Crypto start-up MoonPay launches NFT platform with Universal, Fox

The crypto startup MoonPay announced on Tuesday that it is working with Universal Pictures, Fox Corporation, and Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records, among other companies, to set up a new NFT platform called HyperMint.

With the new platform, big companies, agencies, and organizations can create hundreds of millions of NFTs every day. This speeds up a process that used to take months and used blockchain technology. It will be told to the public by MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright during a keynote speech at Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night. The speech is part of this week’s NFT.NYC conference in New York City.

Universal and Fox, which have decades’ worth of intellectual property, have a lot to gain from the platform and the technologies that power it.

NFTs are digital assets that can’t be copied and are based on real-world things like art, music, and real estate. In the past few months, big companies from all kinds of industries, like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Gucci, and the National Football League, have used NFTs in their marketing.

“It’s more important that NFTs are useful than that they are collected. Over time, you can pretty much program anything into these NFTs, which is why we chose to focus on this new product “Soto-Wright said that CNBC. “That makes this change possible. To go beyond collectability and give these NFTs usefulness, we need enterprise-grade tools.”

MoonPay was started in 2018, and it lets people buy and sell cryptocurrencies with credit cards, bank transfers, and mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Soto-Wright calls this “crypto-as-a-service.” It also gives its technology to other companies, like the cryptocurrency website Bitcoin.com and the non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea.

Soto-Wright has said before that the company’s goal is to make crypto easy for everyone to use, like how video-conferencing tools like Zoom have made it easy for people to call each other over the internet.

MoonPay’s pitch to investors is that it is a “gateway” to digital assets. For now, it’s made up of bitcoin, ether, and other digital tokens like NFTs. Crypto trading has been hurt by market volatility and investors who don’t want to take risks. Soto-Aim Wright’s goal is to expand the platform to include everything from digital fashion to tokenized stocks.

The company’s newest product comes out at a time when cryptocurrencies have been falling for a long time. Investors are worried about the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes and a growing liquidity bottleneck, both of which have caused major companies to have money problems. The $60 billion loss of two major coins last month is still hurting the crypto market.

“The last few months have been tough for crypto,” said Soto-Wright. “I’ve seen a lot of these clear cycles in the past. I’ve watched this film. There will always be times when things get crazy. It is a brand-new type of asset, and NFTs are a brand-new type of that asset.”

MoonPay says it has been making money since its platform launched in 2019. Its service is used by more than 10 million people in 160 countries right now. Last month, more than 60 famous people invested in MoonPay. Among them were Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg, Ashton Kutcher, and others. It was already known that Tiger Global and Coatue led a $555 million investment round, to which new investors added $87 million, putting the company’s value at $3.4 billion.

Bitcoin got back on track on Monday after trading as low as $17,601.58 over the weekend, which was below its 2017 high. Bitcoin is still 70% below its all-time high, which was reached in November, and is down 57% so far this year. On Monday, the price of Ether also went up.

“I think it makes sense that we’ll go through periods of price discovery and irrational exuberance,” Soto-Wright said. “Eventually, people will start to question the value of things, and I think that’s why it will be very, very important to stop thinking of NFTs as collectibles and start programming utility into them.” “We need to take that set of tools and give them to the biggest companies and most innovative people so they can go through the use cases that really matter.”