Google’s struggles offer the cloud gaming market a roadmap for figuring out the future.
To date, cloud gaming’s biggest struggle has been balancing a viable business model with an experience that can come close in quality to traditional gaming on local hardware.
The arc of the tech industry has always been to imagine and then glimpse the future before it fully arrives, and then watch the public struggles of those who try to will these paradigm shifts into existence. From virtual and augmented reality to the current obsession with the metaverse, it seems nearly impossible to chart how something grows from science fiction to fully fledged product.
Much like its futuristic counterparts, cloud gaming feels like one of those inevitable pillars of the future, when internet connections are faster and more ubiquitous and streaming a video game becomes as seamless as listening to Spotify. But open questions remain: How will the gaming and tech industries trying to crack the cloud arrive there? And which companies and platforms might survive a potential future of consolidation, shutdowns and pivots?
To date, cloud gaming’s biggest struggle has been balancing a viable business model with an experience that can come close in quality to traditional gaming on local hardware. There have been countless services sent to the cloud gaming graveyard either because the products did not have a sensible enough pricing scheme or strategy to distribute games, or, more often, because the technology itself delivered a gaming experience so deficient that consumers abandoned it.
“I agree that everybody today is looking for the right model. I don’t think the right model has been clearly identified yet,” said Ivan Lebeau, president and founder of enterprise cloud gaming service provider Gamestream.
The current poster child of the industry, Google Stadia, has struggled over the past few years to succeed, while competitors began to outpace it in pricing, availability of software and in the technical sophistication of the streaming tech. But Google’s struggles are providing the still-nascent cloud gaming market with a roadmap for moving forward, if only as a cautionary tale on what’s necessary to achieve that tricky balance between cost, accessibility and performance that could one day truly make gaming hardware obsolete.
“You have big companies providing cloud solutions, services like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Tencent and Alibaba,” Lebeau said. “But some of them made some mistakes because they didn’t know anything about video games, and they thought it was easy to target gamers, but it’s not. Gamers are very demanding in terms of quality.”
One of Google’s earliest and most visible stumbles was in marketing Stadia as a wholesale console and PC gaming replacement. When the service launched in fall of 2019, it was lacking key features promised during its unveiling earlier that year and required buying a bundle that included a controller, Chromecast Ultra streaming dongle and a Pro subscription to access it in early access.
Google didn’t launch a free tier until the following April, and it wouldn’t be until over a year after launch that it arrived on the iPhone. This staggered and sloppy launch gave the impression that Google’s vision wasn’t a clear one, and that a future dominated by the cloud was perhaps many years, if not decades, away.
“Gamers are just very used to owning the hardware. Not just PC games, console games as well. Mobile gamers even like to have recent smartphones and the latest smartphones,” said Newzoo analyst Guilherme Fernandes. “The sense of ownership of the hardware is very important for some gamers. It would be too sudden to just come in like Stadia did and say, ‘This is the future. Get ready and forget about everything you’ve done for the past 20 to 30 years or more of owning hardware.’”
But perhaps the biggest concern with Google’s approach to cloud gaming was its business model. The company asked players to buy games at full price, and those games lived only on Stadia. The Stadia Pro subscription service has been growing slowly, and only now three years later does it contain more than 50 games you can play for free with a $10 monthly subscription. But the biggest titles on the platform — like CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 — are not part of that subscription service.
Google spun up an internal studio division to develop exclusives that would theoretically have lived on Stadia Pro, but the company shocked the industry when it closed down those studios early last year after failing to deliver a single new game.
That means if Stadia, which is no longer invested in building its own games, ever does go dark, players might lose access to their entire libraries. That very situation happened last month when T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom announced it would shut down its cloud service, Magenta Gaming, on Feb. 26. As it stands, there’s no way for subscribers to transfer their games to other platforms or even their save files.
“The two services, Magenta Gaming and Stadia, have a similar business model, and unless Google goes the extra mile to try and save its relationship with the user base, I would assume if the service closes people would lose access to the games,” Fernandes said. “When we compare that to what Xbox does, which is subscriptions, and [Nvidia’s] GeForce Now that links the user’s account to their Steam and Epic Games account and so on, even if the service closes they will retain access to the games. It provides a lot more confidence for the user.”
Microsoft added cloud gaming as a complimentary benefit to its more expensive Game Pass subscription tier, while also making most of its Game Pass library free to stream, first on mobile phones and tablets and now on desktop computers and older Xbox hardware.
Microsoft plans to release streaming sticks and smart TV integration, so all you’d need is a television and a controller. For Game Pass users, this model ensures they don’t risk buying software they won’t be able to access elsewhere, because it all runs on Xbox devices and through Microsoft’s infrastructure and because it’s all bundled in one neat subscription. Game Pass now has 25 million subscribers, Microsoft announced last month.
Nvidia, which has been slowly building a cloud service since way back in 2015, took a unique approach in that it targeted not casual players or those who didn’t own hardware, but gamers who already had a library of titles on Valve’s Steam marketplace. Nvidia’s service charges a subscription fee to access its platform without any restrictions, and it includes games purchased elsewhere, so long as the developer agrees to let Nvidia stream the game from a remote server. (Nvidia ran into some licensing trouble early on in this regard, but it quickly moved to an opt-in model that let developers decide if they wanted to integrate with GeForce Now.)
The company most recently launched a RTX 3080 tier for $200 per year that has best-in-class performance, outpacing offerings from Amazon, Google and Microsoft and setting a high bar for cloud gaming latency and visual fidelity.
The GeForce Now model is in many ways the ideal cloud gaming model. It targets consumers who want to take their existing library with them on the go, while also appealing to the smaller but fast-growing audience of players who simply don’t want to buy a gaming PC but who still want to play Steam games on their Mac laptop, smartphone or dated Windows machine. Microsoft’s approach, while still early, could turn Game Pass into a major cloud gaming force once a steady stream of new games from its subsidiaries starts flowing onto the platform and once Microsoft catches up to Nvidia’s server performance.
But Stadia now lags well behind both competitors in the games it offers, the attractiveness of its business model, in-game performance and the long-term viability of the platform. “I don’t think that anyone has any doubt the gaming experience can be good,” Fernandes said of cloud gaming as a whole. “The doubt is more in how fast are people willing to change their mindset and commit to this big transition. So far, people are still concerned.”
One potential direction for cloud gaming in the near term is a shift away from do-everything consumer models offered by large tech firms and toward enterprise offerings. These are taking shape as white-label services for big game publishers to launch their own cloud products and smaller, more niche services tailored for specific markets, often by partnering with internet service providers.
This is already the model favored by companies like Ubitus and Gamestream, which have been building their businesses by helping publishers create cloud gaming ports for platforms like Nintendo Switch and partnering with telecoms to offer cloud gaming on mobile in developing markets. These are parts of the world where console hardware and expensive gaming PCs are dwarfed by the number of people who rely solely on their smartphone for all their internet and entertainment needs.
“We’re not at all the competition with the [consumer] players. We’re targeting casual gamers. We don’t target hardcore gamers with these services,” Lebeau said of Gamestream’s offerings. “We are providing a service to the publishers as well, so the publishers can reach and provide a streaming service to their fans by providing a demo which has been set up for Gamestream.”
Gamestream recently partnered with Ubisoft to become a white-label service provider for the French publisher, so it may one day launch a cloud service under its own brand. The company also teamed up with French publisher Focus Entertainment to make developer Asobo Studio’s A Plague Tale: Innocence available as a streaming demo, so players could try it on PC without paying or downloading anything.
Even Google is now in the early phases of pivoting Stadia into an enterprise service offering.Illustration: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol
“We are following respectfully what Netflix is doing in those countries,” Lebeau said of Gamestream’s approach. “We’re looking at price and strategy and what’s successful.” Lebeau said his company has learned how to tailor services for various markets by partnering with telecoms in India and Indonesia, where mobile gaming dominates but not everyone has either the latest and greatest smartphone or a device with enough storage to download and play premium mobile games.
In that context, gamers are less interested in using the cloud to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a MacBook and more interested in, for instance, using a 3- or 4-year-old Android phone to play the latest Genshin Impact update. Lebeau said that by partnering with telecoms, they’re able to plant their equipment within the carriers’ infrastructure to reduce latency and improve performance, instead of renting space in faraway data centers or building their own. “We provide all the content, we provide the service, we don’t have to spend any money on marketing, hosting and we do a revenue share,” Lebeau said.
Even Google is now in the early phases of pivoting Stadia into an enterprise service offering. Insider reported earlier this month that the company has begun pitching a new product, Google Stream, as a white-label service for game developers like Capcom and Bungie and even non-gaming firms like Peloton. The consumer product, on the other hand, has been “deprioritized,” the report said.
«We announced our intentions of helping publishers and partners deliver games directly to gamers last year, and have been working toward that,” a Google spokesperson told Insider. «While we won’t be commenting on any rumors or speculation regarding other industry partners, we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022. With 200+ titles currently available, we expect to have another 100+ games added to the platform this year, and currently have 50 games available to claim in Stadia Pro.» Google points to AT&T’s browser-based Batman: Arkham Knight port and Peloton’s new streamable Lanebreak game as examples of its white-label efforts showing promise.
This white-label approach makes sense as the cloud gaming market starts to mature and a lot of the growth outside Game Pass and GeForce Now concentrates on the enterprise side. Newzoo reported that cloud gaming revenues in 2021 reached $1.6 billion, with more than 23 million players either subscribing to or accessing some form of cloud service last year.
“I think we’re still in the experimentation phase,” Newzoo’s Fernandes said. “The competition is becoming a lot more intense in the cloud gaming space. So we can expect some consolidation both from maybe some of the smaller services shutting down, like with Magenta, also maybe some acquisitions.” Last year, Unity bought enterprise streaming platform Parsec, and Intel bought RemoteMyApp.
Fernandes said there’s plenty of evidence suggesting cloud gaming will continue to grow this year and for many years to come, despite the headlines around Google’s efforts and the lack of mainstream adoption from core console and PC gamers over the past few years. “Stadia is an isolated case. There were some issues with how the service rolled out, the marketing and so on,” he said. “But if we look at how the other services are performing and what we expect to see in the future, just because Stadia isn’t doing well, that doesn’t mean cloud gaming doesn’t have a bright future ahead.”
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At 42, Democratic tech leader Lindsey Schuh Cortés is a three-time CEO, but don’t expect a partisan mission statement on her new data startup’s website.
Lindsey Schuh Cortés wants a new challenge: “I love to build; I am a builder.”
Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of «Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,» a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.
Lindsey Schuh Cortés, Matt Taverna and Bryan Whitaker spent the last decade dragging Democratic voter data and analytics strategies into the modern age. Now they’re leaving politics.
The trio, hailing from data organizations that have been integral to how Democrats use voter data, has launched Statara Solutions, a commercial data and analytics startup serving nonpartisan clients like nonprofits, trade associations, universities and corporate clients. These three won’t be the first campaign junkies to take their experiences in the electoral trenches to greener industry pastures.
“I need a little break from politics,” said Lindsey Schuh Cortés, Statara’s CEO.
At age 42, the Statara leadership role makes Schuh Cortés a three-time CEO. Schuh Cortés, who has a direct yet warm demeanor that comes across even on Zoom, also led progressive analytics shop BlueLabs as CEO and more recently served as CEO at the Democratic Data Exchange. The exchange launched late during the pandemic-dampened 2020 campaign cycle to share voter contact information among Democratic state parties and like-minded advocacy groups, an approach that had already been taken by Republicans.
Leaving the young voter data operation “was definitely not an easy decision,” Schuh Cortés said, adding that the organization has yet to announce her replacement. Her departure comes at a crucial moment when Democratic control of Congress hangs in the balance. Not only do midterm congressional elections loom, but supporters might actually be able to take full advantage of Democratic Data Exchange information to help door-knock and get out the vote through actual in-person interaction this time around as pandemic restrictions ease. Schuh Cortés said the exchange now holds more than 2 billion voter records.
But Schuh Cortés wants a new challenge: “I love to build; I am a builder.”
Her co-founders, Matt Taverna, 40, and Bryan Whitaker, 42, are also veterans of progressive data tech efforts. The pair has spent the better part of the past decade providing data and services solely to Democrats and left-leaning groups at TargetSmart, the party’s go-to voter file management company. Whitaker also worked in data roles alongside Schuh Cortés during her days steering political and strategic partnerships at the Service Employees International Union.
Both Whitaker and Schuh Cortés also served in top tech roles at the Democratic National Committee: Whitaker as CTO from 2011 to 2013 and Schuh Cortés as deputy CTO and interim CTO from 2017 to 2019.
But don’t expect a partisan mission statement on Statara’s website, said Whitaker, who serves as a principal.
“There’s no red or blue or even purple,” Whitaker said, explaining that the company wants to focus on working with organizations that need help with things like donor outreach. Still, he said, “there would be guardrails” on who the company works with. “We’re confident that our reputations will speak for themselves,” he said.
A team of seven, Statara will provide analytics services and help clients run advertising and marketing campaigns using custom data and models built from both commercial data and, when regulations and licensing allows, voter information. It’s also offering packaged, Statara-branded data for ad targeting in a cloud marketplace.
Statara is owned by TARA Group, a holding company that also owns TargetSmart. The companies have separate leadership, structures, processes, staff and separate data from one another and other TARA Group siblings.
Schuh Cortés and Whitaker got a taste of what it would be like to work together under immense pressure while working in offices that shared a wall inside SEIU headquarters in Washington, D.C. In early 2008 when word came down that the union would endorse then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama just a few days before the Wisconsin primary, “Literally everybody in the SEIU political department started scrambling,” Schuh Cortés said.
She focused on travel logistics for transporting hundreds of SEIU members to Wisconsin, while Whitaker handled data to determine which doors they should knock to help get out the vote.
“Doing that over many, many, many states gives you the sense that you can go into the trenches with any single one of those people and be able to come out on the other side: one, successful, but two, still smiling. And that’s Bryan,” she said. “It’s one of the war stories that Bryan and I have together.”
That “campaign trenches” trope was real enough that Schuh Cortés and Whitaker trusted in one another to launch Statara entirely through virtual interactions. “We all have little kids, so we’ve all been a little anxious to get together because none of our [younger] kids can be vaccinated yet,” Schuh Cortés said.
Keeping track of how and where to contact people has always been an elementary need for unions, advocacy groups and political campaigns that want to find likely supporters or hit up previous donors. Now, amid upheavals in digital tracking and targeting technologies, the ability to identify people within today’s data and privacy constraints has become increasingly important to political and commercial organizations.
Taverna and Whitaker said Statara’s ability to identify an individual and match historical information about that person over time is core to the company’s overall capabilities.
“Bryan, Lindsey and I learned from politics that there’s nothing better than knowing a real, hard fact about someone and putting that in a single record or a single ID,” said Taverna.
The company hired former TargetSmart data technologists who have been building Statara’s proprietary relational database and identity resolution system, which incorporates tech from Microsoft Azure for identity management and Alteryx for data transformation and analysis. Statara’s data architecture and science team includes former TargetSmart CIO Jeremy Kane and its former analytics director, Collin Pace.
The company, which launched in stealth mode last November, is betting that accurate data and analytics models used to determine how best to engage voters will work to turn out college alumni to donate and help fundraise.
“You’re asking 10 of your friends to register to vote. That’s not unlike finding alumni and getting them to activate their alumni network from when they were in college to participate in a class fundraiser,” said Schuh Cortés.
Still, it’s unclear whether people feel as strongly about getting their friends on board to support their alma maters as they might to help a candidate win a tight election.
Meanwhile, Statara also faces headwinds from nonpartisan data operations such as political and commercial data consultancy L2 as well as smaller nonprofit fundraising agencies and bigger data services such as Acxiom, Experian and Merkle.
L2, which offers voter file data to left- and right-leaning organizations as well as commercial data, also works with universities, assisting in fundraising using its consumer data services.
“Bryan, Lindsey and I learned from politics that there’s nothing better than knowing a real, hard fact about someone and putting that in a single record or a single ID,” Matt Taverna said.Photo: Statara
“We produce this thing to inform the voter file; why don’t we make it an independent product?” said Paul Westcott, L2’s executive vice president of Sales and Marketing, explaining why L2 works with customers outside politics. Westcott said he has seen a “big appetite” among nonpolitical customers for user-friendly data tools and quick turnarounds, things larger data services firms “tend not to have but [are] critical for political [clients].”
Jeffrey Kaplan, CEO of Popsycle Digital, worked with Whitaker and Taverna while they were at TargetSmart and he was in the Consumer Insights and Targeting division at Experian. Statara’s strong data, speed and platform integrations might help it compete, he said.
“These consumer data giants continue to concede the marketplace and the high-touch, in-depth analytical knowledge needed to understand the ever-evolving digital advertising marketplace,” said Kaplan. Popsycle Digital, an agency that executes digital campaigns for nonprofit and education customers, has partnered with Statara during its ramp-up.
The decision to establish a nonpartisan data consultancy comes with political baggage — and so does its ownership model.
TargetSmart, which has been the key keeper and cleanser of the Democratic voter file for years, has made a point of declaring its dedication to working with Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups, while excluding Republicans. Indeed, political campaigns and advocacy organizations involved in election politicking typically are reluctant to work with consultancies that also work with the other side.
But TARA Group and its other subsidiaries don’t have the same allegiances, a fact spotlighted in a damning October 2021 Mother Jones article detailing a TARA Group subsidiary’s work in support of Republicans.
As co-founders of TARA Group’s newest subsidiary, Whitaker and Taverna declined to comment for this story regarding the Mother Jones expose or its impact on TargetSmart. However, they said it had no effect on their decisions to leave the company to start Statara, a project that had been “proactively” underway two months before the article came out.
TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier had only good wishes and thank-yous for Taverna and Whitaker in an email sent to Protocol. TargetSmart, he said, will stick to its mission to “help win campaigns, build organizations, and elect Democrats.”
Schuh Cortés flashes a deliberate smirk in a black-and-white profile photo. It leaves a complicated impression. She appears friendly and confident, but she might be up to something.
That moxie has helped her climb to high places, fast.
“I can do this job better than anyone else you will interview, and I will work harder than anyone else,” she told Forbes, recalling what she said to the union’s political director Patrick Gaspard while interviewing to direct its political action committee, a weighty role involving the management of millions of dollars in candidate contributions. “He looked at me and said, ‘OK, you’ve got the job,’” Schuh Cortés added, “That job totally changed the track of my career. It was a moment where I had to say what was in my gut and be unafraid to say it out loud.”
Bryan Whitaker is a veteran of progressive data tech efforts.Photo: Statara
After helping launch and run BlueLabs, she was ready to get another startup off the ground. This time, the stakes were high. Spun out of progressive tech incubator Higher Ground Labs, Democratic Data Exchange was the Democrats’ answer to the GOP’s own Data Trust data exchange. It’s a system for sharing up-to-date voter contact information and tracking interactions with voters through door-knocks, phone calls, emails and text messages — data that complements the information TargetSmart manages for use in other campaign functions, like advertising.
Taverna said Schuh Cortés’ ability to speak externally to the needs of clients while making sure internal teams are on the same page is rare. “That’s a very hard thing to do. I have tried and failed,” Taverna said. “She’s always been really great at being able to keep both perspectives in mind.”
Taverna, whom Schuh Cortés described as someone who has “done more to educate the democratic progressive ecosystem about political data” than anyone, said that like her, he’s ready to step away from politics. “My beard is getting whiter by the day,” said Taverna. “We have helped to elect a Democratic president. This pandemic has been quite a thing. The stars are aligned.”
But away from the pressure cooker, some people who leave politics have a tendency to get bored, said Grace Briscoe, senior vice president of Client Development at digital ad company Basis, who has worked closely with its political campaign clients for years. “You have to be a sort of adrenaline junkie to work in politics,” she said.
Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of «Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,» a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.
In a fast-moving world, keeping abreast of developments has never been more important.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance technology and culture journalist and author of «YouTubers: How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars.» His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian and Wired.
The world of cloud computing has become ever more complicated as the world relies increasingly on the underlying technology that powers our key apps, services and products. Data drives our world, and will continue to define our future. Edge computing, the proliferation of 5G and the rise of AI and big data all require cloud computing at a scale never seen before.
That has created a need and an opportunity for IT professionals to learn about new, advanced technologies. “Cloudification is driving critical demand for a broad range of cloud skills, including DevOps, Migration Execution, Data Planning, Cloud Security and CSP optimization,” said Rob Rollinger, Director of Intel® Cloud.U at Intel. Gaining a specialization in these areas offers the opportunity for experts to promote their work, build a career and gain new experiences that may lead to new job opportunities.
Intel Partner University, exclusively available to Intel Partner Alliance members, helps professionals succeed in positioning and selling Intel products and solutions through industry-leading curriculum with specialized training paths and personalized training recommendations. Courses educate experts on core competencies around Intel products and enable partners to maximize their revenue and profit potential by creating the right offerings featuring Intel-based products and services.
The university curriculum covers five key areas: data center and cloud, IoT, client, networking and storage and programmable solutions. Each area includes all the basics, plus a variety of sub-topics to learn from, at no cost to Intel Partner Alliance members.
Recently, Intel launched the Cloud Fundamentals curriculum on Intel Partner University. “Cloud Fundamentals is designed to deliver a solid foundation of knowledge around key cloud concepts, technologies and usage while helping users understand how to unlock the value of the Intel technology in the cloud,” said Rollinger.
The Cloud Professional series — set to launch in early 2022 — will provide partners with the ability to specialize further, either on the technical or business side. “The new Cloud Professional Series provides a deeper understanding of the cloud and the technology that drives it while also introducing role-based specialization through the Cloud Technical Professional and Cloud Business Professional competencies,” said Rollinger.
In all, Intel Partner University offers hundreds of courses for professionals, all tailored to specific needs of people in and around the industry. What’s more, every program has been tested on Intel’s own technical and sales teams to ensure not a single thing is overlooked.
Partners receive digital badges which can be used to promote their skills to customers, as well as help them feel more confident in their skills and knowledge. It’s all to assist partners in growing their business. By utilizing the skills learned at Intel Partner University, professionals can better support customers before, during and after a sale — with those on the technical side gaining a deeper understanding of the technologies they use day-in and day-out.
The flexibility and personalization of the Partner University platform is one of its greatest strengths. When a partner first logs on to Intel Partner University, they are asked several questions about day-to-day job function, goals and areas of interest. Based on that information, their homepage displays personalized content to help achieve those targets. Partners can also pick and choose content a la carte, filtering courses by format, market segment, sales skills or solution — or any combination of the above.
Many of the courses are available in 15 or more languages, so partners can learn in whatever language they speak and wherever they are in the world via mobile learning.
This hands-on, state-of-the-art training on Intel products is just one of the many benefits of being a member of the Intel Partner Alliance. Alongside the advanced training and competencies, Intel Partners have access to:
The Intel Partner Alliance is a fast track to deeper knowledge and engagement with Intel’s core suite of products — and through that membership, enrollment in Intel Partner University is a way to become more knowledgeable about the tools and services partners use every day. To access all the benefits of being an Intel Partner, and to catch up with the latest developments in the world of cloud computing, make sure to join Intel Partner Alliance today.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance technology and culture journalist and author of «YouTubers: How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars.» His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian and Wired.
The key to fast, cheap crypto transactions is «rolling up.» The question is how.
Will developers and users flock to the most advanced technology, or will they just go with what works when they need it?
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].
Ethereum, the second-most-valuable cryptocurrency blockchain after bitcoin, has been hailed for its programmable smart contracts and greater flexibility. But it faces challenges in scaling up: Transaction speeds are slow and costs high.
Layer 2 networks that sit on top of Ethereum are designed to address these challenges. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that the future of Ethereum will depend on Layer 2 networks for scaling, even after Ethereum moves to a faster, more environmentally friendly system known as proof of stake.
This intense competition to «win Ethereum» boils down to this question: Will developers and users flock to the most advanced technology, or will they just go with what works when they need it? Convenience often wins, unless the technology is so much better or some other incentive drives them to try something new.
Scaling Ethereum is still its biggest problem. The company that can solve this will be in the driver’s seat to power a range of services on Ethereum, including decentralized finance, NFTs, gaming and more. Because Ethereum is the largest smart-contract protocol and is popular with developers, whoever becomes the dominant Layer 2 on Ethereum could end up handling a sizable portion of crypto transactions. The debate over which option will prevail is as fierce as any in crypto.
Layer 2 networks are still relatively small compared to other Layer 1 blockchains — the primary ledger and protocol associated with a specific token, like bitcoin or litecoin. «That will change over time» as more users shift to Layer 2 applications, said Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital.
A key Layer 2 strategy is the rollup, or bundling of transactions off the main chain for faster processing. The two main approaches are optimistic rollups and zero knowledge, or ZK, rollups. Both approaches reduce congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, speed transactions and lower costs.
Optimistic rollups are live. Arbitrum is the largest player with $3.4 billion in total value locked, or deposited, in the network. Crypto entities using Arbitrum include decentralized exchanges SushiSwap and Uniswap and NFT project Treasure.
Optimistic rollups validate and execute transactions and send them to Ethereum, and only run a computation fraud proof if a transaction is challenged — thus the moniker «optimistic.» These transactions can be challenged after they’re sent back to the Ethereum chain for up to seven days.
ZK rollups, on the other hand, always run an advanced cryptographic proof called «zero knowledge» and then submit it back to Ethereum. ZK is designed to be foolproof since transactions are all verified and thus can’t be challenged. The newer technology is still just emerging in the wild.
But the technology is much better, and sure to improve, supporters say. «It’s really hard to do» zero-knowledge proofs, said Qureshi, whose firm invested in Matter Labs, a ZK rollup startup. “Only in the last year and a half have they come up with ways that were thought to be theoretically impossible.”
Optimistic supporters like Steven Goldfeder, CEO of Offchain Labs, which created Arbitrum, says ZK rollups are «orders of magnitude» more expensive than optimistic ones, because of the intensive calculations required. Some ZK systems that have launched are not including the costs of the proofs that they run off-chain for customers, which obscures their true costs, he said.
«We think optimistic systems are more practical and much cheaper to operate than ZK systems,» said Ed Felten, co-founder of Offchain Labs.
ZK supporters say optimistic rollups take too long to be fully completed, since they can be challenged up to seven days after they are executed. This means that someone seeking to get their ETH tokens out of a Layer 2 such as Arbitrum to the Ethereum network would have to wait seven days. That’s not viable in crypto, where people want fast access to capital, Qureshi said. One week is «worse than a wire transfer,» he said.
There are several services, however, that will pay users instantly, minus a small fee, and take on the risk of being challenged. And this type of challenge is rare and actually hasn’t happened yet, due to the financial penalties for posting a rollup that is wrong or making an unsuccessful challenge to a correct rollup, Felten said.
Even though there is a delay with withdrawing funds to Ethereum, these optimistic transactions actually have already been fully verified on Layer 2. The reason for the delay is Ethereum doesn’t see the transactions and has not validated those transactions yet.
Firms like Andreessen Horowitz are betting on ZK rollups as the future, and NFT-focused Immutable X uses StarkWare’s ZK rollup technology. But the best technology doesn’t necessarily win.
Even Arbitrum’s Goldfeder admits that ZK rollups are technologically impressive and doesn’t rule out supporting ZK rollups in the future.
But he says it’s unfair to compare optimistic rollups in their current state to ZK rollups in the future, since optimistic technology will improve in the future as well.
This isn’t the first time Ethereum has pushed for an off-chain scaling solution: Plasma was a previous effort that didn’t work out. But Buterin and others believe a new system based on rollups will work, even if it takes years to become mainstream.
Both technologies will coexist for a while, said Jake Brukhman, founder and CEO at CoinFund, which has made some Layer 2 investments. Over the longer term, ZK rollups have a technology advantage, he said. Meanwhile, he said, other Layer 1 blockchains could eventually be an even bigger threat in terms of speed, scalability and security.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].
Fertility startups Ava and Legacy have a unique value proposition for companies: Include us in your benefits offerings, and we’ll save you money and help you retain and attract talent.
Just as tech companies are offering apps like Headspace as part of a push towards mental health support, they’re also offering newfangled fertility-tracking kits as part of the company’s benefits package.
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol, where she writes about management, leadership and workplace issues in tech. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at [email protected].
The Great Resignation has forced employers to start getting creative with benefits in efforts to retain and attract the best talent. The latest frontier: fertility trackers and home sperm-testing kits.
Fertility benefits like IVF and egg-freezing have long been common in the tech industry, with companies like Facebook offering employees access to IVF assistance as part of their benefits packages since 2014. Just as tech companies are offering apps like Calm and Headspace as part of a push towards mental health support, they’re also offering newfangled fertility-tracking kits as part of the company’s benefits package.
Protocol spoke to the CEOs of two of these fertility assistance companies, Ava and Legacy, about why companies are considering these benefits. Ava offers a bracelet which uses sensory tech to detect the wearer’s fertile window in real time, while Legacy offers home sperm-testing and freezing kits.
Both tools have a similar value proposition for companies interested in expanding their fertility benefits. The big one: retention. According to a December 2021 report from Maven Clinic and Great Place to Work, companies that double down on benefits are seeing the results. Organizations that were perceived as offering ‘special and unique’ benefits were twice as likely to retain their working parents.
In the “war for talent,” adding more benefits is a no-brainer, according to Lea von Bidder, the CEO and co-founder of Ava. “You want your employees to be less stressed and less absent, which often happens with infertility,” she told Protocol.
Khaled Kteily, the founder and CEO of Legacy, agrees. “You’re literally helping your employees create life,” he said. “It’s a very profound kind of benefit to be able to offer, more so than offering free snacks in your cafeteria.” Both Ava and Legacy are partnered with Carrot, WINFertility and Maven, the fertility benefits providers that work with Slack, Peloton, Snap, Box, Masterclass and others.
Ava and Legacy are capitalizing on the competition for talent, and they’re not alone. Career platform The Muse will be adding fertility benefits as a filter option for its job search feature by the end of March 2022, according to a company spokesperson. CEO Kathryn Minshew says they added the feature in response to user survey feedback, as well as feedback from employer clients listing jobs on the site who want to differentiate their companies from the competition.
The other selling point is the cost savings benefit for the company. According to von Bidder, the average pregnancy in the U.S. conceived through fertility treatments costs around $70,000, and about one in eight couples have to go through treatments to get pregnant. By comparison, Ava costs anywhere from $299 to $399.
Photo: Legacy
Ava’s aim is to help couples conceive before they even have to get to the costly and invasive IVF stage. “We need to start asking ourselves, ‘Are there things we could do when you’re just trying to conceive naturally that could potentially prevent you going into further treatments or send you into those treatments faster if you need to go there?’” von Bidder said. According to her, the Ava bracelet is the first wearable technology that can detect the fertile window in real time without a urine sample, and 30% of people who have already been trying to conceive unsuccessfully get pregnant within a year after using Ava.
Kteily agrees on the cost savings benefit. Legacy is $195 upfront, with optional sperm freezing at between $100 to $150. Meanwhile, sperm collection at a clinic costs anywhere from $500 to $1000. Employers also receive a discount on the product when they purchase it for their employees, typically anywhere from 10 to 15%.
Ava is covered by three of the biggest fertility benefits providers: Carrot, WINFertility and Maven. This means that around 80% of employees who receive fertility benefits through their employer can get an Ava bracelet as a paid employee benefit. This business is significant compared to Ava’s direct consumer purchases, and von Bidder believes that it will be “even more relevant for us” in the future. Likewise, Legacy is the preferred at-home sperm-testing tool for most of the major fertility benefits providers, including Progeny, Carrot, Maven and Kindbody.
Both companies have spent a lot of their venture investments on R&D, since reproductive health is an under-examined issue, according to the two chief executives. Kteily and von Bidder agreed that fertility, while a misunderstood topic, is an important one.
“Sperm is, believe it or not, not a topic that the average person is super well versed in,” Kteily told Protocol. Studies have shown that sperm counts have gone down 50% to 60% between 1973 and 2011. As researchers continue to examine the causes of this decline, the leading theories ascribe it to chemicals in our environment: “It’s phthalates, it’s hormone disruptors, endocrine disruptors, it’s BPA,” he explained.
Legacy now tests more sperm than any fertility clinic in the country and freezes more of it than any sperm bank in the country, according to Kteily. “As I said at our last board meeting, we are drowning in sperm,” he said.
In Kteily’s opinion,“infertility is a much more common issue than we think, and we’ve only ever talked about it as a women’s issue.” He and von Bidder are aiming to change that conversation, with the help of corporate America.
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol, where she writes about management, leadership and workplace issues in tech. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at [email protected].
Crypto is just getting started, says Jeremy Allaire: “We have not crossed the chasm from the early adopter to the mainstream.”
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire is focused on convincing politicians and regulators that crypto — stablecoins in particular — is the future of finance.
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire is famous for perhaps the quirkiest crypto celebration ever: a rap performance to celebrate USDC’s circulation topping $30 billion.
The head of the company that issued the dollar-linked stablecoin has no regrets about the widely panned video. “Not at all,” Allaire told Protocol. “I grew up in inner city Philly. I grew up with hip-hop and rapping and beatboxing and it’s just sort of how I grew up. So I have no problem with that.”
Allaire is focused on a bigger problem: convincing politicians and regulators that crypto — stablecoins in particular — is the future of finance. When he’s not rapping, Allaire sometimes puts on a suit to explain to members of Congress the rapid rise of blockchain-based financial services and why that tech trend is unstoppable. He’s been doing it for nearly a decade.
“Conversations are a hell of a lot better now than they were two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, five years ago,” he said. Back then, “if I walked in the room and said, ‘I’m doing like a crypto bank,’ people would think I’m an alien and just be like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to get in trouble for having a meeting with you.’”
Circle is gearing up to go public in a SPAC merger with Concord Acquisition Group. Because it involves digital currency, the registration process “is a little bit longer than a widget manufacturer or whatever,” Allaire said. A day after Allaire spoke to Protocol, Circle said in an updated SEC filing that it was valued at $9 billion, double its valuation in July 2021 when it announced its plan to go public.
In an interview, Allaire talked about the push for an official U.S. digital dollar and why he thinks the Fed should essentially get out of the way and let stablecoin companies like Circle take the lead. He also talked about why he thinks crypto has not yet reached the point of being too big to fail, “but it’s certainly too big to ignore.”
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
What’s your fearless forecast on the digital dollar?
Well, the digital dollar is here.
I mean the one that the Fed is expected to issue.
There is a perceived digital currency space race. One could argue that the announcement of Libra created an impetus for China to accelerate something that they wanted to do. And in turn, that has led governments in the West to say: What are we going to do?
That’s come in two forms. One has the question: Should the federal government build something? The other has been: There’s actually something here already called stablecoins. And these are growing incredibly rapidly.
The interesting question, if you step back and ask a different question, is: Over the last 75 years, where has all of the innovation in electronic money happened? Has any of it been created by the federal government? And the answer is no.
Everything we have, from the wire system to credit cards and debit cards to ATMs, to PayPal to Apple Pay to stablecoins, has been kind of driven by private sector innovation, but has fit within a safety and soundness framework around the actual underlying dollars.
That’s created a clear separation between sort of the payment utility side of what happens with dollars and the monetary policy side. In our view, there’s no reason to suggest that it can or should be different. In fact, our belief is that a nationalized infrastructure operated by the federal government creates a whole series of significant other risks. And those are identified even by the Federal Reserve itself in its white paper, as they look at these issues.
Now for a country like China, where they’re very concerned about private market power, and they’re very concerned about people operating outside of government surveillance, it’s a different set of issues. The twin powers of Alipay and Tencent represent significant threats to the authoritarian government. So they have a different calculus. I think the calculus in the West is different, as well. So my short answer is I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see the U.S. federal government building anything in this space. That’s not to say there won’t be research. I think the more urgent issue for the United States is, if the United States wants the dollar to be the currency of the internet and wants to compete with the dollar as the currency of the internet, that is a here and now thing.
It’s really about how to put the right kind of market conduct and regulatory framework at a federal level around this rapidly growing framework for dollar digital currencies that exist today in the market. And I think that is, in fact, what the government’s doing.
I just interviewed Alan Lane, the CEO of Silvergate, who said it will likely be a public-private partnership, like in the space program.
I think SpaceX is a great example. And you know, maybe Circle can be the SpaceX of dollars.
But in all seriousness, there’s just this tremendous technological innovation that’s taking place. But it’s a regulated activity. You don’t just get to put rocket ships into outer space. You’ve got to actually collaborate with the government on that. The metaphor of a space race is an interesting one as well. I don’t think anybody is sitting here going, “Why aren’t we investing more in NASA? Why aren’t there hundreds of billions of dollars being plowed into NASA?” I think they’re saying, “Let’s unleash the free market and competitive forces to compete there.”
You mentioned that there’s a risk if the federal government in the form of the Federal Reserve decides to say, “We will do this ourselves.” What are the most prominent risks you see?
There are a lot of issues. Why is it that virtually every form of payment system innovation, and every form of electronic money that we know, has been private sector driven? There’s constant technology obsolescence, there’s a constant changing of technology and that has historically not been something that the government is very good at.
Taxpayer-funded technological obsolescence is a very real risk. I will make the argument that public internet infrastructure and open standards that are built on public internet infrastructure have strengthened things in so many different areas. That kind of open internet public standards, that kind of technical infrastructure, is basically developed out in the open as open-source technology as a public good in the public domain. That moves at a particular velocity.
That’s not going to be what you get if you pay IBM or whoever to go build something that is meant to be run and updated in a centralized way for a number of years. You’re not going to get the dynamism that comes from open internet innovation. That’s why I think, ultimately, even if the government does decide to do something, the actual usage of digital currency is going to overwhelmingly be happening in the private intermediated world, in the open internet, open infrastructure world.
We’re talking about this in the context of the rapid growth of blockchain and crypto, plus growing concerns about regulation.
I think it’s a very healthy debate. I have been going to Washington for 8.5 years since the very beginning of this industry. I was one of the first people who testified in the Senate in 2013. The policy dialogue today is so much more robust. It reflects the fact that despite all the naysayers, this infrastructure has just grown and grown and grown. It has now reached a point where it is maybe not too big to fail, but it’s certainly too big to ignore, and everyone accepts that this is here to stay and is growing.
Do you think it’s not yet too big to fail?
The Financial Stability Board just came out with a paper. They’re the body that is sort of saying what’s systemically risky to the real economy. That’s the way people kind of define too big to fail. And they’re basically saying crypto is not there yet, but it could be. That’s almost like the academic definition.
But it definitely is here to stay. I think that the debate has really evolved from one of intense skepticism, “This is all just a bunch of crap,” to “There’s a real there there. This is a really meaningful set of innovations, and there’s a lot of important value that can be created from it. Let’s think about this from a national competitiveness perspective. Let’s think about this from an industrial policy perspective. Let’s think about this from a dollar competitiveness perspective.” [There’s] a healthy amount of skepticism as well. There is a bunch of crap in the ecosystem, and so we want to have appropriate safeguards.
It’s a really interesting evolution to the policy dialogue. It’s very healthy. And I think that probably the biggest challenge facing regulators and policymakers is, first of all, the pace and the velocity of this is intense. I’ve been in the internet industry for 30 years. This is like super high velocity. And [it] inherently makes regulators uncomfortable because money is a serious thing. Some protocol came out and there’s a $300 million hack and it’s like, “What!” People’s heads explode.
The velocity is significant. That makes it challenging because when you thought you understood one thing, there’s like this whole other arena and it’s just moving very, very fast.
I think a second issue is the internet and the open internet collided with the media industry, the telecommunications industry, collided with the retail commerce industry, the software industry, and restructured what it meant to even deliver those services and the economics of it.
And now blockchain, crypto finance, digital currency are essentially the internet finally colliding with the financial system. There’s a huge challenge there. A lot of the rules that were written and a lot of the regulations that exist were highly incremental relative to the way that the financial economic system worked in fairly tightly controlled, privately controlled infrastructures.
Now, you’ve got a public internet, a public infrastructure, open-source software. The concept of that and the financial system again makes people’s heads explode. It’s challenging when you have a digital currency that exists everywhere the internet exists. Literally, someone just has a piece of software on their device, and they might be actually on a spaceship going to Mars and it exists. It’s programmable and automatable and all these things. That’s just a problem space that regulators have never had to deal with. They’ve had to deal with it in other parts of the internet, but not in the financial system. That makes it even more difficult.
So there’s a lot of jostling. Which agencies should look over what? How do you define these things? What is a digital asset? Is it a commodity? Is it a security? Is it a currency? How do you define it? Statutes have to be defined. This is a new thing.
A lot of these conversations heated up last year. What have been the most troubling conversations you’ve had either with a lawmaker or regulator?
Given the conversations I have had over 8.5 years, conversations are a hell of a lot better now than they were two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, five years ago. If I walked in the room [back then] and said, “I’m doing like a crypto bank,” people would think I’m an alien and just be like, “Oh my god, I’m going to get in trouble for having a meeting with you.”
Definitely, things have evolved. But I think it gets down to something that I just talked about. I think the impulse for regulators is to superimpose the existing kind of template for how the banking capital markets [work], to superimpose that on top of cryptocurrency and blockchains. I think when you try to do that there’s almost like a cognitive dissonance that exists. Sometimes I will meet with someone who can’t accept that things actually might function just differently.
I’ll give an example. One of the biggest issues is this idea of self-custody, a digital wallet. People call them hosted wallets. But self-custody is something that to an individual is extremely empowering. It is a sort of self-sovereign control over my wealth, over my identity.
“I don’t need a bank account,” essentially.
I don’t need a bank. Be your own bank. The potential for different kinds of privacy and security guarantees that come with that, that’s a profound thing. That has not been possible, but it’s also terrifying to governments. There are people who are like, “We have to ban that. No one should ever be allowed to have self-sovereign money.”
There are these risks that have to do with things like money laundering, tax evasion, financial crime. Those are real. The way in which the regulators in the banking system have dealt with those issues historically has been by basically requiring financial intermediaries to be agents of law enforcement, and to keep huge amounts of records and to kind of share all that information constantly with everyone that they deal with.
Basically your personal identifiable information is being broadcast everywhere behind the scenes. You don’t even know it. And it creates honeypots of data. It creates risk around privacy through data breaches and other things. There’s an existing system to deal with that which is actually privacy-eroding with a goal of thwarting crime, but it has a lot of challenges with it.
Our view is you can actually have a system where individuals can maintain autonomy over their assets, but where you have very high assurances around identity verification. People can build services on the internet that really only allow people who have a kind of identity credentials to interact on some of these platforms.
You can introduce a risk management layer that still gives people sovereignty and privacy and you can actually improve upon the limitations of the existing financial system.
You are obviously very upbeat about crypto. But what are you most worried about the way it is evolving, especially since you lived through the dot-com era and the financial crash a decade ago?
Yeah, I also lived through the last crypto winter which was in 2017-2019, you know.
Are we in another one, you think?
I don’t think so. There’s so much happening that’s very, very positive. I don’t comment on the price of bitcoin or whatever. I have a personal view on that.
I guess the question is: Is there something I worry about? I tell this to all the employees in my company and investors and others: We’re still in the very early stages of this. We’re still in the early adopter phase of this. This is not yet, to use [a phrase from] Geoffrey Moore, the famous marketing strategist, we have not crossed the chasm from the early adopter to the mainstream.
One could argue that buying bitcoin has crossed the chasm. That’s become mainstream, or things like that. You could argue that NF Ts are starting to get there. But when you actually look at internet scale, billions of users, we’re maybe a couple of hundred million people in the world that interact with this with any form of regularity.
So we’re still in the early stages. We’re still, I think, in the very early stages in terms of the ultimate impact that this is going to have. Actually we don’t even know what the impact is going to be. We can’t predict it. Just like we couldn’t predict what the impact of mobile would be.
I think we’re super, super early. And I think that’s important for market participants, including regulators, to understand that there’s so much that is going to continue to develop here. We have to be careful. We need to create the space where the ingenuity that’s happening here can happen.
The stakes are getting higher. We also have to be cognizant that people can get hurt. We’re talking about value, financial instruments. There’s sort of a social compact between certain types of businesses and society and those are real things.
Part of the critical thing here, particularly in the next two to three years, is getting enough clearly defined new regulations in place, that those tail risks can be managed better, because they’re real. But also doing it in such a way where entrepreneurship and the innovation that we see that comes from technology and the internet can really have its opportunity to flourish.
You were quoted as saying that this will make the dot-com era seem like small potatoes.
Totally think so. Systems that impact information exchange and communications are huge. That has a huge impact on society. But I think systems that impact economic organization and economic activity are bigger. Just look at the total addressable market of the financial system and commerce and the intersection of that. It’s $500 trillion? It’s just a different scale.
I think we’re seeing the building blocks of kind of a reordering of how economic organization happens, how economic activity happens in this entirely software-based, internet-based world. For me, at least, it’s another 10- to 20-year journey to kind of realize some of the ideas that we have.
Any update on Circle going public via a SPAC which was announced last year?
We have had multiple rounds of back and forth with the SEC. We fully expect to complete that transaction. At a high level, because this is a new industry, there’s a lot of complexity to digital currency, the time it takes to kind of get through that ultimate registration process is a little bit longer than a widget manufacturer or whatever. It’s taking a little bit longer than we had originally anticipated, but we’re continuing to move through it.
Last question. Do you have any regrets about that rap song?
[Laughs.] Not at all. No.
How has it changed your view of rap and music, given what happened at the Super Bowl where rap and crypto ads took center stage?
I have my own story. I grew up in inner city Philly. I grew up with hip-hop and rapping and beatboxing and it’s just sort of how I grew up. So I have no problem with that.
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
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