#279
Let It Burn!

Gareth goes to Buckingham Palace – It’s not really fintech but... our very own Welshman joined members of the British royal family at Buckingham Palace last week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales. See if you can spot him here in Hello. Read more

LendIt fintech industry awards - Great to see both MoneyLion and Plaid are in the running this year for an award at the Lendit Fintech Industry Awards. Read more

#Buidl on Ethereum in the city of Paris - Click on "View the winners" to look at the 4 winners form ETH Paris. Two of the winning projects incorporated "proof of burn." Read more

Lyft’s $864m insurance unit shows ride hailing is a risky business - A three-paragraph section buried in Lyft’s nearly-800-page public offering document sums up the challenges of insuring unfamiliar risks born from newer business models. The ride-hailing company has established an elaborate system through a subsidiary with $864m of capital to effectively allow it to insure its own risk. Read more

How big data really fits into lending - The FT's Alphaville digs into Moody's description of what datasets (such as education, academic scores, labour profile, job history and other professional skills) might flow into how credit is underwritten. Read more

Coinbase completes first OTC crypto trade directly from ‘cold’ storage- Coinbase has announced on its blog that it has just completed its first over-the-counter (OTC) trade directly out of cold, or offline, storage. Read more

Where millennials turn for financial advice - The FT explores where younger investors, shunned by traditional advisors, are going for their financial advice. Read more

Facebook ramps up hiring as blockchain team tops 60 employees - Since its December announcement that it was launching a stablecoin for its WhatsApp users (which will be pegged to various currencies rather than just the dollar), the company has continued to hire blockchain experts. Read more

Goldman Sachs to open up in-house moneymaker to outside investors- Goldman plans to raise outside money for its $30b special-situations group which has been run since 2013 by Julian Salisbury, a detail-oriented Brit who joined the firm’s management committee two years ago. Read more

Dropping Bitcoin? - With Bitcoin trading volume down nearly 80% since early 2018, the CBOE has decided not to add a Bitcoin (XBT) futures contract for March. It is revisiting how it wants to approach the digital asset derivatives space. Read more

China’s insurance giant thinks it’s a tech company. Maybe it is – Ping An, the $190B Chinese insurance giant, argues its heavy investment in technology differentiates it from other insurers. Because of China’s relatively loose approach in areas such as data privacy, Ping An can use technology in ways its non-Chinese peers cannot. Read more

Why Goldman Sachs is interested in a small bike shop in Mexico - Goldman's $100m credit line to Credijusto, a 4yr old alternative lender in Mexico, from their special situations group in New York is the latest example of a growing market of alternative lenders to local business in emerging markets. Read more

Ethereum insiders deny there is only one computer keeping a full copy of its blockchain - There was a lot of chatter around Vitalik's comments about "big scary nodes" during EthCC. The Ethereum Foundation says that data stored by archive nodes is the full history of Ethereum. Read more