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Poop Token
“Sh*t coins” usually refer to alt coins that have become completely worthless. However, there's now a new coin out to change that perception by going after San Francisco's street poop…
Last week, a couple of Samaritans launched “Poop Token”, an ERC-20 token built on UMA’s Synthetic Token Builder, to help solve San Francisco’s public-defecation problem.
The token tracks the frequency of poop sightings as reported by San Francisco's SF311 (yes, there is an API for that). The token's price goes up with the number of sightings and down as the city gets cleaner. If that sounds like a digital asset for you, then it's available for purchase today on Uniswap.
Tokens can play a meaningful role in incentivizing behavior within communities – allowing for coordination and monetary rewards for governments and citizens alike, whilst holding cities accountable to solve real problems such as homelessness.
While the City of San Francisco may not be issuing “sh*t coins” any time soon, it is good to see someone out there get their hands dirty...
Portfolio News
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Poop Token
The SF Poop Token was conceived at the recent ETHWaterloo hackathon - Creator Hart Lambur used UMA, a FinTech Collective portfolio company, to create the token. At the event, he humorously describes the trend as, “Sh*t is going up!” Read more
Industry News
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Truecaller starts offering financial services to their 100m daily active users in India – India is Truecaller’s biggest market for revenue and users. The Company claims every tenth user has linked a bank account to Truecaller Pay, which it could leverage for lending. Read more
Google Pay to offer checking accounts through Citi and Stanford's credit union – The tech giant announced it will offer personal checking accounts next year through its Google Pay app, initially in partnership with Citigroup and a small credit union at Stanford University. Read more
(Opinion) Tencent spinning off its fintech unit could unlock as much as $230b in value - Tencent has a growing fintech business making up 26% of its revenue last quarter. On its own it would be China’s 4th largest listed company. Read more
Visa is in talks to acquire 20% of Interswitch, Nigeria's largest merchant acquirer, for $200m - Based in Nigeria, Interswitch operates across 20 markets on the African continent powering online payments. Read more
The incumbents respond as Charles Schwab is in talks to buy TD Ameritrade - With zero commission trading ubiquitous across trading firms a few years after Robinhood, the industry has been facing pressure. A deal between Schwab and TD Ameritrade would create a behemoth with more than $5 trillion in combined assets. Read more
PayPal acquires deal-finding browser plugin Honey for $4bn - The plugin works on 30,000 merchant websites helping 17m members save more than $2bn. This is PayPal's largest acquisition to date. Honey had raised $49m from investors, including Ludlow Ventures. Read more
Elavon acquires Sage Pay for $300m to become fourth-largest merchant acquirer in Europe - Sage Pay is one of the bigger payment processors in the UK and Ireland serving SMEs. Read more
Global FinTech Report CB Insights 2019 Q3 – Q3 set the quarter record for fintech deals (if you take out Ant Financial’s $14bn round last year) driven by 19 $100m+ rounds. Early-stage (seed/angel and Series A) deals fell to an 11-quarter low. Read more
Aon to acquire CoverWallet, the digital insurance platform for SMEs - The acquisition provides Aon with additional access to the fast-growing, $200bn+ premium digital insurance market for SMEs. Read more
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