Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Crypto

  • Bright Moments should come to Toronto

    I love what Bright Moments is doing. And Fred Wilson’s post this morning — about their latest event in Mexico City — reminded me of that.

    Bright Moments describes themselves as “an NFT art collective on a mission to create environments where artists and collectors witness the birth of generative art together.”

    What this means is that they are working to move the experience of NFT art away from individual computer screens toward physical events where the art can be consumed and also created (i.e. minted) in a group setting.

    For a taste of what this actually means, check out their website and then hang out for a bit with their homepage video.

    So far they have hosted an event in the following 5 cities: Venice Beach (okay, actually a neighborhood), New York, Berlin, London, and Mexico City. And at each stop on their tour of what will be 10 places, they have done an in-person minting of their official collection, called CryptoCitizens.

    I haven’t been to one of them, but I can see how it would be a lot of fun and how it might change your perception of NFTs. So I am hoping that for one of their last 4 stops (the first stop was in the “Galaxy”), they’ll come to Toronto. Ethereum was pretty much created in this city, so I think it only makes sense for there to be Toronto CryptoCitizens.

    If you too would like to see this happen, make sure you tweet at Bright Moments and tell them that they should come to the greatest city in the world.

  • The next hot thing

    When I was in grad school at Penn I was active in two clubs: the real estate club and some tech/entrepreneurship club (I can’t remember the exact name). These were two areas that I was interested in and so I wanted to hang out with people who were also interested in these things and I wanted to hear from experienced people who were active in these fields.

    At that time, which was before the Great Recession, the real estate club was bigger and more active than the tech club. I think it was something like 3 to 1. But I remember one of my professors telling me that participation across the various clubs generally ebbs and flows. Before the dot-com bubble, the tech club was where you wanted to be. But that asset bubble had burst, and so people had moved onto real estate, which, at that time, was in the midst of creating its own asset bubble.

    What we students were effectively doing — by way of deciding where to spend our time — was chasing the next hot thing. They were chasing where they thought they’d be able to make the most money coming out of school. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. The pursuit of profit is fundamental to capitalism. But at the same time, I think it’s crucially important to have some conviction.

    Right now we are going through another cycle. Real estate was hot last year and it is not right now. Tech was hot last year and it is not right now. NFTs were hot last year and they are not right now. The list goes on. But if you like these things and if you have some conviction, is it really the time to move onto the next club? You may find the opposite to be true. Now is actually the time to ramp up participation.

  • Virtual artists are now being signed to digital record labels

    One of the most interesting things about NFTs is that some, but not all, come with very permissive licensing. What this could mean is that, as a holder, you are free to do whatever you would like with your NFTs, including creating businesses on top of them or using them for other commercial purposes. This is fascinating to me and I like NFT projects that adopt this open approach.

    In the past, we have talked about Bored Ape Yacht Club owners creating things like restaurants on top of their NFTs. But here is another more recent example: An NFT from the CyberBrokers collection has just been signed to a Web3 record label called Player Zero. This is the company’s first “Animated Virtual Artist”, and her inaugural album is available for streaming here, as well as from places like Spotify.

    This might sound kind of crazy if you aren’t following the crypto space. But is it really? We already have virtual influencers with millions of followers, so why can’t we have virtual pop stars being signed to digital record labels?

    I don’t know what this will ultimately mean for the holder of the above NFT, but imagine a world where the owner automatically receives X% of all the proceeds produced by the virtual artist. Now all of a sudden you have a cash flow stream that can be evaluated using traditional finance methods and an asset that can be valued and traded.

    Full disclosure: I own multiple CyberBrokers.