MoonPay co-founder and CEO Evan Soto-Wright at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami.
MoonPay
Crypto startup MoonPay said Tuesday it is partnering with Universal Pictures, Fox Corporation and Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records, among other brands, to launch a new NFT platform called HyperMint.
The new platform allows brands, agencies and large organizations to issue hundreds of millions of NFTs daily, scaling a process that previously took months using blockchain technology. It was officially announced later Tuesday during a keynote speech given by MoonPay CEO Evan Soto Wright at Radio City Music Hall as part of this week’s NFT.NYC conference in New York City.
The platform and its underlying technology represent a huge opportunity for legacy brands like Universal and Fox that are anchored on decades of intellectual property.
NFTs are digital assets that represent real things – like art, music, and real estate – and cannot be duplicated. In the past few months, major brands from every industry, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Gucci and the National Football League, have introduced NFTs into their marketing initiatives.
“The capabilities of NFTs go beyond assembly; it’s utility. You can basically program anything into NFTs over time, which is why we decided to focus on this new product offering,” Soto-Wright told CNBC. “That really makes this shift possible; to go beyond the attainability and utility of the program to these NFTs and there have to be enterprise-level tools in place.”
Founded in 2018, Miami-based MoonPay allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrency using traditional payment methods such as credit cards and bank transfers or mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. It also sells its technology to other companies including crypto site Bitcoin.com and marketplace for non-fungible tokens OpenSea, a model Soto-Wright calls “crypto-as-a-service.”
Soto-Wright previously said the company aims to make encryption more accessible to the masses in the same way that video conferencing tools like Zoom have made it easier to make calls over the Internet.
MoonPay’s offering to investors is that it provides a “gateway” to digital assets. Currently, this includes bitcoin, ether, and other digital tokens such as NFTs. Recent market volatility and the environment for risk-averse investors have not been kind to cryptocurrency trading, but Soto-Wright’s vision is to expand the platform to include everything from digital fashion to token stocks.
The company’s latest product launch comes amid an extended sell-off of cryptocurrencies, as investors continue to grapple with sharp interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve and a worsening liquidity crunch that has sent major players into financial trouble. The crypto space continues to suffer from the fallout of two major coins worth $60 billion last month.
“It’s been a few months since cryptocurrency,” Soto-Wright said. “I’ve seen many of these different cycles before. I’ve seen this movie. There will always be periods of volatility. It’s a whole new asset class and we have a whole new subset of that asset class, which are NFTs.”
MoonPay says it has been profitable since it launched its platform in 2019. Its service is now used by more than 10 million customers in 160 countries. In the past month, MoonPay has added more than 60 well-known investors to its balance sheet, including Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg and Ashton Kutcher, among others. Combined, its new investors poured $87 million into a previously announced $555 million funding round led by Tiger Global and Coatue, valuing the company at $3.4 billion.
Bitcoin rebounded on Monday, after the cryptocurrency dropped below its 2017 high over the weekend, when it traded at $1,701.58. Bitcoin is still 70% below its all-time high hit in November, and is down 57% year-to-date. Ether was higher in trading on Monday as well.
“I think it makes sense that we go through periods of price discovery and irrational exuberance…People eventually start to question the value of things and I think that is the reason for the shift beyond looking at NFTs as collectibles, but the ability to program The utility in them will be critical.” “We need to use this set of tools and arm the biggest brands and biggest content creators to work through the use cases that will really matter.”
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.
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