Gm. Or should I say…
Welcome to Issue 06 of The Quest Digest, where we break down Silicon Valley news for you every week, in 3 minutes.
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Twitch founder Justin Kan raises $35M seed round for NFT gaming marketplace
Fractal, a gaming NFT marketplace founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, announced a $35M seed round last week. The round was led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital, with other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Coinbase Ventures, and podcaster Tim Ferriss.
The platform offers a marketplace for players to buy Solana-based NFTs directly from game companies as well as a secondary marketplace for peer-to-peer trading.
Our Take
Gamers have pushed back against the idea of tokenised assets as another means for companies to profit off players. Despite this, blockchain gaming is booming with almost $600M invested in the space since the start of the year.
People already buy digital assets and in-game items, just not in the form of NFTs. Through NFTs, players can benefit by being able to sell, trade, or lend items they earned through gaming across different platforms as well.
According to Justin, “The idea of putting it on a blockchain and making it a more durable form of ownership, to me, is an obvious next step”, and it seems to be where the industry is headed directionally.
Elon buys $3B in Twitter stock and joins board
On Monday, Twitter published a note confirming Musk had taken a 9.2% share of the company, valued at $2.9B. It makes Musk the largest single-person shareholder of the company.
TWTR stock prices surged by 26% after the purchase was made in pre-market trading.
The file notes that the purchase of shares occurred on March 14, which predates Musk’s claim that he was giving “serious thought” to starting his own social network. Since then, Musk has joined Twitter’s board where he will remain through at least 2024.
Our Take
Over the past few years Musk has shown to have a love/hate relationship with the platform, especially around Twitter’s free speech and censorship guidelines.
Since buying his stake in the company, Musk has polled how followers about whether Twitter should open-source its algorithm for scrutiny and whether the platform adheres to the principle of free speech. Very clearly the Tesla CEO is trying to make a play on free speech.
Shein raising $1B at a $100B valuation
China e-commerce fast fashion company, Shein is aiming to raise $1B at a $100B valuation.
The online retailer is in talks with potential investors such as General Atlantic. Achieving $100B would make the company the 3rd most valuable company in the world followed after ByteDance and SpaceX.
Last year, the clothing company overtook Amazon.com in downloads of shopping apps on US stores, and offers 600,000+ items to customers in more than 220 countries.
Our Take
Shein has boomed from its data-driven formula in responding to new clothing trends, growth of the social media hashtag #SheinHaul, and use of tax loopholes that came from the US–China trade war.
Despite the company’s explosive growth, Shein has also received much scrutiny for its lack of ethics. Shein has been under fire for its lack of supply chain transparency and potential damage as a fast-fashion outlet with “very poor” environmental ratings as well as stealing designs from smaller designers.
The company’s low prices and strong social media presence among young girls will certainly help them continue to grow, but time will tell if shoppers demand more ethically sourced brands instead.
BONUS: End of the Fast Fiasco
Last week we wrote about Fast, the startup with 600K revenue burning $10M per month, and how it was looking like 🚩🚩🚩
After failing to raise or find a buyer, CEO and co-founder Domm Holland tweeted a statement: “After making great strides on our mission of making buying and selling frictionless for everyone, we have made the difficult decision to close our doors.”
Public BNPL fintech company Affirm has partnered to hire the majority of Fast engineers in light of this news.
It all adds a lot of irony to the phrase “fail fast”.
🔥 Press Worthy
Axie Infinity creator raises $150M round to compensate hack victims
OpenAI launches new AI model called DALL-E
Atlassian launches a new cross-functional team product named Atlas
Tesla delivers record number of EVs in difficult quarter
Pinterest bans all climate change misinformation on the platform
TikTok launches program to help creative agencies
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The Quest Digest is written by Hannah Ahn and edited by Brent Liang, two dropouts who hate long tech newsletters. You can sign up to our next issue below.
Elon Owns Twitter? 🕊
Nicely written Brent and Team! Short, informative, on point!