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Crypto Valley and the Crypto Oasis: Ralf Glabischnig

Having supported Zugs Crypto Valley in the early days and founded Crypto Oasis in Dubai to serve as blockchain innovations hubs with regulatory certainty,…

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Having supported Zugs Crypto Valley in the early days and founded Crypto Oasis in Dubai to serve as blockchain innovations hubs with regulatory certainty, Ralf Glabischnig is practically a node of the blockchain industry.

When Bitcoin companies began pouring into his small town in Switzerland in 2013, Ralf Glabischnig was an IT consultant turned entrepreneur running a coworking space. It helped turn the town into ground zero for some of the earliest crypto companies, the Ethereum Foundation among them.

Today, Glabischnig wears many hats, working across timezones to help build both Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates into regional powerhouses of the blockchain revolution. He holds decentralization dear to his heart of regulations, companies and power which he hopes will create an increasingly heavy counterweight to the powers that be.

 

 

Bitcoin citadels
Ralf Glabischnig works across timezones to transform Switzerland and the UAE into blockchain powerhouses.

 

 

Dubai

In many ways, Glabischnig sees places like Dubai and Zug as the long-foretold Bitcoin citadels of blockchain legend secure cities catering to the nouveau riche of cryptocurrency.

A few spots worldwide will attract the people who can afford it because its safe for their family and those people bring the business.

When it comes to Dubai as an emerging citadel of blockchain innovation, there is every reason to be optimistic. Last year, Glabischnig set a seemingly bold goal to see 1,000 blockchain companies in the UAE by the end of 2022 a 90% increase in one year but he now expects the number to be reached by summer. By comparison, Switzerland had 1,100 companies in 2021, after six years of being known as the Crypto Valley.

Glabischnig first visited Dubai in 1998. He recalls seeing the five- and six-story buildings going up in its internet and Media City district and wondering who would ever use them because no one was here. Hes been coming back annually since the early 2010s, now living between Switzerland and the UAE.

Switzerland has decentralization in its DNA, he says, explaining that tax structures are made locally, and the 26 Cantons administrative districts compete with one another to attract business. The consensus mechanism in Switzerland is very similar to how a decision is made in a blockchain network, he explains.

 

 

The DMCC Crypto Centre sits among the top floors of Almas Tower in Dubais Jumeirah Lakes Towers district, blocks away from journalist Elias Ahonens home. Photo by Elias Ahonen.

 

 

People see an overnight success in Dubai, but even an overnight success needs a few years of preparation, he adds.

Glabischnig, who has three children, explains that Switzerland and the Middle East have something in common security. In Dubai, you see people using their wallet to reserve a table while they go buy coffee you cant do that elsewhere, not even in Switzerland, he says.

 

 

 

 

There is a difference, however, with the inherent safety of Swiss society coming bottom-up from the grassroots level, whereas in the Middle East, it is derived from the top-down via strict laws and advanced surveillance. Integration and bureaucracy, however, can be particularly difficult for foreigners coming to Switzerland, while Dubai accepts all nationalities, and almost anyone can simply pay for a visa, he notes.

Seeing the city as a ripe cradle for innovation, Glabischnig began looking for partners in the Dubai blockchain community in 2016. He envisioned a hub where everyone comes together from the industry and says that Marwan Al Zarouni, now the head of the Dubai Blockchain Center, and Saed Al Darmaki, CEO of Sheesha Finance, were early participants in the local crypto scene.

We want to create a soccer field where the players congregate then we can see which players are good, which to invest in, and which to avoid because they are playing fouls.

Headquartered on one of the highest floors of the Almas Tower, the DMCC Crypto Center plays host to nearly 300 blockchain companies. For Glabischnig, it is the beating heart of the Crypto Oasis.

Glabischnig explains that while the idea of Crypto Valley encompasses both Switzerland and Lichtenstein with Zug as its heart, the Crypto Oasis consists of the entire Middle East, with Dubai at its center. And the very heart is DMCC with over 280 companies, but I believe it will grow out of Dubai and into other countries here like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, he adds excitedly.

The DMCC, or Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, is a free zone. This means that it exists under special legislation, with companies incorporated there enjoying unique regulations and special treatment, including 0% corporate tax. With crypto as its newest field, the DMCC has a long history as a global hotspot for companies trading gold, coffee and diamonds between the East and the West.

 

 

The DMCC Crypto Center provides many incentives for companies incorporating there. Source: DMCC

 

 

One factor influencing Dubais success in attracting new companies, according to Glabischnig, has been its soft response to the pandemic compared to peers such as Singapore or Hong Kong, which all but shut down for months on end. When you own the infrastructure, like Dubai owns the hotels, the airlines, the shopping malls and so on, then you think twice if you close it down, he spells out.

 

 

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Swiss time

Glabischnig lived in Germany for much of his career, during which he worked as a software consultant with consulting firms such as Accenture. In 2005, he accepted a job in Switzerland in order to gain experience as a project manager, moving to a small town with a beautiful lake called Zug. Glabischnig chose the city which he describes as a tax haven because it was halfway between his head office in Zurich and a major client in Lucerne. With his low salary, the tax rate did not move the dial, however.

In 2013, Bitcoin companies such as Bitcoin Suisse and Monetas began setting up in Zug owing to its regulatory flexibility. Back in the 1970s, Glabischnig explains, Zug started to grow wealthy due to the commodities business initiated by controversial Glencore entrepreneur Marc Rich, who was once indicted by United States authorities for breaking an embargo on Iranian oil. His business brought oil trading and even blood diamonds into the towns economy, he notes, and Zug has been open enough to give them space an openness that extended to Bitcoin, which, in 2013, still held a difficult reputation as a currency of the illegal drug trade.

 

 

A view of Zug. Source: PeakVisor

 

 

A big step in Zug becoming Crypto Valley was the Ethereum Foundation forming in Zug, he reasons, referring to the group headed by Vitalik Buterin, who later received an honorary doctorate from the nearby University of Basel. The idea of organizing the project as a foundation to serve as Ethereums global headquarters came from lawyer Luka Mller, a friend.

Mller had the idea to use the foundation system of Switzerland for blockchain projects, especially for layer-1 projects. I think this is the reason why we see a lot of the layer-1 blockchains set up in Switzerland as foundations, Glabischnig explains, adding that Mller was paid in ETH for the assistance he provided in 2014.

In 2014, Glabischnig and his business partner Marco Bumbacher created the Lakeside Business Center, a coworking space in the center of Zug. As the city gained a reputation as a blockchain hub, people started knocking on the door, asking if there were crypto companies here. Seeing the demand was there, Glabischnig decided to put together Crypto Valley Labs, a dedicated space for the new industry helping blockchain startups incorporate and settle into the Swiss surroundings.

We have not been the early innovators we have been the supporters of the innovators.

Crypto Valley

Before long, he became a founding member of the Crypto Valley Association, a local government initiative to promote the Canton of Zug as a node of the burgeoning global industry and the Swiss Blockchain Federation, which has similar aims for the country at large.

He played a key role in organizing a blockchain competition with a $100,000 prize, each year in a different category like banking, real estate, and insurance with related companies invited to join as sponsors and judges. We learned what the ideas in the blockchain space are through the contest, Glabischnig recounts, explaining that he went on to create CV VC (Crypto Valley Venture Capital) to strategically invest in the industry.

We saw that there is something else to invest in than just equity there are these tokens, and we began investing in small amounts.

In 2017, these contests evolved into Blockchain Summit Crypto Valley, the first of its kind in Switzerland. This being the time of the ICO hype, Glabischnig recalls that not only did participants pay to attend, but companies also paid to exhibit and reserve speaker slots, which did not quite sit right with him. Everyone was paying to be at these events this was a sign of big hype, he reasons.

With hype came opportunity. The years that followed saw him play an increasingly influential role not only in organizing the industry from afar but also in being an entrepreneur. He is a founder and remains on the boards of ProofX, Inapay, GenTwo Digital and Tokengate and serves as a managing partner of Inacta. Glabischnigs workdays span 18 hours, he tells me.

 

 

 

 

The internet era

Though Glabischnig came from what he describes as simple family circumstances in Austria, he was given one luxury: an Amigo 500 computer, about which he had been reading for months to the extent that he knew everything in detail before even opening the box. He put his skills to use in 1993, aged 16, with a business of creating flyers and later websites.

In 1995, he went to technical school to study software development and economics, the former thanks to his passions and experience, and the latter because he wanted to understand how to reach economic success beyond his childhood environment. I needed a keyboard, he notes, due to his bad handwriting. In those days, he describes, the internet was very slow, and one had to dial in using special hardware a modem. Back then, people were still figuring out what the internet could be used for. The first thing we did was download pictures of Samantha Fox, Glabischnig recalls of his early activities online.

I came to the first internet era, and I like to compare this to the blockchain era today.

Glabischnigs career began with a very boring problem the year-2000 problem at various banks and insurance companies, as he recounts his first job as a software developer at a consulting company. This problem, also known as Y2K, came about as the turn of the millennium approached, and computer programs were not configured to count years beyond 1999, leading to fears of a societal meltdown.

 

 

Glabischnig at the DMCC Crypto Center. Photo by Elias Ahonen

 

 

He soon began working on optimizing data transfers between organizations, including with a teledata system by which companies could automatically exchange information with the Swiss government. What interested Glabischnig about B2B data exchange at the turn of the millennium is also what interests me today in the blockchain space over 20 years later. He sees this trend as the Internet of Value. While the Internet of Things involves all types of items connecting to the internet, the Internet of Value means that we are putting every object that has value on the blockchain, he says with confidence. This might well mean a tokenization of everything.

Having moved away from the consulting world, Glabischnig is more fulfilled by what he calls venture building, something hes been able to take part in as part of his venture capital role. In IT consulting, you give advice and get paid, and if the customer isnt doing what you told them to, you dont get to wrestle, he says with a laugh, as he goes on to elaborate:

Im always very open to invite people to work together, and I try to make small organizations because he finds companies of around 20 people to be nimble, effective and a decentralizing counterbalance to the giants of Silicon Valley.

I dont like the centralization of power in Silicon Valley. Thats the reason I dedicate my time to building Crypto Valley and Crypto Oasis to bring some of it back.

 

 

 

 

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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Spread & Containment

Another beloved brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The beer industry has been devastated by covid, changing tastes, and maybe fallout from the Bud Light scandal.

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Before the covid pandemic, craft beer was having a moment. Most cities had multiple breweries and taprooms with some having so many that people put together the brewery version of a pub crawl.

It was a period where beer snobbery ruled the day and it was not uncommon to hear bar patrons discuss the makeup of the beer the beer they were drinking. This boom period always seemed destined for failure, or at least a retraction as many markets seemed to have more craft breweries than they could support.

Related: Fast-food chain closes more stores after Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The pandemic, however, hastened that downfall. Many of these local and regional craft breweries counted on in-person sales to drive their business. 

And while many had local and regional distribution, selling through a third party comes with much lower margins. Direct sales drove their business and the pandemic forced many breweries to shut down their taprooms during the period where social distancing rules were in effect.

During those months the breweries still had rent and employees to pay while little money was coming in. That led to a number of popular beermakers including San Francisco's nationally-known Anchor Brewing as well as many regional favorites including Chicago’s Metropolitan Brewing, New Jersey’s Flying Fish, Denver’s Joyride Brewing, Tampa’s Zydeco Brew Werks, and Cleveland’s Terrestrial Brewing filing bankruptcy.

Some of these brands hope to survive, but others, including Anchor Brewing, fell into Chapter 7 liquidation. Now, another domino has fallen as a popular regional brewery has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Overall beer sales have fallen.

Image source: Shutterstock

Covid is not the only reason for brewery bankruptcies

While covid deserves some of the blame for brewery failures, it's not the only reason why so many have filed for bankruptcy protection. Overall beer sales have fallen driven by younger people embracing non-alcoholic cocktails, and the rise in popularity of non-beer alcoholic offerings,

Beer sales have fallen to their lowest levels since 1999 and some industry analysts

"Sales declined by more than 5% in the first nine months of the year, dragged down not only by the backlash and boycotts against Anheuser-Busch-owned Bud Light but the changing habits of younger drinkers," according to data from Beer Marketer’s Insights published by the New York Post.

Bud Light parent Anheuser Busch InBev (BUD) faced massive boycotts after it partnered with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. It was a very small partnership but it led to a right-wing backlash spurred on by Kid Rock, who posted a video on social media where he chastised the company before shooting up cases of Bud Light with an automatic weapon.

Another brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Gizmo Brew Works, which does business under the name Roth Brewing Company LLC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 8. In its filing, the company checked the box that indicates that its debts are less than $7.5 million and it chooses to proceed under Subchapter V of Chapter 11. 

"Both small business and subchapter V cases are treated differently than a traditional chapter 11 case primarily due to accelerated deadlines and the speed with which the plan is confirmed," USCourts.gov explained. 

Roth Brewing/Gizmo Brew Works shared that it has 50-99 creditors and assets $100,000 and $500,000. The filing noted that the company does expect to have funds available for unsecured creditors. 

The popular brewery operates three taprooms and sells its beer to go at those locations.

"Join us at Gizmo Brew Works Craft Brewery and Taprooms located in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Find us for entertainment, live music, food trucks, beer specials, and most importantly, great-tasting craft beer by Gizmo Brew Works," the company shared on its website.

The company estimates that it has between $1 and $10 million in liabilities (a broad range as the bankruptcy form does not provide a space to be more specific).

Gizmo Brew Works/Roth Brewing did not share a reorganization or funding plan in its bankruptcy filing. An email request for comment sent through the company's contact page was not immediately returned.

 

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