An investment company for unique digital products, and set-up by the co-founders of cryptocurrency firm Argo Blockchain (ARGO), plans to float in London.
NFT Investments said on Thursday that it hopes to raise around £10 million of growth funding from investors by floating on the niche Aquis Stock Exchange, the old Plus Markets platform. If the company gets all the cash it wants it will value the business at approximately £25 million.
INTANGIBLE COLLECTIBLES
NFT stands for ‘non-fungible tokens’, an emerging investment craze that sceptics say could be another bubble waiting to burst. Non-fungible tokens function effectively as digital, blockchain-based certificates of authenticity for a piece of digital art or other creative work.
The tokens allow the holder to claim ownership of the original creation even if it has been copied. According to Reuters, NFTs of tweets, digital artwork and memes have sold at auction for millions of dollars already this year, with one digital artwork selling this month for nearly $70 million at auction house Christie’s.
‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ is a digital work by American artist Mike Winkelmann, or Beeple as he is often called. It is a collage of 5,000 individual images, which were made one-per-day over more than 13 years.
The sale of the work for $69,346,250 put Beeple in the top three most valuable living artists, Christie’s said in a tweet.
$500 MILLION MARKET
NFT Investment said its plans to use flotation proceeds to identify potential investments and provide working capital for its initial operations.
‘The company considers that there is a sizable potential market for the NFT industry to emerge globally and take market share from the current collectables industry,’ it said, highlighting that the volume of NFT trade amounts to date is over $500 million and that the market is expected to grow over the long term.
NFT Investments is aiming to invest in NFTs directly as well as in companies or funds with exposure to NFTs and blockchain technology. It expects its business will be able to ‘develop substantially’ over the next 12 months.
The firm was set-up by Argo Blockchain’s co-founders Jonathan Bixby and Mike Edwards and its’ advisory board will also include cryptocurrency expert Mack Flavelle and Atari video game founder Nolan Bushnell.
