Tuesday Aug.31, 2021

🤸🏾‍♀️ Simone Biles NFTs

_Can't funge it [Westend61 via GettyImages]_

Hey Snackers,

Finally, a pink frosted for each vaccine shot: Krispy Kreme is sweetening its free doughnut incentive. Customers with vax cards will receive not one, but two free doughnuts through September 5. The glazed legend has given away 2.5M doughnuts this year.

US stocks closed at fresh records yesterday, as tech companies lifted the broader market.

Token

Sports stars and influencers embrace NFTs to unlock the next opportunity in the fan economy

Grab a Sharpie and some blockchain... NFT autographs have arrived. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are like one-of-a-kind trading cards, but digital. Instead of living in a glass case, they live on a crypto blockchain. Today, star gymnast Simone Biles released an NFT collection with Autograph, which makes NFTs signed by athletes like Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, and Tony Hawk. Buyers can trade the tokens in DraftKings' NFT marketplace — where a Naomi Osaka Autograph NFT is currently selling for $63K.

From Taco Bell-themed art... to the internet's original source code, NFTs can be tied to any digital asset. The first NFT hit the blockchain in 2014. Since then, people have sold NFTs of tweets, songs, and even Nobel Prize patents. Over the past year:

NFT sales soared from $13.7M in the first half of 2020 to more than $2.5B in the first half of this year — a 200X increase.
Celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, and even Edward Snowden, have all launched NFTs.
Big brands aren't missing out on the non-fungible frenzy: Charmin rolled out a virtual toilet paper called “NFTP” (lol), Taco Bell's NFTacos sold out in 30 minutes, and Pringles sold virtual "CryptoCrisps" for $2 each — they're now selling for about $8K/tube.

NFTs may be the new merch... of the fan economy. Sports and entertainment stars mostly rely on brand sponsorships, events, and merch sales to monetize their millions of fans. NFTs give fan-favorites from Shawn Mendes to Naomi Osaka a new tool to monetize their followers with digital product sales. OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, takes a 2.5% cut of NFT sales — a good deal compared to YouTube’s 45% cut, OnlyFans’ 20% cut, or even Substack’s 10% cut.

Muted

Zoom's growth is slowing, so it's getting crafty to help keep the Zoom Boom alive

You're on mute... Now repeat the 30-second spiel. Zoom has become a verb, a meme, and a lifestyle — but its latest earnings show the glory days may be fading. Last year, Zoom’s revenue more than quadrupled from the previous year as it led the WFH boom. Zoom's sales are still growing – but more slowly.

Zoom's quarterly sales grew 54% from last year — down from nearly 200% growth in the previous quarter. Next quarter, it's expecting even slower growth.
Zoom stock dropped 10% after earnings. This year, it’s down 4%, while the market-tracking S&P 500 is up 22%.

Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom… I want you in my conference room. Zoom's growth is slowing as people return to offices and IRL events. It's also experiencing the "DPF Effect," aka: demand pulled forward. Growth that should've happened last quarter happened all at once last year. Now, Zoom's getting creative to help keep the boom going:

Zoom-as-a-service: In March, Zoom said it would start licensing its video conferencing tech to other apps as an unbranded service. Think: dating apps and telehealth providers.
Live events: In October, Zoom launched "OnZoom" for people to find and host paid virtual events, from live performances to yoga classes. In July, it launched "Zoom Events," for companies to host external and internal interactive events (think: large workshops).
Customer service: In July, Zoom announced plans to buy cloud-based customer-service platform Five9 for a whopping $14.7B. Zoom sees it as a way to attract more big enterprise customers.

Zoom doesn't need to change its product... to keep growing post-pandemic. It just needs to keep expanding beyond work meetings. That’s why it’s putting its tech to work through live events and whitelabel licensing. Even with the Delta variant surging, the fully remote office life likely won’t last forever. But Zoom could thrive in a hybrid IRL-virtual future — if it offers the tools to support it.

What else we’re Snackin’

TBD: Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna shares slipped while Wall Street waits for the CDC to weigh in on whether Americans should get Covid vax booster shots.
Surge: Gas prices are rising as Hurricane Ida pummels Louisiana, shutting down a critical swath of US oil production and leaving 1M+ without power.
BNPL: Shares of "buy now, pay later" company Affirm popped 47% after it announced a partnership with Amazon, which'll allow 'Zon shoppers to pay in installments.
Sporty: Disney's ESPN is reportedly looking to license its brand to major sports-betting companies for at least $3B.
McClose: McDonald's reversed its plan to reopen indoor dining at 100% of locations by Labor Day, and advised franchisees in Covid hotspots to re-close.
Data: Shares of satellite company Globalstar soared 60% on rumors that the unreleased iPhone 13 may use satellites when out of network range.

Tuesday

Earnings expected from NetEase and Crowdstrike

Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Moderna, Google, Amazon, Disney, and Apple

ID: 1820932

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Pinterest shares surged by roughly 20% Wednesday, posting their biggest gain in three years following its release of strong earnings results. It was the biggest single day rise for the stock in over three years, Bloomberg says.

Q1 sales jumped 22.8%, the fastest since 2021. Monthly active users hit a record 518 million. The company still lost money, though it narrowed to its loss to $24 million, from $209 million during the first quarter last year.

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The Federal Reserve kept its target monetary policy rate unchanged, and noted “a lack of further progress” toward getting inflation down to its 2% target. Stocks and bonds were relatively unchanged on the announcement.

But they rose after Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s post-statement news conference, in which he seemed to discount the chance that the Fed could move to rate hikes soon.

"I think it’s unlikely that the next policy rate move will be a hike,” he said.

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“Unlikely that the next policy rate move will be a hike.”

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Novo Nordisk’s market cap is bigger than Denmark’s entire economy

Something is shapely in the state of Denmark.

Thanks to the success of its diabetes and obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, drugmaker Novo Nordisk is now Europe’s most valuable company. It’s especially having outsized effects on its home country of Denmark, where its market cap of over $570 billion trumps the country’s GDP.

“Without Novo’s contribution, the Danish economy would have stagnated,” Bloomberg reports.

Novo Nordisk therefore is having broad effects on myriad aspects of life in Denmark, from educational priorities to immigration policy to job availability to mortgage rates. As goes Novo Nordisk, so goes the nation. That means if the drugmaker’s finances go south, so will Denmark’s.

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“Without Novo’s contribution, the Danish economy would have stagnated,” Bloomberg reports.

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Binance founder CZ’s prison sentence hasn’t stopped an uptick in trading on the exchange

Yesterday, the founder and former chief executive of Binance was finally sentenced to 4 months in prison. The ruling marked the end of a multi-year investigation in which the crypto magnate — Changpeng Zhao, widely known as CZ — pleaded guilty to violating American anti-money laundering requirements.

The crux of the investigation was that Binance had failed to report more than 100K suspicious transactions, including some with obvious ties to terrorist groups. Prosecutors had been seeking a sentence of 3 years for the billionaire, who will retain the bulk of his wealth despite paying $100M in criminal and civil fines.

Founded in 2017, Binance continues to operate under new leadership with little evidence that the investigation into its founder and former CEO has diminished appetite for traders on the Binance exchange. Data from The Block reveals that 40-50% of monthly crypto exchange volumes go through Binance.

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Cannabis ETFs get high on DEA reclassification news

The Biden admin is moving to weaken restrictions on cannabis, according to a report by the Associated Press.

Marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I drug (on par with heroin) since the Controlled Substances Act was first signed in 1970.

This change would make cannabis, which is recreationally legal in 24 states, a Schedule III drug (on par with anabolic steroids). The shift, which isn't finalized, would likely give a significant boost to the $35B legal cannabis industry through changes to its tax status.

Cannabis stocks and ETFs soared on the news.

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Tesla lays off charging team

Tesla laid off practically the entire 500-person team that runs the company’s Supercharger network, the Information reported.

The network is considered a “crown jewel” and a competitive advantage compared with other carmakers, which have recently cut deals with Tesla to use the network.

It’s not clear yet where that leaves Tesla’s plans to build a 1,800 mile charging corridor for semi trucks, but it also laid off the public policy team, which had failed to get $100 million in federal funding for the project.

It’s certainly bad news for people trying to take long roadtrips with their Teslas. “We will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction,” Musk wrote in a memo on the layoffs.

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It’s a good time to be an AI startup

While the tech industry generally keeps its belt tightened, investors are still going gaga over anything to do with AI, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That’s meant plowing money into startups that don’t even have products, let alone revenue, fueling concerns of a bubble. That money buys a whole lot of chips.

$21.8B

investment in AI deals in 2023

up 5X from 2022

17X

AI chip expense vs revenue