Which Would You Choose: This Crypto Or That Unicorn?

Morning Report: Good morning! Let’s play a fun game.

Games! Everyone loves games. Let’s play one together.

This morning, news broke that you will soon be able to take your regular money, buy something called Monero with it, and then—provided that the value of Monero doesn’t gyrate too quickly—buy G-Eazy records with it. Why you would do this isn’t clear, but it did raise an interesting question: What is Monero worth in terms of its market cap?

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As it turns out, Monero is worth about $3.8 billion. And since it’s a liquid asset, it’s hard to claim that Monero isn’t worth that much today. You could contend that, compared to any sort of fundamentals analysis, Monero is dramatically overvalued; however, that doesn’t change the actual price people are willing to pay for the stuff. Akin to tickets to G-Eazy concerts, I imagine.

Regardless, the number tickled our brains. What else is worth $3.8 billion?

Our recent lab animal Box is worth something around there, right? But if we are going to do one, we are going to do three. So, without further ado, here begins the first-ever round of Crunchbase News Unicorn vs. Crypto game!

Monero vs. Box

Monero is worth, as noted above, $3.8 billion (CoinMarketCap). Box, in contrast, is worth $2.8 billion (Yahoo Finance). This comparison probably made more sense a few days ago, when Box hadn’t dropped a few dollars per share and Monero hadn’t appreciated quite so much. The latter is up around a quarter in the last 24 hours.

Regardless, do you know what Monero does? I bet not. But, according to its own material, “Monero is a secure, private, and untraceable cryptocurrency” that lets you be “your own bank.”

What about regulations? Sadly, if you wanted to ask the founders about it, this article claims that the people who run Monero are a bit hard to pin down:

Monero is headed by a group of 7 developers of which 5 have chosen to remain anonymous while two have come out openly in public. They are: David Latapie and Riccardo Spagni aka “Fluffypony”.  The project is open source and crowdfunded.

On the other side of the coin, if you bought Box, what would you get? Just over $479 million in trailing revenue (12 months, according to Yahoo Finance), free cashflow generation, and a large development team working on the EFSS space.

Your call!

Bitcoin Cash vs. Airbnb

This is a fun one, as it deals with something that includes the word “Bitcoin” set against one of the best-known private technology companies in the world. And, even better, we know quite a lot about Airbnb.

But first, let’s talk value. Bitcoin Cash, a relative newcomer to the crypto world, is worth just under $26 billion (CoinMarketCap). That makes Bitcoin Cash the third most valuable cryptocurrency. Airbnb, in contrast, is worth $31 billion, according to the Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard. So there is spitting distance between the two.

What is Bitcoin Cash, I can hear you asking, and how is it different than Bitcoin? According to TechCrunch, Bitcoin Cash is merely a bitcoin fork.¹

Bitcoin has recently appreciated at an incredible pace, pushing its value to around eight times that of Bitcoin Cash.

So you could buy all of Bitcoin —a bitcoin-derivative that is worth less than the original by a massive margin—or you could buy Airbnb, roughly, which does the following (condensed):

Airbnb pulled in about $1 billion in revenue last quarter, up more than 50 percent from the same period last year, according to someone familiar with the company’s financials. The company is on track to grow revenue nearly 60 percent in 2017 and notch another year of profitability, said the source. Profit at the start-up accelerated over the last three months, according to the source, and is set to surpass the company’s own baseline forecast by $50 million. CNBC is told that excess profit will be reinvested in acquisitions and emerging markets.

Ethereum vs. Xiaomi

Finally, let’s compare the mighty Ethereum to Xiaomi. The former is worth over $44 billion (CoinMarketCap), up from under $1 billion when the year began. The latter is looking to go public.

While the preceding two contrasts were perhaps a bit cheeky, this one might actually give you pause. You see, as we’ve reported, Ethereum is incredibly popular as an ICO platform, which could keep its value up in the short-term. Ethereum is the new Litecoin, essentially, at least in terms of being the second-place crypto to bitcoin’s venerable heft.

Xiaomi, in contrast, is doing this:

Xiaomi’s new Redmi Note 4 sold about 250,000 units within minutes on India’s top online retailer Flipkart.com as well as its own online site, the company said. The Beijing-based company hit $1 billion in Indian revenue for 2016.

“Our path towards internationalization began four years ago,” Lei said Monday through a translator. “At first we faced many difficulties. In 2015 we lost around 1 billion or more yuan – a great loss caused because we were starting in so many countries. After that we set on an idea of whether we could build an example market and we settled on India. Three years later we’re in over 60 countries.”

According to various reports, the firm could see its valuation rise from $46 billion to $50 billion in its debut, putting it quite close to today’s Bitcoin Cash value.

This game took a lot longer to write than I expected, so now our little piece is late to its editors.

That in mind, we’ll wrap: Our entire point was that the value of cryptos can feel quite unmoored from reality at times. What a reasonable value is for this crypto, or that crypto, can be quite hard to come to. some would argue it’s impossible. But we can stack what we do understand against crypto market caps. As a result, we can get a feel for how much value the crypto market is currently claiming has been created to date.

Happy hunting! Just be careful.

1. A fork is when you clone a prior blockchain and add some doodads to the top of it in hopes of replacing the prior blockchain through the power of market adoption of your doodads.

From The Crunchbase Daily:

Seed decline sparks debate

• A new discussion around U.S. early-stage fundraising is kicking around Silicon Valley, as seed and pre-seed stage deals decline. Although significant capital continues to flow to the space, the number of reported deals has fallen markedly, Crunchbase News reports.

Rise of the Rest fund raises $150M

• AOL Founder Steve Case has raised $150 million for his Rise of the Rest seed fund, which will back startups in the Midwest and other U.S. regions deemed underserved by venture capital. The list of fund backers includes a number of high profile names, including Jeff Bezos, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz, and others.

Zeta buys Disqus

• Marketing technology company Zeta Global has acquired Disqus, a platform for adding comments to online content, in a deal reportedly valued around $90 million. San Francisco-based Disqus, founded in 2007, previously raised over $10 million in venture funding.