Combinator and were accepted. We told the partners in the interview that if we were accepted into Y Combinator, we would come to the Bay Area, and we’d build a hydrofoil container ship that carries one container,” says Kearney. The Y Combinator team called bullshit, he tells me. The team rolled up their sleeves and got to work. “We turned up with some hand tools in our luggage, no workshop, nowhere to live, and started building. Ten weeks later, we managed to build this hydrofoil. We spent $150,000 on it, which happened to be exactly the amount of money that YC gives you. We parked out in front of the demo day facility and it made a bit of an impact.”

It’s easy to see how; the company’s prototype ship — and the video it produced to show it off — looks pretty slick:

The challenge with hydrofoiling, of course, is that you need a fair bit of energy to get the ship’s hull out of the water — and that’s harder the heavier the ship gets. The world’s largest cargo ships can transport some 24,000 containers in one go. Needless to say, those behemoths aren’t going to casually lift their hulls out of the water — but that’s also not what the company is competing with.

“The physics [of hydrofoiling] is very similar to that of an aircraft. The amount of the lift-to-drag ratio that you get with modern materials on a hydrofoil wing these days are about the same as what you can get from a traditional airplane. So the amount of power you need to make a vehicle have the same amount of mass takeoff is also kind of comparable. Also the amount of thrust you need scales with speed,” Kearney explains. “An aircraft travels at 500 knots …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/boundary-layer/

For most of the last decade, Americans largely ignored electric vehicles. Some brands sold decent numbers, like the Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf, but they were largely targeted at thrifty commuters or EV diehards. Others, like the Ford Focus Electric, were intended only to comply with laws that mandated a small number of EV sales. Still others, like the early Tesla models, were desirable but out of reach for most people.

In the last couple of years, though, automakers have dropped their resistance and consumers have likewise let go of their indifference. New technology adoption often follows an S-curve, where people are slow to embrace it at first but then rush in once a tipping point is reached. EVs appear to be at that inflection point today: Car buyers snapped up nearly twice as many plug-in vehicles last year as they did the year before.

The sudden surge has observers wondering whether the pace can be maintained, especially in the U.S. Their concern isn’t misplaced: Apart from Tesla’s factories, the U.S. doesn’t have significant EV or battery manufacturing infrastructure, at least not yet. And in terms of publicly available chargers, we have fewer per road-going EV than any country but Norway, where the public’s sudden embrace of EVs has led to a wave of new registrations, according to a recent International Energy Agency report.

The U.S. may seem behind, but is it hopelessly so? Can the country pull a rabbit out of the hat? It’s happened before, of course. The U.S. didn’t invent the automobile — that honor goes to Germany’s Karl Benz — but it did produce the Model T, which helped the country take the lead in the adoption of the automobile.

Neither was the Interstate Highway System the first controlled-access highway network, but today it’s far more extensive than the Autobahn, and until a decade ago, was the most extensive in the world. The trend holds outside transportation, too — Americans didn’t embrace mobile phones at first, but subscription rates continue to grow domestically while they’ve plateaued or dropped in more zealous countries.

It’s not guaranteed, but there are plenty of reasons why the U.S. has a good chance of catching up in the race. And if it does, it’ll mean plenty of opportunities for investors, especially on the infrastructure side.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/the-us-is-about-to-get-serious-about-evs/

Calling all climate-change warriors! If you’re determined to join the new wave of entrepreneurs fighting the climate crisis, don’t miss TC Sessions: Climate on June 14 in Berkeley, California with an online day on June 16. Hear from and engage with some of the climate world’s leading scientists, researchers, founders, CEOs, investors and iconic leaders — including Bill Gates.

This one-day deep dive offers plenty of benefits for students.

• First off, affordability. Discounted student passes cost $45 each.
• Network your way to post-college employment at the conference and at the SOSV Climate Tech Meetup. Note: This networking event takes place the day before TC Sessions: Climate.
• Learn from thought leaders, founders and operators in climate tech, CSR, ESG and sustainability. Have you seen this list of heavy hitters? While you’re at it, take a look at the agenda.
• Understand how America plans to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will speak at the online event on June 16. 
• Apply to compete in the TC Sessions: Student Pitch Competition (Powered by Blackstone LaunchPad). Read all about it here. The prize? A free pass to Disrupt 2022 and hotel accommodations in San Francisco.

Basically, we’re saying that for $45, you can set your climate career aspirations on a faster, sustainable track — and help humanity in the process. Everybody wins.

TC Sessions: Climate takes place on June 14 in Berkeley, California with an online day on June 16. Buy your student pass today. Who knows? You might score a terrific internship or even win a ticket to Disrupt 2022, plus a hotel for three nights.

What are you waiting for?

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions Climate 2022? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/plenty-of-opportunities-for-students-at-tc-sessions-climate/

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

Our startup will be sponsoring my co-founders and me for O-1A visas.

How do we qualify for each of the O-1A criteria?

— Extraordinary Entrepreneur

Dear Extraordinary,

What an exciting journey for you and your co-founders — the O-1A is a great option to enable you to grow your startup and take control of your geographical destiny.

Earlier this year, immigration officials clarified and expanded the types of evidence that meet the requirements for the O-1A extraordinary ability visa, making it more accessible for individuals to qualify. As always, I recommend that you consult with an immigration attorney who can help you and your co-founders devise an immigration strategy and backup plans, if needed.

To qualify for an O-1A, an individual must either have received a major international award, such as a Nobel Prize, or meet at least three of the following eight criteria. Strong cases typically meet four or more of these criteria, backed by extensive letters of recommendation as well as other documentary evidence:

Taking the prize

Nationally or internationally recognized awards

You must demonstrate that you’ve received nationally or internationally recognized awards — typically two or more — for excellence in your field.

In January 2022, the Biden administration announced new efforts to attract and retain STEM talent in the United States. That prompted immigration officials to expand the achievements that qualify as nationally or internationally recognized awards for the O-1A.

Here are a few examples of what can now qualify as an award for excellence:

• Receiving a Ph.D. scholarship or doctoral dissertation award.
• Securing venture capital funding.
• Winning a national or international startup pitch competition or hackathon.
• Professional association awards.
• Awards for presenting at internationally or nationally recognized conferences.

Exclusive membership

Invitation to join a group or association that demands outstanding achievements

This criterion requires you to show you’ve been invited to join a group or association that demands outstanding achievements of its members and is judged by recognized experts. This cannot be a membership that is only based on the payment of a fee or subscription to join, or one based on the level of education or the years of experience in a field or is a requirement for employment, such as union membership.

Some examples that will serve to strengthen your O-1A application include:

• Fellow-level membership in an association or organization in your field, such as …read more

  https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/dear-sophie-how-do-we-qualify-for-each-of-the-o-1a-criteria/

Based on a recent report, Apple’s Safari finally hit one billion users, becoming the second browser to hit the milestone, next to Google Chrome which still shines brighter in popularity. According to Atlas VPN, 1,006,232,879 internet users (19.16% of all internet users) currently use the Safari browser. Meanwhile, Google Chrome has three times more, with a whopping 3,378,967,819 users. Microsoft Edge sits in third place with about 212,695,000 users.

Atlas VPN’s findings are based on the GlobalStats browser market share percentage, which was converted into numbers using the Internet World Stats internet user metric to retrieve the precise numbers. Its report seems to suggest that Safari’s growth could be related to the browser’s adoption of privacy and security features, but it’s likely more a reflection of mobile marketshare where Safari and Chrome come pre-installed on Apple and Android devices.

Apple’s web browser is automatically installed on every Apple device, while Chrome is pre-installed with most versions of Android. This helps to give both tech behemoths a leg up in the competition. And while Microsoft ships its Edge browser with Windows, it lost out on the mobile market due to Windows Phone’s failure.

That said, Apple has introduced several new privacy features to the browser over the past year which could help attract users. The browser’s new privacy report, for example, shows how many and which cross-site trackers Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) stopped from accessing your information.

Chrome is often considered a more attractive browser, however, with web applications such as YouTube, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Earth, and Maps, among others. Just last week, Google rolled out a new way to use Google Lens on the desktop, allowing Chrome browser users on desktop to search any image on a web page with Google Lens. In April, a new “multi-search” feature via Google Lens was launched on the Google mobile app as well.

Additionally, Version 100 of Google Chrome launched in late March, and Chrome on Android became 15% faster.

Other browsers in the report included Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Samsung Internet, and Opera. As noted, Microsoft Edge was the third most popular browser with over 212 million users, overtaking Firefox, which has 179 million internet users. Since the release of Windows 11, Microsoft Edge became the default browser on all devices and, in turn, received a big increase in its userbase.

Firefox browser is oriented towards more privacy-concerned users as it offers protection features like security against tracking, pop-up blocking malware, and phishing. Mozilla launched version 100 of the browser at the beginning of May.

Fifth on the list was the Samsung Internet browser, which is used by more than 149 million users. Last is the Opera browser, with more than 108 million users. Not only can people utilize Opera for everyday tasks, but it also has a Crypto Browser and app with a built-in crypto wallet that supports Ethereum, Polygon, and Celo blockchain technology.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/report-shows-that-safari-reaches-one-billion-worldwide-users-still-behind-google-chrome/