Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning and welcome back to another edition of Friday Inspiration! This week is full of financial-type articles, a few of which are crypto-related. There is just a lot going on right now, prices are moving back up, some major players are buying into bitcoin, and there are some big advancements coming to a lot of other blockchains.
Let’s jump on in!
SoFi Concludes $750M Purchase of Golden Pacific Bank
https://www.pymnts.com/acquisitions/2022/sofi-concludes-750m-purchase-of-golden-pacific-bank/
This first little piece of news doesn’t sound like much, but the implications are a big deal. See, I heard about SoFi a while ago when all they did was refinance student loans. We still haven’t refinanced our loans with SoFi, but we are definitely considering it.
However, SoFi has come a long long way since then.
Today they offer a credit card, direct deposit, refinancing not just student loans, but they also offer home loans and personal loans too. They even have an investment platform now where you can invest in stocks or cryptocurrencies!
To add on, they bought a football stadium where many of y’all probably noticed they got to host the Super Bowl this year!
So yea, SoFi is doing some really cool stuff!
So what does this Golden Pacific Bank deal have to do with anything? Well, it is just one more piece in SoFi’s big dream of becoming an official bank.
They finally have approval to do so, and so by acquiring this bank I guess that gives them tons of physical locations in addition.
Solana Labs launches new payments protocol for e-commerce as SOL projects major upswing
This is actually really cool and seamless. I’ve mentioned this before, but bitcoin can’t really be used for peer to peer transactions or even business transactions. It takes up to 30 minutes for a transaction to be verified on the blockchain, and people can’t wait in a store that long.
Solana on the other hand verifies transactions in less than a second or so.
I think this new Solana based project came out of a hackathon, but I could be wrong. But it now allows peers or even businesses to pay for goods/services using the Solana network!
What does that mean?
Well, this doesn’t mean people have to pay for things using the Solana cryptocurrency. SOL (the currency) is used to power Solana (the network). But there are many different currencies that use the Solana network. One of which is the stable coin USDC, which is just US dollars in digital form.
This is pretty similar to when you swipe your Visa card. You are using Visa’s network to verify a transaction of a virtual form of the US dollar.
But with Solana it is all powered by an open sourced decentralized network of individuals, which I think is pretty sweet!
KPMG Canada Adds Crypto to Its Balance Sheet
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/02/07/kpmg-canada-adds-crypto-to-its-balance-sheet/
So before this news came out I had never heard of KPMG before, but apparently, they are a big deal.
I’m sure many of you are laughing at me for saying that too.
I had no idea but they are in a group of companies nicknamed: “The Big Four” as in the four biggest accounting firms in the United States. KPMG specifically brought in over $32 billion in revenue last year.
And they are now the next big institution to put bitcoin and ethereum on their balance sheet.
They came out and told the world they did this, that they believe in cryptocurrencies, and don’t think they are going anywhere. They did not reveal how much bitcoin or ethereum they bought, but we saw bitcoin go from about $39K to almost $45K in a couple of days after that.
DeFi’s Aave Launches Web 3 Social Media Platform ‘Lens’
I thought this was fascinating for me personally because I’ve spent so much time on DeSo. See, DeSo stands for Decentralized Social. It is that social media I’ve been using lately.
It launched under the name BitClout, then it was released that the underlying blockchain powering BitClout was called DeSo.
So just like DeSo is this blockchain to power social media apps, now this other company, Aave wants to launch a social media platform called “Lens” that is powered by the Polygon blockchain.
I know I’m biased, but I don’t know how well they will do if I’m honest.
The beauty behind DeSo is that it was designed from the ground up to be a social media blockchain. This means the storage and transaction costs are super cheap for social media type actions like sending a like or posting a comment.
Most other blockchains like Solana, Ethereum, or other popular ones like Polygon are “multi-purpose” chains. That means to build a social app on them will either be really expensive (like $2 to send a like), or you’ll have to do a lot of weird gimmicks or tricks to get prices lower (which is what it sounds like Lens is doing).
We’ll see what happens, but a bunch of people on DeSo started talking late last year that 2022 would be the year of Decentralized Social, and perhaps they were right!