To NFT or not to NFT
Also: Shorting Tesla, a new design tool and a way to get an emoji email address
Welcome to the 150 new readers that joined us the last week! Happy to have you on board. If you aren’t subscribed yet, make sure you hit subscribe below:
This week I will do a longer deep dive into one topic in the first section of the newsletter. I also added two new topics to the newsletter: “prediction of the week” and “trade of the week”. You can find these in the catch of the week section. I hope you enjoy this, as always feel free to reach out with feedback!
Let’s go 🚀
If you could, you should🦄
📈Tokenize yourself, or invest in others
I wrote about the current trends in the digital collectible space a few weeks ago (here and here) and pointed out that being early to the party might pay off. Well, it certainly did.
It pretty much did not matter what you bought on popular platforms these last weeks, you were most likely able to sell it for a multiple of the initial price only a few days after. Shaan Puri summarized the current market accurately in this tweet:
The technology enabling all of this is called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. You can think of such a token as a digital proof of ownership of any asset, that is secure and transparent since it is created and its ownership updated on a blockchain. To give you an example - let’s say that an artist created a new piece and wants to sell it digitally. He can now create a digital asset representing this piece of art and sell it to anyone interested via an NFT marketplace.
While I believe this trend is here to stay and will produce lots of interesting innovation, the developments of the past two weeks or so are starting to worry me about the short term as this took off faster than I imagined, showing signs of bubble behavior:
Cryptopunks was one of the first NFT projects out there. It consists of pixelated characters that one can collect and trade. Last week, one of these characters was sold for over $1.5 million in the most expensive trade up to this day!
The Nyan Cat GIF that you see at the top of this newsletter was sold for 300 ETH, at the time roughly $600.000, last week. It was created in 2011 and is an iconic piece in the crypto scene. Still, quite a price for a GIF.
So where do I see future potential for tokenization?
I think that the concept of tokenization through NFTs will enable us to align incentives between fans and creators. Countless creators depend on their fans to support them in the early days, whether it is in the form of donations, moderating a community chat or simply spreading the word and growing the community. I believe we will see a future where creators tokenize themselves, allowing early followers to “invest” in them, thereby financing the creator while being able to participate in the upside of the creators’ future development.
It is basically like an income share agreement (another huge trend at the moment) between the creator and the early supporters. We are seeing the first signs of this trend materializing with people like Alex Masmej creating their own token and a few social token incubators popping up (e.g. Seed Club). Even popular athletes are catching up to this trend with NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie planning to tokenize his salary in the near future.
I brainstormed the idea of investing in upcoming Twitch gamers with friends before and we even came up with a set of KPIs on how to identify promising talent. However, up until now, there was simply no way to accomplish such an investment. So in many ways, this is a two-sided opportunity. It not only allows you to get started as a creator through community investment, but it also allows you to invest in areas where you have a specific insight.
Would you buy a $zerotomio coin? 😜
Catch of the week 🐟
Freezingcam - the ultimate home office hack
Have you ever gotten into a situation during a video call where you would wish you could have a short break to think for a few seconds and turning off your camera is not a real option? Then freezingcam is the perfect tool for you.
Turn it on and your screen will be frozen in the video call, buying you some precious time to think, research, or do whatever. Once you are all set, switch it off, blame it on a short connection issue - and you are back in the game 😁
Spline.design
I don’t think that I have featured any design tools in this newsletter so far, but this tool got me really excited. Nowadays you see all these funky-looking 3D animations on websites. Not only do they look great, but they are also fun to interact with. Spline lets you create 3D animated objects in no time without needing a whole lot of design skills.
I gave it a try and created this zero to MIO cube in under 30 minutes (check it out in your browser). I just love to see how designing objects is becoming more and more democratized with tools like Figma or Spline.design taking the stage.
Prediction of the week 🔮
We will see 10x the amount of Peleton bikes being sold on Ebay later this year
To be honest I am surprised by how many people have even bought Peleton bikes in the first place. At the same time, I am sure that the Peleton will become the dusty device in the corner very soon. Sorry to disappoint you fanboys and fangirls but that’s always been the case with home trainers and I don’t see why this time should be different.
Trade of the week 😎
Shorting $TSLA finally paid off! While most Tesla skeptics gut burned in the market during the last years, we are starting to see a significant correction these last days. I got my eyes on this one in the upcoming months!
Enjoying the read so far? Let others have a piece of it too! 🙌
Links 🔗
Get an @🦄 mail address
Tired of @gmail, @yahoo & co? Mailoji is your solution - check out this super fun product that allows you to purchase an emoji mail address.
I might go for zerotomio@🤑.to (yes, that is the only downside - addresses end with .to or .kz). Maybe we will see even cooler endings in the future, I love this product anyhow!
Audioblogs
If you don’t have enough time to read all your news articles, you should check out Audioblogs. This chrome extension reads out any blog post or news article to you right in your browser, just like a podcast.
Here is an example of Audioblog reading out last week’s newsletter.
Fabrice Grinda on the current financial markets
I have been reading Fabrice’s blog posts for a while as he usually writes quality articles around angel investing and start-up business models. So I was pleased to see him take a macro view on the current situation in global financial markets. Check it out.
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and took some inspiration away from it! Feel free to reach out with feedback, ideas, and things you would like me to write more about. Make sure you hit subscribe below, to be among the first to receive this newsletter in the future