🌊The Fintech Wave #46

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Sep 06, 2022

We are welcoming 26 new members that joined us since last Monday. Hope you all had a nice Labor Day weekend (for you that are in the USA). Also, on Thursday we will send you a deep dive on one fintech stock that you can buy for less than $1. Stay tuned.

TLDR: Learn how you can invest in real estate with $5. A startup that turns any hardware product into as-a-service offering. Unexpected move from Snapchat. We found the list of blockchain emoji list that will help you navigate through the ecosystem. There is a great Twitter thread about how Crocs made a profitable business.

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Fintech Wave graphics

Free Cash Flow (FCF) is one of the most important measurements because it shows how efficient a company is at generating cash. Simplified, FCF tells us how much money a company has, after paying for operating expenses and capital expenditures.

So, we did some research to see what are the companies with the biggest FCF. Apple has $107B of FCF, which is unbelievably high. Of the top 10 companies, 4 of them are tech, 4 healthcare, and 2 oil&gas.

European News and Funding

Fintech helps hardware⚙️companies offer as-a-service business

Berlin-based topi raised $50M for one of the best fintech ideas we saw in a long time. topi’s infrastructure allows any retailer or manufacturer to offer Hardware-as-a-Service to business customers.

With this concept, there is a benefit for all parties in the business. For businesses looking to acquire hardware equipment, they are now able to pay monthly subscriptions, instead of paying everything upfront (causing big capital expenditures). On the other hand, by offering as-a-service option, manufacturers and sellers are expanding their distribution channels.

Offering hardware-as-a-services is not that easy because there are a lot of parties involved in the process - insurance, logistics, financing, etc. It is hard to manage all of that, so topi platform is streamlining this process.

The company started with electronics (PCs, tablets, etc.) but planning to expand into all hardware categories.

Americas News and Funding

Looks like real estate🏠investment apps are a new hit among investors

Landa is the 4th real estate investment app that raises money in the last few weeks. The idea behind all these apps is the same - to allow people to invest in real estate the same way as they can invest in stock.

This is how it works - companies like Landa buy single or multifamily properties in the areas they think that value will grow over time (so there is the revenue from the rent + increased value of the homes over time. Landa also hires a property management company to take care of all maintenance. Property is divided into shares, so anybody can buy the share and own part of the property. It is a really excellent concept and the market size is almost unlimited.

The only problem can happen if some real estate market crash happens and then rent and value of properties would go down and profitability would be questionable.

What makes Landa different from competitors is that you can start with only $5, and receive cash flow with dividend payments deposited directly into Landa's account. Most other companies are requiring at least a couple of hundred dollars to start.

SNAP lay off 20% of its workforce (1300 people) and shut down Zenly😔

One of the biggest news is that Snapchat is having layoffs. With all the layoffs around and missed financial projections, this wasn’t much of a surprise. What is surprising is that SNAP is shutting down Zenly - a location-based social app that is super popular in Japan and SE-Asia with 40M MAU (monthly active users).

Snap bought it for $213M in 2017 and since then the app grew its user base by 30X now they are just shutting down the app instead of just selling it. This app could easily sell for half a billion considering its strong user base. This looks like a pretty unreasonable decision by SNAP.

Snapchat ($SNAP) stock is down 80% this year

Crypto ₿ites

DeFi data provider raises $7M

RedStone raised Seed round to develop oracles for real-world data for DeFi, Smart Contracts & Web3. This might sound confusing. What are oracles?

Oracles are tools that serve as bridges between blockchains and the outside world. They provide a way to access off-chain data in an on-chain environment, which can be essential for contracts that rely on real-world data to make decisions.

When smart contracts need to execute based on inputs from the real world, they use oracles to get these inputs. Let’s check this on example - there is a smart contract that will execute if Tesla stock jump above $1000. The smart contract needs to get this data from the outside world and this is where RedStone oracles come into play.

To acquire financial data, RedStone uses the Arweave blockchain to provide pricing data from sources like Yahoo Finance or Bloomberg to protocols. Redstone provides data feeds to over 30 chains including Ethereum, Avalanche, etc.

Blockchain emoji cheat sheet

If you are following the crypto world on Twitter, you probably saw that a lot of people are putting emojis in the tweets and answers. Somebody created a cheat sheet of what each emoji means.