#336: Circle’s New Partnership With Block’s TBD Should Provide Broad Access To Stablecoins, & More

During its Converge22 Conference in San Francisco last week, Circle announced a new partnership with Block’s bitcoin-focused subsidiary, TBD, to bring stablecoins to users globally.

Initially launched as an open platform to help developers interface directly with cryptocurrencies, TBD will collaborate with Circle to build out infrastructure enabling developers and wallet providers to engage directly with native protocols powering stablecoins, including the on-ramps and off-ramps between traditional fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

“The U.S. dollar is the reserve currency today, and we think bitcoin might be the reserve currency of tomorrow. Stablecoins are the bridge in between,” stated TBD Chief Operating Officer Emily Chiu during the announcement.

To meet the partnership’s first milestone, TBD will support cross-border remittances and digital wallets that hold stablecoins, a promising sign for crypto adoption in emerging markets. In low- and middle-income countries dependent on remittances, we believe cryptocurrencies have the potential to lower transaction costs considerably from the current 6% average remittance cost to a few basis points. With the introduction of stablecoins, users should be able to lower not only costs but also volatility.

Among other stablecoins, we believe Circle’s USDC, the second largest stablecoin by market capitalization, is likely to facilitate a bridge for cross-border payments. Likewise, Block should be able to leverage stablecoins as it builds out its services in emerging markets.

Last Thursday, Meta Platforms published research detailing its new in-house artificial intelligence (AI) model that generates video footage from text input. While this year’s release of DALL·E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion represents meaningful progress in text-to-image modeling, research on text-to-video generation has lagged, perhaps because of the scarce supply of large-scale datasets pairing video with descriptive text. According to new research by Meta, the Make-A-Video model circumvents the obstacles by using existing text-to-image model frameworks in conjunction with unsupervised learning on unpaired video data. Combining the two approaches, Meta enabled its text-to-image model to learn realistic motion, allowing Make-A-Video to produce short videos without audio.

Meta’s website illustrates different ways for users to interact with Make-A-Video, not only generating variations on user-inputted videos but also specifying video styles––”surreal”/ “realistic” / “stylized”––and inferring motion based on users’ static images or image pairs. While the commercialization of synthetic video is at an early stage, the pace of AI research has advanced significantly this year. Make-A-Video seems to have many use cases, from digital video art to the facilitation of digital ad synthesis. That said, Meta has yet to release Make-A-Video to the public who will battle test it.

Last week, Prime Medicine, which houses the intellectual property (IP) for prime editing based on a granted USPTO [1] patent, filed an S-1 [2] ahead of its forthcoming initial public offering (IPO).

Prime editing adds new functionality to the CRISPR-Cas9 protein and is the most recent gene-editing technology to emerge from Dr. David Liu’s laboratory at the Broad Institute, Harvard University, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

In living cells, prime editing can copy parts of a DNA sequence into a targeted site without cutting the DNA’s double strand, or double helix. Double-strand DNA breaks can cause uncontrolled “indels”––insertions or deletions––as well as cell changes like translocations, p53 activation, chromothripsis, and other deletions at the target site. Like base editing, its predecessor, prime editing avoids these undesired outcomes.

In prime editing, the “Prime Editor Guide RNA” (pegRNA) guides the Cas9 protein to the correct DNA sequence and specifies which part of the edited sequence should be inserted. Then, the disabled Cas9 protein nicks one strand of the DNA. Then, the engineered reverse transcriptase fuses to the Cas9 protein and copies the edited sequence into the cell host’s DNA at the nicked target site. The cell then incorporates the edited DNA sequence into its genome, creating a permanent change. Because researchers can direct any sequence with dozens of nucleotides to replace the starting sequence, prime editing appears to be more precise and versatile than CRISPR-Cas9, which disrupts genes but does not correct them.

Prime editing could be a tremendous step forward for gene editing and its ever-growing toolbox of capabilities. We look forward to further updates from Prime Medicine.

[1] United Sates Patent and Trademark Office.
[2] S-1: The registration filed with the SEC when a company goes public.