Bits of Signum 5.7.2020
Paul Tudor Jones bets on Bitcoin // Animal Crossing Numbers // Amazon & Gaming // PayPal on Digital Payments
It has been a big 24 hours for Bitcoin, with Paul Tudor Jones making a bet and comparing it to gold in the 1970s. His response on what will make the best inflation hedge: ‘My bet is it will be bitcoin.’ Separately, Square reported that Bitcoin related income will quadruple this year, reporting $5m in Q1 and expecting $32m in 2020 vs Bitcoin related income for all of 2019 at $8.23m.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons continues to blow away expectations, selling 13.4m units in 6 weeks. For context, it took Animal Crossing: New Leaf six years to reach 12.6m. While Nintendo is selling a lot of Switches (55.7m total to date), they could have sold a lot more, if not for inventory shortages.
Amazon announced May 20th as the launch date of Crucible, their first big-budget title from Amazon Game Studios. It is a free to play, multiplayer shooter game. As mentioned in the past, Amazon is all-in on gaming and generally appears to be going after the hardcore gamer demographic - see full list below.
Not Bitcoin, but on the topic of digital payments and international remittances, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said that we have seen a turn in behavior for Xoom (international remittances up strongly), and that we aren't likely to go back. Also:
"Across the entire base we are seeing daily active users growing 20%. From the beginning to the end of April (on a 7 day rolling basis) transaction growth is up 25%. We think we are hitting a tipping point of people seeing how simple and easy it is to use digital payments to pay for services. "
Amazon in the Game
First big-budget game May 20th - a Sci-fi shooter, Crucible
Twitch: video game streaming
Project Tempo: cloud gaming platform to compete with MSFT xCloud and Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now (delayed to 2021 due to COVID-19)
Developing casual interactive games that Twitch broadcasters can play with viewers
Lumberyard - game processing engine (note GTA Creator Leslie Benzies is working on a Ready Player One type game called Everywhere on this engine.)
3 gaming studios: Relentless Studios out of Seattle (developed Crucible - delayed to May due to COVID-19) ; an Amazon game studio in Irvine, CA (tied to Double Helix Games acquisition in 2014) - currently developing New World, a massively multiplayer online game; a third studio in the works in San Diego (John Smedley, former Sony Online Entertainment President who joined Amazon in 2017 to start this third game studio)
Thanks, and have a good day!
Angie
Notable Earnings Readthroughs
Disney Tuesday, 5/5
Q1 profits down 91%, despite direct-to-consumer revenue, including streaming, nearly quadrupling
Disney+ at 55M subscribers in 6 months vs. initial guidance of 60M in 4 years, along with ESPN+ and Hulu making significant subscriber gains
Activision Tuesday, 5/5
Call of Duty: Warzone up to 60M players (released March 10, 2020); “populations sheltering at home tuned to our content for entertainment and social connections”
EA Tuesday, 5/5
Users downloaded more games, and engagement was up due to COVID-19
Zynga Wednesday, 5/6
Revenue +52% yoy in Q1, but Zynga’s player base declined, averaging 21M mobile DAUs and 68M mobile MAUs, down 7% and 5% YoY
Nintendo - Thursday, 5/7
Animal Crossing!
Profits +41%; ~50% of titles sold digitally in the first 3 months
21M Switch consoles sold ytd (55M lifetime sales); upside limited by inventory shortages
Digital Assets Headlines
Tudor BVI Fund was at $3.3B in AUM as of May 6th
Libra Association appoints Stuart Levey as CEO
Previously served as Chief Legal Officer at HSBC Holding from 2012 onwards
ErisClearing receives BitLicense and Money Transmitter License from NYDFS
Clearing and settlement subsidy of ErisX, a spot and futures exchange
ErisX received a Derivatives Clearing Organization license from the CFTC in 2019
Synthetix launches demo of anticipated Ethereum scaling solution
Optimistic Roll Ups provide a Layer 2 execution environment for smart contracts
37.5x reduction in oracle latency, 75x reduction in transaction delay, with 27x and 140x reductions in gas fees for both, respectively
BlockFi appoints Wittney Rachlin of American Express as Chief Growth Officer
BlockFi looking to launch Bitcoin rewards credit card
Ukrainian energy minister calls for state nuclear power be allocated to mining BTC
Ukraine facing energy surpluses amid COVID-19 demand decline
Cryptocurrency mining was recognized as legal economic activity in 2018
M&A and Raises
Robinhood raises $280M in Series F round
Near Protocol raises $21M led by a16z
vBit raises $1.1M in seed funding to build out mining facility in Alberta, Canada
AppLovin invested in Redemption Games (San Diego mobile game maker)
Dazzle Rocks (Helsinki) raises $6.8M Series A for new social sandbox game, led by Galaxy Digital