Australian Fintech and Startups
Rent-to-buy startup, OwnHome, raised a $31m Series A. I did a ‘Fintech Spotlight: OwnHome’ in August last year if you want to read more about the business. Congrats to the team! Link
Volt may be pitching for a $200m Series F, as they focus on their banking-as-a-service model. Link
Westpac is ramping up cost-cutting. Link
Square sellers can now offer Afterpay at POS. Link
Big Tech
Facebook’s (still not used to calling them Meta) cryptocurrency Diem, formerly Libra, was sold off after facing a bunch of regulatory hurdles. Vale Diem! Link
Meta also dropped 26% after missing their earnings call (namely, reporting the first ever quarterly decline in active users), wiping $332bn off their market cap in one day. If only they lost that in the Metaverse…Link
Google cancelled their project ‘federated learning of cohorts’ (FLOC), which was an attempt to kill browser cookies. It’s being replaced by a project called ‘Topic’. Link
Crypto
~$300m worth of ETH was drained out of a Defi project named ‘Wormhole’, built on Solana. One of the biggest crypto hacks in history (and shows how much Defi really can be the wild west). Link
Potpourri
Teacher: Name two pronouns
Student: Who, me?
Courtesy: David Astle Link
Trivia
(a) What three letter word can go before each of the following words to make a new word? Ding, king, page, saw, the, and thing
(b) What does the A stand for in DNA?
( c) What two US states have the highest proportion of their population in their largest city? (One is on the Atlantic, and one is on the Pacific.)
(d) In the US, political battleground states are usually called which secondary colour?
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Trivia Answers
(a) See-
(b) Acid
( c) 43.0% - New York (New York City)
39.5% - Alaska (Anchorage)
(d) Purple states
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