Public acquires fractional investing firm Otis for NFTs and other collectibles

New York-based investing firm Public announced Wednesday that it announced Otis, a fractional investing company that focuses on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), art and other collectible items. 

“With Otis joining Public, the Public platform will soon be the only place in the world where people can invest in — and build a modern portfolio with — any fractional asset,” Leif Abraham, Public.com’s co-CEO, wrote in a blog post. Public began supporting crypto investments in October 2021, including bitcoin, ether and dogecoin, among others. 

Fractionalization works by breaking down an asset, such as a rare CryptoPunk, into smaller tokens that a user can then purchase. If the asset in its entirety grows in value, the fractionalized token of that asset becomes more profitable as well. 

Some pop culture artifacts have already been fractionalized, such as the original “Doge” meme, worth about $4 million, getting fractionalized into 16,969,696,969 $DOG tokens in August of 2021.