The Contract Programmer

The Digital Artist known as PAK generated over $17 million in sales over 3 days for a Sothebys auction held at the Winklevoss Twins’ digital art site Nifty Gateway.

The Nifty Gateway is fascinating site with daily “drops” of art, each backed by NFTs with a barely veiled crass commercialism crossed with a quasi get-rich quick ponzi scheme like backdrop. Digital art “collectors” purchase NFTs of digital art works and the site immediately lists the purchased holdings on the Nifty Gateway “Marketplace”, where identical images of the NFT series’ are displayed with captions underneath “Not Accepting Offers” or a dollar amount you can pay to get your own copy. Pak “Cubes” that were sold individually for $500 on April 12th, $1,000 on April 13th and $1,500 on April 14th are showing available NFT editions today (April 19th, 2021) from $1,396 to $9,999,999,999 (that’s a dollar less than 10 billion dollars) and with a median sale price of $5,555 (half Pak cubes sell for more, half of them sell for less). So assuming an efficient and relatively liquid Nifty “Marketplace”, and going with the median price, one could have bought an open edition Pak cube for $500.00 on April 12th with no limit to the amount of editions listed for sale, and on April 19th the NFT purchaser can resell with a median price that is 11x that purchase price a week earlier. I don’t know how much movement the Nifty “Marketplace” has, but an 11x return on any investment a week later is the kind of returns that sound too good to be true and such that seasoned investors warn about.

This is fascinating. Here is the link to the site that is hosting the Sotheby’s NFT auction that ends today (Nifty Gateway is owned by the Winklevoss twins according to a close friend that follows crypto).

It’s a bit of a head scratcher at first blush on what the actual offer is, but if you read through, the first offering is “The Fungible Open Edition” It goes on sale today from 1:00-1:15pm ET for the last day. It was for sale previously from 1:00-1:15pm ET on Monday and Tuesday and as of yesterday, sold 22,913 units @ $1,500.00 each = $34,369,500.00 through yesterday. The person that buys the most units by 1:15 PM today gets a “one-of-one” NFT. The next 100 people receive one NFT each from a NFT collection of 100, think of an artist limited edition print, 1 of 100, 2 of 100, etc. That limited edition is distributed based on those that buy the most open edition items (2 through 101) @ $1,500.00 each. Keep in mind that it’s blind on how many people are buying and how much each person has spent.

Additionally for sale: there are a couple of give-a-ways based on what the artist wants to do to spread some wealth around, there are 2 additional single edition NFTs that are offered continuously for sale until 1:15 PM today. So far it looks like 38 million in sales. All the money seems to be going towards “The Fungible Open Edition” right now. Fascinating!!!!

For Coinbase, apparently since it is a Direct Public Offering (DPO) instead of a more traditional Initial Public Offering (IPO), which are orchestrated by investment banks, there are at least 2 things that make it different:
1) The first publicly traded share may not actually take place until this afternoon.
2) The actual opening price is still being worked out.