Crypto startup MoonPay in NFT deal with Universal, Fox

Crypto startup MoonPay said Tuesday it is partnering with Universal Pictures, Fox Corporation and Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records, among other brands, to launch a new NFT platform called HyperMint.

The new platform enables major brands, agencies and businesses to create hundreds of millions of NFTs a day, scaling up an operation that previously took months using blockchain technology. It will be formally announced later Tuesday during a keynote MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright is giving at Radio City Music Hall as part of this week’s NFT.NYC conference in New York City.

The platform and its underlying technology present a major opportunity for legacy brands like Universal and Fox that sit on decades of intellectual property.

NFTs are digital assets that represent real-world objects—such as art, music, and real estate—and cannot be replicated. In recent months, major brands from all industries, including Coca Cola, McDonald’s, NikeGucci and the National Football League, have brought NFTs into their marketing efforts.

“The potential of NFTs goes beyond collection; that’s the utility. You can essentially program anything into these NFTs over time, which is why we decided to focus on this new product offering,” said Soto- Wright to CNBC. “That really makes this shift possible; to go beyond fundraising capabilities and program utility in these NFTs, and it has to be enterprise-grade tools.”

Founded in 2018, Miami-based MoonPay’s software allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using conventional payment methods such as credit cards, bank transfers or mobile wallets that apple Pay and Google Pay. It also sells its technology to other businesses, including crypto website Bitcoin.com and non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea, a model Soto-Wright calls “crypto-as-a-service.”

Soto-Wright has previously said that the firm aims to make crypto accessible to the masses in the same way that video conferencing tools like Zoom made it easier to call over the internet.

MoonPay’s pitch to investors is that it offers a “gateway” to digital assets. Currently, it includes bitcoin, ether and other digital tokens such as NFTs. Recent market volatility and the risk-averse investor environment have not been kind to crypto trading, but Soto-Wright’s vision is to expand the platform to include everything from digital fashion to tokenized stocks.

The company’s latest product launch comes amid a widening selloff in cryptocurrencies, as investors continue to grapple with aggressive rate hikes by the Federal Reserve and a worsening liquidity crisis that has pushed major players into financial trouble. The crypto space is still reeling from the fallout from the $60 billion collapse of two major tokens last month.

“It’s been a tough few months for crypto,” Soto-Wright said. “I’ve seen a lot of these different cycles before. I’ve seen this movie. There’s always going to be periods of volatility. It’s a whole new asset class and we have a whole new subset of that asset class, which is NFTs.”

MoonPay says it has been profitable since launching the platform in 2019. The service is now used by more than 10 million customers in 160 countries. Last month, MoonPay added more than 60 celebrity investors to its balance sheet, including Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg and Ashton Kutcher, among others. Together, the new investors poured $87 million into a previously announced $555 million funding round led by Tiger Global and Coatue, valuing the company at $3.4 billion.

Bitcoin bounced back on Monday, after the cryptocurrency fell below its 2017 high over the weekend, trading as low as $17,601.58. Bitcoin is still 70% below its all-time high, which was hit in November, and it is down 57% so far this year. Ether was higher in trading on Monday as well.

“I think it makes sense that we’re going to go through periods of price discovery and irrational exuberance … people are eventually starting to question the value of things and I think that’s why the shift beyond looking at NFTs as collectibles, but being able to program tools into them is going to be very, very important,” Soto-Wright said. “We need to take that toolkit and arm the biggest brands and the biggest creators to work through the use cases that are actually going to matter.”

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.