The Scoop

As the crypto market matures, owners of “pristine” digital assets will increasingly be able to use their holdings as collateral for an array of financial services, according to Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra.Founded in 2014, crypto wealth management platform Abra closed a $55 million Series C last September led by IGNIA and Blockchain Capital.In this episode of The Scoop, Barhydt explains why the recent Terra blow-up has no impact on crypto’s disruptive potential, and how a new wave of crypto-backed financial products promises to unlock more utility for long-term holders.As Barhydt explains,“Most banks won't recognize crypto — I don't even know any that will recognize crypto when they're trying to figure out your financial status, when you're trying to qualify for a mortgage…”Just last month, Abra announced a partnership with Propy — the company who sold a Florida home for $650,000 using an NFT — allowing crypto holders to apply for loans using their crypto as collateral.While Abra is “not financing homes yet,” allowing long-term crypto holders to use their digital assets as collateral for down payments on property is a sign of maturity for the asset class, according to Barhydt.If crypto can become pristine digital collateral like Barhydt imagines, he believes the implications will be felt around the world:“The banking system knows that I have this much bitcoin, it lends me this amount of money to complete my payments, and that's debited later — that's a much more efficient way to process credit transactions in countries where there is no credit scoring system, which is most countries, so having a kind of digital collateral changes everything.”Episode 44 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

The demise of the Terra blockchain sent a ripple effect throughout the crypto ecosystem last week, as the market absorbed over 80,000 BTC deployed in a failed attempt to keep the UST "stablecoin" pegged 1:1 with the US dollar.“If you’re a market maker and you don’t make money in those kinds of days, then yeah — you’re doing something wrong,” said Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute — an algorithmic crypto market maker with nearly $2 trillion in cumulative volume, according to the firm’s website.In this episode of The Scoop, Evgeny Gaevoy recounts the Terra meltdown from a market maker’s perspective, and explains how future decentralized yield-bearing stablecoins can innovate where Terra's UST failed.According to Gaevoy, the 20% annualized yield promised to users who deposited UST into Terra’s Anchor Protocol was more debt than could be paid by the protocol’s revenue:“What was really wrong about LUNA is they had that 20% yield which was coming out of nowhere,” he said. “It was backed by future growth of the protocol, which could have happened, but didn’t.”Although UST has proven to be a failure, Gaevoy thinks an interest-bearing stablecoin is possible, as long as the promised yield is equivalent to the issuing protocol’s revenue. To illustrate, Gaevoy proposed a hypothetical protocol that brings in $500,000 a year in revenue and seeks to raise $5 million through offering interest-bearing stablecoins:“Let's say they have cash flows of $500,000 per year — they can issue $5 million worth of stablecoins with 10% yield, and then suddenly they have $5 million and they can pay this yield because they actually generate this income. So they can offset these interest payments with what they generate from their own protocol — that model can work, and that model I think is really interesting to explore for a lot of protocols.”Wintermute is in the process of launching its own stablecoin, according to Gaevoy, who said the firm “just needs to iron out the regulatory details.”Episode 43 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected]. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

The Bahamas has turned into an attractive destination for crypto companies looking to set up shop in a jurisdiction with a clear regulatory framework for digital assets — a movement spearheaded by crypto exchange FTX’s announcement to relocate its headquarters to the island nation late last year.In this episode of The Scoop, Ryan Salame, Co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets (FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary), explains why he believes the conference was “an incredible success,” and why he thinks the Bahamas is positioned to become a global hub for the crypto industry.The conference helped to highlight the crypto-friendly nature of the Bahamas, as Salame explains during the interview,“Some of my objectives were to show off the Bahamas as a jurisdiction, to show why we were there, allow the opportunity for companies to send people to see that this is a great place to do business. So that objective was easily hit.”Salame told The Block’s Frank Chaparro that over 20 companies are in conversation with FTX about moving their headquarters to the Bahamas.While the US has yet to solidify its regulatory approach to digital assets, clear legislation in the Bahamas removes the structural uncertainty.As Salame explains, “All of crypto sits under one regulatory body, versus in the US, you're seeing the CFTC and FCC debate.”Salame’s sentiment is shared by former CFTC chair Chris Giancarlo, who gave the regulatory structure for digital assets in the U.S. a “zero” on a scale of 1 to 10 during a panel at the conference. Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from founder and former FTX and Alameda CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions.Episode 42 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Ryan Salame, Co-CEO of FTX Digital MarketsListen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected]. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Bitcoin traded below $30,000 on Monday, amid market uncertainty brought about by the ‘depegging' of UST—an algorithmic stablecoin whose value is supposed to remain equivalent to $1.At publication, UST is trading at $0.92, although the ‘stablecoin’ saw lows of $0.6050 on the Binance UST/USDT trading pair.In this breaking episode of The Scoop, host Frank Chaparro spoke with crypto researcher Mika Honkasalo, who appeared on the podcast to provide a detailed look at how the UST drama is unfolding.As Honkasalo explained, while UST has experienced depegging before, this time around is structurally different:“I think people at first didn't really realize that it would be a real thing, because they had seen something similar before and they didn't realize that the structure of the market had become a lot more averse to UST than it previously had. And I think what you're seeing today is sort of that just escalating or going further.”Although the Luna Foundation Guard announced plans yesterday to support the UST peg with $1.5 billion worth of assets, whether or not UST returns to its peg will likely come down to whether the buyers or sellers win out.As Honkasalo noted during the interview,“Whether or not it maintains the peg today is very much a question of: if the sellers sort of run out of tokens and the buyers have more, the buyers will live to fight another day here in the mid-term.”As for the future fate of Luna and UST, Honkasalo thinks much of its success will rest on macro forces outside of its control.“I think that if the market turns positive, it will be much easier to keep the whole Luna ecosystem going. But if it continues to be more negative than this, the next wave of sells could be even much worse.”Episode 41 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Mika Honkasalo, Crypto Researcher.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

This special bonus episode of The Scoop was recorded live at the Crypto Bahamas conference with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, the digital payments and infrastructure company behind the popular stablecoin USDC.As data from The Block shows, USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization, and its share of the total stablecoin supply has been steadily on the rise.According to Allaire, a primary driver of demand for stablecoins comes from crypto native businesses:“Basically any business that operates in the crypto economy wants to use stablecoins as working capital. Well, these are businesses that also have borrowing needs, these are businesses that want to borrow, and so you want to borrow stablecoins — so there's inherent demand to borrow in that medium of exchange.”It is this demand for stablecoins that creates lucrative yield opportunities for stablecoin lenders in crypto, in the same way that lenders in the world of traditional finance profit from the interest on the money they lend.As Allaire explains, stablecoin borrowers are willing to pay to borrow capital:“Banks get 17 or 20% from consumers for lending the money for credit cards, right? So people pay an interest rate to borrow. Working capital of crypto is stablecoins, there's businesses that want to borrow it, and there you go.”Episode 40 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder & CEO of Circle.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Founded back in 2011, Blockchain.com recently closed a Series D funding round in March at a valuation of $14 billion, making the crypto company both one of the longest-operating exchanges as well as one of the highest valued in the industry.After spending effectively “zero” on marketing for over a decade, Blockchain.com recently announced a sponsorship deal with the Dallas Cowboys, becoming the first crypto company to ink a deal with an NFL team approved by the league.In this episode of The Scoop, Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain.com, discusses his company’s upcoming strategy, including IPO rumors and the rationale behind their Cowboys partnership.As he explains during the interview, Smith wants “to work with the biggest and the best,” making the Cowboys the ideal choice for Blockchain.com’s first sports partnership:“When you really study these marketing deals, you're basically looking for who has the biggest fan base, the demographics of the fan base, and then the TV side of it,” Smith said. “We really wanted to work with them because of the fan base and the TV exposure.”Blockchain.com was also in the news in April, when a Bloomberg report circulated suggesting the company is planning an IPO for some time this year. However, when asked about the report, Smith commented that it must have been “a slow news day at Bloomberg.”While Smith believes Blockchain.com “will be a public company someday – and probably sooner than later,” he clarified: “We haven't done anything in the last 60 days that's different than what we've been doing for the last nine months preparing to someday be a public company.”Episode 39 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain.comListen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Before Jon Cheesman became the global head of FTX Access — a new division of the crypto exchange founded by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried which caters to institutional clients – the seasoned market-veteran served as head of forex sales to banks and hedge funds in London at HSBC, spent time as a partner at crypto venture firm Distributed Global and was a VP at Goldman Sachs.Despite having over a decade of professional experience with global financial markets, Cheesman thinks we are currently living through “the most uncertain macro period” he’s ever seen.In this episode of The Scoop, Cheesman discusses the various macro headwinds which have hit the crypto market so far in 2022, and explains why he believes “a good tailwind is often an end of a headwind.”Cheesman contended that tightening monetary policy hurts crypto in the short-term, but it doesn’t affect the value proposition behind crypto:“There's no question that inflation and what that means for central bank policy is a significant headwind for crypto assets in the near term. But, I think people are comfortable to separate temporary cyclicality with longer term structural tailwinds.”Some of the “structural tailwinds” Cheesman thinks are gaining traction include the idea of “the death of fiat currencies” because of central bank activity, and also the recent focus amongst “high net-worth individuals” on being able to lay claim to one’s assets in light of the removal of some Russian banks from the SWIFT payment messaging network. As data from The Block shows, total daily volume rose for BTC/RUB pairs in March.In addition to, “the more structural tailwinds of the supercycle thesis,” Cheesman also believes both extremely high, and low inflation bode well for crypto.Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from founder and former FTX and Alameda CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions.Episode 38 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Jon Cheesman, Global Head of FTX Access.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

The Blockchain Association — a trade association that lobbies US politicians on behalf of the crypto industry — saw explosive growth in 2021, thanks in part to the controversy surrounding the crypto tax reporting provisions that were included as part of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that went through Congress last year.In this episode of The Scoop, Kristin Smith, Executive Director of the Blockchain Association, appears on the show for a record-breaking fifth appearance (pulling ahead of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried by one) to explain the crypto-friendly momentum that she sees building among American politicians.According to Smith, there are three main reasons why the crypto lobbying industry is gaining influence in Washington:“Between the professionals on the ground, the political giving, and the people back at home that care about this space, the crypto industry is in a much, much better position than we've ever been to date.”Although total US crypto trade association lobbying decreased from $1,034,663 in Q4 of last year to $917,406 in Q1 of 2022, the Blockchain Association increased their Q1 lobbying efforts from $540,000 to $590,000 — over 60% of the industry total for the quarter.Relative to the total crypto market cap — which peaked at just over $3 trillion last November — the amount of money being directed towards crypto lobbying may seem low. But according to Smith, “the amount of money it takes to influence Washington is laughably small.”In the US, direct donations to candidates are limited to $2,900 per election, or $5,800 per cycle. Although they are limited in size, direct donations carry weight with politicians because the funds go directly to the campaign, says Smith.Episode 37 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Kristin Smith, Executive Director at The Blockchain AssociationListen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Founded in 2015, crypto-native VC firm CoinFund has spent the past year bolstering its leadership with talent from the world of traditional finance, including Chris Perkins — a former executive at Citigroup — and Christopher Giancarlo, the former CFTC chair.CoinFund’s hiring of Chris Perkins as the firm’s new President is part of a larger exodus of talent from Citi towards digital asset companies, as reported by The Block.In this episode of The Scoop, CoinFund’s President Chris Perkins and CEO Jake Brukhman break down the recent personnel updates at CoinFund, and explain why the combination of crypto-natives and experienced executives from traditional finance are key to pushing blockchain technology to the point of mass adoption.While Brukhman and Perkins believe outsiders from traditional finance can help crypto projects scale, that is not to say that all crypto projects are eager for VC firms to get involved.As Perkins mentioned during the interview: “Crypto is all about community, and you really have to work to navigate that community to understand the founders and to help them grow.”While the crypto community can be nuanced compared to the world of traditional finance, Perkins believes the allure of working with the burgeoning digital asset industry is strong enough to continue to draw in talent:“We're effectively in the process of giving birth to a brand new asset class. And it's just so incredibly exciting being a pioneer, being on the cutting edge. For those of us who are wired like that, it's kind of obvious why you'd want to transition into this space.”Episode 36 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Senior Fintech Reporter Lucy Harley-McKeown, and Chris Perkins, President and Jake Brukhman, CEO & Founder of CoinFund.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

In this episode of The Scoop, Framework co-founders Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer sat down with host Frank Chaparro to explain their new fund’s investment thesis which centers around the idea that blockchain gaming is “getting to the point of mass-market appeal.”As Anderson explained during the interview, the combination of AAA quality game design and in-game ‘play-to-earn’ economies is the key to mass adoption:“That combinatorial effect is the transition that we predict will move from ‘play-to-earn’ into ‘play-and-earn’ where it’s more that you want to be playing the game because it’s a really fun and engaging game. You get to compete at the highest levels, and you get to play in the economy in the same ways that you get to with Axie.”Despite surging in popularity in 2021, the ‘play-to-earn’ game Axie Infinity has recently seen declining activity, something exacerbated by a $600 million hack earlier this year.According to the Framework co-founders, the remedy to the complexities and risks of blockchain gaming is in custodial solutions — another big theme of their new fund which the two co-founders hope will lead to mass adoption.As Spencer explained:“All of the game loops, all of the things that are super important to these game developers, break without these custodial experiences. And so this is going to be the kind of paradigm through which all of the people will initially come in.”Framework Ventures isn’t the only VC firm that sees blockchain gaming as crypto’s next major development: South Korean VC firm Hashed also shared with The Scoop how they are betting big on gaming with their own $200 million fund deployed last December.Episode 35 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Michael Anderson & Vance Spencer, cofounders of Framework Ventures.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

In the last episode of the Mining Report, The Block's Wolfie Zhao discussed the unprecedented growth of North American bitcoin mining companies in 2021 with massive equipment pre-orders and power capacity build-outs.Over the past few months, there have been several interesting developments in the crypto mining industry. The prices of graphic unit processors, commonly used for mining on Ethereum and other proof-of-working networks, have continued to slump, thanks in part to the overall crypto market downturn. Although Ethereum's hashrate remains steadily at the 1,000 TH/s level, its growth has largely slowed amid anticipation the switch to proof-of-stake will take place later this year.In the bitcoin ASIC arena, Canaan, Bitmain and MicroBT have all rolled out liquid-cooled miners, bringing changes to the market where air-cooling has been the dominant and default setting since the start of the bitcoin ASIC era. It is a sign that bitcoin's mining chip efficiency growth is starting to plateau while equipment designers and manufacturers increase their efforts on other hardware engineering solutions to maximize mining chip performance. Meanwhile, with the massive expansion plans executed in 2021, mining companies face mounting pressure for cash in 2022. Some long-time mining hodlers, who choose not to sell mined bitcoins to cover OpEx or CapEx, have finally started to offload parts of their bitcoin reserves. On the other hand, the demand for private loans in bitcoin mining appears to continue.In this episode of The Scoop Mining Report, The Block Research's mining analyst Wolfie Zhao and host Frank Chaparro take a further look at the changing dynamics in the mining hardware and financing space.Episode 34 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Research Mining Analyst Wolfie Zhao.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto

An estimated 25,000 people descended on Miami, Florida earlier this month for Bitcoin 2022, the world's largest Bitcoin-focused conference. That's more than double the attendance the conference saw last year.The annual Bitcoin conference is known for its fanfare, including some anti-government and anti-regulatory sentiment. That was still on display at Bitcoin 2022, with incidents like billionaire Ricardo Salinas including a slide titled "The Devils" depicting regulators and a Braveheart-style freedom chant from the crowd. But the tone seems to be shifting. In this episode of Policy Scoop, The Block's Aislinn Keely delves into that change in tone, particularly the way this year's conference put a much greater emphasis on policy. The anti-government sentiment that pervaded Bitcoin 2021 turned into a neutral and perhaps even friendly stance toward policymakers at the 2022 event. This may be because most Bitcoiners have accepted that mass adoption won't come without regulation.Keely covered the conference on the ground in Miami, and in this week's episode, she chats with The Block Managing Editor Michael McSweeney about the key takeaways from the policy-related discussions at Bitcoin 2022.Episode 33 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Aislinn Keely and The Block's Managing Editor Michael McSweeney.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected]. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Gauntlet Network — a platform that provides risk modeling and performance optimization solutions for DeFi protocols — recently raised $23.8 million for a valuation of $1 billion.On June 24, 2020, when Gauntlet Network’s CEO Tarun Chitra first came on The Scoop, the total value locked across all DeFi verticals was just over $1.5 billion. Today, less than two years later, that number has grown exponentially to over $211 billion.In this episode, Chitra describes his company’s rise to unicorn status and explains how a project in DeFi can be successful. In his view, it's not just replicating what exists in centralized finance and putting it on the blockchain:“The products that do really well in DeFi are not just straight up, ‘take a centralized finance thing, make the closest clone you can, and then try to get people to use it…’ that pretty much never works in DeFi. It's always something that's somewhat adapted to the nuances of crypto systems and how people interact with crypto systems in a way that's very different than traditional finance or even centralized crypto.”Successful DeFi projects must handle what Chitra describes as the "degen ape," referring to crypto power users. These market participants erratically move large sums of money into decentralized protocols without researching the protocol’s underlying fundamentals.DeFi protocols with billions in TVL currently rely on Gauntlet’s risk modeling for their operations, including Aave, a lending protocol whose founder and CEO Stani Kulechov recently shared with The Scoop how the protocol’s V3 upgrade is mitigating risk.In time, Chitra believes increasingly more forms of contracts will fall under the purview of DeFi:“I don't think DeFi really revolutionizes finance per se. I think it revolutionizes lawyers. You just get rid of lawyers for a lot of transactions… Somehow in DeFi, you're able to make these things like - the tokenization means that you can turn these things that were legal contracts into like exchange tradable assets.” Episode 32 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Tarun Chitra, Founder and CEO of Gauntlet Network.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

During an episode of The Scoop from last November, Mastercard EVP Jess Turner explained how Mastercard was pivoting to become a ‘crypto first’ company.Mastercard has since made significant progress on this decision, including the filing of over a dozen metaverse and crypto-related trademarks.During this latest episode of The Scoop -- recorded at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami -- Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s EVP of Blockchain/Digital Asset Products & Digital Partnerships, shared the progress the payments company has made since entering the crypto industry, and how the move is a natural extension of Mastercard’s core business.As Dhamodharan explained:“We are a payment company that enables commerce. That’s what we are about. The reason we got into crypto is this is about providing choice and making sure people can exercise that choice safely and securely. That’s what our network always stood for: enabling safe commerce experiences across multiple rails.”Mastercard has also made progress on the NFT front, including a partnership with Coinbase and an OpenSea integration. These decisions form part of Mastercard’s broader efforts to simplify the crypto experience for end-users.As Dhamodharan commented during the interview:“This is not about a crypto native going and buying an NFT… it’s really about enabling every artist and every creator to be able to have a large market for them to sell their artwork, and it’s really powering the creator economy. And how can we do that if we don’t enable common consumers to be able to purchase and hold the NFT using a simple consumer experience?”Episode 31 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Raj Dhamodharan EVP of Blockchain/Digital Asset Products & Digital Partnerships at Mastercard.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Amun Holdings Limited - owner of both 21Shares and Amun, Inc. - introduced the first crypto exchange traded product (ETP) to market back in 2018.Although the collaborative ARK Investments and 21Shares bitcoin spot ETF was recently rejected in the US, 21Shares remains the world’s largest provider of crypto ETPs with 30 unique products currently trading across exchanges. In this episode of The Scoop, recorded at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, 21Shares and Amun co-founders Hany Rashwan and Ophelia Snyder sat down with host Frank Chaparro to discuss the current landscape of crypto ETPs, and explain why they believe the rise of crypto index tokens and crypto basket ETPs are signs of a maturing industry.As Snyder commented during the interview:"'Is bitcoin going to zero this year?' is no longer a continuing ongoing narrative. That changes things. It means that people are starting to look at crypto as an asset class, as an industry, as a theme… It's not, 'ok, will bitcoin now exist?' It’s now: ‘Ok, well crypto is definitely going to exist, so what is the S&P 500 of crypto?’While 21Shares has the most ETP offerings on the market, other firms are also developing crypto basket products such as Bitwise’s recently announced NFT index fund (though this fund is only available to accredited investors).Given their positions in the market, both Rashwan and Snyder are very aware of the institutional funds flowing into the crypto: something the two have continued to witness despite the market’s drawdown over the last few months. As Snyder explained:“I had a very interesting conversation with one of our lead market makers about a week ago talking about what’s going on in this market actually, and what are they seeing on the trading side, and one of the key takeaways is this: the institutions are actually forming thesis based investment philosophies. So they look at fundamentals… they develop a thesis and they invest.” Episode 30 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and 21Shares and Amun co-founders, Hany Rashwan and Ophelia Snyder.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected]. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Animoca Brands, the Hong-Kong based digital entertainment startup behind the popular blockchain metaverse platform The Sandbox, raised $358.88 million in January at a valuation of over $5 billion in a funding round led by Liberty City Ventures.In this episode of The Scoop, CEO of Animoca Brands Robby Yung discusses his company’s growth and shares his philosophy on what it means to build an ‘open’ metaverse platform.As Yung explained during the interview:"Our job is very much more like a government from an economics standpoint because we levy what’s akin to a tax on the ecosystem for providing the ecosystem… Our focus is on encouraging economic activity, it doesn’t have to be us selling things to customers, it can be customers selling amongst themselves."Whereas web2 game designers rely on a "storefront model" in which users purchase content directly, web3 metaverse projects such as The Sandbox reap revenue from users’ transaction fees generated from in-game interactions.As Yung commented:"...In an open metaverse we’re providing a public service, but at the same time we need to be mindful that we need to make a profit for our shareholders. You need to balance those two things and not put one at the expense of the other."The Sandbox is an "open" virtual world meaning it provides the basic infrastructure for users to build their own customized experiences. This is something that is central to Yung’s vision for how an open metaverse should operate:"I’m actually most excited about the stuff that I can’t imagine happening with my products, because other people are going to innovate those things."Besides The Sandbox, Animoca Brands has over 150 investments in other NFT and metaverse projects. The studio recently announced its acquisition of racing game developer Eden Games.Episode 29 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Robby Yung CEO at Animoca Brands.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected]. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

After decades of experience working with software companies, Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm with over $100 billion in assets under management, announced its plans to move into crypto last fall. In this episode of The Scoop, Thoma Bravo founder of Orlando Bravo unpacked the similarities between early software companies and today's crypto landscape, and discussed the thought process behind Thoma Bravo's decision to begin investing in the crypto ecosystem.As Bravo shared during the interview:“At Thoma Bravo, the way to think about how we make strategic decisions is actually quite simple: we’re very ‘micro.’ We focus on what are the best deals that are right in front of us that fit our strategy. Our strategy, if you had to define it very briefly, would be: how do you turn great innovators into great companies, and how do you do that while working and empowering existing management teams?”While Bravo cited many similarities between the software industry from the early 2000s and the crypto industry today, he also thinks crypto companies have an edge.Crypto companies have “better business models,” Bravo notes. "You can build a huge business here with very little capital.”Indeed, Thoma Bravo isn’t the only private equity firm from traditional finance to recognize the fact that crypto founders have unique needs. Sequoia Capital and Bain Capital have recently launched their own crypto-specific funds catered toward crypto-native founders.Episode 28 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Greg Lim, Company Intelligence Research Director, and Orlando Bravo, founder and managing partner at Thoma Bravo.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Sequoia Capital has been invested in crypto since 2015, but the VC firm recently raised the stakes by announcing its first sector-specific fund: a $500 million Sequoia Crypto Fund focused on liquid tokens and digital assets.In this episode of The Scoop, Sequoia partners Shaun Maguire and Michelle Bailhe sit down with host Frank Chaparro to discuss Sequoia’s new fund and explain how the power dynamic between venture firms and crypto native founders has evolved.So what are these crypto-native founders looking for when it comes to selecting VC firms? Maguire believes they are looking for funds that can keep pace with the fast-paced crypto industry:“Crypto moves so fast, crypto founders want to work with funds that can move incredibly fast, they want to work with funds that deeply understand their problems, deeply understand the landscape. Those properties are primarily going to live within crypto specific funds rather than in generalist funds.”The crypto-specific fund structure certainly seems to be working well for Sequoia, which recently led a $135 million Series A+ investment in LayerZero Labs, along with FTX Ventures and A16Z.In fact, Bailhe believes that this is why Sequoia’s technical knowledge and understanding of the problems in cross-chain interoperability that LayerZero Labs is attempting to solve made such an impact on co-founder Bryan Pellegrino.“I remember him saying, ‘You really tried to engage on the way that we had constructed LayerZero and how it was working, versus focusing on kind of the easy questions…’” Bailhe recalled. “They felt like they would get people who were deeply committed to crypto.”Episode 27 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro, and Shaun Maguire & Michelle Bailhe, Partners at Sequoia.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Before IreneDAO went viral last year, Irene Zhao only had a few hundred followers on Instagram. Today, the influencer from Singapore has nearly half a million followers on the social platform.In this episode of The Scoop, Irene Zhao and Ben Tang share why IreneDAO is a proof-of-concept for their web3 startup named So-Col or 'Social Collectables', and how web3 could empower both content creators and fan communities alike.As Zhao commented during the interview,“IreneDAO kind of revolutionized the way the creator is able to interact with their fans… the relationship between creator and fans tends to be very transactional, because the creator just gives them exclusive content and then the fans just pay money in return… because of DAOs, all the fans are able to unite together, to come together, and come up with something that really aligns with the creator's vision.”Zhao and Tang believe 'fan club DAOs' will allow fans to organize themselves in a way not currently possible outside of web3.Zhao and Tang believe the problem with the current ownership economy in web2 is twofold: fans have a hard time organizing themselves and creators often rely on advertisements to monetize their content.As Tang explained:“If you look at monetization, there’s not a lot of ways to monetize apart from like selling out, doing a lot of advertisements, or doing like an OnlyFans, or things that people might not really be very keen to kind of do.”This is something they believe will change with web3.“The keyword here is ownership,” Tang explains, “In web2, you cannot own a stake in the creator’s fan club. Here, you can actually own a stake in it through NFTs.”Tang and Zhao are not the only ones who see the potential of web3 to disrupt the ownership economy: digital ownership and DAO services are two topics that web3 VC funds have been paying close attention to.Episode 26 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro, and Irene Zhao and Ben Tang, Co-Founders of So-Col.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross RiverFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About Cross RiverCross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

Do Kwon, Founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, recently made headlines with an announcement to purchase billions of dollars worth of bitcoin in order to establish “decentralized forex reserves” for UST, Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin.In this episode of The Scoop, host Frank Chaparro and Kwon discuss the details of Terra’s bitcoin reserves and unpack Terra's plans for unlocking bitcoin’s potential as the new gold standard for digital currency.While the move could enhance the stability of UST’s peg to the dollar, Kwon also believes it speaks to how the future of crypto could operate multi-chain.In such a future, Kwon hopes utilizing bitcoin as a sort of gold standard will help facilitate adoption of UST across various blockchains.With a market cap of over $16 billion, UST is the largest decentralized stablecoin. However, data from Terra Bridge shows that only just over $1 billion UST has been moved into other ecosystems. This is something Kwon would like to change. As Kwon explained:“We believe that Terra UST has the chance to be the largest stablecoin across multiple different blockchains,” Kwon said. “Not just the largest stablecoin on the Terra blockchain.”While tribalistic attitudes frequently pit community members of competing smart contract ecosystems against each other, Kwon believes this is something that the new ‘bitcoin standard’ for UST can transcend:The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) — the non-profit entity responsible for maintaining UST’s peg to the dollar — has already purchased over $1 billion in bitcoin, and plans to continue purchasing bitcoin as UST grows.As Kwon mentions during the interview, “The future model of Terra $UST is that a certain percentage of new UST that is being minted goes to buy bitcoin all the time to build up reserves."Episode 25 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Do Kwon, Founder & CEO of Terraform Labs.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

In the weeks since the invasion of Ukraine, the US and others have levied heavy sanctions against Russia. Financial businesses, including crypto firms, are now expected to comply with regulations by blocking a growing number of sanctioned entities.Some businesses, like PayPal and Revolut, have chosen to block Russian users altogether, despite this not being a requirement under the current sanctions regime.Others, like Kraken, have made it clear that while they block all sanctioned entities, they will continue to serve Russian users until political forces definitively direct them to stop. And still others, like FTX, have chosen to cut off some Russian accounts that aren't on the sanction list in addition to the sanctioned entities but continue to serve most Russian users.The varying approaches to sanctions compliance have left some wondering where the lines are, both legally and ethically.Meanwhile, some lawmakers are floating proposals to empower the Treasury to bar crypto services providers from transacting with any addresses associated with Russia. In this week's episode of Policy Scoop, The Block's Aislinn Keely sits down with a sanctions expert and the legal chiefs from Kraken and FTX to parse out the complexities around Russian sanctions and the impact on the crypto industry as it stands today.Episode 24 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Aislinn Keely and Marco Santori, CLO at Kraken, Caroline Brown, former attorney at the U.S. Departments of Justice and the Treasury and current partner at Crowell & Moring, & Mark Wetjen, Head of Policy and Regulatory Strategy at FTX.US.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

With nearly $13 billion in total value locked, Aave is certainly one of the dominant players in the DeFi lending space. However, as the protocol grows, so too does its risk factor.In this episode of The Scoop, founder and CEO of Aave Stani Kulechov discusses the innovation brought on by the recent Aave V3 upgrade, and shares what is being done to mitigate risk.While parameter adjustments through community governance may be sufficient to adjust a DeFi protocol’s risk curve during times of fluctuating market conditions, there are deeper, systematic risks that can still lead to devastating losses.For example, a fork of the Aave protocol on the Gnosis blockchain named Agave recently had its smart contracts exploited by a malicious attacker, draining $8 million from the protocol.At the moment, one of the only ways to mitigate smart contract risk at the protocol level is to submit the smart contracts to a third party for security audits. Not only does this leave potential security vulnerabilities if an attack vector is overlooked, but also given the sheer number of new protocols and their underlying smart contracts, security scaling has become a major bottleneck for the industry.As Stani explained, “More and more smart contracts are deployed into the internet of smart contracts, and the challenge here is we need to somehow figure out a scalable way of applying security.”Aave V3 has implemented certain design features such as “isolation mode” which mitigates risk by isolating newly listed tokens from the rest of the protocol’s liquidity.“We understand that the stakes are getting higher and higher,” Stani said, “so we have to become more risk averse.” Episode 23 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected]. This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

David Woo, a former top Bank of America executive, is famous for his 2013 prediction that Bitcoin would prove to be a viable alternative to traditional money transfer providers.Nearly a decade later, Woo is still prognosticating about the future of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, though given the current macro backdrop, his outlook is significantly bleaker. In the latest episode of The Scoop podcast, Woo joins host Frank Chaparro to explain why Bitcoin may not be spared from the economic and geopolitical issues he sees potentially forming on the horizon: “I think the most important story that we could be transitioning into is basically Cold War II," he said. "Cold War II that pits the US and its allies against China and Russia... That’s not going to be fun.”US efforts to potentially develop its own central bank digital currency in such an environment also spells trouble, though the Fed itself hasn't given the official green-light on this front.To illustrate his point, Woo pointed to China, where the launch of a CBDC resulted in a harsh crackdown on services facilitating the exchange of fiat currencies and crypto assets.Earlier this month the Biden Administration issued an executive order which, among other things, “places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”Woo suggests that it is this particular event that will have a profound impact on Bitcoin: “Once you have a CBCC, do you not think the attitude towards Bitcoin is going to change completely?”Episode 22 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and David Woo, Founder and CEO of David Woo Unbound.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

As the market for non-fungible tokens continues to court interest from mainstream corporates, investors, and celebrities, Anchorage co-founder Diogo Mónica reveals how his firm is managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these assets. As Mónica explained during an interview on The Scoop with host Frank Chaparro, there are two main reasons he believes institutions are expressing interest in NFTs:“The first one is that it’s free marketing. You buy an NFT or you do something in crypto and for a few hundred thousand dollars you get tens of millions of dollars of mainstream press. The second reason, which is probably the major reason for the ones who want to build products, is they want to try it out… if you’re going to build a product in NFTs, you have to own one.”Indeed, institutional interest in developing NFT products is accelerating. This month alone, Softbank, Gamestop, and Instagram all announced NFT products slated for release in the near future.Still, Mónica noted that NFTs only represent a small portion of the digital assets of which Anchorage holds custody. “I would say it probably maps in the hundreds of millions. But the business is obviously measured in the tens of billions which makes it not significant enough yet." The core of Anchorage's business is its institutional custodian services, which have been growing since its inception in 2017. Last year, Anchorage became the first federally chartered digital asset bank in the US and has now expanded its operations to lending and trading services.One particularly interesting NFT play that aligns with this narrative was Visa's acquisition of a CryptoPunk NFT last summer, which Anchorage Digital helped to facilitate.Episode 21 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Diogo Monica, Co-Founder and President of Anchorage Digital.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

For those unfamiliar with the term “anon”, it refers to the prolific but anonymous identities that many veteran crypto investors use to discuss projects and express views on the market without revealing details of their personal lives.Out of the legion of such popular anon accounts on Twitter, the members of a syndicate known as “eGirl Capital” have established large followings due to their commentary, research and investment in cryptocurrency.In this episode of The Scoop, CL, an anon from eGirl Capital joins host Frank Chaparro to discuss how the group formed and why they are able to operate so cohesively.What started out in 2020 as a simple group chat between friends became reality when one of the group’s members registered eGirl Capital as a legal entity.While not a VC firm in the traditional sense, the establishment of a legal entity paved the way for eGirl Capital to participate in deals together. At a time when established firms such as Bain Capital are entering the crypto space, CL believes the crypto native anons of eGirl Capital have an edge in terms of spotting quality projects.While being crypto-native gives the group much more experience and knowledge than the traditional financial institutions who are trying to enter the space, eGirl Capital also benefits from their lack of traditional corporate structure.“There is no founder, no head trader...and none of us are getting paid, except for a few interns,” CL said.In regards to potential deals, the decision must be unanimous: “If one person is very firmly ‘no’ then it’s a no.”/This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

VC firm Hashed was founded in 2017 when a group of founders and engineers from South Korea pooled $700,000.Fast-forward five years and more than 500 investments later, and Hashed’s treasury now totals over $4 billion and it is still 100% owned by the firm.Crypto gaming is one of the main pillars of Hashed’s investment thesis, serving as the focal point of a $200 million fund announced in December. While Hashed is actively investing in the emerging Web3 gaming ecosystem, their ambitions don't stop there.In this episode of The Scoop, Baek Kim, general partner at Hashed, joins host Frank Chaparro to explain how Hashed has taken additional steps to help shape the future of crypto gaming.According to Kim, one of the main problems currently facing crypto gaming is sustainability. Indeed, existing crypto gaming projects are fading in popularity, according to data collected by The Block Research.While projects such as Axie Infinity have tried to poach outside talent to reverse shrinking user bases, Hashed has created its own "metaverse ventures studio" with a team of over 80 people in order to help talented game developers incubate more sustainable Web3 games.While existing crypto games largely rely on financial incentives instead of sustainable content to retain their users, Kim notes that games like Axie Infinity are “fun enough to hang out in the Discord channel.”In fact, Kim suggests that interacting with crypto gaming communities outside of the game can be even more fun than actually "playing games." This is a phenomenon that Kim believes is “quite unique about crypto gaming.”Episode 19 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Baek Kim, General Parnter at Hashed.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

LinksDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization aspiring to reimagine the idea of the golf country club through global membership, illustrates the complexity that can underpin the red-hot acronym. While holding a LinksDAO NFT gives users membership rights, there has been some confusion amongst holders as to the extent of what those rights entail. Mike Dudas, co-founder of LinksDAO and 6th Man Ventures, recently discussed the current landscape in an interview on The Scoop.As Dudas explained during the interview:“Today we're in this in-between world where many things that call themselves DAOs are really corporations but have a participatory governance mechanism. So it looks different than a corporation, but it's not truly decentralized and autonomous in the spirit of what I believe these organizations can become over the coming decade.”In the case of LinksDAO, a corporation named LinksDAO Inc. is responsible for fundraising and business development.While owners of LinksDAO NFTs are given membership rights to LinksDAO, they do not receive ownership rights to LinksDAO Inc.“The community is more of an advisory board, so we wouldn't be definitionally a DAO. We would be like a group of members who act as an advisory board to a C-corp.” This division is a necessary reality because, as Dudas puts it, “in America in 2022 you can't sell an NFT to the public using Ethereum self-custody wallets without KYC that gives somebody ownership of an asset.”Still, regardless of the structure of a DAO, projects are cropping up to serve them with tools, Dudas noted. “Right now there are a number of what are called ‘point solutions.’ Early on in the evolution of any ecosystem, what happens is you have solutions that service the most important and critical functions for a DAO.”Funds like Bain Capital Crypto are eyeing this opportunity, with DAO service providers being one of the focus points of their recently announced $560 million fund.This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Spartan Group — an Asia-based consultancy and venture capital firm — is set to close a new $200 million fund aimed at the metaverse, according to Jason Choi, a general partner at the firm.The new fund, which will close less than a year after Spartan announced its $110 million DeFi fund, will focus on projects building in the metaverse, specifically virtual worlds that support “digital ownership" as Choi described in an exclusive interview on The Scoop.To be sure, Spartan is far from alone. A series of big-name investors have recently raised and deployed capital in this space, including a $100 million fund backed by Alan Howard and the Winklevoss twins.The latest market entrance represents a shift for Choi, who was not always as focused on digital ownership. As a self-described fundamentalist investor, Choi wasn’t interested in metaverse projects until the fees generated by Axie Infinity caught his eye in late 2020.“We were pretty skeptical of the sustainability of the game itself,” Choi said. "But the numbers were proving us wrong. And from that experience, it kind of taught us that there's clearly a different type of user in this kind of NFT-metaverse gaming vertical versus the DeFi projects that we're very used to.”Building off its experience with Axie Infinity, Spartan Group’s new fund focuses on three different layers of the metaverse: the infrastructure layer, the experience layer, and the ‘value add layer,’ the latter of which Choi describes as “things that are outside of the metaverse” like guilds and NFT marketplaces.Since Spartan Group’s new fund is designed to capture the value of a fully developed, populated metaverse, Choi believes it will take “at least five or ten years to play out.”Episode 17 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Jason Choi, General Partner at The Spartan Group & Host of The Blockcrunch Podcast.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Multicoin Capital co-founder & managing partner Kyle Samani, an early investor in both Solana and FTX, is turning his attention today towards the NFT space.In this episode of the Scoop, Samani shared his strategy and investment thesis on where he sees NFTs going in the coming months. Samani believes that NFTs will evolve from their current form of mostly static jpegs and become more dynamic, similar to how Web pages evolved since the early days of the internet."So far in NFTs we don’t really have a lot of ‘pieces of state’ that have a relationship to one another," he said. "You vaguely have this in the notion that there are 10,000 apes in a collection, but beyond the fact that they all have the ‘ape tag’ on them, they actually don’t really have a relationship to one another.”Samani used Beeple’s 5000 Days, a collection of 5,000 small NFTs in a 2x2 grid as, an example:“[MetaKovan] who bought it should introduce some sort of game and say, ‘if you can assemble 9 of the 5,000 in a square, you unlock something.’ Now you can start to say that these NFTs have relationships to each other in some sort of unique way.”While Samani sees a lot of potential for innovation in the NFT design space, he believes that it is “unlikely” that Multicoin Capital will hold even a 1% position in NFTs. Instead of buying in NFTs directly, Multicoin Capital is investing in the underlying technology.“There are three major layers of the stack to think about, and we are investing in two of them,” Kyle said. Those two layers are the 'primitives or infrastructure layer,’ and the second is in NFT exchanges or marketplaces directly. The third layer, outright ownership of NFTs, Samani doesn't currently see as being viable enough for Multicoin Capital to invest in at scale.Episode 16 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Kyle Samani, Founder & Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Bitcoin is converging with one of the largest industries in the world: oil and gas.In this episode of The Scoop, Justin Ballard, co-founder of Jai Energy, joined The Block's Frank Chaparro to discuss how his Wyoming-based firm is working with producers of oil and gas to help them put excess energy to work by mining bitcoin."Every single of one them that calls us, typically are calling us about a flare gas situation," Ballard, who worked for more than a decade as an attorney and operator in the oil industry prior to founding Jai, said of new entrants to bitcoin mining from the oil and gas world."The oil and gas industry and bitcoin mining can work together," he said.Jai uses the excess energy or 'run-off' owned by oil companies to power bitcoin mining, which offers a new revenue stream for gas companies and energy for Jai's bitcoin mining operation. Ballard explained how the synergies between these groups will expand:"There's a variety of areas where oil and gas companies have megawatts of excess capacity that they've so capital into building out, but they're not utilizing on a daily basis. And we've had some success showing them those areas and where it's like, Look, you can go build a very nice bitcoin mine on this facility."Ballard also explained how the business models of oil and gas firms and bitcoin mining companies are nearly identical, with the main difference being the change in difficulty built into the bitcoin network.For more visit Theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 15 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Justin Ballard, CEO & Founder at Jai Energy.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

For crypto venture investors, 2021 was a landmark year. The flood of capital that poured more than $28.65 billion into crypto firms last year was propped up by new billion-dollar fund launches, a ramp-up in venture investing among crypto firms, and investor appetite for a general risk-on environment, giving way to a new class of angel investors in the market.But 2022 has been more risk-off, with the crypto market shedding billions of market cap on news that inflation could lead to a hike in interest rates, plus the addition of geo-political uncertainty, which has caused its own price gyrations across markets. This pullback has begun seeping into the private crypto market, according to venture capital investor Darren Lau, who founded crypto educational resource The Daily Ape and runs VC firm Not3Lau Capital. Lau has backed projects including Nansen, Trader Joe, and Mixmob. He was also an early Solana investor.“I talked to a few projects recently, like just this week, and they were telling me like how even though these VC’s were committing to the round a month ago, two months ago, they’re pulling out of the deals based on how the market looks right now," Lau said on the most recent episode of The Scoop.They're also being much more selective compared to previously. "So back then a lot more VC’s were spraying and praying," added Lau. The "spray and pray" approach — which involves an investor making a bunch of bets on the hope that one will deliver a massive upside — appears to be becoming less of a darling strategy in today's market.Says Lau: "People are being more careful with their capital."Episode 14 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Darren Lau of The Daily Ape and Not3Lau Capital.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Jump Trading is one of the deepest-pocketed firms operating in the crypto market. Jump put its full scale on display earlier this month when the firm stepped up to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in losses after Wormhole—a DeFi project to which Jump contributes code—was hacked. In this episode of The Scoop, Jump president and CIO Dave Olsen explained how the firm reacted to the hack and market-bought more than $300 million in ETH to cover the losses."This was not a syndicate or a group of folks that pool resources to go out and purchase 120,000 ether," he said, explaining:"We did debate that but what led to such a swift conclusion was what we felt that we would have a bigger impact on the community by immediately being able to tell everything that their assets were backed one-to-one and step up and kind of lead the community."Once a secretive equities trading operation, Jump Trading has become more public-facing in a bid to grow its presence in the crypto market.During this episode, Olsen dove into details that have not been historically talked about publicly—including Olsen's view on what is important in market making in both crypto and traditional markets.In Olsen's view, connectivity to as many venues as possible is one of the three "building blocks" for being successful as a market maker. "You've got to be involved and connected to and able to trade pretty much everywhere that instrument trades," he said. In addition to connectivity, you also need ample capital, he said. "So connectivity, scale, and then the ability to analyze all the information you're getting and translate that into your best prediction of what should the price be for that asset at that moment in time? Those are really the three building blocks.”Episode 13 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Dave Olsen, President & Chief Investment Officer at Jump Trading Group.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

The United States Congress turned its attention to stablecoins this month, with senior Treasury official Nellie Liang fielding a range of questions during twin hearings in the House of Representatives and the Senate.The hearings centered on a recent report on stablecoins penned by members of the President's Working Group, which Liang oversaw. That report urged Congress to create "rules of the road" for stablecoin issuers, mainly by restricting stablecoin issuance to insured depository institutions (IDIs). The Treasury has already designated stablecoins a "systemic risk" for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, meaning that if Congress fails to act, the council can step in. Liang told the House and the Senate that she believes in flexibility for any charter standards related to stablecoin issuers. In the meantime, proposals are beginning to float around the Hill. During this month's Policy Scoop, The Block's Aislinn Keely sits down with The Block's senior policy reporter, Kollen Post. Post was in attendance for both hearings and has been on the ground tracking the stablecoin regulation landscape from report to proposals.... For more visit theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 12 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Aislinn Keely and senior policy reporter Kollen Post.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

After a year of exponential growth, North American Bitcoin mining companies have raised billions of dollars in 2021 through equity and debt instruments to invest in both new top-of-the-line equipment and additional power capacities.The latest special episode of The Scoop – the Mining Report – features The Block Research's mining analyst Wolfie Zhao and host Frank Chaparro as they discuss the state of mining in North America, which is steadily growing its market dominance with the state of Texas rising to be the new biggest hub for Bitcoin mining.Some of the topics covered in the episode include: The potential growth of the network's hashrate in 2022 The current power capacity supply crunch The rise of traditional energy companies that are increasing their market shares in Bitcoin mining Episode 11 of Season 4 of The Scoop's Mining Report was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Research Mining Analyst Wolfie Zhao.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Wealth and financial advisors oversee trillions of dollars in assets.While a wide range of financial services, from trading firms to exchanges to hedge funds, have warmed up to the crypto market, wealth and financial advisors have largely remained on the sidelines.During the latest episode of The Scoop, Michael Batnick, director of research at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and Jeremy Schwartz, EVP and global chief investment officer at Wisdom Tree Asset Management, walked listeners through the RWM WisdomTree Crypto Index and the state of crypto wealth management today.Ritholtz Wealth Management and Wisdom Tree Asset Management recently announced the launch of a new diversified crypto index for financial advisors in December 2021. Through a partnership with Onramp Invest, the index can be offered by financial advisors via separately managed accounts (SMAs). "The US regulators still can't get their heads wrapped around a bitcoin spot ETF, which we think is the best structure for a 100 percent allocation," noted Wisdom Tree's Jeremy Schwartz.In Batnick's view, the crypto market hasn't done a good job marketing itself to advisors. A report released earlier this year by asset management firm Bitwise suggests that 16% of financial advisors have allocated to crypto in their clients' accounts — an increase from 9% in 2021. Batnick suspects that number might be far lower. "An informal survey, I'd say we're under 1 percent," he contended. "The reason why is because I think that the products that were available to financial advisers have not been suitable or at least had difficulties getting advisers comfortable wrapping their arms around the solution."Episode 10 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Michael Batnick, Director of Research at Ritholtz Wealth Management and Jeremy Schwartz, EVP & Global Chief Investment Officer at Wisdom Tree Asset Management.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Avi Felman's eyes are glued to his trading screen, waiting for market-moving headlines that could be prime opportunities to put on a multi-million crypto trade. These past few weeks have been especially active for the portfolio manager, who joined crypto investment firm BlockTower in November 2019. Felman, who co-leads the firm's flagship fund, navigated price gyrations stemming from macro and industry news, ranging from headlines that government officials recovered funds from Bitfinex's 2016 hack to more recent news that Russia could invade neighbor Ukraine.On this episode of The Scoop, Felman explained the decision-making process that goes into making a trade on headlines, using reports that Russia was on the verge of invading Ukraine as one case study example. "I know that the context is that the Biden administration has been warning about Russia for quite some time," he said. "I know that bitcoin doesn't like uncertainty. I read the headline as being extremely uncertain."Whether a certain news event adds uncertainty is just one factor Felman considers. Timing is equally important. "Okay, I want to make a trade and this all happens in the span of, you have to think, about 15 to 30 seconds," he explained. "You need to make those connections. Then I need to start de-risking a little bit."In some instances, Felman takes a cue from the S&P 500, which has been moving very closely with bitcoin despite the crypto's reputation as a hedge asset."The vast majority of time the bitcoin decouples from the S&P, it's because of a delayed reaction," he said. "It's because bitcoin has some idiosyncratic crypto native bidder that isn't paying attention to broader risk."...For more visit Theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 9 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Avi Felman, Co-Portfolio Manager at Blocktower Capital.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

2021 was a landmark year for Genesis Global. The trading firm — which operates a wide-range of businesses spanning lending and prime services — clocked in more than $100 billion in spot crypto volumes in 2021. On the lending side of the house, cumulative loan originations stood at more than $130 billion. On this episode of The Scoop, head of derivatives at Genesis Joshua Lim helped unpack the dynamics shaping the market behind its headline Q4 numbers.In addition to a compression in the popular, and once very juicy, basis trade, Lim explained that the market became more dynamic with big new hedge funds entering the fold. At the same time, existing participants become more engaged with the market – holding crypto on their balance sheet for not just investment purposes, but for operational use as well.“It could be linked to receiving payments denominated in tokens from projects that they had executed for other firms. It could be related to running nodes on a blockchain,” Lim said. “It could be more traditional kind of crypto native use cases like receiving a percentage of whatever assets under custody as sort of a revenue stream.”“We saw those types of firms really engaging on derivative hedges that would, you know, protect them on the downside, which was actually kind of useful.”Lim added that as more firms enter the space through the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), demand for such hedging tools could extend beyond the crypto native investors that Genesis is used to dealing with. The firm has already started accepting NFTs as collateral for certain loans. Still, it’s early days for NFT-related lending. “It's not something that we do on a regular basis,” Lim said. “I think from a business perspective, it's still, let's say, less than 50 basis points of our overall lending business in terms of the magnitude of the collateral value.Episode 8 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Joshua Lim, Head of Derivatives at Genesis Global Trading.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

For some, a landscape of colorful NFTs and crypto anons can be daunting — yet for traditional investors, it can present an array of new challenges that require near-constant adjustment or reinvention. But as novel use cases evolve under the twin banners of "Web3" and "the metaverse," business interests such as VC firm Standard Crypto are eyeing the opportunity to leap into such a world. During this episode of The Scoop, Alok Vasudev, co-founder at Standard Crypto, joined The Block's Frank Chaparro to discuss the future of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and NFTs, when a project "merits" a DAO, and how Vasudev learned to stop worrying and embrace the 'weirdness' of crypto. Vasudev contends that, unlike other venture firms, Standard Crypto doesn't follow themes but rather operates first as fans of the innovations technology can present.This broad investment approach has recently included DAOs, which Vasudev said he believes could one day potentially function like companies in the future, with the added benefit of on-chain governance. "One thing that we talk about is whether DAOs in how they're structured are actually going to evolve to look a little bit more like companies than they have in the past, but with radically different accountability structures because of token holder governance."Vasudev also believes NFTs and projects being built for Web3 may likely serve as the proving ground for the future iterations of internet success stories like Angry Birds or Facebook: "I think I remember the first time I was kind of stunned that they were actually making an Angry Birds movie... So this idea that kind of internet culture is just going to become mainstream culture, I think is already proven out. And now I think NFTs are the next chapter in that story."Episode 7 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Alok Vasudev, co-founder at Standard Crypto.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Tucked away in Signal’s app is a new “Beta” feature that allows users to send payments between each-other seamlessly. It’s powered by a crypto project called MobileCoin.On this episode of The Scoop, MobileCoin founder and CEO Josh Goldbard joined Frank Chaparro to explain how MobileCoin is trying to blend encrypted messaging and payments to make global money transfers easy. Goldbard and Chaparro explore the increasingly dynamic environment for payments, which has diverse firms from Walmart to Facebook to Jack Dorsey’s Cash App competing for mindshare and transactions.“What we're building is the global Cash App, the global Cash App that allows you to move money in and out at the velocity of the internet,” Goldbard described of the project.“What we want to make here is the last payment rail,” he added. “What makes it the last payment rail is that it is the lowest friction, highest priority, easiest to use payment technology ever made.”In this episode we also explore: What raising venture capital is like in a frothy venture environment Goldbard’s game-plan to recruit top engineers Why Signal decided to partner with MobileCoin How Goldbard poached Cash App’s founding CTO Bob Lee Episode 6 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Josh Goldbard, founder and CEO of MobileCoin.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About Coinbase PrimeCoinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Since volumes skyrocketed in 2021 across marketplaces, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have seemed to become a focal point of the art and gaming world. Love them or hate them, NFT enthusiasts argue that the medium is in the infancy of its evolution. Adopters are beginning to appreciate not only the aesthetics of NFTs, but their potential usefulness. On this episode of The Scoop, Head of Growth at Parallel NFT Franklin Fitch and artist Dave Krugman joined host Frank Chaparro to discuss how NFTs are radically transforming the relationship between creators and the art market, as well as the gaming industry.Krugman compared the current state of NFTs to the early days of Instagram, when early adopters had to learn to become comfortable with sharing content without monetizing it. As the network effect of users and creators grew, eventually Instagram gave creators a way to make money on their efforts -- with certain caveats, like follower milestones. According to Krugman, adapting NFTs comes with an even steeper learning curve."This is a technology that is fundamentally going to change the way that we connect and operate with each other -- it's a lot," said Krugman, when referencing artists who are anti-NFT. Fitch noted that NFTs would be particularly disruptive for the video game industry in the realm of creating incentives for gamers such as loot boxes, which are tethered to their ecosystems and have no external value. Unlike traditional in-game assets, NFTs fundamentally allow an asset to be exchangeable, tied to a marketplace, and to allow for social signaling between players.As Fitch noted, "It adds new levels of competitiveness, new levels of participation, re-imaginings of incentives, right? New social layers. I think it's fantastic. And this is the power games."... For more visit the theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 5 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Head of Growth Franklin Fitch at Parallel NFT & Photographer & Digital Artist Dave Krugman.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Kraken & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the daily lives of virtually everyone around the world radically changed. Commutes to the office ceased. Concerts and dining outings were canceled.For some, punting stocks and cryptocurrencies on online brokerages filled the void. That fundamental shift reshaped US equity markets, ushering in an era dominated by Wall Street Bets, meme stocks, and cryptocurrency. Indeed, retail trading has yet to subside even as economies reopen. Monthly net purchases of US equities by individual investors have stabilized at around $20 billion—a surge from the pre-pandemic norm of about $5 billion. On this episode of The Scoop, eToro's newly-appointed US lead Lule Demmissie explained why she doesn't see retail's newfound presence in the market subsiding anytime soon, and how eToro plans to capitalize on growing its business related to cryptocurrencies and stock trading."What you're seeing is the sustainability of that user base staying engaged, waiting for dips, getting in the markets when necessary," said Demmissie, former Ally Invest president and TD Ameritrade managing director."Ultimately they're sticking around and they're engaging every time there's volatility," she added. Demmissie said that the collective mind of the retail crowd could have more insight than institutions previously may have thought."I'm originally from Ethiopia, right? So I grew up in the throes of a revolution. So the idea of mob rule is something that is like embedded in my DNA as to be averse to it," said Demmissie. "There is a self-made mechanism, a self-clearing mechanism that is happening in social, where there is a balance that takes place within the crowd, where the crowd gets smarter and smarter, and the synthesis of it afterwards becomes something that is really interesting to listen to."Episode 4 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and CEO Lule Demmissie of eToroUS.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Kraken & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

ADA — the native cryptocurrency of the Cardano network — is among the myriad of cryptocurrencies that saw their price soar in 2021.On this episode of The Scoop, The Block's Frank Chaparro sat down with Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input-Output Global, to unpack the ecosystem underpinning the price headlines.While Cardano's ADA has surged over the course of 2021, the blockchain that underpins the token is yet to play host to a large decentralized exchange, of the kind that have sprung up on Solana or Ethereum. There have also been questions about the number of successful decentralized applications or 'DApps' in the ecosystem, when compared to others.Hoskinson says that this sentiment reflects a misunderstanding about what is being developed on Cardano."There's almost 200 DApps that are under construction right now," he noted. "SundaeSwap is one of the most prominent, it's launching tomorrow," referring to the DEX that launched Thursday — albeit with congestion issues that resulted in some transactions taking longer than expected to complete."There are several already running on the ecosystem," Hoskinson clarified.In the future, Cardano could even continue to exist without the participation of the Wyoming-resident. As Hoskinson opined, "the founders are important because they get the party started and they set the initial state of the system." He went on to add, "I think that you have to plan for obsolescence, you have to plan to fire yourself. And that's what Satoshi did."Episode 3 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input-Output Global.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Kraken & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Last year, cryptocurrency concerns took center stage in an ongoing debate over the US government's trillion-dollar infrastructure bill.The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act proposed a variety of ways to pay for its intended projects, including a heightened focus on crypto tax reporting. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has long teased unified broker reporting for exchanges, meaning entities that fall under the broker definition will be required to report information and send tax forms to the IRS. The infrastructure bill made it official: broker reporting is coming in 2023. But some are worried the bill's definition of a "broker" is too broad and could encompass entities that can't reasonably report to the IRS, like miners or decentralized finance (DeFi) entities. Key amendments to clarify that definition failed to pass, and it's now all on the to clarify "broker" in its upcoming guidance.In this week's Policy Scoop, The Block's Aislinn Keely dives into the current landscape of crypto tax reporting and how the coming guidance might affect taxpayers.Keely spoke with Justin Woodward, tax attorney and co-founder of TaxBit, and Seth Wilks, Senior Director of SME and Government Relations at TaxBit about: The historical context of the long-awaited broker reporting guidance and why it matters. What will likely be in the guidance and why it's likely to affect centralized exchanges first. When it will take effect and what that might look like. How the IRS is thinking about DeFi and non-fungible tokens. Episode 2 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Aislinn Keely and Justin Woodward, tax attorney & co-founder of TaxBit and Seth Wilks, Senior Director of SME & Government Relations, at TaxBitListen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Kraken & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

2021 was a watershed year for crypto exchange Coinbase. In addition to becoming the biggest cryptocurrency company to tap the public markets via a direct listing, the firm grew its total assets-on-platform to more than $255 billion, hired more than 3,000 people, and clocked in quarterly revenues above $1 billion during both the second and third quarters. Still, the company’s stock price has slid since its market debut in April, down by more than 31% since its first day of trading. The bearish sentiment is likely tied to the lack of predictability in Coinbase’s revenues, which are volatile and heavily dependent on trading fees.During the latest episode of The Scoop, Coinbase president Emilie Choi said that Wall Street is focused too much on the predictability of short-term revenue rather than the much broader gameplan the company has for becoming a foundation for the emerging crypto-economy.“We have obviously our flagship brokerage, and then we have the exchange and those are reinventing what a financial system can mean,” she said. “And then the final part of this strategy is about crypto as a new form of App Store, and there’s so much to tap into there.”That shift could help diversify its revenue model, she added. “We have largely a trading model that generates a ton of revenue for us, and we love that model and we’re totally OK with the volatility of it. And at the same time, we’re investing very heavily in the subscription and services model, and you’re seeing a lot of growth from that because it’s the thing that helps us control our own destiny.”To that end, Choi said the firm plans to pour more resources into its Coinbase Wallet. It is also expanding its subscription businesses — like Coinbase Cloud — as a means to grow its non-transaction-based revenue.....For more visit theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 1 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and President & COO Emilie Choi of Coinbase.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Kraken & ChainalysisFireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.About KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About ChainalysisChainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder of crypto exchange FTX, joins The Scoop to close out 2021 in a two-part episode that explores the origin story of the increasingly ubiquitous trading venue, Bankman-Fried's worldview, and what he expects for the digital asset market in the year to come.In Part 2 of this episode, Bankman-Fried and Chaparro also explore: Whether a crackdown on stablecoins is a possible concern for FTX’s business The ramifications of the government’s “really extreme fiscal” reaction to Covid-19 and its impact on the monetary supply Why the Fed should have seen hot inflation coming Product leverage in the cryptocurrency market and cascading liquidations How the amount of capital sitting on the sidelines is “absolutely massive” and could fend off a big crypto bear market Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from founder and former FTX and Alameda CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions.Episode 86 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken and KavaBakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more informationAbout KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About KavaFor over four years, Kava Labs has contributed to building a portfolio of decentralized products and services that allow users to gain access to all of the benefits of DeFi. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on one of DeFi’s most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platforms. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets with a simple and intuitive user experience and the full confidence of institutional-grade security and quality. With a proven track record of delivering successful projects safely, the Kava Platform is DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure institutional-grade cross-chain engine.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder of crypto exchange FTX, joins The Scoop to close out 2021 in a two-part episode that explores the origin story of the increasingly ubiquitous trading venue, Bankman-Fried's worldview, and what he expects for the digital asset market in the year to come.We begin with Part 1, during which the former Jane Street trader and Stanford graduate harkens back to the precious beginnings of FTX, spun out of Alameda Research, a trading firm he also founded. Bankman-Fried also explained why the firm was launched in the first place back in 2019. “What it really was, was saying, OK here’s a business [that’s] making $1 billion-plus a year collectively at the time, which we understand deeply,” he said. “They were just not well built. The number of problems they had were enormous. Losing millions of dollars a day in customer funds ... the risk engines just didn’t work. And you could see why.”As Bankman-Fried recalled, some back-of-envelope math played a role in the decision-making process. He said he considered what the expected value of an exchange could be and figured that the odds of success were non-trivial:"I don’t know exactly how high, but definitely not close to zero, so fuck, it let’s do it. That was basically the chain of logic there. Eighty percent chance we fail to ever get a user. If we do get users then there is a 50% chance that it goes pretty well.”Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from founder and former FTX and Alameda CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions.Episode 85 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken and KavaBakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more informationAbout KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About KavaFor over four years, Kava Labs has contributed to building a portfolio of decentralized products and services that allow users to gain access to all of the benefits of DeFi. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on one of DeFi’s most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platforms. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets with a simple and intuitive user experience and the full confidence of institutional-grade security and quality. With a proven track record of delivering successful projects safely, the Kava Platform is DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure institutional-grade cross-chain engine.

On this episode of The Scoop, The Block's VP of Research Larry Cermak joined host Frank Chaparro for a discussion in which he broke down his predictions for the top crypto trends to come in 2022.For the year ahead, Cermak expects that market appetite for established projects will continue, and that exchanges and data businesses in particular stand to benefit most.“If there is already an established exchange or established data business and it just needs a little bit of cash to raise, they're never going to have issues," Cermak remarked.Layer-2's in focusCermak also outlined why he believes layer-2 networks — protocols that enable faster and cheaper transactions on top of blockchains — will be a central theme of 2022, with a particular focus on zero-knowledge rollups.“I do think that there's going to be a big development in layer-2's next year," said Cermak, adding:“You have the first proper decentralized applications launching on these chains not just built for Ethereum, but built already for the layer-2’s. So I think that will be the main theme of next year when it comes to this perspective.” The next NFT wave?Despite recent reductions in attention on NFTs as a whole, Cermak believes there's going to be a shift in demand for certain kinds of NFTs and gaming tokens.Indeed, he expects the NFT market to continue to grow and become more sophisticated in its next wave. “I think, you know, maybe some of the profile NFTs are not going to be as hot next year," Cermak told Chaparro, "But I think some of the more creative ones and in-game assets of proper games… I think we’re going to see some of that next year.”For an overview of The Block's 2022 Digital Asset Outlook, you can download the free, public report from The Block Research team here. Episode 84 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Larry Cermak, VP of Research at The Block.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken and KavaBakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more informationAbout KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About KavaFor over four years, Kava Labs has contributed to building a portfolio of decentralized products and services that allow users to gain access to all of the benefits of DeFi. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on one of DeFi’s most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platforms. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets with a simple and intuitive user experience and the full confidence of institutional-grade security and quality. With a proven track record of delivering successful projects safely, the Kava Platform is DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure institutional-grade cross-chain engine.

As 2021 comes to a close, Copper's head of research Fadi Aboualfa joined The Block's VP of Research Larry Cermak and host Frank Chaparro to unpack the trends that shaped the crypto market this year as well as the future dynamics that might be on the horizon for 2022.Aboualfa highlighted the ascent of so-called meme cryptocurrencies like dogecoin and shiba inu, which surged in value this year. Aboualfa said their rise is tied to strong social and community elements."There's a social aspect to that price appreciation," he said. "Bitcoin started by a couple of people who really believe in it and started becoming very vocal about it."Another trend unpacked by Aboualfa was the race to become the next Ethereum killer. Projects like Avalanche and Solana are among the layer-1s that have seen their price surge as investors appear to believe that these blockchains might be superior to Ethereum.Ultimately, Aboualfa and Cermak both agreed that the crypto markets won't face a prolonged bear market akin to the one that occurred in 2018, but markets will face volatility and short-term setbacks. Cermak outlined two major risks in 2022 that markets face:"One is that, you know, central banks are now starting to hint at tapering measures, starting to hint at being less aggressive when it comes to just responding to Covid and responding to the situation. That, I think, can have a very negative effect when the market starts pricing in that the central banks are going to be way more conservative.""Second risk that I think is pretty real, but I think it's now smaller after what I've seen yesterday at the hearing, is the regulatory risk in the US," he added, referring to the recent hearing on crypto hosted by the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services.Episode 83 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Larry Cermak, VP of Research at The Block, and Fadi Aboualfa, Head of Research at Copper.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken and KavaBakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more informationAbout KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About KavaFor over four years, Kava Labs has contributed to building a portfolio of decentralized products and services that allow users to gain access to all of the benefits of DeFi. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on one of DeFi’s most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platforms. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets with a simple and intuitive user experience and the full confidence of institutional-grade security and quality. With a proven track record of delivering successful projects safely, the Kava Platform is DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure institutional-grade cross-chain engine.

A lot has changed since the sluggish days of the crypto bear market in 2019, according to infamous Twitter personality “Loomdart.”The investor at Egirl Capital—an anonymous group of crypto traders—joined host Frank Chaparro for a discussion about how the market has matured since 2019's doldrums and why he believes it will only continue to mature in the years ahead. In Loomdart's view, cryptocurrencies are no longer as correlated with one other as they once were. However, he also acknowledged that today the recent Metaverse and NFT headlines have temporarily “hijacked” momentum in the $2 trillion market.“Ever since this kind of metaverse narrative started and Facebook did the whole 'Meta' brand takeover, there has been this gigantic influx of capital,” he said.To be sure, Loomdart is also talking about his own book as the founder of MetaDrop, which recently helped Alien-themed shooting game VAIL raise money through an NFT drop. But the anonymous UK-native has data to back up his investment thesis. Over the past month, NFT gaming firm Sandbox raised $93 million, while Solana Ventures, FTX, and Lightspeed Venture Partners has raised $100 million for a blockchain gaming fund.Loomdart told Chaparro that this VC interest in the metaverse and NFTs will ultimately feed back into the broader crypto market, thereby making it more dynamic.“This isn't 2017, 2018's crypto anymore,” Said Loomdart. “Everything was just one market, but like crypto has evolved so far beyond that.”In this episode, Chaparro and Loomdart discuss: How Ether's "flippening" of bitcoin could open up a Pandora’s box Why Loomdart believes crypto prices will likely “slowly go up forever” The impact of the macro backdrop on crypto prices Why the metaverse will only take off if crypto is in the background Episode 82 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Loomdart, Co-Founder of MetaDrop.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken and KavaBakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more informationAbout KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About KavaFor over four years, Kava Labs has contributed to building a portfolio of decentralized products and services that allow users to gain access to all of the benefits of DeFi. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on one of DeFi’s most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platforms. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets with a simple and intuitive user experience and the full confidence of institutional-grade security and quality. With a proven track record of delivering successful projects safely, the Kava Platform is DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure institutional-grade cross-chain engine.

“The evolution is inevitable.”On this episode of The Scoop, Partner at Lightspeed Ventures Amy Wu joined host Frank Chaparro to discuss Lighstpeed's investments in the intersection of crypto and gaming as well as the problems participants in that corner of the market face. Specifically, Wu says that game developers in crypto have to worry about not only building a good game but creating financial incentives to support a robust in-game economy. "Opening up a game economy and allowing a lot of really creative incentivization of both player and creator alike can actually deeply add to a game environment," she said.The rise of in-game economiesAs for blockchain-focused companies, specifically, Wu said that such projects will have to abstract away the complexities of blockchain to allow for a superior gaming experience. "The primary reason for some of these games with the longest longevity is not going to be around NFT speculation at all. It ultimately will actually just be about gameplay in my opinion...it cannot be the main driver of play." Turning in-game assets into NFTs solves a big problem for game developers and players, allowing holders of in-game assets to tap into their value. “Gamers have been buying digital assets in games for decades, so this is essentially just the next step towards that evolution… I think that having the ability to invest the time, actually put money into the game to buy these assets, and then sort of have some guarantee that there will be some value coming out of the assets as well is pretty attractive”.... For more visit theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 81 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Amy Wu, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to [email protected] episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken and KavaBakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more informationAbout KrakenWhether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.About KavaFor over four years, Kava Labs has contributed to building a portfolio of decentralized products and services that allow users to gain access to all of the benefits of DeFi. Kava connects the world's largest cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and financial applications on one of DeFi’s most trusted, scalable, and secure earning platforms. Kava lets you mint stablecoins, lend, borrow, earn and swap safely and efficiently across the world’s biggest crypto assets with a simple and intuitive user experience and the full confidence of institutional-grade security and quality. With a proven track record of delivering successful projects safely, the Kava Platform is DeFi's most trusted, scalable, and secure institutional-grade cross-chain engine.