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music industry NFTs and digital objects paytech philosophy Social / Community

·Mar. 8, 2021

Why Square bought Jay Z’s music service Tidal for $300MM, and how the NFT-driven transformation of music royalties and ownership can explain this future

This week, we look at:

Square acquiring Tidal and its 1-2 million of subscribers for $297 million, and the logic for what a payment processors has in common with the creative industry
How celebrities and creators like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grimes, 3LAU and others are generating millions in NFT sales
The impact on the economic model of the music industry, including a look at royalty structures, revenue pools, and financial vehicles when tokenized
The philosophical divide growing between a feudal platformed commons (e.g., YouTube) and a collectivist anarchist capitalism

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decentralized finance NFTs and digital objects regulation & compliance Social / Community

·Mar. 29, 2021

Are the NFT and DeFi markets recreating traditional human hierarchies through new social capital?

This week, we look at:

The fundraises of Jumio ($150MM), Feedzai ($200MM), and Chainalysis ($100MM) and the function they perform in the fintech industry
The nature of human competition and hierarchies, and why inequality is recreated across the various economic networks that exist
How the NFT markets have higher engagement than DeFi, which is more participatory than Fintech, which is more participatory than finance
The emergence of signalling in the crypto economy that resembles digital citizenship and social capital

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big tech digital lending neobank paytech Social / Community

·Sep. 20, 2021

Unlocking Demand-side growth with Square’s payment network and Goldman’s GreenSky acquisition

Square upgrades Cash App into a payment processing powerhouse, completing the loop between the consumer and merchant side of the house. Goldman Sachs acquires GreenSky, adding a lending business at the point of intent. This analysis connects these symptoms into a framework explaining the increasing integration between commerce and finance, and the increasing role that demand generation plays. That in turn explains how the attention and creator economies interconnect with financial services.

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big tech gaming & sports Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects Social / Community visual art

·Jul. 25, 2021

Getting ahead in Facebook’s Metaverse by earning the Harvard of NFTs

Facebook is building towards a Metaverse version of the Internet, in both its hardware and software efforts. What are the implications? And further, how does one acquire status, work, and social capital in such a world? We explore the recent NFT avatar projects through the lens of Ivy League universities and CFA exams to understand some timeless cultural trends.

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Investing philosophy Social / Community

·Feb. 1, 2021

How the Internet/Reddit/GameStop broke our financial market structure, the social contract, and what comes next

Despite its best efforts to the contrary, Robinhood did end up stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

Melvin Capital, the $8 billion hedge fund that didn’t find GameStop funny, lost 53% of its portfolio in January ($7 billion) trying to short against the rallying cries of the Reddit Capitalist Union. Gabe Plotkin also faces the embarrassment of having to get bailed out by your old boss.

Speaking of, New York Mets owner and former name-on-the-door of SAC Capital, known most recently for its insider trading fine of $1.8 billion, Steven A. Cohen, put $2.8 billion of capital into Melvin’s fund.

Ken Griffin, owner of the Citadel hedge fund (an investor in Melvin), and Citadel Securities (a massive market maker and buyer-of-order-flow for Robinhood), is seeing capital losses in the former and Washington cries for scrutiny into market structure in regards to the latter.

Robinhood itself — which for goodness sake is *not Wall Street*, but as *Silicon Valley* as it possibly gets — raised $1 billion immediately to protect itself from class action lawsuits, DTCC capital calls, and a now-rapidly-closing IPO window. That means Yuri Milner of DST Global chipping in yet again.

That’s at least 4 people that have had a very bad, no good day.

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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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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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exchanges / cap mkts identity and privacy marketing Metaverse / xR NFTs and digital objects Social / Community visual art

·Oct. 6, 2021

User-Generated Finance and Cultural Financial Instruments, via Snoop Dogg, Dapper Labs, and $1.5B Decentralized Social

The structure of capital markets precedes the innovations that come from it. High frequency trading, passive ETF investing, SPACs, and crypto assets all telegraphed their value proposition before becoming large and meaningful in scale. We are now seeing a new market shape emerge, one that starts with community and builds up into financial instruments that are cultural and social. This analysis looks at the most recent developments in the overlap between decentralized social and cultural work and related financial features.

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central bank / CBDC civilization and politics enterprise blockchain macroeconomics narrative zeitgeist philosophy regulation & compliance Social / Community stablecoins things that are not true

·Nov. 24, 2021

World Economic Forum CBDC analysis in the era of Populism, Institutionalism, and Hofstede’s Cultural DNA

We anchor our writing around the World Economic Forum 223 page report on CBDCs and stablecoins. The analysis highlights the key conclusions across several white papers in the report. We then add a layer of meta analysis around the language in the report, and question what it is trying to accomplish, and whether that will work with the Web3 revolution. This leads us to think about the tension between populism, as represented by crypto, and institutionalism, as represented by banking structures. We discuss theories of cultural and national DNA, and the rise of populism, as difficult problems to solve for any global alignment.

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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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