Just when the traditional finance world was beginning to get used to the idea of a “crypto fund,” now it’ll need to contend with million-dollar funds for JPEGs.
The latest is Curated, a $30 million fund that plans to invest exclusively in NFTs and is backed by some of the biggest names in the crypto and Web3 investment space, including Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, as well as Reddit and Seven Seven Six Ventures founder Alexis Ohanian.
NFTs are unique tokens that can be used to demonstrate ownership over digital assets. They’ve become a popular way for digital artists to showcase their talent and turn a profit, with billions now pouring into the NFT art world. Last month alone saw more than $4 billion in NFT sales, according to DappRadar, on top of the $21 billion throughout 2021. Now there appears to be growing interest in the market among large investment funds, including billionaire tech entrepreneurs like Andreessen.
Curated co-founders Todd Goldberg, and Andrew Jiang announced the launch of the fund yesterday on Twitter.
According to a Twitter thread by the Curated account, the fund is meant for high-signal collectors and is long-term focused. “We believe we’re still very early!” Curated wrote. “We will patiently wait for opportune times to buy and plan to hold most assets long-term—5-10 years or longer.”
NFTs enable a new way to invest in culture at internet scale. Curated collects the top assets and helps the creators behind them. https://t.co/uPotwkb4OP
“We want to become a top collector of culturally and historically significant assets,” Goldberg told Decrypt via Twitter. “Ultimately, we want our on-chain provenance to matter. Outside of pure collecting, Curated will be helpful to creators and builders,” he added.
Goldberg says other projects to which Curated plans to contribute include building open-source tools and helping creators with launch strategy and smart-contract deployment. Smart contracts are programs that execute once specific criteria are met, and they’re what networks like Ethereum and Solana use to mint and trade NFTs.
Curated says the $30 million was raised mainly from builders, creators, and investors in the crypto community to collect so-called blue-chip NFTs (i.e., those of high value) from “high-potential” creators and collections.
Besides a16z, other VCs involved in Curated include representatives from Electric Capital, Pantera, and Lattice Capital. Among the “builders and creators” involved in the new fund, Curated lists Shiva Rajaraman, product manager at leading Ethereum NFT marketplace OpenSea, as well representatives of Solana’s largest marketplace Magic Eden: co-founders Jack Lu and Zedd Yin.
