Dear All,

Happy Wednesday!

Each week we update you on our latest happenings, developments, product updates, and more.

Why? Community is at the heart of our product. We want you to be part of the crucial steps of our product development. You can read all of our previous Community Updates here.

If you want to hear more about our mission, check out our CEO, Parit’s demo day video, here.

Waiting list milestone hit 💸

Over the course of the last 4 months, our community has steadily grown and waiting list. At the same time, we have been testing how much $ users would want to invest in the public markets on Zash’s social investing app.

We're excited to announce that we've now hit $2m of total pledges on our landing page, which has been experiencing 14% week on week ORGANIC growth since January!

Our beta testing continues and more of our users will be onboard on our app this week. Keep a lookout in your inbox!

Creator of the Week 🧠

In this week’s installation of our Creator of the Week spotlight series, where we highlight some of our most engaged Creators across the community, we have the CEO and Co-Founder of Kontinous: Ross Murray-Jones. Here’s a little bit from Ross:

• What do you generally like to invest in? I like to invest in growth opportunities where I have a personal connection. For example, I invested in Revolut back in 2017 as one of their first customers. We’re building our business on Algorand’s distributed ledger, and I now have a significant ALGO holding. My dad, who’s 75 and still prints his emails, tried Oculus the other day and loved it so much we bought one for his birthday. I immediately bought more Facebook, given the maturity of their VR play and the potential. I love how accessible investments are becoming these days. There are no limits to what we can invest in anymore, depending on our individual preferences.

• How would you describe your investing style? Everyone’s risk appetite is different. For example, VCs say they invest in lines vs dots, i.e. they like to track projects before making an offer. For me, that makes sense. I want to start small and follow my investment’s performance over time with a vested interest. Once I’m better acquainted, I then up my stake or hold. I rarely sell. I’m excited about Kontinuous as it plays into my style of investing when I’m ready vs when a business is fundraising. Imagine if you could invest in Revolut today at the click of a button?

• What industry/company’s future you’re excited by and why? A new era of consumer investing is already underway, yet there’s a tsunami just around the corner. When we launched YPlan back in 2012, the message was ‘buy a ticket within two taps’. Now we have frictionless two-tap investing for everyday people. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sneakers, crypto or a work of art. That’s a remarkable shift within a few short years, and I expect this ease of investment to accelerate across many previously inaccessible markets. As a growth investor, DeFi still holds potential as it matures. As platforms bring the best of decentralized finance to traditional commerce, my belief is the pace of growth and wealth-building opportunities will continue to accelerate.

• What do you love about the Zash Community? Zash is like the best friend I never had. The level of knowledge, in-depth analysis and community participation is outstanding. Retail investment 3.0 is about removing barriers to entry, and, with Zash, my finger is always on the pulse.

Ethereum crossing the $4k barrier

Ethereum has continued to reach new highs, hitting $4k over the weekend. We have asked our members what price will it hit by July. If you want to see how they responded, be sure to check the #shouldi channel in Slack!

Still confused on why Ethereum vs Bitcoin? Here is one of the best explanations Vitalik (Creator of Ethereum) gave here:

“So one explanation that I heard one person give is that Bitcoin is like a spreadsheet where everyone only controls their own five squares of the spreadsheet, but Ethereum is a spreadsheet with macros. So everyone controls their own accounts, which is their own little piece of this universe, but then these pieces of the universe can have code and they can interact with each other, according to pre-programmed rules. And you can build a lot of things on top of that like Bitcoin builds a monetary system on top, famously Ethereum can build decentralized domain name systems, again, various decentralized financial contraptions, prediction markets, non-fungible tokens, and all different schemes that people have been coming up with.”

Announcing our next clubhouse!

We are thilled to announce after a clubhouse breather, we are back with an epic next speaker.

Matt Clifford, CEO of Entrepreneur First (!), will be joining our Co-founders on Clubhouse for an exciting discussion on DAOs and the Future of Social Networks. This event will be taking place on the 25th of May between 6-7pm, to sign up please subscribe here.

Matt has written about the future of the internet, the new era of variance and DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations)

Some snippets from his fantastic newsletter (you can subscribe here):

“The argument is that DAOs combine the best parts of investment (like WeFunder or Crowdcube), membership (like Patreon) and crowdfunding (like Kickstarter) platforms to "intertwine two kinds of motivations that are usually seen as far apart: social and financial”.

Another detailed read on DAOs here for those blockchain enthusiasts who want to go deeper...

More Reading of the Week 💡

• ‘Call Me the Dogefather’: Elon Musk Explains Crypto to SNL’s Audience

• Gary Vee launches his own NFT project

• Cryptocurrency investors should be prepared to lose all their money

• Visa Partners With Fintech Startup Tala To Drive Crypto Adoption In Emerging Markets

That’s all for now and we’ll see you next week,
-Team Zash

P.s. it seems that some of you have had our emails going to your Promotions tab. In order to train the algorithm, you can drag the email into your inbox - that should sort things out :)