But now, as Hasbro faces a challenging time with consumers pulling back on spending, it is having to tweak its strategy to be the go-to games company. And Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks sees opportunities to do that in one key area: among loyal toy-collecting adults. 

As they are becoming adults, a lot of people become more intense in their loyalties toward brands nurtured when they were kids, Cocks told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Friday, referring to the kidult category. 

He added that about 40% of Hasbros annual revenue comes from those 18 and oldera number he sees expand to 50% in the next five years.

The heart and soul of our adult fan business is delivering to 30, 40, 50-plusers the toys of their dreams from when they were kids, Cocks said. He noted that with some popular games, people started early and continued playing well into their middle age. 

With Dungeons & Dragons, most people start playing at the age of 11 or 12 and never stop playing even when they are a 49-year-old CEO of a company like me. I still play about once a month, Cocks said.

Kidults are typically aged 12 and above, and account for a majority of the toy industrys dollar spending, according to market research firm NPD Group. The age group of 18 and older makes up a fast-growing segmentbetween September 2021 and 2022, this demographic within toy-shoppers grew 19%. 

The definition of adulthood has definitely evolved, Jeremy Padawer, chief brand officer at toy company Jazwares, told CNBC in December. What it used to mean, to be an adult, was to be a very upstanding, serious member of society. And to do that you had to demonstrate it intellectually, emotionally, in every other single way. Now we feel a lot more free to express our fandom as a part of our adulthood.

Tough times

Despite the age-defying interest in many of its products, the Dungeons & Dragons maker has not had it easy in recent months.

It reported downbeat results for 2022 as inflation and a slowing economy bit into holiday-season spending by Hasbro customers. The companys revenue fell 9% in 2022, while some of its competitors made big gains. Price increases over the pandemic also impacted demand for toys and games, and the company lost a key licensing deal to Barbie-maker, Mattel. Hasbro laid off 1,000 people earlier this year in a cost-cutting effort after some parts of its digital business underperformed in 2022.   

We lost sight of play, the center pillar of Hasbro, and underinvested in our core toy business. Because of that, our innovation flywheel wasnt spinning as fast as our competitions, Cocks told the Journal, adding that the loss of market share within the toy industry was among Hasbros biggest challenges. The toy giant also needs to find a way to set itself apart from companies like Mattel, which could make big profits with the July release of a new Barbie movie amid great fanfare.

But Cocks maintains that he is confident Hasbro will capitalize on its existing market and lineup of products to bounce back. Just last month, the toymaker announced a 24-hour streaming channel dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons. 

Weve had a long history of adapting our brands for the way people playwhether its a physical toy, a show that people watch, a movie they go to theaters for, or a game, Cocks said. 

Hasbro reported strong first-quarter results for the first three months of 2023 after Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game, helped lure customers to the companys products. 

Hasbro did not immediately return Fortunes request for comment made outside regular hours of operations.

Jose Fernandez da Ponte is four years into his second stint at PayPal, and to say the global financial landscape has changed since he left for banking giant BBVA in 2015 would be quite the understatement.

Now a senior vice president overseeing all things blockchain and crypto, Fernandez da Ponte, whos also worked for Hewlett Packard and McKinsey, discussed why its vital for U.S. politicians to provide clarity on digital assetsand how, even with regulation by enforcement at peak levels, he still sees the whole situation as glass half full.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Youve held several key roles at PayPal. How would you describe this one?

I have the luxury of leading our digital currencies business, and weve been involved in that for the lastI would say in earnestfour years or so. We believe as a company that a significant part of commerce and payments is going to move to digital payment rails, and thats why weve focused on digital currencies writ largewe care about cryptocurrencies but also fiat-backed stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.

Doing payments for the better part of the last 20 years, this is probably one of the first times that I see technology that can substantially redefine payment railscost, speed, programmabilitythings we couldnt do before that we can do now. So thats kind of the genesis block of why we got involved in the space.

What drew you, perhaps on a more personal level, to crypto?

I got into the space in around 2015, when I was working in banking, and the first thing that I was doing was trying to move funds from bank accounts in one country to a different country using one of the blockchain protocols. If you look at financial innovation, a lot of that in the last 20 to 30 years has been on the front enduser experiencebut not so much on the way that money moves. When youre able to do things that represent an upgrade on the traditional correspondent banking system, it really opens up a ton of possibilities. And thats what got me excited.

When youre able to reduce that cost using this technology, then you can start to do things that you couldnt do beforeyou can start to do micropayments of cents without a fixed fee, you can start to open streaming payments, a channel between you and me for a fixed fee, and start to move value one way or the other. Its a very exciting set of possibilities.

In the crypto world and the digital currency space, there is a ton of focus on the transfer of value from one wallet to another wallet. Part of what we bring into the equation, and where we think we can help, is that a payment is way more than just moving the value between two wallets. A payment is, in essence, the settlement of a contract, the settlement of a liability. And that means that if I send money to you to send me a good, I need to be able to get that money back if the good never arrives. There is a contractual component of a payment that goes beyond the movement of value between wallets. And thats where the programmability of blockchains plays a really important role.

I probably use Venmo or Paypal a couple times a week. When I talk to other people, many are like, Whats the point of crypto if I can just use Venmo? How do you answer that question?

Thats a very good use case, and(laughs)I agree with you, Venmo is a fantastic platform. But let me give you one example of something that you can do with crypto now that you couldnt do before.

As you know, we enabled on-chain transfer, so people on the platform have the ability to move crypto in and out of PayPal wallets, a year ago. And now, thanks to crypto, you can actually send value from a Venmo wallet to a PayPal wallet. There is a little bit of this fallacy in use cases, when people ask, Why do I need crypto to do this? or Why do I need a blockchain to do this? In many cases, it is not a requirement. There are other ways to do it. But this is a very effective way of doing it.

A lot of your work has had an international focus. When it comes to PayPal users overseaseveryday people more so than companieshow does the blockchain help them?

I wouldnt claim by any means that we are in mainstream adoption territory yet, but definitely we are a bit beyond that [initial phase]. People are going to be using it, definitely, and its going to be more useful when you have stable, digital instruments that run on blockchains. Thats why we spend so much time thinking about stablecoins and CBDCs, and, basically, if you have a Bitcoin or Ether balance with us, you can use it to pay anywhere that PayPal is accepted.

In the crypto ecosystem, I do think that you will see cross-border ecommerce is a use case that well see more and more. Imagine that I am a consumer whos in a Latin American country and I want to buy from a merchant in the U.S, but I dont have a credit card enabled for international transactions. I think that we will see, in some of the specific verticals, that digital currency is a really good fit.

Can you talk a bit more about whats next in terms of adoption?

Gaming is a good exampleanything that is media related. And I think that well see adoption in business-to-business payments before we see that broadly in consumer-to-consumer payments. Imagine you are a midsize business in the U.S., and you have a supplier that is abroad. Your alternative today to pay them is that you need to make a wire transfer, and its going to cost you 50 to 100 bucks. You need to do it 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, during banking hours, and that money isnt going to be transferred for three days, right? Now, if you have an instrument where you have 24/7 availability, instant settlement, its dollar-denominated, and its cheaper, thats the rational decision. In a global context, I think thats where you will start to see more and more adoption of this.

B2B makes a ton of sense. Do you have any kind of timeline in mind for when consumers similarly embrace this tech?

If I had a crystal ball? Three to five years out. My hope is that in five years we will be in a place where maybe theres $1 trillion in stablecoin-denominated assets. And when you multiply that by the velocity with which stablecoins circulate, youre starting to talk about trillions in commerce volume that can be enabled. Really, its less of a forecast and more hope and intention.

If Congress were to pass any sort of crypto law, do you agree it would probably be something less spicy at this pointprobably some regulations around stablecoins? And if that happened, what happens next?

I think that its super important that there is clarity on stable coins in the U.S.just look at what is going on in the world. There is very clear regulation in places like Europe about what you can and cannot do in the stablecoin space. There is sustained progression toward clarity in places like the UK and Singapore and Hong Kong and Japan. The world is moving toward more clarity, not less clarity. And it is important that the U.S. is part of the team that you see in that market.

I do believe I am kind of on the glass half full part of the discussion here. I am relatively hopeful that we will see legislation that is passed for stablecoins in the close future. And there seems to be momentum in Congress. I think it is fundamentally important that there is that clarity in the U.S., because if not, there is a risk that the U.S. falls behind in this whole digital policy space.

Sticking with more macro-level themes, what comes to mind when you hear the phrase future of finance?

I think the most macro thingstablecoins and cryptocurrencies are one flavor of thatis the tokenization of assets, different assets that exist in physical or traditional form. By tokenizing them, you make them easier to share, to fractionalize, to move. If you are an asset management firm, you might be thinking about how you can tokenize a money market fund. Or if you are an art dealer, how you can tokenize illiquid assets like art. Or if you are a company in the entertainment space, youre trying to figure out how to tokenize a physical ticket to get into a concert.

This technology enables creating digital representations of assets that wasnt possible in the past. And in different parts of financefrom wealth management to banking to payments to remittancesthe macro theme for me is the tokenization of all formerly liquid assets.

The account, which went by the handle @LADAOffice, no longer exists on Twitter.

Our decision to archive our Twitter account was not an easy one, the office said in a statement. It came after a series of distressing comments over time, culminating in a shocking response to photographs we posted celebrating LADAs first known entry into a Pride parade.

It said its Pride parade post was met with a barrage of vicious and offensive comments that left us deeply troubled.

The comments ranged from homophobic and transphobic slurs to sexually explicit and graphic images, the office said, adding that they remained visible in replies to the account more than 24 hours after they were reported to Twitter.

Twitter, whose new CEO, Linda Yaccarino started on Monday, did not respond to a message for comment. Attacks on LGBTQ+ users have increased substantially since Elon Musk took over the company last fall, according to multiple advocacy groups.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, for instance, recently identified 1.7 million tweets and retweets since the start of 2022 that mention the LGBTQ+ community via a keyword such as LGBT, gay, homosexual or trans alongside slurs including groomer, predator and pedophile. In 2022, in the months before Musk took over, there were an average of 3,011 such tweets per day. That jumped 119% to 6,596 in the four months after his takeover last October.

A big part of the reason is the drastic staffing cuts Musk has enacted since his takeover there are simply not enough content moderators to handle the flood of problematic tweets that range from hate speech to graphic material and harassment. Musk has also described himself as a free-speech absolutist who believes Twitters previous policies were too restricting.

In April, for instance, Twitter quietly removed a policy against the targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals, raising concerns that the platform is becoming less safe for marginalized groups. Musk has also repeatedly engaged with far-right figures and pushed misinformation to his 143 million followers.

Last week, Ella Irwin, Twitters head of trust and safety, resigned after Musk criticized Twitters handling of tweets about a conservative media companys documentary that questions medical treatment for transgender children and teens. Musk tweeted the video, which has been criticized as transphobic, to his followers with the message, Every parent should watch this.

Every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, has opposed bans on gender-affirming care and supported the medical care for youth when administered appropriately. Lawsuits have been filed in several states where bans have been enacted this year.

The Los Angeles district attorneys office said Thursday it will remain active on other mainstream social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok but said, referring to Twitter, that it will not be complicit and utilize a platform that promotes such hateful rhetoric.