July 2, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

  • The number of BTC active addresses hit a low not seen since last April

  • Soros Fund Management has cleared its traders to trade in BTC

  • Animoca Brands, a company that provides digital property rights through NFTs, announced a $139M raise that values the company at $1B

  • Mintable, an NFT platform, raised a $13M Series A

  • The crypto-payment app Strike is now letting customers buy and sell BTC for almost zero fees

  • SoftBank invested $200M in 2TM Group, the parent company of one of Brazil’s largest exchanges, at a valuation of $2.1B

  • FEWOCiOUS sold an NFT art collection for $2.1M at Christie’s

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

Robinhood Files for IPO

Yesterday, Robinhood, the popular — and somewhat infamous — stock trading app, filed for an IPO with the SEC. The company aims to raise $100M and plans to trade under the ticker symbol “HOOD” on the Nasdaq.

The S-1 filing shows massive growth for the company, which has more than doubled the number of accounts on the platform and tripled its assets under custody in just one year.

According to the filing, crypto trading made up 17% of Robinhood’s Q1 revenue, totaling $522M. This is up from 4% in Q4 of 2020. Notably, a big chunk of that growth came directly from Dogecoin, which accounted for 34% of the firm’s crypto transaction revenue — meaning Robinhood made roughly $30M for being a meme-middleman. 

The company’s S-1 filing comes in the same week that FINRA hit the trading app with a $70M fine for “systemic supervisory failures and significant harm suffered by millions of customers.”

Recommended Reads

  • Dmitriy Berenzon on how DeFi is taking over financial services:

  • Get up to speed on DAOs: 

  • Travis Kling timestamped 25 China-related events that happened in June:

On The Pod…

FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Gives the Tom Brady/Gisele Bundchen Backstory

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder of FTX, explains FTX’s sports-centric advertising model and talks about what is on his regulatory wish list going forward. Show highlights:

  • why Sam is so excited to bring Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen onto the FTX team

  • how FTX decides on who to sponsor

  • why so many of FTX’s sponsorship are targeting US customers

  • what makes the sports industry such an attractive place to advertise for FTX

  • how FTX’s tokenized stocks work

  • what Sam learned from the GameStop/Robinhood situation

  • what makes FTX’s tokenized stocks different from Binance’s offering

  • how FTX is dealing with regulatory obstacles

  • what item is on the top of Sam’s regulatory wishlist

  • whether FTT is a security

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Nov. 2nd. Pre-order it today!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians