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The West has long marveled at the business empire built by Tencent, whose ubiquitous everything-app, WeChat, undergirds so much of daily life in China.
And why not marvel? Between Jan. 21, 2011, when Tencent debuted WeChat—a sort of conglomeration of Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, and Uber services wrapped up in a messaging app—and Dec. 1 of this year, it gained more than 1 billion daily active users and shares in Tencent have blasted off more than 1,400% to $75 per share.
No one is paying closer attention to Tencent’s spectacular rise than Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook chief executive openly lamented last year that he should have heeded the wisdom of Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, a tech news outlet, who penned an op-ed instructing him to learn from WeChat as early as 2015. “If only I’d listened to your advice four years ago,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The period of study is over, and Facebook is now taking action. Facebook is building WhatsApp, the nearest western WeChat equivalent and its fastest-growing media property, into a global super-app in its own right. WhatsApp’s prospects are particularly promising in emerging markets; in places such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico, the app has already built massive followings as Internet access and smartphone adoption grow.
Will Cathcart, WhatsApp’s leader, told me in an interview at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference on Tuesday that the pandemic has boosted his unit, as it has so many other tech businesses. In February, even before the world woke to the coming devastation of the coronavirus, WhatsApp revealed it reached 2 billion total users, up from 1.5 billion at the end of 2017.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth in the number of users since then throughout the year,” Cathcart said, declining to reveal a new total user figure, but adding “People who were using it before quite a lot are now using it really for everything.”
A day before our interview, Facebook acquired Kustomer, a service that manages business-to-customer interactions, especially over chats. The deal caps off a slew of new business offerings and payments functionalities that are speedily transitioning WhatsApp from an intimate connector of family members and friends into a mega-marketplace. “We just put out a stat that we have 175 million people each day who message a business account. That’s kind of pretty tremendous growth,” Cathcart said.
It’s not just Facebook; Google wants in too. The search giant recently redesigned its Google Pay app, a highly popular form of payment in India, Singapore, and elsewhere, to put “relationships’—between people and business—at its center.
The point of all this is “stickiness.” If Facebook and Google and Tencent can keep people hooked on their products—by making commerce more convenient, for instance—they can figure out ways to turn popularity into profit. “Everywhere around the world, there’s still billions more people to come online,” Cathcart said. More people “getting access to economic opportunity is a really exciting story for the next decade.”
It’s easy to miss broader Internet trends when our gaze is fixed on the U.S. market, but looking abroad reveals how much progress WhatsApp is making in its quest to do for the world what WeChat did for China.
Robert Hackett
DECENTRALIZED NEWS
Credits
Bitcoin was up, then down, then up to new all-time highs, then back down again ... Facebook's Libra could launch next year in a stripped-down form ... BlockFi to launch Bitcoin rewards credit card ... BitMEX names new CEO ... 7-Eleven introduces mobile contactless wallet ... First LGBT-focused digital bank launches ... Stablecoin Circle on track to join Visa network ... Historian Niall Ferguson on why Bitcoin is winning the pandemic ... Ethereum-based 'DeFi' standout Yearn Finance could merge with competitor SushiSwap ... The Venezuelan Army is mining Bitcoin.
Debits
Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn dead at 86 ... Hong Kong pays its leader in cash thanks to U.S. sanctions ... Libra Association changes its name to Diem, for reasons ... The digital yuan could be bad news for China's gamblers ... U.K. crypto firms do the regulatory limbo.
BUBBLE-O-METER
$204 Billion
The volume of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain in November, up 51.5% for the month, according to data from The Block. This includes only 'on chain' transactions, meaning it doesn't reflect the full volume of trading activity through cryptocurrency exchanges, ETFs, or apps like Paypal or Cash App. By and large, those intermediaries custody large pools of Bitcoin and track their clients' individual holdings in their own 'off chain' systems, partly to save on Bitcoin transaction fees.
FOMO NO MO'
One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.
From a report by the New York Times' Nathaniel Popper on the experiences of Black employees at Coinbase. The takeaway is that even by the sorry standards of Silicon Valley, Coinbase is an exceptionally unfriendly place for people of color. One victim of harassment said her treatment at Coinbase “was the first time I realized what racism felt like in the modern world.” Coinbase, in a statement released ahead of Popper's story, lamely claimed, against clear evidence, that "we do not accept intolerant behavior," and that internal investigations had found "no wrongdoing" in the cases.
None of this should be surprising. Coinbase CEO Bryan Armstrong sent an unsubtle signal of his discomfort with race matters when he issued a company-wide gag order on political discussion in the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests. Previously, Coinbase failed to identify an acquisition target's links to overt fascism as disqualifying.
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What would happen to the economy if Biden forgives student debt? - Aric Jenkins
MEMES AND MUMBLES
This edition of The Ledger was curated by David Z. Morris. Contact him at david.morris@fortune.com
