I am, of course, more grid than cul-de-sac, but here is an interesting NFT art project that is launching on December 12, 2023 at 1PM EST. It's called Cul-de-Sacs:
“Cul-de-Sacs” explores the banality of suburban sprawl through the anachronistic stylization of American folk art. The algorithm generates flattened representations of suburbia at range of scales, interspersed with the remnants of rural life.
The starting price is 0.2 ETH and the resting price is 0.05 ETH. What this ultimately means is that these NFTs are being offered by way of a Dutch action.
Dutch auctions are a price discovery mechanism. They start with a high asking price and then gradually lower it until a price is reached where the quantity demanded equals all of the available supply.
In other words, it's a way to determine what the market thinks a particular thing is worth. In this case, though, the resting price is 0.05 ETH. Meaning there's a floor.
If lots of people are willing to pay 0.2 ETH for this art, it could sell out right away and that will prove to be the market price.
But if few people want to buy it, then the price will gradually fall to 0.05 ETH, and that is where it will hang out until all of the available supply is absorbed. If/when that happens.
Another important feature of this auction process is that if you buy early, and the price subsequently drops, you get a refund equal to the difference between what you paid and the final achieved price (thought to be the market price).
So there is zero incentive to wait for a possible price decline; everyone ends up paying the same price no matter what. You're encouraged to bid aggressively.
And because all of this is now happening on a blockchain and enshrined in code, you can be confident that this is exactly how the process will work and that you'll get any refunds that you deserve.
A lot less people are buying NFTs today compared to last year. But that's okay, everything will be fine. So let's talk about some of the characteristics of NFT marketplaces and how they differ from real estate marketplaces today:
When you create or "mint" an NFT, you are doing so on a particular blockchain, such as on the Ethereum blockchain. You might do that minting through a marketplace like OpenSea, but at the end of the day, your NFT now lives on a public blockchain and not on private OpenSea.
What that means is that if OpenSea suddenly decides to do something bad that you don't like (I am in no way picking on OpenSea), you can simply stop using them and just access and trade your NFTs from some other marketplace. As I understand it, there are also lots of smart people working on blockchain interoperability.
Once you have your NFT on a blockchain, you can choose, through various applications, to list it for sale, run auctions with a reserve price, or just hold it and do nothing, among other things. You can also set it up so that any proceeds from a future sale are automatically split with someone else -- maybe they are a co-creator of the NFT that you minted.
Whether you've decided to list your NFT for sale or not, there is also the option for the market to make unsolicited offers on it. It is up to you whether or not you'd like to accept any of the offers, but in all cases the offers you receive are made fully public to the market. As a bidder, it's easy to hide behind "burner" wallets, but you generally can't hide real intent.
If/when you do sell, that sale becomes public record for all to see. The blockchain never forgets and it doesn't matter which marketplace you decide to use.
In some real estate markets, it's fairly easy to see the sales history of a property. But in other markets, such as here in Toronto, it's still fairly gated. Generally speaking, you are accessing a controlled database and so you need to abide by whatever rules might be in place. If you want to build a new application on top of your local real estate board's database, that is going to be tricky and it will likely involve more than a few lawyers.
It is, however, fun to imagine how this might all change with public blockchains. And I think that NFT marketplaces do offer some clues in terms of what could happen to our real estate markets.
Consider this potentially unexpected scenario:
In the world of NFTs, there is something known as creator royalties. And they function just as you might expect. As the creator of an NFT, you can set a royalty % that gets paid to you each and every time the NFT is sold. And because the blockchain never forgets, you never have to worry about enforcing and collecting your royalty fee. It just gets automatically distributed.
Now imagine a world where people like the architect and the developer of a new property are able to attach their own creator royalties. This would be massively cumbersome to administer today, but it's entirely straightforward once you've got everything on a blockchain. And it would be a huge boon for business models that today do not benefit from reoccurring revenues.
In theory, it might also better align interests, because if you're a "creator" who wants a good solid royalty fee stream, maybe you're a little more motivated to do good long-term work. Who knows? This model might never actually happen, but I do think it is indicative of the kind of changes and innovations that we might see as crypto continues to filter through the economy.
Our week of working remotely in the mountains of Utah has come to an end. Being on mountain time meant early mornings every day. But it also meant being able to enjoy the evenings, including sunsets like the one shown here at the top of Ensign Peak. This was my first time really experiencing the Salt Lake City area in the summer, and I'm grateful for the opportunity. It is a beautiful place, and one that still feels under the radar once you exclude its global draw as a ski and snowboard destination. I also had a great time capturing it on my camera. So I'm excited to share my latest NFT photography collection -- Utah. All of the photos were taken on my Fujifilm X-T3 (35mm) and can be viewed and purchased over here on Foundation.