VNX Weekend Read: March 4 – 11 Issue

If you were worried that you had missed last week’s VNX Weekend Read, rest easy, your curator has taken a much needed break in honor of International Women’s Day. It’s still not too late to buy those flowers!

This week we’ll be catching up on some of the news that missed previous news digests but that we thought you just couldn’t afford to ignore.

Top of Mind

Digitization of venture capital and private equity is a hot issue that goes beyond VNX Exchange’s market proposition. It is not only a solution to the problem of long capital lockups that venture capital firms face daily but also a major topic of concern for the generation of millennial investors, writes Nisa Amoils for Forbes. She talks about the potential of liquidity to improve returns and change the landscape of modern-day VC investing. “Ultimately, we may look back at the days where our financial portfolios were tied up in illiquid investments and consider this as old school as the Blackberry,” she writes. Don’t miss an opportunity to have an outside expert explain why companies like VNX Exchange are going to transform venture capital industry.

What’s Hot

If you want more industry experts to tell you why companies like VNX Exchange are important, read on. Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture North America, talks about blockchain moving beyond cryptocurrencies to traditional enterprise. The power of distributed ledger technology is truly transformative, she notes. “Blockchain is a technology, not an outcome, and successfully implementing a solution with blockchain is less about technology capability and more about a company’s ability to work with other companies and create new business models. Blockchain should be used to address opportunities and problems that lack easier answers,” she writes. At VNX Exchange we are big believers in this philosophy: we use blockchain as a tool, the latest most innovative technology that can offer safer and faster opportunities for investments. It is in no way the only solution to all the problems in enterprise but it can certainly give a leg up to companies that understand the power its capabilities can offer to their product, says VNX Exchange COO Anton Abashkin.

Newsworthy

• Circle, the Goldman Sachs-backed peer-to-peer payments technology company, has finalized its acquisition of equity crowdfunding platform SeedInvest after approval from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
• The chairman of the European Securities and Markets Authority — a top financial markets supervisor in the European Union — has shown his further support for regulation of digital assets.
• Tagomi, a prime brokerage startup that offers digital asset trading services, has raised another $12 million in a funding round led by Paradigm. Other participants in the round include Pantera Capital, Four Arrows and Multicoin Capital. The firm has raised a total of $28 million to date.
• Fusang Group has received approval for a securities exchange license from Malaysia’s authorities for what promises to be the first fully licensed exchange with the focus on digital assets in Asia.

Weekend Read

The news cycle has spun twice already but we could not help but bring you this week’s long-form read on an off chance that you’d missed it. The New York Times reported that Facebook has its own stablecoin in the works to introduce in its WhatsApp messenger. It will be pegged to a basket of currencies instead of just US dollar. It remains to be seen if the reality behind the report constitutes a well-timed pivot or if it is a true inflection point for the company. But if this product comes out in the first half of 2019, as the report suggest, it will make even the most staunch opponents of the crypto industry take it seriously.

VNX Weekend Read has been curated by the VNX Exchange Head of Content Olga Razumovskaya.

Disclaimer: This news digest does not represent the position of the VNX Exchange management and is not meant to serve as a forecast.