- Ivan Soto-Wright is the 32-year-old founder and CEO of Moonpay.
- Moonpay recently closed its Series A financing from a slew of celebrities and big name financiers.
- Soto-Wright laid out why he’s optimistic about crypto and a bear market is the best time to build.
While it seems like almost every other day there is a new negative story about the crypto industry, Ivan Soto-Wright thinks that this is precisely the time when incredible opportunities present themselves.
The founder and CEO of crypto payment infrastructure provider Moonpay recently sat down with Insider and shared the three reasons he’s still optimistic about the future of Web3.
Moonpay is heading to the moon
Founded in 2019 by Soto-Wright and his business partner Victor Faramond, Moonpay began as a crypto payment exchange that allows users to purchase crypto and store it in their own wallets.
In the years since, Moonpay has become one of the fastest growing names in crypto, expanding to over five million users, partnering with major brands like Mastercard, and sponsoring the recent NFT NYC. Moonpay was recently dubbed the “PayPal of crypto,” since it allows for crypto transactions between parties without an intermediary.
The ability to exchange crypto without a middleman has become an important part of the crypto conversation recently. Many centralized exchanges like Coinbase have been criticized for admitting that, in the event of their bankruptcy, investors would not be able to access the crypto that they had deposited on the Coinbase exchange.
Meanwhile, exchanges like Voyager and Celsius have come under fire for refusing to return crypto to their customers as they face insolvency problems — leading many blockchain believers to coin the phrase “not your keys, not your crypto.”
“To me this has always been a big differentiation point of Moonpay,” Soto-Wright told Insider. “We really think you should control your digital identity. You should control your digital currency and you should control your digital property.”
Bullish on blockchain
Soto-Wright told Insider that despite this current crash, he sees three reasons to be optimistic about the future of crypto.
New blood entering the Web3 world
With a crypto winter in full swing, you might be forgiven for thinking that companies are hesitant to dive into the world of Web3. Not so, says Soto-Wright.
“The good news is the headline every single day is that a brand new creator is entering Web3. And so that hasn’t stopped in terms of pace,” Soto-Wright said.
Over the last few years companies from a wide range of industries have dived into crypto. Some examples of major brands that have adopted a Web3 strategy include Adidas, which launched its “Into the Metaverse” NFT drop; Prada, which partnered with Meta to create digital wearables; and General Mills, which is leveraging metaverse technology to showcase its products.
Moonpay itself has partnered with major brands like Universal, with Moonpay creating NFTs for movie fans, to eSports organization FaZe Clan to sell gaming-related NFTs.
“We just announced that we’re partnering with MasterCard on the NFT checkout solution that we delivered. So you have huge brands, huge companies saying they are going to have a web three strategy,” Soto-Wright said.
Funding coming in, deals are being done
Soto-Wright also discussed the healthy deal flow in the crypto space.
With fewer limited partners able to cut checks in this bear market, many funds are cutting back on investments, and crypto’s inherent risk and volatility seemingly would make it one of the first sectors they would cut back on. Soto-Wright shared his contrarian thoughts about this.
“I think with anything, the macro markets are always going to determine some of the conditions that VCs have,” Soto-Wright said. “I know some VCs have incredible conviction. Andreeson obviously raised a pretty considerable fund. There are others, there’s been a lot of capital that’s flowed in. They have pressure to obviously deploy that capital at some point.”
Some other major deals that have occurred during the crypto winter include MagicEden raising $130 million in June, and Polygon, which raised $450 million from funds like SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Sequoia in February.
NFT Maturation
Finally, Soto-Wright said he believes that NFTs are an untapped market — despite NFTs growing into a $40 billion market in 2021.
Soto-Wright noted that when most people think of NFTs they probably think of profile pictures. However, Soto-Wright thinks that the future of NFTs is far greater than that, and that over the next couple of years the NFT industry will see incredible innovation.
“We’re talking about taking this asset class from the billions to the trillions, we think there’s a huge addressable market. NFTs are like a new file format for all of these things that we can now express digitally.”
Moonpay’s newest product, Hypermint, aims to help bridge this gap by providing an alternative to centralized NFT exchanges like Opensea for creators and their supporters. He’s particularly enthusiastic about the opportunities NFTs can provide for celebrities to cash in on their goodwill and to connect with their fanbases.
“I lump them [celebrities] into the category of creators, and I think they’re sitting on some of the most valuable intellectual property,” Soto-Wright said.
He continued: “With a smart contract, they’re actually able to turn that into an income stream, into a royalty stream. I think digital collectibles or digital merchandise or digital NFTs are going to form an important income stream for every creator.”
For example, Snoop Dogg recently used Moonpay’s Hypermint to create a token-gated storefront giving fans access to exclusive merchandise related to his newly released 17-track album, “B.O.D.R. (Bacc On Death Row).”
Despite the constant onslaught of bad news in the crypto market, Soto-Wright doesn’t seem concerned. New entrants into the space, new deals being made, and new uses for NFTs all contribute to the high hopes he has for the future of Web3.
“The good news around bear markets is it typically floods out a lot of the bad actors,” Soto-Wright said. “Now it’s really just a time to build. It’s a time to actually demonstrate, let’s get beyond the mania, the hype cycle, the exuberance, and actually build real things that matter to people.”
