Tokens in the attention economy

The return of scarcity. One of the defining features of digital media has been limitless supply. Media has long been premised on scarcity -- look at the Upfronts -- in order to drive higher pricing. Take the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Yes, it’s strange to see adults spend tons of money on cartoon primates. But what BAYC points to with its NFTs is that i... See more

In other words: A group of people direct their attention to something, and that changes its value. This, in turn, draws the eye of various media and attention merchants, which in turn changes the value again. Crypto hype is the purest and most logical endpoint of this phenomenon. What most people are talking about with a given crypto asset is just ... See more

Attention is to a virtual economy what the gold bullion used to be to the Bretton Woods economy, or what computation aspires to be in a cryptocurrency economy: the ultimate measure of value that everything boils down to in the end. Despite code being the most ethereal and intangible good there is—human thought distilled as runnable logic—it’s made ... See more

To recap the meta NFT thesis: attention is finite, the internet is vast, we’re tribal creatures driven by mimetic desire, and we’re building an insane parallel financial system that may have found a bridge to celebrities and mass retail adoption via crypto-enabled art and collectibles. When you add all of that up, NFTs allow you to “own a piece of ... See more

NFTs are interesting in that they have built-in provable scarcity that ensures value. In the analog world, scarcity is something either circumstantial (the virus that wiped out tulip production) or mandated (Beanie Babies being “retired”). With NFTs, it’s in the code. CryptoPunks are valuable, for instance, because there will only ever be 10,000.

As with everything in crypto, early participants are disproportionately rewarded. There will be diminishing returns -- the 100th company to buy a CryptoPunk or Bored Ape will get a fraction of the press and attention that the first does.

One of the things cryptocurrencies do extremely well – for better or worse – is ascribe monetary value to things we didn’t previously understand as being “worth money.”