Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. Today, Chief is opening its first clubhouse in San Francisco, but co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan want you to know that it’s not a coworking hub. Plus, we spoke with Google walkout organizer Meredith Whittaker on why she left the FTC to serve as president of Signal.

— Allison Levitsky, reporter (email | twitter)

‘This is not a coworking space’

Chief finally has a clubhouse in San Francisco, but don’t call it a coworking space. (And while you’re at it, don’t even try to call Chief members “girl bosses.” The 8,600 square feet do include conference rooms, one-person Zoom rooms, and open-plan seating, but it also has a bar, lounge seating, and — like Chief’s other clubhouses in New York, L.A., and Chicago — a piano.

• “To me, what the piano represents is ‘This is not a coworking space,’” Chief co-founder Lindsay Kaplan told me on a tour of the clubhouse in advance of its official opening Thursday. “This is a place where you can sit back and take meetings in a very laid-back manner.”
• Unlike The Wing, the women-focused coworking space and club that shut down this summer after a six-year run, Kaplan and co-founder and CEO Carolyn Childers are still much more interested in building and supporting Chief’s network of female executives than boosting its physical amenities.
• “Women in tech disproportionately experienced being an ‘only’ in the workplace,” says Alexis Krivkovich, managing partner at McKinsey and co-author a new Women in the Workplace report that looks into why women are leaving their jobs (hint: It's not for more money). Chief sees itself as an answer to trends like this, and 80% of Chief members report that they feel they have more support since joining Chief than they did before, Kaplan said.

That’s why Chief’s main offering — curated, 10-member “Core” peer groups that meet monthly with an executive coach — will still convene virtually.

• “What we most optimize for is finding the right and perfect 10 people for you to be with,” Childers said. “Even in San Francisco, that might be somebody outside the city.”
• Before Chief expanded outside of New York, the groups still met in person, but applicants who said they wanted to join for the space didn’t tend to make it off the waitlist.
• The network is about the peer group, and the space is more like “the container that it can happen in IRL,” Kaplan said.

Chief is more closely modeled after the Young Presidents’ Organization, the 72-year-old network of under-45 chief executives who help each other work through challenges in their professional and personal lives.

• YPO is all about its network and doesn’t have spaces of its own, Childers said.
• Kaplan and Childers also got help from Carole Robin, a longtime facilitator of the popular “touchy feely” course at Stanford, in thinking through “how you create the right level of, frankly, vulnerability that you need to get to in order to truly work through things,” Childers said.
• “The Core [group] truly does get to a place of being able to talk to what’s really happening for you, both personally and professionally, because those two things very much mesh,” Childers added.

That said, the clubhouse is also a place where members can host guests, hold their board meetings, and — yes — take a Zoom call. Ten percent of Chief’s 20,000 members live in the Bay Area, but when Chief was planning its next clubhouse, San Francisco was also the most requested city by members who live elsewhere.

• In other words, Chief members in cities such as Boston and D.C. wanted a clubhouse in San Francisco where they could visit while in town.
• Despite that, Childers and Kaplan try to emulate something like a Harvard alumni club, whose clubhouses have “great amenities,” Kaplan said. But like Harvard clubs, most of the real benefits come from being a part of a vast, powerful network, Kaplan said.

But with a mission to change the face of executive leadership, the women-focused atmosphere might also feel like something more approachable. Kaplan recalled a similar feeling of camaraderie with other women in the dressing room at the old New York department store Loehmann’s.

• “It kind of reminds me of this intimate space,” Kaplan said. “If you tried on something and you went in front of the mirror, all the women around you were like, ‘Honey, that looks good.’”

FTC to Signal

Meredith Whittaker has been “accidentally training” for her new role as president of the encrypted messaging app Signal for years, through her time at Google, her work co-founding the AI Now Institute, and her stint as a senior AI adviser to the FTC, she told Protocol reporter Lizzy Lawrence.

For the latest installment of our “How I Decided” series, Lawrence sat down with Whittaker to hear about why she left the FTC to run Signal, where, among other things, she’s working to find a business model to sustain the app without compromising privacy or security.

Read the full story.

A MESSAGE FROM AUTOMATION ANYWHERE

Today, we expect instant results from our every action, from calling an Uber to ordering a t-shirt. Companies can no longer afford to not adopt technologies like automation. We are now living in the Automation Economy – a new world that requires agility and a complete reimagining of how we work.

Learn more

Feeling stressed?

The pressure is on for many executives, who largely reported higher rates of stress than they did last year, according to a new survey of almost 11,000 knowledge workers conducted by Slack Future Forum.

• Execs reported 40% more work-related anxiety and stress than they did last year with 20% worse work-life balance, Slack found.
• Even as executives’ scores suffered, individual contributors reported 11% better work-life balance and 25% less stress and anxiety, year-over-year.
• Still, 40% of knowledge workers said they were burnt out, including 49% of workers between the ages of 18 and 29. (Thirty-eight percent of workers over 30 also reported burnout.)

Some personnel news

Anyone else having a bad case of Great Resignation whiplash? It’s hard to keep up with which tech companies are growing, shrinking, floating, or sinking. We’re here to help.

⬆️ More NFT, digital games, and metaverse jobs are coming to … the MLB.

⬆️ Palantir is opening a second U.K. base near the National Health Service’s digital HQ, according to Bloomberg.

⬇️ The Boston-based ISP Starry is laying off half its staff, the company announced Thursday.

⬇️ Stripe leaders have asked some managers to manage performance more aggressively, Forbes reported.

For more news on hiring, firing and rewiring, see our tech company tracker.

Around the internet

A roundup of workplace news from the farthest corners of the internet.

Just in time for Halloween: Is your org frustrating applicants with ghost job listings? (Financial Times)

Looking for a better, more inclusive workplace? Glassdoor now lets job seekers filter for companies with higher ratings in work-life balance, culture, and diversity. (HR Dive)

The cybersecurity talent gap is widening, with 3.4 million jobs reportedly vacant around the world. (The Wall Street Journal)

Another Slack finding: Workers with flexible schedules reported 29% higher productivity and 53% better focus. (Axios)

A MESSAGE FROM AUTOMATION ANYWHERE

Today, we expect instant results from our every action, from calling an Uber to ordering a t-shirt. Companies can no longer afford to not adopt technologies like automation. We are now living in the Automation Economy – a new world that requires agility and a complete reimagining of how we work.

Learn more

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com.

Crypto was wrapping up a go-go year when Molly White launched her blog, Web3 is going just great.

Things weren’t exactly going great for crypto in December 2021. There were signs then that an impressive upsurge had come to an end and was on the precipice of a stunning crash: a crypto winter.

White created the blog precisely to turn the spotlight on the even more serious havoc that she feared crypto was going to wreak — not just on the startups and investors rushing into the field, but also people betting their life savings on tokens they’d barely researched after hearing about them online.

“It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person,” she told Protocol. “People were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly.”

Web3 is going just great rapidly attracted an audience, and now gets 60,000 to 100,000 visitors a month, White said. Its Twitter account already has 114,000 followers. She only started the account in January.

White, 29, was a teenager when bitcoin launched in 2009. She is part of a generation of software engineers who entered the tech industry in the past decade when the crypto revolution was underway. Many of her peers ended up joining the crypto wave. White went the other way, emerging as one of crypto’s leading critics.

In an interview with Protocol, White, an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, talked about her journey as a young technologist and why she became a crypto contrarian.

This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.

Your blog is called “Web3 is going just great.” You clearly have a specific view of Web3 and crypto. Do you think it’s all a scam, as some critics have argued?

I wouldn't say it's all a scam. I feel that implies that every person running one of these projects is intentionally trying to take advantage of people, which I don't think is true. I do think the technology as a whole and a lot of the promise of it has been really overblown. But I wouldn't say that it’s all a scam, per se.

You told the Financial Stability Oversight Council that you are “cautiously optimistic about some digital asset use cases, specifically the introduction of non-crypto-based digital cash.” Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

There have been some ideas of introducing other forms of digital cash which don't actually require a blockchain to implement. We use what some could argue is digital currency already today when we transfer money electronically.

I think it would be really valuable for there to be more of a cash equivalent to something like that where you actually get the same privacy and surveillance expectations of cash with a digital currency. It’s not being traced as closely as digital transactions are. You're allowed to make small transactions very privately.

I think that would be really beneficial for society to have something like that. But I think as soon as you start looking at crypto and blockchains, you end up with a more speculative asset that has a lot of inherent flaws and tends to not work so well as currency. I remain hopeful that there might be some sort of digital cash in our future but I don't necessarily expect that it will look like a cryptocurrency.

You were studying computer science in college when bitcoin and the crypto realm were getting started. How were you introduced to crypto and what was your reaction?

I was actually a little younger than that when bitcoin first emerged. I was aware of it pretty early. I have been involved with the Wikimedia communities for a long time, which has a really strong overlap with free software communities and people who are really interested in freedom from surveillance and online privacy. I ran into it in those circles first. I thought it was interesting as a concept, but not something I necessarily had a use for.

Back then, I mostly knew of bitcoin as a way to buy drugs online, which is kind of what it was for at first. Or at least that was the biggest use case for it. And I was not doing that. It was like, “OK, I guess people can go do that,” but it's not really something I was interested in.

The other use case was the people who thought that it was going to become much more valuable in the future. So they were putting money into it for speculative purposes. Well, I was in either late high school or college, and I didn't have a ton of money just kicking around that I was trying to speculate with. It was something that I knew about but wasn't particularly interested in.

I thought some of the aspects of it around censorship-resistant financial transactions was really interesting and the potential for it to be used to fund people who are not necessarily in the good graces of an authoritarian state, I thought there was promise in that. But as time went on, I watched what it became, which was largely quite different from the original principles of it.

Was there an incident or a development or maybe a conversation you had that made you become concerned about the rise of crypto?

I grew increasingly concerned as the years went on. I was vaguely aware of what was happening in the 2017-ish era when ICOs were really big and a lot of people were using those to skirt regulations on securities offerings.

I really started to become concerned in the summer of 2021. It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person. Anyone watching a sports game on TV or riding public transit in some places were getting bombarded with this idea that crypto was a good idea for someone to potentially make money off of, as though it was an investment or something that everyone should be trying out.

Then we started to see the narrative that crypto was going to be the future of the web with Web3. Every new project online was going to be using blockchains in some way. That's when I really started to get concerned and to pay attention. I was really worried that people were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly. There was this magical, “Well, it's computers, so it will work” feeling around it, which is obviously never true on its own. And I was also really concerned about the idea that this is how the web should be going forward.

I've always been someone who cares a lot about the web. I think it is quite amazing. I really like to see projects on the web that are benefiting humanity and moving in a good direction. The idea that everything should start incorporating blockchain, I was like, “Should it?” So I started doing some more research around that.

You’re part of the generation of software engineers who joined the tech industry in the early 2010s, many of whom became excited about and even became part of the crypto industry. But you went the other way.

It's interesting because I actually don't feel like software engineers in general have been overwhelmingly positive about it. A lot of the software engineers I know actually were very skeptical of it, especially when we started seeing things like NFTs and some of these schemes that were more plainly get-rich-quick schemes.

I remain hopeful that there might be some sort of digital cash in our future but I don't necessarily expect that it will look like a cryptocurrency.

I think a lot of people actually took a look at the technology behind it [and said]: “Why is this the future of the web? I don't understand how this is such an improvement.” I've actually spoken to quite a lot of software engineers in my generation and other generations who were actually very skeptical of it.

But there are definitely software engineers and other people who are very positive about it as well. Some people are actually very open about the fact that they don't see much promise in the technology, but they realize they can make a lot of money. That's been a fairly common thing I've run into.

So it’s like saying, “We’ll stick with this because there’s VC money flowing into this, and when it’s clearly not working we’ll get out?”

Yeah, that's sort of the idea. Sometimes it's not necessarily people who are starting companies. It’s like, “I'm going to go work for a crypto company because the salaries are incredible,” even though they don't necessarily believe in the product that they're working on. It's just a great paycheck.

Tell me about the idea to start the blog. How did you come up with the name?

I launched it in mid-December [2021]. I was seeing two really different stories. I was seeing in both mainstream media and in tech media this narrative that crypto is making all these people rich. You can get such good returns if you start putting money into crypto. Look at all these people who have brought themselves out of poverty because they started a crypto project or they started selling NFTs.

Then on the other hand, I was seeing this stream of news stories that was like, “Oh, another project got hacked” or “Oh no, someone lost all their NFTs because someone got their wallet address or their wallet keys.”

It felt like I was seeing a lot of the first story in mainstream media. But the second one was going unreported.

So I started, on my own, keeping a list of examples of how often this was happening, scams were being run, hacks were happening. It began to become clear to me that it might be useful to illustrate this in one place instead of people just having to see a tweet or a news story or a one-off post or whatever.

That was the idea behind the project. As for the name, I just have a sarcastic, dry sense of humor. It felt like every time I was like, “How's this whole Web3 going?” I would just find myself thinking, “Wow, it seems like it's going just great.”

What have been the most troubling reactions?

Sometimes people get really mad at me personally for writing these things, especially if they have some stake in a project or they are personally involved with a project in some way. They see what I am doing as basically drawing attention to the negatives of their project, and that threatens their bottom line.

Sometimes people get pretty aggressive with me. In general, there's people in the crypto community who are just hostile to any negative reaction or negative coverage of the space because they see it as threatening to crypto as a whole.

You told the FSOC that concerns about crypto regulations stifling innovation are “overblown” and that “the most impressive innovation we have seen with crypto has been in separating average people from their money.” That's a pretty sweeping statement. What reactions have you gotten when you raise that argument?

People will just deny it. They'll say, “Oh, crypto has been so revolutionary. It's changed people's lives.” And you press on that question and people tend to say, “Well, it's made some people very wealthy,” which is true. But you could say the same thing about a Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme.

It makes some people really wealthy and isn't necessarily a revolutionary idea. Most people are really excited about what they think crypto might be able to do in the future rather than what it is doing today. And I think that's a problem. I don't think it's reasonable to regulate or legislate around what something might possibly do in the future, especially when there isn't that much evidence that we can really get from where we are today with crypto to this utopian future where crypto is perfect and there aren't all of these issues with it that are actually very fundamental to the technology.

It's almost as if someone said, “You shouldn't ban fossil fuels because when we figure out how to burn coal without creating any emissions, you're gonna be stifling the electricity industry.” You have to look at these things and say, “Well, is that actually possible? Should we be making decisions based on what might possibly happen at some point?”

Crypto has also been compared to the dot-com era when people were also skeptical about a new technology called the web, which eventually grew and thrived. Some argue the same could happen with crypto.

There's two things there. The first thing is I think people actually overstate to some extent how skeptical people were of the early web. I think people had some questions around: Can the internet ever support something like streaming video? Or how it might actually be able to evolve. But I think people got the idea why the internet might be useful, why email might be useful, why these websites are useful in ways that I think don't quite correlate to crypto.

I also think that it's a bold statement to compare something like crypto or Web3 to the internet. The internet was a revolutionary technology, and by all real accounts, enormously successful. It’s become enormously popular. Pretty much everyone uses it to some extent.

I feel that you need to make the argument for why your technology is like the internet versus something more akin to, say, 3D TV. People were really excited about it at one point, but it never really took off the way that some people imagined. You can say that any technology is like the internet and you should just stop being skeptical of it, and everyone should get on board and you don't want to be laughed at in the future for saying it has no promise. But you have to make the argument that the technology is actually more akin to the internet than some other examples of technologies that people had been excited about but have not actually lived up to their promises.

Crypto proponents also argue that blockchain could address the problem related to the concentration and abuse of data, which has become a serious issue, especially with social media and other platforms. How do you respond to those arguments?

It's one of those things where people will make these bold statements like that. And other people will see that and be like, “Wow, that sounds great.” And suddenly it becomes a part of the narrative that blockchains are more secure, your data belongs to you, these companies aren't going to be monetizing your data in the way that they are today.

But if you actually push back on those claims a little bit and say, “Wait a second, how is it any different if Facebook has your data stored on a blockchain? Or how is it actually better that all of this data is stored on a public ledger rather than a private database?”

The claims start to fall apart a little bit. I think we really just in general need to stop taking claims like that at face value, and try to understand how your project is actually going to try to be more secure than, name your big tech company …

AWS …

Yeah, exactly. How is that actually going to happen? We’ve looked at examples of crypto projects that have been running today and we've seen projects that absolutely are not more secure. And they are not more decentralized.

A lot of crypto is actually very centralized in very similar ways as today's web. In fact, there are actually a lot of the same venture capitalists trying to get a stranglehold on Web3, the same people who have had a stranglehold on the current web. It really is important to question those base claims because they don't really stand up to scrutiny.

What do you think of the current push to regulate crypto?

It is important that regulators get involved to some extent, because to date, they've been very slow to act, and I think the industry has really developed into this world of scams and grifts thanks to the lack of action from regulators. I'm glad to see that some regulators are beginning to pay a little more attention to it. But I'm also very worried about the regulatory capture that's been happening and the amount of lobbying that has been coming from crypto groups.

I don't think it's reasonable to regulate or legislate around what something might possibly do in the future.

I've spoken to a fair number of legislators and regulators who are saying that basically they're having a really hard time separating the truth from the marketing because they're basically talking to mostly pro-crypto lobbyists. There aren't that many people out there who can give a more neutral stance on it because no one's paying lobbyists to lobby against crypto. That doesn't really exist, right? There isn't that much of a financial incentive to do that.

I really worry about how well-informed legislators and regulators are. There are certainly some who are quite knowledgeable about the industry, [SEC chair] Gary Gensler being one of them. But I think in general the level of understanding is actually quite low. I think the legislators are prone to accepting those statements that I referenced before that have become repeated as though they are inherently true. I'm worried that regulators are going to begin accepting those as truth and believe this whole idea that you can't stifle innovation and you can't put regulations in place or else all of this wonderful innovation won't be able to happen.

I think that's pretty absurd. There are a lot of regulated industries out there that innovate constantly. I don't think having a complete free-for-all where people are able to run total scams is actually going to be good either for the crypto industry or for the general public. So it really worries me when I start hearing policymakers actually repeating those claims as well.

There was an uproar from the industry over a tax-reporting provision in the infrastructure bill that could impact developers and node operators, and regulators who argue that many crypto tokens are securities because there is a group of people in the middle who determine the way they develop. How do you react to these?

I think it's complicated. I think that there are a lot of cryptocurrencies out there that are very clearly securities and that are very tightly controlled by the developing team or the group that has created it. I think a lot of those projects are hoping that they can claim to be decentralized or not controlled by a small entity in order to skirt securities regulations. I hope that the SEC actually starts taking a little more action against those groups because there are some where it is very clear that it is a security.

But I think it's a complicated question. There are definitely arguments to be made that some of the cryptocurrencies that are popular today, like bitcoin and ether, are commodities or something more like a commodity than a security.

I don't have a super strong opinion on that just because that is not my background. I'm not a securities lawyer by any stretch.

But I think a lot of it really does come down to the fact that the crypto industry would really like to be regulated by someone like the CFTC, which has a lot less resources and has generally been a lot more light-handed on the crypto industry than the SEC. I think a lot of the arguments have basically been made solely in pursuit of that goal.

What are your thoughts on the debate over Tornado Cash?

Boy, what a mess that was. I think it's pretty clear that Tornado Cash was really enabling quite a lot of crime, including state-backed hacking groups out of North Korea and various other entities. That's pretty hard to deny.

But the way that the government has gone about cracking down on that particular issue is a little bit concerning to me, partly in the sense that the individuals who have interacted with Tornado Cash since the sanctions were placed are now facing a pretty labor-intensive process of having to report their sanctions transaction with a sanction entity, potentially in perpetuity, like, forever.

In some cases, it is people who are sent money from Tornado Cash not necessarily out of their own choice. You know, people were “dusted” with funds from Tornado Cash to prove a point.

I do think it does prove the point that the way that this enforcement is being handled is very broad-strokes and threatens to catch a lot of really innocent people in the net.

I also think that for people who want to use cryptocurrency and who want to maintain some semblance of privacy on the chain, they don't have a ton of options aside from using something like Tornado Cash, because in order to have any privacy in cryptocurrency you basically have to learn how to launder your own money. And Tornado Cash is a way of doing that. It's forcing some people to choose between privacy and not risking interacting with a sanctioned entity.

Then there's the question of the Tornado Cash developer who was arrested in the Netherlands. I think there's a lot of questions there. It's not clear exactly what he did, if it was that he just wrote the code or if it was because he was running a relay or what. I think the whole thing has been a bit of a disaster.

You mentioned in your blog letters sent by consumers to the judge handling the Voyager and Celsius bankruptcy cases. I wonder if there are specific letters or stories that really stand out for you and had an impact on you personally?

Those letters were really helpful in exposing the fact that not all of the people who are losing money in crypto are the stereotypical crypto investor. I think a lot of people picture a young male investor who has extra money kicking around and wants to gamble it on cryptocurrency. And if they lose it, it's really not the end of the world. Maybe they shouldn't have made that decision, but they're still going to be able to pay their rent.

I think the Voyager and Celsius letters really show that it can be a very different type of person. A lot of those letters came from people who are elderly, or who had families relying on them. There were single moms, single dads. There were pensioners. It was a mix of people. They were not necessarily people who were making what they thought was a risky investment. A lot of them thought they were putting their money someplace that was similarly reliable or trustworthy as a bank.

That's what really struck me about those letters. In some of these projects that were really marketing themselves as a safe option, there were a lot of really average people losing a ton of money and getting swept up into these schemes that they don't fully understand.

One person was begging the judge to just release some of the money that he had in a Celsius account because he couldn't afford to pay his mom's medical bills. That one really stuck out to me. One woman attached an ultrasound photo of her baby and said, “I really need this money because I can't pay for the things that my baby is going to need when it's born in a couple of months.” Those really stuck out to me because that's not the 22-year-old crypto bro who's just wildly speculating. Those are real people with money they really couldn't afford to lose on this kind of a bankruptcy.

You clearly have a following and are known as one of the prominent critics of the crypto industry. What’s your plan, and how do you see your role going forward?

I'm hoping to keep doing what I'm doing. I feel like the site has been pretty successful in tempering some people's expectations. The goal of the site is not really to change the minds of the bitcoin maximalists and crypto evangelists who are pretty sold on crypto, but to encourage average people who are seeing the advertisements and seeing the stories about people becoming millionaires overnight to just take a second look at it and consider that maybe they're not seeing the whole picture.

I’m just trying to make as much impact as I can as far as where this industry might go, how unregulated it might be allowed to continue to be. My goal is to just try to make a difference in what I see as a concerning direction of both the web and technology in general.

Hello, Protocol Climate friends. We hope you’re having a good day. Surely it’s better than Liz Truss’ at least. Today, we’re exploring the EU’s crypto winter and green hydrogen. Then, we’ll look at the methane emissions of rotting lettuce. Sorry, wait. We’re being informed that’s not “tech” enough. Well, anyway, the other stuff is, so dive in!

The EU's crypto winter

You thought crypto winter was bad? Try the real, potentially harsh winter about to hit Europe. Officials believe shutting down a key segment of the crypto industry could be one solution to the energy crisis.

A crypto mining crackdown could conserve precious gas supplies. The European Commission suggested that EU members should take that measure to provide relief to residential customers during times of peak energy demand.

• The EU has a plan to cut gas use by at least 15% through March.
• A number of groups, including the International Energy Agency, have laid out plans for how to do that by cutting down on commuting or lowering thermostats. Heavy industry can also play a role.
• But so, too, could the crypto industry. “In case there is a need for load shedding in the electricity systems, the member states must also be ready to stop crypto-assets mining,” the European Commission said in a report.

Targeting the crypto mining industry could make a lot of sense. The EU needs to cut gas use now, all while not foisting a heavy burden onto residential users. And a crypto mining crackdown could pay immediate returns.

• Miners have cited the flexibility they have in shutting down and spinning up their operations based on the cost and availability of energy as an advantage compared to other industries and argued that they can actually help stabilize grids and lower the cost of energy.
• Given that the biggest efficiency gains for heavy industry are likely years away, as are the prospects of getting heat pumps in every basement in the EU, that flexibility could pay major dividends.
• EU member states could test how serious miners are about stabilizing the grid.

Crypto mining’s energy footprint has been well established. That’s particularly true for proof-of-work mining — which is used by bitcoin, the most popular crypto ecosystem. The European Commission called it “outdated.”

• Crypto mining energy consumption has “more or less doubled compared to two years ago,” the report said.
• The EU is home to 10% of all proof-of-work mining globally. While not a huge share, the EU is in the midst of an energy crisis and reducing demand as much as possible is the name of the game.

The report also cited the need for retiring proof of work in the long term, pointing to Ethereum’s recent Merge as a path forward. The network moved from proof of work to proof of stake, slashing energy consumption by 99%. The Commission said “we need to go the extra mile for this to happen,” and has a number of moves in place to do so. But first things first could be cutting energy use now so the lights and heat stay on this winter.

Green hydrogen lifts off 🚀

The war in Ukraine has shifted the cost calculation for hydrogen production. The conflict has resulted in soaring gas prices, accelerating investments in green hydrogen made with renewables. The fledgling industry is now “decades ahead of pre-war projections,” according to a new analysis by the think tank Carbon Tracker.

Governments and investors from 25 countries have committed $73 billion to green hydrogen since the war began. The biggest investments come from the combined public and private sectors of Germany ($10.4 billion), Morocco ($9.7 billion), and the U.S. ($9.5 billion). In comparison, the market was valued at just $1 billion last year.

That’s a game-changer for the industry. Green hydrogen is still a fairly nascent technology, but the uncertain supply of methane gas — which is commonly used to create hydrogen — from Russia could put the green hydrogen industry and technology way ahead of schedule.

• In “most regional markets” including Europe and Asia, green hydrogen is now the most cost-effective form of hydrogen.
• That’s not necessarily because it has gotten cheaper, but because the cost of hydrogen derived from coal and especially gas has skyrocketed by more than 70% since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Carbon Tracker said.

Governments can foster an even faster green hydrogen evolution. Money isn’t the only way to give the fuel a boost. With the right incentives in place, Carbon Tracker found the cost of green hydrogen could be “one of the cheapest forms of energy” available by 2030.

• Lawmakers can introduce subsidies, both for investors and for the industry itself. Tax credits are one example of industry-directed subsidies, such as those included in the Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S.
• Setting up banks or other financial bodies dedicated solely to expanding the green hydrogen market could accelerate its growth as well.
• And tracking programs that verify green hydrogen is actually made with renewables could ensure the whole system has integrity.

Speeding up green hydrogen development doesn’t mean the fuel is a savior. Creating it requires renewable energy, something we don’t have a surplus of right now, as well as copious amounts of freshwater. While industries like steel, cement, and shipping could benefit from green hydrogen given the lack of alternatives outside fossil fuels, governments also need to ensure they don’t overcommit to hydrogen when other carbon-free resources are readily available.

— Lisa Martine Jenkins

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Make it rain

Nourish Ingredients, which makes synthetic fats and oils for alternative proteins without relying on animal products, raised $28.6 million in series A funding, led by Horizons Ventures.

The German microgrid company Solarize raised $4.2 million in seed funding, led by Point Nine.

The Miami-based Freebee provides users with free electric rides funded by local businesses and governments. The startup raised $8 million in its series A funding round. BP Ventures (yes, that BP) led the round.

The Indonesian startup Waste4Change aims to reduce how much of the country’s waste ends up in landfills. The company raised $5 million in its series A round, co-led by AC Ventures and PT Barito Mitra Investama.

The corporate sustainability and emissions tracking platform GreenPlaces raised $4 million in its seed funding round, led by Felicis.

In conjunction with its release of a new weather-prediction platform, the AI-for-climate-modeling startup Jua announced that it raised $2.5 million in seed funding, led by Promus Ventures.

The mushroom leather company MycoWorks secured an investment of an undisclosed amount from GM Ventures — the automaker’s investment vehicle — as a part of a collaboration to develop a material that can be used in car interiors.

New VC fund just dropped: Propeller is launching its first $100 million fund, which will invest in companies working at the ocean-climate nexus.

Lowercarbon Capital announced that it raised $250 million for a new fusion energy-focused fund, dubbed Lowercarbon Q>1.

Hot links

Some kinda good news if you squint. Carbon dioxide emissions grew just 1% this year. Which is good and all, but we kind of need them to go in the opposite direction. Fast.

The FTC is asking if you’d like to know how to fix your dryer. No, it’s not just out of the kindness of the agency’s heart. It’s taking comments on whether energy-efficiency labels should come with repair instructions in order to save energy and reduce e-waste.

More and more countries are crossing clean energy tipping points. Bloomberg tallied that there are 87 of them, in fact.

Bill Gates is all-in on sustainable aviation fuel. Breakthrough Energy gave a $50 million grant to LanzaJet to create a plant capable of making SAF that costs the same as jet fuel.

Tide and river power got a boost. The Department of Energy set aside $35 million for two largely untapped sources of renewable energy. That cash is a relative drop in the ocean, though. (Water joke, please clap.)

Björk is climate tech. That’s really all there is to say about that.

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Thanks for reading! As ever, you can send any and all feedback and/or pictures of lettuce to climate@protocol.com. See you next week!

Hello, and welcome to Protocol Entertainment, your guide to the business of the gaming and media industries. This Thursday, we’re taking a closer look at Netflix’s turnaround strategy. Also: global app spending and AI candy.

The three pillars of Netflix’s turnaround strategy

There’s some light at the end of the tunnel for Netflix: The streaming company revealed Tuesday that it added 2.4 million new subscribers in Q3, reversing a trend of multiple-quarter subscriber declines that sent its share price nose-diving from a high of $700 a year ago to less than $170 this summer.

“Thank God we’re done with shrinking quarters,” co-CEO Reed Hastings confidently proclaimed on Netflix’s earnings call Tuesday afternoon. It’s one of those statements that can blow up in your face, but Hastings does have some reason to be optimistic: In a matter of mere months, the company has announced and implemented an aggressive turnaround strategy, while also charting a path toward a subscription service that’s about much more than just movies and television.

Netflix’s foray into advertising is the first pillar of this pivot. The company will launch its ad-supported tier in 12 countries next month, and executives shared a few more details about those efforts this week.

• Netflix expects ad-supported viewing to ramp up over time. “[W]e don’t expect a material contribution in Q4’22,” it said in its letter to investors.
• One interesting disclosure was that Netflix is actually building out its own in-house ad sales team, and not solely relying on its ad tech partner Microsoft to fill those spots.
• “It’s been great to see both Microsoft and their sales team as well as our small but crack ad sales team in action,” Netflix COO Greg Peters said.
• Executives addressed concerns that the ad-supported tier could cannibalize Netflix’s higher-priced plans. “We don’t see a lot of plan switching,” Peters said.
• Peters also reiterated that Netflix was confident that its ad-supported tier would bring in at least as much money as its basic ad-free tier.

Part two of Netflix’s pivot: monetizing account sharing. Starting sometime in early 2023, Netflix will pester people to pay more if they want to continue to share their accounts with others.

• The company is very aware that this could rub some people the wrong way, which is why it is trying hard to avoid calling this a crackdown, or blame anyone for a practice that it has long openly condoned.
• One example: Instead of labeling people who are currently watching Netflix for free on someone else’s account as moochers, executives repeatedly called them “borrowers” this week. Pretty neighborly, right?
• To prepare for this definitely-not-a-crackdown, Netflix rolled out the ability to transfer user profiles to separate accounts this week.

Netflix Games is the third part of Netflix’s pivot, and we’re only now starting to see how dead serious the company is about gaming.

• Netflix has released 35 mobile games to date, and it has 55 additional titles in its pipeline, including 14 produced in-house.
• So far, those efforts have primarily focused on mobile, but the company’s VP of game development, Mike Verdu, confirmed this week that Netflix also wants to bring its games to PCs and TVs.
• To do so, Netflix is looking to build its own cloud gaming service, as Verdu confirmed Tuesday.
• That didn’t work all that well for Google, which will shut down Stadia in January. However, Verdu argued that Google’s problems were all about the business model behind Stadia, not its technology, which he called “amazing.”
• “For us, delivering games to your TV or PC, it’s a value-add,” he said. “We’re not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement, so it’s a completely different business model.”
• Further proof on how serious Netflix takes gaming is the hire of Chacko Sonny, who previously served as executive producer for Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch franchise.
• At Netflix, Sonny will oversee a new in-house studio in Southern California — and perhaps, one might speculate given his background, an expansion into live service gaming.

An ad tier designed to attract budget-conscious consumers, a push to monetize account sharing that is meant to keep Wall Street happy, and an ambitious gaming road map — these three pillars could transform Netflix into a very different company, and ultimately help it fend off competitors like Disney+ and HBO Max.

There’s no guarantee that any of it will work, and gaming in particular has long been a tough nut to crack for industry outsiders. But compared to just nine months ago, Netflix does have a much clearer plan and a new narrative to tell investors.

Executives laid the groundwork for that narrative this week, with Verdu telling the TechCrunch Disrupt audience that the company’s embrace of gaming was one of just a handful of major inflection points over Netflix’s history. And Hastings, while acknowledging that Netflix is not immune to the current economic climate, tried to exude confidence in the company’s path ahead during Tuesday’s investor call.

“All the stars are lining up very well for us,” Hastings said.

— Janko Roettgers

Note: Protocol is owned by Axel Springer, whose CEO, Mathias Döpfner, is on the board of Netflix.

A MESSAGE FROM GOALS HOUSE

It's becoming increasingly appreciated among the broader business and NGO community that the planet and people elements of sustainability are mutually dependent, and as such a focus on one at the exclusion of the other will be fruitless. But balancing profit and sustainability progress remains a more thorny debate.

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Amid record-high inflation, app spending dips

Global Q3 app spending declined by 5% year-over-year, according to data.ai’s new App Index report. App spending is still above pre-pandemic levels, with people shelling out $32.4 billion on apps during the quarter, and free apps continue to do very well.

• People downloaded a total of 38.7 billion apps across iOS and Android in Q3, the company formerly known as App Annie estimates. That’s 8% above Q3 20221 levels.
• Downloads grew 9% on Android, while iOS saw numbers go up by 6%.
• iOS still accounts for most app spending (65%), with iPhone and iPad owners shelling out a total of $21 billion for apps.

A surprise tidbit: Audible is on fire. The Amazon-owned audiobook service saw its app enter the top 10 of apps that attracted the most consumer spend in Q3. No wonder Spotify is looking to audiobooks to further grow its nonmusic revenue.

— Janko Roettgers

In other news

HP is rumored to exit the VR hardware business. The company’s G2 headset has been heavily discounted, and the future of Windows Mixed Reality is uncertain.

Microsoft’s Activision deal is about more than Call of Duty. The Windows maker’s lengthy response to U.K. regulators last week contained scathing criticisms of Sony and news that the company is planning a multiplatform game store, The Verge reported.

Meta is producing a VR horror show. Sometimes the jokes really do write themselves …

Blizzard Albany gears up for a union vote. The Activision Blizzard studio may be the next game studio with a union after 21 QA testers received approval from the NLRB to hold a formal election, The Washington Post reported.

Apple has introduced a cheaper Apple TV. The new $129 Apple TV 4K will effectively replace the HD version, which is being discontinued.

Bayonetta voice acting controversy takes a turn. After voice actor Hellena Taylor’s accusations against Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames went viral, Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the negotiations were far messier than she may have let on.

Nothing’s earbuds are getting more expensive. The phone maker is increasing the price of its Ear 1 earbuds by $50. That’s … not nothing? And also further proof that hardware makers without services revenue are having a hard time making inflation gadgets.

The RIAA now targets AI mastering. The industry association is taking issue with online mastering services that can make any track sound like it was produced by a major label artist.

DALL-E, DALL-E, DALL-E

You may have seen the meme: “PARENTS PLEASE check your child’s Halloween candy,” people on Twitter have been urgently proclaiming in recent weeks, only to reveal that they have found something completely nonsensical in a candy bar. It’s a fun jab at the urban legend of candy containing poison and razor blades, and predictably, it’s getting more absurd by the day. My favorite thus far: a warning against AI-generated candy. I personally wouldn’t mind a bag of Skite right about now!

— Janko Roettgers

A MESSAGE FROM GOALS HOUSE

Currently, much of the ‘E’ in ESG is focussed on climate only, and it is essential that companies also focus on biodiversity, recognizing nature-climate linkages in order to optimize mitigation and build resilience. ESG will prepare us for the necessary paradigm shift, driven by increasing external pressures forced upon us as a result of short-term profits.

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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to entertainment@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow!

More and more fintech app users have gotten used to seeing Plaid’s logo pop up when they try to connect their bank accounts. Now Plaid is trying to play a similar role for crypto applications. The company is releasing a product for crypto developers Thursday that makes it easier for them to connect consumers’ crypto wallets to their apps.

Security is an ongoing challenge for crypto, and crypto wallets in particular are a vector of attack. A number of hacking and social engineering attacks have occurred that find various ways to connect to the wallets of unsuspecting users and drain their tokens. Plaid’s new product is a way to address those fears, but it also feeds into an ongoing debate over just how decentralized crypto can be while addressing consumers’ needs for secure, easy-to-use apps.

When consumers who want to use an NFT marketplace, blockchain game, or DeFi app click on a button to “connect wallet,” they will see a screen from Plaid pop up offering to connect their wallet of choice. Today coders have to custom-build wallet integrations for their own apps, which adds to the cost of development and introduces potential security risks.

Plaid’s Wallet Onboard has integrated with more than 300 wallets, including MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, and Ledger, so consumers can choose almost any wallet they might want to use.

This makes it easier for developers since they will only have to integrate one time instead with multiple wallets. In addition, consumers using many different kinds of wallets, which can range from mobile apps and browser plugins to hardware wallets, will all see one way to connect.

Plaid is trying to address the security concerns around wallets by having any developer who wants to use its product go through its existing traditional compliance and risk checks, says Alain Meier, head of identity and fraud.

Plaid isn’t getting involved in any transactions between the apps and wallets it connects, and can’t see those transactions, Meier said.

Most wallets also ask for confirmation before proceeding, a step meant to prevent tricks designed to drain people’s wallets or keep people from connecting with a deceptive app. Plaid also plans to add more educational information for consumers about what they’re connecting to. Right now, by design in crypto, there is really no trusted intermediary to inform consumers about who they’re transacting with.

“Are you using a smart contract that’s been audited? Is the source code uploaded? We want to build all those things … to also make it even safer and more trustworthy for consumers,” said Clay Allsopp, crypto product lead at Plaid.

There is also the risk of giving too much information that consumers don’t want. “We could give them a lot of information but the question is, do consumers know how to interpret that information?” Allsopp said. “And then we could, on the other end of the spectrum, [add] a red screen that says, ‘Hey, this just looks suspicious.’ But I think what we're still trying to figure out is, what should our role be in that? What kinds of recommendations do we want to make?”

That’s one of the striking things about Plaid’s crypto offering. It’s bringing a centralized third-party authority to crypto in an area where that’s lacking. For many who are new to crypto or want the familiar feeling of the safety of a traditional finance application, they may welcome and trust Plaid’s involvement.

That’s one of the things Plaid is counting on: its brand recognition, since it already helps crypto exchanges such as Binance.US and Gemini with things like bank connections or sharing crypto data.

Crypto is touted by enthusiasts for its ability to be trustless and conduct transactions without intermediaries. Some may see this as more encroachment of traditional finance in crypto. But others could see this as an inevitable maturing of the industry.

That’s what’s different about Plaid’s expansion into crypto wallets. The company is not simply connecting consumers’ accounts at established banks with new fintech apps to transfer data. Instead Plaid is connecting relatively new technologies, which may have numerous risks involved.

Plaid is looking to move further into crypto, especially with its identity verification products for traditional finance. These include a new behavioral analytics tool that can predict whether you are entering your own social security number or a fraudulent one based on the way you put it into a form. Another autofill tool can use a person’s phone number and date of birth to verify identity.

The company is also working on a way of verifying identity without sending data to an app, a feature that may appeal to more privacy-conscious crypto users. For example, if a product is age-restricted to 18- or 21-year-olds, Plaid could just pass on that verification without sharing a user’s birth date.

Since Plaid sits at the middle of a range of this data, this type of identity tool is a logical next step. As it gets further into crypto, though, it may find a challenge persuading the more hardcore blockchain developers and savvy customers that trusted is better than trustless.