• A superstar team is coming together…
  • This news puts Intel ahead of the curve…
  • Facebook wants a piece of the NFT pie…

Dear Reader,

Tonight is it. At 8 p.m. ET, I’ll unveil The NFT Moment.

NFTs – non-fungible tokens – have gotten a lot of headlines lately. But many investors don’t really understand their importance.

The truth is, NFTs will serve a key role in the rise of blockchain technology. And as such, they’re poised to upend the way we transact, communicate, and earn money in the future.

And if we can position ourselves in this technology early, we’ll have the chance to help build the future of this technology… and earn real wealth as we do so.

That’s why I’ve been diving deep into this space to uncover the best opportunities available for my readers. And I’ve found three NFT “coins” that are primed to succeed…

Not only that… My team and I have even gotten firsthand experience in minting NFTs in preparation for this event. And attendees tonight will have the chance to have one sent straight to their digital wallet.

This is a Brownstone Research first… and I can’t wait to reveal the designs.

So I hope to see you there. Please go right here to RSVP.

The next superstar biotech company is on the move…

We’ve kicked off the year with the largest funding round for a biotech company in history. I believe this is a precursor of things to come in 2022.

Altos Labs just raised a mind-boggling $3 billion in its second venture capital (VC) funding round. What’s even more impressive is the superstar team that Altos is bringing together. This is hands-down one of the top biotech companies to watch in the coming years.

We first discussed Altos Labs back in September of last year. At the time, the company had just raised $270 million in its first VC round, which was already unusually large. That instantly valued the company at $1.4 billion, turning it into a unicorn overnight.

As a reminder, Altos Labs was founded upon a moonshot vision. The company is focused on reprogramming cells to fight and reverse disease. We can think of its approach as anti-aging technology. The goal is to extend human life.

I know that may sound like a pie-in-the-sky idea. But it would be a mistake to doubt the team that Altos Labs has put together.

The company was founded by Richard Klausner and his executive partner Hans Bishop. Klausner previously founded Juno Therapeutics and Grail, and Bishop served as the chief executive officer (CEO) of both companies.

I consider these two of the hottest biotech companies in history. Biopharma giant Celgene acquired Juno for $10.4 billion back in 2018. And genetic sequencing giant Illumina acquired Grail for $8 billion last year. These were two of the biggest biotech buyouts ever.

So the Klausner/Bishop pair has a strong track record of success.

And it gets better…

The two just hired away GlaxoSmithKline’s chief scientific officer (CSO) Hal Barron. Barron will serve as CEO of Altos Labs starting in August.

And it doesn’t stop there. They brought in an incredible team of researchers as well.

Jennifer Doudna headlines the list. If we remember, Doudna was an inventor of CRISPR genetic editing technology. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for her work.

Altos is also bringing in Frances Arnold, another Nobel Laureate. Arnold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for her work on engineering enzymes.

Finally, Altos also attracted Shinya Yamanaka, who has been pioneering work on creating stem cells in a lab setting to be used for reprogramming cells.

This is a superstar team that was clearly handpicked for a reason. Engineering enzymes, genetic editing, and reprogramming cells… all these things represent the foundational techniques that will be used to achieve Altos’ moonshot goals.

Not surprisingly, Altos is backed by ARCH Venture Partners, one of the most prominent VC firms in the biotech space. ARCH was also an early investor in Juno Therapeutics and Grail.

I wish we could invest now, but this funding has been tightly held. With that kind of money in the bank, Altos will be able to hire quickly, invest heavily in research and development (R&D), test its ideas, and build a therapeutic pipeline.

I couldn’t be more excited about the work this company is doing, I expect we’ll hear more about its progress in the second half of this year.

Intel’s making a strong push into crypto mining…

Next, we have to talk about a very interesting development at legacy semiconductor giant Intel.

As a technology analyst, I stay ahead of the curve by keeping tabs on all the major industry conferences.

Even when I can’t attend in person or remotely, I always assess who is speaking at each conference and what they are presenting on. The more technical, the better. This can often lead to insights on the future direction of product or therapeutic development.

And through this research, I came across an interesting talk Intel plans to give at a major semiconductor conference next month. The presentation is titled “Bonanza Mine – an Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC.”

I don’t normally speak about Intel in a positive light, but this new product initiative could be interesting for a couple of reasons.

Intel is gearing up to launch an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) optimized for highly efficient bitcoin mining. It appears the first-generation ASIC will offer performance that’s on par with the best mining rigs on the market today… at 15% reduced power consumption. That means lower electricity costs, which will boost profits.

It’s worth noting that the cost of electricity is the single largest operating cost of cryptocurrency mining.

And we can think of the mining as the infrastructure that keeps blockchain networks running. Mining facilities are just large data centers no different than what Amazon Web Services (AWS) has to support Web 2.0 infrastructure.

Aside from the reduced power consumption, there is an interesting industry dynamic worth noting. The largest producer of bitcoin mining ASICs is a China-based company called Bitmain. It has dominated the space for nearly a decade now.

But Bitmain has a problem. The company doesn’t make the semiconductors that go into its ASIC machines. As a result, Bitmain has been dealing with supply chain problems. And it hasn’t been able to produce enough new mining rigs to meet demand.

Intel won’t have that problem because the company has the ability to make its own chips. Its scale is also incomparable to Bitmain. So even if it needs to partner with a semiconductor foundry, it will get manufacturing priority.

That should allow Intel to surpass Bitmain in terms of production volume very quickly. And assuming the new mining rig is as good as advertised (we’ll still need to confirm that), Intel should be able to take market share from Bitmain quickly.

Of course, this is great for Intel, which has struggled to keep up with its competitors in recent years.

In fact, I’m a little surprised that companies like AMD and NVIDIA haven’t yet broken into the crypto mining space. They have been relying on their general-purpose graphics processors to serve the mining market.

This is still good, but these chips aren’t optimized for performance for individual blockchains. As a result, they aren’t as efficient.

This development is fantastic for the blockchain industry.

Having a U.S.-based supplier of a bitcoin mining ASIC will make the industry more resilient in terms of available supply, as well as in a jurisdiction without a nation-state having control over what does, and does not, happen.

Facebook is going all-in on NFTs…

Facebook, now known as Meta, is gearing up to launch a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace.

This could be a game changer given the reach of Facebook’s global social media empire.

And no doubt this is driven by the massive success that top NFT marketplace OpenSea has experienced. As a reminder, OpenSea was recently valued at a $13 billion valuation.

As we discussed last week, OpenSea is the fastest-growing early stage company I have ever seen. Its valuation increased 178 times in less than a year. And if the current trajectory persists, OpenSea is on track to generate $850 million in revenue this year.

Obviously, Facebook wants a piece of this success.

And it turns out that Facebook has been busy building a lot of key NFT functionality into its digital asset wallet Novi. This will allow billions of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users around the world to securely store NFTs.

From there, the next step is to roll out a marketplace where Facebook’s entire user base can buy, sell, and trade with one another. This would instantly become a major competitor for OpenSea.

So we’ll keep a close eye on Facebook’s progress in the coming months. And to be clear, when Facebook launches its NFT platform, this market is going to explode higher. Because of the company’s reach, the industry will go mainstream overnight.

That’s just one more reason I’m spilling so much ink on this trend. And as I mentioned above, it’s why I’m coming to readers tonight to discuss The NFT Moment.

In just a few hours, I’ll reveal one more key event that’s going to feed the mainstream adoption of NFTs. And I’ll share exactly how attendees can build a stake… including details about my top recommendations in this space.

And as a special opportunity, tonight only, attendees will have the chance to receive their own NFT… one of a set that my team and I have had fun designing and minting.

So please… there’s not much time left. Simply go here to ensure your name is on the list to attend.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge

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