🤖 Last Quarter: CBDCs, AI Paywalls & X Micropayments

Hey there,

Welcome to the first quarterly wrap up of 2024.

Over the last quarter our team has been hard at work refining and continuously improving our vision and team’s core pillars around: community, culture, and tech.

We revamped our website, hired new team members, and repositioned ourselves as “community growth partners” for emerging tech companies.

In this issue, we’ll cover some of the latest emerging tech news/trends that sum up our thoughts on the first quarter of 2024.

For subscribers, we’ll dive into Reddit, why it’s been in the news lately, and how you can improve your own growth efforts using “community-driven SEO.”

Enjoy the read,

George Siosi Samuels
Managing Director, Faiā

// FIELD BRIEF

BLOCKCHAIN

Zimbabwe launches ‘gold-backed’ currency to replace collapsing dollar. This is fascinating to witness. Traditionally, gold has always been the fallback for societies whenever inflation or taxes have hit them too severely over time. Each generation tries to improve or break-away from reliance on physical gold (e.g. US cutting the gold standard in 1971), but it’s a “natural” regulator of market forces. Without something like gold, we’ve seen central banks and dominant powers print currencies into oblivion, at the detriment of their own populations (over time). With many governments exploring blockchain for their own CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) over the last few years, Zimbabwe seems to be taking the charge by using gold as the anchor (versus say electricity, in the form of hash-power, for the Bitcoin network).

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Google to paywall AI search. Are we seeing a shift in search domination by Google? As a result of AI content proliferation, Google is considering adding paywalls to AI-driven search. Our team at Faiā have noticed a shift in personal behaviors too, as we now default to Perplexity.ai for search more than Google. This may have a serious impact on SEO and growth efforts over the next 5-10 years. And it’s also why community/forum-sites like Reddit are starting to rise in strength (we’ll talk more about this later).

SOCIAL MEDIA 3.0

You will soon need to pay a small fee (micropayment) to post on Twitter/X. This is not the first time Elon Musk has expressed interest in integrating a micropayments system (e.g. DOGE) into a social media platform like Twitter/X. However, recently, he brought up how it’s the only way to curb the “onslaught of bots.” This is why we, at Faiā, have been huge supporters of scaleable, blockchain-based, micropayment systems in the context of online networks and communities. Bitcoin (BTC) may have gone down a “digital gold” path, but the underlying blockchain system is still useful for micropayments. And as AI starts to dominate our data networks, blockchain-based micropayment systems are going to play a major role in curbing such AI systems.

// META TRENDS

In the first quarter of 2024, the emerging tech sector was marked by several cultural and meme trends, reflecting the rapid pace of innovation and the sector's growing influence on society. Here were our top 3 highlights:

GENERATIVE AI

Generative AI, particularly after the success of companies like OpenAI, became a major cultural trend. The ability of AI to create new content, from text to images and even music, captivated the public imagination, leading to widespread discussions and memes about the potential and limitations of this technology.

SPACE TECH

The ongoing efforts by companies like SpaceX to push the boundaries of space exploration led to a resurgence of space-themed memes and cultural references. These ranged from jokes about colonizing Mars to more serious discussions about the future of humanity in space.

CYBERSECURITY

As cybersecurity threats grew more sophisticated, discussions and memes about data privacy and security became more common. This was particularly evident following high-profile data breaches and debates over the use of personal data by tech companies.

Subscribe to this newsletter to read our deep-dive Tactical Report, where we select one hot trend and show you how to apply it to your own business or community, practically.

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