Show notes
Visa just spent $150,000 for a non-fungible token "NFT" of a digital punk from the CryptoPunks collection from the Larva Labs studio.
This is a watershed moment for a number of reasons:
1) Visa is a monolith of a traditional financial institution finally cow-towing to a crypto project.
Visa, and traditional financial USD fiat-dependent institutions, have long been antithetical to any type of cryptocurrency or blockchain developments. The growth of this ecosystem takes away from activity in the traditional, antiquated financial markets, of which Visa has a considerable stake and vested interest in its continued utility.
2) It's a huge PR boost for Larva Labs & the use case of expensive art on the blockchain.
While most NFTs are less than $100 in value, there is also a handful of projects that see 6-figure sales as a regularity. For some, you can't even buy any of the project's NFTs without shelling out the cost of the downpayment on a house or the whole house itself.
Many would have scoffed at well-heeled, rational investors dipping heavily into their pockets to include this digital art into the alternative asset segment of their portfolio.
It creates further visibility for the important work that Larva Labs is doing to build out this nascent industry of digital art, long ridiculed as having no meaningful value beyond that with a corporation will throw in an artists direction to fashion something together. The narrative forever, and continues to be, is that art is seemingly devoid of value without having been hand painted with oils or pastels and signed by the artist themselves in a 1/1 or as part of a limited series.
We're talking about art that can be resold at auction with real collectibility value. Do not buy art on a cruise ship or anything other than authorized, or signed, by the artist themselves and be exceptionally careful when it's authorized "by the estate" of an artist. These works largely have no value.
3) OpenSea has been crowned King of the NFT platforms
As the home of CryptoPunks, this represents an important feat for OpenSea, which has been an absolute behemoth in the space with an avalanche of activity and the de facto home for NFTs.
The secret sauce of with OpenSea was their willingness to let everyone with a Web 3.0 wallet, like Metamask, on that platform. Other platforms were curating for the most sellable artists and hoped to market them on their own, but, in the process, they left out 99% of artists, who felt spurned, and these artists brought their fans to OpenSea to see their exhibited works.
Further, the willingness of OpenSea to start integrating blockchains other than Ethereum, like Polygon, represents a demonstrated willingness to be nimble in terms of alternative blockchain architectures. Many in the ecosystem are Ethereum maximalists and prefer to absorb the high gas fees associated with using this, presently, hugely congested network as opposed to entertaining bringing NFTs to other blockchains like xDAI, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, or any number of different Smart Contract capable blockchains.
4) It introduces a level of seriousness to the NFT discussion.
For years, the NFT community was mocked, slighted, and any committed artist to this space was seen as scraping the last dredges of monetization to support their fledging art to debase themselves to hocking NFTs, the ultimate belittlement to corral what could be collected in terms of an earnings. Well-known contemporary artists would not lower themselves to introduce an NFT offering, much like film actors, for the longest time, looked down upon TV work as often embarrassing to have to take on, the sign that one's career was on the descent rather than ascent. Now it seems every major movie star either is in a TV project for Netflix, or another production company, or their in-house production companies have a TV project in the works. Hopefully NFTs continue to enjoy a shift of this scope.
It's perfectly rational, however, that if someone is given a one person show in the Chelsea Art District in Manhattan that one would immediately take it, and that's what Damien Hurst, and other contemporary artist visionaries, regularly do. It puts them in front of an elite set of art buyers who appreciate the 1-on-1 experience of interfacing with an artist to learn a bit of their style, but also revel in the flattering attention that whales of the art collecting market demand and enjoy.
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Artists do this but now they are also doing NFTs as well.
5) It introduces NFTs to, effectively, the world.
The number of people who have a Visa card is jaw-dropping: 353 million in the US and 803 million outside of the US, cumulatively 1.141 billion.
Visa's efforts to trumpet their foray into the space is illuminating NFTs on the world stage in a way that crypto enthusiasts and mass adoption advocates have been pining for since the birth of blockchain.
Instead of introducing NFTs to the world through the prism of "Why would someone pay $69 million for an image you could copy and paste to your desktop for free," you're seeing, "Wow, it looks like even long-standing mainstream financial institutions are relenting to the pressure to be seen as first-movers in tech, with the hopes of earning some level of accompanying positive press praising their forethought. Maybe there's something to this blockchain deal." This does much to change the collective narrative.
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