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Gm. To everyone observing the Juneteenth holiday, we hope you have a relaxing and reflective day.
FRESH POWDER
Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.
CRYTPO
The Solend of the world as we know it
In a move that would make Captain Ahab proud, users of the DeFi platform Solend voted to grant emergency power to the company to temporarily take over a whale’s account that was on the verge of liquidation.
The backstory
As crypto prices have fallen across the board, the anonymous whale’s account was teetering on the brink of a catastrophic on-chain liquidation. According to the Solend team, the user parked a ton of Solana on Solend’s protocol, then borrowed close to $108 million in stablecoins against those funds. If Solana fell below a certain price, the whale’s funds would start getting liquidated automatically causing all sorts of chaos.
Solend introduced the controversial proposal to its community to seize control of the whale’s account before anything drastic happened.
The idea: By turning over the keys of the account, the Solend team could liquidate it responsibly by identifying a specific buyer and executing the trade over-the-counter (OTC) rather than on a DeFi exchange.
It all sounds very responsible until you realize that it is entirely antithetical to what crypto stands for. Taking control of a user's wallet brings into question the fundamental principles of DeFi.
And to make matters worse, a single crypto address accounted for the majority of the tokens that voted "yes" to the proposal. So not only was the outcome anti-decentralization, the voting process was as well.
Bottom line: DeFi was created to allow users to trade, borrow from, and lend to each other without intermediaries like banks. But that foundational idea gets called into question every time a new protocol like Solend messes with user funds. As a result, faith in DeFi appears to be at an all time low—according to analytics platform DeFi Llama, the amount of crypto in use on apps is down to $70.6 billion from $205.7 billion on May 5, just before Terra's implosion.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Oracle and TikTok make it official
The arranged marriage between Oracle and TikTok, first teased in 2020 by Donald Trump, has finally been consummated. TikTok announced at the end of last week that all of its US user data has been transferred to Oracle cloud servers. Thus ends one of the oddest periods of deal making in tech history, but…
It’s kinda sketchy timing
TikTok’s announcement comes right on the heels of a Buzzfeed report asserting Chinese-based engineers working for ByteDance had full access to US user data as recently as January, despite TikTok claiming that its US unit operated separately from China's oversight.
Oracle probably isn’t asking too many questions though. The deal represents a major win for its cloud business that is still dwarfed by AWS, but has been growing like a weed in recent months.
Zoom out: While TikTok was playing nice with one sector of the US tech industry, copycats were gaining ground on the market leader—YouTube Shorts has amassed 1.5 billion monthly users which is already bigger than TikTok’s audience.
QUICK HITS
Seed Round
Bernstein via TechCrunch
Stat: Telegram passed the 700 million monthly active user mark just 6 months after crossing 500 million. It celebrated the milestone by launching Telegram Premium which comes with a bunch of features like increased storage and file upload size. Worth noting—Telegram has snagged 34% of the messaging market despite never having paid for an ad. Now that’s called product-market fit.
Story we're watching: Bitcoin only survives if enough miners participate to keep the network strong. But what happens when electrical costs start to eat into too much of a miner's profit? Read through this Hacker News discussion to see why bitcoin is potentially vulnerable right now.
Rabbit hole: The brain’s low-power mode (Quanta).
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON
An Apple Store unionized in Maryland, marking a first for the tech giant.
Ethereum dipped below $1,000 and bitcoin dropped below $20,000, both for the first time in over a year.
The Google employee who called the company's LaMDA AI sentient, is now claiming that it has hired an attorney.
Klarna is reportedly cutting its valuation to $15 billion from a peak of $46 billion in order to raise funds.
TRIVIA
What country has the fourth most unicorn startups? The first three are the US, China, and India.
A Germany
B. Japan
C. Argentina
D. United Kingdom
MONDAY MUSING
If your answer isn't "figure out once and for all if there are more doors or wheels in the world," then you're doing it wrong.
if you had $1 billion to solve a huge problem, which problem would you solve?
— houck⚡️ (@callmehouck)
5:30 PM • Jun 18, 2022
LAYOFFS TRACKER
Aggregating recently laid off tech talent looking for new roles.
JOKR
Industry: Food delivery
Amount laid off: 50
% of workforce: 5%
Date of layoffs: June 16
List of employees affected: N/A
ByteDance
Industry: Social
Amount laid off: 150
% of workforce: <1%
Date of layoffs: June 17
List of employees affected: N/A
CityMall
Industry: Social commerce
Amount laid off: 191
% of workforce: 30%
Date of layoffs: June 17
List of employees affected: N/A
FOUNDERS CORNER
The best resources we came across this weekend that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.
đź’¬ A must-listen podcast exploring product strategy
🌱 Airbnb’s original seed pitch deck
⚒️ A toolkit in how to navigate down markets from Sequoia
TRIVIA ANSWER
D. The UK has the fourth most unicorns with 43 while Germany sits in fifth.