Posts in NFTs and digital objects
Connecting the $2T in Art owned by UHNW investors, with the rise of crypto art and Beeple's $3.5MM NFT digital art auction

A few delicious morsels for us today, connecting ideas between the automation of the institutional art world, and the rise of non-fungible token art. We are surprised by how things are clicking.

We caught up recently with Lori Hotz of Lobus. Lori used to work in the wealth and investment management businesses of Wall Street (Lehman, Lazard) and comes to art with a background of asset allocation and investment assets. One core narrative in wealth management has of course been roboadvisors and digital wealth, and the automation of the financial advisor process. Whether you are doing client experience, CRM, financial planning, trading, or performance reporting, there are now lots of platforms for everyone from mass-retail to ultra-high-net-worth and family office advisors.

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5 Reactions to Messari's 134 page crypto report

Sometimes more is more, and sometimes less is more.

In that spirit, we strongly urge you to check out Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2021. It is a mammoth work of 134 pages, covering each and every development in the ecosystem.

If you don’t want to fuss around with the email gate, the direct link is here.

We are going to pick out five things that are interesting to us substantively and provide a view below. By pick out, we mean screenshot and respond.

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Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures on DeFi and NFT investing and acceleration

In this conversation, we talk with Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures. This is a fascinating and educational conversation that covers frontier technology companies and protocols in blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence, and the convergence of these themes in the future. Jamie walks us through the core investment thesis, as well as the commercial model behind shifting from incubation to acceleration of 30+ companies. We pick up on wisdom about marketing timing and fund structure along the way.

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Virtual communities and digital worlds are the difference between Finance Incumbents, Fintech, and DeFi

This week, we look at:

  • How the medical reality is accelerating remote work and digital commerce, including the success of buy-now-pay-later companies like Affirm and Klarna

  • The emergence of virtual worlds and video game environments that generate $ billions in revenue and have millions of participants, with examples of Zwift, Fortnite, Tomorrowland, Roblox, Genshin Impact

  • How to connect digital environments to digital communities and their economic activity, including through mechanisms like non-fungible-tokens in Rarible and Async Art

  • Advice for shifting thinking from manufacturing financial product, to starting with the customer, to leveraging the community

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Fintech in the Metaverse, plus NFTs, Crypto Art, and Epic Games

Today, we’re joined by Angela Dalton to explore the fun and fantastical world that sits at the intersection of gaming, immersive technology, crypto and economics, namely, the Metaverse.

Angela is the Founder and CEO of Signum Growth Capital, an M&A advisory firm focused on emerging opportunities in fintech, especially blockchain, and digital media.

In this conversation, we discuss expectations for both recreation and work in a digital future, technological advances in recent years that underpin coming changes to immersive virtual experiences, the economics of virtual worlds and more.

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What Finance can learn from the Evolution of Beautiful Artificial Intelligence Art

However, mastery is not immune to automation. As a profession, portraiture melted away with the invention of the Camera, which in turn became commoditized and eventually digitized. The value-add from painting had to shift to things the camera did *not* do. As a result, many artists shifted from chasing realism to capturing emotion (e.g., Impressionism), or to the fantastical (e.g., Surrealism), or to non-representative abstraction (e.g., Expressionism) of the 20th century. The use of the replacement technology, the camera, also became artistic -- take for example the emotional range of Fashion or Celebrity photography (e.g., Madonna as the Mona Lisa). The skill of manipulating the camera into making art, rather than mere illustration, became a rare craft as well -- see the great work of Annie Leibovitz.

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