The Scoop The Block

Many Web3 platforms require users to connect their crypto wallets before engaging with the platform in any meaningful way.
Consequently, the Web3 experience on mobile devices is tedious at best, given current devices are not designed with such functionalities in mind.
Solana Mobile — a subsidiary of the development team behind Solana — hopes to address the difficulties that surround the Web3 mobile user experience with its new Android phone called ‘Saga,’ which is slated for release in early 2023. 
Last week, Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko announced the new mobile device, which will run a ‘Solana Mobile Stack’ (SMS) operating system and will feature a marketplace for decentralized Web3 applications.
In this episode of The Scoop, Anatoly Yakovenko said he believes Saga’s early success will be linked to its ability to significantly enhance the mobile crypto user experience:
“The theory is that crypto users might be crazy enough to switch from iOS to Android because of crypto. It might be so important to have that experience, that they're willing to change their habits.”
If Solana Mobile is successfully able to prove there is consumer demand for crypto-forward mobile products, Yakovenko believes it will inspire major tech companies to integrate crypto infrastructure into their own mobile devices moving forward:
“You need Google and Apple to do it, but they're not going to do it until there is proven demand that people need it — and so somebody has to kind of make that leap…”
Episode 60 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded live at The Block headquarters in New York with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs.
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.
This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Chainalysis & IWC Schauffhausen
About Chainalysis
Chainalysis is the leading blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.
About IWC Schaffhausen
IWC Schaffhausen is a Swiss luxury watch manufacturer based in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Known for its unique engineering approach to watchmaking, IWC combines the best of human craftsmanship and creativity with cutting-edge technology and processes. With collections like the Portugieser and the Pilot’s Watches, the brand covers the whole spectrum from elegant timepieces to sports watches. For more information, visit IWC.com

Web3 can be daunting for new users and brands looking to enter the space.
But MoonPay — the crypto payment infrastructure company that raised $555 million at a valuation of $3.4 billion just last year — has spent the last few months building out a suite of NFT related products in an attempt to simplify the process of introducing new users to Web3.
So far this year, MoonPay has enabled NFT purchases via credit cards, built out its white-glove NFT concierge service for celebrities, and launched an NFT minting service aimed at brands and content creators.
In this episode of The Scoop recorded live at the NFT.NYC conference, MoonPay co-founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright sits down with host Frank Chaparro to discuss the inroads MoonPay has made into the burgeoning NFT industry, and to explain some of the ways he envisions the space evolving over the coming months.
One potential use case for NFTs that Soto-Wright is excited about is their potential to act as redeemable tokens for real-world items. According to Soto-Wright:
“‘Phygital’ — or ‘digital twinning’ — is the idea that you can take something that exists physically and create a digital pair of that as an NFT, and then you can hold on to that and redeem it for the physical…”
In addition to helping brands combat counterfeiting, Soto-Wright explains how brands could use ‘phygital’ items to pitch products directly to consumers:
“Let's say Gucci has a special line of shoes that they want to sell on their website, and maybe the shoes haven't actually been released yet — they could release them digitally and they could actually start to engage with the audience and see whether there's actually demand for that asset before it actually is created.”
Big brands are part of the audience MoonPay hopes to attract with its new HyperMint NFT utility service, announced at the start of NFT.NYC last week, which allows brands and creators to mint millions of NFTs at a time.

Episode 59 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded live at NFT.NYC with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Ivan Soto-Wright, co-founder and CEO of MoonPay.
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.
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. 

 One biotech startup is trying to use blockchain technology to revolutionize the way potential treatments for rare diseases are identified for funding and development.
According to Vibe Bio CEO Alok Tayi:
“Vibe is a community of patients, scientists and partners that help identify promising treatments for rare diseases and other overlooked diseases, and fund them in innovative ways.”
In this episode of The Scoop, Tayi shares his vision for how Vibe Bio aims to disrupt the centralized control of big pharma, and explains why a decentralized autonomous organization (or ‘DAO’) is the optimal solution for organizing the members of the Vibe community.
According to Tayi, the biology of rare diseases is often understood, but biotech companies do not have enough incentive to fund research given the limited financial upside. As Tayi notes:
“There actually ends up being a myriad of different candidate medicines with promise that are sitting on shelves today, but simply lack the capital and the focus to be able to develop them.”
This is the problem Tayi hopes to address through Vibe Bio. By using a DAO structure, Vibe Bio is able to put forward governance proposals to identify promising treatment options. $VIBE token holders can then vote on which treatments will get funded via the proceeds of the DAO's token sale.
As Tayi explains, this decentralized approach empowers patients who would otherwise be unable to get assistance from centralized biotech companies:
“When you start to move away from a traditional sort of financing model to one that's community led, patients can now be in the driver's seat of deciding what medicines to pursue, what disease areas we should try to treat, not profit or politics.”
Earlier this week, Vibe announced it received $12 million in a funding round led by Initialized Capital, which also included participation from prominent angel investors Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan, as well as 6th Man Ventures — the venture firm helmed by The Block Co-Founder Mike Dudas — amongst others.

Episode 58 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Alok Tayi, Co-Founder & CEO of Vibe Bio.
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.
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

Earlier this week, the apparent insolvency of Three Arrows Capital (or '3AC' for short) caught many in the crypto world by surprise, including Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy who commented:
“Everyone kind of assumed those guys just made billions over the years… but now it seems like we were just all horribly wrong.”
In this episode of The Scoop, Evgeny Gaevoy joins The Block’s Frank Chaparro and guest co-host Larry Cermak to analyze the fallout from the 3AC situation, and to explain the wide-scale deleveraging that is occurring in the crypto markets.
According to Cermak, not only was 3AC liquidated by top-tier exchanges, but the firm has outstanding debts with multiple counterparties,
“The impact isn't completely clear when it comes to size… the number I've heard is roughly around $1.5 to $2.5 billion in terms of actual debt that 3AC has — and in terms of the firms affected, it’s almost everyone.”
While the extent of 3AC’s obligations is unclear, Voyager Digital has publicly announced its intent to pursue legal action against 3AC, if the firm defaults on a loan worth over $650 million. 
Given the widespread uncertainty regarding balance sheets in the wake of 3AC’s insolvency, crypto lenders have begun recalling loans to large counterparties, including Gaevoy’s Wintermute.
“[Wintermute] basically got recalled pretty much on all open loans that we had with all the lenders,” Gaevoy said, “our balance sheet decreased more than half basically.”
As Gaevoy explains, recalling loans allows crypto lenders to check counterparties for solvency:
“The reason is everyone just wants to see who is solvent in this market. That’s basically the best way to check it, because once you recall all the loans and you give all the firms like one or two weeks… you probably will see some of them fail and collapse and that's it.”
Episode 57 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Larry Cermak, and Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute.
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.
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.

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?"

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.
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.

This week approximately 15,000 non-fungible token (NFT) enthusiasts from around the world descend on New York City for the fourth annual NFT.NYC conference, which features more than 1,500 speakers over four days.
In this episode of The Scoop, NFT.NYC conference founders Jodee Rich and Cameron Bale sit down with host Frank Chaparro to share details of the upcoming conference and its origins — and to analyze the boom and cultural adoption that NFTs have witnessed over the last few years.
As Jodee Rich explains during the show, although he has worked with multiple forms of emerging technologies over the years, he has never seen a new technology embraced as readily as NFTs have been:
“I was very early in the social media boom, very early in telephony, mobile telephony, very, very early in microcomputers… I've never seen a particular technology being adopted so quickly — and it's way beyond trading, which is the very interesting thing.”
As data from The Block shows, NFT sales have grown exponentially over the last two years.
For this year’s NFT.NYC, the organizers specially partnered with NFT intelligence platform Mnemonic to analyze the crypto wallet addresses provided by attendees. As Cameron Bale explains, Mnemonic’s findings showed that most attendees acquired their first NFT within the last two years:
“Something super interesting is that 68% of our attendees got their first NFT in 2021 and 22% of them got their first NFT in 2022, and that's from a survey of 15,000 attendees.”

Episode 55 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and NFT.NYC Founders Jodee Rich and Cameron Bale.
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
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.