Author: Markets Insider
Crypto exchange FTX is widening its ambitions to target the luxury market, and it has hired former model-turned-beauty entrepreneur Lauren Remington Platt to head the push. Platt will hunt out major luxury brands — a market estimated to be worth $300 billion — that have not yet gotten into cryptocurrency, the company said Wednesday. Three-year-old FTX has waged an aggressive marketing campaign to help it make up ground on legacy exchanges such as Kraken and Coinbase, helping it grow to a $32 billion company. It has focused its efforts on sports, including a Super Bowl ad and giveaway, and paying $135 million for the…
On Twitter, the actress-turned-entrepreneur and her media company, Hello Sunshine, have been touting female-led NFT collections, like the World of Women, and the future digital world. At one point she said, “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity. Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?” Her bullish view of the metaverse — where, like she said, people interact as digital avatars of themselves — comes as platforms like Decentraland and the Sandbox surge in popularity. Land sales in these metaverses are booming, and events like Fashion Week are taking place there in…
Bill Miller described holding bitcoin as insurance against a financial calamity, and he disclosed he still holds a chunky position in the leading cryptocurrency because it is still in its early days. The legendary investor said the notion that bitcoin holds no intrinsic value is correct, and compared the digital asset to high-value collectibles such as a Honus Wagner baseball card or a Picasso painting. “It’s like an insurance policy,” the chairman and chief investment officer of Miller Value Partners told CNBC in a Wednesday interview. “Insurance policies have no intrinsic value. In fact, you want them to have no intrinsic value. You don’t want to have your…
If a “crypto winter” is coming, nobody told venture capital firms. Despite a major slump in digital asset prices, early-stage investors have poured well over $2 billion into crypto startups so far this year. FTX, the exchange founded by crypto whizz-kid Sam Bankman-Fried in 2019, has led the way. The main company raised $400 million in late January, valuing the business at a staggering $32 billion. That was shortly after its US arm also raised $400 million, for a valuation of $8 billion. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian — and husband of tennis star Serena Williams — has also been busy. He raised $500 million for his…
Circle founder and chief executive Jeremy Allaire discussed stablecoins, SPACs, and the SEC in a recent interview with Insider. He also made a bullish long-term prediction that bitcoin will eventually surpass gold in market capitalization and hit a price of $1 million. After founding the software company Allaire Corp. in 1995 and the online video platform Brightcove in 2004, Allaire moved into crypto with the launch of Circle in 2013. The digital payments company offered an early bitcoin wallet and issues the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC. Here are the 10 best quotes from Allaire’s interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity: “I can vividly remember…
Play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity and Decentraland are blowing up across the crypto world. They seem to be revolutionizing the gaming industry with a new, highly engaging format with huge appeal. What is the source of the money? The value across all play-to-earn games comes from the currency that players earn within the platform. But not every game has the same model, and some small names are only looking to cash in on the metaverse craze. Most games have native tokens for in-game purchases and trading between players. They derive value through the use of their tokens which users and cryptocurrency traders deem valuable, according to blockchain developer James…