Exclusive: With Nvidia’s Help, Revenue Surges at Smaller Cloud ProvidersRead more

Photo by Shutterstock

Crypto VCs Aren’t Celebrating This Rally Just Yet

Photo: Photo by Shutterstock

Here are some staggering numbers for you. Year to date, bitcoin is up 43%, ether is up 39%, and Coinbase shares are up more than 92%. In fact, Coinbase is now trading around 5  times its projected next 12 month sales, up from 2.1 times when 2023 began, according to Koyfin. Where’s all this coming from?

It turns out, startups and venture capitalists are scratching their heads a bit, too, around what’s driving this rally (other than the same factors driving the broader surge in tech stocks, that is.) For that reason they’re not rewriting their crypto winter playbooks just yet. “It took a lot of people by surprise, to be honest. I don’t think a lot of people were positioned….to take advantage of the rally,” said Paul Almasi, who leads blockchain infrastructure company Alchemy’s venture capital arm.

Access on the go
View stories on our mobile app and tune into our weekly podcast.
Join live video Q&A’s
Deep-dive into topics like startups and autonomous vehicles with our top reporters and other executives.
Enjoy a clutter-free experience
Read without any banner ads.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Photo by Getty. Art by Mike Sullivan
Exclusive microsoft startups
Sam Altman’s Tangle of Investments
Among the many unusual facts about OpenAI, the buzzy startup behind the hugely popular chatbot ChatGPT, the most extraordinary may be that Sam Altman, its CEO and co-founder, doesn’t have any equity in it.
Art by Clark Miller
The Big Read google
Google’s Darkest Days: After Three Deaths, a Workforce Reckons with a Changed Company
For Google employees, the news was a devastating turn in an already disorienting year. In May, a 31-year-old senior engineer at the company, later identified by police as Kevin Rawlings, died at Google’s New York office late at night in an apparent suicide.
Photo by Getty.
Exclusive startups Finance
Liquid Death Hires Goldman Sachs, Aiming for 2024 IPO
The parched market for initial public offerings is likely to see a new entrant soon: a canned water company.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Exclusive startups cloud
With Nvidia’s Help, Revenue Surges at Smaller Cloud Providers
The demand for artificial intelligence chips is turning into a boom for several upstart cloud-server providers, thanks to the complicated politics of the tech industry.
Character.AI's cofounders Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas. Photos by Getty. Art by Shane Burke.
Deals startups ai
Character.AI in Talks to Raise Funding as Meta Platforms Tests Rival
Character.AI, which lets users create artificial intelligence–powered chatbots modeled after figures like TV character Tony Soprano and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is in talks with investors about raising an additional round of funding, according to a person with direct knowledge.
Fanhouse co-founder Rosie Nguyen (left) and Passes CEO Lucy Guo. Photos via YouTube/Karat and Celia D. Luna for The Information.
Creator Economy startups
Lucy Guo’s Passes to Buy Fanhouse
A startup that rode the pandemic-era frenzy around OnlyFans is selling to a rival. Fanhouse , which operates a website where creators charge fans for exclusive content, has agreed to sell itself to Passes , a Miami-based membership service for creators and their superfans, Fanhouse CEO Khoi Le and Passes CEO Lucy Guo said in an interview with The Information.