Imagine a world with not just a few thousand cryptocurrencies, but billions of them. That's Rally CEO Kevin Chou’s vision. The founder of mobile gaming heavyweight Kabam joined The Scoop's Frank Chaparro to talk about the development of creator coins, which are blockchain-based tokens that are tied to the social capital of a person. “We thought about… if you have instead of just thousands of tokens in the world, but you have millions of tokens, tens of millions of tokens, a billion tokens at som...
Jul 16, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 40
Tom Farley, in many respects, was early to crypto. The 45-year-old — who is best known for his time as the head of the New York Stock Exchange — vividly recalls a conversation with early Coinbase employee Dan Romero, who connected him Coinbase co-founder and fellow Duke alumnus, Fred Ersham. "So I met with Fred and was blown away by what they were doing and agreed to put ten million dollars on behalf of the New York Stock Exchange into Coinbase," Farley said on the most recent episode of The Sco...
Jul 14, 2021•35 min•Season 3Ep. 39
China banning bitcoin has happened so many times it’s become a meme at this point. But with this latest crackdown on China-based miners, there might be no coming back, says The Block’s Wolfie Zhao. “I think the crackdown on bitcoin mining has never been serious. There were a lot of talks in 2018-2019 but there wasn't anything seriously enforced. But this time it seems like there's no way to go back.” On the most recent episode of The Scoop, Wolfie Zhao, Asia Editor at The Block, explained to hos...
Jul 09, 2021•30 min•Season 3Ep. 38
It’s no secret that investors find themselves in a low-yield environment. And that backdrop is forcing investors to explore DeFi. That’s part of the logic behind the recently announced Compound Treasury , a new company that allows investors and firms to access the yields on Compound without engaging directly with the blockchain. On this episode of The Scoop, Compound Labs’ Founder Robert Leshner unpacks how institutional flows hunting for yield are finding their way to DeFi — and how he sees Com...
Jul 06, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 37
Anthony Scaramucci — the New York financier and former White House official — first jumped into the crypto fray at the end of last year. Now, Scaramucci is going all in. During the latest episode of The Scoop, the Skybridge Capital founder walks listeners through his journey to bitcoin. Skybridge first began investing in BTC at the end of last year . "We have a full commitment to crypto," he remarked. Since then, Skybridge has thrown its hat in the bitcoin exchange-traded product ring and also p...
Jun 29, 2021•41 min•Ep. 36
Crypto venture investing is heating up. In 2021, VCs poured $3.18 billion into crypto startups in Q1 2021, an increase from $1.1 billion in Q1 2020. On this episode of The Scoop, Vanessa Grellet, CoinFund’s newly joined Head of Portfolio Growth, joins the show for a discussion on the current state of the crypto venture capital market. “If you compare the deal flow of crypto compared to private equity and hedge funds and the general space, it's still small. And I think there's a few cycles right ...
Jun 25, 2021•36 min•Season 3Ep. 35
Bitcoin mining continues to make headlines this week as China ramps up its clampdown on the long-running — and once-dominant — sector. In the latest episode of The Scoop podcast, Amanda Fabiano — who leads Galaxy Digital’s mining business — explained exactly what is happening in China, noting that authorities there recently ordered bitcoin mining projects to close in the southwest province of Sichuan. However, this could provide a bull case for North American mining, as miners are pushed out of ...
Jun 23, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 34
The slump in prices across the cryptocurrency market has hit DeFi hard. On this episode of The Scoop, The Block's Mika Honkasalo walked us through The Block's Data Dashboard to illustrate the impact of the decline in retail interest across non-custodial trading venues. The most notable area of weakness is demand for trading with leverage on decentralized derivatives venues such as Perpetual Protocol, which are "more reflexive versions of DEX's themselves," according to Honkasalo. "And this is wh...
Jun 18, 2021•31 min•Season 3Ep. 33
Bitwise, the $1 billion-plus crypto asset management firm, announced a Series B funding round to further advance its index and fund products on Wall Street. With the raise, Bitwise became the latest startup in the digital asset industry to raise fresh capital amid a period of heightened interest from institutions and their clients. In this episode of The Scoop, Bitwise co-founder and CEO Hunter Horsley explained how the industry is creating access for new classes of investors. In Horsley’s view,...
Jun 16, 2021•37 min•Season 3Ep. 32
Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, is excited about the implications of El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin. Last week, Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, sparked shockwaves across the bitcoin community with his Miami conference announcement of a proposed bill to declare bitcoin as legal tender in the country and mandate its acceptance as a means of payment. Earlier this week, the bill was formally introduced and then signed into law . During a new episode...
Jun 11, 2021•41 min•Season 3Ep. 31
Aya Kantorovich, head of institutional coverage at FalconX, has been experiencing a bit of déjà vu. Kantorovich, a former associate at crypto hedge fund Pantera, joined The Scoop to unpack the crypto market's recent bouts of volatility and how the market is stuck in a cycle of retail-led drawdowns. FalconX — an aggregator of crypto trading flows — has a window into both the retail and institutional market. According to Kantorovich, liquidations across off-shore market venues, cascading liquidati...
Jun 03, 2021•35 min•Season 3Ep. 30
Elon Musk's trigger-happy Twitter fingers have left the bitcoin world in a tizzy in recent days. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent piece, Musk has become bitcoin's "biggest influencer" — much to the dismay of many evangelists. Since he first tweeted that Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin as payment because of environmental concerns, bitcoin has fallen about 40% from its all-time highs. More recent tweets about Musk working with North American miners on addressing environmental concer...
May 25, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 29
In Vance Spencer's view, the market is completely undercounting the amount of capital that's about to move into the crypto world from institutional investor circles. The co-founder of the $1 billion-plus investment firm Framework Ventures would have a good sense of that trajectory, considering how Framework wrapped up a $100 million fundraise for a new fund in the decentralized finance market. Announced Friday, backers of the new fund include the $40 billion investment firm Hall Capital Partners...
May 14, 2021•35 min•Season 3Ep. 28
Wall Street is embracing crypto one headline-driving development at a time. From Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley, major banks are moving from exploring the digital asset world to fully operating in it. Goldman , for instance, announced Friday it would restart its market for non-deliverable forwards tied to bitcoin. Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman have said they will offer their wealthiest clients exposure to bitcoin. But one channel that has yet to fully embrace crypto is the independent wealth ...
May 07, 2021•51 min•Season 3Ep. 27
It's been an impressive month for the digital assets tied to billionaire crypto exchange executive Sam Bankman-Fried. Solana, the layer-1 blockchain competitor to Ethereum, has seen its price surge 47.8% over the last month, according to CoinGecko . Bankman-Fried is one of Solana's most prominent supporters. Meanwhile, Serum, the Solana-based DEX, has seen its native token Serum increase by nearly 62% over the last seven days, Coin Gecko data shows . During this episode of The Scoop, we dive dee...
May 03, 2021•35 min•Season 3Ep. 25
It was a tweet heard 'round the crypto world. A breaking news account fired off, in all caps, an unsubstantiated headline that the U.S. Treasury Department was set to crack down on a number of unknown banks for their activity in the crypto market. Soon after the tweet's release, several industry insiders — including the Blockchain Association's Kristin Smith — threw cold water on its key claim. "There's a lot of rumors going around that don't have any truth of foundation," Smith said. In this ep...
Apr 30, 2021•30 min•Season 3Ep. 25
Apex Clearing facilitates more than 1.7 million trades a day as the clearing and custody firm behind hundreds of fintech trading platforms. The firm, which entered the crypto market in 2019, provides more than 200 companies, including the likes of Stash, Public.com, and WeBull, with the technology to clear stock trades. At one point Apex also powered Robinhood's platform before the California-based firm launched its own clearing solution. On the crypto side, Apex Crypto helps brokers create thei...
Apr 21, 2021•51 min•Season 3Ep. 24
Crypto brokers are making money hand over fist. The direct listing of Coinbase put on display just how much money such firms are making, with the exchange reporting nearly $2 billion in revenues during the first quarter of 2021. Much of those revenues were transactional and from trades made on its retail brokerage platform. Other large brokerages want in on the action, according to Edward Woodford, CEO of crypto firm ZeroHash. The Chicago-based firm works with brokers to jumpstart their own solu...
Apr 16, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 23
Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, isn't convinced by the bitcoin narrative yet, but it's listening. On this week's episode of The Scoop, Bridgewater's director of portfolio strategy Jim Haskel said he's not surprised by the growing institutional interest. Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio previously said he didn't see bitcoin's merits as a currency, but he amended his statements in a newsletter published earlier this year. "I believe Bitcoin is one hell of an invention," Dalio wrote at th...
Apr 08, 2021•50 min•Season 3Ep. 22
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez turned heads earlier this year when he said he wanted the Florida city to add bitcoin to its treasury . Now, Suarez is pushing a commitment for the city to explore crypto by turning his attention to Ethereum. According to a new episode of The Scoop, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and Suarez announced that they have embarked on a new collaborative project focused on city services. To be sure, it's early days for the initiative, but the two have met on two occasions no...
Apr 06, 2021•30 min•Season 3Ep. 21
Michelle Bond has been focused on financial regulation for decades, and a turn to crypto policy a few years ago led her to take the helm at the Association for Digital Assets Markets by the end of 2020. ADAM is a trade association for crypto markets, featuring a code of conduct that requires its members to commit to operating with certain requirements of transparency and speed. "ADAM is 100% a standards-setting body," Bond said during the most recent episode of The Scoop. ADAM's membership inclu...
Mar 31, 2021•42 min•Season 3Ep. 20
After much anticipation, Uniswap v3 — the latest upgrade to the Ethereum-based decentralized exchange — was announced Tuesday. On this episode of The Scoop, The Block Research's Mika Honkasalo walked through the designed upgrade, explaining the significance of Uniswap's adoption of "concentrated liquidity" which aims to make trading on the platform more capital efficient. In Honkasalo's view, this move will help with the adoption of Uniswap among traders and perhaps serve as a tailwind for the b...
Mar 26, 2021•29 min•Season 3Ep. 19
Digital artist Beeple sold his collection of 5000 daily works for a whopping $69 million in a Christie's auction last week. That's the third-highest auction price on record for a living artist, but the sale was record breaking for another reason — it was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT). In recent weeks, NFTs have soared in popularity, and that's created opportunities for big and small artists alike to generate value for their work. The Block's Saniya More sat down with Cory Van Lew, an artist...
Mar 22, 2021•31 min•Season 3Ep. 18
Fidelity Digital Assets — the cryptocurrency division of multi-trillion asset manager Fidelity — is among the several firms riding the institutional bitcoin wave. FDA, which launched amid a bitcoin bear market in 2018, offers trading and custody services to a wide range of institutional firms. On this episode of The Scoop, Fidelity's Christine Sandler — a veteran of the trading world — walked through the breakneck growth of the crypto market in the past six months and explained how Fidelity has ...
Mar 16, 2021•36 min•Season 3Ep. 17
The market for non-fungible tokens, digital collectibles, and tokenized music is hitting the mainstream. On Thursday, Beeple's NFT-powered suite of 5,000 images sold for a staggering $69 million, making it the third-highest figure paid for work by a living artist. Indeed, the sale sent shockwaves across the broader press, cementing NFT's place in the mainstream consciousness. The market has been growing at a fast clip, with weekly users on NFT platforms soaring from around 20,000 at the beginnin...
Mar 12, 2021•39 min•Season 3Ep. 16
The market for non-fungible tokens and digital collectibles has been growing at a breakneck pace, with projects like Dapper Lab's NBA Top Shot seeing user activity and transaction volumes soar. Since the beginning of the year, the burgeoning market — which runs the gamut of sports collectibles to digital cats — has seen more than half a billion in weekly trade volumes, according to data compiled by The Block. On this episode of The Scoop, Gary Vaynerchuk — the Internet personality, entrepreneur,...
Mar 09, 2021•25 min•Season 3Ep. 15
ARK Invest has had quite the 2021. Since the beginning of the year—underpinned by unprecedented trading volumes and retail activity—ARK has seen its assets under management soar, buoyed by its bets high-growth tech stocks. Many of the names ARK has backed overlap with the stocks that have become darlings among the Wall Street Bets crowd. Indeed, ARK has grown into a heavy-hitter on Wall Street, with the Wall Street Journal referring to founder Cathie Wood as having on of "Wall Street's hottest h...
Mar 05, 2021•50 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Led by Ethereum 2.0 developer and Prysmatic Labs founder Preston Van Loon and Joe Sticco, Cryptex is set to launch the mainnet of its token TCAP in the next few weeks. Already, the firm has lined up 500 users for its testnet, including a number of liquidity providers in the US. On this episode of The Scoop, Sticco and Van Loon breakdown the launch of their token, which offers investors a way to buy the entire crypto market, how DeFi can offer an alternative to indexes popular on Wall Street, and...
Mar 02, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Regulators in Canada approved two bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in recent days, marking the first approvals of their kind for North America. Since launch, the products have seen considerable inflows. With the demand for a bitcoin ETF now proven, many wonder what a Canadian approval could mean for a U.S. offering. The Scoop spoke with Eric Balchunas, a senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, about what an approved bitcoin ETF means for the landscape. During this week's episode Balchunas broke dow...
Feb 26, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Thursday morning, Coinbase's S-1 filing went public , revealing for the first time details about its financials, cap table, and its pitch to the investment world ahead of a planned direct listing on Nasdaq. In this episode of The Scoop, The Block's director of news Frank Chaparro and director of research Larry Cermak unpack the S-1 filing's headline - grabbing sections and the broader implications of Coinbase's plan on the broader bitcoin market. Coinbase has been preparing to go public for seve...
Feb 25, 2021•29 min•Season 3Ep. 10
