Since we first wrote about the intersection of web3 and AI in 2022, this fast-moving technology trend has become a key feature of crypto conferences this year. However, it’s not as common that AI events make an effort to highlight decentralization, or that both sides of the web3 x AI equation come together to such an extent in a single event.

SuperAI, the flagship event during Singapore AI Week this June, might be the first conference I’ve attended that has started to bridge the cultural divide between classic web2 founders and projects, and the developers breaking new ground at the intersection of web3 and AI.

Well-organized and globally attended, the conference felt similar to Token2049, a bi-annual crypto event held in Dubai and Singapore hosted by the same organizers. Crowds flocked to the mainstage to listen to investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinvasan deliver a talk about the complementary nature of web3 and AI. But right behind him was Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert’s robotics presentation, followed by former CEO of StabilityAI Emad Mostaque who announced his new endeavor, Schelling AI, an AI-backed cryptocurrency. Conference goers from all around the world — primarily Asia, the Middle East, India, Australia, and a slew of Western countries — filled the room taking in an eclectic mix of AI and crypto.

While I spent time with some of the most cutting edge teams working to bring the AI production pipeline onchain — Kiva, Pax, Ritual, Sapien, and Schelling AI, to name a few — I also spoke with veteran AI entrepreneurs who held long-term positions at Meta, Microsoft, and other traditional companies historically on the forefront of machine learning and AI. SuperAI also held its Genesis Startup Competition, where early-stage AI companies pitched their products to investors on the stage, competing for a prize. Out of 700 applicants across the world, OpenOrigins — a blockchain-powered trust layer focused on media provenance — took first place.

A thesis in action

SuperAI was a testament that our 2022 thesis will not only be possible, but will offer an alternative and more democratic foundation on which to build this technology. Our thesis was further validated by the many startups who have come onto the scene to build AI infrastructure using web3 primitives, as well as the increasing funding momentum of the category.

At CoinFund, we often say that AI needs web3 much more than web3 needs AI. But the success of web3’s role in AI will depend on how, culturally, these two perspectives can unite. At this gathering among some of the brightest minds in cognitive computing, it was promising to see both groups moving toward each other in recognition of their ability to build more open, more democratic, and ultimately safer AI technologies by combining the two areas.

For developers, web3 hopes to democratize resources, allowing more individuals to participate in AI research. It will also ensure that open source AI continues to be a major source of innovation in capabilities, interpretability, and alignment. For users, web3 data can ensure that agents are self-sovereign and have ownership over their digital identity. When it comes to intellectual property, it will certify that users and copyright owners are protected and properly compensated for their creations.

As someone who has been investing in the AI side of web3 since 2020, this trip was a no-brainer for me. I was glad to bring a cryptonative perspective to the conference, and to work with web2 AI founders to close the cultural gap within the ecosystem.

Takeaways

While so much innovation has occurred in decentralized AI over the past two years, it’s still very early. Most advancement so far has been in laying the infrastructure foundation for decentralized AI, and we’re still early to the application layer. In terms of infrastructure, the most tangible capabilities are GPU compute aggregation. For example, io.net — a company creating instant access to GPUs — sponsored SuperAI. Decentralized training is still getting started and continues to be a challenging and controversial area, though a number of companies including GenSyn and Pax are making meaningful contributions to this area.

Asia continues to play an increasingly important role in web3 innovation and adoption. Many technical projects are based in Singapore and Hong Kong, with strong machine learning talent coming in from across the world. CoinFund has grown its team in Asia in the last two years and approximately half of our portfolio is located outside of the U.S. — we are thrilled to see more builders join the crypto ecosystem globally every day.

More viable infrastructure will help people build applications that generate new capabilities, taking AI development to the next level. Leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic often speak about artificial general intelligence’s (AGI), however, the real and practical “danger” of AI in the short term might be that it causes some automation to, say, 20% of work. More generally, most people I spoke with had a much less dramatic outlook on the dangers of AI. I had conversations with leaders in the space who believe that there’s a less than 10% chance that AI presents existential risks anytime soon.

Reflecting on my week in Singapore, it’s clear that the intersection of web3 and AI is here to stay, and the innovation in the space is continuing to grow as both industries come together to form productive projects and advance the decentralized state of the art.

* * *

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the individual CoinFund Management LLC (“CoinFund”) personnel quoted and are not the views of CoinFund or its affiliates. Certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources, which may include portfolio companies of funds managed by CoinFund. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, CoinFund has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.

This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by CoinFund. An offer to invest in a CoinFund fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by CoinFund, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by CoinFund (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for CoinFund to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://www.coinfund.io/portfolio.

Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. This presentation contains “forward-looking statements,” which can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “may”, “will”, “should”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “project”, “estimate”, “intend”, “continue” or “believe” or the negatives thereof or other variations thereon or comparable terminology. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events or results may differ materially and adversely from those reflected or contemplated in the forward-looking statements.

The convergence of web2 and web3 AI: What I learned at SuperAI conference in Singapore was originally published in CoinFund Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read this post on decentralized infrastructure at Mirror. Jake is founder & CEO at CoinFund, a blockchain-focused investment firm.

Hasu on Twitter: "I have nothing against art or digital goods, I just really dislike nonfungibility. It practically ensures there's never gonna be a liquid market for it. Now how I like to store my value / Twitter"

I have nothing against art or digital goods, I just really dislike nonfungibility. It practically ensures there's never gonna be a liquid market for it. Now how I like to store my value

Today, most people following nonfungibles observe that it is a very illiquid asset class and feel it is likely to stay that way. What may not be obvious is that, in the context of blockchain’s cryptoeconomic mechanisms, “liquidity” is merely a mechanism design problem being rapidly solved. In this post, I would like to dive into how cryptoeconomics will financialize the NFT space, improve its liquidity profile, and extend this technology to other illiquid assets over time.

The financialization of the NFT asset class

Back in the early stages of the blockchain space it took months, and sometimes years, for a fungible (read: ERC20) token to achieve any significant liquidity. Issuers would compete to get listed on a centralized exchange, pay hefty fees, and jump through regulatory gauntlets. But the market applied smart contracts and cryptoeconomic mechanisms to solve the liquidity problem for fungibles. These days, through the magic of liquidity mining and the ingenuity of automated market makers, the time to liquidity for an average ERC20 token is virtually zero and DEXes are doing upwards of $2B of daily volume while serving $44B of DeFi market cap.

In contrast, the prospects of selling any individual nonfungible in the secondary market are still bleak today, even after a year when NFT GMVs have ticked up dramatically in 2020. In a previous post, I proposed that we design NFTs as “liquid intellectual property.” As the scope of NFTs encompasses more and more digital content, the liquid IP view comes with the implicit assumption that NFTs are, in their own right, a new financial asset class.

As NFTs become increasingly financial, they will require new kinds of exchanges, lending protocols, and derivatives. Thus, I claim that price discovery is the next major problem set in the NFT space. Capital efficient mechanisms for price discovery will enable participants to transact more quickly, improve liquidity through tokenization, allow nonfungibles to be collateral without order books, and create a rich set of derivatives with nonfungibles as underlying. In other words, price discovery will enable the financialization of the NFT asset class.

So how will it be implemented? Once again, as we lay out in this post, new price discovery mechanisms — in particular, appraisal games — will create key innovations that will solve the liquidity problem for NFTs and other illiquid assets.

Understanding current price discovery mechanisms

There are only a few ways that price discovery proceeds in NFTs today. First understanding these mechanisms will help us form a framework for how to think about the price discovery problem.

1. The Sale Mechanism. In the sales approach, used by Rarible and most other NFT marketplaces, valuations are created from an open market public sale. As NFTs exchange hands through sales, the market notes historical prices and provenance of assets. Without an outsized market of participants, this default mechanism doesn’t have too much information about pricing and the market is very illiquid. As we shall see, sales are on the frontier of capital inefficiency: their main drawback is that for every dollar of valuation, someone must actually pay a dollar to create it.
2. The Auction Mechanism. For better or worse, most marketplace sellers and buyers actually prefer auctions for obtaining and pricing NFTs. Async.art uses perpetual auctions as their native gallery, as does SuperRare. Beeple’s storied $3.5 million drop shows that auctions, while career-making, are generally exuberant. It’s worthwhile to note that auctions are well-suited toward art sales, where the intrinsic value of assets tends to be much more subjective and in the eye of the beholder. But from a capital efficiency perspective across general NFT assets, auctions are suboptimal. Most blockchain auction mechanisms in production aren’t Vickrey auctions, which would incentivize participants to bid their true value. Even if they were, they would have even worse capital efficiency than sales: they require capital to be locked up by bidders. (Some platforms have even proposed paying bidders DeFi yield on locked up bid capital to mitigate lockups.) In an auction, for every dollar of valuation, the mechanism might require multiple dollars of worth of bidding.
3. The Fractionalization Mechanism. NFT fractionalization, as seen in the pioneering work of Niftex, is the first innovation toward creating capital efficiency in an NFT price discovery context. Together with other approaches like Ark, Wrapped Punks, WG0, and NFTX.org, fractionalization shards one or more nonfungibles into an ERC20 currency which can gain liquidity on a DEX or centralized exchange. Anyone can buy any amount of the currency in order to help establish the overall valuation, bringing down the cost of valuation for an individual user (but not necessarily in the mechanism as a whole). With fractionalization also come the challenges of stakeholder governance and managing a proliferation of ERC20 assets corresponding to a large universe of nonfungibles.

This discussion of existing approaches motivates the question of whether there exist approaches that dramatically improve capital efficiency for the price discovery problem. We cover some of these approaches in the next section.

Capital efficiency is what makes price discovery disruptive

Based on our discussion so far, a basic framework for evaluating price discovery mechanisms is measuring their capital efficiency. Let us define P(x) as the discovered price of a good x and C(x) as the total cost expenditure from participants required to price it. Then we can broadly define the price discovery efficiency of a mechanism as, informally, E = P/C across a particular set of assets. In this framework, sale mechanisms always have an efficiency of E = 1, auction mechanisms have E ≤ 1, and fractionalization deserves a more nuanced analysis than we should do here, with E ≥ 1. The question is whether we can do much better than fractionalization, and the answer is yes.

1. Price Computation. While auctions are great for subjectively-valued goods, collectibles markets are often pricing on scarcity and well-defined properties. Some assets, like CryptoKitties and virtual real estate, might have pricing that can simply be computed. NFTBank.ai is one of the first startups to put forward accurate machine learning models for predicting the prices of collectibles based on past pricing of similar or adjacent collectibles. Virtual real estate pricing might succumb to models which take into account past sales and revenue generation possible in the neighborhood. In this context, capital efficiency goes way up because we can think of the mechanism as having a fixed cost, c, of deploying the pricing algorithms. Thus the cost will be amortized across price discoveries and efficiency E = P/c will go to infinity over time. Still, the jury may still be out on whether machine learning will work well for exuberant and subjectively-valued goods, like Beeple art.
2. Expert Networks. We don’t necessarily need to build a machine learning model in order to achieve a fixed cost of price discovery. Imagine for each pricing, we pay a fixed amount of money to five experts who give us their educated opinions about a good’s fair market value. Capital efficiency improves as the goods appreciate in value. This approach can use centralized services, or incentivized networks of humans, to create appraisals. One concern with using human experts is scale — will we really have enough experts to process the entire potential volume of goods that the NFT space is likely to produce? As we shall see next, this approach is probably best formalized as on-chain oracle networks, which will naturally incentivize agents to play appraisal games and do so efficiently.
3. Peer Prediction Oracles. The most exciting recent development in oracles is the implementation of peer prediction as an on-chain mechanism, pioneered by Upshot. Peer prediction is a cooperative game that incentivizes participants to honestly answer queries, without requiring data feeds or other sources of objective ground truth. Upshot proposes to apply peer prediction, coupled with an ordering algorithm, to create capital efficient price discovery for NFTs. It’s hard to do justice to peer prediction in this small space, but the mechanism by nature is agnostic between objectively priced collectibles or subjectively priced art — the oracle will report an educated consensus. Most importantly, Upshot makes several interesting improvements to capital efficiencies of today’s appraisal games. First, the mechanism’s valuation costs are amortized across a large number of goods, similar to price computation. Secondly, the protocol’s security margin can be assessed from future revenue: if some appraisers are malicious or bad at their job, then the protocol actively reduces their future cash flows by not selecting them for appraisal tasks. Punishing agents by cutting into their future cash flows instead of making them pay for security up front is a big capital efficiency improvement in cryptoeconomic protocols at large. Upshot’s peer prediction will be the first on-chain mechanism widely applicable to NFT price discovery, and NFT pricing will be the first application of Upshot’s protocol to roll out in 2021.
4. Derivative-Implied Pricing. NFT loans, demonstrated by companies like NFTfi, and NFT indices, as contemplated by NFTX.org, create another vector for NFT price discovery — the pricing implied by derivatives which have nonfungible assets as their underlying. Custom derivatives, such as the right to purchase an NFT in the future or prediction market shares, can potentially create NFT pricing, while delegating the costs of liquidity aggregation to other platforms or mechanisms. It’s still early in this space, and it will be developing over the coming years as the financialization trend continues.

Implications of nonfungible liquidity

Overall, the potential for capital efficient price discovery mechansims has profound implications for the liquidity of existing NFTs and, by extension, any illiquid asset which can be formulated as an on-chain nonfungible. We are likely to see a whole ecosystem of appraisal games develop around the price discovery problem in the years to come. We have also seen that some approaches are more suitable for objectively priced goods, and some more suitable for subjectively priced goods.

Here are some practical applications of price discovery.

1. A creator will be able to produce a work and an efficient market of appraisal games will offer liquidity for that work in a completely automated manner. As such, this would be an utterly disruptive mechanism for monetizing creativity, content, and digital goods.
2. Oracle-based pricing will be used to valuate portfolios and collections of nonfungibles to discover new value.
3. “Instant pricing” of NFTs can be used to create a lower bound at which holders can always liquidate their assets. Neolastics have proposed mechanisms along similar lines, and other price discovery might be applicable across a wider range of goods.
4. Any application which uses NFTs as collateral can rely on on-chain pricing to control risk. For example, a lending protocol can set liquidation margins based on automated pricing. Or, in a more technical application, optimistic rollups can potentially use this mechanism to lower “roll-off” costs for NFTs from layer 2.
5. Investors can make purchase decisions faster and more efficiently with suggested prices.
6. We can create decentralized NFT indices backed by the security of appraisal games instead of trust or collateral. This can create major efficiencies for investors seeking exposure to the NFT space but hesitant to evaluate on an asset by asset basis.

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this fascinating and developing space. Follow me on Twitter @jbrukh.

References

1. [Emmons] An efficient price mechanism for NFTs
2. [Brukhman] Twitter thread on #NFTLiquidity
3. [Ausubel, Milgrom] The lovely but lonely Vickrey auction
4. [Brukhman] All digital content is going on-chain
5. [Berenzon] Constant function market makers: a zero to one innovation
6. [Hubert] Niftex: The buyout clause in depth
7. [Emmons] Peer prediction 101

Disclaimer: The content provided on this site is for informational and discussion purposes only and should not be relied upon in connection with a particular investment decision or be construed as an offer, recommendation or solicitation regarding any investment. The author is not endorsing any company, project, or token discussed in this article. All information is presented here “as is,” without warranty of any kind, whether express or implied, and any forward-looking statements may turn out to be wrong. CoinFund Management LLC and its affiliates may have long or short positions in the tokens or projects discussed in this article.

Appraisal games and the NFT liquidity problem was originally published in CoinFund Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

CoinFund’s NFT thesis and our investment in Rarible

NFTs are intellectual property rights to digital content

NFTs [1] are not just cat pictures that people trade on blockchains. Today digital art [2], collectibles [3], and in-game assets [4] are the most visible use cases for these nifty non-fungibles. But the market holds an inconspicuous secret: there is a staggering diversity of online digital content that can be placed on a blockchain in the form of NFTs.

• Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu host over 23,000 pieces of on-demand video content. Disney+ and HBO Max have added nearly 10,000 more.
• AR and VR creators are busy populating the Metaverse with 3D models. Marketplaces like TurboSquid are offering 60,000 3D models today [5] and are poised for growth.
• In music, the world releases about 100,000 albums every year, [6] each with multiple tracks that can generate millions of plays. Recording artists are moving toward self-publication models [7] on services like SoundCloud and Audius [8] and toward self-distribution models like Spotify.
• Shutterstock is home to over 330 million stock photographs which can be licensed and collect royalties. [9]
• Over a billion domain names are registered each year, with 400m registered in the first quarter of 2017. [10]
• We upload nearly 1.8 billion images per day [11] to the Internet, or a stunning 657 billion images per year.
• In social media, we generate around 200 billion tweets per year [12], some of which accrued tens of millions of views and become iconic pieces of history or popular culture. [13] There are over 600 million blogs on the internet today.

This list is just scratching the surface of the broad spectrum of digital content. But we shouldn’t think of NFTs as tokenized digital content itself. A core insight is that NFTs are much better understood as encapsulating intellectual property rights to the assets they describe. [14]

To fully appreciate this view, consider that we seldom own anything on the internet today: we license ebooks from Amazon, we rent music plays from Apple Music, and we make payments to borrow domains from a registrar for a little while. Even when we create our own content, the rights to it are often owned by the content platform, distributor, or label. (In one case of recording artists and music labels, Taylor Swift wasn’t allowed to perform her own music [15] after having signed over rights.)

Most importantly, if we cannot truly own digital content, or easily license it, we will almost surely never resell it.

Blockchains and NFTs will change this state of affairs dramatically. First, they will digitize the rights to digital content in the form of blockchain assets. Second, they will allow for the assets to be placed on secondary markets. Thus, we can view NFTs as liquid intellectual property (“liquid IP”) [18] for all forms of digital content, a marketplace which is measured in trillions of units that is about to be tokenized.

Tokenizing IP assumes, of course, that the creator assigns over actual intellectual property rights, enforced by law or smart contract, as part of the issuance process. This comes with some technical problems to solve, like choosing legal jurisdictions in which the rights would be enforced and connecting legal agreements to the minting process. Luckily, there is some precedent for these structures [16] and Aragon may become one option for a global, digital jurisdiction in the near future. [17]

But why should we want to own digital content when we already have it?

NFTs as a financial asset class

If NFTs are liquid IP, then holders will eventually own the property’s cash flows. This fact makes non-fungible tokens a financial asset class.

Would I buy an art NFT for $30,000 ?NO. I'll google the image, download it, set it as wallpaper for free.

In the future, purchasing an NFT will entitle the owner to certain rights related to its content: the right to own and keep; the right to sell, license, and lend; as well as the right to royalties, the right to confer reuse (i.e. “movie rights”), and so on. That’s why taking a photograph of the Mona Lisa is not the same as actually owning Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. You will not be able to charge 10.2 million yearly Louvre visitors an admission fee to see the print. [19] A similar principle applies to digital objects and their future cash flows.

As intellectual property rights inevitably move onto the blockchain as NFTs, trillions of units of digital content will move onto secondary markets. This will unlock tremendous illiquid value and become the biggest asset class in blockchain. Tokenization creates new ways of working with IP that were previously unavailable or too expensive to set up. For example, blockchain technology will automate IP provenance, use tracking, and rights management. Using existing standards and smart contracts, NFTs can be fractionalized, co-owned, and governed by multiple users or communities. Fractionalized tokens can be traded, crowdfunded, and incorporated into other financialization schemes to manage risk or unlock further value. (Projects like OpenLaw are venturing into new royalty technology and artist royalties are a popular topic in the #cryptoart scene. [20])

While tokenization will impact the liquidity of classic IP, digital-native use cases will arise as we look toward the future. Imagine owning the royalties to a Taylor Swift’s new album Folklore, or trading an index of your favorite digital artists like Frenetik Void [21] or Pak. [22] Imagine selling a digital 3D model you built or licensing a stock photograph you shot directly from your phone into a global marketplace. More exotically, imagine supporting your favorite blogger or influencer by purchasing and owning their blog post or Insta story.

While the Metaverse seems like a distant digital dream, its digital assets are already here and new kinds of investors are taking notice. Andrew Steinwold’s Sfermion is a Metaverse-native firm that invests in “esoteric digital assets” [23], that is, NFTs of virtual worlds, digital art, and related assets. I suspect these assets won’t be esoteric for long. Companies like Fortnite are already measuring revenue streams in billions based on in-game digital objects, while Dapper Labs’ NBA Top shot just brought digital collectibles to the sports industry.

NFTs are about to become a new, voluminous financial asset class. To capture its value we need venues for selling, auctioning, and trading these new assets.

Rarible, the first decentralized and community-owned marketplace for the NFT asset class

Rarible is the first NFT marketplace in the blockchain space to launch a governance token. The token, called $RARI, can be obtained in exchange for marketplace participation and has found its initial liquidity on decentralized venues at Balancer and Uniswap. If you’ve ever transacted on Rarible or made an NFT purchase or sale on-chain, there is a good chance your address is eligible for the $RARI airdrop. [24] [25] [26]

The team at Rarible, founded by Alex Salnikov and Alexei Falin, is based in Moscow, Russia but engages the blockchain space globally and is open for business to anyone in the world who has a smartphone. [27]

The Rarible team has continued to raise the bar on user experiences for both cryptonatives and mainstream users. Today, Rarible comes with state-of-the-art features and experience for NFT creation: ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards support, multi-edition mining, custom on-chain collections, and creator verification and moderation. On the demand side, top notch tools are in the works in the areas of discovery, engagement, and displaying works. Users new to blockchain should find friendly user experiences with Magic and Zerion integration, as well as upcoming credit card support. And, of course, Rarible’s moderated incentive program distributes $RARI rewards for users who transact on the platform.

But the real innovation of Rarible is that it is on a path of gradual decentralization toward community ownership, making it a highly competitive venue to attract participants. Rarible is currently in the process of implementing full decentralized governance, just like many DeFi projects are launching today. As a result, the platform’s core features, economics, and smart contracts will eventually be totally in the hands of the Rarible community through $RARI ownership.

Over time, we think cryptonative monetization and the core value propositions of crypto networks [28] implemented by Rarible will make it highly competitive with other digital marketplaces and Rarible will be a premiere venue for NFT liquidity. The community-building properties of digital assets have been discussed previously [29] and Rarible has already seen an immense response in platform metrics following the launch of the digital asset. Using $RARI, Rarible will be able to shore up a strong, loyal community that maintains an active 2-sided marketplace.

At CoinFund, we’re excited to support the Rarible team’s highly cryptonative approach as the asset class of non-fungibles continues to develop. Mint or browse some NFTs on Rarible today.

Read Rarible’s announcement here.

Special thanks to the Rarible team, Jesse Walden, Roneil Rumberg, Nick Cowen, Alex Felix, Oleg Golubov, Sasha Hudzilin, Roxy Sklavos, Pri Desai, Aaron Wright, Michael Bosworth, Yashar Dehaghani, Ashley Tyson, Austin Barack, Sandro Gorduladze, Andrew Steinwold, Sam Brukhman, and others for giving great feedback on this post.

References

[1] NFTs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token

[2] Digital art https://app.rarible.com/frenetik/created

[3] Collectibles https://www.cryptokitties.co/

[4] In-game assets https://www.cryptovoxels.com/wearables

[5] TurboSquid marketplace https://blog.turbosquid.com/2016/03/10/real-time-portal-60k-3d-assets/

[6] Annual album volume https://www.quora.com/How-many-albums-and-singles-are-released-a-year-worldwide

[7] Self-publication on SoundCloud https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/digital-and-mobile/8551334/soundcloud-mobile-upload-artists-recordings

[8] Audius https://audius.co/

[9] ShutterStock https://shutterstock.com

[10] Domain name registrations https://www.quora.com/How-many-domains-name-are-registered

[11] Daily image uploads https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mary-meeker-photo-report/

[12] Tweets per year https://www.dsayce.com/social-media/tweets-day

[13] “Funding secured” https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776?s=20

[14] NFTs as intellectual property rights https://twitter.com/jbrukh/status/1296046387952594944?s=20

[15] Taylor Swift music rights https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/14/entertainment/taylor-swift-scooter-braun/index.html

[16] The LAO https://medium.com/openlawofficial/the-lao-a-for-profit-limited-liability-autonomous-organization-9eae89c9669c

[17] A global, digital jurisdiction https://aragon.org/blog/aragon-network-on-a-path-towards-a-digital-jurisdiction-752ccf4b9d5c

[18] Mona Lisa at the Louvre https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/arts/design/mona-lisa-louvre.html

[19] Liquid intellectual property https://twitter.com/jbrukh/status/1296054022693167104?s=20

[20] “Modernizing art with blockchains” https://medium.com/@OpenLawOfficial/modernizing-art-with-blockchains-6cba4694833d

[21] Frenetik Void https://twitter.com/frenetikvoid?lang=en

[22] Murat Pak https://twitter.com/muratpak

[23] Andrew Steinwold’s Sfermion https://medium.com/@andrew_34383/sfermion-a-metaverse-native-investment-firm-6aace1733e61

[24] Rarible launched $RARI https://www.coindesk.com/yield-farming-expands-from-finance-to-digital-collectibles-rarible-nfts

[25a] Balancer pool for $RARI https://balancer.exchange/#/swap/0xfca59cd816ab1ead66534d82bc21e7515ce441cf

[25b] Uniswap pool for $RARI https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap/0xfca59cd816ab1ead66534d82bc21e7515ce441cf

[26] $RARI airdrop https://app.rarible.com/rari

[27] Russian teams in blockchain https://twitter.com/jbrukh/status/1297164790347988993?s=20

[28] “The 9 core value propositions of crypto networks” https://blog.coinfund.io/what-we-look-for-the-9-core-value-propositions-of-crypto-networks-88b04d09d873

[29] “Community ownership as a blockchain adoption model” https://blog.coinfund.io/community-ownership-as-a-blockchain-adoption-model-71a87f167de2

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All digital content is going on-chain was originally published in CoinFund Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2020 should be a year in human history when this statement is not controversial and doesn’t need to be said, but unfortunately this is not the case. Black lives and livelihoods are threatened daily by discrimination and structural inequity across every facet of society. This should not be a reality in 21st century America or across the world but it is. Black Lives Matter.

Change will require conscious action from individuals in the choices they make on behalf of themselves and the organizations they are part of. This applies to us as members of the blockchain investment community in the way we allocate capital, help steer network governance, and make decisions related to hiring and selecting vendors. At CoinFund, we can do better on all these fronts and we reaffirm our commitment to do so. Moreover, one of the core reasons for why we are in the blockchain space today is we believe that blockchain technologies will help to level the playing fields of finance, tech, and society, and create immense positive social impact for historically underprivileged people.

As we observe Juneteenth, we are focusing on what we can do on our part. We stand in solidarity with the Black community and make the following pledge to purposefully and actively strive for diversity in the hires we make and the founders we work with across the blockchain products we support, and beyond:

• We unequivocally oppose systemic racism and police brutality.
• We will formalize a diversity recruitment and advancement plan at our organization.
• We will formalize a plan for creating more opportunities to invest with Black, female, and minority founders.
• We will continue to donate to nonprofits that fight systemic inequity and racism and promote technology opportunities and education for minorities. At this time, we are particularly excited to support the #CryptoForBlackLives Gitcoin Grants campaign, set up with the help of our own Devin Walsh.
• We will listen, think, and work on other ways to help.

A big thank you to Robert Greenfield IV of Emerging Impact for his work and for inspiring this pledge.

The CoinFund Team
Jake, Alex, Oleg, Seth, Devin, Ryan, Jason

CoinFund is celebrating #Juneteenth today and supporting #CryptoForBlackLives was originally published in CoinFund Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.