Devil’s advocate: cryptotax-startup Blockpit raised about nine million euros
The Linzer cryptotax-startup Blockpit raised about nine million euros. Here are my five devil’s advocate pointers:
- Vertcial product: established players can extend their product with the Blockpit features. Currently, they are partnering with Bitpanda (see below). In the long term, however, such trading platforms can integrate that as a feature or white-label it.
- Small market: even though the crypto market is growing steadily, it is still a niche.
- Legal challenges: Until the crypto market is established, there will be many legal challenges.
- No product focus: Blockpit offers tax return and portfolio tracking
- Failing developer team: According to LinkedIn, Blockpit has only a few developers working for it. In addition, parts of the product – the cryptocurrency tax – does not work (see screenshot below)
The Bitpanda network – partnerships
Here are all the partnerships Bitpanda has established so far
What can we see:
- They are growing their offering through partnerships
- Automated trading via bots is establishing itself as a trend (NapBots and Cryptohopper)
- Bitpanda is establishing itself as a serious provider by partnering with Raiffeisen Bank International
The good and the bad with wajve
wajve is building a finance app for Gen Z. Their promise:
- Understand finance in seconds
- Grow your money daily
- stay liquid even at the end of the month
The good
- Experienced founders: Bastian Krautwald and David Meyer founded “deineStudienfinanzierung” together
- Very good benefits (understanding finances, growing money and managing expenses).
- Coaching apps are fundamentally useful (see Adidas Running, for example)
- Compelling vision: “We have the ambition to become the strong financial partner for Gen Z across Europe with Wajve,” (Bastian Krautwald, Business Insider)
- Customer focus (Gen Z)
The bad
- Features unclear. What does wajve do exactly?
- Unsolvable problem. While the above benefits are good, they are nearly unsolvable problems
- How profitable is their target market (18 to 25 year olds) and how can they keep them long-term?
- Broad topic-focus; (understanding finances, growing money and managing expenses)
- Regardless of the promised benefits and targeted marketing; banking is somethinig inherently uneappealing