Happy Thursday, Blockfolians
The Lede
One of Wall Street’s biggest trends this year is special purpose acquisition companies or SPACs. They’re basically a different way to go public that avoids much of the rigamarole of the IPO process. In effect, a promoter lists a “blank check” company on a public market and uses the proceeds to go out and merge with a private company, in effect taking it public. 2020 is already the biggest year in SPAC history and they represent 40%+ of IPOs.
NLW did a podcast on them earlier this week:
While Barry Silbert suggested that he was seeing many SPAC deals.
Looks like Barry was right, because today news broke that EQUOS.io was using a SPAC to become the first crypto exchange to be listed on NASDAQ.
There has been much speculation about Coinbase as a potential target for a SPAC. Might they be next?
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Highly Relevant Reading
The Bank of England is building a payments network that could eventually support a digital pound
Here’s how Dharma is trying to become the “Robinhood of DeFi”
The masterminds of the Plus Token Ponzi scam have been arrested by Chinese authorities
ConsenSys is launching a Filecoin accelerator
Community Commentary
Are “strategies” the next DeFi primitive?
This is seriously insane growth.
A Really Big Number We Should Be Paying Attention To
132%
That’s the growth in the number of Ether addresses in profit (i.e. worth more than they were at purchase/acquisition) over the last year
Final Thought
Go get ‘em Frankie