The Scoop The Block

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.
Announced Friday, backers of the new fund include the $40 billion investment firm Hall Capital Partners and unnamed endowments, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. 
Spencer joined The Scoop (prior to the raise being made public) to unpack the case for Ethereum, which powers much of the DeFi market, the impact of Dogecoin mania, and institutional adoption of crypto. 
"The resounding sense that I get is that people are underestimating the amount of capital that's coming off the sidelines by probably 1 to 2 orders of magnitude," Spencer said.
Spencer said that Ethereum and Bitcoin are the two cryptos that are "on the menu" for the large investors and are both "nowhere near a top."
Still, he added that the story of Ethereum "has a lot more to be told in a world where there is not hyperinflation or there's not all these crazy things happening than [bitcoin's story]."

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken, and Exodus
Bakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more information
About Kraken
Whether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.
About Exodus
Exodus is leading the world out of traditional finance by building beautiful and user-friendly crypto products. Forget having to learn the nuances of different cryptocurrencies. Exodus is designed for everyone and hides the complex details behind a beautiful and intuitive interface.
Buy and sell one cryptocurrency for another from the comfort of your wallet, in seconds. Funds remain under your full control. Secure, manage, stake, and exchange all of your favorite cryptocurrencies from one wallet. No account registration is required. Download Exodus at Exodus.com or directly from Google Play and the iOS App Store and you’re ready to go. 

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 exposure to bitcoin. But one channel that has yet to fully embrace crypto is the independent wealth management market. 
Josh Brown — the brains behind the well-followed Reformed Broker blog — is among the legion of wealth managers who have yet to start advising their clients to buy crypto.
The CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management joined The Scoop to talk about how financial advisors are examining the fast-growing $2 trillion market, why he is skeptical of non-fungible tokens and decentralized finance, and how Covid-19 turned the idea of risk on its head. 
Here's a blurb from the show:
"The most concerning is that what we’ve just witnessed completely flipped the entire concept of risk on its head because we’ve just had the biggest risk in 100 years. We had Spanish Flu 2.0 in the modern era, like traveling three times faster than the 1918 version, right? Like the biggest risk you could think of, millions of people suddenly dropping dead from a global pandemic. It turned out to be one of the biggest opportunities. And you didn’t have to wait three years or eight years like the Great Depression to figure that out. Literally. The stock market fell for 16 days and stopped. Think about that. So what even is risk anymore? What if I tell you the next thing is a nuclear bomb going off somewhere? Dow Jones might go up 50%."
 This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken, and Exodus
Bakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more information
About Kraken
Whether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.
About Exodus
Exodus is leading the world out of traditional finance by building beautiful and user-friendly crypto products. Forget having to learn the nuances of different cryptocurrencies. Exodus is designed for everyone and hides the complex details behind a beautiful and intuitive interface.
 
Buy and sell one cryptocurrency for another from the comfort of your wallet, in seconds. Funds remain under your full control. Secure, manage, stake, and exchange all of your favorite cryptocurrencies from one wallet. No account registration is required. Download Exodus at Exodus.com or directly from Google Play and the iOS App Store and you’re ready to go. 

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 nearly 62% over the last seven days, Coin Gecko data shows. 
During this episode of The Scoop, we dive deep into the Solana and Serum eco-systems. Sam Bankman-Fried explains why FTX decided to launch a decentralized exchange on Solana versus Ethereum, which supports the vast majority of non-custodial protocols. 
"Any products that we tried to build or that even that we tried to scope out — we originally were just definitely going to build on Ethereum because that's where everything was — product after product got into the same death dial which was 10 transactions a second for the network was just not enough," Bankman-Fried said. 
Solana's blockchain promises more scalability through a new consensus mechanism known as Proof of History. It appears to be favorable among traders. Serum, which FTX announced in July, has seen its trading volumes top $1 billion last month, as per The Block's data dashboard. 
Of course, the benefits of a more scalable blockchain raises questions about decentralization. He said that there are limitations relative to Ethereum, but it is possible to get a lot more participation than other more scalable blockchains.
"Solana has gone down in the direction of saying, hey, look we want the performance of blockchain to be an important criteria of it and we care a lot about the efficiency and scaling and economics of it," he said. "While also wanting there to be a sufficiently big group of nodes. Now, what does sufficiently mean? I don't know. Different people have different thresholds. Right now, they're about 600 active nodes on Solana."
"At that level, you're certainly going to be in the position where everyone in the world is running a Solana node, but you could be in the position where 5% of the world is running one," Bankman-Fried added. "You can't get the same number as you can with Ethereum."

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken, and Exodus
Bakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more information
About Kraken
Whether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.
About Exodus
Exodus is leading the world out of traditional finance by building beautiful and user-friendly crypto products. Forget having to learn the nuances of different cryptocurrencies. Exodus is designed for everyone and hides the complex details behind a beautiful and intuitive interface.
Buy and sell one cryptocurrency for another from the comfort of your wallet, in seconds. Funds remain under your full control.
Secure, manage, stake, and exchange all of your favorite cryptocurrencies from one wallet. No account registration is required. Download Exodus at Exodus

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. 
"There's a lot of rumors going around that don't have any truth of foundation," Smith said. 
In this episode of The Scoop, Smith unpacked the erroneous rumor, why U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen isn't making bitcoin a priority right now, how crypto policy works, and why crypto market participants should be concerned about the Financial Action Task Force decision coming this June.
As Smith put it during the interview:

"The thing that we do have to worry about at Treasury isn't coming from the top people as I said but Treasury's interaction with the Financial Action Task Force or the FATF. The FATF has proposed something that is fairly scary ... if adopted would require a lot of different entities in the U.S. to register as money services businesses."Smith went on to add: "The threat right now is not Yellen."

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken, and Exodus
Bakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more information
About Kraken
Whether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.
About Exodus
Exodus is leading the world out of traditional finance by building beautiful and user-friendly crypto products. Forget having to learn the nuances of different cryptocurrencies. Exodus is designed for everyone and hides the complex details behind a beautiful and intuitive interface.
Buy and sell one cryptocurrency for another from the comfort of your wallet, in seconds. Funds remain under your full control.
Secure, manage, stake, and exchange all of your favorite cryptocurrencies from one wallet. No account registration is required. Download Exodus at Exodus.com or directly from Google Play and the iOS App Store and you’re ready to go. 

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-based firm launched its own clearing solution.
On the crypto side, Apex Crypto helps brokers create their own crypto trading products. That business touches more than 1 million retail clients today.
This past weekend, Apex began supporting Dogecoin, unleashing the meme-coin on more than 13 million end-clients. It was good timing considering the price of the coin has whipsawed as retail traders turned their attention toward that particular cryptocurrency market. 
In this episode of The Scoop, Apex Clearing CEO Bill Capuzzi talks about the growth of its crypto business, what drew it to the dogecoin market, and why stockbrokers will ultimately break into the non-fungible token (NFT) space. 
"We opened close to 150,000 accounts since we announced and launched Dogecoin from Saturday until today," Capuzzi said, adding:
"They’re hearing it from their end customers. Right. So the end customers are raising their hands and saying, hey, we’d like access to Dogecoin through WeBull, and WeBull is leveraging Apex on the backend."

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken, and Exodus
Bakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more information
About Kraken
Whether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.
About Exodus
Exodus is leading the world out of traditional finance by building beautiful and user-friendly crypto products. Forget having to learn the nuances of different cryptocurrencies. Exodus is designed for everyone and hides the complex details behind a beautiful and intuitive interface.
Buy and sell one cryptocurrency for another from the comfort of your wallet, in seconds. Funds remain under your full control.
Secure, manage, stake, and exchange all of your favorite cryptocurrencies from one wallet. No account registration is required. Download Exodus at Exodus.com or directly from Google Play and the iOS App Store and you’re ready to go. 

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 Woodford, CEO of crypto firm ZeroHash. The Chicago-based firm works with brokers to jumpstart their own solutions to serve retail clients. On this episode of The Scoop, Woodford joins options brokerage industry trailblazer Tom Sosnoff to discuss why brokers want to create one-stop shops for their clients by incorporating crypto trading as well as the revenue opportunities crypto presents.
Sosnoff founded tastyworks, which began offering crypto through a partnership with ZeroHash announced at the end of last year.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt and Kraken
Bakkt® unlocks the $1.2+ trillion of digital assets that is currently held in cryptocurrencies, rewards and loyalty points, gaming assets and merchant stored value. We began in 2018 with the vision to bring trust and transparency to digital assets. Through the Bakkt Warehouse and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures and Options contracts, we serve institutional clients in an end-to-end regulated market with true price transparency. For consumers, Bakkt aggregates digital assets to enable instant liquidity and to empower users to trade, transfer and pay however they want. Visit Bakkt.com for more information
Whether you’re an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With 50+ cryptocurrencies to choose from, industry-leading security and a wide variety of features to suit any investing strategy, Kraken puts the power in your hands to buy, sell and trade digital assets. Visit Kraken.com to get started today.