We certainly are! Even Westerveld, leader for people and brand in Vipps, has written a good piece about what the price we pay for long-term home office is. 

One of his key points is summed up by Cecilie Asker in her master-thesis on creativity, interaction, and work culture in digital spaces at the home office: 

This is why we’ve, over the last few weeks have tried out Gather.town in Stacc, and Kode24 covered it. It has undeniably made our days working from home much more fun, but we still look forward to seeing each other in person. (And if you read the article: Yes, we actually have a disc golf basket in our real office 🙈)

Ransomware virus has cost Norwegian companies close to one billion NOK in 2022 according to NRK. At the same time, the number of attacks is increasing sharply. Many computer attacks are also never made known to the public: “A ‘name and shame’ culture effectively kills any desire to stand up and share experiences,” says Director of the Business Security Council, Odin Johannessen. Within fintech, I can imagine that certainly is the case since security and trust are of utmost importance.

On a related note, the large insurance firm Lloyd’s, says that their cyber insurance will no longer cover attacks by nation-states. Which I would guess is very hard to prove that it is – or isn’t. Meanwhile, the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis claims that North Korean hackers stole close to $400m in crypto last year.

The blockchain discussion we’ve covered over the last weeks apparently has no end. This week Jon Ramvi responds by solving a paradox: on the one hand, blockchain lacks privacy, and on the other hand, actors are so anonymous that it is not possible to hold them accountable.

In the international web3-discussion, Professor Scott Galloway, infamous for his lousy stock-picking, has thrown himself into the debate claiming everything is dependent on the same intermediaries, and DAO’s can’t work. It’s a fair criticism, and it’s ok to be critical, but I wouldn’t bet against entire technologies. 

Packy McCormick has written a long debate around the topic as an answer to Galloway concluding with:

Speaking of regulation: Molly White has created a webpage called “Web3 is going great”, documenting many scams, hacks, and shady contracts in Web3.

When you feel the need to add an accordion to a design, it is essential to ask yourself: “How important is this information we are hiding?” If it’s vital, you probably shouldn’t hide it, and if it’s not important, it is perhaps not needed. But when required, this article on Best practices for designing accordions could be helpful.

Another pattern we often come across in designs is toggles, checkboxes, and switches. But when should we use these? Alex Bueno tries to answer this in his article “The good, the bad and the toggle.”

Sometimes you come across products that are funny because they are so stupid, but when you think more about it, they might be on to something. Slow.sale is the exact opposite of fast.co bragging about their one-click checkout. If you try to buy something online with Slow enabled, you have to type in passwords, fill long entry forms, use 5-factor (!) authentication ++. It is built by Bad Unicorn, a group launching weird, bad business ideas regularly. But in this case, they might be on to something taking care of people’s wallets.

Remember, if you’re enjoying this content, please do tell all your (fintech) friends to hit the subscribe button! If you have some feedback you can always just hit reply!

Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X