MoonPay co-founder and CEO Evan Soto-Wright at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami.
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Crypto startup Moonpay said on Tuesday that 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 enables large brands, agencies and enterprises to create hundreds of millions of NFTs a day, augmenting an operation that previously took months using blockchain technology. It’s being formally announced in a keynote later Tuesday that MoonPay CEO Evan Soto-Wright will be giving at Radio City Music Hall as part of this week’s NFT.NYC conference in New York City. .
The platform and its underlying technology present a huge opportunity for legacy brands like Universal and Fox that have been sitting on decades of intellectual property.
NFTs are digital assets that represent real-world objects – such as art, music and real estate – and cannot be replicated. In the past few months, big brands from every industry, including Coke, McDonald’s, nikeGucci and the National Football League have included NFTs in their marketing initiatives.
Soto-Wright told CNBC, “The potential of NFTs goes beyond collection; it’s utility. You can program essentially anything into these NFTs over time, which is why we focused on this new product offering.” Decided to focus.” “It is exactly what is making this change possible; more enterprise-grade tooling is needed to go beyond collectibles and program usability in these NFTs.”
Founded in 2018, Miami-based Moonpay’s software lets users buy and sell cryptocurrencies using traditional payment methods such as credit cards, bank transfers, or mobile wallets. Apple salary and Google to pay. This crypto website also sells its technology to other businesses, including Bitcoin.com. non-fungible token Marketplace OpenC, a model Soto-Right calls “crypto-as-a-service”.
Soto-Wright has previously stated that the firm aims to make crypto accessible to the public in the same way as video-conferencing tools such as zoom Making calls over the Internet made easy.
MoonPay’s pitch to investors is that it provides a “gateway” to digital assets. For now, it includes Bitcoin, ether and other digital tokens such as NFTs. The recent market volatility and risk-averse investor environment hasn’t been kind to crypto trading, but Soto-Right’s vision is to expand the platform to include everything from digital fashion to tokenized stocks.
The company’s latest product launch is an extended . comes between Selling CryptocurrenciesAs investors battle aggressive interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve and a worsening liquidity crunch pushed major players into financial difficulty. The crypto space is still grappling with the repercussions of $60 billion collapse of two major tokens last month.
“It’s been a tough few months for the cryptocurrency,” Soto-Wright said. “I have seen many of these different cycles before. I have seen this movie. There are always periods of volatility. This is a new asset class and we have a new subset of that asset class, which is NFTs.”
Moonpay says it has been profitable since launching its platform in 2019. Its service is now used by more than 10 million customers in 160 countries. Last month, Moonpay Added over 60 celebrity investors Its balance sheet includes Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg and Ashton Kutcher, among others. Combined, its new investors invested $87 million in a previously announced $555 million funding round, led by Tiger Global and Cotue, The company is valued at $3.4 billion.
Bitcoin rebounded on Monday after the cryptocurrency fell below its 2017 highs over the weekend, when it was trading as low as $17,601.58. Bitcoin still sits down 70% from its all-time high it hit in November, and is down 57% year-on-year. ether On Monday also there was a boom in business.
“I think it makes sense that we are going through a period of price discovery and irrational excitement… people eventually start questioning the value of things and I think that is why NFTs are considered collectibles. Seeing as beyond changes, but being able to program usability in them is going to be very, very important,” Soto-Wright said. “We need to take that tool set and work through the use cases to the biggest brands and biggest creators that really matter.”
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.