The Scoop

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 Decembe...

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 V...

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"...

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,...

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...

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...

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 m...

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 roa...

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 stat...

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...

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 in...

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 dy...

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 th...

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...

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 Para...

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 cryptocurren...

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 blockchai...

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 entitie...

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...

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...

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...

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 establis...

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. Abo...

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, cryptocurre...

“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...