The collapse of Crypto is important, but likely not as significant for markets and economies as the collapse of the Unicorns from a supposed $3.7tn valuation to…a lot less. Like the Dot Coms before them, the ecosystem attracted a lot of leverage and mispriced a lot of capital and capital equipment. The aftermath is not going to be pretty and may even bring about a form of secondary banking crisis. On the positive side, the pressure on wages may ease as a lot of workers realise that you can’t eat in the Metaverse.
The rout in the Crypto world has destroyed a lot of instant wealth, but its economic impact may not actually be too great. Think instead that as the Fed flooded the economy with liquidity, it expanded its balance sheet and at the same time the 10,000 Cryptos that emerged inflated the balance sheets of those who owned them as their agreed valuation soared. It was only if they sold and spent the ‘money’ outside of the eco-system – or more pertinently borrowed fiat money against those assets – that there was a real world impact. As the Fed shrinks its balance sheet, so too do the balance sheets of the Crypto Bros. Sure there may have been some leverage in place, but likely not too much. Indeed, we may find a sudden easing of wage pressure; anecdotally, our IT consultant tells us that after months of finding it impossible to secure a software engineer (they were all working on Crypto), there is suddenly a glut of candidates. That was quick!
A far bigger problem is likely to be the unwind of the Cult of the Unicorn, since this is an area where there was a lot of leverage and a lot of fiat currency spilling over into the real world. At the end of last year, the Hurun Institute in China produced a report on the Global Unicorn Index detailing that there was a total of 1058 Unicorns worldwide, with a value of $3.7trn, double the previous year with 70% of them split between the US and China. Even if we ever believed in letting the investors ‘mark their own homework’ on valuations, the list of the biggest investors should have sent up a few warning signals – especially numbers 2 and 3! Notice that the top 3 investors have almost half of the total, but also that most of the rest have added more than 2/3rds of their total in the last year.
Biggest Unicorn Investors (from the Hurun Unicorn Index)
Table 13A: Most successful investors into unicorns – Top 10 (November 2021)
Source: Hurun Research Institute
If that wasn’t a big enough ‘Bell Ringer’ of a statement, then how about this (from the report)?
“Unicorns are supposed to be hard to find, but investors like Sequoia, Tiger Fund and Softbank make it look easy.”
Hurun Institute, Global Unicorn Index 2021
It’s hardly going to be a controversial statement to say that we doubt that the November 2022 valuations for the Unicorn index are going to be so high – assuming there are any left(!) Nor indeed is it going to be so easy to be mentioned on the Forbes Midas List. As this year’s list breathlessly pointed out:
At number one for the first time is Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon, the two-time entrepreneur turned crypto investment king, who jumped six slots thanks to his firm’s continued investments in crypto exchange Coinbase and a portfolio including decentralized exchange Uniswap and NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs.
Forbes Midas Report
Ouch. Of course, it’s technically only the quoted stocks that have marked to market, but the bubble in valuations is well and truly burst. In terms of our list of Unicorn wranglers we can also get some sense of the the damage at Sequoia by looking at some of the recent IPOs it still holds – DoorDash -50%, Nu Holdings -48%, Snowflake -53% and Unity Software -72% – just to pick its top 4 holdings listed and their performance year to date. Coinbase, with the double hit from Crypto, is obviously down 73%, ytd which is not helpful for Mr Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz keeping his Midas Crown, nor of course to Cathy Wood at ARK, who are the third largest holder of the stock. Importantly, a lot of the valuations that kept the whole show on the road were subsequently helped by the involvement of Ark and the little closed user group that included both Tiger Global and Softbank (see Stranded in Rockpools). The latter in particular, with their significant leverage against their listed and unlisted holdings represents a meaningful risk to financial markets. In effect this has all the potential of a secondary banking crisis of sorts, we may need a lifeboat for an ARK.
If you look carefully in the painting from Simon de Myle (that we posted last year when talking about ARK being left high and dry by a lack of liquidity ) you can see in the top left there are two dragons flying away from the Unicorn on the Ark. Turns out that, contrary to the legend, the (stock) Unicorns did in fact get onto the Ark, just that it was the wrong one…
The Unicorns got on the wrong ARK
