A Short Story on Art and the Parallels to Crypto NFT and Digital Art Investing 👇🏻 messari.io/article/the-ps…
I’ve recently been reading Morgan Housel’s new book “The Psychology of Money” which outlines various lessons on finance through captivating stories. One story is that of Heinz Berggreun, a German immigrant who arrived in the U.S after fleeing Nazi Germany.
Eventually, Berggreun became an Art Director at the San Francisco Museum of Modern art and an art dealer whose collection included Picasso, Braque, Klee, Giacometti, Matisse, and others. Towards the end of his life, his collection was valued at over a billion dollars.
This story is not unique, various art collectors and dealers throughout the 20th century ended up amassing incredible fortunes. But, what made them so successful at building art portfolios?
Overall there are three primary themes present in the greatest art collectors throughout the 20th century: Indexing, Static Portfolio Management, and Skill.
As digital art enters the mainstream, new collectors can follow these techniques when building their portfolios.
Crypto-native indices transform the design space for indices from a 1-dimensional space consisting of just asset exposure, to a multi-dimensional space consisting of meta-governance and fund management strategies.
This design sets the stage for the evolution of index protocols.
In traditional finance constructing an index is a one-dimensional design space consisting of just asset exposure (i.e what assets are in the index).
Additionally, Index managers like Vanguard historically abstain from voting.
The three axes are as follows:
1. Asset returns – price appreciation from assets
2. Fund management strategies – active yield generated by allocating index assets to other protocols
3. Metagovernance – voting in protocols with assets in indices
Cryptonetworks inherently enable more efficient markets.
While much of crypto is focused on finance, there are startups tackling larger issues such as climate change.
Nori is using crypto primitives to create a more efficient carbon market for CO2 removal.
A thread 🧵
Tackling the problems associated with climate change will be one of – if not the largest – issue that the current generation faces over the coming decades.
The secondary effects of climate change are staggering. Mass migration. Decreased biodiversity. The list goes on.
Carbon emissions mitigation will not be sufficient. The focus must shift toward carbon sequestration – removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Nori is developing a carbon removal marketplace that facilitates the trading of carbon offsets. messari.io/article/nori-a…
I’d like to expand on their mental models with a broad framework for how to categorize NFTs. messari.io/article/the-ar…
1️⃣ Individual NFTs and Collections
Ex: Axies, ENS domains, Trading Cards, Decentraland LAND, digital art
While individual NFTs may accrue notable value based on their utility or scarcity, this may not be the most effective strategy to capitalize on the growth of the NFT sector.
The fuse connecting the NFT and DeFi worlds has been sparked by projects like Axie Infinity, Rarible, and MEME integrating DeFi concepts like liquidity mining and staking to build early networks.
NFTfi has facilitated over $60,000 in NFT-collateral backed loans between users.
Launched in May 2020, NFTfi is a protocol that enables users to deposit their NFTs as collateral in order to obtain an ETH denominated loan.
NFTfi is witnessing signs of early traction with over $3,500 in interest paid from over 60,000 in total platform loans.
Besides loans, I expect new iterations on DeFi inspired ideas like NFT staking, insurance, and fractionalized NFTs to gain steam in the coming year.