Hello Reader,
It’s official. We left cable TV to pay for streaming platforms to avoid the ads and now, the ads are following us…to Netflix. The streaming giant has announced a partnership with Microsoft for its new ad-supported subscription plan, expected to roll out by the end of this year.
In other news, the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) announced that it is dissolving the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council (BACC).
Meanwhile, India has a new unicorn. FPL Technologies-owned OneCard raised $100 million in its latest Series D round. A report by TechCrunch valued it at over $1.4 billion, making it the 19th Indian startup to enter the coveted billion-dollar club this year.
Also, it’s Twitter’s birthday today! At 15, no one dreams of having to fight the world’s richest person. But Twitter is hardly your average teen, filing a suit in the Delaware Court of Chancery against Elon Musk for violating his $44 billion deal to buy the social media company.
Psst, can we get that edit button before your sweet 16, pretty please?
KoinX: A simple tax platform for crypto
How are taxes calculated for transactions from anonymous crypto wallets? What about profits from DeFi (decentralised finance) and NFT (non-fungible token) transactions?
And most importantly, is there a simplified tax platform for crypto that consolidates all user transactions?
In 2022, entrepreneur Punit Agarwal started KoinX to build a unified crypto tax platform, which will solve crypto taxation and more.
Key takeaways:
- KoinX aims to enable investors to automate crypto taxations by combining investor portfolios and transactions on a single, unified platform with centralised dashboards.
- It has already integrated with crypto exchanges, including CoinDCX, Binance, WazirX, Vauld, BitBNS, and CoinSwitch Kuber, to automate the calculation of tax implications for crypto users.
- KoinX plans to ship its crypto wallet features by August or September 2022.
The woman techie who designed “6-word Wordle”
Wordle, the bite-sized word game that caught the attention of several people online earlier this year, did not spare Shobhita Agarwal either. Intrigued by the game, she and her husband Dipesh Mittal decided to build their own version.
The two of them worked overnight and created ‘WordHurdle’, a game similar to Wordle, available twice a day, wherein users had to guess six-letter words.
“When we made it, we just posted it on our blog and shared it with our friends, who were similarly addicted to Wordle,” Shobhita tells YourStory.
Inside WordHurdle:
- The initial idea was not to publish the game but let it be another game to enjoy.
- Within a month, WordHurdle clocked 100,000 daily active users. To give a comparison, in January 2022, when Wordle had just become an internet frenzy, it had 300,000 users, which later touched millions.
- The couple was approached by US-based gaming company Unwind Media as the game’s user base rose to 600,000 users worldwide. The duo decided to sell it in April 2022.
5ire turns unicorn after Series A funding of $100M
5ire, a fifth-generation Level 1 blockchain network, announced it raised $100 million in a Series A funding round from UK-based conglomerate SRAM & MRAM. The startup claims to have turned into a unicorn, valued at $1.5 billion.
The startup said the funds will be used for business expansion and extending 5ire’s footprint across Asia, North America, and Europe, with India as the hub of operations and core area of focus.
Key takeaways:
- 5ire was founded by Indian-origin entrepreneurs Pratik Gauri and Prateek Dwivedi, along with Web3 financier Vilma Mattila, in August 2021.
- Besides the cash injection, SRAM & MRAM deal also helps 5ire leverage investor connections to build and establish relationships with several industries and governments across the world.
- Co-founder and CEO Pratik Gauri explained that 5ire is not a crypto company but a blockchain technology firm and, therefore, “is agnostic of the crypto bear market, and so are [our] investors”.
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