The Scoop

In this week's episode, Cho and Matuszewski give the trader perspective on bitcoin and the DeFi scene, including:   How Circle Trade went from making an "ungodly" amount of money to being sold off to Kraken Whether the market is at "peakFi" Why big news events are having less of an impact on bitcoin price swings An overview of the crypto brokerage wars, and how crypto firms will get "more violent"...

On this week's episode of The Scoop, Cermak explained out how The Block first picked up on the biggest Twitter hack in history, and what the early hours of information gathering looked like. He also touched on: The details that indicate the hack was either unplanned or executed by amateurs What a front page BTC scam means for bitcoin adoption The debate over Coinbase's move to block the addresses...

CoinFLEX emerged in 2019 as one of the first marketplaces for physically-delivered crypto futures. Now, the Hong Kong-based firm has relaunched its platform to build out a repurchase market for digital assets. Mark Lamb, CEO of CoinFLEX, sat down with The Scoop this week to talk about the plan. In the traditional context, a repurchase market or "repo market" allows large clearing banks to exchange...

R. Martin Chavez left his Goldman Sachs office in December after decades of work bringing new technology to Wall Street, most recently as Goldman's CFO, though his career began in Silicon Valley. Now, he's returned to the tech world, where he serves on the boards of health technology firms and has gotten involved in the conversation around the " digital dollar ." On this week's episode of The Scoo...

Zane Tackett has witnessed some of the crypto industry's biggest moments. And he recently took a post as a sales and business development executive at FTX, giving him a first-hand look at growth occurring in the derivatives market today. It comes as a notable time for that particular corner of the crypto space, given that more that 100,000 bitcoin options contracts – a historic number totaling ove...

Before Tarun Chitra built out his company, he spent years doing quantitative research and development for places like D.E. Shaw Research and Vatic Labs. Chitra took his experience in machine learning to create and head a simulation platform for crypto networks — Gauntlet — which garnered backing from companies like Coinbase, Distributed Global and Polychain, among others. Gauntlet provides tools f...

In a matter of months, Brian Brooks made the move from Coinbase to head of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).  Brooks left his job as the exchange's top lawyer in March, after his former OneWest Bank colleague and current Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin tapped him to become the COO and first deputy comptroller at the OCC. Just two months later, then Comptroller of the Curre...

Ian Sigalow has been in the venture capital (VC) space for over a decade, launching his firm Greycroft in 2006. Since then, he's taken some big swings in the fintech space, many of which have paid off. Greycroft manages about $2 billion today.  He was an angel investor in Venmo at a time when people told him that PayPal had already won the race of free peer-to-peer service. On this week's episode...

Last week, saw a deluge of prime brokerage news, capped off by Coinbase's announcement of its acquisition of crypto broker Tagomi . After months of rumors surrounding the two-year-old firm, the deal became one of Coinbase's biggest acquisitions in a move to fill out its institutional business of trading and custody services.  With the deal inked, Coinbase is one step closer to becoming a full-scal...

After a gloomy March and a proverbially rainy April, May has shaped up to be a – dare one say it – positive market from a macro market perspective. Despite the ongoing tragedy of the global coronavirus pandemic, investors appear to be buying. The S&P 500 broke 3,000 for the first time in March and the Dow is up broadly on positive sentiment that efforts to reopen businesses in the U.S. – all i...

Institutional crypto exchange LMAX Digital closed out its second year by 10x-ing its trade volumes, trading $75 billion worth of crypto in the past 12 months, the firm revealed exclusively to The Block. Since its launch two years ago, the firm has facilitated $85 billion in trades, according to a Tuesday press release. Last year's monthly high was $8.6 billion traded in June of 2019, and that mont...

If recent headlines are any indication, Wall Street's slow embrace of bitcoin – or, at least, financial instruments tied to it – is beginning to pick up the pace. Earlier this week, it was reported that JPMorgan is offering banking services to cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini. And macro investor Paul Tudor Jones recently revealed that he allocated as much as 2% of his assets to bitcoin...

It’s been an interesting time for the stablecoin market. Total stablecoin issuance recently surpassed $10 billion,  according to  data compiled by The Block Research. Meanwhile, the discussion of Facebook’s Libra has taken on interesting new dimensions of late. Lex Sokolin, a former research analyst and the current global co-head of fintech at Consensys, has been paying close attention to these de...

Unless you were hiding under a rock on Thursday, you would have seen the letter by macro investor Paul Tudor Jones that outlines his case for owning bitcoin as a hedge against central bank money printing.  In the letter – titled The Great Monetary Inflation – Jones dropped the bombshell update that Tudor Investment Corp could allocate a percentage of its assets to bitcoin futures. Although Jones d...

We are going to rewind the clock on this episode of The Scoop with the Odd Lots team, Bloomberg's Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal. The podcast duo – whose combined time covering global financial markets spans more than three decades – take us back to their times at the FT's Alphaville and The Business Insider, respectively, where they covered the 2008-2009 financial crisis.  In this episode, the...

From multi-platinum performing artist to crypto-entrepreneur, the mononymous Akon has long chased lofty ambitions. The Senegal-native's Akoin project is the singer's latest lofty endeavor. The aptly-named cryptocurrency was founded to democratize financial-services in Africa, where traditional banking infrastructure is scarce. Indeed, the project harkens back to the ICO boom of 2017 when celebriti...

Despite the world being beset by the COVID-19 pandemic and a financial crisis, humor is something we can all find respite in. This is even the case, believe it or not, for Wall Street.  From the Ghana funeral that's swept financial services Twitter (FinTwit) following Ray Dalio's "cash is trash" call to the much-loved "Money printer go brr," this crisis has seen its fair share of memes. Indeed, it...

In 19 days, the number of bitcoin released with each block reward will drop from 12.5 to 6.25, a 50% cut in supply. This will be the third halving in bitcoin's lifetime and it has market participants across crypto speculating about the potential ramifications. Namely, whether it will result in a pop in bitcoin's price or whether it is priced in. In this episode of The Scoop, we welcome GSR Trading...

The U.S. Federal Reserve and the Federal government are working aggressively to implement policies to address the financial crisis tied to the spread of Covid-19. Most recently, Americans across the country began receiving checks to recoup losses in their incomes and the Fed said it would serve as a backstop for the junk bond market, announcing it would for the first time purchase corporate bonds...

A financial crisis triggered by a global pandemic has exposed underlying problems on Wall Street and the market as a whole. That's according to Paxos chief executive officer Charles Cascarilla, who made an appearance on the latest episode of The Scoop podcast with host Frank Chaparro.  Cascarilla – who spent the most formative years of his career as a hedge fund investor at Cedar Hill Capital duri...

The cryptocurrency market continues to exhibit signs of volatility. As such, Genesis Global Trading – an institutional over-the-counter cryptocurrency trading and lending firm – decided to hit the pause button on credit extension amidst the coronavirus-tied market chaos.  Recently, Genesis has started to extend credit on a client-by-client basis but is acting gingerly in the market it helped pione...

As markets whipsaw amidst uncertainty surrounding the economic and health impacts of the coronavirus, the pipes and plumbing of our financial system, for the most part, has held up. That is even as legions of bankers, traders, and financial services professionals are forced to hunker down in their homes. Last week, there was one exception, however. A reported ransomeware issue at a little-known pa...

Many have tried to launch a bitcoin-tied ETF, but all have failed. Bitwise Asset Management is one such fund manager, which had its proposal for a bitcoin-linked fund shot down by the Securities and Exchange Commission in January. Indeed, the fight for a bitcoin ETF dates all the way back to the Winklevoss' attempt to launch one with Cboe. The idea behind an ETF is that it would offer an onramp fo...

State Street, one of the largest custody banks in the world, has yet to launch a service to store crypto assets but that doesn't mean it is actively involved in the digital asset market. Leading the charge is  Jay Biancamano , Managing Director of digital product development and innovation at the firm. Biancamano has had his finger on the pulse of all things market structure, having previously wor...

To the bemusement of some XRP bears, crypto exchange Bitso captured attention earlier this year with news that it captured over 2% of Mexico's remittance market.    Indeed, the ability to quickly and seamlessly send money across borders has long been one of the touted benefits of cryptocurrencies, but Bitso's surge has stood out among its rivals. XRP/Peso volume growth has surged over the past 5-m...