naveen jain

Yat founder Naveen Jain talks ’emoji identity’ and lasting web3 trends

As the crypto market continues to struggle, plenty of founders and investors are left wondering whether this latest bull run was all some grand fever dream or whether some of the trends of the past tw

GameStop looks to diversify its meme money

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we looked at web3 without Web 2.0’s winners. This week, we’re looking at a crossover episode for meme investing. You can get this in your inbox e

A meme stock’s second shot at the moon

Everyone’s favorite 2020 meme stock is back in the news, and this time it’s flexing on crypto industry incumbent Coinbase. GameStop, which largely operates brick-and-mortar retail stores f

Mike Shinoda backs a startup that lets you do video calls as NFT avatars

As I speak to Tong Pow over Google Meet, he appears as a cartoon medieval-helmet-clad cat that talks and bobs its head, mirroring Pow’s movement behind the webcam. The visor may be hiding a Ches

Yat thinks emoji ‘identities’ can be a thing, and it has $20M in sales to back it up

I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an “internet identity” for $425,000. “I hate the universe,” sh

IBM has launched a study on the human microbiome and its role in disease

How the bugs in our gut and elsewhere on our body affect our overall health still remains largely a mystery. But IBM is hoping to shed some light on the human microbiome and its role in autoimmune dis