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Hi friends! Parker here.

After writing about the Mainnet conference in Monday’s newsletter, FTT community member and VP of BD & Ops at Messari Ben O’Neill reached out and invited me to the rest of the conference. Thanks so much, Ben! Attending yesterday was awesome. I attended a few panels on decentralized identity, future Ethereum upgrades, and the future of Solana. I also met some really passionate founders and scooped up some fun merch.

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Company News

“Super Apps” Are Eating The World, Smh

PayPal has been talking about its plans to create a “super app” for a while now, and yesterday saw the first iteration of this app. PayPal’s new app offers a combination of financial tools, including direct deposit, bill pay, a digital wallet, peer-to-peer payments, shopping tools, crypto capabilities, and more. This move takes PayPal away from being largely a payments utility company to embodying more of a holistic consumer finance one. While PayPal still doesn’t aim to be a “bank” the new app offers a range of features competing with neobanks like Chime and Cario, as it also includes support for early paycheck direct-deposit, bill pay, and more.

Pipe Lays Down The Pipe

Pipe, the two-year-old startup aiming to be the “Nasdaq for revenue”, announced yesterday that it’s snatched former Stripe EIC Sid Orlando, and Hubspot’s ex-Chief Strategy Officer Brad Coffey, to join it’s team. The Miami-based startup also revealed that it’ll make its first move outside of the US with entry into the UK market.

Revolut Rolls Out Commission-Free Stock Trading

Yesterday, self-proclaimed fintech superapp Revolut announced it will soon offer commission-free stock trading to US customers for the first time, following it’s securement of a broker-dealer license. The development puts Revolut in the retail-trading ring, making it a fair competitor for companies like Robinhood and Square.

Funding and Deals

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Spenmo Raises A $34M Series A

Spenmo, a Singapore-based startup centralizing account payable workflows for small-to-medium businesses just raised a $34M Series A. Spenmo, a YC alumn, was launched just last year. The round is one of the largest Series A’s ever raised by a Singaporean startup. The round included participation from Lee Fixel’s investment firm Addition, Salesforce Ventures, Alpha JWC, Global Founders’ Capital, Broadhaven, and more, as well as angels like Plaid cofounder William Hockey, and head of Stripe Indonesia Ongki Kurniawan.

Wiserfund Gets $3M And Wins Revolut

Wiserfund, a startup that uses AI to assess credit risk and quality, just raised $3M from BGF Growth Capital. The startup also just signed Revolut up as a client. Jason Snelling, business credit manager at new customer Revolut Business, said: “At Revolut Business, we are using the Wiserfunding Rating Model to support the risk assessment of our business customers exposing us to credit risk. We also plan to deploy this solution into our underwriting process to expedite decisions in the future."

Crypto Watch

Sports seems to be an area of NFT that's taking off—Dapper Labs has 1.1 million accounts and $780 million worth of NBA related NFT's have been traded on the platform. Sorare, a fantasy sports NFT game, raised $680 million this week. When Lionel Messi joined PSG earlier this summer, he also got some fan tokens as a part of his contract​https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/exclusive-messis-paris-st-germain-package-includes-crypto-fan-tokens-2021-08-12/, which in theory can appreciate in value. That was all powered by Sorare, which is now valued at a wild $4.3 billion.

Speaking of sports and crypto, Dapper Labs, the NFT company behind NBA Top Shot, raised another $250 million at a reported $7.6 billion valuation, led by Coatue. The company also announced a deal with La Liga, the Spanish soccer league that hosts clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona, to create NFT's from the league's 20 teams. Dapper Labs will also help create a marketplace for the collectibles for users to easily access.

Poor Brian Armstrong. While everyone in crypto seems to be at Mainnet in NYC, Brian's stuck dealing with US regulators who are confused about crypto. In an interview with TechCrunch's Matt Panzarino at Disrupt 2021, Armstong said that Coinbase is drafting a framework for regulators around crypto. Crypto regulation is super fragmented in the US; there are all these state-by-state regulations that companies need to comply to, and on top of that, its a very slow and costly process. Coinbase can not only use this framework as a real starting point with regulators but because this sector is so nascent, it can have a real impact in shaping crypto regulation in the US (which can be good or bad depending on how you look at things.)

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We have dozens of amazing roles on our job board from companies such as Truework, Alloy, Coinbase, Affirm, Klarna, Chimeand many others! If you’ve had luck landing a job or have roles that you would like to highlight, we want to hear from you!

Public just launched a super interesting report on people who’ve started investing in past 3 years. Some findings (thanks to FTT Community member Katie Perry for passing it along!):

• 81% of people who said they bought a meme stock went on to diversify
• 56% said they are first-generation investors; parent’s didn’t own stocks
• 43% said they’d find someone more attractive if they approved of their investments
• 15% would refuse to sleep with someone if they didn’t like where they invested
• 12% would put their portfolio on their dating app profile
• 36% said that since they started investing they’ve consumed less porn
• 3% said they’d tattoo their favorite stock ticker onto their body

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​Parker Jay-Pachirat is Chief of Staff at Fintech Today. Before FTT, she worked in product management for three years across several companies, also gaining experience in venture working for Unovis Asset Management and Impulsum Venture CoLab. Parker graduated from Occidental College in May of 2021 with a specialized focus on brain-machine-interfaces. Her senior thesis interrogated the way in which commercialized brain-machine-interfaces will disrupt society's prevailing models of ability and disability. In her free time, Parker enjoys reading, skiing, and techno.

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