Marc Benioff and Mark Cuban are now investors in their very own NFT company. Ashton Kutcher joined them in a $9 million Series A round of funding I the NFT platform startup SuperRare. So the big boys of activist investments are hot for the NFT market now.
Founded in 2018, SuperRare says that it enables everyone with an internet connection to be an art collector. Authenticated by the Ethereum blockchain, SuperRare describes itself as a social marketplace for earning crypto and trading one-of-a-kind digital artworks from artists around the world. Its mission is to create a global art economy fit for the digital age using NFTs.
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So what is NFT and why should anyone buy one anyway?
Well here’s the deal. A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a kind of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Only in this case it is a specific digital file whose unique identity and ownership are verified on a blockchain. NFTs can be bought with cryptocurrency and resold. NFTs have different values and so they are not interchangeable.
Confused? The key word here is fungible. This means something that has a set value. So Bitcoin has a set value for each coin at whatever the going rate is. So all Bitcoins are equal in value at all times. But each NFT is unique. And the NFT itself is not used as a currency.
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In a blog post SuperRare described its inception as a simple but powerful idea. Its founders wanted to see if NFTs could be used as a way to authenticate and certify digital art? They explained that if this was possible then they “had the potential to create an open and transparent global market for digital art that anyone in the world could access.”
“In six short months, the idea was turned into a reality and SuperRare launched on the Ethereum mainnet on April 4th, 2018,” explains the company. “We immediately knew we weren’t the only ones excited about the potential: a small but passionate group of artists and collectors quickly formed the core SuperRare community, giving this movement shape, momentum, and just the right amount of craziness. We never looked back.”
Mark Cuban recently sold his own NFT at auction. It was a picture with his own quote: “No one every changed the world by doing what everyone else was doing.” Apparently buying this is like buying an autographed picture of a famous actor like Brad Pitt or an autographed Tom Seaver rookie baseball card.
So will this be worth the investment? Will the quote go up in value? Well like with cryptocurrencies, works of art, or any commodity, only time will tell.
