The week in facts n°23
Disclaimer: In this newsletter, you will not find any information or quotes referring to the financial situation regarding FTX, as MyLime is not a crypto company and its business model is not related to cryptocurrency trading.?
Metaverse: Zuckerberg Confirms 'Long-Term Vision' for Metaverse as Meta Fires 11,000 Employees
Meta, the parent company of social media platform Facebook, will cut more than 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce, CEO Mark Zuckerburg revealed on Wednesday.
Zuckerburg said that the move was one of the "most difficult" in the company’s history, which will see Meta take other steps “to become a leaner and more efficient company.”
This includes cutting the Silicon Valley giant's discretionary spending and extending its hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023, Zuckerburg said in a message to the employees.
While the restructuring will see the company make reductions in every organization across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp—collectively referred to as Meta's Family of Apps—as well as its Reality Labs metaverse division, the latter will be affected less than others.
According to the CEO, despite Reality Labs posting a loss of over $3.6 billion in the third quarter of 2022, Meta has a “long-term vision for the metaverse.”
“Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs,” added Zuckerburg.
NFT: OpenSea Pledges to Enforce NFT Royalties After Creator Backlash
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, announced today that it will continue to enforce creator royalties on NFTs following significant pushback from the community.
On Saturday, OpenSea said that it was reconsidering its policy towards enforcing creator royalty fees on NFTs, following a wave of rival marketplaces that had either rejected such fees or made them optional for traders to pay. A royalty fee is set by the NFT artist or creator and typically falls between 5% and 10% of the secondary sale price.
“Unless something changes soon, this space is trending toward significantly fewer fees paid to creators,” OpenSea wrote. “No policy that we implement will reverse this trend if this behavior continues.”
As its tweet suggests, OpenSea got the message “loud and clear” from the community. The $13.3 billion Web3 startup explained that it was “ seeking guidance from our community,” but pointed to data showing that the share of market-wide creator royalty fees is tumbling in recent weeks as royalties-rejecting marketplaces gain steam.
OpenSea announced a royalties enforcement system for newly created NFT projects that are built around a blacklist that blocks listed marketplaces from handling those transactions. The method targets marketplaces that do not fully enforce royalty fees, which are among OpenSea’s biggest rivals—a move that some have called anti-competitive.
Luxury: The Brand Convincing You to Buy an Engagement Ring Off Instagram
The past half-decade or so has seen the growth of a new kind of jewelry business, with a new generation at the center. A cohort of mostly Millennial, mostly female founders is departing from industry traditions by taking the client relationship online.
While these players are still small compared to luxury giants and mass market chains, they have caught consumers’ attention: Ring Concierge, founded in 2013 for example, has over 536,000 Instagram followers — more than Kay and Zales combined. They’ve also brought a new level of approachability to an industry that’s historically been synonymous with its opacity, and where men have long dominated.
New brands have found success marketing to women as both the person who will wear the item and the one who will buy it. The growing popularity of alternatives to mined diamonds also marks a shift. Meg Strachan, the founder, and CEO of Dorsey, a DTC jewelry brand founded in 2019 that sells pieces containing lab-grown diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and more, said that evolving attitudes around lab-grown stones, for both consumers and the industry, have made it much easier to position them as a worthy alternative to their mined counterparts.
"Ninety-nine percent of women just want the biggest diamond their boyfriend can afford them,” said Wegman. “And in order to get that you have to drop in other areas [like colour or clarity]. So a lot of my communication is to guide them to that ultimate goal.”
Social media isn’t just an educational tool for current clients, but for would-be ones, too.
Besides personal posts, Gottlieb said that the posts that receive the highest levels of engagement are those that dive into the jewelry-making process, such as before or after, previews of upcoming items, or information about how to go about making your own jewelry-buying decisions.
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Web3: Google Cloud Just Became a Solana Validator
Google's cloud computing division Google Cloud announced on Saturday that it’s now running a validator on the Solana blockchain, and will soon add features aimed at welcoming Solana developers and node runners.
Solana ( SOL) rose 12% on the news, changing hands at around $36.80 at the time of publication.
In a Twitter thread, Google Cloud revealed that as well as running a Solana validator “to participate in and validate the network,” it is planning to bring its Blockchain Node Engine to the Solana chain in 2023. The Blockchain Node Engine is a “fully-managed node hosting service” run by the provider, which already supports the Ethereum blockchain.
Google Cloud also announced it’s now indexing Solana data and adding it to its BigQuery data warehouse, a move that will “make it easier for the Solana developer ecosystem to access historical data.” The feature will launch in the first quarter of 2023, Mittal said.
“There’s been a bunch of research done on effectively storing secrets in a way that Google doesn’t even know the secrets, and you have partial recovery of the keys between the user and a service provider like Google that can verify your identity,” he said.
Mobility: Rivian demand remains strong, CEO says after $1.7B Q3 net loss
Demand remains strong for Rivian Automotive Inc.'s R1T pickup and R1S SUV, CEO RJ Scaringe said after the automaker posted a $1.7? billion third-quarter net loss and pushed back the launch of a smaller R2 platform to 2026.
"We continue to see strong demand for our product," Scaringe said on the company's earnings call Wednesday.
Rivian said it had preorders for 114,000 vehicles on its current R1 platform, up from the 98,000 that it reported at the end of the second quarter. Those preorders are separate from an Amazon order for delivery vans.
The expansion of production comes just over a year after Rivian launched the R1T into the market.
The R2 platform is designed for smaller, more inexpensive vehicles that likely would include both a pickup and one or more SUV-style vehicles, automotive forecasters have said. The R2 vehicles will be built at a future $5 billion factory in Georgia.
As part of its third-quarter financial results, Rivian reported a net loss of $1.72 billion, compared with $1.23 billion a year earlier. It delivered 7,363 vehicles, up from 4,467 units in the prior quarter.
Will they become A Tesla competitor?
Fashion: Adidas Plans to Still Use Yeezy Designs After Costly Divorce
German sportswear giant Adidas confirmed it plans to still use Yeezy designs as it continues to confront the fallout from a messy and costly split with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
The company slashed its profit forecast for the fourth time this year as the end of its lucrative Yeezy partnership and falling demand for its products in China weighed on its third-quarter earnings.
Adidas also provided guarded updates on some of the big outstanding questions around the end of its Yeezy partnership on an earnings call Wednesday morning. The sneaker line accounted for as much as 8 percent of the brand’s annual revenue and Adidas has already said the termination will cut up to €250 million ($251 million) from the company’s net income this year.
The brand declined to provide detail on how much of its unsold inventory is made up of Yeezy products.
The Yeezy dispute is just one of a handful of long-term concerns affecting the business that Gulden will need to tackle when he begins his tenure as CEO at the beginning of 2023. Its shares are down around 50 percent since the beginning of the year.
Adidas now anticipates a net income of €250 million this year, down from the brand’s previous target of around €500 million set in October (the pre-October forecast for 2022 was originally €1.3 billion).