STONKS: The Reckoning
Tech stocks are taking a beating today. Why? Maybe retail investors are finally figuring out that crypto has a higher rate of return (wait nope not now… wait yes …. wait no) and are rebalancing their portfolios accordingly.
Twitter user Charlie Bilello painted a (cherry-picked) view of some of the highest falls from PE ratios. Notable standouts are Alibaba, the China eCom giant, which has fallen 50% off its highs over the past 16 months.
Maybe tech growth isn’t happening as fast as we had hoped. Maybe the uncertainty around Omicron and inflation has our collective hearts in our throats. But crypto isn’t faring so well, either. This past weekend coins took a beating, falling as much as 12% off their recent highs.
Why does this matter to us in eCom? A softening investment market might signal the need to tap fractional liquidity. Mobile wallets, including Square (ahem Block?) and Paypal, including their P2P alter egos, Cash App and Venmo, have crypto facilities in them today. Coinbase and Robinhood do as well. This amounts to a heavily fragmented amount of liquidity that a given consumer may soon want to tap as they become illiquid. Crypto and BNPL (buy now pay later) may be how they afford their next big purchases, because The Good Lord knows monkey jpegs aren’t going to pay for themselves.
I forecast a wave of mobile wallet checkout integrations on the horizon. We’ll see pressure in the eCom community to provide new facilities for checkout and payments solutions. Look to Bolt and other one-click solutions to quickly fill the gap. I recently learned that Coinbase has a checkout button. That was a shocker. Shopify is already slowly moving to meet the digital goods sales opportunity, having delivered a number of NFT sales projects in the professional sports space recently (see: the Chicago Bulls NFT).
There’s going to be a boom in mobile checkout, eCom, and shopping apps integration.
— Phillip
No/Low Code | Doja Code. Dojacat has partnered up with non-profit, Girls Who Code, to release the first interactive codable music video in the world. Fans can direct the video via code that they write while learning the basics of programming, signalling a future where interactive media becomes a tool for learning next-generation job skills.
Can you hear me now? The KT5(3C) is a desk phone with an android tablet integrated next to the handset. It has a port for a 5G Sim card so you can take your calls from your shoulder, tethered to a 5lb brick of plastic. It’s retro. It's the future. It’s nonsensical. We kinda love it. And kind of hate it.
Eth-Beer-eum. Budweiser has gone NFT and fans went wild. Their first collection of heritage cans sold out less than an hour after being released. The iconic brand also changed their name on Twitter to “beer.eth.” Remember when we just loved them because frogs ribbited their name during the Superbow? We’ve come so far together.
Tweet of all Tweets. Jack resigned from Twitter... via Twitter. Well, sort of. He tweeted his resignation email out for the world to see in the name of transparency, and ended it with a solid, “Hi mom!” Pretty sure he probably told his board members before that, though.
The real chefkiss.jpg was the subsequent announcement that Square (Jack’s other CEO side-hustle) was rebranding to Block, in a signal that the company would become more focused on crypto onramps for both consumers and SMBs.
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