AI Digital, a full-service, global programmatic consultancy helping advertisers enhance digital consumer experiences with an audience-first approach, has launched its proprietary platform ELEVATE. Designed for the programmatic marketplace, ELEVATE is an optimization and measurement solution that empowers brands to make the most of their digital advertising dollars by helping marketers to make clear correlations between digital campaigns and brand and business outcomes. It’s an optimization and measurement platform built for programmatic trading by programmatic traders.

ELEVATE offers a distinct metric called the Accountability Score, which is specifically designed to help brands identify growth areas within media plans that drive unique and unduplicated audiences, minimize ad fraud, and improve brand outcomes. ELEVATE includes metrics to ensure brand safety and address invalid traffic. The platform will also provide brands with total access across data, inventory, scale, and devices to their own target audience and can reach consumers at all touch points across their bespoke consumer journeys.

With ELEVATE, marketers will on average see a 3% reduction in invalid traffic and fraud, a 9% improvement in unique audience delivery, and a 6% increase in brand lift. The platform is designed for all types of media buys across all channels. However, it’s especially unique for CTV and streaming, as CTV currently lacks accountability to performance metrics.

“AI Digital sets out to reimagine how brands and the industry can capitalize on programmatic’s future with ELEVATE. Our experience with the platform has been very positive. We have had better campaign outcomes and are able to more easily demonstrate how campaigns are driving towards brand goals, which is top of mind for marketers,” said Marina Miller, EVP, Marketing & Media Strategy, Media Brokers International (MBI), one of the nation’s leading independent agencies. “We believe ELEVATE will push the industry forward and make media more accountable.”

Following the ethos of helping marketers realize the full potential of programmatic, AI Digital’s ELEVATE shifts the programmatic definition of success away from traditional metrics of impressions, reach, and clicks to more meaningful outcomes such as brand equity and lower funnel actions. ELEVATE improves programmatic optimization, brand and business outcome measurement by providing comprehensive and accountable insights into the audiences, channels, creatives, geographies, and publishers that are driving results.

“Programmatic was promised to be a marketing utopia for CFOs and corporate C-suite; greater accountability to sales/business metrics, precision audience targeting, and real-time optimization. Unfortunately, for some, the practice has been mired in brand safety challenges, invalid traffic, and performance tied to vanity metrics versus long-term returns,” said Stephen Magli, Founder and CEO at AI Digital. “ELEVATE is a solution that aims to establish a higher standard in programmatically traded marketplaces and enable marketers to realize the potential of programmatic.”

About AI Digital – AI Digital is a full-service, global programmatic consultancy that empowers agencies & advertisers with digital expertise and instant data enabled programmatic infrastructure across all media types and access to all leading premium publishers and inventory. Leading with an audience-first approach, the company helps agencies and advertisers navigate the digital ecosystem by delivering hands-on, unrivaled data and technology access, outcome-based audience strategy, advanced analytics driven campaign optimization and advanced measurement including detailed, real-time transparent campaign reporting. AI Digital is a priority Amazon Partner with access to over 150+ people-based data sources and in platform optimization expertise to maximize value of all walled gardens including Google and Amazon’s data and tech stack, along with 10+ DSPs . AI Digital leverages technology through its proprietary platform ELEVATE and the expertise of its world-class, global team to drive a more ELEVATED consumer experience, measurable action, and brand and sales lift for more accountable results. Learn more about AI Digital at www.aidigital.io.

Today, Arrington Capital announced that Bhavik Patel has joined the firm, bringing decades of derivatives, trading and risk management experience to complement the expanding team at Arrington Capital. Mr. Patel was previously Chief Product Officer and Head of Derivatives Business at BitMEX, an early crypto exchange and derivative trading platform, where he assisted the founding team at an early stage on the design of what would be a leading flagship perpetual swap product.

“I look forward to bringing my financial markets experience to Arrington Capital, a digital asset management and venture firm, where we will grow and expand the liquid side of the organization,” said Mr. Patel. “I am equally as thrilled to utilize my background in designing sophisticated financial products in the digital asset space, to support our 200+ portfolio companies that are at the forefront of building financial infrastructure of the future.”

“As the crypto markets mature and converge with traditional markets, it is critical to bring a mature and sophisticated perspective to our trading strategy. Representing just one pillar of how we deliver value to our investors, our liquidity and trading business will be elevated to a higher degree with Bhavik’s leadership and institutional knowledge,” said Michael Arrington, founder of Arrington Capital. “We are honored to have Bhavik join us and we look forward to new strategies and offerings he will bring to our investors.”

Mr. Patel’s prior experience also includes UBS’s APAC Derivatives Strategist, where he was responsible for generating and publishing cross-asset tactical and systematic trade ideas. He was the APAC touchpoint for content driven dialogue with a wide variety of clients (volatility funds, long-short investors, tail funds).

Prior to UBS in Hong Kong, Bhavik had a number of trading and risk management roles in London at a mix of European investment banks. He has a Masters in Mathematics from the University of Oxford.

About Arrington Capital

Arrington Capital is a digital asset management firm primarily focused on blockchain-based capital markets. The firm, founded in 2017 by TechCrunch and CrunchBase founder Michael Arrington and TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, has invested in hundreds of startups around the world. Arrington Capital is a seasoned, international team composed of Silicon Valley veterans and operators with deep venture capital experience and crypto native roots. Arrington Capital’s first fund was Arrington XRP Capital, and has expanded to multiple funds over time, including the Arrington Algo Growth Fund and the Arrington Moonbeam Growth Fund. For more information on Arrington Capital, visit https://www.arringtoncapital.com/.

Personal.ai, a leading AI startup, is on a mission to revolutionize human connection with its AI-first messaging platform. The Company has raised $7.8 million to-date to develop its proprietary personal language model.

The Company is backed by investors such as Supernode Global, Differential Ventures, BBG Ventures, Beni VC, Village Global, Keshif Ventures, and Good Friends, a VC led by the founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s, and Allbirds. The Company also has various angels and advisors on board, such as Rob Granieri of Jane Street Capital, Kelvin Beachum of the Arizona Cardinals, Anirudh Koul of Pinterest and Microsoft, and Bradley Taylor of Google Moonshot.

Personal.ai has developed a personal language model (PLM) called Generative Grounded Transformer (GGT-1), which, in contrast to OpenAI’s GPT-3, trains on personal data rather than public data. Personal.ai’s models are unique to and owned by each user. GGT-1 can absorb massive amounts of unstructured user data, learn through basic chat, and create structured, time-bound memory stacks – a private vault of one’s digital mind. These stacks allow users to seamlessly recall their experiences by asking questions, drafting personal responses, and more.

Personal.ai will leverage GGT-1 to create a chat interface that uses AI to draft personal messages, retain and recall personal information, and unlock the potential of human-to-human chat capabilities. This offering is designed to learn from every conversation and interaction, growing more efficient as users chat. The platform’s AI ensures that users never forget an important moment, fact, or experience.

“We are excited to bring our AI technology to the world and help people unlock more value from their everyday interactions and aggregated knowledge. Our models act to tackle the human limitations of time and cognition. Our mission is to make Personal AIs accessible to everyone,” said Suman Kanuganti, Co-Founder and CEO of Personal.ai.

About Personal.ai

Personal.ai’s mission is to foster deeper relationships between humans and unlock greater access to personal knowledge and experiences. Personal.ai was founded in 2020 by Suman Kanuganti (former Founder and CEO of Aira), Sharon Zhang (CTO, MIT grad and builder of four AI startups), and Kristie Kaiser (Head of UX & Design, Forbes 30 under 30). For more information, please visit www.personal.ai.

Movius, a global leader in cloud-based secure mobile communications, today announced that its conversational artificial intelligence (Conversational AI) platform, Curie, will power spocto’s debt resolution and risk mitigation platform in India and the MENA region.

The Silicon Valley-based Movius has signed an agreement with spocto, the world’s leading debt support and risk mitigation platform powered by AI and ML. spocto aims to shape the future of collections by helping banks and NBFC’s achieve better platform integration to improve customer experience in the most compliant manner.

This agreement between spocto and Movius was made possible by challenging the norms and pushing boundaries to drive customer value, according to Ananth Siva, CEO, Movius. “We are very excited about this partnership with the world’s leading debt support and risk mitigation platform, spocto. The results thus far, even in very complex languages and workflows, have been remarkable,” he added.

Speaking on this milestone, Puja Srivastava, Co-Founder & CTO, spocto said, “spocto has established itself as a credible one-stop organization that can convert more than 60% of the unpaid bank loans on the backbone of digitization and education using high-end AI and Machine learning. This is indigenously developed by a robust backend team of operations and domain expertise. This association will now enable spocto to offer an additional feature of conversational AI for lenders in India.”

Founded in 2017, spocto has become a market leader in the world of consumer analytics and risk mitigation. Using proprietary algorithms, spocto’s suite of products apply machine learning and use predictive artificial intelligence to draw insights from otherwise ambiguous data, helping lenders manage risk and improve debt collection efficiencies.

“Driving business outcomes at scale through AI requires a robust platform that can transform the debt collection industry’s experience through conversational intelligence, unified interaction, and integration across a multitude of languages and channels. We are thrilled to deploy Curie, which will certainly enhance spocto’s developer experience and remove hurdles of AI adoption,” explained Satish Medapati, Head of AI and Data Solutions at Movius.

The partnership gains significance in the light of recent regulatory guidelines in India under which the Reserve Bank of India has tightened the norms for loans recovery process to prevent banks and other lenders from using strong-arm tactics or other unfair recovery practices for collecting debt. It is a matter of time before technology plays a greater role in the debt collection process, whereby debt collection practices will no longer humiliate the person from whom the debt is to be collected and make it less intrusive than what it is now. spocto’s technology, riding on Movius’s conversational AI platform, helps ensure that the debt collection process is robust, personalized, and innovative, as the debt collection process becomes ethical.

ABOUT MOVIUS

Movius is a leader in secure mobile communications that powers the work-from-anywhere world. MultiLine by Movius is the trusted solution for using mobile voice, text, and WhatsApp for business and customer communications globally. Leading banks and enterprises around the world use the company’s AI-powered, unified secure communication platform to connect with their customers in more convenient, cost-effective, and compliant ways. Headquartered in the Silicon Valley, Movius has offices around the world and works with leading global partners, including T-Mobile US, BlackBerry, BT Global, SingTel, China Telecom, Computacenter, Cisco, Telefonica and IBM. To learn more about Movius, or their products and solutions, visit www.movius.ai.

ABOUT SPOCTO

spocto (www.spocto.com) is the world’s leading debt support & risk mitigation platform focused on digitizing the entire collections processes for lenders. The company was founded by a team of Business and Tech leaders who have served as CXOs in Fortune 50 companies and is currently a part of Yubi that is backed by multiple credible investors, including Sequoia Capital and Lightrock. spocto help banks, NBFCs and Fintech lending firms achieve the 3Cs –

– Compliance
– Collection Efficiency
– Customer experience

The debt resolution platform has processed volumes worth over 100 Bn $+, touched 54 mn+ customers, and saved Estimated Credit loss (ECL) of nearly 4 Bn $. It has helped creditors enhance their geographical reach and improved their NPS by 8%.

Spot AI announced today it has closed a $40 million Series B financing round led by Scale Venture Partners, bringing its total to $62 million in funding. Also participating in the round are existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and new investors StepStone Group, and MVP Ventures. Hypergrowth Partners also joins Spot AI as an advisor and investor.

The video security industry has recently seen exponential growth – with 2x growth in cameras since 2015, nearly one billion security cameras have been sold and installed in the world today. Spot AI provides a solution that can help the millions of businesses deploying these cameras to utilize video intelligence, enabling better decisions around security, workforce safety, and process efficiency.

“Video is everywhere, and in today’s world, solving problems requires visual context. But as a business owner, you can’t be everywhere at once. So it’s only natural that more organizations today are relying heavily on video intelligence to help drive efficiency and minimize loss,” said Tanuj Thapliyal, Co-Founder & CEO of Spot AI. “This investment allows us to accelerate our expansion and help businesses continue to unlock the value of video data with industry-first AI products.”

Compared to other cameras on the market, Spot AI’s system combines cloud and edge computing to make video footage actionable, so businesses can instantly surface and resolve problems. The company’s Intelligent Video Recorder is powered by new silicon and new AI algorithms that enable powerful, responsive and first-of-its-kind AI applications. Its modern cloud dashboard allows users to easily access, search and consume insights from their video footage – ranging from operational bottlenecks to unsafe behavior. Businesses can choose to use cameras they already have, or get them for free from Spot AI.

“The product usage and engagement Spot AI has seen in its customers over the past year since launch is a testament to the unique software they’ve built and the velocity of their product engine,” said Jeremy Kaufmann, Partner at Scale Venture Partners. “There is a massive opportunity here and we’re excited to partner with Spot AI as they continue unlocking the value of video data.”

Spot AI is now the fastest growing Video Intelligence company in the world just months after its Fall 2021 launch. The company grew 5x in revenue YoY, is deployed at thousands of locations across the U.S., and is trusted by leaders across 17 different industries – from local businesses to Fortune 500s. Spot AI’s customers range from businesses in the warehousing and healthcare verticals, to nonprofits and car washes.

“When looking to install a security camera system, we wanted a user-friendly solution to help us leverage our video data to improve our operations while reducing IT support overhead. Spot AI is all those things for us,” said Josh Davis, Lead IT Tech at Quick Quack Car Wash, one of the top five largest car washes in the U.S.

To learn more, visit www.spot.ai, and for those interested in a role at the company, visit spot.ai/careers.

About Spot AI
Spot AI was formed by engineers from Stanford, Cisco Meraki, and Samsara. The company is on a mission to create a safer and smarter physical world with the power of sight. With an AI camera system, Spot AI makes video footage actionable to help companies improve their security, safety, efficiency and customer experience. The company’s headquarters are in Burlingame, CA, with offices in San Francisco and Salt Lake City. For more information, visit www.spot.ai.

AT&T and H2O.ai co-created and deployed the platform to AT&T’s Chief Data Office (CDO) and then across AT&T last year. AT&T estimates AI Feature Store has improved speed to market by as much as 70%.

”Feature Store is an ideal platform for making our AI capabilities reusable and easy to access for our data scientists and citizen developers alike, and has helped integrate AI into the fabric of our business,” said Andy Markus, chief data officer at AT&T.

The announcement was made during H2O World, H2O.ai’s flagship conference, at AT&T headquarters in Dallas, TX. The event included world-class speakers including:

• Sri Ambati, CEO and founder of H2O.ai
• Andy Markus, chief data officer, AT&T
• Mark Austin, vice president of data science, AT&T
• Jenny Steffens, Hy-Vee
• Jeremy Elster, Chipotle Mexican Grill
• Sean Otto, the AES Corporation
• Dan Rubenstein, Princeton University
• Kash Patel, Hackensack Meridian Health
• Karamjit Singh, Mastercard
• Jolene Huang, Intuit
• Fred Goldstein, Accountable Health, LLC
• More than a dozen Kaggle Grandmasters (the community of best-in-the-world machine learning practitioners and data scientists)

The fully managed AI Feature Store platform enables users to register, store, update, discover, use and share within AT&T highly curated, validated and model-ready historical and real-time features (attributes derived from raw data that predict an outcome such as churn, likelihood to buy, predicted demand, etc.) collected from throughout AT&T.

Conventional wisdom indicates data scientists and machine learning (ML) experts spend about 80% of their time generating, preparing and labeling data. That leaves only 20% of their time for the important tasks of analyzing and interacting with the data to solve real-world business problems. AI Feature Store flips that breakdown of time.

In the first year of launch, the co-developed AI Feature Store addressed the complexity of data quality requirements by providing a central repository that connects information across disparate systems to bring all of an organization’s data assets together in one place. AI Feature Store plays a key role in AI governance by ensuring that the right kind of data is accessible only to the right folks and taking care of sensitive data like PII or SPI with encryption, data masking and other technologies.

“The external version we co-developed with H2O.ai can help other companies embarking on their own AI transformations, even as the speed and complexity of the challenges they face accelerate,” said Markus. The acceleration of speed to market gives AT&T some of the most advanced AI and CDO departments in the entire country. The team was awarded a top spot by H2O.ai during the conference, which noted their strong AI program.

“AI Feature Store is another way to fuel our drive to help large enterprises transform themselves,” said Sri Ambati, CEO and founder of H2O.ai. “Our drive to enable transformation is at the heart of our mission at H2O.ai – we’re here to connect the world and democratize AI across organizations so that it can have a positive impact on society.”

About H2O.ai

H2O.ai is the leading AI Cloud company, on a mission to democratize AI and drive an open AI movement around the world. They focus on drawing insights from structured and unstructured data like video and documents with their award-winning products like Hydrogen Torch and Document AI. Customers use the H2O AI Cloud to rapidly solve complex business problems and accelerate the discovery of new ideas. H2O.ai is the trusted AI provider to more than 20,000 global organizations, millions of data scientists and over half of the Fortune 500, including AT&T, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Citi, GlaxoSmithKline, Hitachi, Kaiser Permanente, Procter & Gamble, PayPal, PwC, Reckitt, Unilever, Goldman Sachs, NVIDIA, and Wells Fargo are not only customers and partners, but strategic investors in the company. More than 30 Kaggle Grandmasters (the community of best-in-the-world machine learning practitioners and data scientists) are makers at H2O.ai. A strong AI for Good ethos to make the world a better place and Responsible AI drive the company’s purpose. Please join our movement at www.h2o.ai.

TOKYO — Metaverse advanced technology research organization “MATRIX GENESIS LABS” operated by MetaReal’s MATRIX Co., Ltd. (Head office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Junichi Goishi; hereinafter “MATRIX”) succeeded in automatically generating a Metaverse world using artificial intelligence.

MATRIX believes that the new world of the Metaverse should be an infinitely vast space that is not controlled by anyone. For that reason, the generation of Metaverse worlds must not be labor intensive, and we must make it so that anyone can easily and freely generate their own Metaverse worlds. “Project Genesis” is an artificial intelligence-based automatic Metaverse world generation technology that has been developed as one of the important technologies to realize our ideal.

Recently, AI systems that generate images from text have become a hot topic, and in MATRIX’s “Project Genesis,” we have made it possible to “create new worlds simply by speaking.”

The prototype version has three main problems.

(1) It takes about 60 seconds to generate a world.
(2) High-definition image quality has not yet been achieved.
(3) It is not animated.

To meet these challenges, we are currently preparing to adjust the algorithm and expand the computational power. We will make an announcement as soon as the measures are completed. Soon be released as a beta version on our reality Metaverse platform “DOKODEMO Door (https://dokodemodoors.com/en).”

By having more people experience it, we will be able to help people feel like they are a part of the ideal Metaverse that we are aiming for, and at the same time, we will clarify the issues of “Project Genesis” and refine it until it is more sophisticated.

About MATRIX Co., Ltd.
Established in September 2020 as a subsidiary of MetaReal Co., Ltd. (formerly Rozetta). Developed Real & Social Metaverse “DOKODEMO Door” with the corporate vision of “Eliminating disparities and discrimination in the old reality, such as borders, language barriers, physical differences, knowledge gaps, and all other handicaps.”
https://www.matrix.inc

About MetaReal Co., Ltd.
Corporate mission: “Liberate mankind from the limitations of place, time, language, and the physical”. AI, AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), 5G/6G/7G (high-speed, large-capacity, multiple simultaneous connection communication), 4K/8K/12K (super-resolution video), video distribution. By integrating the latest technologies such as solutions, wearable devices, robots, and HA (Human Augmentation), people from all over the world can interact, live, work, and enjoy their lives “anytime, anywhere, and with anyone without the impediment of language.” We will realize the goal of “global ubiquitous.” For the last two years, we have been focusing on the “Metaverse business” as a growth field, handled by our group companies MATRIX Co., Ltd. (“DOKODEMO Door”) and Travel DX Co., Ltd. (“DOKODEMO Door Trip”).

Nathalie Casemajor, Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS)

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital objects that represent something else, such as a work of art, a video or even a tweet. They certify the existence and the ownership of this item through a data recording on a blockchain (a distributed ledger technology).

Since the emergence of NFTs in 2016, many artists have experimented with this new digital device to market their creations. NFTs are most often bought and resold via auction sites, where payments are made in cryptocurrency (such as ether currency). It is this notion of a certificate registered on a blockchain that distinguishes an NFT from a standard digital work.

The public and media discourse about NFTs is polarized: in the eyes of their strongest enthusiasts, NFTs represent the future of art, while their detractors consider them a vast ripoff and waste of energy.

How can this NFT phenomenon be characterized? To what extent does it challenge the established codes of contemporary art?

As a researcher specialized in media studies and sociology of culture, I am providing a brief overview of the situation.

Crypto-evangelists and crypto-skeptics

On one hand, there is the camp that can be described as crypto-evangelists: they adhere to a discourse that present NFTs as a radical revolution that will change everything.

This is precisely the discourse surrounding the sensational 2021 sale of a work by the artist Beeple (a collage of vignettes created by digital software) at the prestigious auction house Christie’s for nearly US$70 million. According to the two main buyers, the purchase was “emblematic of a revolution in progress,” and marked “the beginning of a movement carried out by a whole generation.”

On the other side, there are the crypto-skeptics. This is the position of Hito Steyerl, a widely recognized media artist. She believes that NFTs are the “equivalent of toxic masculinity,” and owe their development to “the worst and most monopolistic actors” who are “extracting labour from precarious workers” and “take up way too much attention and use up all the oxygen in the room.”

This polarization means that the real potential of NFTs, as well as their flaws, which are also very real, tend to be overshadowed by caricatured positions of principle. However, within this ecosystem of NFTs, there exists a set of rich and plural artistic practices.

Emerging creative scenes

The NFT format definitely represents a new type of object being traded. It is based on a new type of contract (known as “smart”), which is itself the result of the innovation of blockchain technology. In this way, the NFT format has given rise to the emergence of a new creative scene. Or, rather, scenes, in the plural, which are characterized by a great effervescence — but also by certain contradictions.

The “native” scenes of the NFT format, that is to say, those born with the invention of this format, are characterized by a strong media visibility, a volume of far-reaching financial investment, and, for some of its actors, a will to reshuffle the cards of the art world by criticizing its established order.

A large portion of NFT creators come from a practice of 3D modelling, graphic design, animation or video game design — in other words, from the creative industries sector. In recent decades, this sector has generated a very large pool of skills, whose creative surplus finds a mode of expression in the NFT format, but also a source of additional income to cope with the often precarious conditions of creative work.

Many figures of the native NFT scenes are, to use the expression of the sociologist Howard S. Becker, outsiders (neophytes) in comparison to the established art world. That is, they socialize in circles other than those of the institutional art world, and they transgress its rules in many respects.

A more egalitarian art world?

The discourse of the main purchasers of Beeple’s sensational work is very enlightening in this sense. MetaKovan and Twobadour (two investors of the crypto world, both of Indian origin) reveal in an interview:

We have been conditioned, from a very young age, to think that art was not for us. …We have always been against the idea of exclusivity. The metaverse is all inclusive. … A metaverse in which everyone will have the same rights, powers, will be legitimate. … It is particularly egalitarian.

However, there are major contradictions between the discourse of egalitarianism they are advocating here, and its implementation in the projects of these two investors. For example, during the technological art event Dreamverse that they organized in New York in 2021, the price of admission to the evening varied between US$175 and $2,500 — an unaffordable cost for many amateurs. This hierarchy of prices leads, rather, to the reproduction of a logic of exclusivity that favours the most fortunate.

Museums are cautious

The gap between the market value of NFTs and their value in museums is unprecedented. The former is reaching unprecedented heights, while the latter is still at rock bottom. Indeed, the collection of NFT by museums remains, to this day, a very marginal practice. Only a handful of NFTs are integrated into museum collections. Some of them are acquired following an exhibition in a museum, where they are presented on digital screens hung on the wall.

Cultural legitimacy is affected by the disintermediation (elimination of intermediaries) and reintermediation (introduction of new intermediaries) that characterize the world of NFTs. In its disruptive impulse, the proclaimed revolution of NFTs cuts itself off from a chain of well-established, legitimate intermediaries — the gallery owners, curators, art critics, conventional collectors and public subsidies.

It has replaced them with new intermediaries, primarily “whales” — investors who have made a fortune in cryptocurrency — or popular culture celebrities. These new intermediaries overinvest in financial capital in the production of NFTs with the aim of gaining a position of prestige as a collector, or to enrich themselves by increasing the value of works. But they often lack the social and cultural capital to find a way to access museums and their exhibition spaces and their collections.

In search of legitimacy

However, these works are publicly accessible, as all NFTs are freely searchable on their buyers’ e-wallets. Some collectors buy works only to speculate. Others gain visibility by displaying their NFTs in a metaverse (a virtual world) such as Decentraland or Space.

And for others, still, the quest for legitimacy goes further: in the spring of 2022, a group of artists, curators, collectors and NFT platforms organized a Decentral Art Pavilion, in parallel to the Venice Biennale. Remaining outside the official program, the exhibition aimed to position NFTs in the orbit of this key contemporary art event.

But the presence of NFTs remained marginal in this edition of the biennial. Only the Cameroon pavilion exhibited NFTs under the leadership of a curator with a shady reputation, and the result was disappointing.

The recognition of the NFTs by the consecrated art world will perhaps come about by other avenues, like the more experimental practices presented at the documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany this year, or through artistic movements from developing countries, like the Balot project, which used an NFT to criticize the appropriation of a work originating from the Republic of the Congo by an American museum.

So recognition could come through the margins. But in these cases, the marginal players could more easily access the established art world because they share its codes.

Nathalie Casemajor, Professeure, Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

• Credit Suisse, Pictet and Vontobel have conducted a proof of concept to issue tokenized investment products recorded on a public blockchain and traded on BX Swiss, the Swiss regulated stock exchange
• The three processes of the proof of concept – issuance, trading and settlement – took place within hours, whereas in a traditional financial environment they take days
• The Capital Markets and Technology Association’s (CMTA) token standard and Taurus’ tokenization technology have been used to issue tokenized investment products
• Trades in tokenized securities are settled in fiat currency – the Swiss franc – through a smart contract and targens’ payment bridge DLT2Pay
• The financial industry is taking advantage of the blockchain technology to increase security and efficiency and reduce complexity

For the first time, key players in the Swiss financial industry successfully developed and tested a novel settlement mechanism for tokenized investment products on a public blockchain testnet infrastructure. A smart contract, developed by the Capital Markets and Technology Association (the CMTA), allows for streamlined processes, reduces complexity, raises security, and eliminates counterparty risks from trades. The CMTA’s proof of concept marks a milestone for the Swiss financial industry.

The proof of concept involves:

• the issuance of tokenized investment products recorded on an Ethereum test blockchain,
• the trading of these products in Swiss francs on a regulated Swiss securities exchange, and
• the settlement of trades through a smart contract developed by the CMTA.

These three distinct operations – issuance, trading and settlement – all happened within hours, when they take days to unfold in a traditional financial environment.

“We are very proud to have developed this groundbreaking mechanism with numerous partners from the financial and technology industries,” says Jacques Iffland, Chairman of the CMTA. “It will enable the industry to increase efficiency, simplify cross-border settlement and improve the quality of service. And customers will benefit from the efficiency gains.”

Vontobel and Pictet each issued an actively managed equity certificate representing a basket of equities, while Credit Suisse issued a structured note, which were associated with digital tokens recorded on an Ethereum test blockchain, a process commonly referred to as “tokenization”. These securities were then traded on the platform of BX Swiss, a FINMA regulated Swiss securities exchange. The trades were settled bilaterally on the blockchain. To do so, the participants used an on-chain mechanism that secures the parties’ obligations. The settlement in fiat currency (Swiss franc) was made possible by an application called DLT2Pay, a product of targens, that connects the blockchain with the Swiss Interbank Clearing (SIC), the real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system of the Swiss National Bank. The proof of concept leveraged the CMTA’s standard token format and smart contract (CMTAT), and another smart contract that replicates the delivery-vs-payment functionality of traditional settlement systems. The creation, security aspects and technical operation of the smart contracts, were carried out under the leadership of Taurus, whose technology was used to issue and manage the structured products across their full lifecycle.

The proof of concept was developed and carried out under the aegis of the CMTA, with the support of representatives of BX Swiss, Credit Suisse, Homburger, Lenz & Staehelin, METACO, Pictet, targens, Taurus, UBS and Vontobel.

The proof of concept lays the foundation for an alternative Swiss post-trade infrastructure that functions without central parties (central counterparty and central securities depositary) and enables participating banks to benefit from cost advantages along the entire value chain of securities transactions (issuance, settlement and custody).

Daniel Gorrera, Head Digital Assets at Credit Suisse, said: “The transactions carried out today clearly establish that products tokenized on a public blockchain can be traded on regulated trading platforms and that the settlement of transactions on tokenized products can be carried out in fiat currencies without creating any counterparty risk. The successful proof of concept is a crucial first step for unlocking the benefits of tokenization in the future.”

Steve Blanchet, Head of Group Tech Strategy and Innovation at Pictet said: “Tokenization is a key strategic element for the future of asset management. It enables issuers to streamline the processes that govern the creation of investment products in a way that is currently not achievable with traditional infrastructures, and to drastically reduce time-to-market. With the solutions we tested in the proof of concept, processes that are currently matters of days can be reduced to a few hours, and eventually down to minutes or less.“

Anna-Naomi Bandi-Lang, Structuring – Credit Solutions at UBS Investment Bank said: “Tokenization has many use cases, but for it to become an established feature of modern financial markets, the ability to trade tokenized products in major currencies and through regulated trading venues is key. The CMTA’s proof of concept demonstrates that there is a path to achieve this goal.“

Marco Hegglin, Chief of Staff Structured Solutions & Treasury at Vontobel, said: “This proof of concept is just a first step on the way to defining a new standard for structured products in the form of a smart contract. Structured products are not only innovative products, they are also predestined for state-of-the-art technology. With a fully automated smart contract covering the entire lifecycle, the possibilities that can be expressed in pure code language are almost unlimited, and the blockchain technology can help designing new generations of financial products.”

Matthias Müller, Head of Markets at BX Swiss, said: “First of its kind, this proof of concept demonstrated that trades carried out on-exchange can be settled on a public blockchain directly between participants. It is no longer necessary for the parties to secure a transaction by transferring tokens or cash to the exchange ahead of trade. This is a significant advantage in terms of speed, cost, and risk management. The smart contract used for the settlement eliminates the counterparty risk that would exist if the cash leg and the asset leg of the transactions were completed independently from one another. The new regulatory regime for DLT-based trading platforms will allow BX Swiss to take full advantage of these developments.”

Jean-Philippe Aumasson, co-founder of Taurus SA and Chair of the CMTA’s Technology Committee, said: “We are delighted to see a consensus building around the use of open standards for DLT-based market infrastructures and to see that the CMTA’s smart contracts are being recognized as reliable technology in this respect. Using collaboratively developed open-source smart contracts reduces development and due diligence costs for participants and contributes to the reliability and efficiency of the Swiss fintech ecosystem.”

Samuel Bisig, Business Development and Product Manager at targens GmbH in Stuttgart, said: “targens’ DLT2Pay solution provides the missing link between a DLT/blockchain and a payment transaction protocol (here: central banks’ clearing systems) for the cash settlement of securities transactions. As long as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are not available, such a “trigger solution” is key if digital assets are to be traded otherwise than in private cryptocurrencies.“

About the Capital Markets and Technology Association
The Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA) is a not-for profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, which brings together experts from the financial, technological and legal sectors to promote the use of new technologies in capital markets. The Association provides a platform to create open industry standards around issuing, distributing and trading securities in the form of digital tokens using distributed ledger technologies. Created in 2018 by Lenz & Staehelin, Swissquote and Temenos with the support of the EPFL, it has today over 40 members representative of the Swiss and international financial industry.
Visit – www.cmta.ch

• The tier-1 decentralized exchange encourages real-world adoption of crypto assets as a founding member of Celo’s $100M “DeFi for the People” initiative
• Curve’s deployment allows for seamless movement of stable assets on- and off-chain via Wormhole’s Portal token bridge
• Curve joins Uniswap v3 on Celo, one of the world’s few layer-1’s providing access to the largest decentralized exchanges (DEXs)

Curve.Finance, one of the largest DEXs and automated market makers (AMM), deploys on Celo, the leading carbon-negative, EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain, using fast, scalable proof-of-stake consensus. The launch is a collaboration among the Celo Foundation, Curve, Stake DAO, and Stake Capital.

“Curve is excited to deploy on Celo,” says Julien Bouteloup, who is part of Curve’s core team. “Celo is unique through its mobile-first design with a diverse ecosystem and user base in regions where real-world crypto adoption is highest. Through continued, long-term collaboration, we aim to bring decentralized financial tools to the masses, such as introducing innovations through a forthcoming rewards program using Votemarket by Stake DAO.”

Built for real-world utility, including payment systems, mutual credit, universal basic income (UBI), climate solutions, and borrowing and lending, Celo boasts technical advantages from mobile optimization to the ability to pay for transaction fees using ERC-20 tokens––the Mento protocol, which provides various stable assets to users of the Celo blockchain (cUSD, cEUR, cREAL), aims to launch stable assets in every currency in the world.

“Curve brings greater usability to Celo,” says Nikhil Raghuveera, the Celo Foundation’s Head of Strategy & Innovation, “by making it easier for people to use and swap stable assets for real-world use cases and moving seamlessly on- and off-chain. We look forward to deepening our relationship with Curve’s ecosystem, including Stake DAO and Stake Capital, through future gauge proposals supporting robust, decentralized Web3 infrastructure––which is needed now more than ever.”

Curve and Celo’s partnership dates back to August 2021, when Celo announced its “DeFi for the People” (DFTP) initiative, committing $100M to make decentralized finance (DeFi) broadly accessible to the 6.4 billion mobile phone users around the world. Curve joined DFTP as a founding member, alongside DeFi protocol Aave, DEXs Sushi and Ubeswap, and Valora wallet, among others.

On Celo, Curve joins DEX Uniswap v3, deployed in July 2022. Celo users now have access to the two largest DEXs in the world, both of which use integration with Wormhole, the cross-chain interoperability protocol, and its Portal token bridge.

About Celo
Celo is a carbon-negative, permissionless, layer-1 protocol with a rich ecosystem of global partners building innovative Web3 applications within the DeFi, ReFi, and NFT sectors on Celo. Accessible to anyone with a mobile phone, the Celo ecosystem consists of a decentralized, proof-of-stake blockchain technology stack (the Celo Protocol), the CELO native token, and several Mento stable assets (cUSD, cEUR, cREAL) that enable anyone to use digital assets like currency. Launched on Earth Day in 2020, the open source Celo mainnet supports 1,000+ projects created by developers and artists located around the world.