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Episode 56 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded in-person with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Magic Eden Co-Founder & COO, Zedd.

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 podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

Magic Eden, Solana’s largest NFT marketplace, is eyeing an ambitious growth plan after raising a $130 million funding round co-led by Greylock and Electric Capital.

While the broader crypto market struggles to find its footing, Magic Eden is coming off its best month ever, with just over 5 million SOL in volume transacted during May.

In this episode of The Scoop, Magic Eden co-founder and COO Zhuoxun ‘Zedd’ Yin, talks through the project’s funding efforts and unpacks some of the reasons why he believes Magic Eden has room to grow into more than just an NFT marketplace.

As Zedd explains during the interview, both Magic Eden’s founders and its investors share a broad time horizon for the future:

“I think despite the ridiculous and amazing traction that I think we’ve had in the first nine months, it’s still very early days for us and we have a lot more we want to build — and I think hopefully that plan and that outlook resonated with a lot of investors. And for us, we were lucky to be able to bring on the partners that we were really excited about.”

Instead of limiting itself to running a marketplace, Magic Eden hopes to establish itself as a hub for all NFT-related activity.

According to Zedd:

“We would love to be the place where there’s actually many layers on top of the marketplace — so not only is this the place where you perform the execution of the transaction, but really all of the discovery, all of the community based interaction, all the fun social elements that come with NFTs is also happened on Magic Eden.”

Magic Eden also plans to branch out beyond the Solana blockchain

“As, you know… very intentional decision to start on Solana. But I really do think that if developers and users are going to be in other ecosystems, it’s almost like if you’re a traditional company starting in Australia. But then there’s a lot of users in New Zealand or like whatever, like Singapore. You want to be there too. Right?”

During this episode, Chaparro and Zedd also discuss:

• The difference between Web2 and Web3 products
• How the bear market is effecting NFTs 
• How Magic Eden plans to expand into gaming

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks 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 Prime
Coinbase 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 River
Cross 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.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Hex Trust, a crypto custody service, has secured provisional approval from regulators in Dubai and will open a regional office in the city, the company announced on Tuesday.

According to the announcement, Hex Trust was granted preliminary approval by Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA). This preliminary approval puts the digital asset custodian in line to receive a Virtual Asset MVP License.

Dubai’s government created VARA in March and tasked the agency with overseeing the activities of crypto and digital asset firms. Companies looking to obtain VARA licenses must establish an operating presence in the city.

Hex Trust already has operating licenses in Hong Kong and Singapore. By establishing a presence in Dubai, the institutional crypto custodian now has offices in four different jurisdictions including Vietnam.

Filippo Buzzi, the head of the company’s Dubai office, stated in the announcement that the move to secure a VARA license was part of the planned Middle East expansion for the crypto custodian.

Hex Trust raised $88 million in a Series B funding round in March. Animoca Brands and Liberty City Ventures led the capital raise with participation from BlockFi, CoinList, Morgan Creek, and several other backers.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto market data provider Kaiko has announced a deal to provide crypto market date to Deutsche Börse Group, the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. 

Kaiko collects tick-level data from centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges, for both spot and derivatives trades. Tick-level data is the most granular trade data available and enables high frequency trading strategies as well as compliance and risk management.

Clients and market members of Deutsche Börse, such as asset managers, banks, high frequency traders and market makers will be able access to Kaiko’s data from the fourth quarter of 2022, according to a statement on Tuesday.  

Kaiko CEO Ambre Soubiran, who spent eight years working in strategic equity derivatives at HSBC before founding the company in 2017, said: “Kaiko is thrilled to partner with Deutsche Börse Group for the redistribution of high quality and auditable digital assets market data.” She went on to say that working with established institutions like Deutsche Börse is essential to making crypto market data accessible to financial institutions. 

Alireza Dorfard, head of market data plus services at Deutsche Börse, echoed these comments and noted consolidated data from centralized and decentralized exchanges was useful for crypto investment strategies. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Elon Musk has reiterated his support for dogecoin in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum today in Doha despite continued weakness in cryptocurrency markets. 

Speaking to Bloomberg in Doha today, the world’s richest person said that while he never encouraged people to invest in crypto, he personally supports the dog-themed coin. 

“I intend to personally support dogecoin,” he said. “I know a lot of people who are not that wealthy have encouraged me to buy and support dogecoin so I’m responding to those people.” 

The CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX noted that the car company will accept dogecoin as a form of payment for merchandise, with SpaceX following suit soon. Musk also said that the two companies have bought bitcoin, but only using a small percentage of cash assets. 

This follows previous Twitter statements where the billionaire has shown support for the meme coin despite his actions attracting a lawsuit. 

Musk has previously shown himself to be a proponent of cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, the billionaire advocated for integrating payments into Twitter more broadly, including support for cryptocurrencies. He has also tweeted his support for cryptocurrencies over fiat currencies. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

An issue with Cloudflare, which provides key infrastructure for the internet, has brought several crypto exchanges to a halt.

Cloudfare, a content delivery network or CDN, confirmed via an update posted early on June 21 that it is experiencing “widespread issues” with its services and network.

A number of crypto exchanges — which rely on Cloudflare for distributed denial of service (DDOS) protection — have been hit by the outage.

FTX said in a tweet that its exchange and other sites “are going to be hard to access for many users,” adding that FTX markets are currently in “post-only” mode. Bitfinex and OKX also tweeted about the issue. 

This is not the first time that a Cloudfare outage has had knock-on effects in the crypto space. In July 2019, several major websites including Coinbase and CoinMarketCap were brought to a standstill by a similar outage.

At approximately 3 a.m. ET, Cloudfare said in its post that the issue “has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

Beyond crypto, numerous other sites such as Discord, DoorDash and Social Blade have also been affected.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto payments firm MoonPay announced Tuesday that it has launched a new service, HyperMint, which allows brands to mint up to 100 million non-fungible tokens (NFTs) at once. 

The new service allows creators and brands to attach images, music, video or other metadata to a token on their own platform.  

The Block first reported in April that MoonPay had been building out the service. Its official launch marks another step in the company’s manoeuvre to create a full suite for brands that wish to release their own digital assets, in an attempt to become what it previously called the “Amazon Web Services for NFTs.”

“If you’re Dolce & Gabbana, Selfridges or Death Row Records, why take your intellectual property and list it on a secondary platform first? You may want to control that issuance yourself,” MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright told The Block in an interview.

Companies already signed up include Fox Corporation, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Universal Pictures, Death Row Records, the United Kingdom-based luxury store Selfridges, lifestyle and gaming platform FaZe Clan and music producer Timbaland’s Beatclub. 

One potential use case, Soto-Wright said, lies in proof of attendance tokens, for capturing how many people attended an event.

MoonPay emphasized that these digital assets would be utility tokens, which are distinct from security tokens. Security tokens must be registered with regulatory bodies such as the United States’s Securities and Exchange Commission.

The service adds another string to the bow of MoonPay’s product suite, which includes fiat onramp infrastructure that allows individuals to purchase NFTs with a debit or credit card, and a concierge service which educates high net worth buyers on crypto. There has also been talk of MoonPay launching its own wallet in the future. 

HyperMint’s launch comes at a time when many of the most popular NFT projects have experienced considerable floor price drops during the crypto bear market. 

Soto-Wright believes NFTs will become buffered from broader market conditions due to their use cases. 

“I think NFTs are going to be unpaired [from crypto market conditions]. But part of the reason I think that will be unpaired is the innovation that will go behind this asset class — You’re gonna see a bunch of different NFT’s where we’re not just focused on the price movement of these assets.”

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

ETPs and ETNs were up across the board on Monday as cryptocurrency prices stabilized. 

Only the ETC Group BTCetc Bitcoin ETP traded down on Monday as the rest of the crypto investment vehicles tracked by The Block gained in value a week on from Celsius halting withdrawals and kick-starting a frenzied sell-off in crypto.

Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) traded below $20,000 and $1,000 over the weekend before recovering on Monday, this stability in crypto prices proceeded a positive day for crypto ETPs and ETNs with some gaining as much as 7.56% — 21Shares Solana Staking ETP. 

Elsewhere, the US got its first short bitcoin ETF as ProShares announced its latest crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) on Monday.

Here’s how some of the major European crypto investment vehicles performed on Monday, June 20:

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The UK government on Monday walked back from plans to collect personal information from private crypto wallets. 

Last July, the UK Treasury office released a consultation document on cryptocurrencies which stated that financial standards should be consistent across all financial services — including cryptocurrency. 

The document proposed that people that wished to send funds to private crypto wallets would need to collect the recipient’s personal identification when doing so. 

This was in reference to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards — aimed at preventing money laundering and the funding of terror activities — which require the sender and recipient of funds to be identified properly.

Under this rule, transfers below a certain threshold — the July 2021 document proposed this to be £1,000 — would require limited information. Anything above this threshold would require the sender to provide more personal information about the beneficiary. 

“Instead of requiring the collection of beneficiary and originator information for all unhosted wallet transfers, cryptoasset businesses will only be expected to collect this information for transactions identified as posing an elevated risk of illicit finance,” according to the amended release on Monday.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Decentralized exchange ZigZag announced Monday that it intends to conduct an airdrop for early adopters but with a caveat: the requirements of the airdrop will be decided by those who purchase governance tokens in a sale.

ZigZag will be selling the governance tokens — with the ticker ZZ — on its exchange on June 24. It’s offering 2 million tokens out of a total supply of 100 million tokens. It didn’t specify the price of the tokens.

Those who buy the governance tokens will be the initial members of the ZigZag DAO, a community that will help decide how the platform evolves over time. One of the first orders of business will be to decide the details of the airdrop.

Crypto airdrops started out as a large sudden gift of tokens to early adopters of protocols. Yet over time, as traders started to use certain protocols in the hope of qualifying for any potential airdrops, projects had to start being more restrictive, adding in more detailed requirements to be eligible. This meant that some airdrops ended up with a negative response from their community.

ZigZag acknowledged in a tweet thread that it faced a similar problem of “airdrop farmers” attempting to game the system. This means the airdrop needs to be restricted in some way to make it fair. Yet ZigZag noted that it didn’t want to be a centralized party dictating the restrictions.

The exchange is trying to sidestep the issue by having the community decide how the airdrop should work. Yet to do so, it was caught in a catch-22: how to have the community vote on how governance tokens are handed out — without the tokens already being out there? ZigZag’s solution is to sell a small percentage and have those token holders decide on the rest.

Yet it does produce an interesting result. Those who have a lot to potentially gain from an airdrop have a greater incentive to buy more governance tokens to have a greater say on how the airdrop is handed out — potentially enabling them to improve the distribution in their favor.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto companies Bitfinex and Tether, which share a parent company, have no plans to reduce staff, unlike some of their rivals. Both firms say they are looking to hire more people in the current market downturn.

“Bitfinex is continuing to invest in acquiring talent and resources, in a measured and methodical manner. We have a range of career opportunities that we are looking to fill and our hiring plans remain intact,” Claudia Lagorio, chief operating officer at Bitfinex, told The Block when contacted about the company’s personnel plans.

Lagorio went on to say that Bitfinex has “never hired aggressively and then reduced staff during a crypto winter.” She added that the crypto exchange operator is profitable and we will continue to hire talent as needed.

Bitfinex’s rivals have recently cut jobs amid crashing crypto markets, including Coinbase, Gemini, Bybit, BitMEX and Crypto.com. Over the past two months, at least 1,500 people have lost jobs in the crypto space, The Block reported recently.

Bitfinex’s sister company, Tether, a stablecoin issuer, is also looking to add staff.

“It remains business as usual at Tether,” a Tether spokesperson told The Block when reached. “Tether is profitable and will continue to hire for key roles to support our business. We care about our people and their futures – we’ve never reduced our staff numbers even during past crypto winters and will not be doing so at any time.”

The current total headcount of Bitfinex and Tether is 250, said Lagorio. Out of that, 50 people work at Tether, the Tether spokesperson said.

While job cuts are becoming common in the crypto space and otherwise, Bitfinex and Tether are not the only companies that plan to hire people in the current market conditions.

Crypto exchange Binance currently has more than 900 open positions, according to its website. Last week, the company’s CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that Binance plans to hire 2,000 people globally.

Crypto exchange Kraken also recently announced its plan to increase headcount by over 500 people. Earlier this month, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted that the company has no plans to freeze hiring. And Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal recently told The Block that the firm is “hiring aggressively” in “all this chaos.”

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.