AI-related projects perk up

Risk assets, as reflected by Dow Jones futures and the spot prices of the largest cryptos, limped lifelessly ahead of a major speech today by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Much more animated are artificial-intelligence-technologies-related tokens including Fetch, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol.

Fetch, for example, brought holders a 24% gain over the past 24 hours, as of 8 a.m. (EST). Fetch’s FET ranks No. 87 on CoinGecko's list of largest digital assets in terms of total market cap. FET is the utility token powering Fetch.AI, a decentralized platform that provides tools and infrastructure required for building an AI-based digital economy, according to Decrypt.

"The impressive price performance for AI-adjacent crypto tokens comes amid the growing interest surrounding AI capabilities," said Decrypt, noting recent reports of Microsoft investing $10 billion into OpenAI, the developer of ask-it-anything tool ChatGPT.

According to CoinGecko, FET has doubled to $0.54 in just the past week.

Meanwhile, Ocean Protocol, which is touted as aiming to facilitate the discreet exchange of data-based services, particularly for AI, has seen its native OCEAN surge 54% in that same seven-day period.

Also trying to harness/monetize AI services is SingularityNET. Its native token's rocket ride is exceptional. AGIX gained 200% in the past week. And AGIX is up a staggering 889% in the past month.

Now at issue in the FTX bankruptcy case: to assign an independent examiner, or not to.

Hey Judge, we've got this covered – that basically was the message delivered yesterday by John Ray, parachuted in as the new FTX CEO this past November amidst a chaotic scramble by new management to seek Chapter 11 protection while staving off an around-the-clock carcass-looting hackathon. Ray insists he and other professionals have been “carefully” conducting an investigation into the insolvent exchange's activities (Cointelegraph).

The destructive spray from the November 2022 collapse of FTX continues to gash holes in the crypto universe and humble former giants: we just now learned that ousted FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been forced to seek court approval to modify his bail conditions so he can get back on WhatsApp, which he now can do albeit on the condition his phone has monitoring software installed to record those messages (CoinDesk).

And the indignities just keep coming. It was bad enough that Digital Currency Group's subsidiary Genesis got swept up in the FTX/Alameda contagion, but now DCG is having to pawn off stakes in several investment vehicles run by its digital asset management subsidiary Grayscale – and having to do so at a steep discount.

According to the FT, citing filings, DCG's recent Grayscale sales have involved shares of Grayscale's Ethereum fund.

Over the course of several trades going back two weeks, DCG dumped one-quarter of its shares in the ETH fund, all told amounting to about $22 million dollars' worth, and sold at $8 per share, despite each share's claim to $16 of ETH.

Meanwhile, on a positive note, DCG and Genesis yesterday reached an agreement with a key group of creditors intending to sell its subsidiary Genesis' crypto trading business, as well as its lending arm, which is the piece in the midst of restructuring through bankruptcy.

In a short while, at 12:40 p.m. (EST) today, the Fed chair will deliver a speech at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. If it is hawkish, well, look out.

Last week saw the release of an extraordinary employment report, suggesting the economy is humming along, not quite an inflation dampening environment, and thus, experts say, there is a danger lurking. And that is the Fed possibly feeling new pressure to become more aggressive and “ratchet up interest rates until it chokes off the demand for workers,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economic Outlook Group.

Powell's remarks, bound to rivet market participants right down to the final syllable, come on the day of the U.S. State of the Union Speech, the annual address to Congress from President Joe Biden. It’s an important speech meant to highlight the administration's accomplishments and set priorities. However, over the years, the SOTUS has become increasingly rote to the point of being unbearable tedious.

To inject some new vitality into the moribund Presidential oration vehicle, the Associated Press experimented with AI technology to get fresh takes from the likes of Aristotle, Cleopatra, Elvis and Shakespeare. To that whimsical end, AP enlisted the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT, built by OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, reportedly set to introduce a ChatGPT-related service. (Yesterday, Google announced a foray into the chatbot space.)

Asked to render some SOTUSs as they might have been written by historical figures, ChatGPT still wound up spewing drivel, as evidenced by this snippet from the concocted Cleopatra speech: "Let us continue to work together to strive for a better future and to build a stronger, more prosperous Egypt."