Will there be a “killer app” that gives individuals sovereignty over their online identities – at global scale? And what is the role of startups in a domain contested by governments and Big Tech alike?

Exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Three Steps to the Future’.

Nexar, a company best-known for its line of smart dash cams, has raised $53 million in a Series D financing round led by Qumra Capital. The funds will be used, in part, to scale its “digital twin” service built off crowdsourced dash cam footage for automotive OEMs and cities.

Email newsletters unlocked a new way to pay for content, but is this a tool or a network? You can write all you like, but how do you get readers? And is the take rate 10% or 90%?

The future of B2B commerce is open and frictionless

‘Big tech’ buys hundreds of startups, but what are they, what does that mean for competition, and how does this fit into the broader market? How many more Instagrams are there, and how many DAOs?

Has Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook, or rebranded VR? What is the metaverse? And can any company decide to build the future anymore?

The auspiciously named Blockchain.com recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, which may as well be a century in crypto years. The U.K.-based private company has another reason to celebrate too: Its revenue just surpassed $1.5 billion year to date, according to vice chairman Nicolas Cary and chief executive Peter Smith, who shared the figure exclusively with Fortune.

The world of technology cannot, and should not, stand apart from ethics and the norms of civil society. On the internet, one of the most central normative questions we have wrestled with is the relationship between software applications, derivative data stored and shared in the cloud, and privacy -- notably, consumer privacy.

Real estate is the world’s largest asset class: UK buy-to-let alone is £1.2T. Yet it remains completely un-securitised and inefficiently managed. Individual investors often find themselves lacking a clear view of property yield, while having to manage an ever-changing landscape of regulations and tax laws.

‘Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to combine might not happen, or not like that. This might be the new ‘information highway.’ But however it works, some kind of break-out of new devices, new experiences and new kinds of popular culture seems pretty easy to believe in.

What does a mailbox with 351 thousand unread emails say about Bauhaus, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Metaverse?

In all the enthusiasms, arguments and panics around tech, Apple is the $2tn elephant in the corner, mostly silent and serenely indifferent to the news cycle. It just ships - and it ships market-leading products, with metronomic precision, at massive scale, on a decade-long strategic roadmap. It also likes lecturing its peers. But is there another Jesusphone?

About a year ago, via our friend and co-investor Taavet Hinrikus, we learnt about a promising pair of ex-Wise (formerly TransferWise) executives who were under the radar, on a mission to democratise retail investment in Europe. At the time, in “stealth mode” the project was called Gandalf. As longtime consumer fintech geeks and Tolkien fans, we were doubly intrigued.

‘Digital transformation’ sounds like a parody of meaningless tech marketing, but actually captures some pretty interesting and important shifts in big company tech. It’s not as exciting as crypto or AR, and it takes a decade or two, but it’s just as big as smartphones.

Privacy is coming to the internet and cookies are going away. This is long overdue - but we don’t know what happens next, we don’t have much consensus on what online privacy actually means, and most of what’s on the table conflicts fundamentally with competition.

We’ve been arguing about Apple’s app store rules for a decade now, but whatever your opinion of them, it should now be clear that something is going to change.

Evgeny, Vadim, and Alexey have blown us away at every turn, with a powerful vision of creating the one-stop shop for DeFi. With a sharp eye for product and growth, they are rapidly bringing that vision to life.

We are living through a fundamental shift in the structure of work: the rise of the non-employee. This presents new challenges: how do you manage an increasingly heterogeneous workforce in a unified, holistic way?

There has been a proliferation – and fragmentation – of new work software in the cloud. End users can now pick and choose products that work for them, pioneered by the likes of Slack and Dropbox. But maintaining a coherent workflow across large teams is a struggle. So what should the “connective tissue” between SaaS applications look like?