It's an incredible result and a 13 year overnight success story for Beeple. The Everydays 5000 is every piece of art that Beeple produced everyday for a 13 year period. Taking on a per piece basis, 5,000 pieces is $13,800 per piece. Four months ago, $13,800 for a single NFT would have been unfathomable. Today we're seeing NFTs sell north of $1m on a daily basis.

What will happen to the Beeple Everydays?

Will it be fractionalized? Displayed in MoCa (virtual Museum of Crypto Art) or will it make its way enshrining itself in the physical world at the Smithsonian or MoMa?

And what does a sale at this level mean about the broader NFT market?

Will we see the likes of the B20 token appreciate in value and more fractionalized artworks come onto the market? What about a proliferation of specialized NFT focused funds? Are NFT curators the new fund managers?

These are the questions I am asking myself as we see this unprecedented sale.

I joined the Christie’s closing party on Clubhouse where Beeple was speaking to a room of 2,200 people.

He tearingly said:

Thank you to everybody who came out here. I'm blown away. Thank you to everybody who has shared my work, commented on it, liked it. It's honestly why Im in this position right now. I got very lucky. There was no guarantee that this work was going to connect with people. That is why I do feel super super lucky.

Whether it was luck, incredible timing or persistence that has paid off. Beeple will go down in history as the artist who showed the world the potential of NFTs.

What's also of interest and almost taken for granted, is that a $69m asset was trusted and sold on the Ethereum network. One asset, one NFT, $69m and sold in instant. The transaction, forever enshrined on the Ethereum blockchain, publicly accessible, immutable and viewable.

This shows the power and trust that is being placed in these decentralized networks to secure our money and assets. The logical prediction is that a sale of this size and nature will result in even more trust being placed on networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin to secure our most precious assets. Today its digital art. Tomorrow, our birth certificates, land tile deeds, and anything of value.

Congratulations to Beeple for his 13 year daily commitment to his craft, and congratulations to all the Ethereans who have worked tirelessly to make Ethereum the trusted network that it is today.

What are they?

B20 tokens represent fractionalized ownership of The Beeple 20 Collection.

If you don't know what that is, you may have heard of the now famous digital artist Beeple. Beeple is an artist who has been producing a digital artwork, everyday, for the past 15 years. His reputation as an artist has exploded since he entered the NFT world, a mere 4 months ago. His first NFT artwork recently sold for a record breaking $6.6m in the secondary market.

He is also famous for being the first artist to have Christie's auction their first digital art piece. That auction, titled Everydays: The First 5000 days closes in 2 days and has bids currently sitting at $9.75m.

Back to the B20.

B20 is a fascinating project that shows the ingenuity and potential of NFTs.

If we go back to January 2021. Beeple decided to auction 20 rare pieces of his works from 2020. It was his second NFT drop and showcased twenty one-of-one artworks, known as the The Beeple 20 Collection.

Unknown to anyone, a single collector, anonymously acquired all 20 of those pieces. Spending over $150,000 per piece and $3.5m in the process. That collector, then spent another ~$500,000 acquiring virtual land in virtual worlds like CryptoVoxels, Decentralanad and Somnium Space. In those worlds, they used the land to build a virtual museum, to showcase The Beeple 20 Collection.

From there, they took all these pieces of digital art and bundled them together into one smart contract. That smart contract, fractioanlizes The Beeple 20 Bundle into 10 million tokens, known as B20 tokens. Through the B20 token, anyone could now own a piece of The Beeple 20 Collection.

The B20 token today trades at over $21. At that price, the current market cap of the collection is $80m.

You may be thinking, this is crazy. How can someone buy some digital art and some digital land for $4m, and that now be worth $80m a few weeks later?

This is the beauty of NFTs. It unlocks new ways to create value, ownership and financial incentives into the digital assets that are created around us.

Art is no longer something that sits dead on a wall. Locked up. Illiquid. Inaccessible. It is now something more alive, liquid and able to produce value beyond its aesthetic appeal. It has turned into an art form that is a liquid asset. And the asset has become part of the art form.

If we look at the B.20 collection, there is also logic behind it.

If one single Beeple artwork sells for $6.6m, then what is 20 Beeple's artworks worth? And if the current Christies auction is already at $10m, then those 20 can only be worth even more.

It will be interesting to see where the Christie's auction closes in two days time. If the auction closes above $20m, it will make Beeple amongst the top 10% of living artist sales in the history of the world.

With the new economic models that unlock value in these NFT artworks, I wouldn't be surprised if we see the Christie's hammer fall at $20m or more.

You can follow the Christie’s auction here.

The world is different. Cars are flying. We've occupied Mars. We've figured out how to turn sand into gold. You look around and notice something strange. You notice, that the only color of clothing that people wear is green. Why green? You have no idea. Everywhere you turn, green.

You try to find out why this is. You ask someone, and they look at you puzzled.. green is good, they reply. You search the great internet machine that is now plugged into your brain. It comes up with the answer that green is good. Green is a symbol of peace. Green is the color of the universe. Green is natural. Green is the only acceptable color for clothing. Green is good.

You try to dig deeper on where this strange notion or idea came from? You find thousands of articles referencing how green is good. You search some more and find fashion blogs talking about the latest green fashion line. Health blogs emphasizing the unique mystical health benefits of green cashmere. Search some more, and you find state sponsored messages emphasizing going green.

Yet you can't find a single article explaining why. No reference to any other colors for clothing. No attempt to question this now held belief. What is going on here?

George Orwell first popularized a term for this type of dystopian future. He called it, a memory hole.

What's a memory hole?

A memory hole is any mechanism for the deliberate alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.

In the book, the Party's Ministry of Truth re-created all embarrassing historical documents, re-writing history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete and undetectable.

Now my green clothing example is ridiculous, but it conveys the point.

Today, the information that we consume comes to us in small summarized byte size chunks. Rarely do we access the source of that information and by the time we do, that source may have already disappeared.

Let me explain. An article gets published, say on the New York Times. Summaries of that article get distributed across the globe on news aggregation sites. People tweet summaries of the summaries. Reddit groups create memes of those summaries. Those memes get distributed on WhatsApp messages and Facebook groups. Before we know it that information has spread across the globe. After a day, the New York Times may decide to remove that article yet the information still spreads.

In fifty years many of those aggregation sites may have disappeared and when trying to reference the original article, the link is now broken. Yet, the information it spread still exists.

Historians will look back to try and understand how we made the decisions that we made. Over time, those decisions will disappear off the internet and they will ask themselves, what is going on?

This is the exact problem that this weeks dApp of the week is trying to solve.

Arweave and the Permaweb

I first met Sam Williams, founder and CEO of Arweave, in a Berlin bar in 2018. It was there that Sam explained to me the idea of building, what he called, the Permaweb (the permanent web). A way to use blockchain technology, to create permanent information storage.

Permanent information storage?

The idea came to him while on a hike. He was busy completing his PHD, and the world was at the height of fake news and Trump. Sam thought about the George Orwell memory hole. He figured that the memory hole wasn't describing a dystopian future, but our actual present day reality.

He then thought about blockchains.

He realized, blockchains are massive decentralized data replication networks. They have no central point of failure. While all internet archives that exist, have central points of failure. He asked himself: What if you put news on the blockchain? It would become un-memory holed!

And if you could put news on the blockchain, why not have a permanent source of truth and storage for all information?

And with that, Arweave was born.

Arweave today

Move forward to today and the Arweave network is growing exponentially.

As an open protocol, developers around the world are starting to realize the benefits of permanent storage and thinking of new models that can be applied in a world where digital archives can be permanent, verifiable, and tamper resistant.

Arweave has a marketcap of $430m today and I believe it is grossly undervalued.

When asked what are the potential use cases for permanent storage and why I’m so excited about Arweave’s potential.

Here are some off the top of my head.

* The internet archive and storage of the worlds information

* Land title registrations being digitized and permanently stored

* Permanent vault for any contracts

* Journaling software that can be passed on to future generations

* Storage for any and all NFTs

* Digital photos that you never want to lose

* Any and all books to be stored forever

* Every political speech ever given permanently stored

Those are just some of the use cases.

Ask yourself, what is the value of the network that contains and stores the worlds information? What is the value of the network that can prove, without a doubt, that this is the verifiable, original, untampered source of anything digital.

I call that knowledge, Proof of Knowledge and my bet, it’s in the trillions of dollars, and at the same time, priceless.

In turn, they have used that data to generate billions in revenue by targeting ads deemed relevant to us. We've seen both the benefits of this kind of personalization when shopping online, and the dark side that this kind of targeting has created.

Google today announced that it would stop tracking users as they browse the web. In effect, Google will be removing third-party cookies from the Chrome web browser by 2022. It also said that it would not create or use any other tools that identify individual users for advertising purposes.

Google will still allow its advertising customers to target users across YouTube and Gmail. You can read more about it in the announcement here.

Well this is a welcomed move, I can't help but feel that this is nothing more than an attempt to challenge Facebook's ad dominance and is this a little too late? Apple made a similar announcement in their iOS 14 update and while not targeting Facebook directly, they included this screenshot displaying the new privacy control features in iOS.

As the battle for privacy online takes shape, new startups have emerged that are privacy first. I for one have replaced most of my typical tech-stack to a privacy-stack.

For browsing, I use Brave. For search, I use DuckDuckGo. For email, I use ProtonMail. For Video, D.tube. For payments, Monero.

While some of these are not yet as good as their counterparts, they are improving. Most important though, is knowing that my privacy online is preserved.

For me, that is well worth the trade off.

I'm excited to see how online privacy will take shape in the next decade. Big tech (like Google and Apple) are going to have to come to the party. More exciting though is seeing how new startups and decentralized protocols that are truly privacy first begin to grow in popularity and emerge.

If you're building a startup in this space, please talk to me.

With time though, this changed. Mobile networks invested capital in a race to be the largest provider across a country. They knew, that the payoff would be worth it. Locking in a monopoly for the networks that won the race, and billions of dollars in revenues to follow.

What wasn't known then was how prolific mobile phones would become in our everyday lives. Today we use our mobiles for making calls, browsing the web, sending emails, mobile money, GPS and more. Roughly 5 billion people use their mobile to access the internet everyday.

These mobile networks have become the centralized gatekeepers to how we access and communicate with the world. For a fee of course.

How is it possible to disrupt such an industry? One with well established gatekeepers and deep pockets? One that requires billions in capital investment to even compete?

As Clayton Christensen says by introducing a "disruptive technology that enables a new market to emerge."

That brings me to this weeks dApp of the week. The people's network, Helium.

What is Helium?

Helium is a disruptive new approach to deploying a wireless network. It is a peer-to-peer blockchain enabled and decentralized wireless network.

Instead of spending billions of dollars to get widespread network coverage across the country. Helium took a different approach.

They created an open network that anyone could build hotspots for, and rewarded people for sharing access to those hotspots.

In a short space of time, over 19,000 of these hotspots have rolled out across the globe. With more installed daily. Broadening and strengthening Helium's network coverage.

In doing so, a new market has emerged. The Helium network now enables a range of new markets at a fraction of the cost of cellular. IoT device tracking, air quality monitoring, building and device tracking, are just some of the use cases built on the Helium network.

Best of all, as the Helium network grows, so does the rewards that the people powering the network receive. I for one have been running a Helium hotspot in my apartment for quite some time. This week alone, I received 140 HNT tokens as a reward (at today's price that’s worth $560). In a month, my Helium hotspot generates close to $2,200 worth of HNT rewards. Imagine that, getting rewarded for being part of the network and not only charged to use it!

How can Helium afford to give out this kind of reward?

It's quite simple. By removing the cost to build, install and manage the hotspot infrastructure off Helium's balance sheet. Helium no longer needs to incur those costs and can pass on those savings to their clients and people (like me) who are hosting a hotspot. In turn, enabling new markets that were not before possible.

This is what it looks like when you disrupt a centralized network. This is the power of aligning incentives and creating the people's network.

To find out more about Helium go to their website. Anyone can order a Hotspot (make sure they have support in your country first) and download the Helium mobile app.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d love to hear from you.

There's been a lot of buzz about NFTs and their impact on the digital art and collectibles world.

In the last two weeks we've seen:

* A CryptoPunk sell for over $1m

* Christie's announce their first digital art auction and accept payment in ETH

* Insta influencer Logan Paul selling over $5m of NFTs in a day

* The sale of a Beeple artwork for $6.6m, breaking the record for a single NFT sale.

Let me repeat that, $6.6m for an original animated GIF.

That should clear up any doubt that digital art is here to stay and taking center stage. With time, we'll stop referring to it as digital art and call it, art.

The question that I continue to get asked over and over again though: why would anyone pay for something that is so easy to copy? What's the point?

In my previous post, I spoke about the fact that NFTs prove IP ownership, rarity and originality. You can make a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa or one thousand prints of it, but there will only ever be one original.

To prove this point, last week we saw this thesis playing out. A new project BinancePunks (aka Bunks) launched. BinancePunks is a direct rip-off of the now famous CryptoPunks.

When I say it's a direct rip-off, I mean its a carbon copy. 10,000 BinancePunks of 24x24 pixel sold for 1 BNB and minted to whoever purchased it. The Bunks look exactly the same as the CryptoPunks and follow the same rarity and attributes. The only difference is that it’s built on the Binance Smart Chain network instead of Ethereum.

To my surprise, the Bunks sold out in less than an hour and the rip-off project raised $2.5m. My guess is that most of these buyers are speculators hoping for a quick flip. There is now a secondary market for Bunks but it’s fetching a fraction of the amount of the original CryptoPunks. If I were to bet, I'd bet that they wont take a hold and will be a dead project in less than a year.

In the physical world, fakes exist because they're often very hard to prove that they're fake. They can look and feel identical to the original. In the NFT world though, proving the fake is as simple as looking at the smart contract address.

Nobody wants to own a fake that is easily identifiable as one. Even if that fake looks and feels exactly like the original.

CryptoPunks is that original. They will be forever considered the OG that kicked off the collectibles world. With time, their legacy and story will only appreciate in value. BinancePunks however, will forever be the fake.

So back to the question, why would anyone pay for something that is so easy to copy?

Well if the story of BinancePunks is anything to go by. It’s the ability to prove provenance, ownership and originality in the digital world. This is the value of NFTs and this is why they are here to stay.

Next week I’ll be diving into the world of NFT audio and the impact it is having in the music world. If you want to get a head start on that post, check out EulerBeats - it’s fascinating.

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