2022 was truly the year of Elden Ring, with FromSoftware’s latest game exploding into the mainstream unlike anything it had previously created. As such, a lot of people played and finished Elden Ring. In fact, according to one set of data, Elden Ring was the most completed game of 2022. But funnily enough, the same source also pegs it as the game players were most likely to abandon before reaching the end.
If you’ve read Kotaku (or any other gaming website) in 2022, you are likely already familiar with Elden Ring, the latest game from Dark Souls creators FromSoftware. And like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Elden Ring is a tough-as-nails action-RPG with a heavy focus on mystery, world-building, and boss fights. However, this time around FromSoftware added a true open world to its popular “Soulslike” formula. The end result? One of 2022’s most acclaimed, best-selling games. The open world in particular helped sway many to try Elden Ring for the first time, letting players avoid harder areas until later and ostensibly making it easier to finish than past FromSoftware adventures. And it seems that design choice paid off.
According to data on HowLongToBeat.com, Elden Ring is 2022’s most completed game, with nearly 6,000 users of the site reporting they have played and finished the massive open-world RPG. That’s an impressive number when you look at the runner-up games on the list. Stray, that adorable futuristic cat game, was completed by nearly 4,000 users. Meanwhile, in third with 2,500 completions, was Game Freak and Nintendo’s Switch hit, Pokemon Legends: Arceus. To see such a big and difficult game top the list is both a sign that Elden Ring is very good and also a hint at the kind of audience that is primarily using HowLongToBeat.com.
Screenshot: Howlongtobeat.com / Kotaku
But perhaps more interesting is that Elden Ring is also the most “retired” game. When users “retire” from a game on Howlongtobeat.com it means they have given up on it, either permanently or temporarily. Now, even though only 261 players officially retired from Elden Ring on the site, that’s still more than double any other game in 2022. Even if the dataset is a bit small and weird (how many people are logging into this site to admit defeat?) it’s still an interesting data point.
This all makes sense to me. Elden Ring was the most talked-about game of 2022, and with that many people playing, it makes sense that a good chunk of them might give up on it. Other data seems to suggest around half the people playing Elden Ring never reached the end. So I buy that Elden Ring could be the most completed game of 2022 while also being the game more people gave up on than anything else.
Some other interesting 2022 data from the site: Turns out Elden Ring is also on the most backlogs, has the most reviews, and is the longest game of 2022. However, Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part 1 is the most positively reviewed game, and Diablo Immortal is the worst-reviewed.
Elon Musk has been trying this week to defend Tesla’s abysmal stock performance in 2022. The electric vehicle giant has seen its stock plummet by 61% this year, making it the 11th-worst performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2022.
“As bank savings account interest rates, which are guaranteed, start to approach stock market returns, which are *not* guaranteed, people will increasingly move their money out of stocks into cash, thus causing stocks to drop,” Musk tweeted.
You might expect that Tesla’s stock drop has wiped out more investor wealth than any other stock in the world this year. But you would be wrong.
If we look at declines in market capitalization — the value of companies’ common-shares outstanding — Tesla TSLA, -1.76%
has been the fourth worst-performing stock in the benchmark S&P 500 this year, as of 1 p.m. ET on Dec. 21:
On a percentage basis, all these stocks have performed worse than the full S&P 500, which has fallen 19%, excluding dividends.
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +1.74%
has erased more shareholder wealth than any other publicly traded company in 2022. In total, investors in Amazon have lost $804.6 billion this year. The stock is down 48% in 2022.
Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.28%
and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.23%
have also suffered larger market-cap declines than Tesla, by virtue of their sheer size.
The companies have different fiscal and annual period ends, but if we look at data for the past three reported quarters and compare to the same period a year earlier, here’s how the four stack up:
Company
Ticker
Change in sales for three quarters from year-earlier period
Change in EPS for three quarters from year-earlier period
Amazon showed a net loss of $3 billion for the first three quarters of 2022 as the company neared the end of its extraordinary multiyear effort to build out its warehouse and fulfillment infrastructure. For the first three quarters of 2021, the company booked $19 billion in profits. When announcing Amazon’s third-quarter results CEO Andy Jassy said the company was working methodically toward “a stronger cost structure for the business moving forward.”
The incredible growth of Amazon’s cloud business has stalled and disappointed the expectations the company had nurtured on Wall Street. The Amazon Web Services business is facing increasing competition from the likes of Microsoft and its customers are pulling back. Meanwhile, retail sales have also come in weak going into the Christmas and holiday season.
Amazon’s stock has declined 22% since it closed at $110.96 on Oct. 27, right before it disappointed investors not only with its third-quarter results, but with its outlook: It expects to break even during the holiday quarter. Analysts polled by FactSet had previously expected a profit of more than $5 billion.
Tesla stands in contrast to Amazon, as you can see on the table above. Its sales grew by 58% during the first three quarters of 2022 from the year-earlier period and its earnings per share rose nearly threefold.
This has been a year of significant declines for shares of giant tech-oriented companies, especially those that had traded at lofty price-to-earnings valuations — that group includes Amazon and Tesla. In fact, these companies have given up all their pandemic era gains int he stock market.
But with Tesla’s results so outstanding through the first three quarters of 2022, it raises the question: How much of the drop in the electric car makers share price was tied to Musk’s actions as CEO of Twitter, which he acquired on Oct. 27 after a monthslong saga? And how much of a relief rally, if any, might there be for Tesla if Musk, as expected, steps down as Twitter CEO?
How about some bottom-feeding?
Here’s the same list of 10 stocks in the S&P 500 that have seen the largest declines in market cap this year, with a summary of analysts’ ratings, consensus price targets and declines in their forward price-to-earnings ratios:
Oh yeah? Then why, when Kotaku called several brick-and-mortar stores just a few days before Christmas this year were we told inventory for both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles was either very limited or completely gone?
The truth of the matter is, while it has become somewhat easier to get your hands on new-gen consoles, doing so still requires diligence and patience—unless you want the smaller, cuter Series S, or can wait for shipping. Otherwise, much like last year, if you were hoping to walk in and out of a store with a brand-spanking-new console in hand, you’re likely out of luck.
Inventory In Brick-And-Mortar Stores Is Unreliable
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You might be tempted to call up your local physical retailer like Best Buy or GameStop with the goal of buying a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X in the store. That’s certainly a possibility, though it depends on the console you’re going for.
A GameStop associate at a Manhattan, New York location told Kotaku over the phone that Sony’s system is “rarely” in stock and when it is on the store shelves, it’s gone within the week. The Xbox Series X is “a little more common,” the associate said, but the same inventory issue arises: When it is available, it’s sold out in just a few days’ time. This situation is repeated at other physical stores, including Best Buy and Walmart, with store associates at both retailers telling Kotaku in brief phone interviews that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are “occasionally” in stock but quickly sell out.
Surprisingly, things are a little different at Target. An employee at a Manhattan store said that the PlayStation 5 was actually sitting on the shelves “right now,” but folks looking to buy one couldn’t just walk in, take one to the counter, and check out. Instead, you have to do an in-store pick-up through the company’s website and, if inventory was available, then you could walk in with money and walk out with a PlayStation 5. In an eye-popping twist, the Xbox Series X was immediately available. The employee said, if I really wanted to, I could go buy Microsoft’s console this instant. They were quick to point out, though, that all system purchases—especially on the PlayStation 5—were limited to one per person due to “security concerns.” Yikes.
Online Retailers Are A Bit Better, But Not By Much
If brick-and-mortar stores are unreliable in terms of physical inventory, you may have a better chance at buying a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X online and shipping it to your home. All the major retailers typically have both consoles in stock and if they aren’t available by themselves, you can usually get it bundled with a game or subscription. There are some exceptions here, of course. GameStop, for example, is completely sold out of individualPlayStation 5s and Xbox Series Xs online right now. As is Best Buy on the PlayStation 5, though you can order the Xbox Series X if you have an account.
It’s always finicky ordering something from Walmart, as the company tends to partner with third-party sellers to complete transactions. But, as I’m checking the company’s website right now, PlayStation 5s and Xbox Series Xs are mostly available to purchase online—though the prices for these consoles seem to vary wildly. Target is similarly strange, withbothsystems either being “discontinued for shipping” or relegated to in-store pick-up only—if they are even available at all, of course. One quick note here, though: You could also order the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X directly from Sony and Microsoft’s official websites, and they appear to be in stock. Shipping here seems to be comparable to other major retailers as well, with orders placed now arriving just a few days after Christmas. Not bad.
Hey, You Could Always Just Get An Xbox Series S
It’s just so cute, even when zoomed in.Image: Microsoft
You may have noticed I skipped one whole console: the Xbox Series S. That’s because, as I wrote earlier, Microsoft’s cheaper, smaller system is almost always available. Several associates across the brick-and-mortar stores told Kotaku over the phone that they had “plenty” of Xbox Series S’s sitting on their shelves at the moment. And while I was browsing around multiple online retailers, including Microsoft’s own website, the slimmer sister to the behemoth shoebox Xbox Series X was ready to be ordered.
Sure, it’s not the monster powerhouse that is the Xbox Series X. It can’t output native “true 4K” and only has four teraflops of processing power when compared to the bigger sister’s 12. And yeah, you do only get 512 GB of internal storage instead of 1 TB. But what the system lacks in power is made up by its impressive form factor and accessible price point. If you’re willing to make those minor trade-offs, then the Xbox Series S is an excellent way to get into this current generation of console gaming.
Another year is in the books, y’all. We made it through. The entertainment and technology industries are still getting battered by both the ongoing pandemic and semiconductor shortages, but it does appear that things are smoothing over a little. Maybe this time next year, the forecast of getting a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X will be significantly better. At the very least, we don’t have to worry much about bots anymore.
CEO of Alphabet and Google Sundar Pichai during press conference at the Chancellery in Warsaw, Poland on March 29, 2022.
Mateusz Wlodarczyk | Nurphoto | Getty Images
More Google employees will be at risk for low performance ratings and fewer are expected to reach high marks under a new performance review system that starts next year, according to internal communications obtained by CNBC.
In a recent Google all-hands meeting and in a separate presentation last week, executives presented more details of its new performance review process. Under the new system, Google estimates 6% of full-time employees will fall into a low-ranking category that puts them at higher risk for corrective action, versus 2% before. Simultaneously, it will be harder to achieve high marks: Google projects 22% percent of employees will be rated with in one of the two highest categories, versus 27% before.
As an example, in order to make the new, highest rated category, “Transformative Impact,” an employee must have “achieved the near-impossible” and contributed “more than we thought possible.”
Earlier this year, Google announced the new process for performance reviews, known as Google Reviews and Development, or GRAD.
But CNBC recently reported that employees have complained about procedural and technical issues with GRAD close to the year-end deadlines, making them anxious they won’t be accurately rated. The anxiety is compounded by a wave of layoffs in the tech industry. While Google has so far avoided the widespread job cuts that have hit other tech companies like Meta, employees have grown anxious if they could be next.
In a December all-hands meeting on the topic, employees expressed frustration with executives, who have long touted transparency but are not providing direct answers to questions about headcount. Some employees believe new performance review system might be a way for the company to reduce headcount.
Headcount has been a subject of employee concern throughout the latter part of 2022. CEO Sundar Pichai found himself on the defensive in September, as he was forced to explain the company’s changing position after years of supercharged growth. Executives said at the time that there would be small cuts, and they didn’t rule out layoffs.
And in November, a number of employees in an all-hands meeting asked for clarification on executives’ plans around headcount, and even asked if executives mismanaged headcount when Google grew its workforce by 24% year-over-year in Q3 2022.
As of Q3, the company employed 186,779 full-time employees. It also employs a similar amount of contractors.
Recent documents about the GRAD also say the company will be looking at bonuses, pay and equity and expects to “spend more per capita on compensation overall.” It also states the company still plans on paying within the top 5% to 10% of market rates.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At the company’s most recent all-hands meeting on Dec. 8, many of the top-rated questions described stress around year-end performance reviews, according to audio of the meeting obtained by CNBC. The questions also suggested some employees don’t trust the company’s leadership is being transparent in how it handles headcount.
“Why did Google push support check-in quotas to front line managers days before the deadline?,” one employee asked, in a question read aloud by Pichai. “I’ve been through a lot in Google in 5+ years but this is a new low.”
“It seems like a lot of last-minute support check-ins were forced through part of Cloud in order to meet a quota, causing a lot of distress and anger,” another employee asked. “With only two weeks to correct course, how is this helpful feedback? How do we prevent this from happening in the future?”
“The support check-in process is confusing, increasingly becoming a cause of stress and anxiety in Googlers, especially given the current economic situation and rumors around layoffs,” said another top-rated employee question.
Earlier this month, CNBC reported employees began receiving “support check-ins” often associated with lower performance ratings in the final days leading up to year-end deadlines. They also said executives changed parts of the process in the final days.
“I know it’s been bumpy,” Google’s chief people officer Fiona Cicconi, eventually said, briefly acknowledging the issues with GRAD in a recent all-hands meeting.
“It’s not ideal to have support check-ins occur so late in the review cycle and we know that people need time to absorb the feedback and take action on it,” admitted Cicconi, adding that “Googlers should have plenty of time to course-correct.”
Several employees also asked executives whether they had quotas for placing people in lower performance categories in order to reduce headcount in 2023. Even though executives said they don’t have quotas, it didn’t seem to convince employees.
One question asked executives if Google was becoming “a stack-ranking company like Amazon,” referring to the process of using quotas to place employees in certain performance buckets.
“Uncertainties around GRAD processes have been putting a lot of pressure on lower level managers to pass down information” about performance reviews and sometimes force “conflicting items,” another highly-rated question stated.
Another read: “Layoffs across the industry has been a topic impacting Googlers, raising stress, anxiety and burnout,” another read. There’s been no official comms on this, which raises even more concern around this. When will the company address this topic?”
But executives largely avoided answering the questions directly. CEO Sundar Pichai kept saying he “doesn’t know what the future holds.”
“What we’ve been trying hard to do is we are trying to prioritize where we can so we are set up to better weather the storm, regardless of what’s ahead,” Pichai said. “We really don’t know what the future holds so unfortunately I cannot make forward looking commitments but everything we’ve been planning on as a company for the past six to seven months has been do all the hard work to try and work our way through this as best as possible so, that’s all I can say.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Competitive analysis is an analysis of who your potential competitors are, what marketing activities they do and what results their campaigns get. It is a crucial part of the groundwork done by every business hoping to stand out and sell well.
When doing detailed social media competitor analysis, people usually start with the number of followers, content assessment and the level of engagement. After this, they should go deeper into the social listening stats.
Competitors’ online visibility and brand recognition
Real-user feedback on products and services
Customer insights
Influencers and mass media
This is a simplified version of a multi-layer process. Knowing your competition lets you perfect your unique value proposition, develop best-selling products, improve your marketing strategy and identify new market segments when done right.
When done via social listening, competitor analysis is not only doable but also worth doing, even if you’re going for it on top of your daily tasks.
Let’s walk through competitor analysis with the help of a social media competitive analysis tool, one step at a time.
While this might seem self-evident, picking the right competitors to benchmark yourself against is a task of its own. If you’re thinking big and want to conduct comprehensive market research, you need every name of the competitive brand on the list. Big and small, well-established and new to your industry.
For more customizable competitive analysis, you’ll need direct competitors only, preferably a company list of comparable size. As soon as you are ready with the lineup, jump to a tool. We need to set up mentions in a monitoring tool to start tracking. You’ll need to put in your brand name as well as your competitor brand names; you can use Awario for it or try other similar tools.
When you set up your alerts, give the tool some time, and it’ll pick up recent mentions as well as some historical data — this way you’ll be able to do an initial analysis. The more information you have, the more thorough your competitor analysis will be.
Once the tool has collected data, you can visit the dashboard and look at the analytics.
Mentions and reach
The mentions and reach metrics will show you how much weight each of your competitors’ accounts has on social media platforms. The buzz a name generates corresponds to brand recognition and overall visibility.
In social listening terms, measuring share of voice — the number of times a brand is mentioned on the web and in social media posts vs. the number of times competitor brands are mentioned — is the closest to measuring market share.
Countries and languages
The countries and languages sections will give you an idea of the geographical distribution of mentions. Depending on the markets you operate in, you can check specific locations to see if any market segments are overlooked and underserved by business competitors. You can see how the competition spreads and analyze what that means.
Age and gender
These sections show who mentions your brand most and reveal the age of people that post messages on the web about your company. It helps you to meet your target audience.
Sources
Next is sources —the distribution of the buzz among social networks and the web. This is an important metric that shows where the mentions come from, platform by platform. More often than not, there are unexpected insights into how well content competitors create, how their advertising is performing across social networks, and how much buzz is coming from the web and news.
The mentionsfeed is the storage of all the mentions collected by the tool.
Here, you can access raw data and filter it in the way that serves you best. Say you noticed a spike in mentions of your competitor, and you know that most of them appeared on Twitter. Therefore, you want to do Twitter analytics and pull the influencers who have talked about the brand in the last month. Go ahead and apply the filters.
Meet the influencers
Influencers are the biggest drivers of brand visibility. When applied wisely in social media management, influencer marketing is an effective and often free tool used to generate engagement and build that genuine brand-to-customer connection other forms of marketing may fail at.
Exploring influencers working with your competitors is made easy with competitive analysis tools. First, you can filter mentions by reach to find the most influential people who’ve talked about competitor brands. This way, you discover significant and minor influencers as you go through the mentions sorted by Reach.
It’s a shortcut to the insights social media competitor analysis tools uncovered. For a marketer, reports offer an overview of all the metrics discussed in this guide. With them, you can measure competitive performance on social media in detail.
Compare brands and get back-to-back performance reviews by:
Share of voice
Counties and languages
Sentiment
Topic Cloud
Top mentions
Age and gender
Influencers
Sources
Step 5: Sit back and feel proud of the work well done!
Good job! We’ve come a long 5-step way, having reviewed primary social listening stats and analytics.
You can try various solutions for analyzing your competitors. The metrics I mentioned are available in most of them. Some social media competitive analysis tools provide integrations with other marketing apps like scheduling posts or template-creating ones.
Please use this guide as a roadmap for future social media competitive analysis. Remember: the longer you track mentions, the more insightful and comprehensive your analysis gets.
LOS ANGELES — States are racing against a deadline to challenge the map federal officials will use to divvy up the nation’s largest-ever investment in high-speed internet.
At stake is a share of the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, part of the infrastructure measure President Joe Biden signed into law last year.
States have until Jan. 13 to challenge a broadband speed map the Federal Communications Commission released last month that, for the first time, illustrates the haves and have nots of internet access down to specific street addresses.
Critics have long suspected that the number of people with internet connections has been overstated by the government, in part because agencies creating the maps have deferred to telecommunications companies to say where service is provided.
Extending service to remote areas with few customers can be expensive for internet providers, but using the surge of new federal funds to fill the gaps depends heavily on knowing where they are.
West Virginia officials have already submitted challenges for 138,000 underserved homes, businesses and other locations in the state that they say are missing, and they’re preparing at least 40,000 more.
“We’re going to find out,” said U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat. “There is no excuse that West Virginia — every nook and cranny, every person — if they’ve got electricity in their house, by God they can get internet in their house, too.”
According to the first draft of this year’s FCC map, 2% of residential addresses in the U.S. have no broadband access at all and 11% are considered underserved. But those figures are likely to rise after the state challenges.
Previous FCC maps depicted broadband availability at the census block level. That meant that if an internet service provider reported that it offered broadband to one home within a census block, the whole census block would be considered served.
But Congress in 2020 tasked the FCC with creating a more precise broadband map. It hired a company called CostQuest, which tapped tax assessment and land use records, as well as census and geospatial data, to create the underlying layer of the map showing every address where broadband can be installed. Then, internet service providers reported what internet speeds they actually offer at each address.
To counter expected discrepancies, the public can challenge the map — an option that wasn’t available with the FCC’s census block-level maps.
“I like to refer to (the new FCC map) as census block-penetrating radar ,” said Jim Stritzinger, the director of South Carolina’s broadband office, which reported 33,000 state addresses missing from the map.
Mississippi’s state broadband director, Sally Doty, said her office found a “tremendous amount” of addresses missing in high-growth areas of the state, including DeSoto and Madison counties and along the Gulf Coast. The state launched a website at the end of November where residents can run speed tests and fill out a survey about their internet service.
“If we have low speeds for an area that is reported as covered, it will allow us to investigate that further and determine the appropriate action,” Doty said, adding that she hopes to get 100,000 unique responses through the website before the end of the year.
Maine’s state broadband office sent engineers to some 2,500 addresses across populated areas where it predicted broadband technology was likely to be misreported. Over the course of two weeks, the engineers identified approximately 1,000 discrepancies between the information on the FCC map and what actually exists in the state, Meghan Grabill, a data analyst working on the project, said. The state is combining its results from the field analysis with data from internet providers, the postal service and emergency dispatchers to identify other discrepancies.
While some states are pouring millions of dollars into the challenge process, others say they lack the resources to fully participate.
Kansas’ state broadband office recently hired two new staff members, boosting the total number to just four. Rather than collect data in bulk, the state has focused its efforts on webinars and public outreach to train residents how to challenge the map themselves.
“We’re walking them step by step through it,” said Jade Piros de Carvalho, Kansas’ broadband director.
Challenges to the map can include assertions that locations are missing or that the internet service depicted on the map isn’t actually available. The challenges can be done in bulk, by state or local governments, or at an individual level, where residents confirm the information for just their address.
The mapping system West Virginia is using to fact check the FCC map was created to provide city-style addresses for large rural areas of the state in order to help emergency services workers respond to 911 calls and other emergencies.
“These maps have been a challenge, and that’s putting it nicely, for years,” said Kelly Workman, director of West Virginia’s Office of Broadband, said of the FCC’s maps. “Everyone in West Virginia has known for a long time that these maps are not serving our state well.”
The Jan. 13 deadline was set so that the FCC can resolve challenges before the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announces states’ allotments in June 2023.
The states will in turn funnel the grant money to several entities, including internet service providers, local or tribal governments and electric co-ops, to expand networks where people don’t have good service. Entities that take this money will have to offer a low-cost service option. Government regulators will approve the price of that service.
Each state will receive a minimum of $100 million and final allocations will be based upon several factors, including an analysis of unserved locations as shown on the FCC map.
Unserved locations are those without reliable service of at least 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload.
Officials in some states, including Texas and Vermont, have pressed for the deadline to be extended, but the FCC has given no indication it will move back the Jan. 13 date.
While acknowledging that the new FCC map is a marked improvement over past versions, Piros de Carvalho, Kansas’ broadband director, questioned whether the timeline of the challenge process will leave certain states behind.
“What makes it really unfortunate is we’re trying to shore up disparities in service, but are we inadvertently exacerbating these inequities by disadvantaging the most rural or economically distressed states that have lower capacities in their offices?” Piros de Carvalho said. “I think it might be an unintentional consequence of these timelines and requirements.”
———
Associated Press reporter Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed to this story. Harjai is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba was one of the 100 over companies that had faced the risk of delisting in the U.S. in 2024 if it did not hand over the audits of their financial statements.
Investors could regain the confidence to put their money in Chinese tech stocks as these companies avoid delisting from U.S. stock exchanges and the Chinese government pledges policy support, according to one investment manager.
Investors often grapple with a lack of transparency into Chinese stocks.
“It will allow institutional investors to come back. Professional investors were very scared about this delisting risk which was why they have stayed on the sidelines,” Brendan Ahern, chief investment officer at U.S.-based investment manager KraneShares, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Wednesday.
As of Sept. 30, there were 262 Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges with a total market capitalization of $775 billion, according to the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
“With that risk going away based on the PCAOB announcement, you are going to see investment dollars flow back into these names,” said Ahern.
“These internet giants are really where investors want to invest when it comes to China,” said Ahern.
But he also caveated that it is still “early days, weeks, months to see that capital return back into the space.”
Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro
But he also noted policy support will help to boost growth for these companies. Last week, China pledged to raise domestic consumption next year, as the country moves toward boosting growth after exiting its zero-Covid policy.
“2023 is a year where we are going to have a lot of government policy support such as raising domestic consumption,” said Ahern. “About 25% of all retail sales goes through the companies.”
“The Chinese government actually needs these internet companies, which explains why we have seen a backing off on some of the regulatory scrutiny we experienced in 2021,” said Ahern.
The collapse of FTX, once a $32 billion crypto exchange, has shattered investor confidence in cryptocurrencies. Market players are trying to gauge the extent of damage it has caused — and how it will reshape the industry in the years to come.
Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s former boss who stepped down on Nov. 11, was arrested in the Bahamas last week. He has been charged by the U.S. government with wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.
“It’s hugely disappointing for investors, or more so devastating for investors,” said Louise Abbott, a partner at law firm Keystone Law who specializing in crypto-asset recovery and fraud.
It’s clear the FTX drama could radically reshape crypto in the years to come. Here are three big ways the industry could change.
For one, the disaster will looks certain to stir regulators into action.
Crypto as an industry is still largely unregulated, meaning investors don’t have the same protections they would have placing their funds with a licensed bank or broker.
That may be about to change. Governments in the U.S., European Union and the U.K. are taking steps to clean up the market.
If there’s no regulation, the investors are left without that protection that they need.
Louise Abbott
Partner, Keystone Law
The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets is the most comprehensive regulatory framework to date. It aims to reduce the risks for consumers buying crypto, making exchanges liable if they lose investors’ assets.
But MICA is not due to start until 12 months from now. Keystone Law’s Abbott said it’s important that regulators act quickly.
“People need to see that there’s steps being taken to regulate it. And I think If we are able to offer some regulation, we will build confidence,” she said. “If there’s no regulation, the investors are left without that protection that they need.”
Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro
The saga has set back adoption of crypto assets by “one or two years,” according to Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO of crypto market maker Wintermute.
“Everything that failed this year, if you look at Celsius, Three Arrows, FTX now — all those guys were taking the worst of both worlds because they were not completely decentralized, and they were not properly centralized either,” he said.
For Kevin de Patoul, CEO of crypto market maker Wintermute, the biggest lesson from FTX’s bankruptcy is that “you cannot have complete centralization and lack of oversight.”
“We are evolving to a world where you are going to have both centralization and decentralization,” he said. “When you do have that centralization, you need to have proper oversight and a proper balance of power.”
I don’t think all the dominoes have fallen out from the contagion. The impact that this will have is that a lot of projects actually are not going to have the funds…
Marieke Flament
CEO, Near Foundation
“The challenge for the whole space when you think about contagion is that FTX and Alameda were extremely active investors in this space,” Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain.com, said in a CNBC-moderated talk at a crypto conference in London.
Near Foundation, which is behind a blockchain network called Near, was among the firms that took investment from FTX. Marieke Flament, Near’s CEO, said the firm had limited exposure to FTX — though the collapse was still “a surprise and a shock.”
“I don’t think all the dominoes have fallen out from the contagion,” Flament said. “The impact that this will have is that a lot of projects actually are not going to have the funds, and therefore the resources, for them to continue and develop.”
Fears have risen over the financial health of other major crypto exchanges after FTX’s failure. Since early 2020, about 900,000 bitcoins have flowed out of exchanges, according to data from CryptoQuant.
Binance, the world’s largest exchange, is facing questions about the reserves it holds to backstop customer funds. The company saw billions of dollars in outflows in the past week.
Currently, there is no reason to suspect Binance faces any risk of bankruptcy. But exchanges like Binance and Coinbase face a bleak market backdrop ahead amid falling trading volumes and account balances.
Experts believe they’ll continue to play a role — though their survival will be determined by how seriously they take risk management, governance and regulation.
“There will be exchanges that are doing things the right way and that will survive,” said Abbott.
As for tokens — bitcoin, being the longest-living digital currency, may be better positioned than its smaller rivals.
“My bet would be that bitcoin and DeFi [decentralized finance] are decoupled from the rest of crypto and actually start to have a life of its own,” Gaevoy from Wintermute told CNBC.
Despite the depressed state of crypto markets, and the toll it’s taken on investors, the digital asset industry is likely to pull through.
Proponents of “Web3,” a hypothetical blockchain-based internet, expect 2022’s crypto winter to pave the way for more innovative uses of blockchain, rather than the speculative uses crypto is associated with today.
“What we’re seeing a lot is companies having digital innovation arms or metaverse innovation arms,” Flament said. “They understand that the technology is here. It’s not going to go away.”
NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, could alter users’ relationships with properties in games and events, for example. These are digital assets that track ownership of unique virtual items on the blockchain.
“Digital assets will be an increasing part of our lives, whether that is a collectible, a ticket, value, identity,” Ian Rogers, chief experience officer at crypto wallet firm Ledger, told CNBC. “Identity could be membership … [people] using NFTs they own to get access to a particular event or something like that.”
But for many, there’s still a learning curve to overcome. “It’s hard creating wallets and storing keys and going through different platforms,” Cordel Robbin-Coker, CEO of mobile games firm Carry1st, told CNBC at the Slush startup conference in Helsinki, Finland.
Robbin-Coker compared Web3 today with the internet in the early 90s. “It was clunky. You had dial-up, it took four minutes to get on, the original web browsers were not very intuitive,” he said.
“It’s really the early adopters that really engage at that stage. But over time, companies build smoother interfaces. And they cut steps out of it.”
Twitter on Sunday announced it will ban accounts that post links or usernames for certain “prohibited” third-party social media platforms.
“We will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter,” Elon Musk’s company said in a tweet thread posted as much of the world was watching the World Cup final. “Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.”
In a blog post, Twitter said cross-promoted posts will still be allowed, but that “Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended.” It did not specify how it will decide what an account’s main purpose is, but provided examples of banned content, such as: “follow me @username on Instagram,” “username@mastodon.social,” and “check out my profile on Facebook – facebook.com/username.”
The new policy triggered an immediate flurry of criticism by many Twitter users.
The move comes after a number of prominent tech journalists were suspended, then reinstated, last week for reporting on Twitter’s ban on an account that tracked Elon Musk’s private jet.
While Musk, who competed his $44 billion takeover of the company in October, has called himself a free-speech absolutist, many of his policies as Twitter’s owner and CEO have been to silence his critics.
Elon Musk Twitter account displayed on a phone screen and Twitter logo displayed on a screen in the background are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on November 22, 2022.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Twitter said it will no longer allow users to promote other social media accounts on its platform, according to a thread of tweets Sunday.
“We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms,” the company said. “However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.”
Many users have been promoting their other social media accounts on Twitter following Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company in October. Twitter said the company will still allow cross-posting from different platforms, but sharing content like “follow me @username on Instagram,” or “username@mastodon.social” are now policy violations.
If users violate this policy, they may be required to delete their offending tweets. Accounts may also be temporarily locked or suspended, Twitter said.
Twitter has carried out a number of controversial suspensions this week as a result of recent changes to its policy on “doxxing,” which the company defines as the “sharing someone’s private information online without their permission.”
The updated policy prohibits users from sharing live location information, home addresses, contact information or physical location information. The changes resulted in a number of account suspensions, including many journalists who have been covering Musk and his companies. The flight-tracking accounts created by 20-year-old Jack Sweeney, many of which tracked Musk’s travel movements, were also suspended.
Musk has been vocal about his efforts to protect free speech on Twitter. In early November, Musk claimed he was such a staunch advocate for free speech that he would not ban the plane tracking account, which he called a “direct personal safety risk.” As of Sunday, Sweeney’s accounts remained suspended.
Many of the suspended journalists’ accounts were reinstated Saturday. Twitter suspended the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz late Saturday night, but her account was reinstated as of Sunday afternoon.
Amazon packages move on a conveyer belt at a fulfillment center in England.
Nathan Stirk | Getty Images
Hundreds of Amazon workers will go on strike, Britain’s GMB union said Friday, marking a first for the company’s employees in the U.K.
Employees at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse in central England voted Friday to go on strike, with the walkout likely to happen in January 2023. Roughly 1,000 people work at the Coventry facility.
The workers are unhappy with a pay increase of 3%, or 50 pence per hour, Amazon introduced in the summer, which they say fails to match the rising cost of living. They want Amazon to pay a minimum of £15 an hour.
Inflation has soared due to increased energy costs and supply chain disruptions, with consumer prices currently at a 41-year high. The Bank of England hiked interest rates on Thursday in an effort to slow inflation.
Though Amazon workers in the U.K. have previously stopped working in August and on Black Friday in November in protest over the summer pay increase, these were spontaneous, unsanctioned withdrawals of labor.
This will be the first legally mandated strike to take place in the U.K.
Amanda Gearing, senior organizer at GMB, said the Coventry workers “should be applauded for their grit and determination.”
“The fact that they are being forced to go on strike to win a decent rate of pay from one of the world’s most valuable companies should be a badge of shame for Amazon,” Gearing said in a statement.
“Amazon can afford to do better. It’s not too late to avoid strike action; get round the table with GMB to improve the pay and conditions of workers.”
Around 98% of the workers who turned out to vote opted to go on strike on a turnout of more than 63%.
In an emailed statement to CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson said: “We appreciate the great work our teams do throughout the year and we’re proud to offer competitive pay which starts at a minimum of between £10.50 and £11.45 per hour, depending on location.”
“This represents a 29 per cent increase in the minimum hourly wage paid to Amazon employees since 2018. Employees are also offered comprehensive benefits that are worth thousands more — including private medical insurance, life assurance, subsidised meals and an employee discount, to name a few.”
“On top of this, we’re pleased to have announced that full-time, part-time and seasonal frontline employees will receive an additional one-time special payment of up to £500 as an extra thank you,” the spokesperson added.
Amazon has long been criticized for labor shortcomings, with the company often accused of poor working conditions in its warehouses and delivery operations. In April, staff at the company’s Staten Island warehouse in New York became the first group in the U.S. to vote in favor of joining a union.
The walkout will add to the wave of industrial action happening across the country. In recent weeks, upcoming strike actions have been announced by nurses, rail workers, postal workers, ambulance workers, airport staff, Border Force agents, highway workers, Eurostar staff, civil servants, bus drivers, firefighters, charity workers, meteorologists and offshore workers.
The Senate has unanimously approved legislation that would ban the use of TikTok on government phones and devices as part of the push to combat security concerns related to the Chinese-owned social media company. What do you think?
“God help the staffer who has to explain to Biden what he’s signing.”
Samantha Graham, Textiles Coordinator
“Good. I prefer our congress people’s data to be stolen by an American company.”
James Gomez, Medical Librarian
“Now the only hurdle is teaching senile legislators how to delete an app from their phone.”
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao on Wednesday said that the situation has “stabilized” at his cryptocurrency exchange, in a bid to assuage investors’ fears after the company was forced to halt withdrawals of a stablecoin.
Zhao said that around $1.14 billion of net withdrawals took place on Tuesday, but tweeted that this was “not the highest withdrawals we processed, not even top [five].” The CEO said deposits are returning to Binance.
His comments come after Binance temporarily halted withdrawals of the USDC stablecoin on Tuesday, while it carried out a “token swap.” Zhao said Binance had seen an increase in USDC withdrawals. The pausing of withdrawals was due to the fact that some currency swaps had to be routed through an unspecified bank in New York that wasn’t open, according to Zhao. Binance resumed withdrawals after about eight hours downtime.
Blockchain analytics firm Nansen said on Tuesday that there have been more than $3 billion of net withdrawals from Binance over the last seven days. But the Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik said the situation is different to FTX, which saw withdrawals to the “tune of multi-billion dollars.”
“I would say that you’re definitely seeing larger than normal withdrawals from Binance. And so it is definitely worth keeping an eye on but as far as I can tell at this point in time, this is very different from the FTX situation,” Svanevik told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Wednesday.
Svanevik noted that Binance has around $60 billion worth of assets on its exchange, of which the withdrawals represent a small proportion.
Binance’s Zhao has tried to project a sense of strength internally at Binance too.
“While we expect the next several months to be bumpy, we will get past this challenging period – and we’ll be stronger for having been through it,” Zhao wrote in an internal memo, seen by Bloomberg.
Investors have called for more transparency from Binance’s business. Last month, the company issued a proof of reserve in which it claims to have a reserve ratio of 101%. That means it has enough assets to cover customer deposits.
But critics have said that the proof of reserves has not gone far enough to give assurances of Binance’s collateral. Mazars, the auditing firm Binance used for its proof of reserves, said in its five-page November report that the company does “not express an opinion or an assurance conclusion.”
Zhao said during a talk on Twitter on Wednesday that it holds user asset reserves one-to-one. He also said that the company is going to release another batch of proof of reserves in the “next couple [of] weeks.”
A Binance spokesperson was not immediately available for comment, when contacted about the contents of this memo and the criticisms of the company’s proof of reserves.
The U.S. has brought in sweeping measures to cut China off from high-tech semiconductors, hobbling the chip industry in the world’s second-largest economy. China has hit back against the measures, beginning an official complaints procedure against the U.S. through the World Trade Organization.
William_potter | Istock | Getty Images
China initiated a dispute against the U.S. at the World Trade Organization over Washington’s sweeping semiconductor export curbs that look to cut the world’s second-largest economy off from high-tech components.
In October, the U.S. introduced rules that restricted chips made using American tools from being exported to China as well as any semiconductors designed for artificial intelligence applications. The move has effectively kneecapped China’s semiconductor industry.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce confirmed the trade dispute in a statement Monday and accused the U.S. of abusing export control measures and obstructing normal international trade in chips and other products.
It said that the WTO dispute is a way to address China’s concerns through legal means.
Washington has maintained that its export restrictions are in the interest of national security.
China’s dispute on chips comes days after the WTO ruled that tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump steel and aluminum imports violated global trade rules. China was among the countries that brought action against the U.S.
Trade disputes via the WTO can take years to resolve. China has taken the first step known as a request for consultations. The WTO also has provisions in its rules that allow countries to impose restrictions in the interest of national security. This could make it difficult for China to win this particular dispute.
“If this is the response to the export controls, it suggests that China has limited options,” Pranay Kotasthane, chairperson of the high tech geopolitics program at the Takshashila Institution, tweeted on Tuesday.
“Given that WTO has exceptions for national security concerns, which can be defined broadly, it’s unlikely to result in any policy changes.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Trade Representative was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
But spokesperson Adam Hodge told Reuters on Monday that the U.S. has received the request for consultations from China in regards to the semiconductor export restrictions.
“As we have already communicated to the PRC (People’s Republic of China), these targeted actions relate to national security, and the WTO is not the appropriate forum to discuss issues related to national security,” Hodge said.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addresses students during a town hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, November 12, 2018.
Anushree Fadnavis | Reuters
Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey didn’t mention Elon Musk by name. But in a blog post on Tuesday, he made it clear that the company he once led still had significant problems then and now.
Dorsey said he was adding his voice to discussion around the “Twitter Files,” which Musk started releasing last week to support his claims that prior management was biased against conservatives in its handling of content moderation.
At the beginning of his post, Dorsey said he’s come to believe in three principles. Social media must withstand “corporate and government control,” the author is the only person who can remove content they produce, and “moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.”
“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles,” Dorsey wrote.
Musk, who closed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October, has rolled back many of the old moderation policies. He’s also welcomed back former President Donald Trump, who was permanently kicked off the site under Dorsey’s leadership after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Dorsey didn’t level any specific criticism at Musk. He said he personally abandoned his efforts to push the company in the right direction after activist firm Elliott Management got involved with the company over two years ago.
“This is my fault alone,” Dorsey wrote. “I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020.”
Regarding Twitter’s decision to suspend Trump, Dorsey said he believes “there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time.”
Still, he said that “mistakes were made” and Twitter would be in a better position today if the company “focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us.”
Dorsey said that in general social messaging platforms shouldn’t take down content or suspend accounts, because “doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity.”
He promoted the idea of a “free and open protocol for social media” that isn’t owned by any one person or company as the only way to adhere to his stated principles.
“The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content,” Dorsey wrote. “Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not.”
Dorsey cited Bluesky, a nonprofit organized by Twitter, as well as Mastodon and Matrix as emerging projects that could potentially live up to his view of what constitutes a free and open social media protocol. He said he would be offering grants to promising projects, starting with $1 million to Signal, an encrypted messaging app.
Pedestrians walk in front of the Twitter Inc. headquarters in San Francisco, California.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In an effort to cut costs following Elon Musk’s chaotic $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media company has stopped paying rent, according to a report from The New York Times.
Twitter has not paid rent for its global offices or San Francisco headquarters in weeks, the report said, as Musk’s team has been trying to renegotiate the terms of the company’s lease. As a result, Twitter has received complaints from real estate firms like Shorenstein, which owns Twitter’s San Francisco buildings.
Representatives for Shorenstein and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department.
Musk said Twitter suffered a “massive drop in revenue” in the days following his $44 billion acquisition of the company. Without providing any figures or evidence, he claimed in a tweet that the revenue drop was the result of activist groups putting pressure on advertisers.
Though many companies did pause advertising on Twitter, some major advertising giants like Apple and Amazon have resumed spending on the platform.
Musk has also revamped Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, with the hope of generating fresh revenue for the company. The service launched Monday after Musk pulled and delayed the launch in November.
Twitter Blue costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for iOS users who purchase it through Apple‘s App Store. The $3 iOS price difference reflects Musk’s recent gripes about Apple’s 30% cut of all digital sales made through apps.
Subscribers with a verified phone number will receive a blue checkmark once their account is reviewed and approved, Twitter said in a tweet Saturday. Blue users will also be able to edit tweets and get early access to new features. The company says Blue subscribers will “soon” see fewer ads, have the option to post longer videos and will appear at the top of replies and mentions.
Musk has been a vocal critic of Twitter’s previous system, which granted verification to notable users like politicians, executives, members of the press and organizations to signal their legitimacy. He said the new verification system will be “the great leveler” and give “power to the people.“
Following a sharp and sustained rise in interest rates, U.S. stocks have taken a broad beating this year.
But 2023 may bring very different circumstances.
Below are lists of analysts’ favorite stocks among the benchmark S&P 500 SPX,
the S&P 400 Mid Cap Index MID
and the S&P Small Cap 600 Index SML
that are expected to rise the most over the next year. Those lists are followed by a summary of opinions of all 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA.
Stocks rallied on Dec. 13 when the November CPI report showed a much slower inflation pace than economists had expected. Investors were also anticipating the Federal Open Market Committee’s next monetary policy announcement on Dec. 14. The consensus among economists polled by FactSet is for the Federal Reserve to raise the federal funds rate by 0.50% to a target range of 4.50% to 4.75%.
A 0.50% increase would be a slowdown from the four previous increases of 0.75%. The rate began 2022 in a range of zero to 0.25%, where it had sat since March 2020.
A pivot for the Fed Reserve and the possibility that the federal funds rate will reach its “terminal” rate (the highest for this cycle) in the near term could set the stage for a broad rally for stocks in 2023.
Wall Street’s large-cap favorites
Among the S&P 500, 92 stocks are rated “buy” or the equivalent by at least 75% of analysts working for brokerage firms. That number itself is interesting — at the end of 2021, 93 of the S&P 500 had this distinction. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has declined 16% in 2022, with all sectors down except for energy, which has risen 53%, and the utilities sector, which his risen 1% (both excluding dividends).
Here are the 20 stocks in the S&P 500 with at least 75% “buy” or equivalent ratings that analysts expect to rise the most over the next year, based on consensus price targets:
Most of the companies on the S&P 500 list expected to soar in 2023 have seen large declines in 2022. But the company at the top of the list, EQT Corp. EQT,
is an exception. The stock has risen 69% in 2022 and is expected to add another 62% over the next 12 months. Analysts expect the company’s earnings per share to double during 2023 (in part from its expected acquisition of THQ), after nearly a four-fold EPS increase in 2022.
Shares of Amazon.com Inc. AMZN
are expected to soar 50% over the next year, following a decline of 46% so far in 2022. If the shares were to rise 50% from here to the price target of $136.02, they would still be 18% below their closing price of 166.72 at the end of 2021.
You can see the earnings estimates and more for any stock in this article by clicking on its ticker.
Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information available for free on the MarketWatch quote page.
Mid-cap stocks expected to rise the most
The lists of favored stocks are limited to those covered by at least five analysts polled by FactSet.
Among components of the S&P 400 Mid Cap Index, there are 84 stocks with at least 75% “buy” ratings. Here at the 20 expected to rise the most over the next year:
Among companies in the S&P Small Cap 600 Index, 91 are rated “buy” or the equivalent by at least 75% of analysts. Here are the 20 with the highest 12-month upside potential indicated by consensus price targets:
Valve’s classic Portal was recently re-released on Steam with some very fancy new visuals, including ray-tracing and DLSS support. That was great news for Portal fans, but it’s also great news for fans of all kinds of old PC games.
Before we go any further, I’ll explain the tech we’re talking about. RTX is the name given to a set of technologies used by graphics card company Nvidia that uses “ray tracing and AI technologies” to, very simply, make PC games look incredible. Here’s a trailer for Portal With RTX, the re-release of the game made with this tech, showing the improvements made to a game that most of us remember looking very 2007:
Portal with RTX | World Premiere
Now, the thing with RTX is that while in this case (and with Quake and Minecraft) it had to be put into the game by developers, Nvidia are also releasing a version of the tech with modders in mind. It’s called RTX Remix:
With RTX Remix, the game runs in the background and we replace the old rendering APIs and systems with RTX Remix’s 64-bit Vulkan renderer. This enables the addition of ray-tracing to classic games and it all updates in real-time as lights and objects move. Light can be cast from behind the player, or from another room, and in Portal with RTX, light even travels through portals. Glass refracts light, surfaces reflect detail based on their glossiness, reflections can be cast into the scene from behind the player, objects can self-reflect, and indirect light from off-screen illuminates and affects what you see.
Compared to Quake II RTX and Minecraft with RTX, the path-traced ray tracing introduced by RTX Remix is even more advanced, bouncing light four times instead of once, improving quality, immersion, and the simulation of real-world light. Additionally, we’ve also introduced several new ray tracing techniques that further improve quality while also being more performant.
Nvidia says that RTX Remix is “a modding platform” that will allow “modders of all ability levels to bring ray tracing and NVIDIA technologies to classic games”. Given it’s not out until 2023 I was expecting we were still months away from seeing what benefits it could bring to older games, but nope!
Modders like LordVulcan have found you can add RTX to some classic titles, right now, just by…dropping some files from Portal with RTX into another game’s folder on your hard drive and enabling some developer stuff in the console. That’s it. And it’s working on games like SWAT 4 and the original Max Payne.
Here’s some footage of SWAT 4taken by EiermannTelevision, which was released in 2005 and most definitely did not look like this at the time:
SWAT 4 RTX Remix
And here’s Half-Life 1, along with a little explainer on how it was done:
How To Get RTX in Half-Life: Source ~ RTX 4090 [RTX Remix] [4K]
None of those examples are perfect, but it’s incredible they work this well given how quick their implementation was. This is going to be so good when the actual RTX Remix is released in 2023, but until then it’s going to be cool seeing what other classic titles this slapdash workaround is compatible with!
Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com, speaking at a 2018 Bloomberg event in Hong Kong, China.
Paul Yeung | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Kris Marszalek wants everyone to know that his company, Crypto.com, is safe and in good hands. His TV appearances and tweets make that clear.
It’s an understandable approach. The crypto markets have been in freefall for much of the year, with high-profile names spiraling into bankruptcy. When FTX failed last month just after founder Sam Bankman-Fried said the crypto exchange’s assets were fine, trust across the industry evaporated.
Marszalek, who has operated out of Asia for over a decade, subsequently assured clients that their funds belong to them and are readily available, in contrast to FTX, which used client money for all sorts of risky and allegedly fraudulent activities, according to court filings and legal experts.
Bankman-Fried has denied knowing about any fraud. Regardless, FTX clients are now out billions of dollars with bankruptcy proceedings underway.
Crypto.com, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, may well be in fine health. After the FTX collapse, the company published its unaudited, partial proof of reserves. The release revealed that nearly 20% of customer funds were in a meme token called shiba inu, an amount eclipsed only by its bitcoin allocation. That percentage has dropped since the initial release to about 15%, according to Nansen Analytics.
Marszalek said in a Nov. 14 livestream on YouTube that the wallet addresses were representative of customer holdings.
While no evidence has emerged of wrongdoing at Crypto.com, Marszalek’s business history is replete with red flags. Following the collapse of a prior company in 2009, a judge called Marszalek’s testimony unreliable. His business activities before 2016 — the year he founded what would become Crypto.com — involved a multimillion-dollar settlement over claims of defective products, corporate bankruptcy and an e-commerce company that failed shortly after a blowout marketing campaign left sellers unable to access their money.
Court records, public filings and offshore database leaks reveal a businessman who moved from industry to industry, rebooting quickly when a venture would fail. He started in manufacturing, producing data storage products for white label sale, then moved into e-commerce, and finally into crypto.
CNBC reached out to Crypto.com with information on Marszalek’s past and asked for an interview. The company declined to make Marszalek available and sent a statement indicating that there was “never a finding of wrongdoing under Kris’s leadership” at his prior ventures.
After CNBC’s requests, Marszalek published a 16-tweet thread, beginning by telling his followers: “More FUD targeting Crypto.com is coming, this time about a business failure I had very early in my career. I have nothing to hide, and am proud of my battle scars, so here’s the unfiltered story.” FUD is short for fear, uncertainty and doubt and is a popular phrase among crypto executives.
In the tweets, Marszalek described his past personal bankruptcy and the abrupt closure of his e-commerce business as learning experiences, and added that “startups are hard,” and “you will fail over and over again.”
Marszalek founded a manufacturing firm called Starline in 2004, according to his LinkedIn profile. Based in Hong Kong, with a plant in mainland China, Starline built hardware products like solid state drives, hard drives, and USB flash drives. Marzsalek’s LinkedIn page says he grew the business into a 400-person company with $81 million in sales in three years.
There was much more to the story.
Marszalek owned 50% of the company, sharing ownership and control with another Hong-Kong based individual, who partnered with Marszalek in multiple ventures.
In 2009, Marzsalek’s company settled with a client over a faulty shipment of flash drives. The $5 million settlement consisted of a $1 million upfront payment and a $4 million credit note to the client, Dexxon. The negotiations over the settlement began at some point after 2007.
CNBC was unable to locate Marszalek’s business partner.
Court documents don’t show whether Starline made good on either the $1 million “lump sum settlement fee” or the $4 million credit note. Starline was forced into bankruptcy proceedings by the end of 2009, court records from 2013 show.
Over the course of 2008 and 2009, Marszalek and his partner were transferred nearly $3 million in payments from Starline, according to the documents.
Over $1 million was paid out to Marszalek personally in what the court said were “impugned payments.” His partner took home nearly $1.9 million in similar payments.
“It appears that there was a concerted effort to strip the cash from Starline,” Judge Anthony Chan later wrote in a court filing.
Some $300,000 was paid by Starline to a British Virgin Islands holding company called Tekram, the document says. That money went through Marszalek, and Tekram eventually returned it to Starline.
By 2009, Starline had collapsed. Marszalek’s representatives told CNBC in a statement that Starline went under because customers failed to pay back credit lines that the company had extended them during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Starline borrowed that money from Standard Chartered Bank of Hong Kong (SCB).
“The bank then turned to Starline and the co-founders to repay the lines of credit and filed for liquidation of the company,” the statement said.
Starline owed $2.2 million to SCB.
Marszalek said on Twitter that he had personally guaranteed the loans from the bank to Starline. As a result, when the bank forced Starline into liquidation, Marszalek and his partner were forced into bankruptcy as well.
The court found that the $300,000 transfer to Tekram was “in truth a payment” to Marszalek.
Marszalek said the money in the Tekram transfer was repayment of a debt Starline owed to Tekram. The judge described that claim as “inherently incredible.”
“There is no explanation why the repayment had to be channelled through him or why the money was later returned to the debtor,” the judge said.
Bankruptcy didn’t sever the ties between Marszalek and his partner or keep them out of business for long. At the same time Starline was shutting down, the pair set up an offshore holding company called Middle Kingdom Capital.
Middle Kingdom was established in the Cayman Islands, a notorious hub for tax shelters. The connection between Middle Kingdom and Marszalek and his partner, who each held half of the firm, was exposed in the 2017 Paradise Papers leak. The Paradise Papers, along with the Panama Papers, contained documents about a web of offshore holdings in tax havens. They were published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Middle Kingdom was the owner of Buy Together, which in turn owned BeeCrazy, an e-commerce venture that Marszalek had started pursuing. Similar to Groupon, retailers could use BeeCrazy to sell their products at steep discounts. BeeCrazy would process payments, take a commission on goods sold, and distribute funds to the retailers.
Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro
Sellers and buyers flocked to the site, drawn in by considerable discounts on everything from spa passes to USB power banks. Buy Together drew attention from an Australian conglomerate called iBuy, which was on the verge of an IPO and pursued an acquisition of BeeCrazy as part of a plan to build out an Asian e-commerce empire.
Court filings and Australian disclosures show that to seal the deal, Marszalek and his partner had to remain employed by iBuy for three years and clear their individual bankruptcies in Hong Kong court. The partner’s uncle came forward in front of the court to help his nephew and Marszalek clear their names and debts, filings show.
While the judge called the uncle’s involvement “suspicious,” he allowed him to repay the debt. As a result, both Marszalek and his partner’s bankruptcies were annulled. A few months later, in October 2013, BeeCrazy was purchased by iBuy for $21 million in cash and stock, according to S&P Capital IQ.
A month and a half after buying BeeCrazy, iBuy went public. Marszalek was required to remain until 2016.
The company struggled after its IPO as competition picked up from bigger players like Alibaba. Marszalek was eventually promoted to CEO of iBuy in August 2014, according to filings with Australian regulators.
Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, China.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Marszalek renamed iBuy as Ensogo in an effort to retool the company. Ensogo continued to suffer, running up a loss in 2015 equal to over $50 million.
By the following year, Ensogo had already reportedly laid off half its staff. In June 2016, Ensogo closed down operations. The same day, Marszalek resigned.
After the sudden shuttering of Ensogo, sellers on the site told the South China Morning Press that they never received proceeds from items they’d already delivered as part of a final blowout sale.
“[Many] sellers had already sold their goods but had yet to receive any money from the platform at that time, their money thus vanished altogether with the online shopping platform,” according to translated testimony from a representative for a group of sellers before Hong Kong’s Legislative Council.
One seller told Hong Kong’s The Standard that she lost more than $25,000 in the process.
“It seems to us that they wanted to make huge business from us one last time before they closed down,” the seller told the publication.
Marszalek’s representative acknowledged to CNBC that “the shutdown angered many customers and consumers” and said that was “one of the reasons Kris was opposed to the decision.”
Marszalek moved quickly on to his next thing. The same month he resigned from Ensogo, Foris Limited was incorporated, marking Marszalek’s entry into the crypto market.
Foris’ first foray into crypto was with Monaco, an early exchange.
With a leadership team composed entirely of former Ensogo employees, Monaco told prospective investors they could expect three million customers and $169 million in revenue within five years.
The exterior of Crypto.com Arena on January 26, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.
Rich Fury | Getty Images
By 2021, the company had smashed its own goals, crossing the 10 million user mark. Revenue for the year topped $1.2 billion, according to the Financial Times. That’s when crypto was soaring, with bitcoin climbing from about $7,300 at the beginning of 2020 to a peak of over $68,000 in November of 2021.
The company inked a deal with LeBron James for a Super Bowl ad, aired a prior commercial with Matt Damon and spent a reported $700 million to put its name on the arena that’s home to the Los Angeles Lakers. It’s also a sponsor of the World Cup in Qatar.
The market’s plunge in 2022 has been disastrous for all the major players and goes well beyond the FTX collapse and the numerous hedge funds and lenders that have liquidated. Coinbase’s stock price is down84%, and the company laid off 18% of its staff. Kraken recently cut 30% of its workforce.
Crypto.com has laid off hundreds of employees in recent months, according to multiple reports. Questions percolated about the company in November after revelations that the prior month Crypto.com had sent more than 80% of its ether holdings, or about $400 million worth of the cryptocurrency, to Gate.io, another crypto exchange. The company only admitted the mistake after the transaction was exposed thanks to public blockchain data. Crypto.com said the funds were recovered.
Marszalek went on CNBC on Nov. 15, following the FTX failure, to try and reassure customers and the public that the company has plenty of money, that it doesn’t use leverage and that withdrawal demands had normalized after spiking.
Still, the market cap for Cronos, Crypto.com’s native token, has shrunk from over $3 billion on Nov. 8 to a little over $1.6 billion today, reflecting a loss of confidence among a key group of investors. During the crypto mania at this time last year, Cronos was worth over $22 billion.
Cronos has stabilized of late, hovering around six cents for the last three weeks. Bitcoin prices have been flat for about four weeks.
Marszalek’s narrative is that he’s learned from past mistakes and that “early failures made me who I am today,” he wrote in his tweet thread.
He’s asking customers to believe him.
“I’m proud of my scar tissue and the way I persevered in the face of adversity,” he tweeted. “Failure taught me humility, how to not overextend, and how to plan for the worst.”
Correction: Crypto.com’s Super Bowl ad featured LeBron James, not Matt Damon. The commercial with Damon came out in late 2021.
Clarification: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect where in Asia Marszalek has operated.
5G remains in a nascent stage in Southeast Asia, despite acceleration efforts.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The Tech Mahindra-Axiata Group Berhad partnership may help accelerate 5G in Southeast Asia but the short-term outlook for the industry is “bleak,” Fitch Solutions said in a country risk and industry research report.
Last week, Indian IT and consulting giant Tech Mahindra and Malaysian telco conglomerate Axiata Group Berhad inked an agreement to jointly develop and commercialize 5G enterprise solutions in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Cambodia.
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“We believe that this is a promising partnership as it combines the capabilities of Tech Mahindra’s 5G enterprise solutions with Axiata’s expertise in mobile connectivity, network infrastructure and product services,” said Fitch Solutions.
While 5G has many benefits, the report said it is still in a nascent stage for many Southeast Asian countries. 5G is the fifth generation of cellular networks and is up to 100 times faster than 4G.
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Fitch Solutions noted there are economic headwinds and other hurdles in two markets that Axiata and Tech Mahindra plan to collaborate in.
In Bangladesh, for example, Fitch Solutions does not expect significant 5G adoption over the next 18-24 months due to expensive mobile phones and next-generation services.
Sri Lanka, on the other hand, is battling a recession, fuel shortages and extended power outages.
“This has led to a contraction of the economy, and we expect the wider technology market to face significant pressures that will effectively cripple the sector. These factors will weigh on the returns on investment of 5G deployment and may discourage meaningful further funding,” the report said.
But there is rising demand for 5G services, which could help increase operational efficiency for companies, such as supporting better crop yield predictions or climate control in agriculture.
Last week, Axiata Group Berhad, Telenor Asia and Malaysian telco provider Digi completed a merger of telco operations to form Celcom Digi.
The merger would likely help Axiata better take on rival Telekom Malaysia in the enterprise connectivity market, Fitch Solutions said.
Celcom Digi will invest up to 250 million Malaysian ringgit ($56.8 million) over five years to build an innovation center in Kuala Lumpur to support the adoption of internet of things, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and 5G in the country.
