Last quarter, fintech funding rose to $30 billion, the highest on record. $14 billion of SPAC capital is waiting to take these companies public. Robinhood and Circle are about to float on the public markets, via SPAC and IPO. In this analysis, we explore the fundamentals of both companies, as well as the unifying thesis that explains their growth.
his week, we look at:
There are two very large revenue pools in the crypto asset class — (1) mining, and (2) trading. There are some large revenue pools in crypto-as-a-software, too, but those tend to be less sensational.
This analysis will establish a 2021 baseline for the most regulated of crypto exchanges, Coinbase, including a detailed financial model building a $100B+ valuation case
We then consider the valuations and multiples of capital markets protocols in Decentralized Finance of Ethereum, now making up over $60B in token value
Lastly, we look at Binance’s $1B in profits, its $35B BNB token, and the activities on Binance Smart Chain
Coinbase is going to go public.
The news hit Reuters, then Coindesk, and then the rest of the world. It feels like big news! The crypto broker is beating Robinhood, Acorns, Stash, Revolut, Betterment, and Wealthfront to the public markets. It's even beating SoFi, which is trying to get a national bank license (and who doesn't want to own a bank!).
In this conversation, we have a really cool conversation on fintech, crypto assets, payments and all the things around it with Ivan Soto-Wright, the CEO and Co-founder of MoonPay.
More specifically, we discuss Liability-driven Investment (LDI), the proliferation of AI in personal finance to drive sound decision-making, innovation in finance is following the same trajectory that resulted in VOIP for the telecommunication industry, the geographical maze of crypto KYC, payment networks, and crypto payment processing.
Robo 1.0 success Personal Capital was acquired for nearly $1 billion by Empower, a major retirement savings manager. Softbank-backed insurtech darling Lemonade IPOed at less than $2 billion, in a successful fundraise and listing, and has since seen its market cap rise to over $4 billion. The IPO is a landmark for an insurtech industry in desperate need of successes. And PayPal announces the impending launch of crypto trading to its 325 million users. The move isn’t overly interesting in its own right, but the implications for the crypto space are worth exploring.
