The Scoop

The latest data from Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that the U.S. has taken over China as the country with the biggest share of Bitcoin's hash rate.The backdrop of this data shift: the near-complete exodus of bitcoin miners from China, once the undisputed powerhouse for this particular sector of the crypto economy.This historic reversal took place over the course of mere months after China ordered its initial crackdown on the crypto mining space in May. China's government escalated the crackdown even further last month, and major companies like Bitmain have been forced to react. With the effects of China's mining crackdown still lingering, this special episode of The Scoop -- the Mining Report -- features The Block editor Wolfie Zhao and host Frank Chaparro as they discuss the state of mining on an international level as well as the current state of affairs in China today.Some of the topics covered include: What China's "banned" in 2013, 2017, and 2021 and why this time was different. The different situation in China for Ethereum miners who rely on GPUs. Why Chinese miners who owned mining equipment had options in the wake of the crackdown but those invested in mining firms faced tough choices. Why a comeback in China is unlikely -- and why the U.S. hashrate share is set to keep growing.  Episode 69 of Season 3 of The Scoop Mining Report was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Wolfie Zhao, Asia Editor.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 Bakkt, Kraken and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.

Robinhood was hit by a slowdown in its crypto business during the third quarter, but the business unit's chief operating officer, Christine Brown, is optimistic.On this episode of The Scoop, Brown told host Frank Chaparro that "business is good" at the brokerage company. "More than 60 percent of Robinhood funded accounts traded crypto in Q2, and now everyone, everyone listening should know that retail is very cyclical," she said, foreshadowing the firm's earnings drop on Tuesday. "There's ebbs and flows."Robinhood reported a decline in crypto activity from its levels in the previous quarter, "leading to considerably fewer new funded accounts."Yet Robinhood hasn't moved as fast on launching new products and listing new coins, allowing rivals like Coinbase to take advantage of hype cycles around cryptocurrencies like Solana and Shiba Inu. And Robinhood's long-asked-for crypto wallet, announced in September, may not launch until next year."We are actively rolling out the alpha and we have a small group of customers, about five to 10 people, who are going to be actively working with us through the last pieces of the customer experience," Brown said.As for new listings, Brown said the firm is taking a "safety-first approach," indicating the firm won't add new coins anytime soon."We only have seven coins on our platform. That's an incredibly curated set of assets, especially if you think of other exchanges out there where there might be hundreds," she said. "We want to make sure that what we list makes sense, that we are working with our regulators in the proper way."Robinhood's slow and steady approach to listing new coins was further emphasized by the firm's CEO Vlad Tenev, who said during Tuesday's earnings call that "[t]he regulatory environment, in terms of new coins and lending products in crypto, is uncertain and evolving."...For more visit Theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 69 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Christine Brown, COO at Robinhood Crypto.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 Bakkt, Kraken and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.

"We're stepping more and more into an almost bigger focus in the building in crypto."On this episode of The Scoop, Kanav Kariya, President of Jump Crypto joined host Frank Chaparro for a rare interview to discuss Kariya’s vision for its 100-person large digital assets division.Launched in the late 1990s, Jump is one of the most active trading firms across equities and crypto markets. Kariya spoke about his path from an internship in 2017 at Jump to becoming the president of the firm's crypto wing."The way things work at Jump is you naturally assume positions and then you're kind of handed the role after," Kariya explained.In addition to market-making and trading, Kariya outlined how the firm is also interested in building new projects. “The possibilities for the space are just far greater than DeFi and financial stuff,” Kariya said.He went on to explain that a big part of the firm’s strategy has been to participate in governance and build on different networks, highlighting projects like Pyth, Oasis and Wormhole. Jump Crypto also has a dedicated staff building on Solana. “A lot of that is in translating the engineering work that we've done on building trading systems and bridging that over the building, tooling and contributing to these open crypto repositories," said Kariya. In fact, he announced that Jump Crypto is focused on putting healthcare networks on-chain via the Oasis Network.Kariya also expressed optimism about non-fungible tokens or NFTs, saying that Jump Crypto is watching the evolution of NFTs as an asset class.“There's no reason that those resources as an asset class couldn't evolve to be like any other tokens or financial products,” Kariya commented.Episode 68 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Kanav Kariya, President at Jump Crypto.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 Bakkt, Kraken and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.

Founder Ari Rubenstein and CEO Ryan Sheftel discuss Radkl's foray into DeFi, merging CeFi order books with AMM liquidity. They predict a surge in secondary markets due to digitization, exploring NFTs, Metaverse, and organization expansion in the crypto space. The podcast also covers GTS's market making journey and the evolution of crypto trading organizations.

“For us it’s almost like having a store on 5th avenue”.Atari is gearing up to celebrate its 50th anniversary, and appropriately enough the company is kicking off its half-century birthday not in the physical world, but in the metaverse. Specifically, it is hoping to capitalize off of the "land" it owns in virtual worlds built by Decentraland and The Sandbox.Atari's Head of Blockchain Manfred Mantschev told host Frank Chaparro on The Scoop: “When these plots came up the value of the adjacent plots would go up because people recognized the Atari brand, and that image would basically drive people, drive interest to the whole project. So that's kind of how we got started.” Real estate in the metaverse continues to sell for record breaking amounts.With early hits such as Pac Man, Pong, and Centipede, Atari is known as a landmark maker of arcade games of the 70s and 80s. Today, Atari’s familiar brand is often seen in nostalgia plays for consumers. By appearing in productions like Stranger Things, Ready Player One and Blade Runner the company has found new relevance.Atari is hoping to onboard a wider audience into the metaverse in the same way that big brand storefronts attract shoppers to enter a shopping mall. Its mission now, Mantschev explained, is is to convince users to enter the metaverse, where Atari hopes to be a familiar face in a new virtual world. "The same way a mall wants to have a flagship store in the mall and smaller stores next to it are prepared to pay higher rents just because there is a sought-after anchor tenant in the mall." ... Read more on Theblockcrypto.com/podcastsEpisode 66 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Manfred Mantschev, Head of Blockchain at Atari.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 Bakkt, Kraken and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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 a global development.”On this episode of The Scoop, 10T Founder and CEO Dan Tapiero joined host Frank Chaparro to discuss his insights into the globalization of crypto markets and how his macro investing strategy has seen his fund 10T pour hundreds of millions into crypto unicorns.To date, Tapiero has already allocated the majority of some of his funds to companies such as Kraken, Deribit, and Ledger. “We have a portfolio of about 10 to 15 companies that are our targets." Tapiero mentioned how 10T has been helping investors adopt a macro crypto strategy, saying that he’s rejected some 50 plus deals in favor of a more careful approach with a closer guarantee to 5-10x returns. In spite of bear swings, Tapiero remains bullish. "I don't think the valuations of things that we're looking at are high to begin with."Tapiero also observed an "asymmetry" that he credits to the market's resilience. He said he's noticed that as bitcoin upside drives valuations up, any market downsides simply cause bitcoin company valuations to remain relatively neutral. He had this to say:"I saw that you can have a productive portfolio of assets withstand an unbelievable bear market without even having a negative mark. And so in 2018, what brought me to this idea to some degree, was in '18 bitcoin was down 80 percent, Ethereum 95 percent, but a basket of companies that we looked at broadly maintained their value. So to me, that's like mind blowing. I can build a portfolio that has access to all of the upside, not just of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the entire space without having to suffer, hopefully, much on the downside... For institutions, especially, this is a very attractive type of portfolio."...Episode 64 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Dan Tapiero, Founder & CEO at 10T Holdings.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 Bakkt, Kraken and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.

Sygnum is one of the few cryptocurrency banks operating in Europe.On this episode of The Scoop, Mathias Imbach Co-Founder and Group CEO of Sygnum joined host Frank Chaparro to discuss the country's crypto ecosystem and how large wealth channels are opening up to bitcoin and other digital assets.“Nowadays, the conversation goes very different," said Imbach. "There's very few banks in Switzerland which have not made it a strategic priority to really think [supporting digital assets] through. Some would still say, 'right now we want to not touch it for x, y, z reasons,' but there needs to be a strategic rationale. They need to have an answer to clients, why they do it or why they don't do it."Sygnum's clients aren't just interested in crypto assets, but all real-world assets that are traded on a blockchain.“It's about creating a more direct link between what we own and how we transfer it,” he said.For that reason, Sygnum is currently exploring the tokenization of wines and other pieces of art for clients who also want to own fractionalized shares of such assets.“If you accumulate 100 percent equivalent of a wine bottle, you can also then burn the tokens and take physical delivery of the wine. So basically, you're creating this digital, but at the same time still a real asset, kind of convergence, where you can take it, use it as an investment opportunity, as a financial gains opportunity, with liquidity along the way.”Episode 64 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Mathias Imbach, co-founder & Group CEO at Sygnum.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 Bakkt, Kraken, and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.

DARMA Capital's Andrew Keys is a believer in the disruptive power of Ethereum, but he's also concerned that regulators may stand in the way of it.Digital Asset Risk Management Advisors, or DARMA for short, is an investment firm with more than $1 billion of assets under management. DARMA currently holds over 10,000 validators at over 320,000 Ether, Keys told host Frank Chaparro on this episode of The Scoop.“And that's staking kind of an institutional-grade, generating tremendous yield,” said Keys.Keys talked about the firm's journey since launching with just $100 million under management in 2019. He also looked forward, saying that despite the potential use cases of Ethereum and decentralized finance, regulatory headwinds might make it difficult for institutions to engage directly with the market. “I think we are about to witness a regulatory environment that is excruciatingly painful and that is a result of being able to go create a wallet, go on to a decentralized exchange, have a million dollars of X and trade it for a million dollars of Y with no KYC, no accreditation at investor accreditation. And I think that until we start solving some of those problems and self-regulating and complying, the decentralized nature of blockchain is under imminent threat.”In this episode Keys also discusses: Why the cryptocurrency market is impacted by global market events such as the Evergrande meltdown How the market has evolved since Keys' early days at Ethereum development studio ConsenSys  Tailwinds for Ethereum and headwinds for Bitcoin What's behind the market success of competitive Layer-One protocols  The growth of the market for non-fungible tokens Episode 63 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded at the 2021 Mainnet Conference with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Andrew Keys, co-founder & managing director at DARMA Capital.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 Bakkt, Kraken, and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.

“We are heavily moving into DeFi.” Pantera Capital, the longest operating US based bitcoin investment firm, now manages 5Bn worth of assets. But when it comes to decentralized finance, Pantera’s Franklin Bi still sees the space as undervalued.“As long as we're still looking at the fundamentals and drawing out what the multiples are there, we're still not at the point where you know, you're really starting to see the speculative mania.”On this episode of The Scoop, Franklin Bi Director of Portfolio Development at Pantera Capital joined host Frank Chaparro to discuss the current state of venture capital investment into crypto and how he’s finding value in an increasingly crowding ecosystem.“There's the crypto native side, which I think a lot of new investors coming into the space don't recognize yet. Things like staking, participating in the network, focusing on decentralized governance and how we play a role there. That's all stuff that looks super different from, you know, just showing up at a board meeting once a quarter to review the financials.”Pantera has been investing heavily into DeFi since 2017, and is continuing their ramp up as more investors begin to move away from simply an interest in novel technologies to searching for sustainable yield. Bi observed this shift in investor sentiment as traditional investors are slowly beginning to comprehend the margins of DeFi products. He expressed that certain digital assets companies are still relatively undervalued when compared to public market counterparts.“They're getting valued like traditional financial institutions, which to me, sounds like they're undervalued because the rate at which a DeFi project can grow is on a totally different scale. The profitability margins. totally different scale.” Bi went on to add, “It tells me that they're actually undervalued rather than overvalued.”Episode 62 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded at the 2021 Mainnet Conference with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Franklin Bi, Director of Portfolio Development at Pantera Capital.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 Bakkt, Kraken, and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.

 On this episode of The Scoop, Sky Mavis Games Co-Founder and Growth Lead Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin joined Frank Chaparro at the 2021 Mainnet Conference to discuss their game Axie Infinity. Chaparro and Zirlin cover Axie’s recent growth in popularity, kicking off the ‘Play-To-Earn’ trend in gaming, and how Axie Infinity players in the Philippines and other emerging economies are playing the game to supplement their incomes.To be sure, the project's concentration in the Philippines speaks to how much work the project has ahead of it in making it truly global. Zirlin told Chaparro that Axie's user base has grown from some 38K active users in April to around 1.7 Million active users in August. Interest in the project has since waned given a wider rout in the gaming NFT market, down roughly 45% as per data from The Block, with a weekly volume has decline of about $220M from peak to around $130M.But even Zirlin admitted that interest can wane as quickly as it has built up: "So the cool thing about NFT games or even crypto in general is like we have these very powerful feedback loops that cause over decades or over years, huge network effects. But any positive feedback loop that creates a negative creates a network effect can also run in reverse." Like the emerging markets Axie is popular in, Zirlin noted that the game also shows characteristics of an emerging market economy where "you have hot inflows of money and then also withdrawals." Zirlin announced on The Scoop that Axie is creating their own DEX for the game. Instead of moving funds to wallets and then to an exchange to convert cryptocurrency, players will be able to convert their funds directly to the currency of their choosing through the DEX."We're also working on an in-house decentralized exchange or a Dex which will be native to our Ethereum-side chain called Ronin." Zirlin said, adding, "I think we really saw the future of the gaming industry and rightly, we've kind of seen the emergence of this metaverse emerging market worker." Axie Infinity recently completed a $7.6 million funding round that included among its investors billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.Episode 61 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded at the 2021 Mainnet Conference with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Jeff Zirlin, Co-Founder & Growth Lead at Sky Mavis.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 Bakkt, Kraken, and ExodusBakkt® 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 informationAbout KrakenWhether 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 ExodusExodus 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.