Perspectives

In this episode, we will continue to introduce decentralized finance, an innovative solution to our current financial system. In addition to reducing costs and improving efficiency, DeFi offers many other advantages that traditional finance does not:

Recently, China released its key economic data which showed a 3.9% YoY growth in its Q3 GDP and a 6.3% YoY growth in its Industrial output 6.3%, both beating their expectation of 3.3% and 4.8%, respectively. However, consumer spending only grew 2.5% YoY, missing the expectation of 3%.

The concept of DeFi, short for decentralized finance, has been around for years ever since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009. However, the term was previously referred to as "open finance” and was not coined until 2018 during a Telegram chat by a group of entrepreneurs and Ethereum developers. The emerging financial technology has attracted great attention within the cryptocurrency and Blockchain communities and stirred up a heated debate about its potential to disrupt the current financial system.

In this episode of Metaverse industry overview, we will continue to introduce this impactful concept and the underlying business opportunities. However, there are still a lot of misconceptions about the Metaverse and its related concepts like Web 3 or blockchain. Below is a graph showing what Metaverse isn’t, and if you would like to know more about its definition, please refer to episode I.

Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system that allows users to program games and play games created by other users. The platform mainly targets the younger generation, with 67% of its users being under 16 and only 14% being over 25. Roblox allows its users, often children, to create their own avatars and jump into games designed by other players. But critics say the company doesn't adequately protect kids from harassment and abuse, and that it doesn't share enough of its income with the young developers who made the platform so successful.

The attention on Metaverse has grown tremendously since the launch of NFTs and Facebook's transition into Meta. However, Metaverse's idea may confuse many investors due to its evolving concept and involvement of advanced VR/AR technology. Thus, the Metaverse needs to be defined and contextualized to be understood appropriately.

In 2022, you almost can't escape the buzz surrounding NFTs, cryptocurrency and Web3. For those who have some experiences working with cryptocurrencies, the Ethereum (ETH)’s merge that help ETH transforming into PoS structure ignites the discussion of Web3 on social media again. But what does Web3 actually stand for? What distinguishes the Web3 from the internet that we currently use? In fact, it simply refers to the next iteration of the Internet that promotes decentralized protocols and how people interact with each other. It includes areas such as NFTs, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, and DeFi.

Sex and gender differences play a major role in mental health and mental illness nowadays:

• 12 million women in USA experience mental health-related condition every year

• 1 in 3 considered downshifting their career or leaving workforce (as compared to 1 in 4 before pandemic)

• 40% have considered leaving or switching their companies

Hence, solutions for women require a different approach and need to address their specific issues and contextualize for them.

One of the great conveniences of simply allocating using the weights of the world market is that rebalancing is basically unnecessary. If a country's market performs especially well, the investor's allocation to that country will grow, but so will that country's weight in the world market, so the investor continues to maintain weights equal to, or at least very close to, those of the global market.