Gareth Jenkinson
The latest earnings call from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, highlighted decreased search advertising spending from financial services and cryptocurrency subcategories.
Alphabet released its earnings report for Q3 on Oct. 25, outlining a 6% increase in revenue totaling $69.1 billion in comparison to Q3 last year. Revenues were down slightly from Q2 2022, dropping from $69.7 billion.
However, the breakdown of revenues from Google Services, which includes its advertising earnings, showed that this segment increased from $58.8 billion to $61.3 billion over the past year.
Philipp Schindler, chief business officer of Google, noted particular strife in the financial and the cryptocurrency sectors, in particular, with notable drops in advertising spending quarter-on-quarter during Alphabet’s earnings call on Oct. 25:
“We did see a pullback in spending by some advertisers in certain areas in search ads. For example, in financial services, we saw a pullback in insurance, loan, mortgage and crypto subcategories.”
Google updated its financial products and services policy in July 2022 to clarify the scope and requirement for adverts relating to cryptocurrency businesses, services and products. This set out rules for advertisers of exchanges and wallet services targeting countries, including France, Germany, South Korea, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Thailand.
Given that they met certain regulatory requirements within these jurisdictions, advertisers could continue to promote their crypto-related products and services through Google’s advertising platform.
The change came several months after Google gave crypto-related advertising the green light in August 2021. The multinational tech giant had previously banned crypto- and initial coin offering-related advertisements back in June 2018.
Global markets and cryptocurrency markets continue to weather difficult times, with the latter enduring what analytics firms like Glassnode have dubbed as the worst bear market on record.
Nevertheless, the decreased advertising spending from the cryptocurrency sector does not reflect Google’s attitude toward the space. Google announced a partnership with American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in October to allow payments for cloud services with Bitcoin and Ether in 2023.
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Judith BannermanQuist
Multi-chain nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace myNFT has announced it will showcase its first-ever physical NFT vending machine at this year's NFT.London event scheduled for Nov. 2–4.
The NFT platform hopes to provide an easy and accessible way for people who want to start buying and trading digital assets without needing deep knowledge of the Web3 industry. The vending machine will allow users to purchase an NFT without owning a digital wallet.
Users who want to purchase an NFT through myNFT’s vending machine will need to select one of the envelopes on display, and then key in the code provided. After paying, they’ll be able to scan the QR code in the envelope, which will come with an invitation to set up a myNFT account, complete with an NFT wallet, in which they’ll receive their NFT.
Hugo Mcdonaugh, CEO of myNFT, said, "The most accessible way to buy anything is through a vending machine and so we're breaking the perception that buying an NFT is difficult via this initiative.”
Interested participants will be able to purchase an NFT from myNFT’s inaugural collection of donated NFTs, which features brands like Dr. Who Worlds Apart, Thunderbirds and Delft Blue Night Watch.
The physical NFT vending machine will be located outside the NFT.London conference venue, at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, Westminster, London.
Proceeds from the NFT vending machine will be donated to Giveth, a blockchain-based philanthropic community that funds public goods, services and education in developing nations, as well as Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity, which provides specialist nurses to seriously ill children.
In February, Cointelegraph reported that Solana-based NFT marketplace Neon unveiled a 24/7 NFT vending machine in New York’s financial district that accepted both credit and debit card payments. However, a week after its launch, users reported that neither the NFT vending machine nor the NFT worked as promised.
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Zhiyuan Sun
According to a new preprint conducted by researchers at the Netherlands' Open Universiteit and Radboud University, in addition to the University of California, Berkley, the vast majority of literature on blockchain energy use from both academic and everyday sources lacks “the scientific rigor expected from a mature scientific field.” The report analyzed 128 scientific and open-source studies related to carbon emissions of blockchains such as Bitcoin.
Researchers found that an astonishing 34% of studies did not even possess an explicit research design. Meanwhile, 43% of studies did not share data, while 67% did not share source code. Finally, 79% of studies had no discussions about the reliability of external data.
Several notable fallacies across studies were discovered by researchers in their analysis. First off, blockchain energy studies typically cite data and derive their conclusions from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. However, the source explicitly states that it only captures about 32% to 37% of all computing power in the network.
Secondly, the validity of electricity costs used in such studies is called into question. Researchers found that a significant portion of studies had “no clear” assumptions for cost of electricity use in cryptocurrency mining. Furthermore, there is considerable opacity within studies regarding their choice of power usage effectiveness.
Finally, researchers flagged the validity of blockchain carbon emission claims. In several studies, they found that the earlier investigators, with no empirical evidence, simply extrapolated carbon emissions data from 2014 and applied it to 2017; from 2019 and applied it to 2021; from 2015 and applied it to 2020, and so on.
The report called for discussions regarding the reliability of models assessing the environmental impacts of blockchains. The crypto community remains heavily divided when it comes to assessing the carbon footprint of blockchains. Some, such as Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, say that 90% of energy from Bitcoin mining comes from dirty energy. Others claim that the network accounts for less than 0.08% of the world's carbon dioxide production.
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This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
