⚡ Zash Community Update 21: Pride, Binance in hot water, Diversity DAOs and the Euros
Building the future of retail investing
Dear All,
Here’s a quick update for you on latest happenings, developments, and more.
We’ve been doing this weekly since Feb! You can read all of our previous Community Updates here.
Creator of the Week 🧠
Daniel Botcherby (ex WBS, Toptal, Antler) is co-founder of mental health app Kalda the world’s first mental health app for the LGBTQIA+ community and was recently backed by Horseplay Ventures.
Kalda is currently in beta and running weekly group therapy sessions that are free to access for the community. If you're interested in a safe community space to access mental health support, please sign up at kalda.co
What do you generally like to invest in?
I like to invest in forex when I have more time to pay attention to the markets. And currently, I enjoy cryptocurrency, tech stocks and ETFs. There are so many great use cases for cryptocurrency and I’m very interested in alternative methods of proof of work to reduce the environmental impact. I also invest into community projects that I like via Crowdcube and Seedrs.
How would you describe your investing style?
I’m very much ‘set it and leave it’ now. I tried some robo traders in the past and I’m now far more risk averse. I’m consistently putting in a monthly amount into some passive ETFs and selected tech stocks. I hold a long term view over cryptocurrency so I’m happily hodling.
What industry/company’s future are you excited by and why?
The mental health industry has become more important over the last few years. The stigma is beginning to break and it’s become easier to talk about our experiences and how to support those experiencing mental health issues. Unfortunately there’s still a huge waiting list of over 1.2m people in the UK who self referred to mental health services. Worst still for the LGBTQIA+ community, where 1 in 4 will experience discriminatory remarks from healthcare staff. I think we will see a rise of community based mental health support and everything we’re doing at Kalda is helping to lead the way.
What do you love about the Zash Community?
Admittedly I’m a bit of a lurker currently so I enjoy learning from others in the community about their decision making. I’m tired of subreddits, facebook groups, and telegram groups and I’m glad there’s a dedicated space where people are serious about their investments and analysis. Though who doesn’t love the odd meme now and then too.
Zash Learn 🤓
This week we’re looking at Exchange Traded Funds, more commonly referred to as ETFs
As Pride month draws to a close we wanted to focus more on what this month means for the LGBTQIA+ community. With this in mind this weeks Zash Learn will focus on ETFs, and in particular Wall Streets first ETF focused on the LGBTQIA+ community.
What are ETFs?
ETFs are financial instruments that track an index, sector, commodity or other asset. The difference being that they can be purchased on the stock exchange just like normal stocks. These instruments can be structured so that they track individual prices or large collections of securities. They can even track investment strategies and market sentiment.
With June being Pride month it was fitting that ProcureAM partnered with LGBTQ Loyalty Holdings to launch the first LGBTQ100 ESG ETF. This fund is one of a kind and will use LGBTQ community data and sentiment to identify the top 100 companies that most align with their ESG goals.
The fund tracks the performance of well known names like Estee Lauder, PayPal, Visa and more.
Read more on ETFs and this unique launch below, as well as how finance has embraced the community!
Pride Month meets Wall Street as new LGBTQ ETF hits the market
Find out more about how to advance diversity in fintech here
Women in Business
According to a recent report by Gemini, women make up only 26% of crypto investors in the U.S. Encouragingly this is higher here in the U.K. at 41%, but across all asset classes women still invest less.
Rebecca Goodman explored this last week, why do women invest less than men?
Over the last year disparities in how women and men were affected by the pandemic shone a light on the disproportionality in the genders, one such irregularity is apparent in the savings gap.
As Goodman explains in here article “Men are more likely to invest than women so even when women have money to put away, they’re more likely to keep it in a cash ISA instead, lowering their potential returns.”
Check out the article to learn more about this and why the work of Gina and Alan Miller is again looking to address something in the public interest.
And if that doesn’t feed your appetite check out the awesome work being done by team over at Komorebi Collective, in collaboration with Syndicate DAO. This is the first investment DAO focused on funding female and non-binary crypto founders.
Binance faces off with the FCA 🥊
The worlds biggest crypto-exchange was ordered to stop operations in the U.K. by the Financial Conduct Authority, but this latest regulatory setback hasn’t stemmed market activity significantly.
The British financial watchdog hit the Cayman Islands based crypto exchange with a regulated activities ban this week. While the FCA doesn’t regulate cryptocurrencies, it has required exchanges to register with them as of January 2021.
Binance have until tomorrow to comply with the ban, however, it remains unclear what exactly the outcome will be. According to the Financial Times, customers here in the U.K. have lost the ability to withdraw sterling from their Binance accounts today. Something which the exchange claims is due to ongoing maintenance.
What is clear is that companies looking to operate in the fintech or crypto space will find the process smoother if they choose to work with the regulators rather than against them.
At Zash, for example, we applied to the FCA’s Innovation Hub earlier this year to take the necessary advice needed, to build a product that we feel will be disruptive in the retail investing space for self-directed investors.
Furthermore, unlike previous bans or restrictions this time the crypto market hasn’t crashed dramatically.
Ethereum is up about 10% today while Morgan Stanley has continued to be active in the crypto market buying 28,000 shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Not to mention Andreessen Horowitz has just announced their third crypto fund, this time worth $2.2 billion!
Call for Help 😀
We’re on the lookout for a brilliant mobile developer!
If you know a mobile engineer who is ferociously relentless when it comes to weaving the most delightful experience for our users at Zash, we'd love to hear about them!
Please feel free to share this with any suitable candidates you might know!
Reading of the Week 💡
Since the Euros are in mid flow and England are still unbeaten we thought we should mention sports this week. If your team has been knocked out - like most of ours have! - fear not you can still get involved.
Despite how much ad space the sports betting companies buy up there’s much better ways to get involved and invest in sport. Check out the Sports Pack from the Alt Goes Mainstream newsletter!
JP Morgan acquired online investment platform Nutmeg this month, but is the union built to last or will integration happen?
Twitter fanatic meets Twitter founder as Elon Musks accepts Jack Dorseys invite to talk all things Bitcoin.
Blockchain Analytics platform Nansen raised $12 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Sir Tim Berners Lee has been receiving some flack for auctioning off the original source code for the World Wide Web, which has now reached almost $3 million after bids began at $1,000!
Forget the original World Wide Web, its all about Web3 since the 2004 move to Web2. Check out more about Web3 here!
Lex Fridman sat down with Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson a few weeks ago and we are working out way through it this week (5+ hours!) . Check it out below!
That’s all for now and we’ll see you next week,
Team Zash