GenZ Tea ☕️:
This study shows that Gen Z consumers invest most of their money in meme stocks and cryptocurrencies instead of traditional stocks. The markets are currently heavily swayed by influential individuals such as… Elon Musk, which is why the volume of investments in certain stocks changes so often. Read more about it here.
Hey Tea Sippers,👋
We hope you are doing well, and that you had a good week. We have one major news story for you today. The F.D.A is still encouraging people to get a Covid-19 vaccine, but there is still controversy on their lack of approval of any particular vaccine. Rather they have declared it for emergency use. Read more about the story here.
Tea Pods ☕️:
In this week’s rendition of Tea Pods ☕️, I would like to introduce you to the Wharton Fintech Podcast led by our friend Miguel Armaza. The Wharton Podcast is committed to educating individuals who want to learn more about fintech. If you have some spare time take a listen to this episode on 11:FS’ Simon Taylor, who is well versed in the fintech space and the blockchain sector as well. To get his insights and some new knowledge take a listen here.
What’s the Tea Today? 🤔
Ready for this week’s tea?☕️ We are talking AAVE and their blockchain conference🤝, and Jack Dorsey’s full go into crypto📲.
Anyways, short and big stories ahead, get your tea ready and start sipping. ☕️
Defi Week in Paris 🗼
rAAVE 🧑💻
It's an exciting time in Paris! This week was the first ethereum conference in the country, dubbed ETHCC, filled with influential people in the blockchain space. The conference discussed the many initiatives that are being built on top of the ethereum blockchain--from DAOs and gaming to privacy and DeFi. Deep diving on the DeFi aspect of things--we saw so many exciting initiatives as well as thought-provoking rhetoric from industry leaders like AAVE and Sushi.
What’s new?
One of the most interesting things discussed during the event was how to increase liquidity in DeFi by bridging two protocols--ethereum and Polkadot-- to allow for developers to bridge their work between the two protocols. This first step of connecting protocols is paving the way for future symbiotic relationships between multiple protocols to make DeFi more mainstream.
The Big Gulp ☕️: To cap off the interesting events AAVE is throwing a party for the attendants of the ETHCC and calling it rAAVE. We’re looking forward to seeing how far this takes the infrastructure built on ethereum! We see big things for the crypto and defi community coming soon.
It pays to be Square ⬛️
Jack Dorsey 👨🍳
Serial entrepreneur, Jack Dorsey, announced that one of his companies, Square, will attempt to build a decentralized financial system built on the bitcoin protocol. Jack Dorsey is the founder of two of the biggest companies. We have Square, then we have Twitter!
What does he plan on doing?
This new entity will include Cash App and Tidal and will try to build a platform to catalyze the creation of non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. These protocols are considered “decentralized” because they do not rely on anyone person or entity to execute that transaction. The blockchain-based smart contracts (what all blockchain protocols are built on) are all that is necessary for the transaction to transpire.
The Big Gulp ☕️: DeFi has shown it is the future with bigger names building in the space and new protocols aiming at making the financial world more efficient and equitable but they still come with their own unique set of drawbacks such as the threat of regulation which we have already seen start to emerge in European markets.
Extra Tea ☕️:
Compound Treasury: Fintech firms get into Defi
NFT: OpenSea is now valued $1.5 billion
Bitcoin: The price of bitcoin has dropped below $30,000
NBA: Fintechs and Crypto firms are getting in on NBA marketing
Sencha “Tea” Fact of the Day 🍃:
“As of May 5, there are currently only 1.75 million defi users.”
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