This week our experts brought you the following insights based on their experience as investors, entrepreneurs & executives.
Monday Ilias Hatzis our Greece-based crypto entrepreneur (Founder & CEO at Kryptonio a “keyless” non-custodial bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet, that lets users manage bitcoin and crypto, without private keys or passwords and Weekly Columnist at Daily Fintech) @iliashatzis wrote Payments are the “glue”
The entire week JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, was all over the Greek news. This weekend it was mentioned countless times in Greek parliament by the prime minister and several other cabinet members, during the no-confidence vote initiated by the main opposition leader. Last Monday, JPMorgan announced that it agreed to acquire a 49% stake in the Greek fintech Viva Wallet. This was really big news for the company, its employees, and the entire local startup ecosystem because it turned Viva into the first Greek unicorn, valued close to $2 billion. In the last ten years the Greek startup scene has been picking up steam and 2021 was a record year for the country in terms of investment, with over half a billion euros in funding. JPMorgan’s investment in Viva is part of its overall strategy of tapping into fintech startups not just for investment, but for growing its business more directly. In 2021, JPMorgan Chase was on a buying spree, investing in more than 30 companies, both big and small, to secure its present and future leadership. JPMorgan Chase has announced that in 2022 it will spend more than $12 billion on technology. That’s some serious money coming into fintech.
Editor note: Jamie Dimon is one smart guy.
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Tuesday Bernard Lunn, CEO of Daily Fintech and author of The Blockchain Economy wrote: Web 3 Part 1 What is Web3 and why do some people love it and others hate it?
Gavin Wood, now based in Switzerland, is crediting with coining the term Web3 in 2014 when he was CoFounder and CTO of the Ethereum Foundation.
Web3 is a vision of a an Internet that is not controlled by a few big centralised players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon ie the Web2 we use every day.
Roy Amara was a Stanford University computer scientist and long-time head of the Institute for the Future who said that we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run. That became “Amara’s law”.
Editor note: this article describes why Web 3 based on decentralised and permissionless exchange of value is real and not hype.
Alan Scott Managing Director EMEA at 24 Exchange @Alan_SmartMoney wrote Facebook Fail!
Is it Libra or is it Diem, is it Facebook or is it Meta? Hard to keep up with all the name and brand changes, but whatever way you look at it, the news just in about the sale to a US based VC called Silvergate for $200m represents a significant fail.
To try and make sense of this, why it happened and what it means for the broader Crypto Industry, we asked our resident stablecoin expert, Alan Scott some questions.
Editor note: Digging below the surface of important news is what we do at Daily Fintech.
Wednesday Alan Scott Managing Director EMEA at 24 Exchange @Alan_SmartMoney wrote his weekly roundup of Stablecoin news.
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Thursday
Rintu Patnaik, an Insurtech expert based in India, wrote: The Latent Potential In Insurance Markets: Two Indicators That Unravel
The median of global Insurance Penetration, defined in terms of insurance premium as percentage of GDP, was below 2% as recently as 2016. But it masquerades the fact that national differences are large, ranging from 20% at one end to 0.06% at the other. Some countries don’t have developed insurance markets, being at early stages of development. Theories suggest there is a per-capita income threshold after which insurance adoption starts growing.
Editor note: This is a very thoughtful post that rewards close attention for investors concerned about climate change.
Christian Dreyer @x3er, the Swiss based CFA who focusses on how XBRL changes our world wrote his weekly roundup of XBRL news.
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Friday Howard Tolman, a well-known banker, technologist and entrepreneur in London, wrote his weekly roundup of Alt Lending news.
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