💧 The Ripple Effect Our goal from the start has always been to empower our fellows with the skills and knowledge to strive towards their goal - whether that’s becoming a founder or a VC. From building outstanding startups to creating new initiatives, our fellows and alumni don’t disappoint. We’re pleased to announce our investment in Lula , an all-in-one delivery platform for convenience stores. The $5.5M USD seed round was co-led by Ripple Ventures along with Outlander VC and UP. Partners (TechCrunch ). Founder & CEO, Adit Gupta is a RippleX alumnus who took part in Cohort #6. We will always be proud to continue supporting our fellows! Learn a little more about who they are in our blog post here . Oh, it doesn’t stop there…we're also excited to share the Humans of RippleX led by Andrew Hong ! The series is designed to feature the brightest bunch behind the scenes of the Ripple community. We'll cover their backgrounds, what they're working on, and advice they'd share with students interested in tech/startups/VC. Give the first episode featuring Godwin Chan a listen, here . To anyone reading this now, get started on that startup/podcast/blog that you’ve always dreamt of. The Ripple Effect you create today may just somehow start your next journey! 🧢 Cap Tables Imagine you’re a founder seeking out your first pre-seed investment, you’ve got big goals to achieve and this means that you’ll need the right plan to get everything started. Before you dive into the deep end of your financials, you’ll need to clearly outline the breakdown of the company’s ownership in a cap table (also known as capitalization table). What are cap tables? A system of record of the shareholders in your business. Usually in an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet, but companies are moving towards tools like Carta for better cap table management. Showcases how many shares, what type of shares, and how much of the company a shareholder owns. What does a cap table look like? Before any financing, a cap table should look like the image below. Only the founders and in some cases, an ESOP (Employee Stock Option Pool) will be in place. This is not common 100% of the time and depends on what was done when founder shares were created. Founders should own nearly 100% of the business at the start but can change depending on how the company was created This lesson doesn’t stop here, there’s much more to cover! Take a peek into our course accessible to anyone and everyone: RippleX Fellowship 📈 Assessing the Crypto Markets The stability of the overall crypto market is difficult to understand and you’ll oftentimes find yourself wondering about why there is a constant fluctuation in the markets. Though the day-to-day analysis is near impossible, here are three indicators that can help to track the overall growth of the crypto ecosystem: Overall market capitalization Decentralized finance and exchange activity Total transactions and wallets Market Drivers and Capitalization Market capitalization is a great high-level view into market sentiment around the space and whether the asset class is becoming more valuable over time. The global crypto market was sitting at $2.2 trillion as of today - which is a high indicator regarding the potential of the growth of this ecosystem over the next few years. After hitting all-time highs with a market cap of $2.9 trillion on November 9, the market has slowly begun to retreat. However, the momentum continues to rile up with heavy activity with NFTs and DAOs, providing overall optimism within the space. Decentralized Finance and Exchange Activity The global adoption of decentralized finance and exchanges show promising growth with their potential based on user base and activity. Despite there being roughly 4 million Defi users in the world, the total volume across the decentralized exchanges has consistently been over $2 billion during a declining market capitalization. Transactions and Wallets The daily transactions and the total number of wallets are both metrics that can identify the total number of Web 3 participants and how engaged these participants are within the ecosystem. Both of these metrics are near all-time highs or close to all-time highs. Although there has been a decrease in market capitalization in the past few months, the daily transactions sit at roughly 1.2 million and over 184 million individual wallets on the Ethereum network. Of course, this year has also started very interesting as we can trace many wallets directly to the total volume of NFT transactions which have hit an all-time high of $3.5 billion on OpenSea alone. Interested to keep reading? This was only a taste of the full article and it’s available here . 💡 Fellow Spotlight Brandon Fan - Co-Founder & CEO of Blankly Finance If you were ever curious to build out quant models or simply play around with trading algorithms, you’ll immediately realize that it isn’t as easy as it may seem from watching that 30 second Youtube ad. There is quite a steep curve to overcome from the data collection, model development, and of course, navigating how to deploy it. Well, this was exactly what Blankly Finance aims to solve. Introducing Brandon Fan, Co-founder, and CEO of Blankly Finance from Cohort #8. An open-sourced framework that aims to empower curious minds to build and deploy trading algorithms, investment platforms, and no-code fintech applications across stocks, crypto, and forex. It provides the support and infrastructure for you to focus on building great models which can be seamlessly unified on all brokerages and exchanges. Brandon has always been a builder and engaged in creating solutions that can have a meaningful impact. From creating AI models for healthcare to winning $10,000 in research grants - his interests have allowed him to strive towards solving the problems that he has always faced. Going forward, his goal is to build and deploy strategies in minutes instead of months and as a result, revolutionize the future of hedge funds and algorithms. Give his story a read. Interested in being featured? Looking to share exciting news? Please reach out to Turja at turja@rippleventures.com. Authored by Turja Chowdhury (Cohort #9).