Random

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.

Read Full Story

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).

Read Full Story

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

Read Full Story

DAOs decentralized finance generational change marketing Social / Community

·Jul. 18, 2021

The difference between Gen Z and Millennial online culture, resulting in DAOs, decentralization, and creative financial communities

Gen Z is becoming a cultural force, reshaping culture and online society. This is starting to echo in fintech startups and crypto protocols. We explore how financial communities are beginning to congeal into DAOs, their nature and structure, and potential longer terms outcomes. The analysis identifies the differences in Millennial and Gen Z approaches — however imperfectly — to explain the frontier of social tokens and why ShapeShift chose decentralization, while Revolut chose decacorn funding.

DAOs are not socialist communes built for the benefit of humankind. Rather, they are techno-fortresses to defend, and make valuable, exclusive online tribes.

Whereas Millennials dream about a VC-funded unicorn startup, permissioned into wealth with capital from traditionally successful investors, Gen Z and crypto natives dream about bottoms-up community syndicates with trillions to spend on the sci-fi future, unshackled from regulatory overhang and the sins of the 2008 quantitative-easing past.

Read Full Story

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.

Read Full Story

eCommerce Embedded Finance paytech Social / Community

·Apr. 16, 2021

Building global paytech companies and communities with Anil Aggarwal of TxVia, Money2020, and Fintech Meetup

In this conversation, we talk with Anil Aggarwal of Clarity Payment Solutions (acquired by TSYS) and TxVia (acquired by Google) about how he “stumbled” upon the payment space at the right time.

Anil is an absolute FinTech icon as the founder of renowned FinTech conferences – Money20/20 and FinTech Meetup. Additionally, we explore the various concepts of payment network utlity, the market timing large platform shifts, as well as, how social capital and community formation can serve as drivers towards the monetization of our attention even further.

Read Full Story

digital transformation generational change marketing mega banks neobank Social / Community

·Jul. 29, 2021

Step CEO CJ MacDonald on building the leading Gen-Z bank, TikTok influencers, and money culture

In this conversation, we delve deep into next generation finance and banking with CJ MacDonald, the Founder and CEO of Step – an incredibly successful neobank on a mission to improve the financial future of the next generation.

More specifically, we discuss traditional vs. digital banking, how personal experiences influence entrepreneurial the spirit, immersive market research, banking-as-a-service, the importance of financial literacy amongst Millenials and Gen-Z, the power of influencers who actually believe in a brand, aspirational brands vs. plastic Wells Fargo stage coaches, and lastly the proliferation of crypto in the minds of the next generation.

Read Full Story

DAOs eCommerce marketing microeconomics NFTs and digital objects Social / Community visual art

·Jul. 4, 2021

Luxury and Fashion market structure applied to finance, NFTs, and DAO

Luxury and fashion markets are structurally different from finance or commodity markets in that they seek to limit supply in order to generate value. This increases price and social status. We can analogize these brand dynamics to what is happening in NFT digital object markets and better understand their function as a result.

We’re not cool. That’s why we’re in finance.

But people want to be cool. As highly social and intelligent animals, we want and need to belong, differentiate against each other, and negotiate for status. We create signals and hierarchies to create pockets of relational capital, which we then cash in for real world benefits.

Such mammalian realities are contrary to the economic rendering of the homo economicus, the abstracted rational agent making choices in financial models. In 2021, our financial models are waking up and instantiating themselves, becoming Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), spun up by DeFi and NFT industry insiders, and implemented into commercial actions onchain.

Read Full Story

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.

Read Full Story

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

Read Full Story