Crypto start-up MoonPay in NFT deal with Universal, Fox

Crypto startup MoonPay said Tuesday that it has partnered with Universal Pictures. Fox Corporation And among other brands, Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records has launched a new NFT platform called HyperMint.

The new platform allows large brands, agencies and businesses to create hundreds of millions of NFTs a day and expand operations that previously took months using blockchain technology. Later Tuesday, MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright will be officially announced at the Radio City Music Hall keynote as part of the NFT.NYC conference in New York City this week.

The platform and its underlying technology offer great opportunities for legacy brands such as Universal and Fox that have existed in decades of intellectual property.

NFTs are digital assets that represent real-world objects such as art, music, and real estate and cannot be duplicated.Leading brands in all industries in the last few months, including: coca cola, McDonald’s, NikeGucci and the National Football League have incorporated the NFT into their marketing initiative.

“The potential of NFTs goes beyond collection. It’s a utility. Basically, you can program anything in these NFTs over time, so we decided to focus on offering this new product.” Soto-Wright told CNBC. “This really enables this shift. To move beyond collectability and programming utilities to these NFTs, we need enterprise-grade tools.”

Founded in 2018, the Miami-based MoonPay software allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using traditional payment methods such as credit cards, bank transfers and mobile wallets. Apple With payment Google payment.Also, the crypto website Bitcoin.com and Non-substitutable token Marketplace OpenSea, model Soto-Wright calls it “crypto-as-a-service”.

Soto-Wright previously stated that the company aims to make cryptography available to the masses in the same way as video conferencing tools such as: zoom Calling over the internet has never been easier.

Selling MoonPay to investors is to provide a “gateway” to digital assets.For now, it’s included Bitcoin, ether And other digital tokens like NFT. While the recent market volatility and risk-off investor environment has not been friendly to crypto trading, Soto-Wright’s vision is to extend the platform to include everything from digital fashion to tokenized equities. ..

The company’s latest product launch will take place in an extended period Cryptocurrency sold outAs investors continue to aggressively raise rates from the Federal Reserve Board and exacerbate the liquidity crisis. Driven major players into financial difficulty. Cryptographic space is still moving from fallout $ 60 billion collapse Of the two major tokens last month.

“It was a rough few months for cryptocurrencies,” Sotrite said. “I’ve seen many of these different cycles before. I’ve seen this movie. There’s always a period of volatility. It’s a whole new asset class, a whole new subset of that asset class. There is an NFT that is “”.

MoonPay says it has been profitable since launching the platform in 2019. Today, the service is used by more than 10 million customers in 160 countries. Last month, MoonPay Added over 60 celebrity investors For balance sheets such as Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg, Ashton Kutcher.In total, the new investor will spend $ 87 million. Previously announced $ 555 million funding round, led by Tiger Global and Coatue, Valuing the company for $ 3.4 billion.

Bitcoin rebounded on Monday. Cryptocurrencies fell to $ 17,601.58 after falling below 2017 highs over the weekend. Bitcoin is still 70% below record highs, hit in November and has fallen 57% to date. ether Trading on Monday was also high.

“I think it makes sense for us to experience a period of price discovery and irrational frenzy … people eventually start to question the value of things, and it collects NFTs. I think that’s why we can shift beyond what we see as goods. It will be very, very important to program utilities into them. ” “We need to use that toolset to arm the biggest brands and the biggest creators and handle use cases that really matter.”

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBC Universal and CNBC.