Tuesday afternoon Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced on Twitter an agreement to buy FTX.com, the non-U.S. section of FTX.
Making news this week was FTX expanding into stock trading, Plaid getting into identity verification, Klarna raising money at a lower valuation, Nubank adds 5.7 million new customers in Q1, Robinhood launching self-custodial wallets and more.
We look at a recent report from Protos that traces the issuance of USDT to the institutional players in the centralized crypto capital markets. The data reveals the market share of players like Alameda, Cumberland, Jump, and others in powering trading in exchanges. We try to contextualize this market structure with what exists both in (1) investment banking and (2) decentralized finance. The analogies are helpful to de-sensationalize the information and calculate some rough economics.
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.
Sometimes more is more, and sometimes less is more.
In that spirit, we strongly urge you to check out Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2021. It is a mammoth work of 134 pages, covering each and every development in the ecosystem.
If you don’t want to fuss around with the email gate, the direct link is here.
We are going to pick out five things that are interesting to us substantively and provide a view below. By pick out, we mean screenshot and respond.
The crypto contagion continued this week with BlockFi being the center of attention. There was also news from FTX on Robinhood, Celsius continued to flounder, Three Arrows Capital is toast, and amid all this turmoil the EU agreed to a crypto regulatory framework.
Leading the news this week was the incredible demise of Fast that imploded this past week. Also making news was a big M&A deal from Fast archrival Bolt, Jamie Dimon's shareholder letter discusses tech, the UK go all-in on crypto, the SEC wants to regulate crypto exchanges and more.
In this analysis, we explore an overarching framework for the M&A activity in the fintech, big tech, and crypto ecosystems. We discuss acquihiring, horizontal and vertical consolidation, as well as the differences between growth and value oriented acquisition rationales. The core insight, however, is about the arbitrage between the fintech and financial services capital markets, as evidenced by the recent transactions for Starling and Figure.
This week, we cover these ideas:
The difference between building a Fintech company, and building an empire to transform the world
How Warren Buffett is the best in the world at getting leverage through third party capital to grow
How Elon Musk is the best in the world at re-investing capital into his own judgment and view of the future
The $1.2B BitGo acquisition by Galaxy Digital, and the growing footprint of Alameda Research
DAOs as a way for all of us to participate
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