The opportunities in the silver economy are manifesting more visibly globally and in the Asia Pacific region.

By 2025, the ageing population in the Asia Pacific will reach 600 million, potentially accounting for US$4.56 trillion. The markets ageing most rapidly in the Asia Pacific include China, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

With the pandemic aggravating the existing ageing issues, there will be great potential for ageing technologies and innovations to grow and scale. We believe there is a huge pot of gold to be found in the silver economy globally and in Asia.

Through intensive research on the silver economy and correspondence with the Quest Ventures team, Zacchaeus Chok, a Quest Ventures Fellow, identified key opportunities for venture capital in the article below.

Zacchaeus Chok was attached to Quest Ventures through the Reactor Venture Scout Program.

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The combination of longevity and a decline in birthrate engenders a pressing economic and social need for innovation. Although population ageing poses a double whammy to public spending and productivity, a technology-driven silver economy ecosystem is poised to meet the unique demands of an ageing population.

The reward for being the first to capture the sunrise marketplace will be huge, with the Asia Pacific’s silver economy potential projected to reach US$4.56 trillion by 2025. Boasting a silver economy potential of over US$500 billion, Singapore, Japan, and Australia are Asia Pacific’s top three markets.

The demographic shift presents two sides: a growing market segment for investors and a potential liability for governments. In turn, public and private sector investments in supporting seniors will increase. 

Opportunities in the silver economy

Senior citizens have long been ignored by venture capital money. Yet, seniors will account for over 22 per cent of the population in the Asia Pacific by 2050 and entrepreneurs will be keen to cash in.

Investment opportunities span a wide range of industries, including housing, food, tourism and transport, with healthcare-related products featuring strongly.

Also Read: The world is flat but SEA is a (growing) bowl of venture capital and startup talent

Businesses need a strong understanding of the lifestyle aspirations and healthcare goals of seniors in order to successfully court the region’s 600 million senior citizens.

Building-integrated care solutions through telemedicine

The incoming class of senior citizens are likely to be more well educated, affluent and tech-savvy than their parents. For Singaporean residents aged 75 and over, smartphone usage grew from 41 per cent in 2019 to 60 per cent in 2020, along with an increase in internet usage.

At the same time, the adoption of digital services among seniors has sharply risen with COVID-19. Older patients can now book medical appointments online and have their medications delivered to their doorstep, rather than go to the clinic. 

With senior citizens demanding greater accessibility, affordability, and personalisation in healthcare, the way healthcare is delivered could benefit from decentralization. Digital technology improves the affordability of previously inefficient care delivery practices, such as home-based urgent care, hospital-at-home model and virtual primary care.

Homage, which recently closed its US$30 million Series C funding in late 2021, uses a matching engine to connect families with caregivers and therapists.

Investor sentiment in healthtech has reached record levels in Southeast Asia, with deal value has grown more than four times since 2017. Deals in the care delivery vertical represent the largest portion of healthtech deal values, with significant growth in digital health solutions, online pharmacies and remote patient support.

Despite the progress made in telemedicine, challenges remain in managing the infrastructure and logistics, defining data collection standards and coordinating medical equipment needs. 

IT can play a central role in overcoming the fragmented nature of caregiving

The rapid ageing of the population has resulted in increased pressure on health care delivery arrangements. Even though the value of preventive and promotive care has been given more weight, remarkable fragmentation in patient-centred care for the elderly persists.

For example, the patient referral procedure is locked in archaic data management systems and in some cases, paper-based record cards. When patients move to other facilities, re-evaluations are duplicated, causing healthcare professionals to spend unnecessary time and money. 

Volunteer management is another area where the consolidation of services results in significant social impact. For example, SG Assist provides timely and affordable assistance to dependents at home through a digitally crowdsourced Community Responder network.

Also Read: Cake DeFi launches US$100M venture capital arm for global startups in Web3, gaming, fintech

By streamlining the caregiving and volunteering sector through digital processes, a generation of tech-enabled social enterprises is paving the way for greater efficiency in the care sector. 

In addition to mobile and web technology, several Blockchain healthcare start-ups have emerged in Singapore, addressing health analytics, data privacy, and insurance issues.

MediLOT uses blockchain technology to securely store patients’ health records while Hearti Lab uses the same technology for policy agreements, smart contracts and risk management. 

However, many healthcare providers in Southeast Asia are still reluctant to share data or transition to cloud services. Besides Singapore, other governments in the region have been spending less on healthcare.

There remains significant work in integrating real-time patient data, defining standards, ensuring the interoperability of patient record systems and building security infrastructure.

Fortunately, there are signs of a greater governmental push to adopt technology in the near future, with the Philippines and Thailand governments introducing measures to incorporate technology into legacy systems. 

Widespread adoption of assisted living devices

Cutting-edge wearable technologies supported by AI and the Internet of Things, alongside fitness monitoring devices, are gaining steam among senior citizens, caregivers and community healthcare providers.

In the inaugural Healthcare Open Innovation Challenge launched by Enterprise Singapore in 2020, several innovative solutions to prevent falls among seniors and promote adherence to prescribed medication regimes were presented.

Singapore-based Longway AI designed a solution to predict and prevent falls while IoT startup EloCare developed a smart pillbox solution to promote medication compliance and traceability.

With more seniors wanting to live autonomous and dignified lives without burdening their caregivers, assisted living devices and the wearable technology markets present major investment opportunities. 

Challenges in the silver economy

Social entrepreneurship is an important linkway to developing the silver economy. Early-stage social enterprises are “catalytic innovators” that produce disruptive innovations outside of established corporations and bureaucracies, solving pressing social problems like our ageing population.

Since they carry significantly higher risk, they complement the low-risk appetite of government units. There are numerous examples of how early impact can lead to large scale adoption and system-changing impact, such as Indonesian health tech startup Halodoc whose digital platform services were recently tapped by the Ministry of Health to facilitate coronavirus vaccinations.

Young entrepreneurs are interested in creating products designed for senior citizens with needs unique to them but face numerous barriers to entry pertaining to talent, insight, distribution and capital. 

Removing barriers to entry and silver marketplace growth

The silver ecosystem is enabled by the right type of funding and capability building at every stage. Even though there exists significant government funding in the social sector, innovation capital is typically disbursed in limited amounts e.g., philanthropies awarding small start-up grants.

In the earlier stages, philanthropic grants offer capital to seed promising business ideas. Private impact investors and venture philanthropists source, develop and optimise these promising businesses by providing systematic organisation-building support. Successful social programmes with a track record are scaled further by the government and NGOs. 

Also Read: Holding tight or letting go: A paradox I face as a father and a corporate venture builder

While wealth owners are on the lookout to apply their assets toward more social causes, capability-building support is equally important to support innovation. Like venture capitalists, impact investors contribute their networks and expertise to nurture a new generation of social enterprises.

Social impact has largely focused on leveraging the skills and capabilities of the ICT industry but there is considerable potential to transfer skills, networks, and infrastructure in the venture capital ecosystem to the world of social impact. 

No clearly defined playbook for silver economy startups

The term “Silver Tsunami” captures the unique nature of this demographic shift, and investors have only just begun to take notice. Developing active-ageing products aimed at the elderly is not a mainstream idea.

Of the 204 digital health startups registered in Singapore in 2022, only a small fraction develop eldercare-centric products.

Unlike e-commerce start-ups with clearly defined marketing playbooks, many investors still have the perception that seniors are not tech-savvy and that the total addressable market for senior-focused digital technology is limited. 

Achieving scalable social impact hinges on a sustainable business model; silver social enterprises have to consider who is their target customer and how will they pay for the product. Overcoming perception challenges, social enterprises also need to consider how to position their technology products as simple as possible. 

Golden dividends in a silver economy

The full potential of the silver economy is yet captured by investors and entrepreneurs. Seen differently, longevity is a macro tailwind behind the digitalisation of healthcare, the consolidation of caregiving and the proliferation of emerging technologies like blockchain.

These step changes in senior-centric healthcare are here to stay and investors are already paying attention to hot spots like telemedicine, wearable devices and patient analytics. 

Small is beautiful, but the scale is necessary. Early-stage social enterprises are entering a fast-forming tech-enabled silver marketplace in Singapore, where novel ideas can be tested before expanding to larger markets in Japan and China.

Provided the right type of funding at the right stage, start-ups in the silver economy can optimise their business models for a growing consumer class and reap the dividends of a maturing silver market. 

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Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activity in Enterprise tech, e-commerce and fintech continue to be hot in the news in the last few weeks.

I’ve spoken and written, in the past, about the pivotal role of M&A and why founders and leadership teams should not underrate this tool in a company’s journey of growth. I have attempted to share my experiences in M&A in the context of recent activity.

In Asia, we already have seen a promising M&A trend in Q1 of 2022 (as an example, PhonePe acquired GigIndia). In Singapore, Nium, a fintech unicorn company, acquired cash management and alternate payments firm soCash.

M&A as an integral component of progress

When I acquired a company in the startup world, the objective was to access technology to build customer experience and add layers of offerings, with speed being the essence.

Broadly speaking, the reasons for M&A are to enhance the product-market fit to get the next round of financing, growth may start getting stalled which may not allow the company to be fit enough to become a public traded company (Nium is planning its IPO in the next 12-18 months) and when the buyer has approached the target company and the offer is compelling enough to target the company’s investors (here, Vertex is a common investor in socash and Nium).

For an M&A deal to work, the discussion on integration post-merger and aligning the combined value proposition to customers and partners on both sides may have been ongoing for a while now.

Such M&A efforts would need to make commercial and strategic sense, first, for both the parties before going ahead with any M&A discussion.

Embedding finance

There are small and large businesses keen to enter the fintech industry and offer financial services. At a broader level, this deal between soCash and Nium is about embedding finance within the customer experience.

Specifically in this deal, it lowers the costs for Nium to process transactions by embedding alternate payments method offering to its small merchant businesses and accelerating their revenue growth. It allows Nium to move to an adjacent market.

Also Read: Singapore’s pre-IPO and pre-token trading platform prePO raises US$2.1M

soCash allows Nium to have access to licenses, technology and thousands of collection points for its cardholders and wallet holders to withdraw instantaneously in Singapore and beyond.

This allows Nium to widen its business model beyond the issuance of prepaid or debit cards to customers. For socash, it allows its offerings to expand the customer segment and go beyond the shores of Singapore.

Expansion to emerging markets

I recognise the value of physical presence in any digital journey particularly in emerging markets. It is seen across industries that integrating alternate payment methods, including cash, allows revenues for merchants to increase revenue by 30 per cent to 40 per cent.

Also Read: Nium adds US$200M more to its war chest to become Southeast Asia’s latest unicorn

For instance, in LATAM, payment methods like PIX and payment slips are alternate payment methods driving more revenues for merchants than cards.

As these payment methods have local interfaces, merchants on these platforms can expand to new geographies and monetise their offering faster and spend less time on compliance requirements related to payments in these new geographies.

All about timing when it comes to shareholding value

The timing of this M&A deal between soCash and Nium is crucial. It allows the teams to work together to monetise this combined offering for at least a year before Nium sees its impact on valuation, and ring the opening bell on the stock market.

While it is simple to state that this deal enhances the shareholder value, for the founders, it is a much more complex calculus.

The personalities and backgrounds of the founders, on both sides, trigger motivations which become an important element to iron out the details of the deal. Calculating the expected chance of higher valuation or risk-adjusted outcomes by both sides is important for saying yes to the deal.

If this is not a pure cash buyout, then the soCash team will expect to see the value of its shareholding multiply faster by being offered shares in Nium than what they would have expected if the team had decided to be independent.

Post M&A and during integration, my experience shows that cultural, political and strategic elements play a key role in monetising the combined offering. The integration process would need to embrace challenges.

Integrating philosophies of product teams of both the companies, designing new incentive schemes for sales teams or continuing with the incentive schemes of either the acquirer or the acquired for the combined organisation, addressing the concerns of prioritisation in allocating resources to acquired business are some of the key challenges.

In one of the M&A deals that I was leading and involved around 5000 employees, I had advocated keeping sales and customer-facing functions separate. The products from the acquired businesses required different sales processes.

The sales team is used to sell to particular buyers/customers where the main discussion is around financials and these customers have different adoption curves and may find it difficult to sell new or challenger products to these buyers. It will be interesting to see if the teams are kept separate or if some functions of soCash will be merged.

In other situations, it is important to clarify the key metrics upfront. This helps the leadership teams of both the companies to focus on revenue growth and help capture new value and not be compelled to focus on penny-pinching measures (like costs savings will be the only metrics).

Every M&A experience is unique and situational. I hope to see speed and urgency in rolling out the combined offering if this M&A deal has to create and capture value.

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LottieFiles, the company behind the motion graphics platform for designers and developers, today announced a US$37 million Series B funding round led by Square Peg Capital, with participation from XYZ Venture Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, and existing investors 500 Startups and Microsoft’s venture fund M12.

In a press statement, LottieFiles said that it plans to use the funding to further its product roadmap and expand its operations to cater to the expanding user base. The company wants to launch a new design workflow and collaboration solution to its global user base in the summer of 2022, which will enable designers to save even more time per asset shipped and even more time to focus on creativity.

“The LottieFiles team spent the last three years studying and perfecting a blueprint that now works for design and developer teams from more than 135,000 companies. We are excited to bring LottieFiles into offering this year and grow our user base even more,” says LottieFiles CEO and co-founder Kshitij Minglani.

Lottie is a JSON animation file format that enables designers to ship animations on any platform as easily as shipping static assets. Launched in 2018, LottieFiles builds Lottie to help motion designers and developers save weeks of effort by not having to code motion graphics individually for each platform.

Also Read: 25 notable startups in Malaysia that have taken off in 2021

With its key advantages being its ability for cross-platform application and functionality, its lightweight and interactive nature, and its ability to play at 120 frames a second, Lottie animations are touted as the “perfect” replacement for conventional formats such as GIF or PNG sequences.

The company said that it currently count 135,000 companies globally as Lottie users including animation designers and motion designers from Google, TikTok, Disney, Uber, Airbnb and Netflix. LottieFiles also has integrations with the likes of Adobe XD, Adobe After Effects, Figma, Webflow, and WordPress.

LottieFiles previously raised US$9 million in Series A funding in January 2021, led by Microsoft Venture Fund M12. The company said that it has experienced 160 per cent growth in net new registered users since that time.

In February last year, LottieFiles announced the acquisition of India-based design asset marketplace Iconscout.

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Image Credit: LottieFiles

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We, as a society, have come to expect Google to know the answer to every question we have. An actor’s first movie, how many colours a lobster can see, and the chance of being struck by lightning are all questions Google and other search engines or forums can answer easily.

But what about when the answer is more complicated than that? What if we ask questions such as “How do I find the sitemap for my 301 redirect errors?” or “How do I market to a technical audience and, in particular, one from the blockchain developer domain?

Enquiries such as these need a more specific, expert-understood answer. While we may find something we think could be the answer on Reddit or even Quora, who knows the person’s background answering these questions.

That’s where micro-consulting comes in.

What is micro-consulting?

Micro-consulting involves subject domain experts assisting individuals on a one-on-one basis with a specific question or set of questions over a short period of time.

Instead of someone hiring a consultant for a long-term project that could cost their company thousands of dollars, micro-consulting lets users search through a catalogue of experts who can help them within just a few hours or days.

Not only can micro-consulting assist people in finding the correct answer to their specific questions, but it also helps industry experts. Instead of working on only one or two projects at a time, experts can take on up to 10 conversations or meetings a month.

This gives industry experts and thought leaders the chance to meet regularly, network, and grow their skills and knowledge.

Also Read: Why the world needs a knowledge engine now

Any professional or entrepreneur can utilise it to help scale their businesses and personal knowledge base.

For instance, an HR manager may be dealing with internal communications issues and company culture. The resolution to this challenge depends on many factors: company size, how they handle complaints, current internal comms pathways, and more.

Instead of trying to figure it out all alone, a Wizly micro-consultant (a certified HR professional) can help this HR manager on a one-on-one basis in as little as 24 hours.

All users need to type in their question, issue, or topic into a search bar, and industry experts are matched based on their keywords. Experts can also be found through browsing micro-insights, pieces of written or audio-recorded knowledge shared, focusing on improving topical understanding and problem-solving in their industry.

How do you start micro-consulting?

Signing up is a breeze once you have determined yourself to be an industry expert or thought leader in your field (roughly seven years of experience). There are two main ways to sign up as a Wizly micro-consultant:

• Follow this link to fill out an application.
• Be invited directly by one of the Wizly team

After you have signed up to be a consultant, you can immediately set up your account and start answering questions! Wizly encourages you to use WhatsApp for notifications (which you can download from your chosen app store).

The future of solving

We believe the way business challenges are solved needs to be simplified and done in a more open access and cost-effective manner. Micro-consulting is a way for experts and thought leaders to use their knowledge more deliberately and flexibly.

Join our next LIVE Learning session on May 5 here.

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As crypto grows in popularity, crypto scams are also on the rise. In 2021 alone, scammers ran away with a record US$14 billion in crypto assets. Of all the heists so far, Axie Infinity (owned by Sky Mavis) example stands out. Hackers stole digital assets worth US$625 million by exploiting vulnerabilities in its Ronin Network.

According to Ravi Madavaram, Director of AI Commercialisation at Advance.AI, say such incidents will affect users’ trust and confidence in P2E games, but recovery is possible if businesses invest in security measures and are transparent about these to their users.

In this interview, he speaks about the different measures to be taken by various stakeholders to prevent future heists.

Edited excerpts:

What does the Axie Infinity incident tell us? What lessons can we take from this?

The Axie Infinity hack reminds us about the vulnerabilities in the crypto markets even amidst its popularity. As crypto adoption continues to rise, this is drawing the attention of regulators and hackers, who are becoming increasingly bolder in their approach.

Enormous sums of money are being siphoned off in crypto heists, like Axie Infinity’s US$625 million. In 2021 alone, scammers ran away with a record US$14 billion in crypto assets.

The size of crypto exchange hacks growing together with the rising prices of crypto prove the susceptibility of both consumers and exchanges to such fraud and hacks.

What measures should different stakeholders take to prevent similar attacks in the future?

As for consumers, they should be more digitally savvy and educate themselves on the risks in this digital world. They need to be more alert and aware of divulging login information, wallet recovery phrases and clicking on links.

Web3/blockchain/crypto exchanges/metaverse gaming companies should ensure that proper security measures are in place to mitigate the risk of well-coordinated attacks by hacker groups, sometimes state-sponsored cybersecurity threats.

They should conduct KYB (know your business) and KYT (know your transaction) processes on top of eKYC. While compliance is done in the onboarding phase, where exchanges ensure individuals go through eKYC to verify their identity, businesses also need to invest in KYB to verify the business’s legitimacy and KYT.

Also Read: Sky Mavis raises US$150M led by Binance to reimburse users hit by the Axie breach

Exchanges can use KYT monitoring to review wallet transactions in real-time, detect any suspicious activity, file such reports, and manage investigations. This helps them tackle the high incidence rate of fraud in transactions.

Multi-factor authentication for centralised exchanges also needs to be done. Instead of using SMS OTP authentication, which runs the risk of having SMSes diverted and fraudulent transactions performed and being a weak link for spoofing, exchanges should consider biometric authentication instead. Biometric authentication is much more robust. It identifies the individual rather than the device, and solutions like liveness detection allow verification of a live user by checking the live person’s facial movements. This makes it less likely for identity theft to occur.

Crypto exchanges are also susceptible to hacking when the attacker exploits some part of the chain or smart contract and illegitimately trades or withdraws cryptocurrencies. They should invest in technology to effectively detect potentially fraudulent activity, such as on-chain insight to screen wallet addresses, monitor transactions, scrape the darknet and cluster, fraud prevention to monitor transactions, and detect and prevent fraud across different channels.

Regulatory bodies should ensure measures are put in place to protect both consumers and crypto exchanges. Crypto exchanges and other financial service institutions should adhere to these measures/guidelines for a safer environment.

Will such massive hacking incidents discourage users from play-to-earn games?

Since users’ trust and confidence in P2E games will certainly be affected, recovery is possible if businesses invest in security measures and are transparent about these to their users.

As the market continues to mature and grow, businesses will have to ensure these measures are robust and in place to prepare for the next wave of consumers who will join the P2E space and a potential round of new hackers that may displace this trust again.

What are the other common security threats that crypto exchanges face?

There are potential threats across the entire customer journey with crypto exchanges: onboarding, transactions, and identity recovery.

Onboarding phase: The risks associated with the onboarding phase include identity fraud, document fraud, technical fraud and multiple account fraud, where most of the compliance and focus is on individuals and institutions.

For individuals (for example, crypto traders), eKYC can be done remotely via your smartphone. You can submit documents like national identity to pre-fill customer information.

For institutions/institutional customers (for example, those entering the crypto market to facilitate payments from customers + B2B transactions), do KYB to verify the business and review the structure and background to ensure the company is who it claims to be. This helps to avoid fraud, money laundering or other criminal activity and should be automated to remove the lengthy onboarding and manual errors with manual KYB.

Transaction phase: The risks associated with the transaction phase include phishing emails, fake SMSes and higher value cases like money laundering. This can be checked using KYT and monitoring the entire chain.

For anti-money laundering/ financial crime, review transactions in real-time, detect suspicious activity, manage investigations and file suspicious activity reports.

Also, conduct on-chain insight to screen wallet addresses, monitor transactions, and scrape the darknet and cluster transactions.

Identity recovery phase: This phase might be most overlooked but is also quite common: how many of us have genuinely forgotten our passwords and need to find a way to re-login?

How can the exchange tell if this is a genuine customer or a bad actor trying to find a loophole and misappropriate someone’s login and password details?

There are also risks/gaps when working with multiple vendors for different phases in the customer journey, which shows the need for an integrated, single solution.

Also Read: Play-to-earn: Understanding the popularity of Axie Infinity

Advance.AI offers a one-stop platform to provide customers with a faster time to market, lower cost and efficiency, and the ability to customise workflows and ensure compliance across multiple markets.

Many countries are still apprehensive about cryptos’ possible misuse and have imposed a blanket ban on digital assets. How long can governments stay away from crypto?

There is no denying the popularity of crypto. There are an estimated 300 million users globally, with the total cryptocurrency transaction volume rising to US$15.8 trillion in 2021.

There is over 60 per cent unbanked/underbanked population in Southeast Asia. Crypto appeals to this audience as it promises quick gains and allows them to have an ownership stake in the ecosystem.

Crypto also appeals to the vast proportion of young, digitally savvy Gen Z and millennial generation in Southeast Asia. They are very comfortable with new technologies and want to be included in Web3.

While this is the case, we also see a high number and value of crypto scams, proving that there is more to be done to educate and improve these consumers’ digital literacy of fraud.

Governments’ key concerns include volatility of the currency/financial stability (which stems from that it is prone to speculation), AML/terrorist financing, the safety/ security of the platform, consumer protection and the ease of onramp/offramp, albeit their belief in the usefulness of blockchain.

Regulators tend to be more cautious and have a holistic view of benefits and risks than consumers.

If these are addressed in the long run, we should see more widespread adoption, and government approaches should warm up.

NFTs and tokens are also on the rise. Do you think governments should regulate these digital assets as well?

As the adoption of NFTs continues to grow, there is also an increasing number of scams; for example, US$1.7 million worth of NFTs were stolen from OpenSea in a phishing scam.

Also Read: ADVANCE.AI secures US$80M in Series C funding led by Gaorong Capital, Pavilion Capital, eyeing regional expansion

Other scams include forgery, money laundering, financial crime, pump and dump/ wash trading, and rug pulls.

Albeit a different asset, the same scam methods are being used, and hence there is still a need to regulate these asset classes.

Hence a need for KYT to monitor on-chain transactions, cluster, analyse and detect signs of association with tainted wallet funds or illicit behaviours.

As understanding and awareness of NFTs and tokens increases, we expect governments to bring in regulations in this area to protect consumers from fraud/bad actors.

While the users in its neighbouring countries are already embracing NFTs and metaverse, Singapore is yet to join the bandwagon. What could be the possible reasons for this lag?

Singapore may have been slower to adopt crypto as it has a much smaller proportion of the unbanked/underbanked population (2 per cent), which is much lower than that of the SEA region.

Singaporeans largely have access to various financial products and services and may be more cautious about adopting a risky asset like NFT/ crypto.

Having said that, Singapore is starting to join this bandwagon, with brands from various categories like running (races) and F&B entering this space.

We expect to see a surge in adoption in Singapore as an understanding of this grows.

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Although the excitement around non-fungible tokens (NFTs) was growing high, Shivek Khurana (27) and his younger brother Sarthak (20) couldn’t figure out why this hype.

As they watched this space more closely, the siblings realised that NFTs are rigid, and most projects presented virtually zero utility.

The youngsters wanted to change this.

“We believe NFTs are more than just valuable JPEGs; they are a token belonging to a particular community of like-minded individuals. But what’s the point of being part of a community without self-expression? This is why we created 3moji stickers,” Shivek says.

3moji offers an upgradable and composable NFT avatar system, which Shivek says will transform how NFTs are used in games and across the metaverse. (NFT avatar is a digitally generated image made in a cartoonish or pixelated fashion)

“3moji is all about expression. This DApp (decentralised application) — a P2P app that operates autonomously on the blockchain — allows Web3 users to customise their avatars over time and purchase and combine different NFT accessories,” explains Shivek. The 3moji avatars can also be used as stickers on Web2 apps like Discord and Telegram, bringing the NFTs to your day-to-day communication.

“In a nutshell, we bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3 cultures, and profile pictures are just the tip of the iceberg,” Shivek claims.

Also Read: How Summoners Arena takes on popular P2E games with its ‘play, own, earn’ version

3moji is owned by a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) with a globally distributed team across India, Singapore, Australia, Spain and Ireland. Shivek is the tech brain behind 3moji, who previously built Meta Blocks, which helps users build immersive NFT apps. In the past, he also worked at Status, a messenger, crypto-wallet, and Web3 browser. Sarthak earlier worked at prePO, a speculation platform for pre-IPO stocks and pre-IDO tokens.

How 3moji works

To get started with 3moji, users start by minting a “base” layer, an empty face on which all other NFT accessories are stacked. Once they have a base layer, they can buy NFT accessories and augment their avatar.

3moji is built on the Meta Blocks Protocol, which allows users to customise avatars without burning or modifying the metadata. The original NFTs are never touched and can be sold on secondary marketplaces.

“Our go-to-market audience is the Solana NFT community, who we hope will welcome and see the value of this new concept of upgradeable and composable NFTs,” Shivek adds.

The company earns money by making and selling base layers and accessories. It is also working with other NFT projects, including Famous Fox Federation, Piggy Sol Gang, and Dapper Ducks. All these projects are creating their own 3moji compatible NFT accessories.

3moji also has utilities in other domains, such as fashion. “It offers fashion brands a fool-proof and effortless way to create their NFT collections that can be worn in metaverses without building any expensive proprietary tech. It is a simple way for luxury brands to release their NFT collection with an inherent utility,” he elaborates.

“3moji brings the vanity of luxury goods to the digital world. People buy a Gucci Bag or an expensive NFT for the same reason: social vanity,” he says, adding the company’s ultimate goal is to be the expression engine across all social channels and metaverses.

The 3moji Dapp explores new possibilities for NFTs to allow users, brands and influencers to change the look of their avatars in the metaverse and across Web2 applications.

“There are unlimited opportunities for Web3, NFTs and the metaverse. While we are starting with stickers and avatars, we believe there is scope for creating AR functionality to enable you to use your avatars to stream online, video call with friends and create content,” Shivek tells e27.

3moji recently raised US$750,000 in seed funding, led by Collab + Currency, Big Brain Holdings, Definitive Capital, and NFT influencer Gmoney.

According to Binance, the growth of NFT avatars will likely skyrocket, driven by private collector capital and institutional investment. The obsession with individuality on various social networks will also catalyse the demand. 3moji is betting big on these new trends.

However, the market is already dominated by the likes of CryptoPunks, Avastars, Bored Ape Kennel Club, and Hashmasks? Can 3moji compete with these popular NFT avatars?

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Jungle Ventures leads e-bike startup Dat Bike Series A

Dat Bike, a Vietnamese e-motorbike startup, has announced a US$5.3 million Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures with participation from existing investor Wavemaker Partners.

This brings the total fundraise by Dat Bike since inception to US$10 million.

Dat Bike intends to use the new money to invest in technology, scale production, expand to metro and tier-I cities across north, central and south Vietnam, and hire top talent.

Founded in 2019 by Son Nguyen, Dat Bike aims to drive the mass adoption of green transportation in Vietnam, and, in the near future in Southeast Asia. It wants to convert the 250 million gasoline motorbikes to electric.

Also Read: Dat Bike bags US$2.6M pre-Series A to bring more electric motorbikes to Vietnam

Dat Bike claims it has a competitive advantage in its performance against gasoline bikes. Its first line product Weaver (2019) offered 3x the performance (5kW versus 1.5kW) and 2x the range (100 km versus 50 km) of most e-motorbikes at the same price point.

In November 2021, Dat Bike launched its second model Weaver 200 (2021), which is double the range (200 km) and more powerful (6kW) compared to the Weaver. Further, charging time has been reduced to 1 hour for a 100 km charge and 2.5 hours for a full 200 km charge, compared to 6-8 hours for other electric bikes.

Since the launch of Weaver 200 (November 2021), the company says it has seen strong customer response, with revenue increasing 10x. The company has also opened a new store in Hanoi in April 2022 and will open one more in Danang soon, to meet the growing demand.

Accel Partners injects US$3M Series A into Finbots.ai

Singapore-based Finbots.AI, a company bringing innovation to banks and financial institutions, has raised a Series A funding of US$3 million from Accel Partners.

With this capital, Finbots.AI will look towards accelerating product enhancement, marketing and sales, and customer support. The firm is also looking to recruit senior talent and expand its team across its offices with the fresh funds raised.

Also Read: Ethics and AI: Is the technology only as good as the human behind it?

Finbots.AI was founded in 2017 by Sanjay Uppal (CEO) and Shripad Keni (CTO). Since its inception, the firm identified an opportunity to use AI-powered solutions to aid banks and financial institutions to overcome industry challenges. ZScore is a full-scale AI-driven credit scorecard system for lending institutions that spans the entire credit lifecycle. Equipped with an intuitive user interface and robust scorecard development capabilities, ZScore rapidly develops higher accuracy credit scorecards by using advanced Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that utilise historical traditional and alternate data to automatically build, validate, and deploy real-time, high-performing risk models.

With ZScore, financial institutions have better visibility over potential borrowers’ credit capacity which consequently and indirectly, lead to higher financial inclusion. The World Bank Group considers financial inclusion a key enabler to reduce extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. According to the latest Global Findex database, 1.7 billion adults worldwide are unbanked, meaning they do not participate in any basic financial products or services.

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Ramadan is a month of celebration and the biggest holiday season for Muslim majority countries around the world. In Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Southern Thailand, and Mindanao island in the Philippines will celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr (Hari Raya in Singapore, Malaysia and Lebaran in Indonesia) after a month of fasting. 

It is expected some businesses and government offices to be closed for this major holiday, which will be on May third and fourth of 2022 and the number of holidays may extend to a week or sometimes more.

The holidays may be seen as a time for celebration, but families are not the only ones who see these occasions as the most wonderful time of the year. Cyber-threat actors or cybercriminals know exactly that due to low staffing because on vacation, have a higher workload, and get distracted more than usual, the holidays are one of the best times to attack.

As a result, the long holidays such as Hari Raya will put your organisation at a higher risk of cyberattack.

Throwback attack: Shamoon malware on The Saudi Aramco

The attack was started in mid-2012 when one of the IT team at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned Saudi Arabia oil company, opened a scam email and clicked on a bad link containing malware, later called Shamoon.

The hackers were into their system but not immediately attacked. The actual threats began during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan when most Saudi Aramco employees were on holiday. On the morning of Wednesday, August 15, 2012, some employees noticed their computers were acting weird: screens started flickering, files began to disappear, and some computers just shut down, according to CNN Business.

More than 30,000 workstations at the company were affected by the malware. Saudi Aramco’s computer technicians had no choice but to rip cables out of the backs of computer servers at data centres all over the world.

Also Read: How much does cybersecurity cost and how to budget for it?

Every office was physically unplugged from the internet to prevent the virus from spreading further. Everything, from managing supplies, shipping, and contracts with business partners to reporting was done manually with typewriters or fax machines. Not only that, Saudi Aramco bought 50,000 new hard drives to replace the infected ones.

After the attack, a group calling itself “Cutting Sword of Justice” claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they were retaliating against the Al Saud regime for its crimes against humanity. There is no ransom requested by Shamoon and it is an example of weaponised malware that is designed for use in cyber-war. 

Shamoon, known as W32.Distrack, is an aggressive, disk-wiping malware program that can wipe the master boot records and replace them with various images, such as an image of a burning U.S. flag. The Shamoon malware was also used against Qatar’s RasGas oil company.

After the 2012 attack, Shamoon resurfaced in 2016 and in 2018 in a new version that targets energy sector infrastructure in the Middle East.

Other cyberattacks cases during the holidays

Besides Shamoon, several major cyber-threat cases during the holidays in 2021, such as: 

• The largest fuel pipeline operation company, Colonial Pipeline, was forced to pay a ransom of US$4.4 million to the Darkside hacker group after a ransomware attack during the Mother’s Day Weekend on May 9, 2021. The attack successfully disrupted fuel deliveries in the South-East US for several days.  
• JBS, the world’s biggest meat processor, paid US$11 million after a cyber-attack sabotaged its operations, including abattoirs in the US, Australia, and Canada during Memorial Day weekend on May 31, 2021.
• On the July 4 holiday weekend in 2021, when millions of Americans logged out to spend time with friends and family, one of the most significant ransomware attacks of the year began. It was targeted against Kaseya’s software technology which caused national railway systems, schools, broadcasters, etc. to shut operations as file-encrypting malware hit them. 
• Over the Labour Day weekend, Howard University in Washington DC was taken offline and forced to cancel classes for a week as its network was held hostage by cyber-criminals. The cyber-criminals used phishing emails to gain access to credentials from unsuspecting university network users and used the credentials to orchestrate this holiday ransomware attack.

Cybersecurity tips during the holiday season

It is important to prevent cyber threats because security breaches risk financial pain, fines, and endanger your brand, reputation and customer trust in your organisation. Several best practices to reduce the risk and impact of cybersecurity attacks, such as:

• Make an offline backup of your data

Make and maintain offline, encrypted backups of data and regularly test your backups. It is important that backups be maintained offline as many ransomware variants attempt to find and delete or encrypt accessible backups. Review your organisation’s backup schedule to take into account the risk of possible disruption to backup processes during weekends or holidays.

Also Read: Shouldering the responsibility of digital payment security

• Do not click on suspicious links

Minimise the risk of human errors through user training programs and phishing exercises to raise awareness about the risks involved on click or opening malicious websites and attachments.

• Use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Passwords should not be reused across multiple accounts or stored on the system where an adversary may have access. Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all services to the extent possible, particularly for remote access, virtual private networks, and accounts that access critical systems.

• Secure your network(s) by maintaining the highest standards of cyber-hygiene across the organisation

All of your networks, application and devices should meet certain cyber hygiene to protect your most valuable data and information and prevent cyber threats. Automated cyber hygiene and policy enforcement to meet your needs and your industry security compliance.

• Choose a comprehensive security solution

A comprehensive security solution that provides real-time cyber-attack warnings, actionable insights and security analytics to continuously strengthen your security posture and minimise the risks of cyber-attacks during the holidays.

This article has been published on ArmourZero blog on April 21, 2022

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The post How to tackle cybersecurity threats during the holidays appeared first on e27.

In October 2021, the US and Israeli IT security company Check Point Software Technologies (CPST) identified security flaws in the world’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea. Later, it also detected similar vulnerabilities in Rarible, an NFT marketplace with over two million active users.

According to Oded Vanunu, Head of Products Vulnerability Research, CPST, if exploited, the vulnerability would have enabled threat actors to steal users’ NFTs and crypto tokens in a single transaction.

“In terms of security, there is still a huge gap between Web2 and Web3 infrastructure. Any small vulnerability opens a backdoor for cybercriminals to hijack crypto wallets behind the scenes,” he said in an interview with e27. “Marketplaces that combine Web3 protocols still lack a sound security practice. The implications following a crypto hack can be extreme. We’ve seen millions of dollars hijacked from marketplace users that combine blockchain technologies.”

Popular metaverse game Axie Infinity, owned by Sky Mavis, also faced a similar attack last month, resulting in the loss of digital assets worth US$625 million from its Ronin Network platform.

Also Read: Sky Mavis raises US$150M led by Binance to reimburse users hit by Axie breach

“In the Axie hacking incident, we have seen the importance of a decentralisation network. In this case, Axie only had nine validators, although you only needed five of them to verify deposits and withdrawals. However, all these five validators were saved in the same place. Decentralisation could have reduced these points of weakness in the systems,” he noted.

While explaining the modus operandi behind the Axie attack, he said that the Ronin network requires five signatures, known as a multi-sig system, to verify deposits and withdrawals. The validators were held by Sky Mavis, the blockchain gaming platform that created the Ronin network. The hacker found all the five multi-sig signatures they needed to sign off on a transaction when they breached the Sky Mavis servers.

“Blockchain bridges are platforms that connect two different networks enabling a cross-chain transfer of assets and information from one blockchain to another. Attackers are targeting bridges because they are the weakest point in the system. All the complex code creates many opportunities for exploitable bugs, and as these bridges usually hold a large amount of money, this makes them even more attractive to attackers,” he further shared.

Vanunu recommends being careful and aware of sign-in requests even within the marketplace itself. Before approving a request, users should carefully review what is requested and consider whether it seems abnormal or suspicious. If there are any doubts, users are advised to reject the request and examine it further before authorising it.

In his view, crypto exchanges and blockchain/metaverse firms face the same security risks as any other company. In addition, crypto exchanges and blockchain/metaverse firms face the new kind of attack vectors related to the smart contract with all the reentrancy, flash loans and other smart contact security bugs and attacks on user wallets.

Also Read: Play-to-earn: Understanding the popularity of Axie Infinity

“The difference between a regular company and a crypto company is that a regular company is well familiar with the cyber-attacks. There is multiple security protection they can add, like Firewall. On the other hand, Crypto companies have to face new kinds of attacks and pioneer new means of protection from such attacks,” he said.

Vanunu, however, doesn’t think that such cyberattacks will discourage users from joining P2E games. “The users are there mainly for the profits, rather than the technology (that sometimes gets hacked). As long as the games are profitable to the players, they will continue to be there. Also, we can see that from every attack, the game developers improve their security, transfer the users to new contracts and try to protect their systems as much as they can.”

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Trusting Social, a credit scoring company headquartered in Singapore, has received US$65 million as part of its Series C round of financing from The Sherpa Company, a subsidiary of Vietnam-based Masan Group.

The strategic collaboration intends to develop an AI-powered consumer tech platform. It aims to provide customised retail and consumer financial products to serve 27 million families in Vietnam, as per a press statement.

In addition, the partnership will enable Masan to drive efficiencies in its core business by leveraging Trusting Social’s AI capabilities in areas such as retail store selection, demand & supply planning, and product assortment & development.

With this collaboration, Trusting Social said it is a step closer to providing one hundred million lines of credit to underserved borrowers across Asia. “Our partnership with Masan is exciting since we broaden our platform from credit access to a total consumer life solution. Masan and Trusting Social believe that Vietnam can create transformation and disruption on par with global peers,” said Trusting Social’s Founder and CEO Nguyen Nguyen.

Also Read: How voice AI is revolutionising the fintech scene

Masan Group CEO Danny Le said, “Walmart has invested heavily to develop an AI and ML platform and has leveraged it to become the leading offline and online daily, consumer life platform. The Trusting Social partnership provides Masan with a similar cutting-edge AI and ML platform but tailored for 100 million Vietnamese consumers. Our job together now is to develop it from a pure credit scoring use case to a holistic Consumer engine.”

Trusting Social is an AI techfin company aspiring to democratise financial services through AI-based consumer insights and embedded finance. It drives financial inclusion by providing credit insights covering over a billion consumers to over 170 financial institutions across Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.

The AI company’s other backers are Sequoia Capital, Beenext, Tanglin Ventures, 500 Global, Kima Ventures and Genesis Alternative Ventures.

Masan Group is a leader in fast-moving consumer goods, branded meat, modern retail, F&B retail, financial services, telecommunications, and value-add chemical processing.

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