Crypto-startup MoonPay in NFT agreement with Universal, Fox

Crypto startup MoonPay said on Tuesday that 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 companies to create hundreds of millions of NFTs a day, and scale up an operation that previously took months using blockchain technology. It will be formally announced later on Tuesday during a keynote that MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright will hold at Radio City Music Hall as part of this week’s NFT.NYC conference in New York City.

The platform and its underlying technology provide a great opportunity for older brands such as 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, Nike, Gucci and the National Football League, have brought NFTs into their marketing efforts.

“The potential of NFTs goes beyond fundraising; it’s the benefit. You can basically program everything into these NFTs over time, and that’s why we decided to focus on this new product offering,” said Soto- Wright to CNBC. “It really makes this shift possible; to go beyond fundraising opportunities and program utility in these NFTs, and there must be enterprise-quality tools.”

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

Soto-Wright has previously said that the company aims to make crypto available to the masses in the same way as video conferencing tools such as Zoom made it easier to make calls 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. The recent market volatility and the risky investor community have not been kind to cryptocurrency 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 expanded sales of cryptocurrencies, as investors continue to struggle with aggressive interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve and a worsening liquidity crisis that has put major players in financial difficulties. The cryptocurrency is still on its way after the collapse of the $ 60 billion collapse of two major tokens last month.

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

MoonPay says it has been profitable since the launch of the platform in 2019. Their 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. In total, the new investors shared $ 87 million in a previously announced $ 555 million round of financing led by Tiger Global and Coatue, and valued the company at $ 3.4 billion.

Bitcoin returned on Monday, after the cryptocurrency fell below the 2017 high this weekend, when it traded as low as $ 17,601.58. Bitcoin is still 70% below the all-time high, here 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 are going to go through periods of price discovery and irrational abundance … people are gradually 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 in them is going to be very, very important, “said Soto-Wright. “We have 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.