EncryptoTel weekly digest 10.07.20
Unicorn companies without investments, Paxful’s victory over LocalBitcoins and gaming sales growth in app stores
Crunchbase: 44 new unicorn companies appeared in the first half of the year, but the investment volume fell
Crunchbase published unicorn market research results. According to them, from the beginning of 2020 to June 28, 44 new companies appeared whose capitalization exceeded $ 1 billion. The most notable among them are the British Arrival, which develops electric cars, the American developer for autonomous cars Pony.ai and the Indian biotechnological Biocon Biologics. All of them are estimated at $ 3 billion and above. The total number of unicorns is now 601, and their market value exceeds $ 2 trillion. The pace of unicorns in 2020 fell sharply. So, in 2018, over the same period, 169 unicorn companies appeared. Venture capital investments have also decreased: if in the first half of 2019 $ 65 billion was invested in unicorns, then this year the volume of investments fell to $ 12 billion. The number of investors exiting from such companies (through IPOs or selling shares) also decreased: from 43 in 2019 to 12 in 2020.
LocalBitcoins Loses Market Leadership in P2P Platforms for Buying and Selling Cryptocurrencies
According to Coin.dance, Paxful is currently the leading p2p platform for buying and selling bitcoins in terms of global weekly trading volume. June 13, the volume of transactions at Paxful was 4,361 BTC ($ 42.5 million), and 4,094 BTC ($ 40 million) at LocalBitcoins. In the week ending June 6, Paxful also outperformed LocalBitcoins: the weekly trading volume on Paxful was $ 42.8 million, with $ 41.7 million on LocalBitcoins.
A change in the balance of power in the p2p platform market was facilitated by tightening the regulation of digital assets in the European Union. In 2019, LocalBitcoins toughened the requirements for verification and user identification in accordance with the new European directive designed to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. LocalBitcoins also stopped supporting cash payments in accordance with the regulatory requirements of Finland, where the platform operator is registered. This led to an outflow of traders who preferred this method of payment.
However, this did not stop LocalBitcoins from expanding its user base by 1.46 new accounts in 2019 and increasing revenue by 10% to $ 29.48 million. Trading volume in 2019 amounted to 2.48 billion euros ($ 2.79 billion). In 2019, the platform completed 15.6 million transactions and had 913,000 active traders.
Facebook admitted to transferring personal data of inactive users to third parties
Several thousand applications gained access to the personal data of Facebook and Instagram users who had not logged in for more than 90 days, Facebook said in a blog post. About 5000 developers were able to use the data.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Facebook was banned from transferring personal information to applications if the person who used the social network account to log in to the third-party application did not log in to Facebook within the past 90 days. But in some cases, applications continued to receive data.
“For example, this can happen if someone used the fitness app to invite their friends from their hometown to train, but we did not know that some of his friends have been inactive for many months,” Facebook explains.
This vulnerability has now been fixed.
UK authorities intend to ban the use of Huawei equipment in 5G networks
The UK government will prohibit the use of equipment of the Chinese company Huawei in the deployment of 5G networks. It is reported by The Daily Telegraph, citing sources in the government. In the coming days, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will be presented with a report by the UK National Cybersecurity Center (GCHQ), which assesses the admissibility of using Huawei equipment in the creation of 5G network and recommends completely ban the use of Huawei equipment in 5G for national security reasons. In a previous report on this topic, GCHQ experts noted that the Chinese company’s equipment can be used in non-critical infrastructure elements, but now experts have revised their position.
Huawei accounts for about one third among the telecommunication equipment for the previous generation of networks — 4G and LTE.
Statistics: in 2020, users spend more money on the App Store and Google Play
According to the research by Sensor Tower Store Intelligence, Android and iOS app stores received a total revenue of $ 50.1 billion in the first half of 2020, which is 23.4% more than store sales in the first half of 2019 ($ 40.6 billion).
For six months, iOS users spent $ 32.8 billion in the App Store (+ 24.7% from last year). Purchases on Google Play increased to $ 17.3 billion (+ 21% by 2019).
TikTok, WhatsApp and Zoom have become the most downloaded applications.
In 2020, users were 42.5% more likely to download mobile games to their devices. They spent $ 36.6 billion on them, which is 21.2% more than in 2019 for the same period.
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