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Metaverse / xR

exchanges / cap mkts gaming & sports governance identity and privacy Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects regulation & compliance Social / Community

·Sep. 6, 2021

Financial Mythmaking with $200MM of Loot NFTs and their growing world

We discuss the top-down and bottoms-up approaches to innovation and project building. For the former, we reference Australia’s draconian surveillance laws, and the integration of US driver’s licenses into Apple’s wallet. For the latter, we dive into the Ethereum-based Loot project and its incredible derivatives, $500MM token, and $200MM of volume. Last, we conclude by highlighting the role of creators on the coming wave of Fintech.

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DAOs gaming & sports generational change Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects Social / Community

·Sep. 3, 2021

Metaverse 101 with Lex Sokolin and Cris Sheridan, Sr. Editor of Financial Sense

In this conversation, Cris Sheridan, who is the Senior Editor of Financial Sense and Host of FS Insider, leads the conversation around the basics to understand the exciting new digital universe, more commonly known as The Metaverse.

More specifically, we discuss all things VR & AR including social media’s proliferation into the sector, Millenial vs GenZ behavioural approaches to the metaverse, the creator economy, NFTs, Axie Infinity, Mr Beast, Computational Blockchains, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), ConsenSys, MetaMask, and Ethereum vs Institutional Finance (Schwab).

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Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects visual art

·Oct. 2, 2020

Fintech in the Metaverse, plus NFTs, Crypto Art, and Epic Games

Today, we’re joined by Angela Dalton to explore the fun and fantastical world that sits at the intersection of gaming, immersive technology, crypto and economics, namely, the Metaverse.

Angela is the Founder and CEO of Signum Growth Capital, an M&A advisory firm focused on emerging opportunities in fintech, especially blockchain, and digital media.

In this conversation, we discuss expectations for both recreation and work in a digital future, technological advances in recent years that underpin coming changes to immersive virtual experiences, the economics of virtual worlds and more.

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artificial intelligence big tech China civilization and politics Metaverse / xR visual art

·Jul. 27, 2020

OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction

This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.

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augmented reality digital lending Investing Metaverse / xR neobank roboadvisor

·Dec. 10, 2019

Neobank Chime valued at $6 billion with 7 million users, Goldman to launch roboadvisor with $5,000 minimum

We look at some of the recent Fintech bundling news that boggle the mind. Neobank Chime just raised a mammoth round from DST Global, valuing it at $6 billion. Figure raised another $60 million round. Goldman is launching a retail roboadvisor. Revolut is offering pensions. Wealthfront is offering mortgages. The world is upside down. We cool down with pictures showing augmented reality implementations in commerce and finance, and finish with an elevated thought about the future.

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credit unions/small banks marketing Metaverse / xR music industry neobank Social / Community

·Oct. 21, 2019

Double Standards — Fortnite game praised for black-out, neobank Chime upsets 5 million customers

Let’s look at the recent Fortnite blackout and compare it to neobank Chime's embarassing down time, as well as explore the business model implication of what it means to be the social square where people hang out. Does Finance have such an equivalent? Maybe it is Venmo, crypto Twitter, or the credit unions. We also look at statistics behind influencer marketing, and how influencers have usurped the position of music labels. Perhaps banks should get ahead of this game too.

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Crypto DAOs decentralized finance Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects

·Sep. 24, 2021

What’s next in Web3? Tachyon Accelerator’s MD Gabriel Anderson on early stage in NFTs, DeFi, & Crypto

In this conversation, we chat with Gabriel Anderson – Managing Director at Tachyon, Head of Market Strategy & Business Intelligence at ConsenSys Labs. Former Head of VaynerMedia. Alumnus of Merrill Lynch.

More specifically, we touch on what Tachyon is, how it works, and who it’s for, the growth of crypto, and what needs to come next to allow the widespread adoption of crypto by mainstream society. Gabriel talks about the best projects he has seen so far that combine NFTs with other elements of DeFi and crypto, and what he’d like to see more of in the future.

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augmented reality Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects visual art

·Jan. 8, 2021

Lessons for banking and finance from video game interface design

We’ve had this write-up in some various mental states floating around for a while, and better done than perfect. So treat this as a core idea to be fleshed out later.

Payments and banking companies should be looking at how people purchase and store digital goods and digital currency in video games. That experience has been polished over 40 years, and is what will be the default expectation for future generations.

For those interested, here is a website that collects user experiences of shopping across hundreds of designs.

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China digital lending eCommerce Metaverse / xR neobank small business Social / Community super app supply chain / trade

·Jun. 13, 2021

The links between tech, commerce, and finance behind Klarna’s $45B valuation and Pinduoduo’s $150B marketcap

This week, we cover these ideas:

Klarna’s $640 million raise and its $45 billion valuation, and how its business model arbitrages the payments revenue pool to build a lending business
Pinduoduo’s growth path to a $150B marketcap, and the links between shopping, media, and financial mechanisms that help it compete with Alibaba
A comparison of approaches to growth and economics
Implications for crypto assets for capturing “the real economy”

Klarna is raising $640 million on a $45 billion private valuation, with over $1 billion in net operating income. The buy-now-pay-later company has over 90 million active customers and 250,000 merchants. It was founded in Sweden in 2005.

On the other side of the ocean, Chinese ecommerce company Pinduoduo is beating Alibaba with 820 million active buyers, generates over $3 billion in revenue per quarter, connects buyers to 12 million farmers, and has a market capitalization of $150 billion. It was founded in China in 2015.

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augmented reality Metaverse / xR

·May. 25, 2020

Apple’s augmented reality leak, and what Fintech should do for the coming Multiverse

This week, let's dive into the Apple augmented reality glasses leak, the Magic Leap $350 million financing, and the uncanny imagery created by Epic Games' Unreal Engine. We summarize and pull apart the thesis of the Metaverse -- a virtual world as realistic and economically important as our own -- and how media and financial companies should think about the opportunity.

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