"Today, Deliveroo is so much bigger than I ever would have thought possible."

The food delivery company's founder and CEO, Will Shu, was in a buoyant mood about the future of the company as it announced plans to launch its hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO).

Expected to be one of the biggest flotations on the London Stock Exchange for several years, Deliveroo is expected to be valued at more than $7 billion, although the company hopes it will be closer to $10 billion.

Along with food delivery, Shu said: "We are building delivery-only kitchens, delivering groceries, building tools for restaurants to take them into the digital age – things I never contemplated when we launched."

Shu's confidence comes despite the company recording a loss in 2020 of $308.93 million, albeit down from $439.27 million in 2019.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are becoming the latest crypto market to boom, with tens of millions of dollars being spent on the ownership of digital files. NFTs serve as encrypted digital signatures to certify who owns photos, videos and other online media.

Now Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is auctioning off an NFT of the first-ever tweet – his message, which reads: "just setting up my twttr."

The post, sent from Dorsey's account in March of 2006, attracted bidders seeking to own a part of digital memorabilia. Over the weekend, the highest bids for the tweet stood at more than $2 million.

The tweet's buyer will get an autographed digital certificate, signed using cryptography, that will include metadata of the original tweet, according to the Valuables auction website. The tweet will continue to be available on the Twitter website. 

Below we have more on the growing NFTs market, a video from our Razor team on the carbon-neutral potential of leaves and an interview with financial guru Arturo Bris. 

Daniel Harris, 

Digital correspondent 

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China's exports surged 60.6 percent year-on-year in the first two months of 2021, after factories reopened and global demand started to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Apollo Global said on Monday it would buy Athene Holding in an all-stock deal valuing the annuities provider at about $11 billion, making it the private equity firm's first major deal after co-founder Leon Black stepped down as CEO.

Oil prices remained steady after pushing above $70 a barrel for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. 

GameStop said it has picked shareholder Ryan Cohen as the head of a new committee to help the world's largest video games retailer transition to an e-commerce business, sending its shares 13 percent higher on Monday.

The European Central Bank and the Bank of England respectively questioned lenders over exposure to Greensill Capital, according to the Financial Times. Officials are trying to determine to extent of the crisis that led to Greensill filing for administration on Monday afternoon. 

The Milan fashion house Dolce & Gabbana has filed a defamation suit in an Italian court seeking more than $600 million in damages from two U.S. fashion bloggers, who reposted anti-Asian comments attributed to one of the designers that led to a boycott by Asian consumers.

Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng said its net loss in the fourth quarter of last year narrowed 42 percent from the same period in 2019, as sales of electric vehicles increased in the world's biggest car market.

Sweden's H&M, the world's second-biggest fashion retailer, said it was shocked by the use of deadly force against protesters in Myanmar and that it had paused placing orders in the country. 

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WATCH: It's something we're taught early in biology lessons: Plants use sunlight and water to turn carbon dioxide into food, in a process called photosynthesis. But now scientists at Cambridge University are replicating this process using light absorbers and specially designed catalysts to produce a carbon-neutral alternative to petrol called Syngas. 
 

Financial expert Arturo Bris explains how markets, which were once dominated solely by powerful institutions, have changed. Now, Bris told The Agenda's Stephen Cole, retail investors have shown their power, using technology to upend the financial order. 

 

What was unique about the GameStop situation?

What has happened with GameStop is that for the first time in our financial market, we have had the coordination of the small investors that get together through technology in order to push stock prices up. And this is new because by so doing, they have hurt a lot of institutional investors and particularly hedge funds. This is not a matter of the direction of sellers, but the fact that through information sharing and through a network, through Reddit, investors collude to push prices up. 

It was described as a sort of David and Goliath story. Is that accurate? 

Exactly – you see, what happened normally in financial markets, you have these big players, the BlackRocks and the Fidelities and the pension funds and the mutual funds that dominate trade. And they drive prices. Whenever one of these institutional investors makes a big trade, stock prices go up. And so far that was fine and that was acceptable. 

For the first time in the GameStop episode, the individual retail investor had the same market power. And that, of course, I think shakes the foundation of financial markets. And that's why institutional investors and regulators went after the platform and after Robinhood, the Internet broker that was facilitating the trades. 

And finally, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a growing and volatile market with an increasing number of people attracted to "owning" a digital file. It might seem like an expensive novelty to some, but NFTs are attracting millions of dollars and making many artists and content creators rich.