Token Offerings 90% Down from January; Paying by Smile or Blink with Alibaba & Ping An; Military Use for Magic Leap, HoloLens -- via Autonomous ?NEXT

Hi fellow futurists -- our top 3 thoughts for this week are:

1. CRYPTO: September ICOs 90% Down from January, but Venture Funding is Ray of Hope.  
2. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Paying by Smile with Alibaba or by Blinking with Ping An
3. AUGMENTED REALITY: Government and Military Use Will Drive Magic Leap, HoloLens Adoption. 

Analysis of these items is below, and this week’s artist is Rob Ley Studio.

CRYPTO: September ICOs 90% Down from January, but Venture Funding is Ray of Hope.  

We're really trying to make this look good! But it's not working. We've scrubbed token offering data from September, and the trend continues generally to be down. Last month saw about $300 million in ICO funds raised, with the month before that revised to a bit over $400 million, a far cry from the $2.4 billion in January of this year. If we include EOS and other chunky private token raises, the highs go to over $3 billion, suggesting that monthly ICO activity is down 90%, which of course looks a lot like Ether's price performance, but with a 3-month lag.

There are three narratives at play, which are worth exploring. First, perhaps investors have devalued the idea of buying a utility token (does nothing yet, legally non-binding), and instead want to buy equity in the same companies. To test this, we looked at Pitchbook's data on blockchain and Bitcoin venture capital raises, which you can see in the second chart below in the magenta color. There is indeed a lagged effect in venture as well, with increasing drips of capital, reaching over $1 billion in August 2018. Why is that? Two reasons: (1) fintech companies like Robinhood and Revolut pivoting into crypto and (2) Bitmain trying to vacuum up capital before the public offering. This gives us a slightly more balanced view of funding in the space -- with recent months seeing a decline in public crowdfunding, but an increase in private checks. Anecdotally, projects are selling equity and giving matching tokens for "free" to investors in the capital structure.

The second narrative is Security Token Offerings (STOs). We know many different platforms working on this space -- from Templum, to Tokeny, to Sharespost, to Indiegogo, to tZero. And while we'd love to plot STOs on this chart as well to offset the decline, truth is that STOs won't hit the market in earnest for another half-year at least due to regulatory indigestion. We tried to find that extra monthly billion in STO land, but it's not there yet. And last, we're testing a narrative about the collapse/crisis in Chinese P2P lending since 2015, and whether that risk-seeking capital wound up in ICOs. If you've got any hints on that last one about Asia, let us know!

Source: Autonomous NEXT, Pitchbook Data, China Microlenders

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Paying by Smile with Alibaba or by Blinking with Ping An

Chinese commerce is very digital already, far outpacing the US in both nominal and percentage terms. Since almost no mobile payments in 2011, China now sees almost 100 trillion yuan, or $14 trillion USD, in mobile payment transaction volume. This compares to less than $100 billion in the United States -- a 10x difference in adoption of using phones, rather than cards or cash, to pay for things. Further, unlike in the West, the vector of payments intersects much more closely with social identity and networking, which is the platform globally for developing artificial intelligence. Just check your Facebook Newsfeed.

So we give to you implementations of AI for payments in the East. The first is from Alibaba. If the customer has Alipay's app and has enabled facial recognition, a smart vending machine is able to scan your face and associate it with the payment account. We would guess that there is a geolocation element involved as well for two factor authentication, or perhaps just a phone or pin verification. The second example is the newly launched Ping An partnership with Danyang Rural Commercial Bank. The plan is to use facial recognition combined with "blink detection" to authorize a payment. The Bank claims to target 1,000 merchants for the initial pilot of the program. Reminder -- Ping An has built out machine vision capabilities to cut down on time processing insurance claims, and here it is trying to rent it out as a cloud service to other providers.

We end with a few questions. First, if Ping An was able to stand up real machine vision capabilities within a couple of years, what's stopping Visa or Mastercard or JP Morgan from building the same? Why have American finance firms failed to own the AI technology layer and its associated cloud? We think the answer has to do with the role of enterprise tech firms and implementation consultants in the US, which make the default option to out-source rather than in-source such capability. Why build, when you get this from Google for free as part of a cloud deployment? And second, we observe that massive data processing and hosting infrastructure is needed to accurately process image recognition on video for millions of people in real time. Likely, you also need high definition images to pick up blinks and smiles. So let's refresh that 5G network!

Source: Walk the Chat (Charts), Fung Global Retail & Tech (Chart), TechCrunch (Alibaba), MPayPass via CrowdFundInsider (Ping An)

AUGMENTED REALITY: Government and Military Use Will Drive Magic Leap, HoloLens Adoption. 

Last week, we spent a bunch of time talking about how consumer VR as a standalone platform is not turning out to be as good as iTunes, the iPhone, YouTube or the Web. One problem was the form factor, another problem was the lack of pirated content -- though games and adult content will slowly address this. This week, we want to point to IoT (Internet of Things) and Augmented Reality (AR). Do these themes have a reason for being and are they an opportunity for a major retooling of our interaction with technology? Here, we think the answer is a stronger Yes. But this is due to a surprising reason -- government and military use.

The Web was popularized through consumer use and now powers our digital selves. But it was brought to life and initial use as ARPANET in the 1960s through funding by the US Department of Defense. Imagine unlimited funding with life and death use cases by a nationally-embedded client base. This is also what the Chinese government is doing in relation to AI, blockchain and quantum computing, and get to the meat. First, Bloomberg reported that AR companies Magic Leap and Microsoft's HoloLens are bidding on a $500 million augmented reality Army project. The order is for 100,000 headsets which would run the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, overlaying intelligence on the physical world. These would be used for both training as well as in live combat. The manufacture of these types of devices would create an economic base on which consumer versions could be created, as well as condition a whole generation that using AR headsets is normal.

Another data point supporting this idea is the investment by local government entities (e.g., UK councils) in digital twins of their neighborhoods for urban planning. In particular, Liverpool is running a ￡3.5 million IoT program that combines the rollout of a 5G network with innovative health and social care services for residents. Of the 11 proofs of concept in place, examples include video connection between vulnerable people at home and their pharmacy, AR maps that bridge physical distance and combat social isolation, and sensors that monitor whether older adults are dehydrated. Similarly, earlier this year, Bournemouth was mapped into 3D, incorporating 30 different data sets, also as part of planning the 5G network. These live 3D maps, which could then be projected into the real world via AR devices, are a social good and should be part of centralized infrastructure. This in turn can further move the needle in consumer adoption and market maturity.

Source: Magic Leap (Bloomberg, Next Reality, Daily Mail), UK Authority (Liverpool, Bournemouth), Wikipedia (ARPANET)

Featured:

• DigitalAssetStrategiesSummit.com: Thrilled to chair the Digital Asset Strategies Summit, October 16-17 in Dallas. Check out this exclusive event for financial advisors and family offices on how digital assets should be incorporated into wealth advice.
•  Crypto Challenge Forum: Join me at the world blockchain forum, taking place on 28-30 October at the Central Hall Westminster, London connecting global thought leaders, policy makers, investors and startups from all over the world for a 3 day top content event. 
• Artificial Intelligence for Financial Services Conference: I’ll be speaking at AIFS EU 2018 in London on November 28. The conference agenda is focused on practical examples of commercialising artificial intelligence applications and overcoming operational challenges.  

Thanks for reading!

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