MoneyNeverSleeps: Metaverse Infrastructure | ETH Merge | Big Rounds from Wayflyer and Alloy

Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald dive into the shortcomings of Metaverse graphics through the lens of Metaverse deep-thinker Matthew Ball and his new book on the Metaverse, what’s up with the Ethereum Merge, the big fundraisings of Irish unicorn Wayflyer and Techstars grad Alloy, the death of ING’s Yolt, Block’s Cash App’s small-dollar lending milestone, and old friend Bradley Tusk takes his super-charged regulatory advisory into crypto and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

This episode of MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by Philip Lee, one of Ireland’s fastest-growing corporate law firms and expert advisors at the heart of the Dublin and London start-up, fintech and crypto communities.

KEY QUOTE:

Pete Townsend on the long arc of development required for the Sci-Fi version of the Metaverse to come to life:

“One of the example’s from Matthew Bell’s ‘Metaverse’ book points to how most video game developers set the bar of latency, which is the delay between your controller instructing something and it actually happening in the game, at 10 to 20 milliseconds.

“The quickest, you can possibly send a message of any kind between New York and Hong Kong is 45 milliseconds. So the world’s infrastructure and fiber optics are not there yet to be able to support what is the Ready Player One and Snow Crash visualizations of what the metaverse really is, and there’s a lot of work left to do.

“There’s going to be a ton of money going into the companies that are building the infrastructure that will enable the Metaverse to actually happen. It is such a massive, massive market and a huge opportunity.”

STORIES WE COVERED:

When Metaverse (Life in Color, 1-Aug-22)

After $177 Billion in Investment, Why Do Metaverse Graphics Still Suck? (Decrypt, 27-Aug-22)

Ethereum’s Big Moment Is Coming With ‘The Merge’ What It Means for Crypto (5-Sep-22)

Wayflyer secures €254m in debt financing from Credit Suisse (Irish Times, 1-Sep-22)

Fintech startup Alloy leans on fraud prevention to land new $1.55B valuation (TechCrunch, 1-Sep-22)

KlimaDAO Engages Tusk Strategies to Push Congress to Write DAOs Into Law (Decrypt, 4-Sep-22)

ING pulls the plug on Yolt, shutting down its open banking operation (AltFi, 30-Aug-22)

Cash App Now Originates 1m Small-Dollar Loans A Month (Fintech Business Weekly, 21-Aug-22)

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