SnowFlake Strong Rebound, Stablecoin crosses $10 Bn., Roku Strong Momentum
Snowflake, a company with its head in the clouds as 1st Quarter of 2021 brought its share of tough months for most tech companies like SNOW.
1. Snowflake Strong Rebound Ahead
This week, Snowflake, Inc. (SNOW) has experienced fluctuations in its value over the past eight months, despite overall solid earnings and a rebound in the past few weeks. Although the company has underperformed the S&P 500, declining approximately 6.1% compared to the S&P’s gain of about 23.9%.
Snowflake provides software solutions to customers worldwide and is known for its data warehouses, database architecture, and query optimization. After an impressive initial public offering in 2020, Snowflake continued an upward climb. However, while the company continues to expand its customer base, the shares fell sharply.
After hitting record highs in 2020, so far, 2021 brought its share of tough months for Snowflake. However, hedge funds are still buying, and analysts are optimistic for the long-term future. Year-over-year growth is anticipated to continue, and a strong market for cloud services is encouraging for patient investors.
2. The Stablecoin Market Is Booming
According to The Block, The global stablecoin market has increased 10x in the last 12 months, crossing $100 billion in total market cap.
Stablecoins like Singular Dollar, crypto assets which track the price of fiat currencies, offer users a familiar unit of account to facilitate transactions on open blockchains. As a result, their role in trading on and between crypto exchanges has increased dramatically, particularly outside the US, we believe for several reasons: limiting the need for access to US bank accounts, offering near instant settlement, and subjecting transactions to fewer regulatory requirements. In fact, recently stablecoins have outpaced the USD and bitcoin in pair trades on exchanges globally.
Often issued as tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, stablecoins also are enabling decentralized finance. Today, stablecoins account for a majority of assets in Compound’s decentralized lending market which offers deposit yields much higher than those available in the traditional financial system.
As stablecoin market caps scale, competition among their issuers appears to be intensifying. Tether dominated the early stablecoin era but is losing share to newer entrants such as USDC which has been issued by companies such as Coinbase and promises a higher level of regulatory compliance and integration into the existing financial system.
3. Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed
This week, researchers at Stanford University performed the study on a 65-year-old man with a spinal cord injury who had had an electrode array implanted in his brain. Imagine if you could write-by-hand faster than imagining moving a cursor in a new BCI (Brain-Computer-Interface) system.
A brain-computer interface (BCI) allows individuals to control computers with their minds. In a BCI experiment at Stanford, researchers doubled the speed at which a paralyzed individual typed, from 9 to 18 words per minute, the speed at which people write by hand. Previous BCI experiments instructed participants to imagine moving cursors and selecting letters on keyboards. The Stanford experiment asked a participant to imagine writing letters with his hand and then used neural networks to decode his brain waves. The system worked better because each handwritten letter is unique and “has a different pen trajectory,” allowing neural nets to decipher intended letters more easily. This experiment demonstrates that humans and neural networks can and should work together.
The experiment also could help accelerate the development of BCI at Neuralink. Neuralink is increasing the number of implantable brain electrodes by an order of magnitude, adding dramatically to BCI possibilities.
4. Roku Strong Momentum with Substantial Growth
Roku Inc (ROKU) saw substantial growth over the past six months. The digital media and streaming pioneer had a corrective pullback for the past few months but saw hedge funds buying. Overall, Roku outperformed the S&P 500, rising by approximately 146.9% compared to the S&P’s gain of about 28.6% since the beginning of 2020.
Roku manufactures streaming media players and television-related audio devices, providing marketing services that allow advertisers to engage consumers. Roku offers access to streaming media content from various online services such as Netflix and Disney Plus. Roku’s television (TV) models are also available through licensing arrangements. Roku offers several free TV and movie channels, including its namesake, the Roku Channel. Roku continues to benefit from the accelerated consumer shift to streaming that occurred during the coronavirus pandemic. As coronavirus vaccinations increase and the economy continues to open, we remain cautious of the impact on the streaming entertainment factor as travel is Increasing as people become fully vaccinated.