Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and take a peek at the week that is to come.
Now that we are finally past Y Combinator’s demo day — though our Friday show is worth listening if you haven’t had a chance yet — we can dive into the latest news.
So, this morning on Equity Monday we got into the chance that the United States might pass a real data privacy law.
There’s movement to report, but we’re still very, very far from anything becoming law.
After a lengthy trial and conviction, we finally learned how long former crypto baron Sam Bankman-Fried will be behind bars: up to 25 years.
It’s a lengthy sentence, but one that given the scale of the crimes he was convicted of, doesn’t come as a shock.
For the crypto industry, it’s also the final page in a chapter that many may want firmly behind them.
After all, we’re out of the last crypto winter and are back in a period of rising token prices, growing trading volume, and hints of the prior excitement that web3 commanded during the last asset bubble.
Still, before we fully wrap up our coverage of SBF and his erstwhile empire, it’s worth taking one last trip down memory lane to cement in our minds how we wound up with a former venture and political darling not in the dock, but behind bars.
How crypto exchange Backpack climbed its way to success after its major investor FTX died Backpack hit $27.5 billion in total trading volume during its beta phaseBackpack’s founders, who are building a crypto exchange and wallet, have experienced strong growth since launching in 2022.
There’s a bunch of lessons to learn from FTX, Ferrante said.
This is done in hopes that there’s no single point of failure and that the operations of the Backpack crypto exchange can be split up across multiple entities.
At the end of February, Backpack raised $17 million at a $120 million valuation in a Series A round led by Placeholder VC.
But product distribution is top of mind for the exchange as it hopes to get into every country around the world.
Stripe is sufficiently large that when we consider its growth we have to weigh it against the overall growth in the payment space more generally.
Major growth pointsIn its annual missive, Stripe noted that it crossed the $1 trillion total payment volume metric in 2023, a figure that is large, and round, if imprecise.
Certainly the threshold is notable, but when paired with recent growth figures becomes all the more impressive.
Stripe said that in 2023 its payment volume rose 25%.
Any company processing that much total payment volume through Stripe could build their own in-house stack, or pursue a more DIY option.
For instance, OpenSea has partnered with the music and arts festival conglomerate Coachella to release three NFT collections that offer both virtual and tangible real-life VIP experiences and merchandise.
The partnership will eventually produce three collections offering different perks and varying tiers of exclusivity (as well as cost).
There have been a lot of NFT collections announced since the term even gained adoption.
OpenSea alone has over 2 million collections and 80 million NFTs on its marketplace, according to its website.
But even with that much total volume, OpenSea isn’t the biggest NFT marketplace today.
Crypto fund Asymmetric Financial is creating its Bitcoin DeFi Venture Fund I to focus on investing in the blockchain’s nascent space with a target raise of $21 million.
The fund will be spearheaded by general partner Dan Held, former director of growth at Kraken and long-time Bitcoiner.
Many Bitcoin-focused VCs ignore DeFi because it’s speculative, and broader crypto VCs see it as a “dead boomer rock,” he added.
Much of this activity has centered on the Ethereum blockchain, but Held believes Bitcoin’s blockchain has tons of future potential as an ecosystem.
“It will be a Bitcoin DeFi renaissance.”“Bitcoin is worth more than every other crypto asset combined,” Held added.
Bitcoin spot ETF volume rose, Coinbase went to court, Solana Mobile announces new device and Google cuts crypto apps in IndiaWelcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important crypto stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT, subscribe here.
Prior to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of the spot bitcoin ETFs, some experts told me they expected trading volumes to hit $10 billion in a year, not a week.
Monica has spent the last 10 years at Ripple, working her way up from the director of communications to now, president.
What else we’re writingWant to branch out from the world of web3?
How low can bitcoin ETF fees drop before it hurts a business?
On Thursday, Franklin Templeton’s Franklin Bitcoin ETF ranked sixth among the 11 for first day trading volume at $65.45 million by the end of the day.
(Note: A number of issuers, Franklin included, are waiving fees for a limited time.)
There’s reason to believe that spot bitcoin ETFs and other related products that may come to market will see strong demand over time, and major investment houses want a piece of the action.
An additional preexisting $2.3 billion from Grayscale’s GBTC fund, which converted into a spot bitcoin ETF on Wednesday, brought the 11 issuers’ total to $4.6 billion.
He said there are around 350 shows published weekly, with only around “a handful” of creators making multiple shows, meaning it has around 350 creators using the platform today.
The Danish Export and Investment Fund (EIFO) is leading the round, with HighlandX and Augustinus Fabrikker also participating.
Strunge said that prior to this round, the company had raised just over €200 million.
Podimo’s funding and traction are coming at a tricky time for the podcasting industry.
The plan will be to take this model further, Strunge said, with a focus on ever-more “hyper local” content.
The trading volume at top Indian crypto exchange WazirX fell to $1 billion in 2023 as the platform faced intensifying regulatory pressure in its home market alongside a broader slump for digital asset prices — and equities — globally.
WazirX, which has had a dispute with Binance over the Indian firm’s ownership, put a positive gloss on the latest figures, touting the $1 billion trading tally in a public statement Tuesday.
The 97% plunge in trading volume comes as WazirX faces mounting regulatory pressures from Indian authorities that have left the country’s once-burgeoning crypto sector fighting for survival.
India began taxing virtual currencies last year, levying a 30% tax on the gains and a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction.
India’s intensifying regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrencies has cast a chill over local investors once eager to back the country’s crypto startups.
