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Mispricing Opportunities: Underserved Small Business Segments Immigrant communities are the heartbeat of American entrepreneurship. They’re launching startups, scaling innovations, creating jobs, and driving economic growth. According to payroll company Gusto, immigrants have formed about around 20% of new businesses, with rates over 40% in some states. A more recent study at MIT reveals, on a per capita basis, newcomers are 80% more likely to start their own businesses than US-born citizens. In fact, many of the biggest names in tech—Google, SpaceX, and Zoom—were founded by immigrants, highlighting the fact that nearly 55% of America’s billion-dollar startups have immigrant origins. But despite their entrepreneurial drive and solid track records, immigrant business owners face steep barriers to accessing affordable funding sources. The data is clear: immigrant and minority entrepreneurs are denied bank loans more frequently than average applicants regardless of their credit scores - even if they are found to have lower delinquencies. These founders face higher scrutiny around income verification and asset documentation, creating a nearly impenetrable barrier to capital. This underserved market is significant. About 5 million new businesses (mainly small or micro) are formed every year, with around 20% owned by immigrants. Assuming half of these immigrant-backed businesses survive their first 5 years and roughly 40% of them seek a loan, this translates into approximately 300 thousand potential new credit customers in the market annually. Of these, 70% could get approved for a loan averaging nearly $500 thousand each*. For lenders, they might have looked into but essentially ignored a more than $70B lending market by origination volume. Moreover, such credit relationships might unlock cross-selling opportunities, creating extra revenue streams to lenders. Drivers of Mispricing The challenges for immigrant founders are often systemic. Language barriers, cultural obstacles, and rigid documentation standards make for a complex landscape. Without conventional documentation, US credit histories, or W2 incomes, many simply don’t fit the mold set by traditional underwriting standards. This gap leaves many entrepreneurs relying on costly equity financing or informal funding from personal or family sources. Yet hope on the horizon. The fintech sector is stepping in, offering innovative, tech-driven solutions designed to serve this overlooked market segment. Technologies Unlocking Origination and Underwriting With advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and Open Banking regulatory reforms (like 1033 rulemaking), we’re seeing real change in how lenders assess creditworthiness. Cash flow-based underwriting model looks beyond credit scores, focusing instead on business dynamics like bank transactions, customer relationships, and revenue streams. Take this scenario: a small business supplies materials to a reputable, large-scale manufacturer. That stable client relationship could be the key factor in determining lending eligibility. APIs and alternative data sources generated through AI/machine learning technologies could additionally include 20-500 data points, making risk assessment more comprehensive. On individual entrepreneurs specifically, their alternative personal scoring could be as accurate as traditional methodology. Combined with conventional scores, total assessment results could offer a nearly 5% lift on model predictive performance for risk differentiation. Innovative Funding and Distribution Channels As origination and underwriting evolve, so do the sources and methods of distributing originated small business loans along the credit value chain. Here’s a breakdown: Diverse Funding Sources: The cautious stance of traditional banks has paved the way for private funders to step up. Percent and YieldStreet have been democratizing access to small business lending, allowing a broader range of individual accredited investors to get involved. Additionally, companies like Bluevine leverage larger-scale asset managers/private credit funds to support small businesses at scale.


Digitized Distribution Platforms: Platforms like iCapital, CAIS, and Moonfare are making institutional private credit more accessible and streamlined. These platforms enable wealth advisors (e.g., RIAs and independent broker-dealers) to connect private credit funds with accredited investors and family offices, minimizing operational burdens. For investors, this approach offers exposure to lending opportunities that are diversified and professionally managed, similar to a mutual fund experience.


Secondary Market Innovations: Secondary markets for small business revenue-based financial assets are creating an exciting new space. An increasing number of secondary marketplaces have emerged and allowed investors to trade small business loan shares like stocks. By leveraging innovations like blockchain, these markets could unlock new funding channels for entrepreneurs, even as they remain niche for now. Micro Connect Financial Assets Exchange (MCEX), for example, is a licensed revenue-based financing exchange out of China. It enables small businesses to raise capital through revenue-based financing that can be traded like stock shares or ETFs. MCEX has set an inspiring example for US lenders and investors, showing a transparent, flexible, and scalable pathway for funding for small business owners in America, combining liquidity with steady cash distributions. Immigrant and minority-owned businesses are indispensable to the American economic growth. But traditional funding hasn’t kept pace, leaving many small business loans mispriced. As technology reshapes lending and distribution, the small business financing market is set for a transformative evolution, bringing inclusivity, cost savings, and increased liquidity to the forefront. Notes: Triangulated using average SBA (7) loan size as well as interview data by the author
Information only. No investment advice provided in this article
Revenue-based financing can be packaged into loans and other credit instruments; only focused on loans in this article Feature Image*: Google co-founder Sergey Brin (left) came to the US at the age of 6* Mispricing Opportunities: Underserved Small Business Segments Mispricing Opportunities: Underserved Small Business Segments Immigrant communities are the heartbeat of American entrepreneurship. They’re launching startups, scaling innovations, creating jobs, and driving economic growth. According to payroll company Gusto , immigrants have formed about around 20% of new businesses, with rates over 40% in some states. A more recent study at MIT reveals, on a per capita basis, newcomers are 80% more likely to start their own businesses than US-born citizens. In fact, many of the biggest names in tech—Google, SpaceX, and Zoom—were founded by immigrants, highlighting the fact that nearly 55% of America’s billion-dollar startups have immigrant origins . payroll company Gusto 20% 40% A more recent study at MIT 80% 55% 55% of America’s billion-dollar startups have immigrant origins But despite their entrepreneurial drive and solid track records, immigrant business owners face steep barriers to accessing affordable funding sources. The data is clear: immigrant and minority entrepreneurs are denied bank loans more frequently than average applicants regardless of their credit scores - even if they are found to have lower delinquencies. These founders face higher scrutiny around income verification and asset documentation, creating a nearly impenetrable barrier to capital. denied bank loans more frequently regardless of their credit scores - even if they are found to have lower delinquencies. This underserved market is significant. About 5 million new businesses (mainly small or micro) are formed every year, with around 20% owned by immigrants. Assuming half of these immigrant-backed businesses survive their first 5 years and roughly 40% of them seek a loan, this translates into approximately 300 thousand potential new credit customers in the market annually. Of these, 70% could get approved for a loan averaging nearly $500 thousand each*. For lenders, they might have looked into but essentially ignored a more than $70B lending market by origination volume. Moreover, such credit relationships might unlock cross-selling opportunities, creating extra revenue streams to lenders. This underserved market is significant. 20% first 5 years 40% 300 70% $500 thousand For lenders, they might have looked into but essentially ignored a more than $70B lending market by origination volume. For lenders, they might have looked into but essentially ignored a more than $70B lending market by origination volume. Drivers of Mispricing Drivers of Mispricing The challenges for immigrant founders are often systemic. Language barriers, cultural obstacles, and rigid documentation standards make for a complex landscape. Without conventional documentation, US credit histories, or W2 incomes, many simply don’t fit the mold set by traditional underwriting standards. This gap leaves many entrepreneurs relying on costly equity financing or informal funding from personal or family sources. Yet hope on the horizon. The fintech sector is stepping in, offering innovative, tech-driven solutions designed to serve this overlooked market segment. Technologies Unlocking Origination and Underwriting Technologies Unlocking Origination and Underwriting With advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and Open Banking regulatory reforms (like 1033 rulemaking ), we’re seeing real change in how lenders assess creditworthiness. Cash flow-based underwriting model looks beyond credit scores, focusing instead on business dynamics like bank transactions, customer relationships, and revenue streams. Take this scenario: a small business supplies materials to a reputable, large-scale manufacturer. That stable client relationship could be the key factor in determining lending eligibility. 1033 rulemaking 1033 rulemaking APIs and alternative data sources generated through AI/machine learning technologies could additionally include 20-500 data points, making risk assessment more comprehensive. On individual entrepreneurs specifically, their alternative personal scoring could be as accurate as traditional methodology. Combined with conventional scores, total assessment results could offer a nearly 5% lift on model predictive performance for risk differentiation. 20-500 5% Innovative Funding and Distribution Channels Innovative Funding and Distribution Channels As origination and underwriting evolve, so do the sources and methods of distributing originated small business loans along the credit value chain. Here’s a breakdown: Diverse Funding Sources: The cautious stance of traditional banks has paved the way for private funders to step up. Percent and YieldStreet have been democratizing access to small business lending, allowing a broader range of individual accredited investors to get involved. Additionally, companies like Bluevine leverage larger-scale asset managers/private credit funds to support small businesses at scale. Digitized Distribution Platforms: Platforms like iCapital, CAIS, and Moonfare are making institutional private credit more accessible and streamlined. These platforms enable wealth advisors (e.g., RIAs and independent broker-dealers) to connect private credit funds with accredited investors and family offices, minimizing operational burdens. For investors, this approach offers exposure to lending opportunities that are diversified and professionally managed, similar to a mutual fund experience. Secondary Market Innovations: Secondary markets for small business revenue-based financial assets are creating an exciting new space. An increasing number of secondary marketplaces have emerged and allowed investors to trade small business loan shares like stocks. By leveraging innovations like blockchain, these markets could unlock new funding channels for entrepreneurs, even as they remain niche for now. Micro Connect Financial Assets Exchange (MCEX), for example, is a licensed revenue-based financing exchange out of China. It enables small businesses to raise capital through revenue-based financing that can be traded like stock shares or ETFs. MCEX has set an inspiring example for US lenders and investors, showing a transparent, flexible, and scalable pathway for funding for small business owners in America, combining liquidity with steady cash distributions. Diverse Funding Sources: The cautious stance of traditional banks has paved the way for private funders to step up. Percent and YieldStreet have been democratizing access to small business lending, allowing a broader range of individual accredited investors to get involved. Additionally, companies like Bluevine leverage larger-scale asset managers/private credit funds to support small businesses at scale. Diverse Funding Sources : The cautious stance of traditional banks has paved the way for private funders to step up. Percent and YieldStreet have been democratizing access to small business lending, allowing a broader range of individual accredited investors to get involved. Additionally, companies like Bluevine leverage larger-scale asset managers/private credit funds to support small businesses at scale. Diverse Funding Sources larger-scale asset managers/private credit funds Digitized Distribution Platforms: Platforms like iCapital, CAIS, and Moonfare are making institutional private credit more accessible and streamlined. These platforms enable wealth advisors (e.g., RIAs and independent broker-dealers) to connect private credit funds with accredited investors and family offices, minimizing operational burdens. For investors, this approach offers exposure to lending opportunities that are diversified and professionally managed, similar to a mutual fund experience. Digitized Distribution Platforms : Platforms like iCapital, CAIS, and Moonfare are making institutional private credit more accessible and streamlined. These platforms enable wealth advisors ( e.g., RIAs and independent broker-dealers ) to connect private credit funds with accredited investors and family offices, minimizing operational burdens. For investors, this approach offers exposure to lending opportunities that are diversified and professionally managed, similar to a mutual fund experience. Digitized Distribution Platforms e.g., RIAs and independent broker-dealers Secondary Market Innovations: Secondary markets for small business revenue-based financial assets are creating an exciting new space. An increasing number of secondary marketplaces have emerged and allowed investors to trade small business loan shares like stocks. By leveraging innovations like blockchain, these markets could unlock new funding channels for entrepreneurs, even as they remain niche for now. Micro Connect Financial Assets Exchange (MCEX), for example, is a licensed revenue-based financing exchange out of China. It enables small businesses to raise capital through revenue-based financing that can be traded like stock shares or ETFs. MCEX has set an inspiring example for US lenders and investors, showing a transparent, flexible, and scalable pathway for funding for small business owners in America, combining liquidity with steady cash distributions. Secondary Market Innovations : Secondary markets for small business revenue-based financial assets are creating an exciting new space. An increasing number of secondary marketplaces have emerged and allowed investors to trade small business loan shares like stocks. By leveraging innovations like blockchain, these markets could unlock new funding channels for entrepreneurs, even as they remain niche for now. Micro Connect Financial Assets Exchange (MCEX) , for example, is a licensed revenue-based financing exchange out of China. It enables small businesses to raise capital through revenue-based financing that can be traded like stock shares or ETFs. MCEX has set an inspiring example for US lenders and investors, showing a transparent, flexible, and scalable pathway for funding for small business owners in America, combining liquidity with steady cash distributions. Secondary Market Innovations Micro Connect Financial Assets Exchange (MCEX) Immigrant and minority-owned businesses are indispensable to the American economic growth. But traditional funding hasn’t kept pace, leaving many small business loans mispriced. As technology reshapes lending and distribution, the small business financing market is set for a transformative evolution, bringing inclusivity, cost savings, and increased liquidity to the forefront. Notes: Notes: Notes: Triangulated using average SBA (7) loan size as well as interview data by the author Information only. No investment advice provided in this article Revenue-based financing can be packaged into loans and other credit instruments; only focused on loans in this article Triangulated using average SBA (7) loan size as well as interview data by the author SBA (7) loan size Information only. No investment advice provided in this article Revenue-based financing can be packaged into loans and other credit instruments; only focused on loans in this article Feature Image *: Google co-founder Sergey Brin (left) came to the US at the age of 6* Feature Image Feature Image

Mispricing Opportunity: Lending to Immigrant Founders

የተሳሳተ ዋጋ መስጠት፡ ለስደተኛ መስራቾች ብድር መስጠት

Възможност за погрешно ценообразуване: Кредитиране на основатели имигранти

Špatná cena: Půjčka zakladatelům přistěhovalců

Oportunidad de fijación de precios erróneos: préstamos a fundadores inmigrantes

הזדמנות לתמחור שגוי: הלוואות למייסדי עולים

Սխալ գնագոյացման հնարավորություն. վարկավորում ներգաղթյալների հիմնադիրներին

誤った価格設定の機会：移民の創業者への融資

ໂອກາດທີ່ບໍ່ຖືກຕ້ອງ: ການໃຫ້ກູ້ຢືມແກ່ຜູ້ກໍ່ຕັ້ງຄົນເຂົ້າເມືອງ

गलत मूल्य निर्धारण गर्ने अवसर: आप्रवासी संस्थापकहरूलाई उधारो

Möjlighet för felprissättning: Utlåning till invandrargrundare

Yanlış Fiyatlandırma Fırsatı: Göçmen Kuruculara Borç Verme

错误定价的机会：向移民创始人提供贷款

In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of companies using technology to profit from arbitrage on various asset classes — for both consumer and business debt. We started about 2.5 years ago while working full-time jobs on H-1B visas. After we were accepted to Y Combinator’s W16 class, we completely focused on Stilt. As an online lending company, we raised debt capital from multiple investors and continue to do so as we scale the company. I get multiple requests for guidance from new companies that are just starting a lending business. Here are some learnings from our journey. Stilt A quick background of the lending industry The original wave of lending companies were divided into 3 classes: — , , (formerly Progresso Financiero), etc. Consumer Lending Lending Club Prosper Oportun — , , etc. Small Business Lending Ondeck Capital Funding Circle — , , , , etc. Real Estate Lending Realty Shares LendingHome PeerStreet FundthatFlip Consumer Lending: The consumer lending companies are largely divided into 2 categories — unsecured personal loans and student loan refinancing. Prosper and Lending Club were the pioneers of the P2P lending model. The years after the financial crisis were the golden years for this. Most of the banks had pulled back on lending ( ) and middle-class Americans were left with a lot of credit card debt and no other options. Citibank sold its subprime lending business to Springleaf a few years ago These companies created a platform to help consumers refinance credit card debt with an unsecured personal loan for a term of 3 years to 5 years. The idea was novel and worked well. Lending Club went public in 2014 with a $10B valuation. It is valued at ~$1.7B at the time of this writing. SoFi was the first startup to establish the student loan refinancing market. They were the first ones to do it at scale and have been the biggest non-bank player in this asset class. For the first few years, SoFi funded the loans using their balance sheet. They were originating, funding, and servicing the loans on their own. Since then multiple other startups have come up and some banks such as and have since jumped on the bandwagon. Citizens Bank DRB (Laurel Road) Small Business Lending: The small business lending market has flourished in the past 10 years. As banks pulled away from financing small businesses, non-bank lenders such as Ondeck made it simple and faster (than banks) to get a business loan. Many small businesses did not even have other options. But these new generation lenders came in with a completely online model and attracted small businesses with higher approval rates and better service. Now business owners don’t have to visit a bank branch multiple times to convince a creditor to get a loan. Other players such as Funding Circle (started in the U.K.) have also been around for almost a decade helping businesses get access to funds faster than a bank. The other big area of lending has been invoice factoring. Almost every business that delivers a product to other businesses gets paid in 30-, 60-, or 90-day cycles. This creates cash flow issues as the payment for a delivered product is stuck while the business has to pay the bills every month. The invoice factoring companies such as and advance the funds to the business (while taking a 2–3% cut) and get paid later over 90 days. This is a multi-hundred billion dollar market without much innovation for the past few decades. The new set of companies have developed systems to provide almost instant invoice factoring solutions to thousands of small businesses. Fundbox Bluevine Real Estate Lending In the recent years, a new asset class has emerged that promises high single digit returns (7%-9%) on a collateralized asset — houses. By using technology, online real estate lenders are able to better price residential properties and improve the speed of funding. The most common use of these loans is to houses. fix and flip A few venture funded companies like Realty Shares and Lending Home started in 2013 to offer this asset class through their marketplace. The loans are relatively shorter term — most are less than 12 months — and have a 75% LTV ( ). This asset class has quickly become popular amongst funds looking for a slightly lower risk profile and faster liquidity. Most marketplaces only allow HNWIs and investment funds to participate (no retail investors). A few companies are now funding billions of dollars of these loans every year. Loan to Value Ratio For a detailed history on consumer and business lending, I recommend Frank Rotman’s (QED Investors) detailed white papers (he is one of the most experienced fintech/credit investors). Consumer Lending — The Hourglass Effect Small Business Lending — The Brave 100 Another one is a white paper by Charles Moldow of Foundation Capital: Consumer Lending — A Trillion Dollar Marketplace Debt Capital The common thread across all lending companies is that they had to raise . This capital is separate from equity and solely used to fund the loans originated by the platforms. Raising quality debt capital from diverse sources is one of the most important aspects of a lending business that founders need to learn. debt capital At the end of the day, every platform is operating a marketplace between investors and their consumers. The success of a lending business is dependent on securing debt capital (supply) to match consumer/business loan originations (demand). The original P2P model set up a marketplace between retail investors (people who invest their savings) and borrowers. An investor could invest small amounts in multiple loans to diversify their risk. As the platforms matured and demonstrated high returns compared to other asset classes, it attracted bigger funds to invest billions in these loans. The model evolved to become a marketplace with large investors on the supply side. Managing debt becomes a competitive advantage for lending businesses and helps them scale to billions of dollars in annual originations (as few have done). All the big players are taking advantage of their scale and expertise in managing debt. However, large scale is not reached in one day, and a startup has to go through various stages before they can expect to deploy nine figures of capital every year. Below is a high level classification of debt capital investors in the market. This is by no means the most exhaustive list, only the most common. A founder will have to work with various types of investors based on their scale and growth. I will also discuss types of debt deal structures later in the post. Let’s get to it. Types of Debt Investors: Pre-Seed — Pre-Series A — They are the first source of capital for most lending startups. These are individuals (sometimes angel investors) with a large net worth and your best bet for a first check. They generally invest based on personal relationships with the founders and should believe in you and your idea. They may be your friends, work colleagues, friends of your investors, or family. A personal relationship underpins their investment and expectation that you will make sure their capital is returned. They are easy to sign up and terms are straightforward. They really help you get off the ground but are limited in terms of how much you can scale. High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) You can expect to pay an interest rate of 10–15%, and generally these loans are for 2 years. HNWIs can help you get up to $5M in originations. Seed — Series A — Series B — After your company has had some traction and proven some level of success with your credit risk model with capital from HNWIs, and you have raised a seed round, you can start knocking on doors of some banks for venture debt. If you have a brand name investor in the U.S. , you can expect to get some debt from a bank as a loan. This is a senior loan secured by your company’s assets and comes with covenants. However, There is risk involved with this option. If you aren’t able to pay off the loan, they can sell your company’s assets to get paid. The venture debt providers are banks (like ) and capital providers like . The amount of debt raised from these sources will be proportional to the equity and brand value of the investors. Venture Debt Silicon Valley Bank Western Technology Investment Venture debt can range from $500k — $5M with interest rates currently between 8%-15. These loans are for a couple of years and come with a set of covenants. — These are private or combined offices that manage the wealth of rich families. They have a mandate of preserving principal. So, most family offices are risk averse and don’t do risky deals. They still work with startups at smaller scale if you can make them comfortable with the risk. They are certainly more risk-taking than HNWIs. Family offices can be varied depending on the wealth of the individual. Anyone with $1B+ in wealth may have an office that manages his/her wealth. Other family offices manage money for multiple families ($50M+) in net worth. The best way to reach family offices is through your network. You can generally get to them through your investors. The deals will be smaller but they can be done faster. Family offices also value warrants in many cases. They are unlikely to be the first check, so you will need some data to prove your underwriting. Some family offices also have a social mission and if that fits with your company’s goal, you may have a better chance. Family Offices Family offices can help you scale originations up to $10M+ and beyond. Depending on the size of the family office and their appetite for risk, you can get to $50M in originations with them. They seek anywhere from 10–15% interest rate based on the quality of your originations. Series A and beyond — These funds are one of the largest sources of capital in the market, but can be expensive and they need scale. There are a lot of hedge funds who participate in the online lending industry. Hedge funds are looking for mid-teen returns but they also use leverage (on their books) to juice up their returns. The lending platforms have to offer scale to make it worthwhile for hedge funds — as they want to deploy $30M+ per deal and can go up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The time it takes to close these deals can easily be 6 months or more — even if someone’s working full-time on this. Hedge Funds and Investment Management Firms As you get to $25M+ in annual origination volume with an equity cushion, you can start reaching out to hedge funds to scale to $50M+ in capital. The interest rates will start at 8%, but the line is scalable. — A new class of funds are cropping up to specifically fund alternative lenders. These funds are mostly forward-looking in terms of unique and different risk classes. As online lending platforms have unlocked new types of assets, alternative lending funds have been increasingly providing initial capital boosts to fledgeling startups. These funds are easy to work with and deals can be quickly signed, but they will expect to be compensated well for taking the initial bet. The advance rates are generally lower than what is offered by banks, family offices, and other capital providers. These funds are also the most experimental in setting up unique deal structures. As they are dealing with startups mostly, they understand the value of equity and are willing to accept warrants as a part of the deal. These funds have gotten bigger in size over time (some are $1B+), and they invest across both consumer and business loan asset classes. Alternative Lending Funds If you want to close deals fast and not worry about giving away some equity in terms of warrants, alternative lending funds can be your best bet. You can get started anywhere from $2M+ to $100M+ with a path to more. — As the name suggests, they are the largest sources of capital and a pain to deal with. If you are going to source capital from banks, give yourself 9 months to close the deal. They will move slowly and will be the most concerned about compliance. Banks have really low cost of capital but are also risk averse. Banks also don’t like to deal with startups as much. The lines of credit are offered to companies with a strong equity position and a proven track record of performance. If your underwriting models are too fancy, banks will need more time to understand them, and in some cases, they will not fund the loans due to compliance risk — irrespective of how good the risk/return reward is. Banks Banks are a cheaper and larger source of capital with rates starting at 6%, but they would want to make sure you are compliant and your underwriting models are thoroughly proven with a strong equity position. — As you scale to hundreds of millions of dollars in originations, you will need diversified sources and bigger pockets to fund loans. Insurance companies, pension funds, and large asset managers have that kind of scale, but they are extremely risk averse. These firms are usually looking for assets with low risk and stable returns for the long term. Student loan refinancing is a common type of asset class where they invest. Also, most of these funds invest in rated bonds through the securitization market. This requires a lot of effort up front and only after Series B can realistically expect to access the securitization market. Insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other asset managers If you have a low-risk asset class with a long-term stable return, insurance companies and asset managers can deploy billions of dollars. The securitization market starts at $50M and offers competitive options. This is just a high level overview of the debt capital markets, and by no means exhaustive. If you are starting a lending business, it is worthwhile to think through the stages of growth and capital needs for your business. You can secure debt capital from providers who offer capital to companies that are a stage ahead of you, but jumping multiple stages is difficult and unlikely. As you plan on scaling up your business, take into account the equity required to get access to larger capital sources. I hope this helps as an overview of what you can expect before you start raising debt capital for your online lending business. I’d be happy to help with any further questions. Thanks to Aaron Harris, Yee Lee and Louis Beryl for reviewing drafts of this.

Lessons in raising debt capital for lending company founders

hunter-johnson@unsplash.com We have all heard about Nike. It’s the iconic brand associated with such athletes as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. It is a true symbol of American industry and consumerism. What fewer people know is that Nike started off as an importer of Japanese shoes, before it ever made an American shoe. According to Nike founder Phil Knight, in his book ‘Shoe Dog’, the company also had cash flow issues when it was a small business, just starting out. It went through several banks in its early years, as few banks wanted to keep its business. The main issue which lead banks to drop Nike was that Knight requested small business loans, which banks did not want to give him. His business strategy was growth at all costs, this meant that he used each loan to purchase as much inventory as possible. The net result of this strategy was that he was requesting credit when he had little to no cash in the bank. While this was an effective growth strategy, it made Nike struggle to receive lines of credit each time it wanted to acquire further inventory. joshua-rodriguez@unsplash.com Getting Credit is Not Easy It turns out that difficulty obtaining credit is a common issue for small and medium sized businesses. It is also a huge, dysfunctional market. Estimates put the size of this market, known as the factoring market, between 2.4$ — 3$ trillion globally; it is also growing at ~10% annually. The dysfunction lies in how banks and other financial institutions approve credit for SMBs, and the interest rates which creditors charge. Creditors take on the risk that the SMB may be unable to return their loan. To cover the risk which lenders assume, they charge SMBs very high interest rates. It is also commonplace to see a scenario like Nike’s, where any available cash goes to inventory. Banks, when assessing whether to lend to a SMB, analyze the current cash flow of the business. If the business has a lot of cash on hand, then credit is easier to obtain. Yet this is rarely the case with small businesses, as they often use their cash to invest in the business. Businesses need credit or cash and financial institutions have the money they need. In a sense, the financial institution is the middle man between SMBs and their cash. To increase efficiency in the factoring market, removing the middle man might make sense. From ride hail to hospitality, technology has shown it is an ideal tool for removing the middleman. Technology products, such as Bluevine and Fundbox, indeed exist to provide loans for small businesses. Regardless of technology, these platforms must still assume a fair amount of risk when lending to SMBs. Therefore, the interest which they charge is still higher than what most SMBs would like to pay, somewhere between 10 — 50 %. In a word, what is missing in this relationship is trust. If the credit providers could trust that they would be paid back in full by the SMBs, they would be able to charge less interest. billy-pasco@unsplash.com Blockchain Makes Getting Credit Easier Enter blockchain. Leveraging this technology, a different kind of factoring platform was built, called INVIOU. This platform allows creditors to provide businesses with credit, and for businesses to seek and obtain credit from creditors. The platform leverages blockchain to enable SMBs to share their credit worthiness. This reduces risk for lenders, while maximising profit for them at the same time. Creditors can predict with greater accuracy whether they will be paid back. In this way, INVIOU aims to bring factoring interest rates into single digits. It aims to do this by creating a blockchain protocol for small businesses to log and verify their financial documents. This gives them a trusted and fraud-free credit reputation. SMBs can use this credit reputation to show that they are more likely to return funds, and secure more favorable interest rates. The platform enables businesses to upload digital invoices to the network and encrypts them. Invoices are tokenized so that they can be transferred between parties. Encryption and decryption of the financial record data takes place exclusively on the users’ machine. This means that INVIOU servers do not need to hold private keys. To solve the challenge of sharing confidential data among users of the platform, the platform uses advanced Proxy Re-Encryption. This allows secure delegation of decryption rights, which enables confidential data to be shared between participants in public networks. INVIOU’s system also addresses lenders’ fear of fraud and forgery. For example, invoices cannot be forged or duplicated. The platform uses IPFS hashes to represent a file while only storing its hash in the Ethereum blockchain. This guarantees authenticity for the IPFS file. Any change to the IPFS file creates a modified hash which will no longer match the one stored in the blockchain. adrian@unsplash.com More Than Just a Technology Platform What sets INVIOU apart from other factoring services is not only its technology, it’s also its ambition to be a platform. It does not aim to compete with banks, lenders, and technology platforms like Fundbox and others. These and other creditors become part of INVIOU’s community and ecosystem. INVIOU aims to build a community around itself, providing SMBs and creditors with access to a shared platform. Transactions on the platform strengthen the community. As transactions are made, the virtual credit score for SMBs using the platform is backed up with further proof and becomes more reliable. Each transaction reduces the risk for lenders and enables the SMBs to get better rates. While many startups strive to bring blockchain to the mainstream, INVIOU may have a product that makes actual business sense.

Why Use a Credit Score if You’ve Got Blockchain?

A conversation with Eyal Lifshitz, founder & CEO of BlueVine about how he is building Company Culture at BlueVine Hi, this is Rama, cofounder/ CEO of GoodRipple. helps you send fun positive vibes to your coworker anonymously on Slack and helps you see how your Company Values are lived weekly, so you can build strong in real-time. I had a fascinating conversation with Eyal Lifshitz, founder & CEO of and wanted to share some of the things we talked about. I am a big fan of the organization he has built and is building. GoodRipple Avocado Culture company culture BlueVine Eyal next to BlueVine’s Company Values A leap from Greylock (VC) to do a startup Eyal was working at Greylock IL, a top VC firm, and with an interest in FinTech was seeing how traditional lending was being revolutionized and done better by new players online. At the same , he came across factoring and got an idea that the same innovations that were happening to traditional lending could be done to factoring for small businesses. He was not looking at becoming a founder, it is just that the idea found him, and he thought there was an option to build a large company. He came from a line of small business owners (his father and grandfather) and could relate to the cash flow issues small business owners typically face given his personal experience of it — that made it exciting for him to pursue this journey. He made the leap to start BlueVine (Greylock IL and Lightspeed were early backers). time Going beyond Factoring as the only product to understanding the cashflow needs of small business owners BlueVine started with factoring and did factoring better and faster online and made it more modern. A more modern factoring was a very useful product, but when serving small business owners, BlueVine realized that the small business owner’s need is not necessarily product specific — they have a more primal need, how do I deal with my cashflow issues? Factoring is one of the ways to help with this need, but this deeper understanding of clients opened up new ways for BlueVine to serve their clients — for example, lines of credit was a new BlueVine product that helps small business owners and over time even delivering non-credit products that serve the customers’ need. A broad offering of solutions is the key to delighting the small business owners. Growing to 185 people (and growing fast!): Hiring with intention: Good people hire good people At the beginning, it was only Eyal and his cofounders. He needed to bring other people on board for the BlueVine journey. For those early employees, he needed to tell people about how they could come and help build this company from the ground up. These people usually had excellent outside options, and would typically take a significant pay cut to come work at BlueVine. They needed to believe in the upside potential of BlueVine. As the team grew, the senior people would become easier to bring on board. At the same time, Eyal realized he needed some structure to have an effective organization, so that people had proper mentorship and time with their line managers. For the people below the executives, different things would appeal to them. Instead of coming to help co-build the company (like the earlier people were), they are coming in with slightly more structure — for these people, the draw is the mission of the company (helping small business owners thrive), the upward trajectory that they will have (compared to a larger company) and the greater ownership in their work. I mentioned to Eyal I noticed that the office exuded raw energy and people talked to each other a lot. He thought ‘people’ is an important factor in applicants choosing to work at BlueVine- good people hire good people and when people meet BlueVine employees, they can assess if they are a good fit for each other (‘seeing is a thousand words’). Sometimes, Eyal would get involved in the hiring process when needed, where he shares BlueVine’s mission and values. Another aspect to growing the company, was to grow different sections of the company in lockstep (for example, grow sales and operations in tandem) to make sure when people were here, they had the right corresponding teams to work with. With scale, Eyal needed to communicate values more explicitly At some point, it became clear to Eyal that he needed to change the way he communicated to people at BlueVine as the organization was now much larger (as he was no longer able to be in communication in the same way with everyone). He needed to be more explicit about the way he instilled the culture and values of the company. The company values were now written on a wall, so everyone could see them. For Eyal, a big lever in creating Company Culture is hiring the right people and the CEO doing what he/she preaches. Because of the company size, he does not always know directly how the people other than his direct reports, are living company culture, but he sets the example with his direct reports and keeps them accountable and has them do the same down their reporting lines. Eyal is alert to ensure that nothing conflicts with the messages and has a variety of ways to be aware of what is happening at BlueVine. He has a monthly coffee chat with different people at BlueVine to learn first-hand what is happening. He reads Glassdoor reviews of BlueVine (he notes that these comments tend to be extreme — either very positive or very negative). He surveys people to get insight on what is happening. These are the things that matter to him as a company CEO. Eyal’s view: It is not a company value if it is not timeless Eyal is building an organization for the first time and when they started thinking about their Company Values, they at first thought of 10 values. They realized for them 10 would be too many for people to remember. One of the values they wanted to have is: ‘Maintaining a high level of security’. After some discussion, it became clear that this was table stakes, not something that inspires people, which in Eyal’s view Company Values are meant to do. He thought of values in the following way: What makes us different? What is true for everyone in the company? What values are unique to us and help us succeed? The values need to be universal and timeless for the company. To illustrate timelessness, he uses one of Amazon’s value of ‘Frugality’. Although right now for BlueVine they do act frugally, he would not be opposed at some point for having business travel for employees who need to travel internationally for business as they go into profitability (Amazon does not have business travel as standard for its employees). So for Eyal, although they are frugal now, it is not something that defines BlueVine forever, so would not be a Company Value as it is not timeless. Every value needs to be applicable to each person in the company. BlueVine’s Company Values: inspired by who they are for their customers Move Fast This is inspired by what really makes a difference to the small business owners — if BlueVine is fast, this allows the small business owners to not have to remain in uncertainty and can move on to doing business. The speed is not a nice feature for customers, it is a life-changer for them to get fast decisions and be able to focus on their business. To be that for the customer, internally at BlueVine, everything needs to move fast. 2. Make it Simple Similarly to speed, BlueVine delivers complex products simply from the point of view of customers and this matters a lot to small business owners. Internally, it serves the company and its clients to make things not cumbersome or too complex. 3. Push Boundaries When BlueVine was trying to disrupt the old industry of factoring, the traditional factoring industry said: ‘Are you nuts?’ BlueVine is playing in a conservative industry. To succeed in that context, BlueVine had to constantly push the boundaries and challenge assumptions. To many questions ‘why’, they would hear the answer: ‘Because it has always been done before’. Through asking questions, BlueVine allows people to disrupt things, including themselves. Constantly Learn Whilst this one may not be unique to BlueVine, it reflects how people are and allows people to get into new areas. This reflects a little bit Eyal’s journey of BlueVine. When he started his foray in factoring, he did not know much about it and had to learn it. With this value, BlueVine is a learning organism. Win Together Winning together and partnering internally are super important to BlueVine. The approach extends to thinking about everyone winning, especially their clients. This is the way to create a long-lasting brand where people genuinely like you. Eyal shared a message he had just received on LinkedIn, where a customer whom Eyal does not know, told Eyal about how BlueVine made a difference to his life as a small business owner. The business owner’s email also conveyed how ‘fast’ BlueVine was. Reading other customer reviews, ‘simple’ comes up often. BlueVine’s values seem to correspond quite well with how their customers perceive it. Plans for the future — BlueVine looks to grow its team a lot this year (from 185 to 230) (BlueVine’s hiring!) BlueVine plans to grow fast this year through a combination of outside hires and internal promotions (where the internal people are almost qualified for the next level up). With this growth, Eyal thinks some more structure and governance would be needed, and policies become more important. He sees HR as growing in strategic importance to the organization in thinking about the right way to grow. Standardization and resource allocation would start taking a bigger dimension in the organization. Eyal’s tips to fellow company leaders to build an organization and Company Culture It is hard! Try to adopt candor with yourself and others. Ego is a not a good thing. Be willing to learn from anybody (listen even if you may not end up following the advice). Be humble — be willing to change. As CEO, hire great people who complement you and are better than you at their respective functions. Eyal is proud to have built a great team and he attributes BlueVine’s success to his amazing team. Hire high caliber people who work well together. Building a great team requires investment, work and a bit of luck, which Eyal thinks BlueVine has had with its team.

Company Values should be ‘Timeless’ (not just something we will do for x months/years) says Eyal…

(1) Feng Liang, The University of Texas at Austin and Work partially done during an internship at Meta GenAI (Email: jeffliang@utexas.edu);
(2) Bichen Wu, Meta GenAI and Corresponding author;
(3) Jialiang Wang, Meta GenAI;
(4) Licheng Yu, Meta GenAI;
(5) Kunpeng Li, Meta GenAI;
(6) Yinan Zhao, Meta GenAI;
(7) Ishan Misra, Meta GenAI;
(8) Jia-Bin Huang, Meta GenAI;
(9) Peizhao Zhang, Meta GenAI (Email: stzpz@meta.com);
(10) Peter Vajda, Meta GenAI (Email: vajdap@meta.com);
(11) Diana Marculescu, The University of Texas at Austin (Email: dianam@utexas.edu). Table of Links Abstract and Introduction
2. Related Work
3. Preliminary
4. FlowVid
4.1. Inflating image U-Net to accommodate video
4.2. Training with joint spatial-temporal conditions
4.3. Generation: edit the first frame then propagate


Experiments


5.1. Settings
5.2. Qualitative results
5.3. Quantitative results
5.4. Ablation study and 5.5. Limitations
Conclusion, Acknowledgments and References
A. Webpage Demo and B. Quantitative comparisons 5.2. Qualitative results In Figure 5, we qualitatively compare our method with several representative approaches. Starting with a per-frame baseline directly applying I2I models, ControlNet, to each frame. Despite using a fixed random seed, this baseline often results in noticeable flickering, such as in the man’s clothing and the tiger’s fur. CoDeF [32] produces outputs with significant blurriness when motion is big in input video, evident in areas like the man’s hands and the tiger’s face. Rerender [49] often fails to capture large motions, such as the movement of paddles in the left example. Also, the color of the edited tiger’s legs tends to blend in with the background. TokenFlow [13] occasionally struggles to follow the prompt, such as transforming the man into a pirate in the left example. It also erroneously depicts the tiger with two legs for the first frame in the right example, leading to flickering in the output video. In contrast, our method stands out in terms of editing capabilities and overall video quality, demonstrating superior performance over these methods. We highly encourage readers to refer to more video comparisons in our supplementary videos. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. (1) Feng Liang, The University of Texas at Austin and Work partially done during an internship at Meta GenAI (Email: jeffliang@utexas.edu); (2) Bichen Wu, Meta GenAI and Corresponding author; (3) Jialiang Wang, Meta GenAI; (4) Licheng Yu, Meta GenAI; (5) Kunpeng Li, Meta GenAI; (6) Yinan Zhao, Meta GenAI; (7) Ishan Misra, Meta GenAI; (8) Jia-Bin Huang, Meta GenAI; (9) Peizhao Zhang, Meta GenAI (Email: stzpz@meta.com); (10) Peter Vajda, Meta GenAI (Email: vajdap@meta.com); (11) Diana Marculescu, The University of Texas at Austin (Email: dianam@utexas.edu). (1) Feng Liang, The University of Texas at Austin and Work partially done during an internship at Meta GenAI (Email: jeffliang@utexas.edu); (2) Bichen Wu, Meta GenAI and Corresponding author; (3) Jialiang Wang, Meta GenAI; (4) Licheng Yu, Meta GenAI; (5) Kunpeng Li, Meta GenAI; (6) Yinan Zhao, Meta GenAI; (7) Ishan Misra, Meta GenAI; (8) Jia-Bin Huang, Meta GenAI; (9) Peizhao Zhang, Meta GenAI (Email: stzpz@meta.com); (10) Peter Vajda, Meta GenAI (Email: vajdap@meta.com); (11) Diana Marculescu, The University of Texas at Austin (Email: dianam@utexas.edu). Table of Links Abstract and Introduction 2. Related Work 3. Preliminary 4. FlowVid 4.1. Inflating image U-Net to accommodate video 4.2. Training with joint spatial-temporal conditions 4.3. Generation: edit the first frame then propagate Experiments 5.1. Settings 5.2. Qualitative results 5.3. Quantitative results 5.4. Ablation study and 5.5. Limitations Conclusion, Acknowledgments and References A. Webpage Demo and B. Quantitative comparisons Abstract and Introduction Abstract and Introduction 2. Related Work 2. Related Work 3. Preliminary 3. Preliminary 4. FlowVid 4. FlowVid 4 .1. Inflating image U-Net to accommodate video .1. Inflating image U-Net to accommodate video 4.2. Training with joint spatial-temporal conditions 4.2. Training with joint spatial-temporal conditions 4.3. Generation: edit the first frame then propagate 4.3. Generation: edit the first frame then propagate Experiments Experiments Experiments 5.1. Settings 5.1. Settings 5.2. Qualitative results 5.2. Qualitative results 5.3. Quantitative results 5.3. Quantitative results 5.4. Ablation study and 5.5. Limitations 5.4. Ablation study and 5.5. Limitations Conclusion, Acknowledgments and References Conclusion, Acknowledgments and References A. Webpage Demo and B. Quantitative comparisons A. Webpage Demo and B. Quantitative comparisons 5.2. Qualitative results In Figure 5, we qualitatively compare our method with several representative approaches. Starting with a per-frame baseline directly applying I2I models, ControlNet, to each frame. Despite using a fixed random seed, this baseline often results in noticeable flickering, such as in the man’s clothing and the tiger’s fur. CoDeF [32] produces outputs with significant blurriness when motion is big in input video, evident in areas like the man’s hands and the tiger’s face. Rerender [49] often fails to capture large motions, such as the movement of paddles in the left example. Also, the color of the edited tiger’s legs tends to blend in with the background. TokenFlow [13] occasionally struggles to follow the prompt, such as transforming the man into a pirate in the left example. It also erroneously depicts the tiger with two legs for the first frame in the right example, leading to flickering in the output video. In contrast, our method stands out in terms of editing capabilities and overall video quality, demonstrating superior performance over these methods. We highly encourage readers to refer to more video comparisons in our supplementary videos. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv

FlowVid: Taming Imperfect Optical Flows for Consistent Video-to-Video Synthesis: Qualitative Results

GRAND CAYMAN, Cayman Islands, August 6th, 2024/Chainwire/--Sui’s new Mysticeti protocol cuts consensus latency to 390 ms, elevating its industry-leading tech and developer stack to new highs. Sui, the pioneering Layer 1 blockchain known for industry-leading performance and infinite horizontal scaling, today announced the successful deployment of Mysticeti on Sui Mainnet after a successful run on Testnet. This innovative protocol cuts consensus latency to an astonishing 390 milliseconds, establishing Sui as the fastest consensus layer in the industry. Developed from extensive research into Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanisms, Mysticeti represents a significant advancement from Narwhal-Bullshark, the consensus algorithms launched with Sui Mainnet over a year ago. Mysticeti achieves unprecedented transaction speeds, extending Sui's impressive low latency performance across all transaction types on the network. Sui's object-oriented architecture allows the network to process transactions differently based on the characteristics of the transaction and the objects involved. Transactions on Sui involving only “owned objects,” such as peer-to-peer transfers, bypass the need for consensus, following a fast-path execution that completes in a shorter time. Now, with Mysticeti, transactions involving shared objects, such as those in marketplaces or collaborative game assets, are processed using an optimized version of BFT consensus that results in lower latencies nearly akin to those of owned object transactions. Mysticeti minimizes cross-validator communication and fully utilizes network bandwidth to maintain high throughput. Live on Testnet for the past three months, Mysticeti’s remarkable results – including an 80% reduction in latency – generated significant buzz within Sui’s developer community and a broad desire to see the update pushed to Mainnet. With the update now live, the Sui Network can handle tens of thousands of transactions per second with end-to-end latencies well below one second. “Mysticeti's successful deployment is a testament to the collaboration between research and engineering, and the validator community that has integrated this new consensus mechanism,” said Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “Mysticeti is a next-generation consensus protocol that sets a new standard for blockchain transaction speeds and puts Sui at the forefront of our industry.” Kevin Nelson, Co-Founder & CTO of Aftermath Finance, which created a leading DeFi protocol on the network said, “Mysticeti's shift to minimizing latency for the general case—shared object transactions—marks a significant advancement across many sectors on Sui, particularly within the Sui DeFi ecosystem. The rollout to Mainnet has already begun to show tangible results, with noticeable latency reductions across our entire product suite. At Aftermath, we are excited to leverage Mysticeti's full capabilities to deliver more efficient, lower latency products to market.” Rabeel Jawaid, Co-founder of leading derivatives exchange Bluefin said, “On-chain settlement latency just dropped significantly on Bluefin with the Mysticeti upgrade! P50 consensus latency currently is just under 400ms and E2E client latency when measured via a fullnode is under 1s for P50, which as far as I know is the fastest in Web3 right now - especially at scale with parallelization. With this upgrade, the trading experience on Bluefin has already become more seamless for retail, and our institutional partners have started to scale their flow and liquidity on the platform.” Bonkman, the pseudonymous Founder of Hop, a DEX aggregator on Sui said, “Hop allows users to interface with Sui DeFi. This makes it dependent on Sui's consensus mechanism and before Mysticeti swaps took roughly 2-3 seconds. Now, nearly every single swap takes less than 1 second to execute and reach finality. In all of web3, there has never been a better DeFi experience that is present today on Hop via Mysticeti.” Contact Sui Foundation media@sui.io This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. GRAND CAYMAN, Cayman Islands, August 6th, 2024/Chainwire/--Sui’s new Mysticeti protocol cuts consensus latency to 390 ms, elevating its industry-leading tech and developer stack to new highs. Sui, the pioneering Layer 1 blockchain known for industry-leading performance and infinite horizontal scaling, today announced the successful deployment of Mysticeti on Sui Mainnet after a successful run on Testnet. This innovative protocol cuts consensus latency to an astonishing 390 milliseconds, establishing Sui as the fastest consensus layer in the industry. Developed from extensive research into Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanisms, Mysticeti represents a significant advancement from Narwhal-Bullshark, the consensus algorithms launched with Sui Mainnet over a year ago. Mysticeti achieves unprecedented transaction speeds, extending Sui's impressive low latency performance across all transaction types on the network. Sui's object-oriented architecture allows the network to process transactions differently based on the characteristics of the transaction and the objects involved. Transactions on Sui involving only “owned objects,” such as peer-to-peer transfers, bypass the need for consensus, following a fast-path execution that completes in a shorter time. Now, with Mysticeti, transactions involving shared objects, such as those in marketplaces or collaborative game assets, are processed using an optimized version of BFT consensus that results in lower latencies nearly akin to those of owned object transactions. Mysticeti minimizes cross-validator communication and fully utilizes network bandwidth to maintain high throughput. Live on Testnet for the past three months, Mysticeti’s remarkable results – including an 80% reduction in latency – generated significant buzz within Sui’s developer community and a broad desire to see the update pushed to Mainnet. With the update now live, the Sui Network can handle tens of thousands of transactions per second with end-to-end latencies well below one second. “Mysticeti's successful deployment is a testament to the collaboration between research and engineering, and the validator community that has integrated this new consensus mechanism,” said Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “Mysticeti's successful deployment is a testament to the collaboration between research and engineering, and the validator community that has integrated this new consensus mechanism,” said Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “Mysticeti is a next-generation consensus protocol that sets a new standard for blockchain transaction speeds and puts Sui at the forefront of our industry.” “Mysticeti is a next-generation consensus protocol that sets a new standard for blockchain transaction speeds and puts Sui at the forefront of our industry.” Kevin Nelson, Co-Founder & CTO of Aftermath Finance, which created a leading DeFi protocol on the network said, “Mysticeti's shift to minimizing latency for the general case—shared object transactions—marks a significant advancement across many sectors on Sui, particularly within the Sui DeFi ecosystem. The rollout to Mainnet has already begun to show tangible results, with noticeable latency reductions across our entire product suite. At Aftermath, we are excited to leverage Mysticeti's full capabilities to deliver more efficient, lower latency products to market.” Kevin Nelson, Co-Founder & CTO of Aftermath Finance, which created a leading DeFi protocol on the network said, “Mysticeti's shift to minimizing latency for the general case—shared object transactions—marks a significant advancement across many sectors on Sui, particularly within the Sui DeFi ecosystem. The rollout to Mainnet has already begun to show tangible results, with noticeable latency reductions across our entire product suite. At Aftermath, we are excited to leverage Mysticeti's full capabilities to deliver more efficient, lower latency products to market.” Rabeel Jawaid, Co-founder of leading derivatives exchange Bluefin said, “On-chain settlement latency just dropped significantly on Bluefin with the Mysticeti upgrade! P50 consensus latency currently is just under 400ms and E2E client latency when measured via a fullnode is under 1s for P50, which as far as I know is the fastest in Web3 right now - especially at scale with parallelization. With this upgrade, the trading experience on Bluefin has already become more seamless for retail, and our institutional partners have started to scale their flow and liquidity on the platform.” Rabeel Jawaid, Co-founder of leading derivatives exchange Bluefin said, “On-chain settlement latency just dropped significantly on Bluefin with the Mysticeti upgrade! P50 consensus latency currently is just under 400ms and E2E client latency when measured via a fullnode is under 1s for P50, which as far as I know is the fastest in Web3 right now - especially at scale with parallelization. With this upgrade, the trading experience on Bluefin has already become more seamless for retail, and our institutional partners have started to scale their flow and liquidity on the platform.” Bonkman, the pseudonymous Founder of Hop, a DEX aggregator on Sui said, “Hop allows users to interface with Sui DeFi. This makes it dependent on Sui's consensus mechanism and before Mysticeti swaps took roughly 2-3 seconds. Now, nearly every single swap takes less than 1 second to execute and reach finality. In all of web3, there has never been a better DeFi experience that is present today on Hop via Mysticeti.” Bonkman, the pseudonymous Founder of Hop, a DEX aggregator on Sui said, “Hop allows users to interface with Sui DeFi. This makes it dependent on Sui's consensus mechanism and before Mysticeti swaps took roughly 2-3 seconds. Now, nearly every single swap takes less than 1 second to execute and reach finality. In all of web3, there has never been a better DeFi experience that is present today on Hop via Mysticeti.” Contact Sui Foundation media@sui.io This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here . here

Sui Sets The Standard For Blockchain Speed With New Mainnet Consensus Mechanism

সুই নতুন মেইননেট কনসেনসাস মেকানিজমের সাথে ব্লকচেইন গতির জন্য মান নির্ধারণ করে

Sui setzt mit neuem Mainnet-Konsensmechanismus den Standard für Blockchain-Geschwindigkeit

Sui establece el estándar para la velocidad de Blockchain con el nuevo mecanismo de consenso de Mainnet

Sui établit la norme en matière de vitesse de blockchain avec un nouveau mécanisme de consensus sur le réseau principal

सुई ने नए मेननेट सर्वसम्मति तंत्र के साथ ब्लॉकचेन गति के लिए मानक निर्धारित किया

Sui は新しいメインネット合意メカニズムでブロックチェーン速度の標準を設定します

Sui는 새로운 메인넷 합의 메커니즘으로 블록체인 속도의 표준을 설정합니다.

Sui define o padrão para velocidade Blockchain com novo mecanismo de consenso da Mainnet

Sui устанавливает стандарт скорости блокчейна с помощью нового механизма консенсуса в основной сети

Sui, Yeni Ana Ağ Konsensüs Mekanizması ile Blockchain Hızının Standardını Belirliyor

Sui đặt ra tiêu chuẩn cho tốc độ chuỗi khối với cơ chế đồng thuận Mainnet mới

Sui 通过新的主网共识机制为区块链速度设定了标准

Authors:
(1) Han Jiang, HKUST and Equal contribution (hjiangav@connect.ust.hk);
(2) Haosen Sun, HKUST and Equal contribution (hsunas@connect.ust.hk);
(3) Ruoxuan Li, HKUST and Equal contribution (rliba@connect.ust.hk);
(4) Chi-Keung Tang, HKUST (cktang@cs.ust.hk);
(5) Yu-Wing Tai, Dartmouth College, (yu-wing.tai@dartmouth.edu). Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction 2. Related Work 2.1. NeRF Editing and 2.2. Inpainting Techniques 2.3. Text-Guided Visual Content Generation 3. Method 3.1. Training View Pre-processing 3.2. Progressive Training 3.3. 4D Extension 4. Experiments and 4.1. Experimental Setups 4.2. Ablation and comparison 5. Conclusion and 6. References 4.2. Ablation and comparison To demonstrate the efficacy of various elements in our baseline design, we compare our baseline to the following 3 variants. As we are the first, to the best of our knowledge, to aim at generative NeRF inpainting, there does not exist baselines for direct comparison. Therefore, we conduct ablation by modifying some parts in our baseline, and conduct comparisons by replacing a subprocess by an existing baseline. View independent inpainting. In our baseline, all training images are pre-processed to be consistent with the first seed image, providing a guarantee for coarse convergence. To show the necessity of our pre-processing strategy, in this baseline, we inpaint all training images independently. Warmup training and IDU are kept unchanged. The results are shown in figure 4. It is clear that independent inpainting results in divergence across views, and IDU fails to produce the initial highly inconsistent image convergence. This explains that the pre-processing step to help convergence is indispensable. Instruct-Nerf2Nerf after warmup. The second stage of our NeRF training is largely based on iterative dataset update, which is the core of instruct-nerf2nerf [4]. This brings out the question of whether instruct-nerf2nerf can accomplish our task. Since instruct-nerf2nerf is mainly for appearance editing without large geometry changes, it is inappropriate to directly run it on our generative inpainting task. Therefore, before running their baseline, we first run our baseline until the end of warmup training, so that we have a coarse geometry as the prerequisite. By this design, the main difference between the two methods is that instruct-nerf2nerf uses instruct-pix2pix, a non-latent diffusion model, to do training image correction. Figure 5 shows its results compared with ours. We can see that the final result maintains the blurriness from the warmup NeRF, and does not achieve a higher level of consistency. Warmup without depth supervision. The goal of warmup training is to provide an initial convergence, especially in geometry, which requires depth loss as supervision. To demonstrate this, we provide an example of warmup training without any depth supervision, and show the rendered depth map in figure 6. Compared with the depth map in our standard setting, this depth map has clear errors within and around the target object. From inconsistencies in geometry, the later fine training stage may suffer from “floater” and inconsistency artifacts. This can be eliminated by our simple planar depth map as guidance, even if it is not accurate. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. Authors: (1) Han Jiang, HKUST and Equal contribution (hjiangav@connect.ust.hk); (2) Haosen Sun, HKUST and Equal contribution (hsunas@connect.ust.hk); (3) Ruoxuan Li, HKUST and Equal contribution (rliba@connect.ust.hk); (4) Chi-Keung Tang, HKUST (cktang@cs.ust.hk); (5) Yu-Wing Tai, Dartmouth College, (yu-wing.tai@dartmouth.edu). Authors: Authors: (1) Han Jiang, HKUST and Equal contribution (hjiangav@connect.ust.hk); (2) Haosen Sun, HKUST and Equal contribution (hsunas@connect.ust.hk); (3) Ruoxuan Li, HKUST and Equal contribution (rliba@connect.ust.hk); (4) Chi-Keung Tang, HKUST (cktang@cs.ust.hk); (5) Yu-Wing Tai, Dartmouth College, (yu-wing.tai@dartmouth.edu). Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction Abstract and 1. Introduction 2. Related Work 2.1. NeRF Editing and 2.2. Inpainting Techniques 2.1. NeRF Editing and 2.2. Inpainting Techniques 2.3. Text-Guided Visual Content Generation 2.3. Text-Guided Visual Content Generation 3. Method 3. Method 3.1. Training View Pre-processing 3.1. Training View Pre-processing 3.2. Progressive Training 3.2. Progressive Training 3.3. 4D Extension 3.3. 4D Extension 4. Experiments and 4.1. Experimental Setups 4. Experiments and 4.1. Experimental Setups 4.2. Ablation and comparison 4.2. Ablation and comparison 5. Conclusion and 6. References 5. Conclusion and 6. References 4.2. Ablation and comparison To demonstrate the efficacy of various elements in our baseline design, we compare our baseline to the following 3 variants. As we are the first, to the best of our knowledge, to aim at generative NeRF inpainting, there does not exist baselines for direct comparison. Therefore, we conduct ablation by modifying some parts in our baseline, and conduct comparisons by replacing a subprocess by an existing baseline. View independent inpainting. In our baseline, all training images are pre-processed to be consistent with the first seed image, providing a guarantee for coarse convergence. To show the necessity of our pre-processing strategy, in this baseline, we inpaint all training images independently. Warmup training and IDU are kept unchanged. The results are shown in figure 4. It is clear that independent inpainting results in divergence across views, and IDU fails to produce the initial highly inconsistent image convergence. This explains that the pre-processing step to help convergence is indispensable. In our baseline, all training images are pre-processed to be Instruct-Nerf2Nerf after warmup. The second stage of our NeRF training is largely based on iterative dataset update, which is the core of instruct-nerf2nerf [4]. This brings out the question of whether instruct-nerf2nerf can accomplish our task. Since instruct-nerf2nerf is mainly for appearance editing without large geometry changes, it is inappropriate to directly run it on our generative inpainting task. Therefore, before running their baseline, we first run our baseline until the end of warmup training, so that we have a coarse geometry as the prerequisite. By this design, the main difference between the two methods is that instruct-nerf2nerf uses instruct-pix2pix, a non-latent diffusion model, to do training image correction. Figure 5 shows its results compared with ours. We can see that the final result maintains the blurriness from the warmup NeRF, and does not achieve a higher level of consistency. Instruct-Nerf2Nerf after warmup. Warmup without depth supervision. The goal of warmup training is to provide an initial convergence, especially in geometry, which requires depth loss as supervision. To demonstrate this, we provide an example of warmup training without any depth supervision, and show the rendered depth map in figure 6. Compared with the depth map in our standard setting, this depth map has clear errors within and around the target object. From inconsistencies in geometry, the later fine training stage may suffer from “floater” and inconsistency artifacts. This can be eliminated by our simple planar depth map as guidance, even if it is not accurate. Warmup without depth supervision. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv

NeRF Editing and Inpainting Techniques: Ablation and comparison

The cryptocurrency market has taken a significant step towards standardization and accessibility with the launch of the GMCI 30 Index (GM 30) on the Pyth Network. This integration brings real-time pricing data for the 30 largest digital assets by market capitalization to developers across more than 60 blockchain ecosystems. The GM 30, created by index provider GMCI, offers a comprehensive snapshot of the cryptocurrency market, including major players like Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as long-standing industry leaders. By tracking the performance of these top digital assets, the index provides valuable insights into the stability, sentiment, and growth trends of the overall market. The Pyth Network, known for its decentralized financial data oracle, has made the GM 30 feed accessible to developers in a permissionless manner. This means that DeFi applications can now base their operations on real-time pricing data for the index, opening up new possibilities for financial products and services in the cryptocurrency space. The integration of the GM 30 into the Pyth Network is a testament to the growing importance of reliable and transparent financial data in the world of decentralized finance. As more traditional investors and financial institutions enter the cryptocurrency market, the need for standardized benchmarks and indices becomes increasingly apparent. Several DeFi protocols across multiple blockchain ecosystems have already begun integrating the Pyth GMCI 30 feed into their operations. These include decentralized exchanges like Bluefin on Sui, D8X Exchange on Arbitrum and Polygon zkEVM, Pingu Exchange on Arbitrum, and Vela Exchange on Arbitrum and Base. Additionally, Horizon Protocol, a derivatives trading and liquidity protocol, is also leveraging the GM 30 feed to provide users with exposure to the broader cryptocurrency market. The collaboration between GMCI and the Pyth Network represents a significant milestone in the evolution of the cryptocurrency market. By combining GMCI's expertise in creating unique indices with Pyth's cutting-edge Oracle technology, this integration provides developers and users with a reliable and accurate source of market data. As more DeFi protocols and applications adopt the GM 30 feed, we can expect to see increased transparency, efficiency, and innovation in the cryptocurrency space. Final Thoughts The launch of the GMCI 30 Index on the Pyth Network is just the beginning. As the cryptocurrency market continues to mature and evolve, the demand for sophisticated financial products and services will only grow. With the foundation laid by this integration, developers and entrepreneurs have a powerful tool at their disposal to create the next generation of DeFi applications that can revolutionize the way we interact with digital assets. Don’t forget to like and share the story! Vested Interest Disclosure: This author is an independent contributor publishing via our business blogging program. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR. The cryptocurrency market has taken a significant step towards standardization and accessibility with the launch of the GMCI 30 Index (GM 30) on the Pyth Network . This integration brings real-time pricing data for the 30 largest digital assets by market capitalization to developers across more than 60 blockchain ecosystems. GMCI 30 Index Pyth Network The GM 30, created by index provider GMCI , offers a comprehensive snapshot of the cryptocurrency market, including major players like Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as long-standing industry leaders. By tracking the performance of these top digital assets, the index provides valuable insights into the stability, sentiment, and growth trends of the overall market. The Pyth Network, known for its decentralized financial data oracle, has made the GM 30 feed accessible to developers in a permissionless manner. This means that DeFi applications can now base their operations on real-time pricing data for the index, opening up new possibilities for financial products and services in the cryptocurrency space. GMCI The integration of the GM 30 into the Pyth Network is a testament to the growing importance of reliable and transparent financial data in the world of decentralized finance. As more traditional investors and financial institutions enter the cryptocurrency market, the need for standardized benchmarks and indices becomes increasingly apparent. Several DeFi protocols across multiple blockchain ecosystems have already begun integrating the Pyth GMCI 30 feed into their operations. These include decentralized exchanges like Bluefin on Sui, D8X Exchange on Arbitrum and Polygon zkEVM, Pingu Exchange on Arbitrum, and Vela Exchange on Arbitrum and Base. Additionally, Horizon Protocol, a derivatives trading and liquidity protocol, is also leveraging the GM 30 feed to provide users with exposure to the broader cryptocurrency market. The collaboration between GMCI and the Pyth Network represents a significant milestone in the evolution of the cryptocurrency market. By combining GMCI's expertise in creating unique indices with Pyth's cutting-edge Oracle technology, this integration provides developers and users with a reliable and accurate source of market data. As more DeFi protocols and applications adopt the GM 30 feed, we can expect to see increased transparency, efficiency, and innovation in the cryptocurrency space. Final Thoughts The launch of the GMCI 30 Index on the Pyth Network is just the beginning. As the cryptocurrency market continues to mature and evolve, the demand for sophisticated financial products and services will only grow. With the foundation laid by this integration, developers and entrepreneurs have a powerful tool at their disposal to create the next generation of DeFi applications that can revolutionize the way we interact with digital assets. Don’t forget to like and share the story! Vested Interest Disclosure: This author is an independent contributor publishing via our business blogging program. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR. Vested Interest Disclosure: This author is an independent contributor publishing via our business blogging program . HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR. Vested Interest Disclosure: business blogging program business blogging program

GMCI 30 Index Launches on Pyth Network, Expanding Access to Cryptocurrency Market Data

GMCI 30 Index Pyth নেটওয়ার্কে চালু হয়েছে, ক্রিপ্টোকারেন্সি মার্কেট ডেটাতে অ্যাক্সেস প্রসারিত করছে

GMCI 30 Index wird im Pyth Network eingeführt und erweitert den Zugang zu Marktdaten für Kryptowährungen

El índice GMCI 30 se lanza en Pyth Network, ampliando el acceso a los datos del mercado de criptomonedas

L'indice GMCI 30 est lancé sur le réseau Pyth, élargissant l'accès aux données du marché des crypto-monnaies

GMCI 30 इंडेक्स पाइथ नेटवर्क पर लॉन्च हुआ, जिससे क्रिप्टोकरेंसी मार्केट डेटा तक पहुंच का विस्तार हुआ

GMCI 30指数がPythネットワークで開始、暗号通貨市場データへのアクセスを拡大

GMCI 30 지수가 Pyth Network에서 출시되어 암호화폐 시장 데이터에 대한 액세스가 확대되었습니다.

Índice GMCI 30 é lançado na Pyth Network, expandindo o acesso aos dados do mercado de criptomoedas

Индекс GMCI 30 запускается в сети Pyth, расширяя доступ к данным рынка криптовалют

GMCI 30 Endeksi Pyth Ağında Başlatılarak Kripto Para Piyasası Verilerine Erişimi Genişletiyor

Chỉ số GMCI 30 ra mắt trên mạng Pyth, mở rộng quyền truy cập vào dữ liệu thị trường tiền điện tử

GMCI 30 指数在 Pyth 网络上推出，扩大了加密货币市场数据的访问权限

GRAND CAYMAN, Cayman Islands, May 3rd, 2024/Chainwire/--Protocol launches, growth trajectory, and industry-leading technology point toward more success to come. On the first anniversary of Sui’s Mainnet launch, the Sui community is celebrating a landmark year that saw it rise from a nascent ecosystem to the top tier of Layer 1 blockchains, amassing household name partners and shipping multiple technology breakthroughs in the process. In the build-up to its launch in 2023, the chatter around Sui reached a level of excitement that has not been matched by any chain that has launched since. The first anniversary of Sui represents a culmination of the remarkable milestones achieved by the network in its first year. While centralized institutions face growing public distrust due to decades of anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior and legacy blockchains lack the speed and technology to solve the problem, in a single year, Sui has emerged as the decentralized solution most capable of disrupting the status quo at scale. The innovations of Sui begin with Sui’s novel programming language, Move, which was created by Mysten Labs Co-founder and CTO Sam Blackshear. Move introduced a new architecture centered around objects, enabling performance and functionality that was simply not available on existing blockchains. The result is a blockchain that is singular in the industry — the universal coordination layer for intelligent assets. “Like many transformative innovations before us, we knew the problem we had to solve and built the technology to solve it without applying labels, but a year after launch, it is clear that Sui is a vibrant developer ecosystem,” said Evan Cheng, Co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs. “Developers are taking advantage of Sui’s performance, and its scalable, composable, on-chain storage, and native accessibility features to build sustainable business models with a consumer ownership-first approach. While the Network’s achievements to date are remarkable, the road to onboarding the next billion users to web3 has just started.” Technology Innovations The results Sui has achieved have validated the team’s approach. In addition to not experiencing a single minute of downtime or instance of degraded performance since Mainnet launch, in the last 12 months, Sui has achieved: Lightning-fast transaction speeds — time to finality clocked at just 400 milliseconds
Massive scale — 297,000 peak TPS in a controlled environment
Record-setting Mainnet performance — 65.8M transactions executed in a single day, the most of any blockchain ever
Extremely low fees — predictable, stable transaction fees even during high usage Yet technology improvements are a constant at Sui. In recent weeks, including at its first global in-person conference, Sui Basecamp, Sui unveiled Mysticeti, which significantly shortens Sui’s end-to-end time to finality, and Pilotfish, which enables nearly unlimited horizontal scaling by enabling individual validators to use multiple machines to extend their capacity. Sui has also introduced unique implementations of technologies that make adoption easier and make the blockchain accessible to mainstream users, both at the enterprise and retail levels. zkLogin is on-chain authorization with traditional OAuth providers like Google and Twitter, allowing all users to directly operate on-chain with the single sign-on process they have become accustomed to, removing the hurdle of managing wallet addresses and seed phrases. zkSend is an application exclusive to Sui that utilizes zkLogin to enable users to send and claim tokens simply by sharing or clicking a link. Sponsored transactions, enabled by Sui’s extremely low fees, empower builders to remove a final hurdle for engagement. Finally, Enoki, which was announced at Sui Basecamp, removes requirements for enterprises looking to incorporate blockchain technology with a turnkey solution that gives them access to build seamlessly on Sui. “The rate at which the ecosystem’s deep and talented developer community has shipped powerful protocols and industry-first technology breakthroughs has been breathtaking, and it’s only a year in,” said Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-founder and CPO at Mysten Labs. “Sui’s purpose is to redefine how individuals and businesses collaborate to create, grow, and share value in a digital-first economy and since its mainnet launch, Sui has demonstrated important and unique capabilities in that regard.” Network Momentum – Sui is a destination for DeFi, Gaming and Commerce Also owing to the strength of the network and especially notable for an ecosystem so early in its development, Sui has quickly become one of the preeminent destinations for DeFi activity. Within 9 months of its Mainnet launch, Sui ranked in the Top 10 of all blockchains in TVL. A month later, Sui’s DEX volume also achieved top 10 status. Throughout, Wormhole stats show Sui as a top destination for bridging from Ethereum, including over a 30-day period where Sui saw more inflows than all other blockchains combined, and more than twice as much as the next closest blockchain. In each of these cases, Sui eclipsed numerous well-known networks that have existed for far longer. Builders and enterprises integrating with Sui are also adding to the growing momentum. Bluefin, a derivatives exchange that had already executed billions in transaction volume in its first iteration on another chain, shut that integration down to build on Sui. Solend, a leading lending protocol on Solana, chose Sui for its first integration beyond its initial network, launching the Suilend protocol which has already amassed over $30M TVL. Additionally, First Digital Labs, creator of FDUSD, the fastest-growing stablecoin in crypto with over $4B in market cap, chose Sui for its first expansion since its launch on Ethereum and BNB. “As we mark the first anniversary of Sui's launch, the growth and innovation within the Sui ecosystem have been sensational and Sui has quickly ascended to the forefront of Layer 1 blockchains,” said Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation. “Sui’s global footprint has continued to expand at a remarkable rate as more and more builders see Sui as the best platform for enabling real world solutions aimed at addressing the world’s most pressing challenges.” Gaming is another focus for Sui that will continue in the coming months and years. With low, predictable fees that allow game developers to build with confidence and dynamic objects that make games built on Sui more expressive, Sui is the optimal blockchain for gaming studios. Dozens of development teams are currently building games on Sui, including established studios such as NHN (Pebble City), ONBUFF x SNK (Samurai Shodown), NDUS Interactive (Xociety), Orange Comet (The Walking Dead: Lands), and Ambrus Studio (E4C: Final Salvation). Leading professional esports team, Team Liquid, will leverage Sui for the relaunch of its fan loyalty program, and at Sui Basecamp in April, Sui joined gaming infrastructure developer Playtron in announcing SuiPlay0X1, the first handheld gaming device with native blockchain capabilities to wide acclaim. Other notable ecosystem partnerships achieved in Sui’s first year include those with Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud, which focused on enhancing security, scalability, developer tools and user experiences across a range of Web 3.0 and AI-powered applications. BytePlus, the web3 arm of ByteDance, partnered with Sui ecosystem partner Mysten Labs to explore collaboration on data warehousing, AI recommendation algorithms, and AI visual algorithms in web3 game platforms and socialFi projects on Sui. The crowds that gathered for Sui Basecamp 2024 represented the culmination of Sui’s arrival, as over 1,000 projects, partners, investors and enthusiasts from 65 countries around the world came to Paris in April to celebrate Sui at the vaunted Layer 1’s inaugural global conference. Contact Sui Foundation media@sui.io This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. GRAND CAYMAN, Cayman Islands, May 3rd, 2024/Chainwire/--Protocol launches, growth trajectory, and industry-leading technology point toward more success to come. On the first anniversary of Sui’s Mainnet launch, the Sui community is celebrating a landmark year that saw it rise from a nascent ecosystem to the top tier of Layer 1 blockchains, amassing household name partners and shipping multiple technology breakthroughs in the process. In the build-up to its launch in 2023, the chatter around Sui reached a level of excitement that has not been matched by any chain that has launched since. The first anniversary of Sui represents a culmination of the remarkable milestones achieved by the network in its first year. While centralized institutions face growing public distrust due to decades of anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior and legacy blockchains lack the speed and technology to solve the problem, in a single year, Sui has emerged as the decentralized solution most capable of disrupting the status quo at scale. The innovations of Sui begin with Sui’s novel programming language, Move, which was created by Mysten Labs Co-founder and CTO Sam Blackshear. Move introduced a new architecture centered around objects, enabling performance and functionality that was simply not available on existing blockchains. The result is a blockchain that is singular in the industry — the universal coordination layer for intelligent assets. “Like many transformative innovations before us, we knew the problem we had to solve and built the technology to solve it without applying labels, but a year after launch, it is clear that Sui is a vibrant developer ecosystem,” said Evan Cheng, Co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs. “Like many transformative innovations before us, we knew the problem we had to solve and built the technology to solve it without applying labels, but a year after launch, it is clear that Sui is a vibrant developer ecosystem,” said Evan Cheng, Co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs. “Developers are taking advantage of Sui’s performance, and its scalable, composable, on-chain storage, and native accessibility features to build sustainable business models with a consumer ownership-first approach. While the Network’s achievements to date are remarkable, the road to onboarding the next billion users to web3 has just started.” “Developers are taking advantage of Sui’s performance, and its scalable, composable, on-chain storage, and native accessibility features to build sustainable business models with a consumer ownership-first approach. While the Network’s achievements to date are remarkable, the road to onboarding the next billion users to web3 has just started.” Technology Innovations The results Sui has achieved have validated the team’s approach. In addition to not experiencing a single minute of downtime or instance of degraded performance since Mainnet launch, in the last 12 months, Sui has achieved: Lightning-fast transaction speeds — time to finality clocked at just 400 milliseconds Massive scale — 297,000 peak TPS in a controlled environment Record-setting Mainnet performance — 65.8M transactions executed in a single day, the most of any blockchain ever Extremely low fees — predictable, stable transaction fees even during high usage Lightning-fast transaction speeds — time to finality clocked at just 400 milliseconds Massive scale — 297,000 peak TPS in a controlled environment Record-setting Mainnet performance — 65.8M transactions executed in a single day, the most of any blockchain ever Extremely low fees — predictable, stable transaction fees even during high usage Yet technology improvements are a constant at Sui. In recent weeks, including at its first global in-person conference, Sui Basecamp, Sui unveiled Mysticeti, which significantly shortens Sui’s end-to-end time to finality, and Pilotfish, which enables nearly unlimited horizontal scaling by enabling individual validators to use multiple machines to extend their capacity. Sui has also introduced unique implementations of technologies that make adoption easier and make the blockchain accessible to mainstream users, both at the enterprise and retail levels. zkLogin is on-chain authorization with traditional OAuth providers like Google and Twitter, allowing all users to directly operate on-chain with the single sign-on process they have become accustomed to, removing the hurdle of managing wallet addresses and seed phrases. zkSend is an application exclusive to Sui that utilizes zkLogin to enable users to send and claim tokens simply by sharing or clicking a link. Sponsored transactions, enabled by Sui’s extremely low fees, empower builders to remove a final hurdle for engagement. Finally, Enoki, which was announced at Sui Basecamp, removes requirements for enterprises looking to incorporate blockchain technology with a turnkey solution that gives them access to build seamlessly on Sui. “The rate at which the ecosystem’s deep and talented developer community has shipped powerful protocols and industry-first technology breakthroughs has been breathtaking, and it’s only a year in,” said Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-founder and CPO at Mysten Labs. “Sui’s purpose is to redefine how individuals and businesses collaborate to create, grow, and share value in a digital-first economy and since its mainnet launch, Sui has demonstrated important and unique capabilities in that regard.” Network Momentum – Sui is a destination for DeFi, Gaming and Commerce Also owing to the strength of the network and especially notable for an ecosystem so early in its development, Sui has quickly become one of the preeminent destinations for DeFi activity. Within 9 months of its Mainnet launch, Sui ranked in the Top 10 of all blockchains in TVL. A month later, Sui’s DEX volume also achieved top 10 status. Throughout, Wormhole stats show Sui as a top destination for bridging from Ethereum, including over a 30-day period where Sui saw more inflows than all other blockchains combined, and more than twice as much as the next closest blockchain. In each of these cases, Sui eclipsed numerous well-known networks that have existed for far longer. Builders and enterprises integrating with Sui are also adding to the growing momentum. Bluefin, a derivatives exchange that had already executed billions in transaction volume in its first iteration on another chain, shut that integration down to build on Sui. Solend, a leading lending protocol on Solana, chose Sui for its first integration beyond its initial network, launching the Suilend protocol which has already amassed over $30M TVL. Additionally, First Digital Labs, creator of FDUSD, the fastest-growing stablecoin in crypto with over $4B in market cap, chose Sui for its first expansion since its launch on Ethereum and BNB. “As we mark the first anniversary of Sui's launch, the growth and innovation within the Sui ecosystem have been sensational and Sui has quickly ascended to the forefront of Layer 1 blockchains,” said Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation. “Sui’s global footprint has continued to expand at a remarkable rate as more and more builders see Sui as the best platform for enabling real world solutions aimed at addressing the world’s most pressing challenges.” “As we mark the first anniversary of Sui's launch, the growth and innovation within the Sui ecosystem have been sensational and Sui has quickly ascended to the forefront of Layer 1 blockchains,” said Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation. “Sui’s global footprint has continued to expand at a remarkable rate as more and more builders see Sui as the best platform for enabling real world solutions aimed at addressing the world’s most pressing challenges.” Gaming is another focus for Sui that will continue in the coming months and years. With low, predictable fees that allow game developers to build with confidence and dynamic objects that make games built on Sui more expressive, Sui is the optimal blockchain for gaming studios. Dozens of development teams are currently building games on Sui, including established studios such as NHN (Pebble City), ONBUFF x SNK (Samurai Shodown), NDUS Interactive (Xociety), Orange Comet (The Walking Dead: Lands), and Ambrus Studio (E4C: Final Salvation). Leading professional esports team, Team Liquid, will leverage Sui for the relaunch of its fan loyalty program, and at Sui Basecamp in April, Sui joined gaming infrastructure developer Playtron in announcing SuiPlay0X1, the first handheld gaming device with native blockchain capabilities to wide acclaim. Other notable ecosystem partnerships achieved in Sui’s first year include those with Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud, which focused on enhancing security, scalability, developer tools and user experiences across a range of Web 3.0 and AI-powered applications. BytePlus, the web3 arm of ByteDance, partnered with Sui ecosystem partner Mysten Labs to explore collaboration on data warehousing, AI recommendation algorithms, and AI visual algorithms in web3 game platforms and socialFi projects on Sui. The crowds that gathered for Sui Basecamp 2024 represented the culmination of Sui’s arrival, as over 1,000 projects, partners, investors and enthusiasts from 65 countries around the world came to Paris in April to celebrate Sui at the vaunted Layer 1’s inaugural global conference. Contact Sui Foundation media@sui.io This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here . here here

Sui Turns One: Debut Year Of Growth and Tech Breakthroughs Puts Sui At Forefront Of Web3

PARIS, France, April 10th, 2024/Chainwire/-- Sui Basecamp, the inaugural global conference for the Sui ecosystem, opened its doors today in Paris, welcoming developers and entrepreneurs from around the world as they celebrate Paris Blockchain Week. A two-day event across two venues, Sui Basecamp features speakers across web2 and web3, spanning industry verticals from payments to gaming to e-commerce to major league sports. A celebration and exploration of the latest developments in web3, attendees are invited to presentations on cryptography from some of the world’s leading technologists, fireside chats on increasing market liquidity, and panels on real-world technological use cases. Highlight announcements from the conference included: Introducing the SuiPlay0x1 – a lightweight handheld gaming device designed in collaboration with Playtron. SuiPlay0x1 runs Playtron’s device-agnostic gaming operating system, which is building up compatibility with various hardware configurations, gaming storefronts and direct-download game partners. The SuiPlay is the first handheld gaming device with native web3 capabilities and will be available in stores worldwide in 2025. First Digital Labs is launching FDUSD, the fastest-growing stablecoin in crypto, on Sui, becoming the ecosystem’s first native stablecoin. Originally deployed on Ethereum and BNB, with plans to expand to other blockchains, Sui becomes the first blockchain FDUSD has expanded to since its inception. FDUSD launched in August 2023 and has already amassed a market cap of over $3.5 billion. Over the last week, FDUSD has seen the fifth-highest trading volume across the entire industry, including over $8 billion of volume in a single day. Enoki – Mysten Labs, the original contributor to Sui, has announced the launch of the Enoki platform, the gateway to next-gen customer experiences. Inside the Enoki portal, enterprises can access, leverage, and embed public ledger solutions inside their applications, products, and services, thanks to SDKs powered by Sui’s native feature, zkLogin. Partners integrating Enoki at launch include: Bluefin: A perpetual DEX with blazing-fast settlement and a seamless trading experience. Drife: A decentralized ride-hailing platform powered by blockchain with the intent of empowering both drivers and commuters. Quantum Temple: The digital platform for immersive cultural travel. The event is a two-day affair that begins at 9:30 AM local time on Wednesday, April 10, and concludes at 4:15 PM CET on Thursday, April 11. On Wednesday night, registered guests are invited to attend the Sui Soiree, an evening of cocktails, refreshments, and dancing with a performance by German electronic music record producer, songwriter, and DJ, Boys Noize. For more information, please visit sui.io/basecamp. About Sui Sui is a first-of-its-kind Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform designed from the bottom up to make digital asset ownership fast, private, secure, and accessible to everyone. Its object-centric model, based on the Move programming language, enables parallel execution, sub-second finality, and rich on-chain assets. With horizontally scalable processing and storage, Sui supports a wide range of applications with unrivaled speed at low cost. Sui is a step-function advancement in blockchain and a platform on which creators and developers can build amazing, user-friendly experiences. Learn more: https://sui.io About Mysten Labs Mysten Labs is a team of leading distributed systems, programming languages, and cryptography experts whose founders were senior executives and lead architects of pioneering blockchain projects. The mission of Mysten Labs is to create foundational infrastructure for web3. Learn more: https://mystenlabs.com About First Digital Labs First Digital Labs is the brand name of FD121 Limited, a Hong Kong-registered subsidiary under the First Digital Group. First Digital Labs focuses on cutting-edge research and development, specializing in the innovation and advancement of digital assets. First Digital Labs is the issuer of the FDUSD stablecoin. To learn more about First Digital Lab, visit https://firstdigitallabs.com/. About Playtron Playtron is building a lightweight gaming OS optimized for a new generation of powerful handheld gaming PCs and beyond. Play all your games from every store: Steam, Epic, GOG, and more. Playtron's founders built Android for 1B users while simultaneously overseeing a multi-hundred-person operational system team in an attempt to unseat the incumbent mobile duopoly. Playtron is backed by Samsung Next, Polychain, Circle, Mysten Labs, Alumni Ventures and more. Playtron-powered devices will start to ship worldwide later this year, ready to onboard the next 100 million core and casual gamers. Contact Sui Foundation media@sui.io This story was distributed as a release by Chainwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program . here

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