Let’s get ‘phygital’ — how NFTs are changing the retail game according to MoonPay’s CEO

The Scoop

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.

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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.

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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.