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
Traffic
Traffic explores a crossroads between the metaverse & reality through organized chaos. The complexity of this aural / visual landscape demanded over 200 hours of design time between Slimesunday & 3LAU. Every detail of this piece was built from scratch, from the reflective puddled pavement to the stabbing synthesis of the song. We think we'll be spending a lot more time in the metaverse in the future, don't you?
The Moth Catcher
In this psychologically bed-headed portrait, a creature sets in a trance; his eyes devolved and vestigal, his third eye open but hardened and in a form resembling a Sharingan. The imagery therefore expresses an awareness existing in corporeal introspection. The creature’s mind sprouts, on the left side, an emerging face, grinning. To the right side of the head, red tentacles and fingers intertwine–a collaboration of invertebrate and vertebrate consciousness cooperatively handling paint brushes of the sort used to build an oil painting. The neck and throat bristle with random thorns, as from a rose or the upper portions of a beak sprouting from its flesh. The neck itself disassociates into layers of membranous material, terminating upon an abstracted base of convoluted forms composing its body. The nose is virtually non existent, more a sinus reiterative of the shape of the third eye. Set against the exposed teeth peering out of thick, meaty cheeks, a skeleton-like impression results. That impression sets behind a visceral set of lips and tongue, which is the creature’s prime seat of awareness. Sensual, organic, the tongue organ hangs, meaty, and with consciousness of a sea cucumber. It illuminates at the tip, drawing the attraction of a nearby moth–with mystery of purpose.
Crypto Bubble
Realize what you really want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold. Digital Artwork by Sandro Ieva
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The classical poet Ono no Komachi, one of the Six Immortal Poets
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) The classical poet Ono no Komachi, one of the Six Immortal Poets 1800s-1810s - Japan