NFT Roundup #4: Digital Apes sell for millions; Apple blocks Gnosis Safe wallet; Lessons learned from selling NFTs, artist Amber Vittoria sells NFTs, Christie's auctions Gary Vee's NFTs
Buy the rumor, sell the news
Quick programming note: this newsletter has been converted from a general theme to one which covers NFTs (non-fungible tokens) exclusively. For more on this change, please refer to this introductory note here.
If you like this newsletter and want to see more of it, please consider liking, commenting on, and sharing it, as those actions train the algorithms to expose this newsletter to a broader audience. A broader audience means more followers, which provides more incentive for me to continue putting issues out.
Digital NFT apes sell for $24 million at auction
Sales of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs continue to impress:
Rutgers Business School financial technology professor Dr. Merav Ozair expressed neither shock nor outrage nor confusion over Sotheby's auctioning off a lot of 101 JPEGs of cartoonish apes for $24.4 million.
"It's a historical moment," she said. "Probably this particular NFT will increase in value because it was the first."
Or at least one of the first of these collections of profile-pic-style NFTs. The creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club used an algorithmic program mixing and matching images of apes, different fur colors and fur patterns, outfits and accessories to create 10,000 unique images varying in rarity.
When it launched in the spring, users could mint one of those digital images by spending — as of Tuesday evening's prices — around $270 worth of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, then gaining entry into a room of a very active Discord chat for only Bored Ape owners. Since that minting, the NFT secondary marketplace OpenSea reports nearly $543 million in Bored Ape Sales.
Whenever someone unfamiliar with NFTs sees stories like this, the first question they ask seems to be “Why would someone spend $24 million on that?” To which I’ve no answer, any more so than do I have an answer to the question of why someone would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Birkin handbags.
But, as any art or wine collector or luxury real estate broker can tell you, there are a lot of wealthy people in the world who enjoy spending a lot of money to signal to others (mainly their peers) that they can afford to throw a lot of cash around. The price paid for any collectible need not make sense to you. What matters is that the price makes sense to someone.
Apple store reportedly blocks Gnosis Safe wallet update for hosting NFTs
Apple looks to be interested in getting a slice of the burgeoning market for NFTs. It has withheld approval of Gnosis Safe’s wallet app because the wallet provides access to NFTs that were not purchased inside the app.
The Apple App Store reportedly blocked a Gnosis Safe crypto wallet app update due to it hosting nonfungible tokens (NFT) that weren’t purchased inside the app.
Lukas Schor, a product developer at Ethereum-based crypto wallet provider Gnosis Safe, revealed the firm had run into trouble when it submitted an updated version of its app to the IOS app store earlier this month.
Schor noted on Tuesday that despite the update having nothing to do with NFTs, the App Store flagged a sample image that displayed an NFT in the app’s description section, even though it had been up for “many months.”
I suppose that your reaction to this story depends on where you are in the transaction chain. If you’re Apple (or an Apple shareholder) you want to extract as much value as you can from the app store. If you’re the developer of a mobile wallet for NFT storage you want to provide as much functionality to your end users as you can. And if you’re the actual user of the mobile wallet, you want to be able to access everything that you store in the wallet.
Apple, of course, was recently sued by Epic Games for some of its app store practices. It will be interesting to watch this space to see whether it is sued by crypto wallet developers.
Glitches, ‘gas fees’ and lessons we learned selling an NFT
EdSurge is a news website focused on the intersection of education and technology. They decided to turn one of their articles into an NFT, and recorded a podcast about the experience:
Spoiler alert: our effort to sell an NFT did not end in riches, despite the fact that some big-name publications have made hundreds of thousands selling digital versions of their articles as collectables. There was a moment, in fact, when we almost lost money in our attempt to auction an EdSurge article on the blockchain.
But making money was never the goal. The purpose of the experiment was to learn first-hand how the world of NFTs works—and to better understand how they might be used in education. And we definitely learned a few surprising things along the way. See the original article that we turned into an NFT here.
You can listen to their podcast here.
It’s good to see people far removed from crypto/blockchain/NFT world experimenting with NFTs. One of my main criticisms about cryptoworld is that it is too insular and non-normal for it to achieve the mass adoption for which it yearns. User interfaces remain far too clunky and complex for average, non-technical people. Communities are often jargon-heavy and deliberately obscurantist.
All of this tends to limit the amount of adoption by normal people. If crypto advocates are serious about their desire to see widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and/or NFTs, then they had better figure out ways to reach out to people like those who read EdSurge and convey to them the value of this technology.
Amber Vittoria makes her NFT debut with two colorful collections
Amber Vittoria is an illustrator based in New York City, who has worked for companies like Warby Parker, Gucci, and The New York Times. She has created a collection of NFTs:
Amber Vittoria is a New York-based artist who seeks to empower the feminine mystique through a vibrant aesthetic that references the many abstracted shapes and curvature found in nature. Having worked with clients that range Gucci to Aesop, Vittoria has entered the NFT marketplace with two colorful collections on OpenSea.
The first is entitled “Final Forms” and embraces the journey of aging through a set of 50 unique NFTs. The series reflects on the idea that the universe will morph us gradually through our experiences into the entity we are meant to become before rejoining the universe.
“The Alphabet Collection” is less abstract but focuses more on the poetic. Each of the 26 letters are available in 10 different color palettes, making 260 possible NFT’s in total. For collectors who form a five-letter word, Vittoria has provided them an option to contact her via Discord, which she will then gift them with a custom NFT of the word formed. The artist notes on the power behind the spoken word and how it “humanizes and strengthens the connection of her work for others.”
You can view the various collections she’s selling at the links embedded in the quote above. As with the recent $24 million sale of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs I discuss above, I’d reemphasize that all art is subjective, and that whether you see value (or beauty) in someone’s art isn’t really the relevant question. The relevant question is whether anyone else sees value or beauty in someone’s art.
I recently put out a Twitter thread about what I see as OpenSea’s growth opportunities.
One of those opportunities is essentially what Amber Vittoria has done here: curating exclusive drops of NFTs created by well-known artists or brands or celebrities. It’s a vast world, and people’s interests vary widely.
Christie’s will auction original art from Gary Vee’s Veefriends NFT collection
Storied auction house Christie’s will soon auction some NFTs that social media star and entrepreneur Gary Vee created:
On the Veefriends official site, the NFT collection is defined as:
“VeeFriends is the name of Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT collection. He created VeeFriends to bring to life his ambitions of building a community around his creative and business passions using NFT technology and their smart contract capabilities. By owning a VeeFriend NFT, you immediately become part of the VeeFriends community and get access to VeeCon.”
So, maybe Gary Vee ’s credentials as an artist are lacking, but he’s a titan at generating value. Maybe his childlike drawings are not that aesthetically pleasing, but Gary Vee’s ability to generate community around an idea is a proven fact. And his drive to win is unmatched. Which characteristics are more important for an NFT project? What are Veefriend’s holders investing in?
The human instinct for affiliation is powerful, and a lot of people want to affiliate themselves with Gary Vee’s brand and world. As with other art, and as I have said repeatedly in this newsletter, the question here is not whether you find these NFTs to be interesting or valuable, but, rather, the question is whether anyone else finds them to be interesting or valuable. And, given Gary’s large following, I suspect that some people will find his NFTs to be interesting and valuable.