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Hi all, Julie here.

I’m in a sassy mood today, so brace yourselves for this newsletter. The Christmas party was a success on Friday. New podcast is out today with Stripe’s Head of EMEA Matt Henderson. FTT will be off after this week until the New Year. Yes, I’ll miss you too. Lastly, we have an Instagram now. You should probably follow us.

Today's Partner, Fintech Meetup

500+ Organizations have already signed up for Fintech Meetup, the world’s largest fintech meetings-only event! That’s right - no speakers or content….just 30,000+ double opt-in online meetings that result in Leads, Deals, Partnerships and Funding. It’s the easiest way to meet the people who’ll help accelerate your business in 2022!

Here are just some of the organizations already signed up:

• Fintechs including Akoya, Alloy, Alviere, Argyle, Autobooks, Azimuth, BitPay, BlockFi, Botdoc, Certa, Checkout.com, Circle, FISPAN, MANTL, Novi, Nuance, Nymbus, Onyx, Ripple, Signal Intent, Sila, Socure, Synctera, Urban FT, Zero Hash (to name just a few!)
• Banks including Bank of America, Citi, Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Santander, Wells Fargo & 75+ others
• Neobanks including Dave, First Boulevard, Revolut & Varo Bank and more
• Credit Unions (125+ of them already signed up!)
• Investors including Bain Capital, Commerce Ventures, General Atlantic, Mosaik Partners, Next Level Ventures, Point 72 Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, Vestigo Ventures & more
• Networks including American Express, Discover, Mastercard & Visa
• Plus Solution Providers, Community Banks, Tech Cos, Retailers & Merchants, Media and more!

Online, March 22-24. Startup rate available for qualifying cos. Get Your Ticket Now!

Company News

Better.com CEO Taking Time Off

Guess his Christmas vacation started early? Just one week after firing 900 employees over Zoom, Better.com’s founder is taking some time off. He’ll probably still be getting paid heading into the new year though, unlike a lot of those 900 people he let go. I did see that the severance package got bumped up from 4 weeks to 60 days after all this blow back. For some reason that doesn’t make me feel that much better (pun intended).

Funding and Deals

Router Protocol, which is building a decentralized exchange as well as cross-chain infrastructure to facilitate communication across layer 1 and layer 2 blockchain solutions, announced it has raised $4.1M in a funding round from Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Polygon, and more. The genesis of Router was that all of the blockchains being built will need connectivity that they don’t have right now. Here’s founder Ramani Ramachandran in TechCrunch:

“There are going to be layer 1 scaling solutions — the Polygons of the world — and ‘Ethereum killers’ such as Aave, Solana and then we have non-EVM players such as Terra and Algorand that are coming up from different perspectives. You marry that with profusion of capital in the space. All of these players have a large warchest. Nobody is talking about less than a $1 billion warchest. The battle is not going to end anytime soon.”

Crypto Watch

Time’s Person of The Year

The guy who caused a number of wild price swings in crypto this year is Time’s Person of 2021. He doesn’t think he’s the reason for those swings, nor does he think crypto will replace fiat. But who knows, he might change his mind on that in a week and send another crypto to the moon (figuratively).

Crypto Exchange Backed By Hack VC Gets Hacked

Umm, pretty sure there’s been a crypto hack in every newsletter over the past week? Y’all ngmi. Cryptocurrency exchange AscendEX (formerly BitMax) announced that it suffered a hack for an estimated $77M following a breach of one of its hot wallets. The company said that assets not affected have been transferred to cold wallets while the investigation is carried out. Blockchain analytics firm PeckShield estimated that the stolen funds amounted to $77M and were spread across Ethereum ($60M), Binance Smart Chain ($9.2M) and Polygon ($8.5M). Ironically, the team had recently raised a $50M Series B led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC. Can’t make this stuff up.

Earning Yield With Coinbase

Late last week, Coinbase announced that it’s making DeFi more accessible and letting customers put their crypto to work and earn yield. Eligible customers in more than 70 countries can access the attractive yields of DeFi from their Dai (a stablecoin that is designed to be pegged to the US Dollar) with no fees, lockups, or set-up hassle. Once you opt in, your Dai is deposited into Compound Finance, a DeFi protocol with an offered APY that varies based on the rates from Compound and will automatically update to reflect changes in the market. During the month of October, the APY for supplying DAI fluctuated between 2.83% and 5.39%.

​Senior Product Marketing Manager, Banking Services​

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This is the funniest thing I've seen in awhile and that says a lot about me tbh.

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Julie VerHage-Greenberg is the co-founder of Fintech Today, where she focuses on editorial content and brand. Prior to joining, she was Bloomberg’s first fintech reporter, covering Robinhood from before it was a billion dollar company, breaking the news that Plaid was acquiring Quovo, and interviewing executives on Bloomberg TV and at several large conferences.

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