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big tech China Investing IPO / SPAC paytech

·Sep. 21, 2020

Is Ant Financial the best Fintech in the world? Let’s analyze the IPO!

In this conversation, Max Friedrich of ARK Invest, Will and Lex break down Ant Group’s highly anticipated IPO.

Ant, a spinout from Alibaba and the parent of Alipay, one of China’s leading payments companies, filed papers to IPO in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Max, Will and Lex dig into Ant’s business, from the origins to today, discuss growth opportunities and potential headwinds and explore the multi-faceted relationships between Ant and other big tech companies and national governments.

We cannot understate how impressive Ant Financial has become, connecting 700 million people and 80 million merchants in China, with payments, savings, wealth management and insurance products integrated in one package. The company also highlights the likely road for traditional banks — as underlying risk capital, without much technology or client management.

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central bank / CBDC China civilization and politics Crypto DAOs decentralized finance governance India macroeconomics Metaverse / xR regulation & compliance

·Aug. 5, 2021

Sheila Warren of the World Economic Forum on the 4th Industrial Revolution, the role of Law, Government, and DAOs, and the Creator Economy

In this conversation, we are so lucky to tap into the brilliant mind of none other than Sheila Warren who sits on the Executive Committee of the World Economic Forum and is a key member in the executive leadership of the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), in which she oversees strategy across the entire C4IR Network, consisting of centers in 13 countries. Sheila also holds board member and advisory positions at multiple institutions and organizations including The MIT Press (Cryptoeconomic Systems), The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), NGO network TechSoup and she is a Member of The Bretton Woods Committee.

More specifically, we discuss her professional journey from small claims court to NGO Aid to refugees to corporate law to The WEF, touching on rational choice theory, corporate personhood and its correlation to the growth around ESG, new substrates, DAOs and protocols, artificial intelligence, the purpose of The World Economic Forum and its impact on governments and society alike, and just so much more!

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China digital transformation Embedded Finance insurtech

·Jan. 22, 2021

Embedded Finance as a $7 trillion market opportunity for banks in the business of suffering, with Simon Torrance

In this conversation, we talk all things embedded finance, platform banking, and APIs with Simon Torrance – one of the world’s leading thinkers on business model transformation, specializing in platform strategy, breakthrough innovation and digital ventures.

There’s an enormous gap between the financial needs of humanity and what the financial sector is able to deliver there. This gap is being filled by tech-savvy solutions and embedded finance plays which are putting into question the role of a bank in this new ecosystem.

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China covid pandemic decentralized finance macroeconomics philosophy

·Aug. 3, 2020

The symbolic battle over TikTok, intellectual property, and blockchain-based finance

This week, we look at:

The 10% collapse in GDP across the US & Eurozone, and how it compares with China's second quarter

The geopolitical battle over TikTok, its alleged spying, and understanding the winners and losers of the Microsoft deal

A framework for how to win in open source competition, explaining both Shenzhen manufacturing success and decentralized finance growth to $4 billion

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central bank / CBDC China civilization and politics enterprise blockchain super app

·Mar. 15, 2021

The battle for Chinese Fintech as China highlights blockchain in Five Year Plan, ramps up Ant and Tencent regulation, phases in e-CNY

This week, we look at:

China’s Five Year Plan, the industrial logic of the system, and its ramifications for blockchain and fintech in the country
The regulatory challenges faced by Chinese tech companies, including the resignation of Ant Group’s CEO and the anti-competition fines for Tencent
The growth path of the e-CNY digital currency, as well as Beijing’s enterprise blockchain powering the city infrastructure and governance
Footnote: Stripe worth $95 billion, closing $600 million investment

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artificial intelligence big tech China civilization and politics Metaverse / xR visual art

·Jul. 27, 2020

OpenAI, backed with $1B+ by Elon Musk & MSFT, can now program SQL and write Harry Potter fan-fiction

This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.

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central bank / CBDC China covid pandemic macroeconomics regulation & compliance small business stablecoins

·Apr. 20, 2020

War over Money reaches new heights, as Libra opts into regulation, China launches national blockchain, and Financial Stability Board raises alarm

This week, we look at cash -- blockchain cash. The war for money is just starting to ramp up, as Facebook Libra explains its new regulated plan, the Chinese national Blockchain Service network goes live, Ethereum stablecoins reach historic market caps in the billions, and the Financial Stability Board recommends to go heavy on global stablecoin arrangements. In 2008, Bitcoin threw a rock through the window of the financial skyscraper, and today we are starting to see the cracks. As the US government runs out of $350 billion in small business bail-out money and gets ready to print more, where do you stand?

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big tech China civilization and politics fixed income governance macroeconomics narrative zeitgeist philosophy Social / Community

·Sep. 23, 2019

Facebook’s Supreme Court is like Compliance in Banks, or Chinese Communist Party entities in joint ventures

I've seen a whole bunch of headlines this past week about how Facebook is launching its version of the "Supreme Court", as if that were an app feature. The oversight board is meant to police controversial content decisions, and have the power to overrule Zuck's judgment on political matters. Its charter is drafted as if Facebook's 3 billion users were citizens of an Internet nation. Add to this the insanity over WeWork's failing IPO plans, where the CEO has been personally named in the amended filing documents with clear checks on demonstrated abuses of power. We are drifting into a Twilight Zone episode where modern corporations act as if they were feudal states run by divine kings negotiating with their nobility over a Magna Carta. Which is actually sort of where we are.

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big tech China digital lending digital transformation paytech

·Jul. 31, 2020

Growth of brand banking, tragedy of OnDeck vs. Kabbage, and the Indian Fintech war between WhatsApp and WeChat

The fintech world is not taking the summer off. New developments are coming fast and furious, from fundraisings to product launches to government intervention.

Banking for brands startup Bond raised $32 million to capitalize on the exploding trend of B2B2C banking.

Samsung Money launched, leveraging SoFi’s infrastructure. As SoFi again seeks a national banking charter, they could become the de facto leader in this space.

Kabbage and Intuit launched small business bank accounts as extensions of their already deep relationships with SMBs.

And WhatsApp is trialing all sorts of financial services in India just as Chinese fintech super apps are being banned from the country.

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central bank / CBDC China decentralized finance digital lending identity and privacy philosophy

·Jun. 7, 2021

Purpose of Identity, its connection to finance, and implementations in the Euro digital wallet and DeFi protocols

This week, we cover these ideas:

The nature of digital identity, and the difference between a representation at some moment of time vs. a record of your being
The launch of the DeFi Passport by Arcx and how it can be useful for underwriting
The European Digital Wallet, and the implication of such a development for CBDCs and government services
China’s CBDC, Sweden’s BankID, and other existential crises

If you want to go deeper on this topic, we strongly recommend our conversation with Michael Cena of the Ceramic Network here. Whereas Michael started working on the identity problem by trying to add labels to people, where he ended up is creating a protocol that tracks historic software activity and interactions between actors. In thinking about the Ship of Theseus, this is the solution that says — your identity is your journey through the river of time itself, and not any particular stop you make along the way.

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