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The NFT market crash has a long tail. In the late 2010s, crypto enthusiasts and web3 advocates celebrated the arrival of digital art. Non-Fungible Tokens, they argued, could offer the permanence and investment value of a traditional painting. Not anymore: even amid President Trumps memecoin surge, NFT valuations continue to hit new lows. The market has been in free fall for nearly two years, with no bottom in sight. While NFTs may be dead, NFT lawsuits are alive and well. Corporate suppliers are beginning to regret their blockchain experiments. The NFT lawsuit boom Most recently, buyers of Nikes NFTs sued the retailer for $5 million. Nike had acquired the virtual sneaker shop RTFKT in 2021, generating nearly $200 million in NFT sales. But in 2024, Nike began winding the operation down. The lawsuit alleges that the shutdown destroyed demand for RTFKTs NFTs, effectively causing “the rug to be pulled out from under” buyers, according to Reuters. Some RTFKT NFTs even briefly displayed error messages during the turmoil. The online sportsbook DraftKings also ventured into the NFT space, only to shut down its Reignmakers NFT marketplace in July 2024. Meanwhile, a 2023 lawsuit alleged that DraftKings sold NFTs as unlicensed securities, reaping the full benefit of initial sales and a 5% commission on secondary sales. That case has since been settled, with DraftKings agreeing to pay out $10 million in February to those who purchased NFTs between 2021 and the shutdown. NFT buyers have also gone after the celebrities who hawked their fast-declining digital assets. Shaquille ONeals 2023 lawsuit recently concluded, with the former NBA player agreeing to pay out $11 million (plus $2.9 million in attorneys fees) to buyers of his Astrals Project NFTs. Meanwhile, the MAGA-friendly Nelk Boys are still battling their own lawsuit, which claims the YouTubers promised additional perks with their NFT sales that were never fulfilled. For corporations and celebrities, NFTs were a side business. But for companies dedicated solely to producing digital assets, these lawsuits are far more threatening. Dapper Labswhich partners with companies like Disney and the NFL to build branded NFTsrecently settled for $4 million over claims that its NBA Top Shot moments were unregistered securities. Yuga Labs, meanwhile, has been stuck in court for years fighting copyright battles over its Bored Ape Yacht Club. Recently, it even petitioned for access to a copying artists crypto wallet. How NFTs became a bad corporate bet Just a few years ago, major companies from Nike to Coca-Cola were racing to launch web3 ventures. Some are still ongoing; many have flamed out. And with the barrage of lawsuits now hitting NFT suppliers, these blockchain bets are looking increasingly risky. They may also fail to deliver value. NFTs were meant to serve as brand extensionsespecially for luxury companies, which sold highly expensive goods in digital form. But according to a recent study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, NFT availability may actually have a negative effect on consumer sentiment. The researchers found that for goods with web3 iterations, the physical counterparts were perceived as less luxuriousand thus less worth spending on. NFTs have lost their value to major companies. Theyre not effective brand extensions, theyre not sustainable investments, and theyre barely even good cash grabs anymore. All theyre left with is a mess of lawsuits.
Category:
E-Commerce
Billionaire entrepreneur, NBA owner, and CEO of Wonder Marc Lore reveals that he plans all his meals with AIand he loves it. Its just one part of his vision for transforming peoples relationship to food and health. His startup, Wonder, has already acquired Blue Apron, Grubhub, and the media brand Tastemade. Lore shares how these acquisitions and embrace of personalized AI-driven dining are all laddering up to a superapp for mealtime. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. How do you describe what Wonder is? At the core, Wonder is a vertically integrated food-delivery platform. So think Grubhub, but we actually own the restaurants. So we both do the delivery, we own the restaurants, and we cook the food. That enables us to have a superior delivery experience. So out of a single, 2,800-square-foot kitchen, we can cook 30 different restaurants across 30 different cuisines, so everything from a high-end steakhouse, Bobby Flay Steak, José Andrés, Spanish tapas, burgers, barbecue, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Middle Eastern, Thai, 30 different cuisines with only two pieces of electric cooking equipment. It’s set up more like a micro-fulfillment center. All the food is fresh and it’s cooked to order. How does one kitchen offer hundreds of menu items and operate with as few as two staffers? You’re not reheating frozen food. So are you using different kind of equipment, different kind of processes, all of that? Yeah, it’s different equipment, different processes. The proteins are sous vide, so they’re par-cooked. They sit in a tank of hot water. Restaurants do something similar, but we do that ahead of time so we’re able to finish a steak in six minutes to perfect temp every time. We’re able to cook a pizza in 90 seconds. We can cook pasta without water. We’ve invented new ways of cooking food where we can replicate the quality, but also do it with a lot less labor. And the benefit for consumers is being able to order from multiple restaurants in a single delivery so you can order from five different restaurants and get it all delivered hot in under 30 minutes. When I asked you how you describe what Wonder is, I was curious which direction you were going to go in because your history and part of Wonder is sort of the tech side, and there’s been talk about being a superapp, which is kind of a buzzy term these days. So can you square those things for me? The bigger vision is a superapp for mealtime, meaning all the ways in which a consumer might want to consume food. It could be first-party through Wonder, it could be from your local restaurant delivered via Grubhub, it could be a meal kit from Blue Apron, it could be groceries, it could be even restaurant reservations, so all the ways in which you eat. The reason why we want to capture all those occasions is because we’re building this AI-based platform wrapper around it that’s going to, in the future, be able to autonomously feed you according to your budget and health goals. Autonomously feed you. So I’m not going to decide what it is I want to eat. The AI is going to tell me what I want to eat or what I should eat? AI will learn your food preferences better than you do yourself and that you’ll be happy to rely on AI. So personally, now about 90% of my meals are all AI derived. So AI tells me what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That’s the oatmeal that I was explaining to you this morning. I should ask you to tell everybody what you had for breakfast this morning. You told me this story before I started recording, and I was compelled by the specificity of it. It was steel-cut oatmeal with fivenot four, not sixfive raw walnuts, two tablespoons of flaxseed, two tablespoons of chia seed, half a banana, and half a teaspoon of cinnamon. It’s your custom recipe. But just because that’s what you had today doesn’t mean that that’s what AI’s going to tell you to have tomorrow. No, but I rate it very highly, so AI does know I do like to eat that, so I do get that quite often. I basically get my blood work done. I have my Oura ring, my blood glucose monitoring, all the blood results, all the biomarkers, all the data gets fed to AI. I set health goals, and based on the health goals and based on the foods I love, it basically tells me, Okay, well then eat this for breakfast, eat this for lunch, eat this for dinner. In the future, if I go out to a restaurant for dinner, AI will be able to tell me what to order off the menu because now we have 375,000 menus via Grubhub. So that’s the future. It’s pretty technocratic though, right? A lot of people take joy in sort of choosing what to eat, or being . . . I don’t know, trying something different that maybe they didn’t know they liked. I mean, based on my own personal experience, I love it. I can’t imagine having to think about what I want to eat because it knows the ingredients you like and so it comes up with different meals that are new and you’re like, “Wow, I never even thought about eating this,” and then you wind up liking it, so the variety’s there. It remembers every great meal you’ve ever had. So if I rated something 9.5 six months ago, I forgot it two weeks later. AI doesn’t forget. And so these great dishes get rotated. If you leave it up to me, I’m thinking of the same three things, probably what I had yesterday or the day before, and maybe a couple other things. The brain, it’s not good at remembering all the great meals you’ve ever had, but AI doesn’t forget. So think about it not as a computer telling you what to do, but it’s really a better version of yourself. It’s sort of like if you could capture the best of your brain’s abilities to think about food, that’s AI. And when you talk to the celebrity chefs you deal with, José Andrés or Bobby Flay or Marcus Samuelsson, and you tell them this story, are they like, “Oh, that’s great,” or are they like, “Well, wait a minute, that’s what we bring to it? No. I mean, it doesn’t change. hink about it. You could as an artist, as a creative, as a chef, create a bunch of dishes that you hope resonate with people, and then each individual person’s AI is going to have different preferences, and it’s going to prefer certain meals over others. So nothing changes. The creative canvas is still necessary. It’s still valuable. It doesn’t change that at all. What it does change is having to go to a restaurant and having to spend time, look at the menu, look at everything. I mean, it’s just, boom, there it is, get this. AI knows you better than your partner or better than your best friend. You might have biomarkers that have issues. I had low iodine, I had high mercury. I don’t have to think about it. AI is giving me kelp to fix my iodine. I’m not getting tuna because I have high mercury. It’s taking care of all these health issues in the background without having to think about it. So it’s like my personal food critic and my personal doctor working together to give me what’s ideal. It’s really fascinating because it’s able to fix your health issues but still get good scores. So number one, you have to love the food. Okay. Now, given the foods you love, AI, you have to now make Marc healthy. And so AI does these little things, and I see it trying things that are a little bit more healthy, and I give it a bad rating. It’s like, “Okay, he doesn’t want to. . . . That’s too healthy for him,” right? And so it’s found a really nice happy medium now where I love every meal, and I’ve never been healthier, and I’m not having to think about what I want to eat. I don’t spend any time on it. I sit down. It’s a great meal. I mean, this is the future.
Category:
E-Commerce
As Americans are having fewer babies, the White House has been gathering ideas on what can be done to increase the birth rate. The New York Times reported that one of the ideas is a $5,000 baby bonus to entice women to have more babies, received after delivery. Other ideas being entertained to start a baby boom include: reserving 30% of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious, government-backed international fellowship, for applicants who are married or have children; government-funded programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles, so we understand when we ovulate and conceive; and a National Medal of Motherhood awarded to mothers with six or more children. While President Trump and his administration want a baby boom, none of these ideas address the root causes of why Americans arent having babies and why the annual birth rate is at a record low. Mothers don’t need a medal, they need meaningful family policies. If Trump truly wants a baby boom in his administration, heres what the government can focus on delivering for all Americans: better maternal healthcare, national paid leave, affordable childcare including not ending Head Start, better public education including not closing the Department of Education, safer schools,and a better cost of living for all. And sure, the government alone cant solve this problem. As the Edelman Trust Barometer survey reminds us that trust in government continues to decline, business continues to be the default solution for societal issues because it is seen as outperforming government on competence. The pressure on business leaders to step upincluding from their own employeesshows no sign of disappearing, particularly when it comes to how to best support employees and their families. Private-company based solutions to public policy shortcomings will leave millions of Americans out, but its still in business owners’ interests to support the working parents they employ (both moms and dads). In our workplaces, heres a reminder of what leaders can begin to do to help all parents start and expand their families: Support employees with buying their first home One factor in the decline of U.S. birth rates is lack of affordable housing. According to a Clever Real Estate study, 70% of Americans are afraid of an impending housing market crash. And 32% of Americans are afraid they won’t be able to make housing payments as a result of todays economy. Middle-class families in half in less than half of the U.S. can afford an average priced home. And If you cant afford a home, you may be less likely to want to start a family. Heres where leaders can step in: Offer resources and support your employees ability to purchase their first home. Partner with companies like Multiply Mortgage, a Denver based-company that offers employees one-on-one sessions with mortgage advisers, employee education sessions around the home purchase and financing process, and mortgage interest rate discounts of up to .75%. The company partners with a network of 15 to 20 lenders to access discounted interest rates. Homeownership has become increasingly out of reach for many Americans, and we dont expect interest rates to fall to the levels we saw in 2020 ever again, shares Michael White, cofounder and CEO of Multiply Mortgage. White says companies work with them with zero cost to the employer, other than low administrative cost to promote the benefit internally to employees. For leaders, this can be a win-win. Employees who own their home and put down roots into a community are far less likely to leave your company and relocate somewhere else. Partner with other companies to solve the childcare crisis A recent Lendingtree study showed that it costs close to $300,000 to raise a child in the U.S. today, from the time they are born until they turn 18 years old. Costs have jumped 35.7% versus when the study was conducted in 2023. One of the biggest drivers of costs continues to be childcare, which is close to $18,000 a year. In places like the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and Hawaii, the cost is closer to $25,000 a year. A $5,000 baby bonus (which may also be taxed) would hardly make a dent in that cost. According to a recent HiBob report, only 15% of companies surveyed provide childcare-related benefits. Leaders can step into help solve another root cause then it comes to why Americans are having less babies: the childcare crisis. Employees need to be able to afford childcare, and have access to reliable, safe options so they can be fully present to contribute at work. Companies can partner with local childcare providers and negotiate a group discounted rate for their employees. They can also partner with Bright Horizons and bring a corporate day care to their location, and help fund the costs. If you cant afford the cost on your own, and are worried about low utilization rates, find other companies to partner with you to build a daycare center in a location that all employees can access. Finally, you can provide a caregiver stipend to employees so that they can use that to pay family members or friends to help take care of their children. For leaders, this can be another win-win. Employees who can be fully present at work, and not worry about whether their children are being well taken care of, are able to make an impact. And we know there are limits to linking childcare coverage to a job. The most important thing an employer can do is to let their employees know they support their roles as parents, by offering support with childcare, and other related benefits, and most importantly, providing them flexibility to be there for their children as needed. Remember to focus on parental leave, not maternity leave The U.S. still remains one of only seven countries that doesnt guarantee any paid family leave. If companies are busy lobbying the U.S. government about lowering tax rates, preventing regulations, drug pricing, fossil fuel incentives, data privacy, and more, they should add paid family leave to that list. Until then, the burden remains on companies to offer leave to parents and help fill this societal gap. As I discuss in my book, Reimagine Inclusion: Debunking 13 Myths to Transform Your Workplace, when we dont offer parental leave, and focus only on maternity leave, we put the burden on mothers to constantly be the primary caregiver. Ill never forget working for a leader who didnt want to create a parental leave policy. His response to me was, Why do we need to give dads time off when they have a kid? Its the mom doing all the work, and the dad is on the golf course using this as vacation time. He needs to be back in the office. According to research from the brand Dove Men + Care, giving fathers time to bond with their child not only helps the other parent, but also later on, can lead to better behavioral outcomes when the child is in school. Fathers who are close to their children are healthier, and have stronger and happier marriages with their partners. In Sweden, the data shows that for each additional month of paid parental leave taken by the father increases the mothers earnings by 6.7%. Imagine the positive ripple effect this can have on our society. Finally, the stereotypes about fathers not helping when a child is born and playing golf, or not being lazy or useless or not good at parenting is not only damaging to fathers, but also to mothers. Its up to all of us to shatter these stereotypes. Leaders need to support more men in taking parental leave, leaving work early to take their kid to doctors appointment to attend that school play, and being a public role model when it comes to all things parenting. And men who are leaders should be doing it themselves. If we want more women to become mothers, we cant leave fathers out of the equation. If the government refuses to address the declining U.S. birth rates with solutions that address the root cause, businesses will need to step up to support parents. Creating a society where we can start and expand our families and support both children and parents is best for everyone.
Category:
E-Commerce
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