With the NFT market on life support, creators are pivoting to real-world assets to stay afloat: The market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been plummeting since April amid a broader sell-off of crypto made worse by the collapse of major crypto exchange FTX, the Financial Times reports. Sales of NFTs fell 87% since March of this year to just USD 17 bn, compared with USD 19 bn spent on NFTs in the first quarter of the year alone. Makers of popular NFT collections are left trying to expand their brands beyond the blockchain universe by using their branded characters and art to sell merchandise and create Disney-inspired entertainment franchises. Some are already reaping the rewards of their pivots, with one brand — Pudgy Penguins — seeing the price of its NFTs more than triple to around USD 5.7k in December.

But some think NFTs are beyond rescue: “The fundamental model of NFTs didn’t work. It was a bubble that has burst and is not going to happen again,” said one analyst. Others claim that with values of NFTs plummeting, the brands are doomed to fail in the real world. “Once there has been a disconnect between the valuation and the product, they can never become a Disney-type brand,” said the analyst.

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Meta is still committed to AR: Despite major losses, Meta’s Reality Labs division spent close to USD 10 bn last year — around half their budget — on augmented reality (AR), The Verge reports. The company’s goal is to develop slimmer, lighter, and faster AR glasses that are crucial to the Metaverse ecosystem. Last year Reality Labs released the Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses — equipped with cameras for an on-go Instagrammable experience — followed by the Meta Quest Pro headset marketed for designers, architects and other creatives

AR vs VR: AR is a mix of the real world and computer generated content using sensor cameras and GPS to capture the user’s surroundings in-depth and then generate a real life 3D image — think Google Glass. VR, on the other hand, is a completely immersive environment that is computer generated, like Meta Quest, Oculus Quest, and HP Reverb. VR is both a software and a hardware that immerse the user in a computer generated virtual world.

But all these tech ambitions aren’t translating to income: Meta lost over USD 9 bn in 2022 and the losses are expected to continue in 2023, Meta disclosed in a statement.

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The rise of synthetic food startups could support ethical eating habits: Startups creating synthetic meat and whey in labs through synthetic biology are helping create crueltyfree food alternatives that could upend the ethics of our eating habits, Virginia Postrel writes for the Wall Street Journal. These startups get their meat from cells grown in vats — large tanks used for holding liquids — and can then sell them to restaurants or individuals.

But there are cultural hurdles: Some activist groups are lobbying against these synthetic alternatives, arguing that “natural foods” coming directly from natural sources are healthier, and raising concerns around the kinds of synthetic chemicals used to create these foods. While it might take some time for synthetic foods to become mainstream, Postrel says there are signs it will become normalized sooner rather than later. The US Food and Drug Administration, for example, has for the first time approved lab grown chicken meat from San Francisco-based startup Upside Foods.