New York-based crypto investment firm CoinFund has made an undisclosed investment into the digital art-focused non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, Rarible.
According to a September 8 announcement from Rarible, funds from the pre-seed round will be used to develop a “community-governed” NFT marketplace. The Rarible platform launched earlier this year and began issuing its RARI governance token this week — with RARI doubling in price since trade commenced on Uniswap 24 hours ago.
Rarible predicts that the NFT sector will see a 50% growth in capitalization to tag a $315 million market in 2020.
In a blog post from CoinFund announcing the investment, the firm predicts that “all digital content is going on-chain” — emphasizing the “staggering diversity of online digital content that can be placed on a blockchain in the form of NFTs.”
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.
CoinFund asserts that understanding NFTs “as tokenized digital content itself” is reductionist, describing non-fungible tokens as liquid expressions of intellectual property rights for all forms of digital content.
For example, the firm highlights that the difference between “taking a photograph of the Mona Lisa” and “actually owning Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece” is that someone with a photo is not able to charge $10.2 million in annual admission fees to view it.
“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.”
