Sep 1, 2021
Pumpkin Spice Lattes may be back in stock at Starbucks,
portending fall's arrival, but it's still very much NFT SUMMER in
crypto land.
August smashed all records for transaction value in this new
breed of digital assets. There are no signs things are slowing down
in September. OpenSea, a leading NFT platform, tallied volumes of
more than $1 billion in a month, more than eBay's sales volume in
the same period. Crypto art connoisseurs (or are they just
speculators?) are now routinely spending thousands and sometimes
millions of dollars on the rights to own the rights to certain rare
images.
The dam has broken and NFT culture is flooding into the
mainstream. Tom Brady has an NFT platform called Autograph, and
Steph Curry has changed his twitter avatar to an NFT he owns in his
crypto wallet, and paid $180,000 for to boot.
So what exactly are NFTs and why have they captured the
zeitgeist? What does their stunning rise tell us about the viral
power of crypto. Art is a big market- $67.4 billion in 2018- and
growing, but that pales in comparison to the financial services
industry, the prize DeFi is targeting. NFT's have taken the art
world by storm. Even Damien Hirst is jumping on the band wagon.
Will Wall Street be turned on its head when DeFi has its own "NFT
Summer" moment? How do NFTs intersect with DeFi - art is an
investible asset class and thanks to fractionalization, anyone can
own a slice of an NFT or invest in an NFT fund. Could this
democratize access to art as an investible asset class? Is
this all positive, or is the speculative mania of NFTs going to
cause a hangover across the asset class if (and perhaps
inevitably when) the music stops?
On this episode of DeFi decoded, Andrew and Alex pull out
their provervbial easel and palette to paint a clearer picture of
just what the heck is going on. Tune in!