It’s beginning to look a lot like… Netflix is switching from “Netflix & Chill” to “Netflix & Get Fit”. And that’s great news because it might encourage all the coach potatoes - who spent on average over 3h on Netflix - to get up & take care of their health!

No worries, we have some more, including Twitter updates. Here’s the agenda for today. Hope you will enjoy it! 🧡💚

1. What’s buzzin’ in marketing?

2. Vitalik eyes 3 opportunities for crypto in 2023

3. SBF released on $250 million bail

4. Tough times for Bitcoin miners!

5. Visa explores auto-payments for crypto wallets

🛒 What’s buzzin’ in marketing?

1. Netflix has officially entered the fitness streaming market with a new partnership with Nike Training Club. The ultimate goal is to encourage Netflix users, who spend on average 3.2 hours watching content, to exercise and move around. Of course, the aim is also to extend the time spent with Netflix and attract new users during the New Years’ resolution goals planning. The first batch of Nike-branded content will launch on December 30th and will include 5 curated sessions with 46 classes in total:

   1. Kickstart Fitness with the Basics

   2. Two Weeks to a Stronger Core

   3. Fall in Love with Vinyasa Yoga

   4. HIT & Strength with Tara

   5. Feel-Good Fitness

2. Since we are at Netflix - the latest report by Antenna shows that only 9% of new US subscribers opted in for the ad-supported tier in November. That’s a really modest start compared to the 15 percent of new signups that reportedly opted for competitor HBO Max’s ad-supported subscription during its launch month in 2021.

3. What’s up with Twitter? Let’s digest the three big updates:

   1. Vox populi made Elon Musk step down as a CEO. There is no “foolish enough” successor to take his place yet, but Mr. Beast looks like a good candidate to Musk. What we know is that Musk is considering changing how Twitter polls work so that only Twitter Blue subscribers can vote. How democratic!

   2. Twitter is rolling out View Count, so users can see how many times a tweet has been seen. When it comes to how views will be measured, apparently, every time a tweet is displayed on your screen will count as a view. If you see a tweet on your desktop and then on your smartphone, Twitter will count them as two views.

   3. Twitter launched 2 new brand safety features to Ads Manager:

      • Adjacency Controls - keyword-based exclusions for advertisers allowing them to avoid negative/unwanted context for their ads (pre-bid)

      • 3rd-party Brand Safety - Double Verify and IAS will offer extra paid brand safety reporting to advertisers (post-bid)

4. Google Search Console may soon display content ideas for publishers, webmasters, and SEO experts. Google seems to be experimenting with this feature, which looks very similar to Google Question Hub, which launched in the US two years ago.

1️⃣ Vitalik eyes 3 opportunities for crypto in 2023

In an interview with Bankless, the Ethereum co-founder shared three major opportunities for the crypto industry. Let’s look into each of them:

Mass wallet adoption. Vitalik pointed out that more development is needed in the area of wallet infrastructure capable of onboarding billions of users. “If you can make a wallet that a billion people will use — that’s a huge opportunity”.

Inflation-resistant, globally accessible stablecoin. Buterin suggested that the creation of a stablecoin “that can actually survive anything up to, and including, a US dollar hyperinflation” would be a huge opportunity. The speaker didn’t comment on the technical aspects of such a stablecoin.

Ethereum-powered website logins. Buterin said that any technical developments contributing towards unseating Facebook, Google, and Twitter as the “login overlords” would be a huge opportunity itself. This could enable Ethereum to capture more market dominance on internet-based applications.

2️⃣ SBF released on $250 million bail

The FTX ex-CEO was released on $250 million bail secured by his parent’s home. Bankman-Fried has been filed eight criminal charges on top of civil suits filed by the SEC and CFTC. The decision was announced just 14 hours after SBF arrived from the Bahamas.

His ex-workmates, Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda Research) and Gary Wang (co-founder, CTO of FTX), had both pleaded guilty to charges of wire, commodities, and securities fraud. Ellison additionally pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. Both are cooperating with prosecutors.

Sam Bankman Fried will now live with his parents in San Francisco, monitored by a GPS device.

3️⃣ Tough times for Bitcoin miners!

One of the largest publicly traded crypto miners, Core Scientific, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas. The company still generates positive cash flow, but its revenue is not enough to repay debtholders for leased mining equipment.

The Austin-based company got listed on NASDAQ in January 2022 and has since seen its stock tank 98%. Core Scientific’s performance has been mainly impacted by the prolonged decrease in the price of Bitcoin, the increase in electricity costs, as well as the increase in the global Bitcoin network hash rate.

4️⃣ Visa explores auto-payments for crypto wallets

In the latest blog post, Visa announced a solution that could help providers automatically pull assets from users’ Ethereum-based crypto wallets, with no need to manually sign off on every transaction.

The solution taps into a concept known as “Account Abstraction” (AA), which makes user accounts (called “delegable accounts”) on Ethereum function more like smart contracts by allowing a user to have programmable features embedded into their wallets.   

Visa has already successfully tested delegable accounts on its private L2 blockchain StarkNet.

🔥 OTHER RELEVANT NEWS

• Brazil welcomes new crypto law establishing a crime of fraud involving virtual assets

• Nigeria plans to allow Bitcoin after an anti-crypto policy proved a failure

• Dogecoin moved up by 5% after Bitstamp listed the token

• Coinpaper covers all the most important blockchain news - follow Coinpaper on Twitter to stay up to date!

• China’s Zhejiang province to develop $28.7 billion metaverse industry by 2025

• Bankless posted a great article on Binance’s situation and if the biggest crypto exchange will collapse.

• NFTs are at a crossroads - their value plummeted, but evangelists are refusing to give up

• We are launching advertising opportunities within the SMT newsletter - reach out to us at contact@smartmarketingtoken.com for details!

🏖 FUN FACTS & MEME SECTION

💡 Do you like emojis? We do because they help us express more apart from words. Surprisingly, it is not easy to design a good emoji of scissors. Some folks analyzed which emoji scissors are designed properly = can actually close. Check the results here!

🥇 Meme of The Week