The Scoop

Aya Kantorovich, head of institutional coverage at FalconX, has been experiencing a bit of déjà vu.  Kantorovich, a former associate at crypto hedge fund Pantera, joined The Scoop to unpack the crypto market's recent bouts of volatility and how the market is stuck in a cycle of retail-led drawdowns. FalconX — an aggregator of crypto trading flows — has a window into both the retail and institution...

Elon Musk's trigger-happy Twitter fingers have left the bitcoin world in a tizzy in recent days. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent piece, Musk has become bitcoin's "biggest influencer" — much to the dismay of many evangelists. Since he first tweeted that Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin as payment because of environmental concerns, bitcoin has fallen about 40% from its all-time highs....

In Vance Spencer's view, the market is completely undercounting the amount of capital that's about to move into the crypto world from institutional investor circles.  The co-founder of the $1 billion-plus investment firm Framework Ventures would have a good sense of that trajectory, considering how Framework wrapped up a $100 million fundraise for a new fund in the decentralized finance market. An...

Wall Street is embracing crypto one headline-driving development at a time. From Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley, major banks are moving from exploring the digital asset world to fully operating in it. Goldman , for instance, announced Friday it would restart its market for non-deliverable forwards tied to bitcoin. Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman have said they will offer their wealthiest clients...

It's been an impressive month for the digital assets tied to billionaire crypto exchange executive Sam Bankman-Fried.  Solana, the layer-1 blockchain competitor to Ethereum, has seen its price surge 47.8% over the last month, according to CoinGecko . Bankman-Fried is one of Solana's most prominent supporters. Meanwhile, Serum, the Solana-based DEX, has seen its native token Serum increase by nearl...

It was a tweet heard 'round the crypto world.  A breaking news account fired off, in all caps, an unsubstantiated headline that the U.S. Treasury Department was set to crack down on a number of unknown banks for their activity in the crypto market. Soon after the tweet's release, several industry insiders — including the Blockchain Association's Kristin Smith — threw cold water on its key claim. ...

Apex Clearing facilitates more than 1.7 million trades a day as the clearing and custody firm behind hundreds of fintech trading platforms. The firm, which entered the crypto market in 2019, provides more than 200 companies, including the likes of Stash, Public.com, and WeBull, with the technology to clear stock trades. At one point Apex also powered Robinhood's platform before the California-base...

Crypto brokers are making money hand over fist.  The direct listing of Coinbase put on display just how much money such firms are making, with the exchange reporting nearly $2 billion in revenues during the first quarter of 2021. Much of those revenues were transactional and from trades made on its retail brokerage platform. Other large brokerages want in on the action, according to Edward Woodfor...

Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, isn't convinced by the bitcoin narrative yet, but it's listening. On this week's episode of The Scoop, Bridgewater's director of portfolio strategy Jim Haskel said he's not surprised by the growing institutional interest. Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio previously said he didn't see bitcoin's merits as a currency, but he amended his statements in a newsle...

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez turned heads earlier this year when he said he wanted the Florida city to add bitcoin to its treasury .  Now, Suarez is pushing a commitment for the city to explore crypto by turning his attention to Ethereum. According to a new episode of The Scoop, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and Suarez announced that they have embarked on a new collaborative project focused on ci...

Michelle Bond has been focused on financial regulation for decades, and a turn to crypto policy a few years ago led her to take the helm at the Association for Digital Assets Markets by the end of 2020. ADAM is a trade association for crypto markets, featuring a code of conduct that requires its members to commit to operating with certain requirements of transparency and speed. "ADAM is 100% a sta...

After much anticipation, Uniswap v3 — the latest upgrade to the Ethereum-based decentralized exchange — was announced Tuesday. On this episode of The Scoop, The Block Research's Mika Honkasalo walked through the designed upgrade, explaining the significance of Uniswap's adoption of "concentrated liquidity" which aims to make trading on the platform more capital efficient.  In Honkasalo's view, thi...

Digital artist Beeple sold his collection of 5000 daily works for a whopping $69 million in a Christie's auction last week. That's the third-highest auction price on record for a living artist, but the sale was record breaking for another reason — it was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT). In recent weeks, NFTs have soared in popularity, and that's created opportunities for big and small artists a...

Fidelity Digital Assets — the cryptocurrency division of multi-trillion asset manager Fidelity — is among the several firms riding the institutional bitcoin wave.  FDA, which launched amid a bitcoin bear market in 2018, offers trading and custody services to a wide range of institutional firms. On this episode of The Scoop, Fidelity's Christine Sandler — a veteran of the trading world — walked thr...

The market for non-fungible tokens, digital collectibles, and tokenized music is hitting the mainstream. On Thursday, Beeple's NFT-powered suite of 5,000 images sold for a staggering $69 million, making it the third-highest figure paid for work by a living artist. Indeed, the sale sent shockwaves across the broader press, cementing NFT's place in the mainstream consciousness. The market has been g...

The market for non-fungible tokens and digital collectibles has been growing at a breakneck pace, with projects like Dapper Lab's NBA Top Shot seeing user activity and transaction volumes soar. Since the beginning of the year, the burgeoning market — which runs the gamut of sports collectibles to digital cats — has seen more than half a billion in weekly trade volumes, according to data compiled b...

ARK Invest has had quite the 2021.  Since the beginning of the year—underpinned by unprecedented trading volumes and retail activity—ARK has seen its assets under management soar, buoyed by its bets high-growth tech stocks. Many of the names ARK has backed overlap with the stocks that have become darlings among the Wall Street Bets crowd. Indeed, ARK has grown into a heavy-hitter on Wall Street, w...

Led by Ethereum 2.0 developer and Prysmatic Labs founder Preston Van Loon and Joe Sticco, Cryptex is set to launch the mainnet of its token TCAP in the next few weeks. Already, the firm has lined up 500 users for its testnet, including a number of liquidity providers in the US. On this episode of The Scoop, Sticco and Van Loon breakdown the launch of their token, which offers investors a way to bu...

Regulators in Canada approved two bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in recent days, marking the first approvals of their kind for North America. Since launch, the products have seen considerable inflows. With the demand for a bitcoin ETF now proven, many wonder what a Canadian approval could mean for a U.S. offering.  The Scoop spoke with Eric Balchunas, a senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, about...

Thursday morning, Coinbase's S-1 filing went public , revealing for the first time details about its financials, cap table, and its pitch to the investment world ahead of a planned direct listing on Nasdaq. In this episode of The Scoop, The Block's director of news Frank Chaparro and director of research Larry Cermak unpack the S-1 filing's headline - grabbing sections and the broader implications...

Decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX is expanding. After raising $10 million in  Series B funding  last month, the team is gearing up for its coming V3 launch. Founder Antonio Juliano sat down with The Scoop this week to talk about where the decentralized finance (DeFi) space is going in the coming year. They could be the answer to the traditional financial system's transparency and security pr...

Michael Sonnenshein took the reigns of cryptocurrency asset manager Grayscale Investments earlier this year.  At the helm of the more than $30 billion investment firm, Sonnenshein is charting a course for a broad expansion of the business, which is best known for its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. "We brought in $5.7 billion last year," Sonnenshein said. "We are launching new products, we are investing...

"It's been number one on the ask list for a long time." That's Tim McCourt, global head of equity products for CME Group. Speaking about the reception of the more than hundred-and-seventy-year-old exchange's latest product -- futures based on ETH, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network -- McCourt characterized the response as "overwhelming." "People have been really excited ... I think...

Stock markets have seen unprecedented levels of trading in recent days, fueled by retail trading activity tied to Wall Street Bets. Robinhood — which became the key figure in this drama as the venue through which much of the publicly visible trading occurred — has been a focal point of this market backdrop after buckling under the pressure of heightened activity and temporarily limiting purchases...

Cboe is a Wall Street powerhouse.  On a typical trading day, the exchange operator handles about a third of U.S. equity volumes. In derivatives, major Wall Street products such as the VIX and S&P 500 options trade hands every day through its venue.  Cboe is now trying its hand at the crypto market — again, that is. More than a year after it shuttered its bitcoin futures product, the exchange s...