Sam Blumenthal

In December, a fashion startup called Scarce started selling used luxury clothing in the form of mystery boxes, following in the footsteps of a British startup, Heat, which launched with the same concept in late 2019. Both companies claim they have managed to avoid a high return rate — one of the biggest potential pitfalls of a mystery box sales... See more

Miko embodies the rise of “VTubers” (Virtual YouTubers), a catchall term for online creators who digitally obscure their faces and bodies. But more broadly, Miko embodies a nascent, but fascinating space: synthetic media.

Seven months after adding live video to its social commerce app, Verishop is expanding the feature by building a “pipeline of influencers,” who get paid 10% commission for sales, co-founder and CEO Imran Khan said. It recently brought on Elle magazine as a live video partner.

So the parsimonious mental model of an NFT based on what we’ve discussed so far is that it is a promiscuous and vacuous digital social object. A thing that contains no substance itself, not even reliable pointing properties, but has an identity and can be traded, transferred, mixed and matched indiscriminately with other things in a social context.