Making cryptocurrency accessible

Hello Reader,

The blood of the dragon is strong indeed.

Even before the second episode of HBO’s new fantasy series House of the Dragon is released, the show has been renewed for a second season! After all, the premiere, which aired on Monday, has already been seen by 20 million people and counting—the highest for any new original show in HBO’s history.

In other news, domestic indices closed higher on Friday—if only by a hair. The BSE Sensex ended the day 0.10% higher at 58,833 while Nifty50 rose by 0.21% to end at 17,558. 

Meanwhile, password manager LastPass got hacked. However, it doesn’t believe any passwords were compromised and users shouldn’t have to take action to secure their accounts.

ICYMI: A 17-year-old became the youngest person to fly solo around the world. Mack Rutherford, a Belgian-British dual national, landed in Bulgaria earlier this week, where his journey began five months ago. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Making cryptocurrency accessible
• Sequoia sells partial stake in Zomato
• Innovation in men’s innerwear segment

Cryptocurrency

Making cryptocurrency accessible

For cryptocurrencies to gain widespread popularity, they also need to be accessible. With this vision, Ray Youssef started Paxful, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange where nearly 10 million users trade on a regular basis across the world.

"This is a business that has to grow from the bottom up and that requires tremendous amounts of education, investment in people and risk and it has to be built up from the ground up,” he says.

Improving accessibility:

• Paxful is used to send money to families for e-commerce, import and export.
• Over six million trades on Paxful originate from Africa.
• While it specialises in Bitcoin, users can make payments for BTC via Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, and Golem. 

Investor

Sequoia sells partial stake in Zomato

After Tiger Global and Uber, Sequoia Capital India has sold its partial stake in foodtech decacorn Zomato after the mandatory one-year lock-in period ended post the IPO last year.

Sequoia Capital India will sell 171,904,811 shares with voting rights, which it holds through Sequoia Capital India Growth Investment Holdings I and Sequoia Capital India Growth Investments II.

Key points:

• This comes after Zomato lowered the investment guidance into Blinkit to $320 million for breakeven.
• Sequoia Capital India Investments IV received 45,153,346 incremental shares in Zomato in August 2022 following the acquisition of Blink Commerce, which operates Blinkit.
• Zomato shares closed at Rs 61.90 per share on Friday, down from its previous close of Rs 62.05 per share on BSE.

Turning Point

Innovation in men’s innerwear segment

Looking at the lack of product innovation in the innerwear market, Yogesh Kabra decided to fill the gap with a brand that is not only rooted in comfort and functionality, but was also fun and playful and aesthetic.

Now, XYXX Apparels has become a popular men's innerwear brand among millennials. In the last six months, the brand has expanded to more than 14,000 multi-brand outlets.

Rapid growth:

• The startup sells three lakh units, mostly men’s underwear, every month.
• It witnessed a 300% growth year-on-year during FY22 compared to the last fiscal year.
• XYXX recently announced raising Rs 90 crore, contributing to a total Rs 135 crore raised so far.

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