Biden Arrives in Brussels & the Okta Breach Details

the war in Ukraine, including a NATO summit. We will break down what to expect from this trip to Europe, plus new details on the hacking group behind the Octa breach, why they've been called laughably bad even as they've managed to infiltrate so many large scale tech companies, and Madernat says it's COVID vaccine produced a strong immune response in kids under age six, but it's only honestly effective against omocron.

WHA on that. Later this hour, President Biden now in Brussels, set to meet with European leaders and attend an emergency NATO summit, the goal to show that the world is united against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Bloomberg's political news director Jody Schneider with US Now, Jody, what are we expecting from this trip? What does President Biden want to convey Yeah, Emily. He wants. There's several main messages to look for from

President Biden now that he's in Brussels. One will be unity that NATO and UH and the European allies and the US and the UK are united in their denunciation of Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, and that they are doing what they can to try to stop it from going any further and to stop him UH from from uh you know, anything any gains he can

make there, and to punish him for this. UH. Biden also wants to show solidarity with the European countries that are taking in so far millions of refugees from Ukraine. More than three point three million UH Ukrainians have left their country for neighboring countries. More than ten million have left their homes. Obviously some sting in Ukraine, but they have they have had to leave their homes and their communities.

And so President Biden wants to make that clear UH that the US supports and and empathizes with this what will be a growing refugee crisis. Certainly, he wants to make the case for more sanctions. The US has had the toughest sanctions on oil because the US frankly imports the least amount of crude oil and petroleum products from Russia. European countries in a much more different situation, but the US wants to push them to do more on sanctions. So those will be the three messages you can look

for from the US president. Well, and how could we see the US step up sanctions and put pressure on Europe to step up sanctions. Yeah, so the US has already, you know, gone a long way towards sanctioning both uh, the oligarchs in Russia, and UH done things like you know, banned the import of Russian oil, Russian crude oil to

the US. However, they're taking more steps and UH, the National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said today the President Biden tomorrow at that summit and on Friday, will be announcing even more sanctions against oligarchs, against individuals as well as companies and other entities. So the US is trying to double down even more on those sanctions, even as Vladimir Putin continues to criticize them. And we will be seeing more. I think we will be seeing at least more verbal

um accusations made against Russia. President Biden before he got on the plane, when he was talking to reporters before he got on Air Force one or earlier today, said that he would not be prize. The Ladimir Protin was to use chemical weapons in Ukraine. So there will be a lot of warnings as well as talk about sections. All right, Bloomberg's Jody Schneider, thank you for that. Update

will continue to follow the president's trip in Europe. Meantime, insta Cart is launching a platform of services to sell to supermarkets, including fifteen minute delivery for grocery retailers and building warehouses to store products and manage picking, packing and delivery for supermarkets, a move that cements the company's turn into enterprise services. Under new CEO FJ Cmo, Insta Cart has been making multiple moves to strengthen the company's relationship

with grocers as opposed to just consumers. Coming up, they claimed to have hacked some of the biggest names in tech. We've got the latest on Lapses and how they've managed to preach so many large scale tech companies despite being described as laughable. That is next. This is Bloomberg the latest now on the evolving Opta breach the identity management company that many businesses use as a top line of cyber defense. The group behind the breach calls itself Lapsis,

and Bloomberg reports it has a murky background. For more, I'm joined by Bloomberg's Jack Gillum, who reports on cybersecurity for US. So Jack talked to us about what we've learned about LOPSIS in the last twenty four hours. We've heard laughable, We've heard the word murky. Who are they? So? This is a group Emily that has sort of breached, has risen up in the last year or two, according to certain experts that we've spoken with. Um, they've made

bigger splashes in the last few months. They operate on Telegram channels, which we might use to communicate with folks, but they used it to actually, uh, you know, brag about what they've been able to hack. Um. They're kind of an interesting group. Normally, when we think of these groups, we think of folks ransomware actors who take our data and encrypted and will offer to unlock it for us if we give them, you know, some sort of money

in exchange. UM. These folks instead will just release the data. UM. Now you know, we've talked about them being sort of laughably bad. That was one expert we we spoke to who studies this kind of stuff. Um, but you know, just like a broken clock is right twice a day. I mean, even idiots, he said, can do really bad things. Uh. In this case, they apparently had released the source code, some source code of being, which is Microsoft's signature search engine,

their mapping platform, their voice recognition software. Um. So you know, even if there are they might be you know, kids, they might be amateurs, they might not be nation state hackers. You know, given the right tools and opportunities, that could be pretty dangerous. Right. So they've hit Microsoft, as you say, they've been targeting Crypto, and of course this Octa breach.

Let's dig in to what exactly happened with Octa because Octa says the company itself was not breach, but due to a breach of a third party, three sixty six Octa customers were compromised. How serious is this and what does that actually mean? So to start from the beginning, Octa is what's called an identity management platform. That's just a fancy way of having a central place where you can log in, you know, putting your user name and password. We all do it for our jobs. Um, you know,

where you just have to put in your credentials. Your two factor authentication wants to get access to all sorts of things. So that essentially is like a mainline uh, you know, authentication to get into say a company web portal, um to get into a software developers back in you name it. Now, you know, it's only as the company says, two point five percent, but that's still hundreds of companies, you know, as you mentioned three hundred and sixty six.

And while we need to be careful here and appreciate that this investigation is ongoing, you know, the details are slowly coming out and we're understanding them. You know, at worst case scenario here, these attackers could get access to

these victims networks. So even though OCTA may in and of itself not have been breached, if these attackers were able to get sort of get into that authentication stream, you know, be able to get into uh one of their client's networks, they could pull out all sorts of data. And we don't know the extent of that yet, but I think that's going to be the big question as we go forward here so it does sound pretty serious. Indeed, and just to underscore this, you said LAPSES is not

a nation state tied hacking group. Does that mean this has no relation to potential Russian cyber attacks or the chaos going on in cyberspace right now as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It might not be emily. But we also need to realize, and this is to follow up on the you know, very not specific, but very repeated warnings by the US government and others that you know, Russia is looking for opportunities, they say, to access major companies and their networks in order to bring

them down, especially critical utilities. We saw and new Burger Um, the senior US official in charge of cyber Um, who made a very public plea about companies updating their security. Adding this what's called two factor authentication. So you might have a group of you know, a loose group of folks who are trying to infiltrate companies and steal their data.

But these two things aren't mutually exclusive. You still have what the government is calling this persistent threat of Russian nation states um and that companies need to do more in order to improve their security and keep themselves and their customers safe, all right, Bloomberg, Jack Gill and thanks for the additional details there. I do want to continue this conversation on cybersecurity and bringing Karen Martin. He is the former CEO of the UK's National Cybersecurity Center. He

is also the managing director at Paladin Capital Scarin. Thank you so much for joining us. You know, so far it seems we have seen a dearth of cyber attacks from Russian would be attacker since the war has started, would you agree and why is that? Well, thank you Emily for having me on. I think saying as a dearth of attacks might be taking it a little bit farther. Have been some quite important hacks. There was the hack of the VIAS satellite network, which according to the Ukrainian

Cybersecurity Agency, caused some quite serious disruption to communications. But that's the sort of thing we've seen from Russia before against Ukraine since hostility started, not on February twenty four, but with the annexation of Crimea, and I think a lot of people would have expected a serious intensification of

that and that hasn't happened yet. Why might that be, Well, it may be that the Russian cyber hackers weren't ready, like a lot of the Russian forces, maybe they weren't told And unlike some military operations, say flying a bombing squad over a city, and a sophisticated hack of a power grid of internet infrastructure actually takes a very long time to plan. That takes a lot of time, skill, resources, and a bit of luck. You have to remain under acted,

So maybe they weren't ready. Um Also, frankly, when you're in a state of full scale war, blowing something up is easier for the invader than doing a sophisticated cyber attack. So there are all sorts of reasons. But I think the sort of cyber war that we feared hasn't happened yet. But we're still in this crisis, and I think the President was right to sign the alarm the other night about what might happen because we need to be prepared.

So how serious that would you say? The threat is of Russian cyber attacks given so many of their resources have been focused on this physical invasion thus far, And if these cyber attacks do happen, how damaging could they be? So it depends on your starting point. If you subscribe to a kind of Hollywood version of cyber war where everything goes off at once, a normal life is completely blown apart. I don't think that's realistic. That's very hard to do, and it's extremely hard to do at scale.

And obviously, if you're in Ukraine, you're in fear of your life, your way of life, the survival of the country, and so they've got worse things to worry about the computer hackers, although they do have to try to defend their critical networks. But if you're looking at the risk to the West. We spoke earlier a little bit about

the sort of ransomware attacks and the criminal attacks. A lot of those happened out of Russia, and Russia has got both criminals and state workers who are very very good at hacking, and maybe they don't need to do the elitive level attack on a paragride or something to cause us real difficulties. Last year, Russian criminals attacked Colonial pipelines email systems and that caused the company to shut

down the pipeline, causing fuel shortages. And all the bunch of Russian criminals who've pledged support for a president Putin and his invasion last year attacked the Irish healthcare system and cause huge delayed cancer operations, anti natal services and so forth. So where those attacks to happen, I think there's a soft underbelly of a way of life that could be disrupted, not directly sort of fatal like a

military operation, and but it could be seriously disruptive. And that's why I think the authorities are right to sign the alarm. What kind of counterattacks are being waged by the United States and others around the world at this moment, Well, they don't say, so it's hard to know, and occasionally some operations get declassified. But I don't think we should think that we have some magic invisible weapon that can force Putain to change his mind. Otherwise we would have

used it by now. And I think if you look at it, So, let's take that operation against Irish healthcare, which was done by criminals for money. Will the United States towards allies who have been demanding that Russia ceases hostile cyber action against critical infrastructure. Would we disrupt the civilian healthcare system in Russia? Now it's technically possible, but are we going to do things to noncompetent Russian civilians that we're not prepared to do in the in the

in the physical world. Some of the activists that are working on behalf of the Ukrainians have been doing things like disrupting a bit of media and that has some tactical effect, but it's hard to see what strategic effect we have. I think there's an asymmetry here. We've got these highly digitized, vulnerable societies that are more digitally advanced than most of Russian civilian life. So some it's not

really a case of fighting cyber with cyber. The sanctions, the diplomatic pressure of the Army Ukrainians, those are always of pushing back, probably more than using cyber capabilities. Meantime, we are getting some headlines on the lapses the group that we believe hacked OCTA earlier this year, that a teenager is suspected by cyber research searchers of being the mastermind behind this operation, a teenager who still lives with

his mom in England. What's your take on what happened with OCTA quickly and if it has any ties to the chaos going on in cyberspace as a result of the war. But we're moving from the fog of war to the chaos of the Lapsis attack and who knows. There's no evidence I've seen of any connection to the war, so let's not jump to conclusions. Actually, it's a reminder that people can cause chaos and mayhem on the internet, even if they're not connected to politically motivated objectives, even

if some of their methods are laughable. So let's a critical reminder of vulnerabilities and need to clean up oor digital environment. Karen Martin, Paladin Capital Group Managing Director, really appreciate your expertise on this, Karen, thank you. At the Bloomberger Quality Summit, Visa chair and CEO L Kelly weighed in on the difficult decision to suspend operations in Russia. He also talked about how Visa is helping its employees

in both Russia and Ukraine take a listen. We have employees in both Ukraine and Russia, so this impacted us and in both countries, and from the beginning, our number one goal was to get as many people to safety who wanted to be The reality is today we have about sixty families, so we took care of children, in some cases mothers and fathers. Where we did send vans

through a couple of different security companies. Almost all our global security people are either in in Hungary or Poland right now, and we extracted people when we could, it's getting harder and harder to do. We have about a dozen people left in Kiev. It's gonna be hard to get them out at this point. Uh, most of our employees are on the scattered along the western coast, hoping to stay, hoping not to have to break up their

their families. UM. You know when I was in Poland, the one of that's when the the base twelve kilometers from the Polish border was bombed and one of our employees husband is in the army and she had been facetiming and with with him every day, and she went like half a day or three quarters of a day

without hearing from them. And right before I left Poland had to Dubai to see our Russian employees, she grabbed me and told me that she had gotten a text from him that he was alive, which at least is good news, but it shows the impact this is having, and we're equally committed to our Russian employees. We ended up UH two weeks ago shutting down or suspending our business in Russia. Not an easy decision, but a decision that was driven by three things. One is, with the

sanctions UH, it was getting increasingly difficult to operate. Number Two, the reality was that we we were, you know, concerned about this unprovoked war that had been UH put upon, thrust upon the people and in Ukraine. And number three, we thought that for the sake of everybody, that had orderly wind down of the business, where we weren't forced into it by another round of sanctions that might say, you know, immediately we have to shut down, was in

the best interests of everybody. And we subsequently UH made available to our Russian employees the ability to relocate, and if they relocated, we would give them a job. And in what is quite a statement, we had a town hold with them on a Sunday morning, and by that Wednesday, seventy of them and their families had already moved to

dubai Um. And today I believe that now I didn't get a briefing this morning, but last I knew we were somewhere in the neighborhood of about a hundred and twenty employees in their families said migrated UH to Russia. So we'll see what happens. You know, a lot of these folks are hopeful that they'll get back in weeks. I'm not sure that's going to be the case. I think this is going to be a prolonged battle. I think Putin underestimated the will and the skill of the

Ukrainian people. Visa Zeo L Kelly there well. Instagram will let users switch their feed so they can view the most recent posts first. This after years of complaints about the photo apps current ranking system that orders post based on user behavior. In a blog post, Instagram saying it wants people to feel good about the time they spend their giving them tools to shape their own experience. Welcome

back to Bloomberg Technology and Emily Chang. In San Francisco, Maderna says it's COVID nineteen vaccine produced a strong immune response in children under age six and initial results from a large final stage trial, but it showed only modest effectiveness in reducing omicron infections. Maderna will submit this data to regulators in the US and overseas as soon as possible.

I want to get more on this with Bloomberg's Drew Armstrong. Drew, what are we supposed to make of this efficacy data, and why has it been so hard to get this vaccine buttoned up for kids five and under? It's a really good question, you know. I mean, so what we know from this is that you do see this modest efficacy.

I think it's a forty three percent for kids UM six months to two years and thirty seven and a half percent for UM kids two to five, which is you know, so so it's below the f d a's kind of prior stated threshold about what they're looking for. I think, you know, there's a couple of pieces of good news when you dig deep into this one. You know, the antibody response that's kind of the immune system's initial defense, UM line of defense. Essentially, it looks similar to what

you see in adults. So that's good. UM. In terms of severe outcomes hospitalizations, deaths, it's inconclusive, and part of that is just because the trial is signed. I mean, those types of bad outcomes are so rare in kids UM luckily, that you actually would have to have a truly huge trial to be able to measure them. And you know, they did sixty undred children. I believe in this and saw you know, none of those severe events

in either groups. So it's just really really hard to get the data when you're looking for events that are that rare. Visor's vaccine for kids also has had some effectiveness problems. I mean, is there something about very young children that has made this more difficult or has it not been as higher priority? Yeah, you know, you look at the hospitalization rates for younger children. They're around one in a hundred thousand of the population at any given time.

That's substantially less than adults. I mean, it's I think it's about a twenty rate of adults, and so it's it's honestly, this comes down to it. It seems to be less about the actual vaccine itself. And really this is more of a statistics problem where you know, to get a result out of this, whether your visor or Maderna, you need some you know, meaningful number of kids to get sick enough to be hospitalized um in your placebo arm,

and then you know none in the vaccine arm. And because those events are so rare, and because you know you're you're doing this with only a few thousand kids, it becomes really hard to detect those in a way that is statistically meaningful, and so you run these trials, you see the antibody response that tells you that, hey, this looks like it works the same way it does in adults, and that's good news, and this should be

generally true for kids. But when you're looking for that type of real world efficacy where you need these real, really really rare events to happen in a defined population in a limited period of time, it's just really hard to get that and then not have it be statistical noise um And so I think that has really been the challenge. This is a trial design and stats problem. It doesn't seem to be as much um of a problem with the drugs themselves sort with the vaccines themselves,

but again, it's just really hard to measure. All right. Well, thanks for working through the complexities of all this as a mom with kids in that age group. Very anxious to see more progress here, Drew Armstrong, thank you. I want to continue the conversation out and talk about how

the pandemic has impacted the healthcare landscape. I want to bring in Tera this one often RUPA Health founder and CEO, along with tallya Goldberg partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, partners Roup of Health just raised twenty million dollars in their

series A led by Bessemer. Thank you both so much for joining us, Tara, I want to talk a little bit for us about what RUPA does that you focus on specialty lab tests, which, to be fair, you know, often get ignored by traditional doctors, to traditional Western medicine, they're not covered by insurance. What is the gap that RUPA is looking to fill here? Yeah, so the gap is really one piece of it is the type of

lab tests that we give doctors access to. So our platform allows doctors to have access to over three thousand different specially lab tests. And when we say that, we're talking about DNA testing, microbiome testing, advanced hormone panels and things like that. And so our broader mission is to make personalized root cause approach to met us and accessible

and available to every person on the planet. And you know, we can talk a little bit more about the gap and how we're being treated, but what's happening on a macro level is this shift towards patients demanding more holistic and personalized care. Talia, let's talk a little bit more about that. Obviously, you know some people are learning the hard way they need to take be their own advocates

when it comes to healthcare. You know, where do you see weaknesses in the health care system and how do you see this as an opportunity to address those I think, well, first off, thank you so much for having us on

the show. It's great to be here UM, and we're really excited to have let the series day and rub up because the shift that Tara just described, of the shift towards root cause health and personalized care UM, there's enormous consumer demand and there's been a lack of accessibility and availability for this sort of testing, some of which is newer, newer agnostics and newer types of tests that are emerging, things like genomics microbiome testing UM that we're

just starting to get really great data on and be able to use in a personalized and holistic manner. And as all of these specialty tests have emerged and there's growing demand and their importance in the landscape UM has swelled, there's been a challenge and actually accessing those tests and synthesizing what the data means and how to interpret the

diagnoses UM and actually taking action. And so that's where we see enormous potential for Ruba to make root cause care just normal healthcare, uh that every patient and every consumer has access to Tara healthcare, and our needs have evolved dramatically through this pandemic. I'm curious for your thoughts about where we are in this pandemic and the decision at this point to live with the virus but keep businesses, for example, open, even though we're not necessarily at the

final end. Is that really the right call. That's a tough question, and I think it's um it's tough for any one person to answer, and I think we're seeing that with the broader, broader government and state by state

regulations as well. I think one of the things that's been interesting in in our world, in our field is actually this potential like continuing epidemic of long COVID and how we're actually going to be treating that in the day to day because by this point, many people have actually experienced experience the disease, but they have they have not they have not been rid of all of the symptoms yet, and so one I think struggle we're going to have is how to actually treat all of these

people who are experiencing these long COVID symptoms, Talia, how do you think about that? I mean, obviously, you know we're in kind of a whole new world. We're gonna be living with an epidemic for potentially years. What does that mean from a healthcare perspective? And how is that influence where you and Bessemer are placing your bets. It's

had an enormous impact on the investment landscape. One of the major changes that has happened has obviously been the adoption and acceleration of at home testing, which plays in really well with a lot of the momentum that we see with Rupa health UM, as well as with the availability of telehealth and accessibility of that, and I think making again healthcare more affordable, more accessible UM, and more holistic, taking into account mental health, physical health, UM, and someone's

environment is is really important. And we're starting to really see the UM the potential of some of the new technologies and new models of care that are emerging really on display throughout COVID and that's what's been super exciting for us and has been behind a lot of our investments over the past two years. All very important UM. Tara vis Wanathan, Rupa Health founder and CEO along Talia Goldberg, partner at Bessemer, will keep our eye on you both.

Coming up where bitcoin goes from here? Speaking with Anthony pomp Liano also known as POMP, to talk about the crypto landscape, the war on Ukraine, and what institutional adoptive adoption of cryptocurrency looks like over the next few years. More on that next. This is Bloomberg time now for our crypto rapport with Bitcoin while staying in its range after breaking for a bit, not going much higher or lower, staying in that tight range ever since the start of

the year. Joining us now our crypto contributor sale Bostick with more shnale. Why isn't it breaking out? Yeah, that's that's really the real question here. We are back above for three hundred dollars, but we have been about in a fifteen thousand dollar range since the beginning of the year. Here we have not yet hit even the highs of this year. So the big question here is what will

give bitcoin another leg higher? One question that we will have answered by our next guest, Anthony Pompliano from POMP Investments. Thank you so much for joining us. What is keeping bitcoin from breaking out this year the way it had

last year. Yeah, one of the big things that is very obvious with bitcoin is that the supply demand, uh that mechanisms are very well understood, and so you can actually go ahead and check on the on chain metrics where the supply is and how a liquid and what we're watching is exactly what we actually saw in and then again in the summer right before the big run up, is that more and more long term holders are acquiring bitcoin, they're taking it off of exchanges, Miners are acquiring bitcoin,

they are not selling what they're mining, and so you're getting this highly illiquid supply that once a catalyst hits, regardless of what it is, whether it comes from the macro environment, whether it comes from a big buyer, bitcoin could be one of many many things that catalyst will go ahead and kind of ignite this underlying a liquid market, and I would expect to see a very big movement the bitcoin price. Now when that happens is the big question.

Will that happen in the coming weeks, will it take months to happen. Nobody knows. But whatever we get these lulls where people are to supply off the market, it's becoming highly liquid. That's where we see those parabox moves happen shortly afterwards. You know, I'm kind of curious, not just about liquid markets generally, I'm curious about the private

markets here. You had been tweeting about the board at yah Club Club creator you Go Labs raising four d fifty million dollars in the seed round, a big seed round. Why do you think that the private space is garnering so much money? And what do you think about the private valuations here? I think there's two things happening. One, if you're investing in bonds, you're losing. If you're holding cash, you're losing. So people have to go to the private market.

They have to push out on the risk curb. That's exactly what they're doing. The second thing is this is a generational trait. If you want to get asymmetric returns, you have to go and invest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You have to invest in the infrastructure, you have to invest in the liquid assets. And that's what every single great investor is doing. And so the ones that are still sitting out from this market, frankly, they're just going to be left behind. And I think that seeing this

foreigner fifty million dollar round is a perfect example. If you look at the Yuga Labs financials, their mind blow. These guys are operating with a margin, their company is less than two years old, and they've got nine figures of revenue. Anybody on the planet who would see those types of financial metrics would be excited about investing this type of business with this type of momentum. And so I think that there's plenty of people who point at

the industry, they laugh, they don't understand it. But what I do know is that the world's wealthiest people not the future wealthiest. The world's wealthiest people today are crypto investors. And my guess is that over time, the Force four hundred is gonna be dominated by bitcoin and crypto investors. And so if you want to be part of that,

you should get into the industry. Given the prominent role that crypto is playing in the war on Ukraine and especially in providing humanitarian aid along with President Biden's executive order, why don't you think bitcoin has broken out in a

bigger way? Well, Bitcoin's up twenty since Russia invaded Ukraine, and so ultimately people tend to look at since it's so volatile, it's hard to lose track of what's happened in just a matter of weeks, but it's it's outperformed in three other assets that people would look at in these types of scenarios, we just don't think about that has been trading in that range. And so I think that watching what has happened on the Ukraine situation is

a perfect example. The raised over a hundred million dollars from bitcoin and crypto investors around the world. That's more than most countries gave to Ukraine. And so when you start to see this, how you do it? They literally just posted a wallet address on the Internet, and that's just the donations directly to the government. As Alex glad Steams from the Human Rights Foundation pointed out, that doesn't even include the NGOs or any of the non government

type organizations that also got those donations. And so I ultimately think that what people are waking up to is these payment rails are superior to every other payment rail

in the world. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are good for business, and that's true for individuals, that's true for corporations, that's true for nation states, and whether we're talking about nation states like El Salvador, the United States, where the president and his administration is now said he wants to be a global leader, or we're talking about a country that is literally being invaded by a nuclear armed adversary. Every single person needs this technology, and if you don't adopt it,

somebody else will and you will be at a disadvantage. Now, to new investors, it's really bitcoin, evarium and everyone else. There are thousands of other cryptocurrencies out there. I recently spoke with Michael Saylor of micro Strategy, the world's biggest corporate holder of bitcoin as far as we know, and asked, if we're gonna see massive consolidation in this market, how many cryptocurrencies actually exist five years from now. Take a

listen to what he had to say. This is a rotation from an entrepreneurial driven industry to an institutionally driven industry. And we're sitting at this point where we're crossing the chasm, and the question is which and which on trepreneurs will be institutionalized income public. There will be a shakeout, and obviously crypto current sees are not going to be around here in a decade. What do you think the crypto industry looks like in five years, how many cryptocurrencies actually

survive and which ones are they? Yeah, look, I think that he's dead on right. Anytime you have brand new technology, have tons of intellectual capital and financial capital flowing into an industry like this, you're going to get a lot of folks who are experimenting. They're trying things, but the truth is that most of them don't last. And if we go back to the late nineties as an example, all the ideas were right straining music, food delivery, et cetera.

But those first iterations, most of them did not work, and it took another decade before the infrastructure was in place. People understand the technologies. There was the consumer behavior kind of transition, and I think the same thing is going to happen here now. The beauty of this is something like bitcoins, specifically as a digital currency. This is not

the first attempt at at this. For over forty years, the cipher punk movement has been trying to create digital currency, and finally on iteration eight nine ten, whatever Bitcoin ended up being now is actually struck and is receiving global adoption. The same thing is likely to happen in many of these other ideas is just gonna take a while for us to get there. So you're somebody that's moved to Miami, a place that you know, the mayor has been very

openly accepting cryptocurrencies in the community. To what extent pomp are you seeing other cities and states truly adopt cryptocurrencies as a form of payment, as a form of ways of accepting taxes, uh and welcoming some more of the community there. Yeah. Look, I think the Miami is the shining example of what freedom and leadership is in the United States today. This is the last place in the world where socialism is going to take hold. And I think that what we're watching play out here is a

resurgence in the fact that leadership does matter. And so what Mayor Swore has has done is he has taken a city that most people frankly didn't even know existed outside of Miami Beach and kind of the South Beast tourism area, and he has revitalized by putting a flag in the ground and basically promising one thing, I'm going you cheer for your success and do everything I can

to help you be successful. And the sad part is that that is a message that is exactly a hundred and eight degrees degrees different than most people have been hearing in places like New York City or in various cities across California. And so I think that bitcoin is a big part of that story, it's not the only part of the story. And what you're now watching is that politicians are realized, both at the local, state and federal level, that bitcoin is good for their campaigns, it's

good for business. I have had literally tens of different politicians who are running through various positions across the political spectrum in this next election reach out, and they're leading messages on pro bitcoin, on pro crypto. But that is no longer something that makes you stand out. If you are anti these technologies, you're basically going against tens of millions of Americans where they're choosing to store their Well,

you will not get elected. And if you're anti crypto and you're in a current seat, you will be voted out. And I think politicians are both looking at this as a curate and stick. It's a character because you'll get the support of the community if you're pro the technology, and it's a stick because if you are Antibeast Technologies, they'll meet you to death on Twitter and they'll chat alls. Alright, no room for interpretation there. Uh, Anthony pomp Liano Pomp,

as you're known from Pomp Investments. Thank you. Along with Shannali bask Let's talk China tech. Now. Ten Cent the latest company in China to embrace a new paradigm of stricter government oversight. Shares of the social media and gaming giant dropped after it posted single digit sales growth for the first time since listing in two thousand four. Now ten Cents saying it's time for an era of healthy growth are Ludlow joins us now to unpack at all that is a huge change. Ed, Yeah, it is, and

there's a lot going on right. Growth has slowed down. The advertising market is difficult. Ten Cent is a social media company. The gaming environment in China very hard, the regulatory crackdown as pause licensing. But the reality is what ten Cents saying is we can no longer basically fund losses through the capital markets and to drive that high

rate of growth. I mean, just look at that chart on your screen, and they're kind of acknowledging that in the environment, the Chinese government have put in place, there's a new normal, which is one that they play ball in and that it will actually help the company to be more stable, have stable, healthy growth as you put it in quoting the company, but he should also help stabilize margins too. So what comes next here? Could it be other companies saying they're also in for an era

of healthy growth? Yeah, I mean Ali Barber was kind of the first big of the tech giants in China to say, yep, we agree with this kind of position from the Chinese government of cracking down. Ten cents followed suit and in specific cases ten cents talking about working

much more closely with the government. So, for example, one bright spot for the business is it's fintech harm and you know they have known to make acquisitions, and they're talking about potentially having a separate financial holding company for that business, about working closer with the Chinese government. The other half is kind of the outlook, right, the Chinese government has changed its tune of late and been signaling they'll be more supportive that this crackdown on their tech

companies that's been going for a year could ease. So then what comes next, Well, they talk about working closely with the government on gaming for example, where they have a pipeline of games ready to go, but they've not been able to bring them to market because of the licensing holes. So it's a kind of old playball with the government, kind of game in the best interests of future growth, and you wonder what the additional pain points are.

Thank you that does it For this edition of bloomber Technology, join us tomorrow. We've been joined by Kathy Gao of Sapphire Ventures along with Ross Gerber talk all Things Disney, as well as Spencer Bogart of Blockchain Capital and don't forget to check out our new podcast. You can find it on the terminal of course, and with Apple, Spotify, I Heart, and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Emily Changing in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg