16/12/2021 Andreessen Horowitz backs NFT investor group behind rare Wu-Tang Clan album purchase

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The crypto collective that bought Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” album and an NFT of the original Doge image has a new member: venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The firm tells TechCrunch it has made an investment inPleasrDAO, a blockchain-aligned group of a few dozen crypto investors that have been teaming up to buy high-priced NFTs in recent months. The group’s purchases include the famous Doge image, which they bought for $4 million (1,696.9 ETH to be exact) then later fractionalized and sold to the crypto community (its current implied market cap is just above $100 million). The DAO also paid some $5.4 million for a work from Edward Snowden and $4 million for the Wu-Tang Clan album.

A DAO (or decentralized autonomous organization) is basically a group organized formally around blockchain voting mechanisms to make decisions and invest capital.

A16z Crypto’s investment in PleasrDAO is not their first publicly announced bet on the organization type. In October, the firmmade an investment inFriends With Benefits (FWB) DAO, which theyvalued at $100 million. Andreessen Horowitz did not disclose the size of their investment in PleasrDAO though council member Santiago Santos specified their overall stake of the DAO’s governance tokens was “less than 5%.”

Like many other crypto groups, PleasrDAO had a very singular ambition when it was formed — to bid on a work by a digital artist, in this case one bypplpleasr. Said work was an animated video advertisement for the decentralized exchange platform Uniswap. The group formed in March after crypto founder Leighton Cusacktweeteda link to the auction and asked, “Anyone want to create a quick DAO to bid on this???” The group eventually won the bid at 310 Eth (some $525,000 at the time) with all proceeds for the purchase going to charity.

“Very quickly on, we thought, a lot of the smartest minds in DeFi are here — there is an opportunity to really take this in an interesting direction,” Santos tells TechCrunch. “I think, over time, the DAO grew to the point where we felt that we needed some more structure and hierarchy.”

The group has since continued making investments and bulking up its portfolio while aiming to discover new artists that it can support. Santos says he has aims for the group to become a “Medici house” of NFTs “where a lot of digitally native artists can come and get initiated and discovered.”

“DAOs are almost the purest manifestation of what web3 and crypto are all about,” a16z GP Ali Yahya tells TechCrunch.

While a16z was early to crypto, the rise of so-called “crypto native” investment funds operating closer to founder and developer networks in the space has made it necessary for legacy firms like a16z to get bolder in backing new groups like DAOs. Andreessen Horowitz sees plenty of areas where they can help PleasrDAO including policy and regulatory concerns — an area where DAOs currently seem to be operating in a gray area of as unregulated investment funds of pooled capital.

A16z’s bet on the group is, in many ways, a leveraged bet on NFTs, which the group has already bet heavily on. This year, the firm backed NFT marketplace OpenSea, NFT gaming giant Sky Mavis and NFT music platform Royal, among others. The firm also anchored Meta4 — a $100 million venture fund dedicated to buying up pricey NFTs. These investments are being made from the firm’s massive $2.2 billion crypto-centric fund, which the firm debuted this summer.

“It’s easy to underestimate the potential of NFTs,” Yahya says. “It very well could be that NFTs will be enormous and that the total market cap of all NFTs down the line will actually be bigger than the market cap for fungible tokens.”

Arts

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/14/andreessen-horowitz-backs-nft-investor-group-behind-one-of-a-kind-wu-tang-clan-album-purchase/

Interesting NFTs
Who Is The Creator 2
The idea for this piece was borne out of a tweet of mine that caused a bit of a stir. I’d posted a link to a blog article I’d written a number of months previous titled ‘Who is the Creator’ discussing various types of creative collaborations and why I hire people to work on my animations. It generated a lot of debate around creation and attribution with the community split on whether it’s right or wrong for an artist to hire other professionals to help them realize their art projects. I decided to push the boundaries even further and see how the cryptoart community responded. What if I quite literally had nothing to do with the physical or digital elements of the work other than coming up with the concept and coordinating it? I decided there was one artist in the space who could add huge value to this idea on levels that none other could and so I gathered my courage and contacted the great JosĂ© Delbo to ask him if he’d be interested in a very unique collaboration. I explained to him that to make this piece ‘work’ he couldn't have any say in what I produced and moreover, he wouldn’t even be allowed to see the animation until it was dropped on MakersPlace. To my surprise, Mr Delbo agreed to my proposal. The animation tells the story of the creative process, which includes my roles as writer, director, and producer working with a team and making edits and changes ‘in real time’. The dialogue between myself and my ‘hired guns’ plays out in front of the viewer. The music written for the piece adds to the nostalgia of the comic book superhero theme but other elements such as the snapping and kicking of the pencil and the signing of my signature at the bottom incorporates further layers and challenges the viewer to ask important questions, such as, is the ‘Art’ the final animation (the creation) or is the ‘Art’ the concept/credit for the creation itself?
Smile to Shreds, Neon Gwen
The First KayPikeFashion Mint Ever. Ever feel so joyful and were grinning so hard you felt you could split in half? That punk rebel yell of glee when you pull of a particularly refined stunt? This is the paint of dreams, fangs and neon. Hellish and hard to pull off. I was able to with this work quietly paint a sweet inner tale of childhood influences, rat fink and autobody shops. All while pretending to paint gwenom for the audience. More on that in bonus material. This is my alternate animation made specifically for crypto art collectors. It will only ever exist in this format. You get the Shiny, unused in media verified image. More on that in the bonus material. Mixed Media: Bio/Digital. Glycerin on 5'9" human skin 10-14 hours Performance art. Shot on Canon EOS RP. 16 + hours Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve. All Works are SFW. Art has been Seen on the front page of Reddit, Featured in the New York Times, Galileo.tv, and multiple other promotions including Twitch.tv, Disney Interactive, RIOT games, WB games, AMD and more! More on how this art is unique and potentially explosive in the NFT world: https://youtu.be/CXbNF2Y6srs ------------------------- The purchase of this NFT Grants the buyer unique bonus material. Physical Mail Bonus Package: A verified physical Art Print. Autographed from the artist in 12x16. Please allow a few weeks for delivery. Digital Bonus Package: This image in .mp4. An "About the Art" Video and an "From the Artist" introduction. A README.txt about the artwork with some personal notes and Links relevant to the artwork.
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taNNa
conceptual art. drawing and digitally processed.
Hell Riders
A still image NFT. Exclusive to makersplace. February 2020.