This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?
People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will. The premise for web1 was that everyone on the internet would be both a publisher and consumer of content as well as a publisher and consumer of infrastructure... If there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned about the world, it’s that people do not want to run their own servers.
In this context, knowledge and judgement and taste are valuable. We trust curators because we believe that they spent time and effort in developing their expertise. This belief seeped from the art world into the aspirational economy, with the new breed of aspirants looking to share their taste and turn their social and cultural capital into the eco... See more
Siqi Chen (CEO of Runway): “We treat closing a candidate almost exactly the same as closing an investor. In fact, we’ve found the best candidates will do even more diligence than the average investor. Arguably, candidates are investing something even more valuable than capital: their time. Our pitch and demo for our Series A is pretty much exactly ... See more
But I think it’s equally interesting to look at communities of professionals in design, engineering, etc. I think those professional groups can ultimately look like social communities, as well as labor marketplaces
The online opportunity lies mid-market (for now). Pre-covid, the distribution of transaction volume online is skewed towards the middle, while most of the high-value sales still happen offline. Just 1% of the >100k€ artworks are sold online, yet make up for 23% of the value.