I am back in from San Francisco after a week on the East Coast (Miami, Palm Beach, Boston, etc)! Everyone at the Permissionless Conference only wanted to talk about Terra...
Here's 5 great reads for this week:
💰 Terra Saga Continues - One week after the Terra Luna token price went spiraling to $0, Do Kwon (founder of Terra) proposed to launch a new blockchain called Terra Classic and suffered from backlash and criticism from the community, CZ (founder of Binance) and Vitaly (founder of Ethereum). In 2018, Binance put $3 million into Luna and received 16 million tokens in return (valued at $1.6 billion in April 2022). The tokens are worth about $2,391. Terra's investors include Pantera, Arrington XRP Capital, Binance, Huobi, OKEx, Hashed, Kakao Ventures, Hashkey, etc. The only winner in this saga is Circle. USDC gains $3.4 billion in market value.
❤️ Elon Loves WeChat - He wants to either turn Twitter into WeChat or make a WeChat for the rest of the world! If you're in China, everyone live on WeChat and it does everything. It is like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus Uber Eats and a whole bunch of other things all rolled into one. Watch his comments at the All-in conference.
😇 Never Sell Your SOL - Hedge (our portfolio company) launched its mainnet beta! I am definitely taking credit for coming up with this tagline. =)
📺 Edith in Miami - Some lovely founders hosted me in Miami this past week. Many of them are European and they love setting up offices in Miami mainly due to timezone, language, cheaper housing and no income tax!. If you are operating in Miami, you can easily setup your European office with much closer timezone. No I am not moving to Miami, but it's not all partying at South Beach for the founders and builders. My view on Miami.
This week a total of 24 startups raised $1.11B in funding, 3 M&As:
$499.3M goes to 12 Enterprise startups
$113M goes to 4 Blockchain/Crypto startups
$46M goes to 1 Mobile startup
$45M goes to 1 HRTech startup
$50M goes to 1 Real Estate startup
$45M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
$270M goes to 1 BioTech startup
$18.2M goes to 2 Renewable Energy startups
$26M goes to 1 Other startup
If you love this newsletter, ask your best friends to sign up.