Bits of Signum 4.24.20
Goodbye Salesforce, Hello Substack. Concerts in Video Games! Facebook isn’t new to Gaming even if the App is.
Happy Friday! We hope you enjoy the UI of our new Substack newsletter.
See important press bits of the week under our broad topics of Digital Assets and Disruptive Entertainment. We are calling it Disruptive Entertainment because advances in gaming are not limited to game publishers, even though they are certainly lead indicators (Theme: Epic and Fortnite are showing us the way). A couple of things that stand out:
Epic’s Fortnite hosted the Travis Scott concert LIVE and 12.3 million concurrent viewers gathered to watch!!! This is 20% more viewers than Marshmello drew on the day before the Super Bowl in 2019. After attending that conference, we wrote this Medium piece on the power of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Note: you didn’t miss out - there are additional performances tomorrow 4/25: at 11 AM EST for European and Middle Eastern servers, and at 6pm EST for North and South American servers.
Facebook launched a gaming app, which made a lot of headlines. I would argue Facebook isn't new here, even if they have been stealth in their growth. At E3 last year (June 2019), I spent time at the Facebook booth below because from a digital payments perspective, I saw that the Libra token had the potential to unlock in-game tipping (by the way, no one at the booth really knew much about Libra 😬). They spoke last year about investing heavily in their gaming creator programs for live-streamers and professional gamers, citing the figure that 700 million users already interact with gaming content on the main Facebook app. This all came after the original June 2018 announcement of FB.gg, a destination where viewers could start watching streamers playing video games. By October of 2019, there were reports of gamers earning more on Facebook than on either Twitch or YouTube. By December 2019, we saw some market share numbers from StreamElements and Arsenal.gg which indicated that Facebook’s hours watched share was up to 9% from 3% a year earlier, at the expense of Twitch (61%, down from 67%), but not at the expense of YouTube Gaming (flat at 28% share) or Mixer (2.6% from 2%).
Thanks and have a great weekend,
Angie
E3 2019 @ Facebook Gaming booth
Digital Assets
Max Fiege | LinkedIn | Twitter | Email
HEADLINES
Ethereum-issued stablecoin market cap grows 95% YoY to $6.25B.
Led by Tether ($5.6B) and USDC ($700M)
DAI’s market share has fallen from ~3.5% to ~1.35% since Black Thursday on March 12th, presumably due to an inability to return to its $1 peg in spite of a reduction of the savings rate to 0%
Dharma rolls out Twitter crypto payments
Allows users to send funds to anyone with a Twitter handle for the recipient to claim; funds accrue interest even prior to recipient claiming them
Cash App-like experience for anyone in the world with an internet connection
Coinbase launches Decentralized Finance price oracle
Provides applications launched on Ethereum with price feeds from Coinbase Pro
Will add a trusted fallback option for the oracle systems relied on by the likes of Uniswap, Compound, MakerDAO, and Keep Protocol
China has rolled out the pilot of its central bank digital currency in 4 cities
In concert with the launch of the Blockchain Services Network being spearheaded by telecom companies, payments providers, and banks
A digital yuan is still not expected prior to 2022
CFTC approves Bitnomial to offer futures contracts with physical BTC settlement
Second exchange to offer physically-delivered, margin-ready Bitcoin derivatives behind Bakkt
2018 Series A was led by Jump Capital, suggesting the high-frequency trading firm could be an active participant upon launch
Gemini passed SOC 1 Type 1 audit conducted by Deloitte in March
Comes after successful completion of SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 audits over the past two years; to be followed up with SOC 1 Type 2 audit in 2021
Brings Gemini’s custody up to speed with BitGo’s
M&A AND RAISES
tZero raises $5M in sale of equity stake to GoldenSand Capital
a16z raising $450M for second crypto fund
AppliedBlockchain raises £2 million funding round lead by Hong Kong based venture capital firm QBN Capital
Disruptive Entertainment
Nik Vantzos | LinkedIn | Email
HEADLINES
Facebook launches Facebook Gaming game streaming app (a la Twitch, YouTube) - includes streaming, chat, and playable games
Pits Facebook in more direct contention with Amazon and Google on game streaming; the app is available for Android today, iOS coming soon
Integrated approach, aligned with Amazon’s push into developing casual / interactive games for Twitch broadcasters to play with viewers (“2-way engagement”)
Follows the huge success of Marshmello’s digital Fortnite concert (10.7M viewers), and the in-game Star Wars event (3.1M viewers), both in 2019.
The first of the two Americas concerts (yesterday) was phenomenally successful, seeing 12.3M concurrent viewers.
Remaining Schedule:
-Saturday 4/25 - Asia & Oceania - 12am EST
-Saturday 4/25 - EU & ME - 11am EST
-Sunday 4/26 - The Americas - 6pm EST
Riot Games is working on this with third-parties vs. keeping it all in-house; Riot Games has been a pioneer in Esports, with CEO Nicolo Laurent remarking in late 2019 “you cannot see Esports as marketing, we view this as a business. We want to make sure everybody has something to win.” They’re putting that philosophy to work with this ecosystem-friendly approach.
The company also released a blueprint for Teamfight Tactic’s league play.
Gaming metrics continue to see upticks during Corona
SuperData Research estimates $10B in global spending on digital downloadable games in March. This is the highest single-month total ever, and an 11% increase over March 2019; a specific winner, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, sold 5M digital units in March, also a single-month record.
Major gaming apps - Twitch, Mixer, Caffeine, Discord - hit their highest single-month revenues in March - Discord also had 10.4M downloads in March and Twitch engagement was up 36.5% YoY.
M&A AND RAISES
Fandango acquires Walmart streaming video service Vudu (undisclosed amount)
Fox completed its $440M acquisition of video-streaming service Tubi
Verizon acquires videoconferencing company Blue Jeans (estimated $400M)
Startup crowdfunding platform Republic acquired gaming crowdfunder Fig
Riot Games acquires community-driven sandbox game developer Hypixel after helping seed the company in 2018
Reworks (Helsinki mobile games studio) raised $4.3M in funding; EQT led with Play Ventures and Anton Gauffin (CEO, Huuuge Games) participating
Superplus Games raises $4.7M - Finnish mobile studio working on PvP games; investors include Makers Fund and Sisu Game Ventures
FaZe Clan announces completion of its $40 million Series A funding. Jimmy Iovine and NTWRK led the round, with a star studded cast behind them.
According to Bloomberg, Epic is raising (last round was a $15B valuation; 2018)
Confluent raised a $250 million Series E (~$4.5 billion valuation). Altimeter CAp and Coatue led; Franklin Templeton, Index Ventures, Sequoia participated
The Dipp (N.Y.-based subscription-only entertainment news startup), raised a $2.3 million seed,round led by Defy Partners.
Draftkings is going public via a merger with Diamond Eagle Acquisition (SPAC)
Signum Growth Capital Team
Angela Dalton | Founder and CEO | angela@signumgrowthcapital.com
Max Fiege | Director, Digital Assets | max@signumgrowthcapital.com
Nik Vantzos | Director, Disruptive Entertainment | nik@signumgrowthcapital.com