Tokenising

Adam Neumann, co-founder of WeWork,(Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg) WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann’s redemption story has begun, according to Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen. His venture-capital firm has poured $350 million into Neumann’s residential real-estate startup Flow , citing the entrepreneur’s “lessons learned” — an understatement considering WeWork’s rollercoaster ride from $47 billion flexible-office giant to its near-collapse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of a smaller investment that is also a redemption of sorts: Neumann’s championing of tokenised carbon credits via a startup called Flowcarbon , which is apparently unaffiliated with Flow though both are backed by Andreessen Horowitz. While the $70 million in funds Flowcarbon raised in May make it less significant, the firm’s recent delay of its cryptocurrency launch looks like a cautionary tale. As frothy moonshot investing moves from We to Web3, blockchains are too often … [Read more...] about Adam Neumann’s Flow isn’t his latest comeback, there was also Flowcarbon

Transaction values in 2021 have grown by 103 percent. When the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched in 2016, little did anyone know that it would account for over 50 percent of retail payments in India in just five years. While India looked towards digital payment modes right after the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bills in 2016, it was the pandemic in 2020 that brought a large chunk of new users onto digital platforms amid the nationwide lockdown. Pandemic push In 2021, the second year of the pandemic, with the second wave of Covid-19 way worse than anything India had seen earlier, people began switching to digital transactions more than ever before. Monthly UPI transaction values took four years to breach the Rs 3 lakh crore mark in August 2020. Barely 14 months later, in October, that number more than doubled and crossed the Rs 7 lakh crore mark. Once the habit set in, many Indians have only used online payments for transactions. … [Read more...] about 2021: The year UPI became the undisputed payments champion