"but were people deeply concerned by the cash burn of the...

"but were people deeply concerned by the cash burn of the company, and did it tank their market cap?"

What is the point of this question? It was 2016! Even as recently as early 2021 the market didn't care about cash burn either. But you're asking the question in mid-2022, times have changed rapidly. Talking about Afterpay circa 2016 and attempting to draw parallels to IOUpay circa 2022 is stunningly pointless.

The investor sentiment revolving around IOU is "they're not operating at a profit therefore the company is not going to be around in 3 months". So if that's a reasonable judgment of IOU's, or any others, market value, why has it *never* applied to Afterpay?

Very easy answer: because in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and early 2021, all these cash-burning growth companies could easily tap the market for more funds. That's clearly no longer the case. If Afterpay hadn't been acquired by Square/Block, it'd be in the same world of pain. Take a quick look at Zip, Sezzle, Affirm, any of the other BNPL's recently; share prices in all are collapsing because the market is betting that some will go belly-up (Zebit was the canary in the ASX coalmine).

"It might be worth even more depending on the size and age of their customer database, and the infrastructure, IP, etc, they own. And how much is the AG code license worth, cash value?"

Pity that neither company has revealed useful data on this, despite IOU throwing huge amounts of *shareholder* cash at it. But consider the implication: if IDSB is worth say $100M, and IOU will soon own $42M of this, and they are currently trading at a market cap of $27M.... then the rest of the business is worth, technically speaking, less than zero. Dan, I think you're stuck in a rut thinking this is a lending business and not a BNPL. Over the past nine months there have been all sorts of wild theories thrown about as investors tried to make sense of why IOU would buy a non-controlling investment in a small private Malaysian lender. All of those theories have so far delivered nothing, and ignore what is probably the most likely reality: it was a very poorly timed / planned purchase which has contributed (along with sector sentiment) to destroying shareholder value. Don't believe me, listen to the market. It's been long enough now for them to prove otherwise, and they've not done that. (PS: IDSB was a private sale. It just happened to be purchased by a listed company).