11/03/2022 Chris Dixon, Marc Andreessen back $30M fund exclusively investing in NFT art

Chris Dixon DSC02390

The world of NFTs is never dull — as long as the money never stops. While investors continue to pour billions into the sector, albeit at a slowing pace, more crypto buyers are spinning up funds to back NFT platforms, projects and the non-fungible tokens themselves.

While dedicated funds solely devoted to NFTs as an asset class are starting to pop up, it’s still a risky space for the bigger institutional firms. That’s not stopping those investors from becoming LPs in the NFT funds themselves, though. A number of prominent Silicon Valley crypto VCs have backed a new upstart NFT fund led by Andrew Jiang and Todd Goldberg.

The $30 million fund calledCuratedis devoted to buying and holding NFT artwork.The fund is backed by a who’s who of crypto investors, with LPs including a sizable chunk of a16z’s investing team (Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Andrew Chen, Arianna Simpson and Jon Lai are all backers), as well as Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Electric Capital’s Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer and a host of other investors and founders in the space.

The fund plans to invest about half of the fund in so-called “blue-chip NFTs,” including popular projects like CryptoPunks, Art Blocks and Bored Apes, as well as works from popular artists selling singular NFT works. The other half of the fund is going into what Jiang and Goldberg deem as “high potential collections” from artists with smaller existing markets.

“NFT assets are what we think are going to be a really big deal over the next decade, like orders of magnitude larger than they are today, because NFTs give us a digitally native way to invest in culture at internet scale,” Goldberg tells TechCrunch in an interview. “We want to become a very high-signal collector that acquires the top assets and is also helpful to creators and builders.”

Goldberg says that the firm may also explore doing its own NFT drops, partnering with some of the artists in their portfolio.

The NFT market is still raking in billions, but the pace of investment appears to be slowing in recent weeks. In the past 30 days, the OpenSea platform has done $2.3 billion in transaction volume, a 40% decrease over the previous 30-day period, according to blockchain analysis toolDappRadar.

“The market has been frothy, however, we’re kind of entering a bear market, which is actually great for the fund as we are very patient capital,” Goldberg says. “We’ll wait for the best opportunities to enter these positions and then we’ll just hold these things long-term. Long-term, patient capital doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I think in this market where everyone is very short-term focused, it actually is a strategic advantage.”

Jiang, who is the primary manager of the fund, previously founded the hardware startup Soda Labs, as well as the YC-backed nonprofit Bayes Impact. Goldberg, who co-founded the ticketing startup Eventjoy, already has aseparate fund making equity investments in startups, which he operates with Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra. A number of that fund’s portfolio founders are backers of Curated, including Dapper Labs and the founders of NFT startup Manifold.

Arts

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/10/chris-dixon-marc-andreessen-back-a-30m-fund-investing-exclusively-in-nft-art/

Interesting NFTs
OriginalplanÂŽ - Series 1 - Raw Cut Diamond Be@rbrick
The Be@rbrick series is a project around creating unique Be@rbrick designs. Originally it started as a daily project so each design was created on a daily basis. The concept and idea is based on the subcultural phenomenon of collectibles and designer toys. Raw Cut Be@rbrick is made of several hundreds of diamonds and is only availabe as a 1/1 limited edition collectible. Format : 3D Render. File: JPG * size: 5120 × 2880px After purchase a hand signed Glichē print will be sent to the address of your choosing. Limited to: 1/1 digital pieces.
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.
Misty
*waves*! I'm Misty. I believe the world is flat. Some people say I'm the Homer Simpson of the group. Can't wait to eat chocolate with you!
Ringers #686
There are an almost infinite number of ways to wrap a string around a set of pegs. On the surface it may seem like a simple concept but prepare to be surprised and delighted at the variety of combinations the algorithm can produce. Each output from 'Ringers' is derived from a unique transaction hash and generated in Javascript in the browser. Feature variations include peg count, sizing, layout, wrap orientation, and a few colorful flourishes for good measure. Additional project feature(s) => Background: White, Size: Normal, Wrap orientation: Off-center, Wrap style: Weave, Peg layout: Recursive grid, Peg scaling: Uniform, Body: Yellow, Peg style: Solid, Extra color: Red, Peg count: 15
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