Investing $50m to empower the NFT creators of the open metaverse
Investing $50m to empower the NFT creators of the open metaverse
Announcing the closing of our Series A
My last post in March 2021 was about Beeple’s record breaking sale of a $70m NFT. Since then, I disappeared, and if you thought I had vanished into the metaverse, you’d only be partially wrong.
The Beeple sale signified a cultural shift in a new frontier economy that had been gaining momentum - digital ownership: the ability to cryptographically prove ownership of a digital good, whether that be a piece of art, a membership to a club, a deed to a property or a piece of virtual real estate. This new economy, being built right in front of our eyes, is where I believe the future of our culture will exist and is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
As we spend more and more time online and on our digital devices, our virtual experiences have become as important, if not more important, than our physical ones. Who you are online is, well, who you are.
Ownership of one’s online experience becomes about more than just pictures of Punks or Apes on the internet; it becomes about one’s own identity. And ownership of one’s identity is key.
This is the thesis for the metaverse: a pervasive digital experience for both work and play. Many companies are attempting to own this experience. Facebook recently rebranded to Meta, Epic Games raised over $1b to build the metaverse and Nike acquired RTFKT (a digital sneaker company) in their attempt to enter the space. But we have seen what happens when we allow companies to control both our access and ownership of the web. It’s the current paradigm of Web2 and one that we must prevent from occurring in this new frontier economy.
This is why I’m excited to reveal that we have closed $50m in our Series A to invest in the NFT creators and founders of the open metaverse: a metaverse built on decentralized technology, governed by its global community and open to any creator to design new experiences and new models to engage with their fans.
Over the 9 months since the Beeple post, we’ve successfully built an all-star team of entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, curators, analysts and investors to form the founding team of Metaversal. I’m joined by my co-founder, Dan Schmerin who headed up the largest fine art storage and logistics company on the east coast. He grew frustrated that 92% of the world's most iconic cultural artifacts live locked up in storage, and decided that there had to be a better way to experience them.
Metaversal’s launch couldn’t have happened without our founding investor and partner, CoinFund. CoinFund is one of the earliest investors in the NFT economy (having invested in companies like Dapper and Rarible), and were prepared to back me as a founder and investor as far back as March 2021, when Metaversal was nothing more than a concept. The CoinFund team leaned in and opened up their network, enabling us to have conversations with some of the best investors in the world, who I’m now privileged to work with.
While this Series A announcement is a milestone we’re public about and proud of, we’ve been hard at work over the past months having invested in over 750 NFTs, backing a number of tremendous founders, and securing exciting partnerships that our studio will be producing NFTs for.
We will be talking more publicly about those acquisitions, investments and partnerships shortly, and you can learn more about them and the broader NFT market by subscribing to our publication, The Metaversalist and I’ll continue to document my journey building Metaversal here.
I can’t tell you how excited I am for what we’re building at Metaversal throughout 2022 and beyond.
LFG.
Click to watch our epic launch video below
