Super Bowl Ads Debate, First Bank in the Metaverse, Crypto Balkans

Claiming to be the first bank in the metaverse, JPMorgan announced the opening of a “lounge” in Decentraland. The bank doesn’t appear to believe that its metaverse presence will serve random metaverse visitors who will, on a lark, decide to open a checking account, however.

Southeast Europe - Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia - have become a crypto startup hub. The world’s most sophisticated investors are piling in.

Cryptocurrency commercials felt like they were everywhere at the Super Bowl, but instead of selling actual use cases for blockchain, Web3, and Bitcoin, the ads just highlighted the idea that crypto was the future, without any details.

Neobank Atom has raised a round of more than $100 million led by Spanish banking group BBVA and investment manager Toscafund.

Founded in 2016, Neon is a Brazilian digital bank. Following the transaction, the stake of BBVA in Neon will reach 29.7%.

The Financial Conduct Authority has told investment platform Freetrade to remove all paid for social media influencer posts after its use of an influencer for the company suggested consumers in debt could use the platform to make money

Payments infrastructure company Stronghold has launched a venture capital arm to deploy $100 million of its balance sheet capital in startups and funds in three core strategies — underrepresented founders, fintech and web3, CEO Tammy Camp told TechCrunch in an interview.

Wealthy individuals overtook crowdfunders in UK equity deals last year — for the first time in seven years

BlockFi agreed to pay $100M in penalties and cease its unregistered offers, but this hasn´t been applauded by all commissioners at the SEC. 

A new $40 million investment fund led by executives from top Nordic banks and fintechs targets B2B, infrastructure players driving efficiency throughout the ecosystem.

PayPal has amended the terms of its merchant-focused Seller Protection program to account for transactions of more than $10,000 that involve non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Early-stage fintech-focused venture firm Better Tomorrow Ventures has raised $225 million for its second fund — triple the amount it raised for its debut fund that closed in September of 2020. Founded by Sheel Mohnot and Jake Gibson in November of 2019, San Francisco-based Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) has allocated $150 million to invest in startups at the pre-seed and seed stages.

In fall 2018, BECU, Washington’s largest community credit union, partnered with CoMotion to create a fintech hub in the Seattle region, which included the launch of the BECU FinTech Incubator powered by UW CoMotion. Housed in CoMotion Labs at Startup Hall, the collaboration combines BECU’s expertise in broad-based financial services, data analysis, and customer experiences with CoMotion’s strengths in incubation, partnership, innovation, company formation, and technology commercialization.